Sociologists have long identified a “perception gap” between Black and White Americans regarding racial injustice, often emphasizing either “epistemologies of ignorance” or “religio-cultural” mechanisms. Integrating and extending these insights, we theorize that conceptions of America’s religio-cultural heritage and identity are racially coded and grounded in White supremacy, but only for those atop the racial hierarchy. From this, we predict the perception gap is largely driven by Whites’ racialized idealization of their own religio-cultural preeminence in American civic life—what we call “White Christian nationalism.” Drawing on nationally representative data with currently relevant measures of Americans’ perceptions of racial injustice, we show the more Whites affirm seemingly race-neutral statements promoting Christianity’s preeminence in American life, the more they affirm White victimhood and deny anti-Black injustice. This association seems to drive the perception gap. Specifically, for Whites, Christian nationalism is powerfully associated with refusing to acknowledge anti-Black discrimination while affirming supposed anti-White discrimination; lower likelihood of attributing Ahmaud Arbery’s murder to racism or to even know about the incident; and greater likelihood of denying racial inequality in policing. For Black Americans, however, affirming the same measures of Christian nationalism produces no consistent change in their recognition of racial injustice. Thus, for Whites, appeals to America’s “Christian” heritage are racially coded and contribute to an ideological defense of White supremacy, including the denial of blatant anti-Black injustice and a commitment to White victimhood.

This study examines the extent to which the racial composition of a congregation moderates explanations for Black/White inequality among White, Black, and Hispanic congregants. Using nationally representative data from General Social Surveys and National Congregations Studies, we find that religiously affiliated Blacks and Hispanics tend to hold different racial attitudes than religiously affiliated Whites, but these differences largely disappear inside multiracial congregations. Importantly, we find that attending a multiracial congregation is unassociated with Whites’ explanations for racial inequality, and Blacks who attend multiracial congregations are actually less likely to affirm structural explanations for Black/White inequality than Blacks in nonmultiracial congregations or Whites in multiracial congregations. We find little evidence that multiracial congregations promote progressive racial views among attendees of any race or ethnicity. Rather, our findings suggest that multiracial congregations (1) leave dominant White racial frames unchallenged, potentially influencing minority attendees to embrace such frames and/or (2) attract racial minorities who are more likely to embrace those frames in the first place.

Despite a general acceptance of “race” as a social, rather than biological construct in the social sciences, racial health disparities research has given less consideration to the dimensions of race that may be most important for shaping persistent disparities in adult physical health status. In this study, we incorporate the social constructionist view that race is multidimensional to evaluate the health significance of two measures of race, racial self-identification and the socially perceived skin tone of black Americans, in a sample of black and white adults in the Nashville Stress and Health Study (N=1186). First, we use the approach most common in disparities research—comparing group differences in an outcome—to consider self-identified racial differences in allostatic load (AL), a cumulative biological indicator of physical dysregulation. Second, we examine intragroup variations in AL among blacks by skin tone (i.e. light, brown, or dark skin). Third, we assess whether the magnitude of black-white disparities are equal across black skin tone subgroups. Consistent with prior research, we find significantly higher rates of dysregulation among blacks. However, our results also show that racial differences in AL vary by blacks’ skin tone; AL disparities are largest between whites and dark-skinned blacks and smallest between whites and light-skinned blacks. This study highlights the importance of blacks’ skin tone as a marker of socially-assigned race for shaping intragroup and intergroup variations in adult physiological dysregulation. These results demonstrate the importance of assessing multiple dimensions of race in disparities research, as this approach may better capture the various mechanisms by which “race” continues to shape health.

The Black Church has remained an important topic of scholarly interest for more than a century, but less attention has been devoted to the consequences of contrasting denominational affiliations within the African-American Protestant religious tradition. We advance a new coding scheme that allows researchers to measure and test black affiliates across a range of denominations with roots inside and outside of the greater Black Church. Findings from the 1972 to 2014 General Social Surveys indicate that our "Black Reltrad" syntax more meticulously captures similarities and differences among African Americans with respect to religious sensibilities, religious-related social attitudes, and engagement in black politics than extant coding schemes. Consequently, although the legacy of racial discrimination and inequality binds blacks together, scholars must also recognize differences within the African-American Protestant religious tradition.