Neighbors Like Me? Religious Affiliation and Neighborhood Racial Preferences among Non-Hispanic Whites

Abstract

Abstract:Research on racial residential segregation has paid little attention to the role that social institutions play in either isolating or integrating racial and ethnic groups in American communities. Scholars have argued that racial segregation within American religion may contribute to and consolidate racial division elsewhere in social life. However, no previous study has employed national survey data to examine the relationship between religious affiliation and the preferences people have about the racial and ethnic composition of their neighborhoods. Using data from the -Multi-Ethnic United States‖ module on the 2000 General Social Survey, this study finds that white evangelical Protestants have a significantly stronger preference for same-race neighbors than do Catholics, Jews, adherents of -other‖ faiths, and the unaffiliated. Group differences in preferences are largely accounted for by socio-demographic characteristics. Negative racial stereotyping and social isolation from minorities, both topics of interest in recent research on evangelical Protestants and race, fail to explain group differences in preferences.

Studying Race and Religion

“…An influential set of work focuses on the impact of religion on race—from attitudes to actions to relationships to organizational dynamics to urban change (e.g., Brown 2011; Edgell and Tranby 2007; Marti and Emerson 2013; Merino 2011; Mulder 2015; Perry 2014; Porter and Emerson 2013; Yancey 1999). Emerson and Smith’s (2000) work Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America is an oft-cited work in this area.…”

When to Preach About Poverty: How Location, Race, and Ideology Shape White Evangelical Sermons

“…Emerson and Smith (2000) argue that these network closures and patterns of self‐exculpation led to further segregation, including the continued separation of Protestant congregations into racially distinct groups, a finding Jones noticed nearly 20 years later. Similarly, Blanchard (2007) argues that White Evangelicals’ network closure can explain their residential segregation (see also Merino 2011), especially considering how White Evangelicals tend to emphasize volunteering in their own church communities rather than with those who are different from them, perhaps leading them to their suspicion of government assistance programs. Perhaps the solution, Jones suggests, is one of greater interaction: “ [Whites’] core social networks—the space where meaning is welded onto experience—tend to be extremely segregated…This effectively closes the door to interactions with people who might challenge what feels like a natural and ‘commonsense’ perspective on the events they see on cable television” (Jones 2016:160).…”

Converting White Christian Congregations to Sites of Anti-racism

“…Other studies have used measures of social distance such as residential preference and attitudes toward interracial marriage to find the correlation between religious affiliation and racial attitudes. Evangelical and mainline Protestants were found to have the strongest preference for same-race neighbors when compared to Catholics, Jews, and other faiths (Merino, 2011), and Whites who attended multiracial churches were found to be far more likely to be comfortable with the idea of interracial marriage than those who attended monoracial churches (Perry, 2013). These findings, although not causal, show there is a contribution by monoracial churches to the social distance between races present in society today.…”