Unequally Yoked
Over at FiveThirtyEight, I’ve got a rundown of a new paper that tried to check how receptive different Christian denominations were to new members of different races:
A team led by Bradley Wright, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut, sent emails to more than 3,000 churches across America. Each email was ostensibly from a person who had recently moved to the neighborhood, was thinking about joining the congregation, and wanted information about the church or parish. The researchers signed the emails with names that were considered identifiable as white, black, Hispanic or Asian to see whether churches replied to them in different ways. To select the names, researchers used census data to create a short list of names that strongly correlated with a particular racial identity and then used small surveys to see whether people did indeed identify a given name with a particular race.
[…]
When the researchers grouped churches by affiliation with either the Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant or Evangelical Protestant traditions, they found that Catholics and Evangelical Protestants responded equally to all the names. But they found a significant racial gap in the response of mainline Protestants: a 67.1 percent reply rate for white names, 59.9 percent for blacks, 57.5 percent for Hispanics and 48.9 percent for Asians.
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