Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America

Sociology of Religion, Summer, 2004 by Rhys H. Williams

Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, MICHAEL O. EMERSON AND CHRISTIAN SMITH. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, 224 pp.;$25.00 (cloth) $13.95 (paper)

Michael Emerson and Christian Smith have written an important book about the contributions of white evangelical Protestants to the persistence of racial inequality in the contemporary United States. This is sure to make many evangelical Protestants uncomfortable; the book has none of the celebratory tone that marks much recent writing, including some sociological writing, on white evangelicalism. Non-evangelical white Americans, however, should refrain from too much self-satisfaction--one of the book's contributions is to demonstrate how well intentioned beliefs and attitudes can nonetheless contribute to society's racial problems. The evangelicals in these pages are not mean-spirited, uneducated bigots who are too often caricatured by academics or the media. They are sincere, thoughtful, often compassionate Christians who desire a better society. And yet, the cultural resources they use to understand their lives, and the principles that undergird their strong faith, perpetuate American racial inequality.

An introductory chapter makes a case for understanding American society as fundamentally "racialized." Among other points, the authors deftly demonstrate that individuals' intentions are irrelevant when analyzing the reproduction of this racialization. Education, supposedly the cure-all for prejudice, tends to lead individuals into more segregated life circumstances, as it is also often accompanied by higher income and more occupational prestige. And the higher white Americans go on the class ladder, the more segregated their lives are. Following the introduction are chapters that chart evangelical racial thought and practices from the eighteenth century to the mid-1960s, and the recent evangelical efforts at racial reconciliation. The authors note the distinct failure of such efforts, and ask, "why?"

This question sets up the chapters that explore Emerson and Smith's interview and survey data. They isolate three core "cultural tools" (following Ann Swidler) that white evangelicals use to think and talk about race. They are "accountable freewill individualism," "relationalism" (attaching central importance to interpersonal relationships), and "antistructuralism" (inability to perceive or unwillingness to accept social structural influences). These tools push white evangelicals to understand racial problems as the products of individual prejudice, and beyond that, individuals' sinful resistance to God's will. Emerson and Smith note that their interviewees who lead less racially segregated lives were more aware of institutional issues and concrete instances of racist discrimination, but even these respondents tended to see solutions in terms of individual attitudes, actions, and faithfulness.

The authors show that issues of black-white economic inequality produce similar themes. There is little of the biologically based racism of the nineteenth century, but there is also a concomitant inability to see inequality as significantly affected by anything other than a failure to make the most of the opportunities offered. One controls one's own economic destiny much as one controls one's own decision to make an active decision for Christ. Again, Emerson and Smith note that those in their samples with more cross-racial contact were less enamored of the individualist and relational diagnoses and prescriptions than were those who were more racially isolated. However, in a chapter on the racial segregation of religious congregations, they show that expecting such organizations to be the sites of cross-racial contact and reconciliation is unrealistic in the extreme. Using the structural principle of homophily, they note that voluntary associations in a racialized society cannot but reinforce the racial order.

One could ask whether the racial orientations unpacked here are produced by evangelicals' religious culture, rather than just being elements of conservative white American culture more generally. Few interviewees used explicitly religious language or worked hard to tie their racial views to their faith. Emerson and Smith's survey evidence does offer some suggestive connections, as they find that evangelicals are more likely than other whites to use the individualistic language when they respond to questions about race. And evangelicals' high rates of church attendance, in largely segregated congregations, may make evangelical communities particularly isolated from racial pluralism.

Harder to sustain is an argument that Emerson and Smith have found a distinctly evangelical take on race. The cultural tools of individualism, relationalism, and antistructuralism are available to, and used by, a wide variety of white Americans (the voices in chapter four--titled "Color Blind"--sound very much like the voices found in Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's or Joe Feagin's work, neither of whom deals with religion or evangelicals). There are no non-evangelical interviewees here with whom to compare responses. And, I am tempted to ask, if an ahistorical, racially segregated, individualistic oriented religious worldview is a "subculture" in American life, then who or what exactly is the "culture?" Perhaps what Emerson and Smith have shown, rather than a distinctively evangelical way of thinking about race, is the extent to which evangelical religious culture forms much of the bedrock out of which American cultural worldviews generally have emerged. Finally, I have some issues as to whether Emerson and Smith have chosen the right cultural metaphor by using Swidler's "tool kit" language. Swidler's approach is much more interpretive and instrumental in its view of culture than Emerson and Smith are--or than their respondents' voices would support. The "cultural equation" they use on page 98 particularly misses Swidler's point.