by Kiana Cox
Black Americans are among the most religious groups in the United States. But religion differs substantially among Black Americans. Similar to patterns seen among the U.S. population overall, older Black adults are more religious than younger Black adults, and women are more religious than men.
Here are key facts about Black Americans and religion, based on Pew Research Center’s 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study (RLS) and other Center surveys.
Most Black Americans are Christian, though the share who identify as such has fallen since 2007. About three-quarters of Black adults (73%) are Christian, including 65% who are Protestant, 4% who are Catholic, and 4% who identify with other Christian groups such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The Christian share of Black adults is down from 79% in 2014 and 85% in 2007. Christian affiliation has similarly declined among the overall U.S. population during this time. Nonetheless, Black adults are more likely than U.S. adults overall to be Christian (73% vs. 62%).
Only 4% of Black adults identify with non-Christian religions, including Islam. And 22% of Black adults are religious “nones,” or adults who are not affiliated with a religion, including 3% who identify as atheist or agnostic and 19% who say their religion is “nothing in particular.”
Read the rest here.
Democrats are less likely than Republicans to believe in God, to pray, to attend religious services, and to say religion is very important to them, according to Pew Research Center surveys.
At the same time, among Democrats, religiousness differs widely by race and ethnicity. On a host of measures, White Democrats – and sometimes Asian Democrats – are a lot less religious than Black and Hispanic Democrats. Among Republicans, there is less variation.
In general, U.S. adults who are Republican or lean toward the GOP are more religious than Democrats and Democratic leaners.
For instance, 52% of Republicans say they pray daily, compared with 35% of Democrats. And 41% of Republicans say they go to religious services monthly or more often, compared with 24% of Democrats.
We combined these two questions (about prayer and religious attendance) with two others (about belief in God and how important people say religion is to them). By this measure, Republicans are about twice as likely as Democrats to be highly religious.
Meanwhile, Democrats are more than twice as likely as Republicans to score low on the same scale (34% vs. 14%).
by Jerry Mitchell
I figured I had the right place when I saw the bumper sticker for David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader who nearly became Louisiana’s governor. I knew I had the right place when I saw a Confederate battle flag flapping in the breeze outside a white wooden-frame house.
As I stepped down the gravel driveway, a wiry 5-foot-8 man hailed me. I shook the hand of the 69-year-old, surprised by his steady grip. As I let go, I realized it was the same hand that squeezed the trigger of the .30-06 rifle that killed Medgar Evers in 1963.
Byron De La Beckwith waved me inside his home in Signal Mountain, Tennessee, and guided me into a back room, where he sat in a floral chair, holding court. An orphan by age 12, he had fought in the Pacific during World War II and returned to Mississippi with a Purple Heart. Eager to belong, he joined the Sons of the American Revolution, where he told me members began telling him “the horrible, insidiously evil things that went on in local, county, state, federal and worldwide government.”
Beckwith and his wife belonged to the far-right Liberty Lobby. Through its newspaper, The Spotlight, the organization claimed that fraud enabled “illegal aliens” to stay in the U.S. and that 6 million Jews didn’t die in the Holocaust because only 74,000 died at Auschwitz. (Historians put the actual Auschwitz figure at 1.1 million deaths, nearly all of them Jews.)
Spotlight, whose readership reached up to 1 million, pushed the agenda that secret sinister forces controlled the government, seeking to harm Americans through drinking water, prescription drugs and conventional medical treatment, including vaccines, despite the role vaccines have played in the global eradication of smallpox and the near eradication of polio. A recent study concluded that immunizations had saved more than 150 million lives.
Now, decades since my 1990 interview with Beckwith, what was once fringe thinking has become fashionable. Anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-immigrant and anti-federal government rhetoric have made their way into the mainstream.
Read the rest here
United Lutheran Seminary (ULS) will host A Vision for Liberating Our Democracy: Examining the Religious and Racialized Roots of American Democracy on February 27–28, 2026, at its Philadelphia campus. The interdisciplinary conference will bring together scholars, activists, educators, and faith leaders to examine how religion and race have shaped democratic life in the United States and to explore liberative visions for the future.
The conference builds on a growing body of research that examines the theological, cultural, and political intersections of democracy, citizenship, and power. Participants will investigate how worldviews and faith traditions have informed concepts of governance, belonging, and personhood from the founding era to the present. The conference will highlight not only the Haudenosaunee Influence on American Democracy but also the historic and present contributions to Democratic thought by Black, Indigenous, and Latine communities, contributions which are often forgotten and ignored.
“As America’s oldest Lutheran seminary, founded by an antislavery theologian 200 years ago in Gettysburg on land that was to become part of the Civil War’s greatest battlefield, United Lutheran Seminary has always been part of the nation’s conversation on race and freedom," said the Rev. Dr. R. Guy Erwin (Osage Nation), ULS president. "The Lutheran heritage of freedom of conscience and its emphasis on serving the common good draw us always from faith toward action. With this conference, our Seminary returns to the center of our current national debates.”
Dean Teresa L. Smallwood said, “The American context is ripe for a time of reflection on the concept of democracy. “We the People” must evaluate our democratic commitments as we witness our nation entering a period of structural erosion. It is felt across all pockets of the nation. Have we redefined the governance schemata such that democracy is literally on life support? Do we continue to believe in the checks and balances of government? Is America a bastion for equality or have we reordered our commitments as a nation? These are some of the questions we must wrestle with at this conference.”
"United Lutheran Seminary is committed to fostering public conversations about the moral and historical foundations of democracy,” said the conference organizing committee member Adam DJ Brett. “By examining the ways religion and race intertwine with political life, we can better imagine inclusive and equitable systems of governance.”
Featured Speakers
The conference will feature exciting plenary addresses by:
- Maya D. Wiley, President and CEO of Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
- Dr. Raymond Winbush, Research Professor and the Director of the Institute for Urban Research, Morgan State University
- Rev. Dr. Joseph Evans, The J. Alfred Smith, Senior Professor of Theology in the Public Square Director at Berkeley School of Theology
- Brandon Paradise, Associate Professor of Law and Professor Dallas Willard Scholar at Rutgers Law School
- Betty Hill (Lyons), (Onondaga Nation, Snipe Clan), Executive Director of the American Indian Law Alliance
Call for Papers - The organizing committee invites papers on the following topics:
- The Middle Passage, The Mid-Atlantic Slave Trade, Maa’afa
- The Continental Congress and the Balance of Power
- The Haudenosaunee Influence on American Democracy
- W.E.B. Du Bois and the Black Reconstruction of Democracy
- The Doctrine of Discovery and settler colonial foundations
- White Christian nationalism and the myth of civil religion
- Religion, race, and legal personhood
- Religion and resistance in Black, Indigenous, Latine, and immigrant communities
- Race, religion, and the media in shaping democratic narratives
- Womanist, Feminist, and Mujerista Methodologies
- Foreign Policy and Human Crises
Submission Information
The organizing committee invites proposals for papers, panel discussions, roundtables, and creative presentations. Submissions from scholars at all career stages, including graduate students and early-career researchers, are encouraged. We are open to presentations from independent scholars as well.
The program will also include undergraduate poster sessions, graduate student panels, and live podcast recordings designed for classroom and public scholarship use. Following the event, an open-access journal volume will publish selected presentations.
Proposals should include a 300-word abstract and a 100-word biography. The submission deadline is January 15, 2025. Proposals may be sent to abrett@uls.edu.
Event Details
Conference: A Vision for Liberating Our Democracy: Examining the Religious and Racialized Roots of American Democracy
Dates: February 27–28, 2026
Location: United Lutheran Seminary, 7301 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19119
Submission Deadline: December 15, 2025
Contact: Adam DJ Brett, abrett@uls.edu
