Democrats Can’t Rely on the Black Church Anymore
6 min read
When Kamala Harris learned that Joe Biden was going to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race, she called her pastor to ask for prayer. Like many other African American Democrats, Harris is a member of a predominantly Black, social-justice-oriented church, and her pastor, Amos C. Brown, is a veteran of civil-rights campaigns.
Traditionally, the route to winning the African American vote for Democratic politicians has run through Black churches that are very much like Brown’s—that is, ecumenically minded congregations that preach the message of the “beloved community” and civil rights. The members of these churches are overwhelmingly loyal to the party of Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama, and Biden; 90 percent of Black Methodists, for instance, are Democrats.
But today, many of those churches are shrinking, and their members are aging. Brown himself is 83. For many younger African Americans, the Black Church no longer holds the place of importance that it did for their parents or grandparents. Fewer than one-third of Black Gen Zers and Millennials ever go to Black churches. The result is that the Democratic Party is losing a reliable way to reach Black voters.
Black Protestant churches are squeezed by two forces. One is secularization. Although African Americans are still more likely than whites to attend church, church-attendance rates are falling among younger Black people. Nearly half of Black Gen Zers and Millennials say they “seldom or never” attend church—which is true of only a quarter of African Americans from the Silent Generation and fewer than a third of Black Baby Boomers.
“For those who were part of the Baby Boom or Silent Generations, the Black Church was a semi-involuntary organization,” Nichole Phillips, the director of the Black Church Studies Program at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, told me. Black people in the 1950s and ’60s, she said, believed that nothing else could equal the Church as “a refuge from racial animus and hostility” and as a leader in “political, religious, legal, educational, [and] social reform.”
Younger African Americans face a very different situation today. Although Phillips insists that the “prophetic” tradition of the Black Church still influences young people, she concedes that they also have a much wider array of options than their parents or grandparents did. “The emergence of social media has become a distraction from what was once the ‘primary’ and often ‘sole’ site of Black authority and power: the Church,” Phillips said. “What attracts young people beyond church walls hastheir attention and therefore influences their choices—social, political, religious.”
The evidence suggests that some Black people who have stopped attending church have also left the Democratic Party. A 2024 study by the University of Texas sociologist Jason E. Shelton found that only 43 percent of religiously unaffiliated African Americans are Democrats, which he notes is “the lowest percentage for any religious classification in Black America.”
This doesn’t mean that the majority of Black “nones” have become Republicans. Nor have most abandoned religious faith. Data from a 2021 Pew survey suggest that the majority might fit into the category of “spiritual but not religious,” with some perhaps drawing on traditional African or Caribbean beliefs that they may have syncretized with Christian practices. Ninety percent of religiously unaffiliated Blacks believe in God or a higher power, 57 percent believe that “evil spirits can cause problems,” 54 percent pray at least a few times a month, and 36 percent believe in the efficacy of prayers to ancestors.
But regardless of their spiritual practices, their lack of participation in the Black Church means that many don’t have Black Church members’ access to Democratic Party networks and traditional commitment to the party. They are less likely than members of historically Black denominations to vote in presidential elections, and when they do vote, they are more likely to identify as independents whose votes cannot be taken for granted.
Black churches are also losing potential congregants to white or multiracial churches. Among Black Gen Zers and Millennials who do go to church, nearly half say they attend churches that are not predominantly Black. These churches tend to be evangelical congregations, often of the Pentecostal or charismatic variety that have provided Donald Trump with his strongest base of evangelical support. Many of these churches preach a theology of personal empowerment and use conservative rhetoric on abortion or sexuality.
At such multiracial megachurches, “the pastor is essentially an entrepreneur,” Paul Thompson, a history professor at North Greenville University whose research focuses on African American Christians, told me. “Like attracts like.” In these congregations, the pastor “rarely addresses contemporary politics from the pulpit.”
This is very different from the theology of African American Christianity, which has historically been grounded in the Exodus narrative: the story of Moses leading the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt and directing them toward the promised land. From the beginning of the 19th century to the present, African American churches have cast this story as an assurance that God rescues the oppressed and brings freedom and deliverance to the marginalized. They have described their own communal struggle against racial injustice as a continuation of Exodus. And because they tend to see political action on behalf of civil rights and racial justice as an integral part of their Exodus theology, many Black churches have invited progressive Democratic politicians to deliver campaign messages from their pulpit.
African Americans who attend a nondenominational church or a congregation affiliated with a white evangelical denomination may be more likely to hear a sermon against abortion than to see a Democratic politician in the pulpit. Perhaps it’s not surprising that they’re also significantly less likely than members of historically Black denominations to identify with the Democratic Party. In the late 2010s, only 57 percent of Black nondenominational Christians and only 62 percent of Black members of predominantly white evangelical denominations identified as Democrats, according to data compiled by Shelton. “We cannot rely on old assumptions about Blacks’ beliefs about the role of government in presuming that most African Americans are politically liberal,” Shelton wrote.
Most Black Christians who leave the Democratic Party become independents, not full-fledged Republicans. Even when they are surrounded at church by white evangelicals who are enthusiastic Republican partisans, African Americans are still highly reluctant to support the GOP, according to Shelton’s research. But even if they return to the Democratic Party at election time, they no longer view the Democratic Party as part of their political identity in the way that members of historically Black churches have for decades.
Harris herself seems to sense that the religious changes among African Americans may have weakened the networks that connect them to the Democratic Party. Although she has spoken at Black Church events during her presidential campaign, she hasn’t relied heavily on Black churches to rally younger Black voters, even though she attends church frequently.
Instead, she depends on organizations including the Black Voters Matter Fund, the Black Power Voters Alliance, BlackPAC, the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, and the NAACP’s nonpartisan Building Community Voice Fund. These groups help register new Black voters through door-to-door canvassing and use digital media and outreach events at historically Black colleges and universities in battleground states such as Georgia to mobilize voters and excite a Black Democratic base.
Trump, by contrast, is mobilizing conservative Black voters by speaking at Black-led nondenominational community churches, such as the 180 Church in Detroit, that tend to attract politically unaffiliated Black voters who might be open to the Republicans’ campaign message. In addition, he has enlisted the support of Black rappers such as Sada Baby and recruited Black Republican politicians to help with outreach in the Black community. The historically Black denominations may be unreceptive to his message, but Trump is bypassing those churches to find other venues, both religious and secular, that might appeal to younger African American independents.
Whether socially conservative Black churches outside the traditional Black denominations will be able to deliver enough Republican votes to offset the Democrats’ door-to-door canvassing and campaign events on HBCU campuses or whether the election will instead be won primarily through digital-media events and celebrity endorsements remains to be seen. But neither side is taking any chances. Younger Black voters who are not members of historically Black denominations are not as loyal to either party as their parents and grandparents might have been—which means that the path to winning the Black vote no longer runs through the church door.
