Race Relations in an Evangelical and a Catholic High School

• In Event: Private Religious Catholic and Protestant Schooling in North America: Motivations and Outcomes

Abstract

Do faith-based schools bridge or exacerbate racial divides, and to what extent is this influenced by different traditions of Christian education? Two urban high schools with racially-diverse students, one Roman Catholic and the other Evangelical, were studied through student sociograms and open response surveys, focus groups, and one-on-one interviews with over 40 students and 6-10 faculty members in each high school, for a total of 94 total participants in the focus group/interview process. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded. The researchers aimed to understand the ways in which faith traditions might influence how youth perceived and related to one another and to the diverse society outside their schools. In addition to determining the extent to which students in each school related to one another across racial and ethnic lines, this study sought to identify the distinctives of each school that catalyzed (or impeded) integration, especially as they related to the unique Christian worldview of the school.

Findings
While school-specific goals and circumstances inform individual and overall student experiences, the reported student experience was directly related to the worldview embraced and imparted at each school, though the worldviews embraced and imparted at each of these schools, while both distinctly Christian, were in some respects quite different. Differences in worldview manifest in the different theological traditions of an Evangelical as contrasted with a Catholic school result in significant differences in how each school approached its educational mission.
To a considerable extent, the two schools are concerned with preparing students for different types of societal and cultural engagement. At Evangelical High, societal and cultural engagement is focused on critiquing society, especially with regard to issues of social justice. Catholic High is more concerned with helping working-class students to access and engage with middle class culture and the demands of employment.
Discussions of social issues at Evangelical High, and the research done by each senior on some current issue, concluding with its defense before an outside panel, make it clear that this is not a community turned inward; its focus on society and culture is based on a continually-nurtured sense of critical distance. Catholic High seems to function with much less sense of separation from American society and culture, and more concern with how its graduates could accommodate themselves successfully to the demands of successful participation in the workplace; the school works to remedy social inequalities for the students it serves, by enabling the students rather than by changing the expectations for employment in offices and hospitals.

Authors

• Cara Stillings Candal, Boston University

• Charles Glenn, Boston University