Understanding Black Congregational Types: Assessing Social Service and Politically Oriented Activity Patterns Using Latent Class Analysis

• In Event: 262 - Section on Sociology of Religion Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 08. Measuring and Defining Religion

Abstract

Growing social and economic cleavages in Black communities due in part to continued racial inequities in employment, incarceration, income and wealth, and school funding, have led to changes in the church. A growing and important body of scholarship examines how predominately Black churches adapt and respond to these cleavages, the growing dynamics in Black communities as Whites are increasingly gentrifying Black “working-class or low-income areas” and an increasing number of middle class African Americans move into predominately White suburbs, building new Black churches. Previous research, mostly qualitative, have created typologies for understanding difference between Black churches in terms of their social and political engagement activity, but few have done so given these present changes, and even fewer have done so using nationally contemporary quantitative measures.
To this end, I report results from the first two waves of the National Congregations Study (NCS), conducting latent class analysis with predominately African American churches across a range of social service and politically oriented activities. I examine the extent to which the larger social, political and economic changes in the lives of African Americans also corresponds to varying classes (or latent types) of Black churches, unique in political and social service engagement patterns. Finally, I discuss the implications of these classes not only in terms of their relationship to African Americans and their communities, but also to the typologies and classifications of Black churches found in previous scholarship.

Author

• Patrick Charles Washington, University of Illinois-Chicago