The public interest law firm Becket has released its second annual Religious Freedom Index and, like last year, it revealed some newsworthy information. While the index found that people value religious freedom highly, they also expressed some revealing opinions about racial justice issues facing the Church.
According to the summary, “More than 4 out of 5 respondents who said faith was important also think that religious organizations and people should have a role in advocating for racial equality and justice. But less than half of that group think their faith community is doing a good job of responding to issues of racial equality and justice.”
Though 84% said religious organizations should have a role in advocating for racial justice and equality, about half said their faith community had done a neutral or poor job of doing so. This is in light of racial issues having dominated the news cycles during the spring and summer following the death of George Floyd.
This gap in what people of faith want to see in terms of racial justice and reconciliation and what they do see in their faith leaders should come as no surprise. Several denominations, including the Southern Baptist Convention, were called out this summer during the civic unrest for failing to address this problem in their churches earlier. “A Southern Baptist leader said ‘black lives matter.’ Should people be shocked?” read one Houston Chronicle headline in June.
Prominent Southern Baptist Russell Moore tried to make sense of this divide in an essay about Christianity and racism. On the other hand, Beth Moore, no relation, has before been outspoken about faith leaders’ failures to denounce racism in church communities for years. She became even more vocal about this issue this last year.
If you’re gonna let a little name-calling keep you from standing up for what you believe according to the Word of God is gospel truth, you ain’t ready. White supremacy has held tight in much of the church for so long because the racists outlasted the anti racists.
Outlast THEM.— Beth Moore (@BethMooreLPM) August 6, 2020
In an opinion piece for NBC News, Robert Jones, author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, wrote that “[a] clear pattern has emerged: White Christians are consistently more likely than whites who are religiously unaffiliated to deny the existence of structural racism,” although he said that “it’s a mistake to see this as merely a Southern or an evangelical problem.”
Jones’s observations are a cautionary tale also reflected by this year’s results in the Religious Freedom Index. “While most white Christians think of themselves as people who hold warm feelings toward African Americans, holding racist views is nonetheless positively and independently associated with white Christian identity,” he wrote. “Again, this troubling relationship holds not just for white evangelical Protestants, but also for white mainline Protestants and white Catholics.”
In addition to questions about race, the Religious Freedom Index showed that support for various religious freedom-adjacent ideas, including religious pluralism, religion and policy, and religion in action, remained high, although it dipped just slightly from last year’s numbers. Now that the metrics are established, it will be interesting to see if things shift a year from now.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
