For Richer, for Poorer
Joy Borkholder
October 1, 2001
We know American churches are segregated by race—are they also segregated by income? It's a tricky question. As a group, Episcopalians are clearly wealthier than Baptists, but what about individual Episcopal or Baptist churches: how income-diverse are they? With the help of the General Social Survey, that inexhaustible treasure trove of data, we can begin to answer the question, and find out some interesting things about race along the way.
Respondents to the survey were asked their race—though, alas, they were restricted to the categories of "Blacks/Negroes/African-Americans," "Whites," and "Other." Then the black respondents were asked, "Do whites attend the church that you, yourself, attend most often, or
not?" The white respondents were asked a similar question about blacks. (We can only wonder what the respondents who described their race as "other" were asked—that data is omitted here.)
As we move up the income brackets, we find that both blacks and whites are more likely to attend church with the other race. The one curious exception is the highest income group of blacks, whose likelihood of attending an interracial church drops sharply (although the total number of
wealthy black respondents attending church is very small). This data allows us to answer our first question: if people in lower-income households are generally not attending interracial churches, and people in higher-income households are, it follows that they are not attending the same churches. Ergo, North American churches are segregated by income—though the churches attended by people of higher incomes are less segregated by race than the churches attended by people of lower incomes.
You might think that those who live near people of ...
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