Democrats Can No Longer Count on the Black Church

When Kamala Harris learned that Joe Biden was withdrawing from the 2024 presidential race, she called her pastor to ask him to pray for her. 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 path to African-American voting for Democratic politicians has been through black churches that look a lot like Brown’s—ecumenical congregations that preach the message of “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 example, are Democrats.

But today, many of those churches are in decline and their membership is aging. Brown himself is 83. For many young African Americans, the black church no longer has the same importance it did for their parents or grandparents. Less than a third of black Gen Z and millennials attend black churches. As a result, the Democratic Party is losing a reliable way to reach black voters.

Black Protestant churches are being challenged by two forces. The first is secularization. Although African Americans are still more likely than whites to attend church, church attendance is declining among young blacks. Nearly half of black Gen Z and millennials say they “rarely or never” attend church, compared with only a quarter of African Americans in the Silent Generation and less than a third of black baby boomers.

Read: What Really Happens When Americans Stop Going to Church

“For those who were part of the baby boom or the silent generations, the black church was a semi-involuntary organization,” Nichole Phillips, director of the Black Church Studies program at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, told me. Blacks in the 1950s and ’60s, she added, believed that nothing else could match the church as a “refuge from racial animosity and hostility” and as a leader in “political, religious, legal, educational (and) social reform.”

Young African Americans today face a very different situation. While Phillips insists that the “prophetic” tradition of the black church still influences young people, she concedes that they also have a much broader range of options than their parents or grandparents did. “The rise of social media has become a distraction from what used to be the ‘primary’ and often ‘only’ locus of authority and power for black people: the church,” Phillips said. “What draws young people beyond the walls of the church has changed that.” their attention and therefore influence their choices – social, political, religious.”

Evidence suggests that some blacks who have stopped attending church have also left the Democratic Party. A 2024 study by University of Texas sociologist Jason E. Shelton found that only 43 percent of religiously unaffiliated African Americans are Democrats, which he said is “the lowest percentage of any religious category in black America.”

This is not to say that the majority of Black people with “no” religion have become Republicans. Nor have most abandoned their religious faith. Data from a 2021 Pew survey suggest that the majority might fall 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 Black people with no religious affiliation believe in God or a higher power, 57% believe that “evil spirits can cause trouble,” 54% pray at least a few times a month, and 36% 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 of them lack access to Democratic Party networks and are not traditionally committed to the party. They are less likely than members of historically black religious denominations to vote in presidential elections, and when they do vote, they are more likely to identify as independents whose vote cannot be taken for granted.

Black churches are also losing potential congregants to white or multiracial churches. Among black Gen Zers and millennials who attend church, nearly half say they attend churches that are not majority black. These churches tend to be evangelical congregations, often Pentecostal or charismatic, which 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.

In these multiracial megachurches, “the pastor is essentially an entrepreneur,” Paul Thompson, a history professor at North Greenville University who studies African-American Christians, told me. “Birds of a feather flock together.” 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 based on the Exodus narrative: the story of Moses leading the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt and into the promised land. From the early 19th century to the present, African-American churches have presented this story as an assurance that God saves the oppressed and brings freedom and deliverance to the marginalized. They have portrayed their own communal struggle against racial injustice as a continuation of the Exodus. And because they tend to see political action on behalf of civil rights and racial justice as integral to their Exodus theology, many black churches have invited progressive Democratic politicians to deliver campaign messages from their pulpits.

African Americans who attend a nondenominational church or a congregation affiliated with a white evangelical denomination are more likely to hear an antiabortion sermon than to see a Democratic politician in the pulpit. Perhaps not surprisingly, they are also much less likely than members of historically black denominations to identify with the Democratic Party. In the late 2010s, only 57 percent of nondenominational black 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 long-standing assumptions about black beliefs about the role of government to assume 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 surrounded at church by white evangelicals who are enthusiastic Republican supporters, African Americans are still very reluctant to support the GOP, Shelton’s research shows. But even if they do return to the Democratic Party at election time, they no longer consider the Democratic Party part of their political identity, as members of historically black churches have for decades.

Harris herself seems to feel that religious shifts among African Americans may have weakened the networks that bind them to the Democratic Party. Although she spoke at events hosted by black churches during her presidential campaign, she did not rely heavily on black churches to rally young black voters, even though she attends church frequently.

Instead, it relies on organizations like the Black Voters Matter Fund, the Black Power Voters Alliance, BlackPAC, the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation and the NAACP’s Building Community Voice Fund, a nonpartisan organization. These groups help register new black voters through door-to-door campaigns and use digital media and outreach events at historically black colleges and universities in key states like Georgia to mobilize voters and build a black Democratic base.

Read: The American Evangelical Church is in Crisis. There is Only One Solution.

In contrast, Trump mobilizes conservative black voters by speaking at nondenominational, black-led community churches, such as Detroit’s Church 180, which tend to attract politically unaffiliated black voters who are likely to be receptive to the Republican campaign message. In addition, he has enlisted the support of black rappers such as Sada Baby and recruited black Republican politicians to help him reach out to the black community. Historically black denominations may be unreceptive to his message, but Trump is bypassing these churches to find other venues, both religious and secular, that might appeal to young, independent African-Americans.

It remains to be seen whether socially conservative black churches outside of traditional black denominations will be able to garner enough Republican votes to offset Democrats’ door-knocking and campaign events on HBCU campuses, or whether the election will instead be won primarily through digital media events and celebrity endorsements. But neither side is taking any chances. Young black voters who are not members of traditionally black denominations are not as loyal to either party as their parents and grandparents might have been, which means the path to winning the black vote no longer runs through the church door.