In my first-ever piece for @BlkPerspectives (🙌🏾), I talk about the continuing importance of the Black Church juxtaposed with the ways Black Christians have always moved across the ecclesiastical color line.
aaihs.org/crossing-the-e…
According to @pewresearch overall, 60 percent of Black churchgoers attend Black churches…Thirteen percent attend a church that is predominantly white/other, and 25 percent attend a multiracial church where “no single race makes up a majority of attendees”
aaihs.org/crossing-the-e…
The same @pewresearch study also shows church attendance among younger Black Christians…
Millennials
53% - Black church
18% - white/other church
27% - multiracial church

Gen Z
53% - Black church
25% - white/other church
19% - multiracial church
aaihs.org/crossing-the-e…
“This racial reshuffling, however, has been almost entirely one-way. “All the growth [in multiracial churches] has been people of color moving into white churches,” sociologist Michael Emerson says.
aaihs.org/crossing-the-e…
The increasing numbers who attend white or multiracial congregations calls into question the future of the Black church in reference to its past. But a historical examination shows churches in the US have never been uniformly segregated.

aaihs.org/crossing-the-e…
It appears that there will always be some attempts at forming multiracial faith communities and that Black people will engage in such efforts on the proposition that their presence in other congregations will be accepted and even transformative.
aaihs.org/crossing-the-e…
It also appears that if Black people continue to face racism and pressure to culturally assimilate, then there will always be a need for and the presence of predominantly Black churches. 
aaihs.org/crossing-the-e…

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More from @JemarTisby

Feb 16
Phew! When you end up in @Newsweek because a group of conservative Christian parents and college students allege that you’re a stark, raving Critical Race Theory apologist! 😱 Fam, I’m a historian, and history has America’s many racist receipts.
newsweek.com/angry-debate-o…
I was invited to speak and preach at this college a month before the 2020 presidential election. 2020!!! This controversy has been going on for almost a year and a half!
newsweek.com/angry-debate-o… Image
Notice the word “escape.” Too often Christian schools are set up as enclaves with high walls barring their students from “the world.” Attempts to engage other ideas are seen as attacking the Christian foundations of the school.
newsweek.com/angry-debate-o… Image
Read 7 tweets
Jan 6
The swirl of thoughts and emotions surrounding the one year anniversary of an #insurrection have been difficult for me to sort out. I'm sure many of you feel the same. So here are some related but distinct items I'm reflecting on concerning the assault on our democracy...🧵
White evangelicals, who are all wrapped up in this thing because of Christian Nationalism (more on that in a moment) spend tons of time arguing about whether women can stand in the pulpit, but hardly a word from conservatives on the crumbling of the democratic process.
I wrote in my first book about the complicity of segments of U.S. Christianity in racism. If I were to write a history of the past 5-7 years, it would be about the conspiracy of many Christians to undermine democracy and promote authoritarianism with the veneer of religiosity
Read 12 tweets
Nov 30, 2021
As hard as fundraising is, in general, it’s even harder for Black-led nonprofits. Here’s why… 🧵
#GivingTuesday
jemartisby.substack.com/p/why-its-so-h…
Racism grew and endured in the United States because it was attached to a financial system—race-based chattel slavery…For centuries, enslaved Black people literally built the wealth of this nation and they were compensated not a bit.
jemartisby.substack.com/p/why-its-so-h…
Even after emancipation, Black people found themselves released from the physical chains of slavery only to be enslaved to generational poverty.

Through replacement systems such as convict leasing and sharecropping, the economic exploitation of Black people’s labor continued.
Read 7 tweets
Nov 29, 2021
The “scandal of the evangelical mind” continues by denigrating the work of historians and sociologists for not being sufficiently “biblical.” We are called “false teachers.” But here’s a thread of my so-called false teachings. Decide for yourself. Image
From the intro to the “Color of Compromise” I explain why this tragic history of racism must be revealed—not to harm but to heal.
bookshop.org/books/the-colo… Image
What must the church do in light of its racist past? Discern between a complicit Christianity that compromises with racism and a courageous. Christianity that confronts it. Image
Read 5 tweets
Nov 21, 2021
I don’t think *most* of the Christians who try to discredit my work and that of other scholars are mean-spirited. I do think they’re so used to a narrow interpretation of the faith that they believe theirs is the self-evident and best way to think about and do Christianity.
When people come along who say A) your theological reasoning is just as socio-culturally influenced as you say mine is and B) your loved practice does not match your professed theological belief…they get defensive and default to what’s most familiar to them.
What’s most familiar to many Christians is a highly cognitive form of faith that explicitly or tacitly thinks that right belief necessarily, or at least mostly, leads to right practice. Pro-slavery and pro-segregationist church folk obviously show this fallacy.
Read 9 tweets
May 23, 2021
#OTD: This is a couple days late, but on May 21, 1961 prominent civil rights leaders (including #MLK), other activists, and everyday Black folks in Montgomery, AL were nearly burned alive in a church by a mob 3,000 white people. This is the saga of the "Siege of First Baptist."
The day before, on May 20, 1961, Freedom Riders had once again been viciously attacked by segregationists at the Greyhound bus station in downtown Montgomery. The attackers used baseball bats and iron pipes. They specifically targeted white Freedom Riders like Jim Zwerg (below). Freedom Rider, Jim Swerg shown in a hospital bed, beaten and
The next night, a Sunday, about 1,500 Black people gathered at First Baptist, pastored by Ralph Abernathy. Black Christians started ithe church in 1867 after the Civil War. After a fire, leadership asked members to bring a brick a day to rebuild. It's nickname: Brick-A-Day church Black and White photo of First Baptist Church Montgomery
Read 11 tweets

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