In a recent front-page article, New York Times religion reporter Ruth Graham explores a historic gendered shift in church attendance. As the data show: survey after survey reveals a marked increase in young men’s church attendance, while young women’s church attendance continues to wane. But Graham’s silence on the overwhelming whiteness of these young Christian men is deafening. It reflects an all-too-American tendency to collapse “religion” into what white Christian men do, think, or feel.
American evangelicalism is racially diverse, and white American evangelicals absolutely have a racism problem. Graham’s piece accounts for neither of these facts. The article draws on her own observations in Waco, Texas, along with insights from the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute, a libertarian-right think tank, and the Pew Research Center. According to Graham, Grace Church Waco offers “a dramatic example of an emerging truth,” which is that “[young men] attend services more often and are more likely to identify as religious.” She observed “men greet[ing] visitors at the door, mann[ing] the information table and hand[ing] out bulletins.” In addition, four out of five on-stage musicians, most of the college students sitting in the front rows, and the pastor delivering the sermon were also men.
And all of the men in question were white, which makes sense as Grace is a white evangelical church, with three white male pastors and a deaconry composed of white men and women. In fact, there doesn’t appear to be any person of color on the website, which includes 22 faces (including the entirety of the church’s leadership). The photos included with the article likewise feature only white people.
Grace Church is part of the Southern Baptist Convention, one of the largest white Protestant denominations in the country. The SBC also happens to be grappling with hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse by church leaders as well as debates over a potential ban for churches with women pastors. That increasing numbers of young white Christian men are attending churches like Grace Church Waco while such churches remain SBC-affiliated is no coincidence.
Phil Barnes, another white pastor affiliated with Grace, wonders aloud in Graham’s article: “What’s the Lord doing? Why is he sending us all of these young men?”
Perhaps the space white evangelical churches make for the unremarked exclusion of people of color, as well as the oppression and sublimation of women and children, might provide some answers.
White evangelical racism
Dr. Anthea Butler, author of White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, insists that “morality isn’t a religious issue for evangelicals, but a political tool they hide behind that allows them to obscure the racist and sexist pronouncements and laws they often back and promulgate.” Sexism and white supremacy are deeply, perhaps indelibly embedded in the white American evangelical ethos. While Graham notes that “this growing gender divide [in Christian churches] has the potential to reshape the landscape of not just religion, but also of family life and politics,” she fails to consider that the pronounced racism and sexism of white evangelicalism might be precisely what’s drawing more young white men to church.
“White evangelical racism,” as Butler defines it, is the deep entanglement of American evangelicalism with racist, and specifically white supremacist, ideologies. That is, evangelicalism as an institution has historically upheld a racial hierarchy with white people at the top, often using Christianity to justify segregation and racist domination over African, Indigenous, and other people of color. Butler emphasizes that this racism isn’t merely a relic of the past—it is a core feature of contemporary white evangelicalism, shaping both its theology and political commitments in the present.
The overwhelming whiteness and the increasing maleness of congregations like that of Grace Church isn’t an accident. It’s a selling point—especially for young white conservative Christian men who perceive themselves as embattled and disenfranchised. And the uptick in young white men’s church attendance has potential political consequences.
As Graham notes, “in a Times/Siena poll of six swing states in August, young men favored former President Donald J. Trump by 13 points, while young women favored Vice President Kamala Harris by 38 points—a 51-point gap far larger than in other generational cohorts.” White evangelical churches, marked by the racism that formed them, are drawing in young white men who are likely to vote for controversial evangelical darling, Donald Trump. As Butler effectively shows, it is precisely because of white evangelicalism’s historic racist legacy that white Christians have rallied behind Trump’s white nationalist rhetoric.
Young white Christian men continue to flock to the former president and his vision for the future of the nation, one in which white Christian men will continue to reign atop America’s racial hierarchy. Unmarked conservative white Christian spaces—such as Trump’s campaign rallies—appeal to young white men in record numbers, further revealing how exactly whiteness, masculinity, and Christianity coalesce. PRRI’s Melissa Deckman recently contended that “there’s a deliberate strategy by the Trump campaign to reach out to, especially, disaffected young men. A lot of those men care a lot about the economy, but I think they’re also drawn to the perception that Trump is very strong.” As others have noted, whiteness and masculinity dominate at Trump’s rallies, much as they do in white evangelical congregations like Grace Church.
Trump has called on young white Christian men to join his forces, stating:
Christians: get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you, Christians… I love you. Get out. You gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not gonna have to vote.
Trump effectively speaks directly to the heart of white evangelical America while alluding to a future free from the burden of democracy in which white evangelicals are “not gonna have to vote.”
To most, Graham’s vignette about young white men attending church in greater numbers might seem nothing more than a statistical curiosity. But Graham’s failure to name the whiteness of these men, these spaces, these communities, is a problem. The article, like mainstream coverage of “religion” (read: white evangelicalism) in general, is emblematic of a well-established and violent practice of failing to recognize both the whiteness and the white supremacy embedded in mainstream narratives. The result is that, once again, this political crisis goes unaddressed.
