Against All Odds: The Struggle for Racial Integration in Religious Organizations

8. What We Learned

What We Learned We have covered a great deal of ground in our case studies, and we have visited a variety of places and religious organizations. For each case, we conducted around thirty in-depth face-to-face interviews with affiliates of religious organizations, including current members, former members, and leadership. We also observed religious meetings and “hung out” with members and leaders in less formal contexts. In doing so, we shared in the challenges, joys, and satisfaction that come with being a part of an interracial religious organization. We have studied these organizations not just to get an inside look at them and gain a visceral understanding of the issues that confront them as they attempt to integrate, but also to make generalizations about the processes that occur in these social spaces. So in this chapter, we ask: what did we learn? We have focused primarily on the challenges these organizations face, paying specific attention to those forces that work to stabilize or destabilize them. We consider forces that facilitate the development or sustenance of racial integration in religious organizations to be stabilizing forces. Those forces that work against racial integration we call destabilizing forces. We categorize the forces affecting these organizations into three broad areas: internal organizational dynamics, external socioeconomic structures, and internal religious forces. Internal Organizational Dynamics In all of the organizations we have examined, we found that the ability of members to find belonging through friendship networks was a central problem. Because these are religious organizations, finding belonging is a much higher priority for members than would be the case in the workplace, for example. We found that the racial diversity of these organizations often 8 151 complicated the ability of members to find belonging within them. As seen in five of the six cases, majority group members had a higher proportion of close friends from their own racial group than did minority group members. Also in five of six cases, majority group members had a higher proportion of their close friends within the organization than outside of it. For example, in the case of Messiah, where the numerical majority is Filipino, Filipinos were much more likely to name other Filipinos in the congregation as their closest friends. And compared to the non-Filipinos in the congregation, they had significantly less racial diversity among their close friends. What is more, their best friends were more likely to be within rather than outside the congregation. African Americans at Crosstown, the numerical majority group in that organization, were also more likely than white attenders to say that their closest friends were of their own race, and were more likely than whites to have their best friends within the church. We also found in each of our cases—at least in the early stages of the organizations’ interracial transitions—that the turnover of numerical minorities was greater than for numerical majorities . These findings lead us to three general conclusions and a corollary: Other factors being equal, numerical majority group members have, within the religious organization, a higher percentage of close friends who are their same race, relative to the friendship racial backgrounds of minority group members. Other factors being equal, numerical majority group members have a higher percentage of close friends within the organization, relative to minority group members. Generally, within the religious organizations, turnover rates are higher for numerical minority groups than for majority groups. Insofar as the first three conclusions are true, interracial religious organizations are inherently unstable. We expect that these conclusions generalize beyond our case studies, so we offer them as hypotheses to be tested further. The first conclusion is built into the very nature of relative group sizes: the larger the relative size of a group, the lower the rate of outgroup relations. For example, if we have an organization with eight blue and two orange people, and they 152 | What We Learned have roughly the same number of friends, the blue people are less likely to have orange friends than the orange people are to have blue friends. Obviously, the greater the disparity in the relative size of groups, the more fully actualized is the statement that majority group members, relative to minority group members, will have same-race friends. Our second and third conclusions make sense when put into theoretical context. Two processes are of particular importance: the niche edge effect and the niche overlap effect. We...