People of the Dream: Multiracial Congregations in the United States (review)

Why is it still the case that religious congregations remain so segregated? And given that they are, what are we to make of the few congregations that defy that trend to create multiracial communities? Do the people who do the hard work of creating and maintaining those cross-cultural experiments have anything to teach the rest of society? After six years of data collection and close observation, undertaken with a multiracial research team and the counsel of the pastor of a multiracial church, Michael Emerson's book brings careful sociological attention to those questions and offers both words of hope and words of caution.

The data on which those words rest includes a national telephone survey of the American population, with oversamples for African Americans, Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans. There are some gaps in the sample, but not many, and Emerson is consistently careful in interpreting his data. The survey allowed him to gauge how likely it is that a person attends religious services where no more than 80 percent of the others present are of the same race as the respondent (the answer: 15.5 percent of regular service-attenders are in such mixed environments). He could then assess what factors in the person's background, attitudes, and current religious and social situation are associated with inhabiting this distinctive minority.

In addition, Emerson puts the National Congregations Study to good use to identify structural, ecological, religious, and demographic factors that distinguish more diverse congregations from less diverse ones. By the 80/20 binary measure, the NCS identifies 7 percent of American congregations as multiracial (although Emerson suspects that number overestimates the reality). Comparing more and less diverse congregations in this nationally representative sample allows a systematic analysis that reveals some surprises – conservative v liberal theology has no effect, for instance, but charismatic worship styles are associated with greater diversity; there are no regional differences; and both higher income and occupational status are associated with greater diversity.

While Emerson's team did a congregational survey of their own, they primarily put it to use to select thirty congregations for in-depth analysis. Twenty-two of these were identified as multiracial, while eight were not. These case studies, along with Emerson and Woo's intensive analysis of one Houston congregation over more than a decade of ethnic transformation, provide the texture behind the numbers. Looking closely, for example, leads them to suspect that many of the congregations that show up at any given moment as "multiracial" are actually in transition from one group to another and will not remain mixed.

Looking closely also allows them to examine the very different paths by which congregations become multiracial and assess the particular hazards of each. One clear message is that starting a multiracial congregation is far easier than transforming a formerly uni-racial one. And if you are going to try to transform an old one, far better to do it out of an internally-generated sense of mission than to have it imposed by a denominational hierarchy.

That latter point is intimately related to the "cautionary tale" aspect of this book. Congregations are, by their very nature, places where people produce dense and significant webs of affiliation, systems of power, and symbolic culture. Emerson borrows Bourdieu's notion of "habitus" to describe the emotionally-powerful mental structures that guide members' notions about how things rightfully should be. Given 350 years of racialized history and separate experiences of worship, the divide between black and white is far more than a matter of individual prejudice. Bringing other ethnic groups together is twice as likely, in fact, as bridging that black/white divide. The rare congregations that do, have to work constantly to avoid the pitfalls of lingering white hegemony.

Why bother? Congregations matter, Emerson argues, because they are so pervasive in American society and because they so thoroughly reflect American patterns of voluntary organizing. For...