I think church is great for mixing up people who differ professionally and socioeconomically. But at least in the US it has also very much deepened the racial and (obviously) religious lines between people.
While I totally understand why you'd find community there, I am surprised that you'd consider Church to be a place to find people of diverse backgrounds. That hasn't at all been my experience
If you go and visit a church, you will realize that no, you don't have a communal meeting ground across class. Class and geography is strongly correlated, so that pre-sorts already. Within that church, people self-select according to the smaller sub-strata of class they belong to.
The takeaway from those articles seems to be that even the most integrated churches are still trailing average neighborhood integration numbers (which are broadly considered problematic). There has been progress, but there is still a ways to go:
> Despite progress in church integration, congregations remain far more segregated than the society in general. Dr. Dougherty, an associate professor of sociology at Baylor University, states that “congregations are looking more like their neighborhoods racially and ethnically, but they still lag behind. The average congregation was eight times less diverse racially than its neighborhood in 1998 and four times less diverse in 2012.”
The context here is whether churches are a good way for people of diverse backgrounds to engage and interact. I contend that they have unnecessary elements that make them worse than a non-religious community event (supernatural beliefs, explicit conformity of dress and thought, protecting predators, etc.)
I go to a Christian church that is geographically situated in an urban area around a bunch of college campuses. Some of my friends from this church are:
* A heart surgeon in residency
* A guy who does flooring / carpentry
* A physics professor
* A bass violin player
* An actuary
* A piano tuner
* A computational biology post-doc
We have fun conversations and other than a foundational worldview alignment tend to have very different perspectives on politics/life choices/etc. Our church could be more diverse in many different ways but it certainly is diverse socioeconomically and I have benefited enormously because of these friendships.
Churches themselves are divided the same way, rich and poor churches, white and black churches. The rich churches are pro-science bastions of professionalism with engineers, lawyers, and doctors.
One thing that I've noticed and that kind of concerns me is that in my environment (urban, well-educated, white, late-twenties, Western-Europe) there's a distinct lack of regular interaction with people who are significantly older, younger, less-educated, and/or 'less' white.
Perhaps the reason why I notice is it that in my previous Evangelical Christian life I interacted with a much greater variety of people through regular church-related activities (every Sunday and Thursday, and special events on top of that).
From mentally disabled (apologies if that's not the PC term) to genius-level mathematicians, from as-local-as-<insert typical local food> to a huge amount of different ethnic backgrounds, from watching babies in the Sunday kindergarten to volunteering for 'coffee duty' at events for seniors, and from dirt-poor to local jeweler/banker/realtor; all of that came together on, at the very least, a weekly basis. And it's one of the few things I really miss from my church-going years. Literally every single one of those people in some way enriched my life.
I think it's a very good thing to try to counterbalance increasingly common lifestyles of 'homogenous interactions' through initiatives like this. I really think it does increase empathy, and I really think it's necessary.
I see your point, but I think it goes the other way.
Churches et al are microcosms of a geographic community, resulting in greater localized diversity of thought. And these groups can either lead or hold back a community along the lines of race- and class-exclusion. The church I grew up with was the very first institution in my life that had an openly homosexual person in a position of power (the rector, in charge of the local church).
Point being, the exclusionary aspect of these institutions is often a reflection of the communities they exist within. Certainly clubs are self-grouping communities, with their own sets of exclusionary rules...and some clubs were and are quite explicit in their exclusions: anything that is pay-to-play is largely going to have an element of class-exclusion, whether you pay at the door or whether you pay with something you can "show" (eg being able to read Latin, being a great classical musician, etc). Certainly many clubs have been race- exclusionary, at times intentionally ("keep those people out!") and other times unintentionally ("wait you don't know about X??").
But just because these groups exhibited these exclusions, I don't think it necessarily follows that segregating by worldview is healthier than segregating by geographic region.
Church is great for this specifically because it's a social group that spends all its time espousing the idea that all men are created equal, therefore ALL backgrounds are welcome. The most important piece of social mobility is knowing those outside of your economic circle.
Example: You need a job, you know your great buddy Bob has a spot that you could hop into, he knows you pretty well and that you're not an idiot, so he hires you on the spot into a job you never would've had the qualification for otherwise.
I don’t know much about lodges and golf clubs, but most churches are overwhelmingly of one race or another. Finding a church that reflects the broader community is quite rare, most of the community tends to self-segregate on Sunday mornings.
That said, growing up churches seemed fairly class-integrated (I’m atheist now, maybe this has changed?). But growing up we had everyone from an American Football quarterback on a multi-million dollar contract to working class folks in the same room.
I am not a religious person or church goer, but are the perspectives really that different? To me, it looks like a church is a self selected group of geographically proximate people who tend to look alike and dress alike. You don't usually see much ethnic diversity in a church photo.
It's more diverse than sitting at home, but I think exposure to a few TV shows has more diversity of thought, ethnicity, sexuality, etc., compared to going to church.
I'm not saying its bad for people to get together and talk. I see that church was an important mechanism for this in the past. However, I can't get past the negatives (supernatural belief, child abuse, kowtowing to authority, shame, ostracism) to believe it will continue to be a net positive.
What we need is more of what I think the Unitarians are after - non denominational community.
Good point. Although maybe a good percentage of people can imagine finding a social group at one or the other, noting that not all churches are evangelical in either theology or culture. Meaningful shared group experiences are important.
Neither, most people are born into whatever church their parents went to ;)
But seriously, it really is a mix. A church can most certainly shape its members beliefs, but many people will also leave a church over issues like these.
> To me, it looks like a church is a self selected group of geographically proximate people who tend to look alike and dress alike. You don't usually see much ethnic diversity in a church photo.
I agree any given local church in the US is unlikely to have a ton of ethnic diversity. And, for obvious reasons, it will have almost no religious diversity.
They do tend to have a decent amount of professional and socioeconomic diversity, though, which is also valuable.
It's not at all guaranteed that joining a religious community will diversify your social circle. It may very well have the opposite effect depending on the particular community you join.
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