Traditionally, the route to winning the African American vote for Democratic politicians has run through Black churches that are very much like Brown’s—that is, ecumenically minded congregations that preach the message of the “beloved community” and civil rights. The members of these churches are overwhelmingly loyal to the party of Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama, and Biden; 90 percent of Black Methodists, for instance, are Democrats.
But today, many of those churches are shrinking, and their members are aging. Brown himself is 83. For many younger African Americans, the Black Church no longer holds the place of importance that it did for their parents or grandparents. Fewer than one-third of Black Gen Zers and Millennials ever go to Black churches. The result is that the Democratic Party is losing a reliable way to reach Black voters.
Black Protestant churches are squeezed by two forces. One is secularization. Although African Americans are still more likely than whites to attend church, church-attendance rates are falling among younger Black people. Nearly half of Black Gen Zers and Millennials say they “seldom or never” attend church—which is true of only a quarter of African Americans from the Silent Generation and fewer than a third of Black Baby Boomers.
“For those who were part of the Baby Boom or Silent Generations, the Black Church was a semi-involuntary organization,” Nichole Phillips, the director of the Black Church Studies Program at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, told me. Black people in the 1950s and ’60s, she said, believed that nothing else could equal the Church as “a refuge from racial animus and hostility” and as a leader in “political, religious, legal, educational, [and] social reform.”
Younger African Americans face a very different situation today. Although Phillips insists that the “prophetic” tradition of the Black Church still influences young people, she concedes that they also have a much wider array of options than their parents or grandparents did. “The emergence of social media has become a distraction from what was once the ‘primary’ and often ‘sole’ site of Black authority and power: the Church,” Phillips said. “What attracts young people beyond church walls has their attention and therefore influences their choices—social, political, religious.”
The evidence suggests that some Black people who have stopped attending church have also left the Democratic Party. A 2024 study by the University of Texas sociologist Jason E. Shelton found that only 43 percent of religiously unaffiliated African Americans are Democrats, which he notes is “the lowest percentage for any religious classification in Black America.”