Black praise in white pews: When your church doesn't love you back
Black praise in white pews: When your church doesn't love you back
How do you participate in a faith practice that hasn't had the best track record with racism? That's what our NPR play-cousin J.C. Howard gets into in this week's episode of Code Switch. He's been reporting on Black Christians who, like him for a time, found their spiritual homes in white evangelical churches.
"Being a Christian has always been one of the primary ways that I identify, but finding my place in Christianity has been a journey," J.C. says. And he wasn't alone in making the shift to white evangelical spaces; in the past few decades, large Christian ministries have been reaching out to Black Christians to join their white-majority churches.
J.C. grew up Pentecostal, but going from a Black Pentecostal church to a white evangelical one isn't just a shift in worship style. He says that being the young Black man surrounded by white evangelicals made him "realize that this place might invite me in, but it wasn't built for me."
As J.C. was thinking through his own spiritual journey, he read the story of another Black Christian, Dante Stewart, who started and ended in a very similar place. On this episode, J.C. talks to Dante as a way to explore his own story.
James Willetts engineered this episode.