“Mighty Like A River”: The Black Protestant Church and Violence in Black Communities¹

ABSTRACT

Little empirical attention has been devoted to the link between black Protestant adherence and crime, despite significant public and political interest in the correlates of offending in black communities, as well as both historical treatments of the black church and prominent sociological theories pointing to black Protestantism as working to mitigate social problems. Using 2010 Religious Congregations and Membership Survey and county-level crime data, we examine whether black Protestantism is negatively associated with homicide, robbery, burglary, and larceny, especially in more disadvantaged black communities. We conclude by discussing the ongoing public debate surrounding the future of the black Protestant church, and we suggest directions for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Community
• race
• religion
• violence

Funding

This project was made possible by by National Institute of Justice grant NIJ 2015-R2-CX-0038.

Notes

1. Billingsley, Andrew. 1999. Mighty Like A River: The Black Church and Social Reform. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2. The black Protestant church today includes the following denominations: African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, Christian Methodist Episcopal Zion, Church of God in Christ, Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith, Inc., Cumberland Presbyterian Church in America, Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship, National Baptist Convention of America, Inc., National Baptist Convention USA, Inc., National Missionary Baptist Convention, Inc., Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc., and United Holy Church of America, Inc. (http://www.thearda.com/denoms/families/groups.asp).

3. Even the improved 2010 data likely undercount some black Protestants (as well as nondenominational congregations that are not part of the Glenmary process) because they lack resources for data collection efforts (see Finke and Scheitle 2005 for details). Again, while we know of no alternative sources of data, it is important to keep in mind that many religious adherents may still be missing despite efforts to capture them.

4. Sampson (2013:7) notes, “the phenomenon of crime does not privilege any one type of place or ecological unit either. Crime varies within societies, states, counties, cities, and certainly within neighborhoods.”

5. We also ran a full battery of diagnostic tests to assess the effect of influential cases in our sample of counties. No outliers were identified using standard DFFIT cutoff points. Cook’s D tests revealed several potential outliers (all smaller counties with higher black violence rates), which did not substantively influence the results when removed from supplemental models. We also conducted Breusch–Pagan/Cook–Weisberg tests and visually assessed plots of residuals versus fitted values, which revealed little indication of heteroskedasticity. Finally, we inspected the distribution of counties to assess whether spatial autocorrelation could be a problem, but found few large clusters of counties sharing common borders within the data once we applied our selection criteria. As such, many counties were not close enough to another in space to have meaningful spatial effects (i.e., there were spatial “islands”). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Moran’s I tests were nonsignificant and we could not reject the null hypothesis that values on our dependent variables were spatially random.

6. Our sample captures much of the historically “black belt” South. Approximately 70 percent of our counties fall within the Census’s South region, with the remainder falling in the West (7 percent), Midwest (12 percent), and North (11 percent) regions.

7. Because we rely on three years of data (2009–11), relatively few counties report zero offenses (only 103—or about 14 percent—report zero values for homicide). However, to account for places with low counts of homicides, we use Poisson-based negative binomial models that take into account the presence of zero counts (see description of analytic techniques). Diagnostic tests regarding the appropriateness of zero-inflated models revealed that standard negative binomial models were more appropriate.

8. We also emphasize here that we cannot control for congregations and adherent populations simultaneously because of collinearity as evidenced by large variance inflation factors in saturated models. Moreover, it is not our goal here to disentangle the impact of congregations relative to adherents (see, e.g., Beyerlein and Hipp 2005).

9. Critically, we are not claiming that social disorganization, institutional anomie, and civic community are race-specific in and of themselves. That is, the same theoretical criminogenic processes (population instability, poverty, anomie, etc.) generate similar effects on crime for all racial and ethnic groups. However, we are suggesting that there might be qualitative differences in the manner in which these processes play out (or are counteracted in the case of the black church). Again, we are not able to fully adjudicate between these theories and, as such, our models provide only suggestive evidence consistent with these various perspectives; however, there are reasons to suspect here that the link between black Protestantism and crime may be more pronounced for black than for white crime.

10. While arrest statistics may reflect police arrest bias, we have no theoretical reason to believe the extent of that bias in regard to black arrests would be correlated with black protestant adherence. Thus, we are making the assumption that while black overrepresentation in arrests due to police bias likely exists, it should be relatively uniform with respect to the distribution of black protestant adherence and, in turn, should not affect our findings.

11. Because the crime outcomes are race-specific, we also constructed race-specific independent variables for mobility and the disadvantage index. The latter variable was constructed using the same principal component technique as employed in our original disadvantage index, but included race-specific (white, black) poverty, unemployment, female headship, and low education.

12. Though we estimated models using this alternative focal independent variable with substantively similar results, for several reasons, we argue that calculating the permeation of black Protestantism using only the black population is inappropriate. First, using only the black population in the denominator assumes that all (or nearly all) black Protestants are black, when there is a fair degree of diversity in the racial composition of adherents to historically black denominations (Doughtery 2003; Lipka 2015). Indeed, even some prominent leaders of historically black denominations are nonblack (e.g., St. John African Methodist Episcopal pastoral leader Renita Lamkin). Second, doing so makes comparisons across other religious traditions difficult because each reflects the relative proportion of adherences out of a community’s overall population.

Additional information

Funding

This project was made possible by by National Institute of Justice grant NIJ 2015-R2-CX-0038.

Notes on contributors

Casey T. Harris

Casey T. Harris is an Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Social Research at the University of Arkansas. His research focuses on stratification inequality, race/ethnicity, communities, and crime.

Jeffery T. Ulmer

Jeffery T. Ulmer is Professor and Associate Head of Sociology and Criminology at Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on courts, sentencing and corrections, religion and crime, and race and ethnic inequalities.