Is Sunday Morning Still The Most Segregated Time In U.S.?

We must face the fact that in America, the church is still the most segregated major institution in America. At 11:00 on Sunday morning when we stand and sing and Christ has no east or west, we stand at the most segregated hour in this nation. This is tragic. 

Those are the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1963. He was repeating what Dr. Helen Kenyon had said more than a decade earlier (in November of 1952). They were right. It was true in 1952, and just as true in 1963. Some states were still segregated at that time and some were not, but as Americans went to their place of worship on Sunday morning, they did so almost exclusively with members of their own race (and the same could be said of those who worshiped on other days).

Has that changed? Maybe some, but it can probably still be said that our religious institutions are much more segregated than work or school environments. The chart above is from the Pew Research Center concerning racial diversity in religion. It uses the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index to rank individual religious institutions on their diversity. They explain that index this way:

If a religious group had exactly equal shares of each of the five racial and ethnic groups (20% each), it would get a 10.0 on the index; a religious group made up entirely of one racial group would get a 0.0. By comparison, U.S. adults overall rate at 6.6 on the scale. And indeed, the purpose of this scale is to compare groups to each other, not to point to any ideal standard of diversity.

Frankly, it looks to me like most religions still have a long way to go -- and even if an organization has  a pretty good diversity index, that doesn't mean those people necessarily worship together (but has their own churches that cater to mostly a single race).

And us atheists and agnostics aren't doing a whole lot better than most religious organizations -- with whites making up the huge majority. We also need to do a better job of reaching out to people of color.