What may houses of worship do to advance political causes or candidates? By Ira Rifkin Freelance Writer The Church at Pierce Creek was a non-denominational, conservative Protestant congregation outside Binghamton, N.Y., until the Internal Revenue Service revoked its tax-exempt status for sponsoring a 1992 newspaper ad attacking then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s stands on abortion and […]

Bernard Richardson is an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. He teaches pastoral care and counseling at Howard University School of Divinity, where he also is dean of the Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel.

James Kenneth Echols was president of the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago until May 18, 2011. He edited I Have a Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Future of Multicultural America (Augsburg, 2004), and he is an expert on the subjects of African-Americans in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Monte Sahlin is vice president for creative ministries with the Seventh-day Adventist Church, in which blacks make up 31 percent of members and which has 750 multiethnic congregations in which no ethnic group is more than 51 percent.

The University of North Carolina’s digital archive, “Documenting the American South,” includes a history on the southern black community and documentation of the past.

Read a brief history and review of scholarly surveys on community outreach by black churches, by John J. DiIulio Jr. at the Manhattan Institute Web site.

The Public Influences of African-American Churches Project conducted focus groups and surveyed black congregations and church leaders over three years to learn about congregational involvement in elections and setting public policy since the civil rights era. Despite the existence of 8,000 black elected officials and dozens of black civic and lobbying organizations, the survey found that black churches […]

The Pew Research Center surveyed religious groups about their reactions to the 2006 elections, about religious mobilization in congregations and about attitudes toward 2008 presidential candidates. Data is presented for black Protestants.

Survey Documentation and Analysis (using data from the General Social Surveys from 1972-2004) shows that 75.7 percent of blacks are Protestant, 6.5 percent are Catholic, 0.2 percent are Jewish, 7 percent are “Other” and 10.6 percent do not identify with a religious group.