Politics in the Pews: The Creation and Maintenance of Black Political Churches

264 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004.Recent work in the Black political participation literature has pointed to the importance of political churches. While scholars have established that these churches positively impact Black participation, they do not explain how these political churches come to exist. I argue that a church will become politicized when it possesses two qualities: a pastor who communicates the salience of the political identity and a membership that feels that political activity facilitated through the organization is appropriate. Further, I examine how this identity, once adopted, is maintained. Using survey data, I explore the characteristics that predict the propensity for a pastor to advocate the adoption of a political identity as well as the characteristics of those members who are more accepting of the use of the church to attain political goals. Through qualitative interviews of church members and leaders, I assess how this debate between pastors and members is shaped by the context and environment over time. I find that there are a variety of factors that impact the attitudes of clergy and members in evaluating the importance of the political identity of the church.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD