As Black churches see emptier pews, Democrats may lose a key turnout weapon

Purple-and-red light streams from stained-glass windows onto congregants’ faces, as Highland Park Mayor Glenda McDonald takes the pulpit at New Grace Missionary Baptist Church on a recent Sunday afternoon. 

For weeks, the Rev. Leon Morehead had been encouraging his flock to attend the Lift Every Voice and Vote event at the church, where Democratic organizers would be offering on-site voter registration. But only about 30 people showed up. Mayor McDonald doesn’t hide her disappointment. 

“This place should be full,” says the mayor of this almost all-Black enclave of Detroit. “Your vote is your way of saying, ‘I’m here, and I will not be moved.’”  

Ever since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Black voters have been the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituency. And Black churches have frequently operated almost as an extra organizational arm for Democrats, with church leaders endorsing candidates, giving them platforms to connect with voters, and spearheading registration and turnout efforts.

Civil rights icons like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rep. John Lewis began their careers in the church, preaching love and peace as a path to social and political progress. As “the first Black institution,” says Eric McDaniel, co-director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Politics of Race and Ethnicity Lab, the church is “where Black politics took shape.”

Lately, however, the bond between the Democratic Party and the Black electorate has been looking more tenuous. Polls show President Joe Biden’s support among Black voters across the United States has fallen by double digits from the 92% he won four years ago. The decline in swing states is even sharper: A May New York Times/Siena poll of registered Black voters in battleground states found that fewer than half said they planned to vote for Mr. Biden this fall. While neither party believes the president is in any real danger of losing the Black vote, both sides agree that presidential elections can be won or lost on turnout in majority Black cities like Detroit.

Former President Donald Trump is trying to win over Black voters with ad buys and campaign stops, and is vetting a potential Black vice presidential candidate, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott. The Trump campaign is leaning into Black voters’ frustration over inflation and concerns about illegal immigration.

But another trend may also be working to the Republican Party’s advantage: the decline of the Black church. 

Overall church membership has dropped precipitously in the U.S. since the last presidential cycle, as many churchgoers formed new habits during the pandemic and never made their way back to the pews. And Black churches have seen a particularly steep drop-off. This November, when the Biden campaign will need the support of Black voters more than ever, it may not have the turnout machine of Black churches operating at full tilt. 

The 30 people sitting in the pews at New Grace for the Lift Every Voice and Vote event were reminded of their legal rights while voting and given an overview of Michigan’s new voting access laws – including nine days of early voting that encompass two Sundays. But some worry that getting voters to the polls on those Sundays may not be as easy as it was in the days when they could all go straight from church.

“At this point, not only is the church dying,” says Mr. Morehead, “but voter equality is going to die.”

Decline in church attendance

Many Black Americans have long relied on their church for both immaterial and material needs. During Mr. Morehead’s morning service, he shared the podium with an electrician, who offered to help any interested congregants learn about skilled-trade careers that only require a high school diploma. Black churches are often central community hubs, including for political decision-making, with surveys suggesting that voters who attend Black Protestant churches are more likely than others to hear sermons on race and politics. And in most Black churches, these mobilization efforts have been to the benefit of the Democratic Party.

In 1962, a privately funded program called the Voter Education Project was founded at the behest of Democratic President John F. Kennedy’s administration and was active for the next several decades, working with Black churches to coordinate voter registration. In Detroit, two church-based political action committees – the Fannie Lou Hamer PAC and The Black Slate – have for decades endorsed and promoted Democratic candidates, including Coleman Young, who served as the first Black mayor of the city. Souls to the Polls, a movement that started in Florida in the 1990s to get Black voters to the polls after Sunday services, was widely adopted by Democratic state parties and churches across the country. 

But after-church carpools are only an effective turnout strategy if voters are at church to begin with. 

Church membership has been declining among U.S. adults since the early 2000s, and saw a sustained drop after the COVID-19 pandemic upended life in 2020. The decline among Black Americans has been particularly steep. In a 2023 Pew survey, just 46% of Black Protestants said they attended religious services once a month – a 15% decline from 2019. 

The pandemic may have escalated the trend, but pastors say they’d been seeing it for years. New Grace was considered a megachurch in the 1970s and ’80s, says Mr. Morehead, with multiple services every Sunday and more than 1,000 members. By the early 2000s, that number had gone down by half. When Mr. Morehead began at New Grace in mid-2022, in-person attendance was below 100. Weekly attendance now averages between 125 and 175, he says, although this particular Sunday had closer to 100 attendees and more than two-thirds appeared to be part of the baby boomer generation or older. 

“Some of our senior members say, ‘It’s not the same way it used to be,’ and that’s because movie theaters and stores weren’t open on Sunday. There was no sports or work,” says Mr. Morehead. “You open the doors and people flock in – those days are over.”

One factor behind this decline is increased mobility. For years, New Grace needed only a small parking lot because its congregants all lived within walking distance. But as more Black Americans have moved out of urban neighborhoods into farther-flung suburbs and exurbs, many are no longer in close proximity to the churches their parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents attended – weakening relationship ties and feelings of obligation. 

“We have turned into silos of self instead of communities of care,” says the Rev. Torion Bridges, who founded The Commonwealth of Faith in Redford, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. “Whether it was a strong block club or a strong PTA, we are systematically losing these community organizations. And the last one we’re losing is the church.” 

“The cornerstone to Democratic success”

That hasn’t stopped campaigns from continuing to use Black churches to try to rally voters. Mr. Biden has given speeches at several historic Black South Carolina churches this year, including Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, where nine parishioners were killed by a white shooter in 2015. Earlier this month, Mr. Trump spoke at a Detroit church where he said that Mr. Biden has been “the worst president for Black people.”

A June USA Today/Suffolk poll found Mr. Biden winning just over half of Michigan and Pennsylvania’s Black voters, with Mr. Trump winning 15% and 10% respectively. Many experts expect the president’s stock among Black voters will rise as the election nears and more people begin paying attention. Still, polls at this same point in the run-up to the 2020 election had Mr. Biden’s support among Black voters between 70% and almost 90%.

And Democrats still remember the 2016 election, when Hillary Clinton got almost 48,000 fewer votes in Detroit than President Barack Obama got in 2012. Mrs. Clinton lost Michigan, one of the “blue wall” states that cost her the election, by fewer than 11,000 votes. 

“The African American vote in Michigan is the cornerstone to Democratic success,” says Heaster Wheeler, senior adviser to Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state. “Every successful Democratic outcome in Michigan for the last 40-plus years is rooted in Black voter turnout.”

Mr. Trump’s current strength in the polls could well be a mirage. Pictures released from Mr. Trump’s Detroit church appearance last weekend indicated that many attendees were actually white. And a recent Brookings article pointed out that many of the polls showing Black voters moving toward Mr. Trump have high margins of error. Other polls suggest that Mr. Trump’s recent conviction in his New York hush money case may have already flipped a number of Trump-supporting Black voters back to Mr. Biden.

Among Black voters interviewed by the Monitor in Detroit, the conviction came up repeatedly, with many expressing incredulity that the life of a felon could be so different for a famous white man.

“You can’t even get a job at McDonald’s if you’re a convicted felon, and now this guy is running for president?” says Toni Burgess, a member of New Grace.

Still, a handful of Black voters at a Pride parade in downtown Detroit, where an “Out for Biden/Harris” yard sign was leaning upside down against a giant rainbow flag, expressed a willingness to spurn the Democratic Party.

Although Kelly McAlpine voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, she says she’ll vote for either Mr. Trump or third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. this year because of “what’s going on” at the U.S.-Mexico border. A man named Ken, who declined to give his last name, says he voted for Mrs. Clinton in 2016 and Mr. Biden in 2020, but plans to stay home this November – even though he knows “that’s essentially a vote for Trump.” 

Young Black voters less Democratic

As Black Americans become less religious and church attendance declines, community leaders are less able to reach voters like Ms. McAlpine or Ken, says Mr. Bridges. Telling older, mostly female church attendees that they need to vote and to vote Democratic “is like shooting fish in a barrel,” he says. But getting through to Black voters who are more likely to stay home on Sunday could be a challenge.

Young Black Americans are far less likely to have a connection to the Black church, according to the recent Pew survey. And while older white voters tend to skew more Republican, the trend is reversed in the Black community: Another Pew poll found that 29% of Black voters under the age of 50 supported or were leaning towards Mr. Trump, compared with just 9% of those over 50.

Feeling isolated – or even alienated – from the church, young Black voters are looking for community elsewhere: in LGBTQ+ groups, which have long had a complicated relationship with Black churches, or with Black Lives Matter, which some experts characterize as the first significant Black rights group that has no ties to church. 

Pandemic-inspired changes, such as adding live-streaming options, could be an opportunity to bring more young people back into the fold, says the Rev. Charles Williams II of Detroit’s Historic King Solomon Church. Before the pandemic, Mr. Williams says he preached to more than 125 congregants every Sunday; now it’s fewer than half that. But social media clips of his sermon often get as many as 400 views. 

“I not only have membership from the neighborhood or city; I have membership from across the country now,” says Mr. Williams, who is also the Michigan chair of the National Action Network, a civil rights organization founded by the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Still, virtual connection can’t fully replace the benefits of gathering in person, says Mr. McDaniel at UT Austin. He remembers attending church one Sunday back when he was in grad school, and the pastor asked him to participate in a local march that the Rev. Jesse Jackson was leading. Although he really wanted to go home and watch football, he said yes – and was glad he did. 

“It’s the personal connection that is lost, and that’s critical,” says Mr. McDaniel. “It’s the people who are there sitting in the pews who will be more committed.”