The Black Church Traded the Gospel for a Voting Guide

Before there were civil rights organizations, before there were Black political parties, before there were Black newspapers or Black colleges or Black professional associations, there was the Black church. It was the first institution that enslaved Africans in America were permitted to build, and they built it with a ferocity of purpose that reflected its function: the Black church was not merely a place of worship. It was a school, a bank, a courtroom, a counseling center, a political organizing space, a mutual aid society, and the single most important incubator of Black leadership in American history. The church taught formerly enslaved people to read. It pooled their pennies into funds that purchased land and built businesses. It provided the moral framework that held families together under conditions designed to tear them apart. It produced Nat Turner and Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth and Richard Allen and every leader of consequence in Black American life from the eighteenth century through the middle of the twentieth. The Black church was not an institution within the Black community. It was the Black community, and everything else grew from its roots.

I say all of this with reverence, because what I am about to say requires that my reverence for what the church was be established before I describe what it has become. The Black church — the institution that organized the Underground Railroad, that funded the abolition movement, that provided the infrastructure for the most successful nonviolent revolution in modern history — has been reduced, in too many of its manifestations, to a voter registration office with a choir. It has traded its prophetic voice for political access, its moral authority for partisan loyalty, its gospel for a voting guide, and its mission of individual and community transformation for a permanent alliance with one political party that takes its loyalty for granted and delivers, in return, precisely what any institution delivers to those who offer their allegiance without conditions: nothing.

What the Church Built

The historical record of the Black church’s contributions to Black American life is not a matter of sentiment. It is documented in institutional histories, in economic data, and in the biographies of every major Black leader from the antebellum period through the civil rights era.

The African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded by Richard Allen in 1816 in Philadelphia, was the first independent Black denomination in America. Within two decades, AME churches had established schools, mutual aid societies, and economic cooperatives across the northern states. The AME Church funded and operated Wilberforce University, founded in 1856, and dozens of other educational institutions that provided the only available formal education for Black Americans during the era of slavery and its aftermath.

Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, was the staging ground for the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956 — the event that launched the modern civil rights movement. Its pastor, a twenty-six-year-old Martin Luther King Jr., organized the boycott from the church basement, coordinated the carpool system that allowed 40,000 Black commuters to avoid the segregated bus system for 381 days, and delivered the sermons that transformed a local transportation protest into a national moral revolution. Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where King served as co-pastor with his father, was the organizational hub of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the command center for the campaigns in Birmingham, Selma, and across the South.

But the church’s contribution extended far beyond headline-making activism. In communities across the South, the Black church operated the functions that government would not provide and the market would not serve. Church offerings funded Black businesses through informal lending circles that operated on trust and accountability. Church-run benevolent societies provided insurance, burial funds, and emergency assistance to members. Churches operated literacy programs that were, for decades, the only educational resources available to Black adults. Churches provided marriage counseling, family mediation, and youth mentorship at a time when no other institution in Black life offered these services.

The church did all of this on the strength of two assets: moral authority and community trust. Moral authority came from its commitment to a gospel that demanded personal transformation, family responsibility, community accountability, and resistance to injustice. Community trust came from its demonstrated willingness to deploy its resources in service of the people, not the pastor. The two assets were inseparable. The moral authority justified the trust. The trust funded the mission. And the mission produced outcomes that no government program has ever matched.

The Pivot to Politics

The Black church’s alliance with the Democratic Party is not as old as most people assume. In the century following emancipation, Black Americans — and Black churches — were overwhelmingly Republican. The Republican Party had, after all, been the party of abolition, the party of Lincoln, and the party of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. This began to shift during the New Deal, when Franklin Roosevelt’s economic programs attracted Black voters despite the Democratic Party’s continued association with Southern segregation. The decisive shift came in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and Barry Goldwater opposed it, producing a partisan realignment in which Black Americans moved overwhelmingly to the Democratic column, where they have remained ever since.

The church followed the voters, and in following the voters, it entered an alliance that would gradually transform its character. During the civil rights era, the church’s political engagement was prophetic — it spoke truth to power on the basis of moral principle, and it was willing to challenge any party, any politician, and any institution that fell short of those principles. King criticized both Democrats and Republicans. He pressured Kennedy and Johnson alike. He was as willing to march against Northern housing discrimination as Southern voting restrictions. The church’s political voice was independent, and its independence was the source of its power.

What happened in the decades after King’s assassination was a gradual, largely undocumented transformation in which the Black church’s political engagement shifted from prophetic to partisan. The church did not merely support Democratic candidates who advanced its principles. It became an arm of the Democratic Party’s electoral machinery. Pastors became precinct captains. Pulpits became campaign platforms. “Souls to the Polls” became a standard feature of election season, in which Sunday sermons concluded with organized transportation to early voting sites and explicit or implicit direction on which candidates to support. The church’s voter registration drives, which had been acts of liberation under Jim Crow, became acts of partisan mobilization under freedom — and the difference between the two is the difference between an institution that serves its people and an institution that delivers its people to a party.

The Cost of Unconditional Loyalty

A church that cannot criticize its political allies is no longer a church. It is a Political Action Committee with stained glass windows.

The Democratic Party has held between 85 and 95 percent of the Black vote in every presidential election since 1964. The Black church has been the primary institutional mechanism for delivering that vote. And in exchange for this loyalty — the most reliable voting bloc in American politics, delivered with near-unanimity for sixty years — what has the Black community received?

The cities with the longest records of uninterrupted Democratic governance — Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, Cleveland, Newark, Memphis — are the cities with the highest Black poverty rates, the worst-performing school systems, the highest crime rates, and the most severe housing deterioration. This is not a coincidence. It is the predictable consequence of unconditional political loyalty: a constituency that will vote for you regardless of results has no leverage to demand results. A church that will deliver its congregation to a party regardless of outcomes has no leverage to demand outcomes. And a party that receives loyalty without conditions has no incentive to deliver anything in return.

King understood this. In his 1967 speech at the SCLC convention, he said that Black voters should not be the “tail on anybody’s kite” and argued for political independence that would force both parties to compete for Black support. The church that King led was willing to challenge its allies. The church that succeeded him is not. And the price of that unwillingness is measured in the conditions of the communities it claims to serve.

The Prosperity Gospel Betrayal

The politicization of the Black church has a theological companion that is equally corrosive: the prosperity gospel — the doctrine that God rewards faith with material wealth and that poverty is a symptom of insufficient devotion. This theology, which has no basis in the actual text of the New Testament and was explicitly rejected by every major Christian tradition for two thousand years, has been embraced by a significant segment of Black megachurch pastors with results that are both documented and grotesque.

In 2015, Pastor Creflo Dollar of World Changers Church International in College Park, Georgia, publicly appealed to his congregation for donations to purchase a $65 million Gulfstream G650 private jet. The appeal was documented by multiple media outlets and was not denied by Dollar or his church. His congregation, located in a county where the median household income is approximately $52,000, was asked to fund a jet that costs more than the combined annual income of more than a thousand of its families.

Dollar is not an anomaly. He is the most visible example of a pattern that extends across the Black megachurch landscape. Bishop T.D. Jakes lives in a 12,000-square-foot mansion valued at $5.5 million. Pastor Eddie Long, before his death in 2017, drove Bentleys and lived in a 7,000-square-foot home funded by a congregation in DeKalb County, Georgia, where the Black poverty rate exceeds 20 percent. Jamal Bryant, John Gray, and dozens of other high-profile Black pastors maintain lifestyles that bear no resemblance to the humble servant model described in the gospels they claim to preach.

The prosperity gospel is not a victimless theology. It extracts wealth from poor communities and concentrates it in the hands of pastors who claim that their wealth is evidence of God’s favor — an argument that, logically, implies that their congregants’ poverty is evidence of God’s disfavor. It replaces the gospel’s demand for justice, humility, and service with a transactional theology in which God is essentially a cosmic vending machine who dispenses material rewards in exchange for sufficient deposits of faith and cash. And it does this in communities where financial literacy is low, economic vulnerability is high, and the pastor is the most trusted authority figure available.

The Decline That Proves the Point

If the transformation of the Black church from a prophetic institution to a partisan and prosperity-driven one were serving the community, the community would be flourishing and the church would be growing. Neither is happening.

Pew Research Center data from 2014 and 2023 shows a steady decline in Black church attendance, particularly among younger generations. Among Black Americans aged 18 to 29, the share who attend religious services at least weekly has dropped from approximately 40 percent in the early 2000s to approximately 28 percent by the early 2020s. Among Black Americans aged 30 to 49, the decline is less steep but equally consistent. The overall share of Black Americans who identify as religiously unaffiliated — the “nones” — has risen from approximately 12 percent in 2007 to approximately 21 percent in 2023.

The young people leaving the church are not leaving because they have lost interest in God. Surveys consistently show that Black Americans of all ages maintain high levels of personal religious belief and private prayer. They are leaving because the institution feels more political than spiritual, more concerned with elections than with souls, more interested in the pastor’s lifestyle than in the congregant’s struggles. They are leaving because they can see, with the clarity that youth provides and age often obscures, that an institution whose primary public function is delivering votes to a party and donations to a pastor’s lifestyle is not the institution that organized the Underground Railroad or marched at Selma. It is something else entirely. And whatever it is, they want no part of it.

What a Renewed Church Could Do

I am not arguing for the destruction of the Black church. I am arguing for its restoration. Because the model of what the church can be is not theoretical. It is historical. It existed. It worked. It produced outcomes that no government program, no political party, and no social service agency has ever replicated. And it can be rebuilt, if the church is willing to reclaim the mission it abandoned.

Return to the mutual aid model. The Black church of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries operated as an economic cooperative. Members pooled resources to fund businesses, purchase land, provide insurance, and support families in crisis. This model — which predates government welfare by generations and outperformed it by every measure — can be revived. Church-based credit unions, community land trusts, cooperative business incubators, and emergency assistance funds are not innovations. They are restorations of a tradition that the church invented and then abandoned in favor of political dependence.

Rebuild family counseling and accountability. The historic Black church held families together not merely by preaching about family values but by providing the institutional infrastructure that supported families: premarital counseling, marriage mentorship by older couples, youth programs that provided structure and supervision, and a community accountability culture in which family dissolution was not celebrated or normalized but addressed with both compassion and expectation. The church was the institution that said to a young father: you will stay. You will provide. You will be present. And we will help you do it. That voice has been largely silenced, replaced by a theology that asks nothing of men and offers nothing to families beyond a Sunday morning program.

Recover the prophetic voice. A prophetic church is not a partisan church. It is a church that speaks truth to all power, including the power of its political allies. It is a church that can say to the Democratic Party: you have had our vote for sixty years, and schools in Black communities are still failing, Black neighborhoods are still violent, and Black families are still fractured. What are you going to do about it? And it is a church that can say to the Republican Party: if you want our vote, show us results, not rhetoric. A church with this voice has leverage. A church without it has nothing but the illusion of influence.

The Gospel Is Not a Voting Guide

I want to close with theology, because the Black church’s crisis is ultimately a theological crisis. The gospel — the actual text, not the political interpretation superimposed upon it — demands something very specific of the individual: personal transformation. Repentance. A turning away from the patterns that produce destruction and a turning toward the patterns that produce life. The gospel does not say, “Vote for the right candidate and you will be saved.” It does not say, “Send your pastor enough money and God will make you rich.” It does not say, “Your circumstances are entirely the product of external forces and your individual choices are irrelevant.”

The gospel says, with a directness that no political platform has ever matched: you must change. Not the system. Not the party in power. Not the structural forces that surround you. You. You must examine your life, identify what is broken, take responsibility for what you can control, and do the difficult, daily work of becoming a different person. This is not a conservative message or a liberal message. It is the message of the text, and it is the message that the Black church preached with thunderous conviction for two hundred years before it decided that political affiliation was more important than personal transformation.

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” — James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955)

Baldwin’s insight applies to the church as precisely as it applies to the individual. The Black church clings to its political identity — its role as a Democratic Party institution — because releasing that identity would require dealing with the pain of what the church has become: an institution that has traded transformation for transaction, moral authority for political access, and the hard demands of the gospel for the easy comfort of partisan certainty. Releasing the political identity would force the church to ask what it actually offers its congregation beyond voter registration and a Sunday morning performance. And that question, honestly answered, would be painful enough to require the very transformation that the gospel demands.

The Black church that marched at Selma was not powerful because it was allied with a political party. It was powerful because it was allied with the truth. It spoke from a moral authority that transcended partisanship, that could not be co-opted because it was not for sale, and that could not be silenced because it was grounded in something deeper than any election cycle. That authority — the authority of an institution that demands transformation rather than delivering votes — is the only authority that has ever changed anything in Black American life.

The church can have it back. It simply has to want it more than it wants the political access and the pastoral prosperity that it received in the exchange. It has to want the gospel more than the voting guide. It has to want the Underground Railroad more than the campaign bus. It has to want to be what it was: the most important institution in Black American life, the institution that built a people and held them together through the worst that human cruelty could devise, the institution that proved that moral authority is the only authority that endures.

The voting guide will be obsolete by November. The gospel will outlast the republic. A church that knows the difference between the two has something to offer the world. A church that has forgotten the difference has nothing to offer except a ride to the polls and a suggestion for whom to vote for once you get there. And the young people walking away from the pews know it, even if the pastors sitting in them do not.