SerpApi.Org
A larger share of Protestant pastors in the U.S. say their churches are becoming more racially diverse even though they are less likely to say that every congregation should strive to achieve diversity than they were nearly a decade ago after a white supremacist rally in Virginia put race at the forefront of the national news cycle.
Lifeway Research published a report on Tuesday drawn from a survey of 1,003 Protestant pastors conducted last September, with a sampling error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.
The report found that 84% of respondents in 2025 agreed that “Every church should strive to achieve racial diversity,” down from 93% in a 2017 survey conducted just days after the "Unite the Right" white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a counter-protester was killed by a Neo-Nazi who drove a car into a crowd. In 2013, 86% of pastors said every church should view diversity as a goal, while 88% said the same in 2021.
“Now that we have more historical context across these surveys, 2017 stands out as an outlier,” said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research. “Some pastors were likely impacted by the violent clashes at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, just a couple weeks prior to the survey that year. Still, the typical response of more than 4 in 5 pastors reflect a strong value among Protestant pastors that the fellowship of each local church is to be for people of all ethnicities.”
The percentage of pastors reporting that their church is largely one racial or ethnic group has also dropped in recent years.
In 2025, 77% of respondents said their church was “predominantly one racial or ethnic group,” down from 86% in 2013 and 81% in 2017.
McConnell said that congregations in the U.S. "have a long history of being comprised of almost entirely one ethnicity.”
“The reasons reflect both social tendencies and historical factors such as repercussions from slavery, waves of immigration from specific regions and denominations that also immigrated to the U.S.,” McConnell said.
“While the majority of new churches seek to reach people from multiple ethnicities or cultures, most fall short of sociologists’ multi-ethnic threshold, which is when the largest ethnic group does not exceed 80%.”
The report also found that Mainline Protestant pastors are more likely than Evangelical pastors to report having a church that is predominantly one racial group (83% vs. 75%), while Mainline pastors are more likely than Evangelical pastors to see racial diversity as a goal (89% vs. 79%).
Lifeway Research reported a similar decline in 2022, when the percentage of pastors supporting the goal of racial diversity fell from 93% in 2017 to 88% by 2021.
“The peak of pastor aspiration for more racial diversity in churches was measured just days after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 where clashes with opponents ended in one death and injuries,” McConnell said in a 2022 statement.
“While such events that year reminded pastors of the need for progress on racial reconciliation, there remains a consensus among pastors that this unity should be seen within their churches each week.”
