The most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. lamented this some 48 year ago. Regrettably, it remains true even today. Most Americans profess their faith while divided by lines of race, ethnicity and class. Whether you are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Unitarian or Sikh, it is pretty likely that when you worship, the people around you look like you and have backgrounds and experiences that are similar to yours.
Our segregated worship practices offend King’s most famous notion, his oft-quoted and ubiquitous dream. Today, millions of children of all races will passionately honor King, as they recite his most memorable line: little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. We should all regret that on Sunday mornings, in the holiest of moments, black children and white children rarely actually join hands because people of different races rarely worship together.
It is appropriate to turn our concern to why. Why 50 years after King’s assassination is our worship so separate? For many, it is because we tend to worship close to where we live. And our neighborhoods and communities remain separate and segregated.
The problem of American housing and neighborhood segregation was repositioned as a central issue in 2013 when the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia released stunning maps of the United States of America. The maps help visualize America’s segregation problem. They show one dot per person in the country, color-coded by race and pinpointed to each person’s home address, 308,745,538 color-coded dots.
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