At Call & Response, Mark Chavez draws upon an April 2008 article by Paul DiMaggio and Bart Bonikowski to explain why fewer black congregations tend to have websites than predominately white congregations:
If it’s not because black ministers are older than white ministers, and if resource differences are only part of the story, what else contributes to the digital divide between black and white churches? Another piece of the puzzle, I think, is that the digital divide between black and white churches reflects the digital divide between black and white people.
In an article in the April, 2008 issue of the “American Sociological Review,” Paul DiMaggio and Bart Bonikowski document a substantial race difference in internet use. According to a 2001 survey, 72 percent of whites compared to only 53 percent of blacks reported using the internet. The race difference was even larger when people were asked about connecting to the internet from their homes: 59 percent for whites, 36 percent for blacks. The gap is striking. A majority of whites used the internet from home while nearly two-thirds of African Americans did not.
Read the rest of the piece here.