A new analysis released by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life finds that “African-Americans are markedly more religious on a variety of measures than the U.S. population as a whole”:
While the U.S. is generally considered a highly religious nation, African-Americans are markedly more religious on a variety of measures than the U.S. population as a whole, including level of affiliation with a religion, attendance at religious services, frequency of prayer and religion’s importance in life. Compared with other racial and ethnic groups, African-Americans are among the most likely to report a formal religious affiliation, with fully 87% of African-Americans describing themselves as belonging to one religious group or another, according to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, conducted in 2007 by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. Latinos also report affiliating with a religion at a similarly high rate of 85%; among the public overall, 83% are affiliated with a religion.
[…]Compared with other groups, African-Americans express a high degree of comfort with religion’s role in politics. In fact, a summer 2008 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum shows that African-Americans tend to closely resemble white evangelical Protestants on that score, with roughly six-in-ten among both groups saying that churches should express their views on social and political topics, and roughly half saying that there has been too little expression of faith and prayer by political leaders. Fewer members of other religious groups express these views. At the same time, most African-Americans, like white evangelicals and other groups, support certain restrictions on the mingling of politics and religious institutions, with nearly six-in-ten (58%) saying that churches and other houses of worship should refrain from endorsing political candidates.
Read the full report here.