Protestant pastors say their churches are becoming more diverse: survey
By Michael Gryboski - Posted at The Christian Post:
Published July 22, 2026
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.”
