It wasn’t easy for Cecilia and Manuel to get to church on Sunday morning. They took whatever shifts were available at Walmart, working as long and as often as the manager allowed. The city bus appeared, if at all, once an hour outside the hulking box store, making a timely arrival anywhere nearly impossible. Ryan and Tom were in the same boat. Money was tight, and even though they worked 40 hours a week, both adult men lived with their parents to make ends meet. A vet tech and a butcher, when shifts came open, they would take them.
I thought of my former church members’ economically driven attendance when Ryan Burge assessed the data on church membership in relation to class and declared that “religion has become a luxury good.” The religious demographer’s research found that churches are increasingly the habitat of the more educated and wealthy in our society. The people most likely to attend Christian worship have a master’s degree and earn a salary between $60k and $100k. Those least likely to attend worship, who ticked the religious box “nothing,” hold a high school diploma.
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Burge’s assessment is stark. Our churches are increasingly designed by and for those who have done everything right according to the White, middle-class script: college degree, marriage, stable income.
Other studies confirm Burge’s findings. One researcher, seeking to understand why White working-class people were defecting from institutional churches, noticed that the economic erosion of viable working-class wages led to a crisis in values and identity. As livable wages, adequate housing, and affordable health care options evaporated in the 1970s, churches that upheld values of education, delayed gratification, and self-control—bourgeois virtues—increasingly became detached from workers’ lives. Churches have not simply lost working-class people; they have been formed as institutions built on a brand of moral superiority that requires middle-class stability to participate.
Jason Shelton noticed a similar trend in the Black Church. Looking at 50 years of data on church membership, Shelton notes that Black families attaining middle-class status were relocating to the suburbs and seeking congregations with similar levels of education and wealth. This economic shift, along with the rise of interracial marriages and the influence of social media, led more Black Christians into nondenominational and majority-White churches. At the same time, more Black working-class people are rejecting organized religion altogether, leading to an exodus of working-class Black people from Sunday worship.
As a pastor, I watched worship attendance teeter and then topple after the pandemic, and I read many position papers and assessments on how we, as religious professionals, could address this de-churching: tech-driven youth programming, slicker children’s ministries to attract young families, higher-end amenities, captivating sermons, and increased social media output. But while programmatic suggestions like these may temporarily stem the tide, they don’t address the root of working-class discontent with the church.
Witnesses from the past can help us reshape our future. Keri Day’s work on the Azusa Street Revival pays particular attention to Black domestic workers who led the revival in worship practices unabashedly rooted in their African legacy and slave heritage. In doing so, they challenged both White evangelical and upper-class Black religious leaders who staked their futures on capitulating to the demands of racialized capitalism. Day narrates Azusa Street as a revival that was both racially and economically subversive, fostering an interracial community that shifted away from individual uplift and toward communal forms of abundance and belonging.
A few decades later, Claude Williams, a radical Presbyterian socialist pastor, also imagined a religious and economic future for his Alabama community, one that defied the logic of the upper-class southern aristocracy. Following several years of labor organizing with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, Williams and his friend Owen Whitfield, a Black Baptist preacher and sharecropper, formed the People’s Institute of Applied Religion.
For several weeks, groups of Black and White preachers, Sunday school teachers, and Sunday school superintendents gathered around a chart labeled “The Galilean and the Common People” and “Way of Righteousness.” The simple drawings depicted the story of the God of working-class people—Moses calling down a plague on Egypt, the fiery chasm between the rich man and Lazarus, and the call to unity among the poor in the Sermon on the Mount. Whitfield and Williams knew from their own lives that the southern poor weren’t looking for handouts. They were natural leaders whose faith and experience were integral to the possibilities for a more just and hopeful society. All they needed were the skills and the support to realize God’s reign among them.
The Azusa Street Revival and the People’s Institute are exemplary not because they took on issues of social justice, but because their theological practice produced counternarratives and theologies of belonging that refused the racialized logic of mass consumption and accumulation. Day points to how Black domestic women challenged the patriarchy and professionalization of the clergy in the Azusa revival, shifting the center of spiritual authority. Whitfield and Williams took the biblicism of their rural kin seriously. Rather than dismissing their scriptural accounts, the People’s Institute invited poor southerners to identify themselves within the arc of Jesus’ redemption.
Demographers’ warnings are dire: the church has not merely failed the working class; it has re-formed itself in the image of middle-class capitalism. As the US economy cedes to technocracy, the urgency of integrating a theology of labor and human dignity into our churches is more pressing than ever. The insecurity produced by the gigification of labor, AI-driven job loss, and algorithmic scheduling is an occasion to shift the site of our theological knowledge. Until we reckon with the legacy of worship and belonging that requires middle-class stability, the bus schedule will continue to decide who meets God on Sunday morning.
