A growing number of Protestant pastors say their congregations are becoming more racially diverse, even as fewer believe every church should intentionally pursue racial diversity as a goal, according to a new Lifeway Research survey.
The findings come from a survey of 1,003 U.S. Protestant pastors conducted in September 2025 and released Tuesday by Lifeway Research.
The survey found that 84% of pastors agreed in 2025 that “Every church should strive to achieve racial diversity,” down from 93% in 2017, when the poll was conducted shortly after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a counter-protester was killed after a Neo-Nazi drove a car into a crowd.
Support for that statement has fluctuated over the past decade. It stood at 86% in 2013 and 88% in 2021 before declining to its current level.
“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.”
At the same time, fewer pastors described their churches as being made up primarily of a single racial or ethnic group.
In 2025, 77% of respondents said their congregation was “predominantly one racial or ethnic group,” compared with 86% in 2013 and 81% in 2017.
McConnell noted that American churches have historically been composed largely of one ethnic group.
“The reasons reflect both social tendencies and historical factors such as repercussions from slavery, waves of immigration from specific regions and denominations that also immigrated to the U.S.,” McConnell said.
“While the majority of new churches seek to reach people from multiple ethnicities or cultures, most fall short of sociologists’ multi-ethnic threshold, which is when the largest ethnic group does not exceed 80%.”
The survey also found differences between Protestant traditions. Mainline Protestant pastors were more likely than Evangelical pastors to report that their churches were predominantly one racial group (83% versus 75%), while Mainline pastors were also more likely to say racial diversity should be a goal (89% versus 79%).
Lifeway Research reported a similar trend in an earlier study, showing that support for pursuing racial diversity declined from 93% in 2017 to 88% in 2021.
