What's good, y'all? You are listening to Coatswitch, the show about race and identity from

NPR. I'm Gene Demby. On this episode, trying to find your place as a Christian when your

church doesn't love you back.

If you've listened to us at all over the last couple of years, you've heard a site this

non-partisan polling company called the Public Religion Research Institute. Like a lot.

You know that stat? We always throw out about how 75% of white folks don't have any friends

who aren't white. That stat comes from them. And they've looked extensively at the racial

attitudes of one of the most influential religious populations in this country, white evangelicals.

At the Public Religion Research Institute, they did this big survey. They called it the

structural racism index, where they ranked respondents on how likely they were to agree with

statinists like, quote, today discrimination against white Americans has become as big a problem

as discrimination against black Americans and other minorities. And quote, white evangelical

respondents, they ranked higher than any other group on the racism index. And as you might

imagine, that makes that population very distinct from the many, many, many black Christians in this

country. Like my colleague, JC Howard, he works on the show How I Built This. You've probably heard

of it. But over the last few months, he's been reporting on the stories of black Christians,

and in particular, those like him for a time who found their spiritual homes in white evangelical

churches. Welcome to the coast with JC. Thanks so much, Jane. Glad to be here. Okay, so black

Christian is a category that includes people like you. And it includes people like me,

I grew up in black Catholic parishes. I was an also boy. I even had a stint as an abstinence only

speaker, which I'm not talking about. But you, it's not about me, it's about you. You grew up

in Pentecostum, right? Yeah, I grew up in the church who got in Christ, which is a black

...