White Unto Harvest. Really White.

White people are the most receptive gospel demographic in America, and also the most neglected.

Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest (John 4:35)

After Jesus famously encountered the Samaritan woman, it was scandalous in the eyes of the disciples. Not only was she a woman, which was bad enough, but she was a Samaritan. The Samaritans, you see, were considered half-breeds and traitors by Jews, because they had intermarried with the Gentile carpetbaggers who filled the land after the Assyrians took the highest-functioning Hebrews to Assyria.

Forget that Samaritans almost certainly had as high a Jewish blood quantum than those who had been taken captive and returned after a generation of intermarrying during their exile. The diaspora Jews looked down on the Samaritans, and it was downright scandalous for Jesus to go through the territory on his way to the Feast of the Tents, let alone for him to stop and converse with a woman (the Billy Graham rule was not invented yet).

As the disciples guffawed at what they saw after returning with Jesus’ sandwich, Jesus confessed that he had lost his appetite. The reason for this is that Jesus’ physical hunger had been replaced with spiritual unction. He responded to them (as you see above), “Look around, dummies. The fields are white (the color of mature wheat, primed for the plucking). This is the harvest, right here.”

That’s a hillbilly paraphrase.

His disciples, which understood basically nothing until the Holy Spirit would come down at Pentecost, unsurprisingly did not comprehend. In fact, even after Pentecost, there’s clear indication that the Jewish believers would still have a hard time understanding that the gospel was for Gentiles as much as it was for them. They may not have realized at the time that a deacon named Phillip would take Samaritans the gospel in just a short time, or that Samaria would be the first place (not the last) that Jesus instructed them to take the gospel once it had saturated Jerusalem.

But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth (Acts 1:8).

Paul Washer once told a friend of mine, “Find where the Spirit is moving, and go there.” But the idea is thoroughly Biblical. After all, it is the Holy Spirit who called Paul from Macedonia, and directed his paths to where the Spirit would take him.

In American Evangelicalism, the white fields largely consist of white people, as I’ll explain in this post of Insight to Incite. In previous ages, not long ago, this was not true. In fact, the demographic in America we know as “Caucasians” have been the most resistant to the gospel for nearly a century, and Black and Brown people were taking in Christian teachings like drinking from a garden hose (although Liberation Theologians stole that from them in the 1960s, which is a whole other post). “Missiologists,” as they came to be called a couple decades ago, noticed this and kicked our home mission boards into overdrive, focusing extensively - and almost exclusively - on minority racial demographics.

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I don’t intend to give a thorough historic analysis of American evangelical missiological history to demonstrate this, although I could. I’ll just use one example, which is the North American Mission Board’s (SBC) SEND Network, which developed its strategy in response to the so-called Great Commission Resurgence Taskforce Report in 2010.

This report, commissioned by SBC Messengers in 2009, was submitted by Johnny Hunt to Ronnie Floyd, and supported heavily by Albert Mohler and Frank Page. To summarize the report, it spoke extensively of the need to “diversify” the American evangelical witness, which basically meant to focus on non-white, non-rural people. Tom Ascol, who supported the initiative, said the following…

I am grateful for the demographic realities that are highlighted in the report. Our too-Western, too-American, too-Southern perspectives on the gospel, church and lostness need huge doses of reality that such demographics can provide.

One wonders if Ascol, having taken his stance on multicultural Critical Theory he has in recent years, could look back and see that this task force report laid the groundwork for treating many Southern Baptists like red-headed step children. Hindsight is always 20/20, except for men like Morris Chapman, who gave one of the best sermonettes I’ve ever heard from the floor of the SBC annual convention opposing the measure (I could not find a video, so you just kind of had to be there in person). Nonetheless, it passed with 90% of the vote.

What supporting that report did, was move the SBC into a direction that would focus on ethnic minorities in large cities, but to the neglect of the majority of their membership and the communities their membership were largely located. In 2010, Kevin Ezell was chosen as NAMB president and a year later, NAMB launched the SEND initiative, which would focus no longer on wherever the (to quote Ascol) too-Western, too-American, too-Southern churches would organically spread, but upon 32 key cities. The cities were chosen specifically because of their ethnic diversity “from which cultural influence emanates.”

Soon, it would be next to impossible to receive any substantial money from NAMB to reach rural white people, but the money would flow as though through a faucet for urban church planting efforts. Fifteen years later, the results of the SEND Network’s goals have become clear. Church plants have been reduced by 364 churches between 2011 and 2022 (and many of those church plants don’t survive), giving is down, and baptisms are down dramatically.

Good job, guys (golf clap).

In reality, SEND’s focus might have worked well…in 1920, as the population of America became more urban than rural for the first time. However, by 2010, the drain of rural population in America had largely stabilized, and was growing.

But there was another oversight failure in the SEND initiative. The notion that urban America is where “cultural influence emanates” is accurate. However, they overlooked the obvious. Urban America grew from a generational exodus of Americans from rural America to urban America. In other words, the cities were filling up from rural refugees. Focusing on people from where the population to the cities were coming would have made total sense, but the SBC was already doing that and Southern Baptists really like doing new and exciting stuff, whether or not it’s prudent.

Soon, nerdy white boys in bow ties - fresh out of seminary - were lecturing the rest of us on why we should implement Christian hip-hop into our services, it was the “cool thing” to be sent to the inner city on mission, and if you stayed behind to minister to your tribe, you were considered probably racist but definitely unimportant. But their strategy did not work. In fact, it was a total failure easily demonstrated by statistics.

If your eyes haven’t started to water from this boring stuff, let me help you get straight to bed. Consider this demographical and statistical data to be your daily dose of spiritual melatonin.

One reason why it would have been smart to focus on Black Americans long before the SBC got hip enough to consider it, would have been a disproportionately higher rate of religiosity among our Black neighbors. Blacks, on average, were more likely to be church-attenders (albeit less frequently) than their White counterparts. The same goes for Hispanics (albeit they were also far more likely to be Roman Catholics, which doesn’t really count).

All of this started to change, around about the same time the SBC changed its focus to urban America (which, as everyone knows, is short-hand for “Black people”). A 2021 poll of 8,600 Black adults revealed that younger Black people have become far less likely to be church attendees than their parents, or any previous generation going back to colonial America. The Silent Generation (1928 to 1945) had only 5% of Blacks considered “religious unaffiliated.” By 2021, it was 33% for Millennials and 28% for Generation Z.

Likewise, in 2010, only 10% of Latinos were religiously unaffiliated, but it grew to 30% by 2020. Those changes are significant.

However, there is stark contrast when looking at the religiosity of White Americans. While it is also down (which doesn’t appear to be a contrast at first), a side-eye inquisitiveness tells an interesting tale. Up about 10% between 2015 and 2024, religiously unaffiliated Whites seem to be leaving organized religion at roughly half the pace of Black and Brown Americans. However, studies demonstrate that a White exodus from church doesn’t exist across the board. It is quarantined to urban Whites, not rural.

You have to be careful with studies promoted by major mission boards claiming that Christianity is shrinking among whites. In most of those studies, the headlines are misleading. They usually say something along the lines of, “White Christian Population Shrinking in America.” But when you dig in, what the studies demonstrate is that such is a true claim, but it has far more to do with the White population shrinking, not the White Christian population. In other words, there are fewer White Christians in the U.S. only because there are fewer (proportionally) White people in America.

When you see these studies, you’ll see them claim that “rural Americans identify as Christian in percentages commensurate with their urban counterparts.” That seems wildly incongruent with your perception of reality, doesn’t it? There’s a reason that doesn’t live true to your experiences. When you look at the details of these studies, you’ll see the demographers and pollsters lump in suburban Americans with urban Americans, and juxtapose them against rural Americans. Surely you can see the flaw.

Culturally, suburban America is far more similar to rural American than it is urban America in almost every way. When you combine percentages of church attendees (or religion claimants, depending on the study) you’ll see that Christianity is holding its own everywhere except urban cities. The soccer moms in suburbia largely mirror the religious tendencies of the rodeo moms in Bumpkinville.

But it’s not just about geography. In fact, it’s mostly not about geography.

As Sarah Mollette points out, “income, race, partisanship, age, and education influence religious attendance more than geography does.”

Do-tell.

It turns out, middle-class, White, Republicans (especially those under 45), and those lucky enough to avoid the university system, are more likely to embrace Christian identity than upper-class, ethnically diverse, college-educated Democrats.

In other words, I spent a lot of time to tell you demographically what you already knew. You’re welcome.

Now, let me ask you.

When you read Christianity Today, which group (the aforementioned group of blue-collar, White, Trump-voters or the latter group) are they trying to reach? When you consider the church planting strategy of most mission boards, which group are they trying to reach? When you consider most parachurch ministries, which group are they trying to reach?

It’s not the White MAGA supporters, that’s for sure.

I suppose someone might be shouting right now, yelling at me, “But just because they claim to be Christians doesn’t mean they are!”

Exactly, buddy. Exactly. That’s the point. These people are predisposed to embrace the teachings and culture and calling of Christ, but largely lost. They’re almost like Samaritans, if you think about it.

Like the Samaritan woman, these people understand a thing or two about true religion. Like the Samaritan woman, who asked Jesus a theological question, they know just enough about the scriptures to be dangerous. Like the Samaritan woman, most of them are lost. But like the Samaritan woman, they are more likely to inquire - and listen - than say, for example, Grecians. Or urban Americans.

There are certainly missionaries, like Paul, who are called to trail blaze out ahead of the church and take the gospel to people who’ve never heard of it. But it only makes sense that the rest of us focus on the crowd set before us, the people least likely to be offended by our message, and those most able to understand us.

White, rural, blue-collar, redneck Trump supporters should be considered the lost sheep of the House of Israel (for all intents and purposes). It is so much easier to bring in those sheaves than other demographics, but until we stop treating them like they’re invisible to the church, we’ll never impact that community with the gospel.

Donald Trump’s success in this demographic is largely due to their feeling that they finally they have a politician or leader to whom they are not invisible. The church would be wise to make them feel that way about us.

We notice them. We see them. They are valuable. They, also, are the Imago Dei. We love them, and we want them to embrace Jesus as their Lord and Savior.