In a highly contentious presidential election year, a steady drumbeat of stories and reports will focus attention on issues that divide American voters into cultural and political camps. Such issues include critical race theory, gender identity, immigration, gun ownership, abortion, animal rights, and others.  The Congregations and Polarization (CAP) project seeks to explain the ways Indiana’s religious congregations are framing their missions and ministries in communities shaped by these well-documented divisions.

We know from past research that congregations’ responses will differ considerably.  Some will experience serious cultural conflict within their own ranks, but most will not, because many congregations have already sorted into culturally and politically homogeneous camps.  Some will try to keep all discussion of these divisions outside their congregation’s walls, seeing politics as a distraction from their spiritual mission.  Some will try to be peacemakers, often searching for some moderate, purple, center between red and blue.  And some will join the fray, likely also hoping for peace, but committed to creating changes they believe are just.

The CAP project is based on two important assumptions.  The first assumption is that these culturally divisive issues are grounded not simply in differences of personal opinions or values, but also in different interpretations and experiences of these issues that must be understood in specific social contexts.  Because we are working across the state of Indiana, we begin with social differences among rural, urban, and suburban contexts.  The discussions taking place in these different areas do not start with the same assumptions and do not share the same definitions of the problems.  School boards in these different locales do not argue about the same issues. People’s daily experiences can be quite different depending on where they live and this clearly influences their shared opinions and attitudes.  So rather than holding inclusive conversations at the statewide level that might lead toward mutual understanding and community wellbeing, we often have multiple conversations running on very different tracks.  Put most bluntly:  Discussions about problems of race, inequality, immigration and the rest are not framed the same in these different contexts. This makes productive engagement on these issues very difficult.

The second assumption is that congregations seek to build community in ways that most social organizations do not and cannot.  Congregations are communities and they serve communities.  And these communities are themselves deeply shaped by the social contexts in which they operate.  Congregations seeking to address certain difficult issues in rural Indiana will have a very different conversation than congregations in urban or suburban areas.   For instance, discussions about gun ownership and gun violence will be framed differently in a rural community where many of the residents go hunting than in an urban area where guns are most often associated with violence.  Conversations about animal rights will be different in a farming community than in one where most animals that people own are pets.  Even conversations about difficult issues such as the role of historical and systematic racism play out very differently in an environment where there are very few Black people.   The principles may be the same, but the lived, daily, experiences shape the ways decisions are made and resources are used.

Therefore, the first step in the Congregations and Polarization project is to develop a clearer picture of differences and similarities in these three different parts of Indiana:  rural, urban, and suburban.   To do this, our colleagues at Polis used the best-available methodology from the  Department of Housing and Urban Development  to separate Indiana into urban, rural, and suburban areas.  This method is especially helpful because it asks residents how they would describe the place where they live, rather than only relying on a measure such as housing density.  Polis then used data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (2017–2021) to point out important differences and similarities among these areas.  In this exercise, all urban areas are lumped into one group, all rural areas into a second group, and all suburban areas into a third.

Recognizing, however, that not all urban or rural or suburban areas are necessarily identical, we took the further step of creating eight different, smaller, study areas for deeper analysis.  These are:  Marion County (Indianapolis), the Indianapolis suburbs (technically the 2023 Indianapolis-Carmel-Greenwood Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) minus Marion County), The Region (five counties in northwest Indiana including the cities of Gary and Hammond), Elkhart County, Allen County (Fort Wayne), Bartholomew and Jackson Counties, Ohio and Ripley Counties, and Crawford County.  These study areas represent very different parts of the state and will, in some cases, show differences within the rural or urban or suburban classifications that would not otherwise be apparent.

We encourage readers to sort through the data on their own and to think about information that confirms or challenges their prior assumptions.  We have provided introductory analysis of differences and similarities we think may be important for understanding the contexts in which congregations work.  This report is a first step because, in the end, this is a project about congregations and this information is meant to provide needed background for that effort, rather than public policy analysis.

Our deepest hope is that this data will spur productive, sustained conversation within religious communities about their mission goals and the context in which they operate.  Beyond this, we hope to inform public officials and civic leaders who are thinking about the public role of congregations.  And they should be thinking about that role:  Religious congregations are on the front lines of many different socially divisive issues.  They are frequently the first stop for people seeking help.  They are intimate, supportive, communities of ordinary people who mean to make the world a better place.  If they cannot contribute to a shared vision of our lives together, if they cannot sustain conversations about fraught topics, what organizations can?

Racial discrimination remains a divisive force in American society.  Our shared history of slavery as an institution makes Black/white racism a persistent source of polarization as demonstrated by the national outrage over the murder of George Floyd, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the furor surrounding critical race theory in schools.   The intellectual and moral issues underlying these questions are the same for everyone no matter where they live.  But as a practical matter, daily experience of racism differs considerably, and this is likely to shape cultural attitudes and assumptions.  Indiana is overwhelmingly white (83%) but this is not highly unusual.  Fifteen states have a higher proportion of white residents than Indiana.   Indiana has a relatively low Hispanic population, so non-Hispanic whites make up 78% of the state’s population.

But the differences in racial makeup among urban, rural, and suburban places in Indiana are very large.  In urban areas, non-Hispanic white people make up 60% of the population and Black people make up 22%.  In rural areas, non-Hispanic white people make up 93% and Black people are less than 1%.  White and Black people are therefore likely to encounter one another every single day in cities and unlikely to encounter one another at all in rural areas.   This daily exposure, or lack thereof, surely influences cultural assumptions and political behavior to some degree.   As noted above, this empirical difference alone does not prove anything about racial attitudes–or about the prevailing culture in different places–but when we look at other evidence about differences, we have to consider the social context.

Other racial and ethnic differences follow the same pattern.  Roughly 12% of residents in urban areas are Hispanic, while only 3% in rural areas are.  Although the Asian population of urban Indiana is relatively small overall (2.5%) it is still more than three times the percentage of Asians in rural Indiana.   In short, urban Indiana is much more diverse than rural Indiana, with suburban areas coming in somewhere in between.   These differences will not surprise anyone, but the scale of difference is likely larger than most people realize.

A closer look at metropolitan Indianapolis makes this point very straightforwardly.  In Marion County, the Black population is 28%.  In the rest of the metropolitan area minus Marion County, it is 4%.  Conversely, the non-Hispanic white population of Marion County is 53%, while the metro area without Marion County is 86%.   Whether we are looking at the quality of schools, homeownership and housing patterns, voting patterns, or the kinds of religious organizations present, these differences play an important role.

Income and Poverty

Economic inequality, specifically the narrative around poverty, drives much of the social, political, and cultural polarization in America, and here, the differences among the three areas of Indiana are stark. In urban areas, 17% of families live in poverty.  In rural and suburban areas, this figure is 6–7%.  The same figures—17% urban vs. 6–7% elsewhere—apply for families receiving some kind of cash assistance (SNAP).   If one looks at the total population living in poverty, as opposed to family units, the figures are 22% in urban areas compared to 9% in the suburbs or rural areas. Per capita income is roughly $25,000 in cities compared to $33,000 in rural areas and $37,000 in suburban ones. Median household income differences are clearer:  $76,000 in the suburbs, $71,000 in rural areas, and $45,000 in cities.   In short, average income is lower in urban areas and poverty is much higher.

But these cumulative differences do not tell the whole story.  A closer look at our eight study areas provides some important nuance.  Crawford County, a rural area of only 10,000 residents, is much poorer than any urban area we designated.  Crawford has the highest percentage of households on public assistance, the highest (by far) living in poverty, the highest (by far) of youth in poverty, and the lowest income whether measured by household or per capita.  The upshot is that cities have higher percentages of poverty, but they also have pockets of wealth that drive up averages.