I was digging around on the PC(USA) website, looking for the latest statistics on congregational size and participation. My corner of the Reformed world loves to gather and ruminate over data points, and so our research folk track all manner stats and demographic information.
While nosing about, I couldn't help but notice the banner on the home page of our research services department. It's a collage of generically diverse human beings, one that looks like thirty three stock photos cobbled together into a Multihued Rainbow of Humanity(tm). Young and vibrant, of every race and an even admixture of genders, I half expect them to burst into a song in which they offer the world a Coke.
In perfect harmony, of course.
Thing is, this intersectional collage bears no resemblance whatsoever to the demographic reality of the Presbyterian Church USA. It's not meant to, I'm sure, but merely sits as a "we include and celebrate all" placeholder.
What if one were to rejigger that banner to truly represent who we actually are? What would that look like?
Working with the most recent actual data on our demographics, I plugged that information into my instantiation of the machine mind, which I then asked to make a demographically accurate and representative banner collage for the PC(USA).
What I got was this:
Majority XX-chromosomed, strong supermajority White, and with an age-bracket-breakdown
that might have inspired a P.D. James novel? Yup. That looks familiar. It's not entirely representative of the last Presbytery meeting I attended...being urban, we're a smidge more
beautifully various...but it's pretty close.
The irony, of course, lies not simply in the difference between the above two images, but also in the disjuncture between that second image and the broader face of the Reformed and Presbyterian movement.
If one was to map out what twenty average Presbyterians look like across the whole swath of humanity, it wouldn't look anything like the PC(USA). I asked, again, that the machine mind first draw on global datasets on our movement within Christianity, then reviewed that data for accuracy and sourcing. Then I asked that it aggregate them, and finally regenerate the image based on the total global Frozen Chosen population data.
Globally, the banner of human beings who call themselves Presbyterian looks more like this:
Within reasonable tolerances, this is what we look like globally. We are now supermajority African and Korean and Latino, "Black and Brown," so to speak. Taken as a whole, we are young, and we are vibrant. This is a known known.
If we take a step back and view it from a greater and non-nationalistic height? The truth of our tradition now looks a bit more like that photoshopped aspirational banner, just wearing more interesting clothing.
Ahem.
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