Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour of American life. There are, to be sure, churches of mixed congregations (and this, in my estimation, is the way it should be). But many Churches, both white and black, prefer to separate themselves. Why? CNN has an interesting take on the subject.

The Rev. Paul Earl Sheppard had recently become the senior pastor of a suburban church in California when a group of parishioners came to him with a disturbing personal question. They were worried because the racial makeup of their small church was changing. They warned Sheppard that the church’s newest members would try to seize control because members of their race were inherently aggressive. What was he was going to do if more of “them” tried to join their church? “One man asked me if I was prepared for a hostile takeover,” says Sheppard, pastor of Abundant Life Christian Fellowship in Mountain View, California. The nervous parishioners were African-American, and the church’s newcomers were white.

Sheppard says the experience demonstrated why racially integrated churches are difficult to create and even harder to sustain. Some blacks as well as whites prefer segregated Sundays, religious scholars and members of interracial churches say.

The racial divide in Christianity isn’t confined to white preferences. Having attended a Black church on a number of occasions I have to confess that it just wasn’t for me- not because of the color of the skin of the majority of people there- but because of the style of worship. Indeed, I was as uncomfortable in Pentecostal services. In point of fact, I don’t think that segregation on Sunday has as much to do with race as it has to do with worship.