“Then white evangelicals voted for Mr. Trump by a larger margin than they had voted for any presidential candidate.”

Black congregants — as recounted by people in Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Fort Worth and elsewhere — had already grown uneasy in recent years as they watched their white pastors fail to address police shootings of African-Americans. They heard prayers for Paris, for Brussels, for law enforcement; they heard that one should keep one’s eyes on the kingdom, that the church was colorblind, and that talk of racial injustice was divisive, not a matter of the gospel. There was still some hope that this stemmed from an obliviousness rather than some deeper disconnect.

Then white evangelicals voted for Mr. Trump by a larger margin than they had voted for any presidential candidate. They cheered the outcome, reassuring uneasy fellow worshipers with talk of abortion and religious liberty, about how politics is the art of compromise rather than the ideal. Christians of color, even those who shared these policy preferences, looked at Mr. Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants, his open hostility to N.F.L. players protesting police brutality and his earlier “birther” crusade against President Obama, claiming falsely he was not a United States citizen. In this political deal, many concluded, they were the compromised.

– “A Quiet Exodus: Why Blacks Are Leaving White Evangelical Churches” in The New York Times. I’m not sure we’ll ever know the extent of the negative impact this past election had on the lives of individual Christians. I’ve heard a lot of stories about disgruntled white progressive evangelicals who found themselves to be further out of step with the rest of their churches than they’d previously imagined. But this is the first story I’ve read about the particular spiritual damage inflicted by white churches on black Christians, people, it must be said, who genuinely wanted to find spiritual homes among white Christians.

As an aside, I spoke with the reporter, Campbell Robertson, months ago as he was working on this piece. He struck me then as a trustworthy narrator of this very particular experience of American Christianity and I think the article bears that out. It’s always refreshing to read good religious reporting.