Politics & Power Quote by Barney Frank

Calling out Sunday morning as America’s stubborn segregation slot is a neat political judo move: Barney Frank borrows Martin Luther King Jr.’s moral authority, then twists the knife with “sadly still true.” The line isn’t primarily about churches. It’s about the country’s favorite alibi. We love to narrate racial progress in public-facing arenas - laws passed, workplaces integrated, celebrity culture diversified - while the most intimate rituals of belonging remain sorted by race, class, and geography.

Frank’s intent is pointedly secular and legislative: if even worship, the space Americans associate with conscience and community, reproduces separation, then racism isn’t just a policy problem you can solve with a vote. It’s a social architecture. The subtext is accusation-by-mirror: the institutions that preach brotherhood often function as pipelines of homogeneity, and congregants who would never endorse segregation in principle still choose it in practice through where they live, whom they marry, what music feels “reverent,” what sermons feel “comfortable.”

Context matters because King’s original “most segregated hour” critique was aimed at white Christian complacency during the civil rights era. Frank, a Jewish liberal lawmaker and culture-war veteran, repurposes it to indict a broader, contemporary hypocrisy: America’s self-image as post-racial keeps colliding with the reality that people still cluster where they feel unchallenged. “Hour of worship” also lands because it’s voluntary. No one assigns you a pew. That’s why it stings: segregation persists most powerfully where choice is dressed up as tradition, and tradition is dressed up as virtue.