The chapter analyzes how frequent- and infrequent-churchgoing youth understand their citizenship identities and obligations at the local and national levels. Both frequent and infrequent churchgoers highlight communal aspects of citizenship, but frequent churchgoers stress citizenship as faith-inspired actions such as prayer and reciprocal ties in church communities. Frequent churchgoers view citizenship as acts that build the nation, though this citizen goal often has a distinctly Christian tenor. Frequent churchgoers use more legalistic language than infrequent churchgoers and display more political efficacy. Afrobarometer findings confirm that more religious involvement relates to higher political activism, but our respondents illustrate that youth agents at times contest religious leaders’ political messaging and question those leaders’ integrity. Case studies from a renewalist church in Ghana and a mainline Protestant South African leadership program illustrate how youth adapt political messaging as they craft their own citizen identities.

Chapter Six extends the argument beyond the black-white binary by exploring the degree to which the racial anger gap and enthusiasm advantage are exhibited by Asian and Latina/o Americans. This chapter illuminates how features that distinguish these respective racial groups—specifically narratives that paint these groups as politically dormant or ostracized—shape their emotional responses to politics in a manner similar to African Americans. Returning to data from the CMPS, I reveal that the anger gap and enthusiasm advantage are not limited to African Americans. Both Asian American and Latina/o American respondents exhibit significantly less anger than their white counterparts. And the linkage between anger and political participation is far weaker for these groups relative to white Americans. Similar to African Americans, pride is strongly associated with political participation for both groups of color. Further, this chapter reveals the unique association between people of color’s anger expressions and their perceptions of intergroup racial solidarity. Asian, Latina/o and black respondents all demonstrate a remarkable consistency between their expressions of anger and their support for policy stances indicating interracial coalition. This relationship is not exhibited by white respondents. Conversely, expressions of pride from these groups surface both interracial and intra-racial tensions.

Chapter Two examines the psychology of anger, its expected effects on behavior, and the prevalence of anger in political messaging. Drawing on different traditions in social psychology, this chapter breaks down the distinct attitudes underlying the emotion of anger, and I provide a theoretical account of why the emotional sentiment of resignation cultivated among African Americans inhibits the emergence of anger as this group surveys the political environment. I investigate a range of campaign messages and speeches from political elites over the years to highlight the why’s and how’s behind elites’ attempts to activate various emotions within the intended public—specifically anger. I conduct emotion discourse analyses of these messages in order to identify the emotional sentiments that are cultivated and reinforced within primarily white and black audiences. The chapter begins the exploration of the racial divide in the activation of political anger by surveying trends from the open-ended findings from the original survey experiment titled the 2018 Race, Anger and Participation (RAP) Study.