Policies cannot police attitudes. For example, when students are absent from school for observing a religious holiday, they still have to complete assignments. This can result in more work for teachers. The words and tone of these mentor teachers displayed resentment over giving up their own time to help students whom they felt should have just come to school on their holidays because they are “not that Jewish.” The feeling of entitlement to say that their students are not Jewish enough illustrates an attitudinal dimension of Christian privilege38: the perceived authority to judge and opine on others’ religiosity, and to generate opinions based on one’s own understanding of someone else’s faith. White Christians’ way of life is reinforced and reflected in everyday culture, which provides an additional sense of entitlement to judge, categorize, or condemn members of minority faiths. The fact that those public school teachers could make those judgments, and share them aloud, shows the power of Christian normativity. Such attitudes may be reflected in their interactions with the students and their families. Whether in schools, or workplaces, or the public square, the judgments and reactions my interns identified are carried out thousands of times in thousands of places in America every day.
The Racialization of Religion
As an obstetrician and gynecologist with a medical practice in Cobb County, Georgia, my dad has delivered thousands of babies and had patients from all walks of life. His right hand in the practice was a bright and talented office manager who worked for him for twenty-eight years. Vicki is a White woman of great faith, very involved in her Southern Baptist church community. Soon after she started, members of her church started criticizing her for working for my father because he is not a Christian. Although he was a healer, my father was a foreigner and not a church goer, so the message to Vicki from the church community was that he could not be trusted. Thankfully, Vicki believed more in God’s message than in the community’s slanders and she continued to work for my dad. She and her family defended my father’s character, telling everyone at the church that he was a good man. In the end, Vicki prevailed. In fact, after a few years, a new minister joined the church and his wife also came to work for my dad.
Vicki’s fellow congregants—White folks—did not know my Dad was Hindu, and may not have really understood what that meant. They may or may not have realized he was Indian; more likely, they recognized him as part of an undifferentiated racial “other.” They knew he was not White and not Christian, which made it unacceptable for Vicki to work for him. Were they trying to protect Vicki from being tainted by contact with my father, or to deny an unwelcome foreigner the help of a good Christian lady? It does not matter. Whatever it was, my father’s religious and racial identity made him foreign, different, not normal, and therefore untrustworthy.
Vicki’s fellow White Christians in the 1980s were exhibiting the feelings later captured in Robert Jones’ 2017 book The End of White Christian America: “While the country’s shifting racial demographics alone are certainly a source of apprehension for many White Americans, it is the disappearance of White Christian America that is driving their strong, sometimes apocalyptic reactions.”39 Suspicion of the dark-skinned religious minority is symptomatic of White Christian communities’ concern about growing racial and religious diversity in the US today. “The American religious landscape is being remade, most notably by the decline of the White Protestant majority and the rise of the religiously unaffiliated” (the “nones” we discussed earlier).40
With the recognition of diverse religious voices, and the increasing visibility of religious minorities who are racially non-White, the White Christian majority41 perceives their religion as being lost or supplanted in the very land that popular American history had said would be theirs. Parts of White Christian America view the move toward social equality as discrimination against them. Nothing feels so imbalanced as a level playing field, when for as long as you can remember the field has been tilted in your favor. But of course, the playing field is still far from level. It is still tilted against religious and racial minorities. White Christian Americans often do not see the structural benefits they continue to benefit from—built up over centuries of law, policy, and tradition. Nor do they see how those privileges are part of White Christian supremacist foundation of this country.
At the intersection of racial and religious bias, where the notion of Americanness (nationalism) sweeps together Whiteness, Christianity, and native-born status, both non-White communities and “foreign” faith traditions are denigrated and seen as suspect and un-American. White Christian supremacist projects are rooted in entrenched racial and religious privilege, along with racialized notions of who belongs within the national community. The racialization of religion is a process in which particular religions are associated with certain physical appearances and human differences come to be treated as absolute, fundamental, and heritable, like race. Modern antisemitism, for example, echoes the centuries-old conflation of religion with racial difference as a way of isolating and delegitimizing the Jew as “other.” In the United States, Christianity has been racialized as White in a way that establishes it both as virtuous and superior, while the religions of African, Asian, and Native peoples are racialized by association with phenotypical (racial) features that are seen as markers of savage, uncivilized, exotic, and inferior peoples. The racialization of religion also results in the religious dimension of discrimination becoming obscured or disappearing entirely.42
The racialization of religion occurs in a specific social and historical context. Centuries of European domination over such racially different groups as Asian Buddhists and Hindus, African Muslims and animists, and others has resulted in an entwinement of religious and racial meanings. Those meanings position a variety of faiths together in the colonialist mind as an undifferentiated, racially and religiously inferior group of “heathens.” Racialization thereby leads to essentialism—it reduces individuals to one aspect of their identity and presents a homogeneous, undifferentiated, and static view of migrant religious communities. It can result in religions being conflated with one another, or treated as similar, because of shared racial associations; it can also produce situations of “mistaken identity,” in which the perception that they are members of a given racial group leads to the assumption that they are members of a given religion when they are not.
The most conspicuous example of the racialization of religion today is the association of brown skin with Islam. From the oil shock of 1973 and the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979 through the Gulf Wars and the post-9/11 “Global War on Terror,” the West has been confronting “enemies” whose ideology is expressed and explained by reference to their interpretations of Islam. This ideology is racialized via its association with Islam: “Arab” and “Muslim” are used interchangeably and the politics and tactics of terrorist movements are described as “Islamic” by the popular media.43 Edward Said argued that Islam had been turned into the West’s “post-Soviet devil,” replacing “godless Communism” as its sinister global enemy.44 Note that both of these perceived enemies, Communism and Islam, are positioned as the opposite of Christian. More recently, legal scholar Neil Gotanda has argued for making “Muslim” a racial category when examining the law because “[e]qual protection categories in constitutional law are inadequate to describe the racial nature of the Muslim terrorist.”45 In addition to endangering brown Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the racialization of Islam also diminishes it as a global religion, ignoring Muslims who