White Christian Privilege. Khyati Y. Joshi

created a twenty-first-century social and political environment in which unprecedented diversity has led to a new backlash that is redefining Americanness yet again.

      2

      Christianity and the Construction of White Supremacy

      In 2018, National Geographic looked back over its 130-year history and issued an exceptional apology under the headline: “For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist.”¹ In an extensive, introspective article, the magazine set out “to rise above our past” by acknowledging how it perpetuated and contributed to colonialist and racist notions of civilization and barbarism. It recognized that its coverage had encouraged “seeing the cultures and religions of Asia, Africa, Oceana and Central and South America as exotic things to be consumed,” including by offering images of barely clothed aboriginals, “black people … doing exotic dances,” and villagers wearing ritual garb or engaging in unfamiliar spiritual practices. In its text, images, and selection of subjects, the magazine had perpetuated a dichotomy between the moral, civilized West and the depraved, uncivilized other with its “savage” and “exotic” rituals.

      “How we present race matters,” National Geographic’s editors concluded. But the flaws and failures in the magazine’s White supremacist writing and photography were not just about race. For more than a century, the magazine had offered numerous depictions of religious rituals beyond the Christian realm, including both world religions and unique regional faith practices. Rituals and traditions of South America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania particularly tended to be presented as a collection of superstitions, delusions, and curiosities. National Geographic had helped to produce and promote not only notions of racial others and a dynamic of racial superiority and inferiority, but also notions of backward, idolatrous, religious others and the inherent superiority of Christianity over them.

      By defining its shortfalls as merely racist, National Geographic ignored the specific ways it misrepresented and mistreated non-Christian peoples. National Geographic’s self-critical analysis still divided the world into White and “other,” without recognizing how numerous factors, including religious practices and beliefs, interacted to form both Whiteness and “otherness.” Whiteness is a not a free-standing idea; its shifting definition is given contour by other factors such as culture, geography, and religion. Nor is it uniquely American. The concept of race as it operates in our society today emerged in the fifteenth century,² as the product of even earlier encounters between Europeans and people from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia whose physical appearance was very different from theirs. The intimate embrace of Whiteness and Christianity (specifically, Protestant Christianity) in the United States contains roots in the repression of Jews and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula, the transatlantic slave trade,³ the Orientalist gaze on Arabia and Asia that accompanied European colonialism, and European Enlightenment thought as it shaped colonial projects in the Americas. Through all of these eras the Bible was, in the European, and later the American colonial settler mind,⁴ “the world’s constitution,”⁵ and differences that came to be seen as racial first emerged from religious differences.

      Exploring Christian privilege in the United States requires an understanding of the symbiosis between race and religion. Christian privilege and Christian normativity are part of the larger construct of White Christian supremacy. In the US, as in Europe before it, religion has been central to the construction of race.⁶ From the first colonist/settler encounters with Native Americans and the arrival of slave ships to the debates over the status of Asian immigrants and the political framing of America’s global rivals and allies, religion and religious identity have been inextricably bound up with notions of racial difference, assimilability, and American identity. In tandem with White social and economic power, Christian theologies of racial difference have helped to codify advantage for those who are perceived as “White.” It takes an understanding of Whiteness’s role in US history and its collusion with Christianity in the construction of American identity for us to trace how laws, court decisions, public policies, and social movements perpetuate White Christian privilege despite the optical illusion of religious freedom for all.

      The European Roots of Whiteness and Christian Hegemony

      To understand the interaction of race and religion and specifically to follow the ties connecting Whiteness and Christianity, we must go back to the fifteenth century. During this time, Spain was “the first great colonizing nation and a seedbed for Western attitudes toward race.”⁷ Throughout Europe, Jews had been demonized, vilified, expelled, or segregated in ghettos, mainly on religious grounds. While outcast from Christian European society because they did not accept Christ and were blamed for the Crucifixion, Jews were at one time absorbed into Christian culture if they converted to Christianity. These “Conversos” (Jewish converts to Christianity) needed to adopt Christian cultural conventions, such as grooming, style of dress, and bodily comportment, as proof of their genuine worthiness of the privileges only Christians enjoyed. Almost a century later, the “Moriscos” (“Little Moors”⁸), Muslim converts to Christianity, also faced expulsion. Thus, the term “Moor” was originally a religious identifier; its meaning shifted over time to include racial connotations of brownish skin color.⁹ For the converts, tests of religious purity conflated ideas of blood lineage and biology with religious faith and cultural notions of kinship.¹⁰

      Ultimately, conversion was not enough and as early as the fifteenth century, Spain required that Christians show “certificates of birth” to attest to their blood purity (limpieza de sangre). Spanish society became preoccupied with determining who was a “crypto-Muslim” or “crypto-Jew” even after conversion, thus beginning a conceptual connection between religion and blood. That connection led easily to the conflation of the idea of a “religion” and of a “race.” In effect, Catholic Spain constructed its Jewish and Muslim minorities as infidels in relation to Christianity. In doing so, it connected the notion of raza (race) with the religious opposition of Christianity. The notion of blood purity led to the emergence of a caste system, sistema de castas, in which those with “pure” Spanish Catholic genealogies were held above those with mixed, impure heritage.¹¹ Mixed heritage was often, but not exclusively, associated with skin color and physical characteristics and with religious difference.¹² We can see echoes of this thinking in later US racial notions like the “one-drop rule,” which imagined anyone with even one drop of African blood (racial heritage) to be inferior.¹³

      In European Christians’ demonizing of Jews and Muslims we detect the precursors of colonial racism in the Americas. In particular, we see how race gradually replaced religion (and, in particular contexts, race and religion remained interchangeable) as a way to distinguish among different peoples. In the European political context of the time, Muslims and Jews were the early categories of religious and racial others. Later, the European patterns of thought about and treatment of those religious others were brought across the Atlantic and applied to enslaved and indigenous groups in the Americas, whose theologies included animism and ancestor veneration.¹⁴ Notions of race, nation, and religion were conflated and consolidated in these interactions. By beginning with religious difference, and reconceptualizing the Christian/non-Christian rivalry in biological or “natural” terms, European Enlightenment thought replaced religion with race as the defining distinction between superior and inferior peoples. As European society continued to encounter different “others,” including during precolonial and colonial times in the United States, race was foregrounded as the basis for distinguishing peoples who were also religiously different.

      European colonialism was a worldwide enterprise that involved not only economic exploitation but also the perpetuation and enforcement of ideas of White Christian superiority over the uncultured heathen masses through displacement, genocide, and missionary work.¹⁵ Through colonization, religious conceptions were transposed or reinvented as racial conceptions in a process of racial othering. In this way, the church “became the handmaiden of European world domination.”¹⁶ There has always been a religious dimension to colonialism’s economic and territorial agendas. In addition to providing a religious “purpose” for an economic and