world and US history and religions’ influence in society today, and nothing in Engel or Schempp prevents that.
Understanding the roles Christianity plays in the development of American law and society—and even of how laws and public perceptions define who is or may become “American”—allows us to see through the optical illusion of “religious freedom,” and to understand how Whiteness and Christianity have coexisted and mutually supported each other. That edifice of privilege for certain Americans, and the corresponding struggles and disadvantages faced particularly by non-White non-Christians, are fundamental to the ways the US has fallen short of the “more perfect union” it could be and should be.
Judging Devotion
In New Jersey, students pursuing a teaching career must complete an internship in the schools. Each student intern is paired with a mentor teacher who has been identified as a role model. One fall semester, around the time of the Jewish “High Holy Days” of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, two interns who had taken my Multicultural Education class described a conversation between their mentor teachers. The topic was several students’ absence for the Jewish holidays. One teacher remarked, and the other agreed: “I don’t know why they keep the kids home on these days; they’re not really that Jewish.”
This statement illustrates the judgments and attitudes of people who have spent a lifetime internalizing their dominant status as Christians in America, to the point that they feel at ease to pass judgment on their Jewish students based on their Christian interpretation of what makes a person “that Jewish.” My interns were troubled by the exchange because they could see how their mentor teachers were deciding how others should behave religiously. It is not appropriate—particularly for religious outsiders, as these teachers were vis-à-vis their Jewish students—to critique how others express their faith or celebrate religious holidays. As my students correctly recognized, their teachers’ remarks exemplified several facets of Christian privilege.
Let us unpack the situation a bit more. First of all, are the Jewish students really free to observe the Jewish holidays? Many school districts across the country have policies that treat religious holidays as “excused absences.” While appearing progressive, these policies still create a structural bias against students who are not Christian. The notion of an excused absence for Christmas or Easter is moot, as the school year is designed around the Christian calendar. Christian students never have to be absent (excused or otherwise) to observe their major holidays, while religious minority students and their families face the conundrum of observing their religion or going to school.
Second, the teachers are casting judgment on what it means to be “that Jewish,” or Jewish enough to observe the holidays. In doing so, they are applying Christian standards of what religiosity looks like. Too many people’s understanding of other religions is limited to what I call “Wikipedia knowledge”—a general understanding, at best, that boils down to rudimentary knowledge that “Jews do X” or “Buddhists believe Y.” This monolithic approach ignores how religions are actually lived. Christians may be selective about belief and practice, choosing to believe only certain passages of Scripture, or to abide by some religious prohibitions and not others. Yet this idea—that a person can agree with or observe only certain tenets of their faith, such as going to temple on the High Holy Days even if they do not keep kosher or wear a yarmulke—is not always extended to how we think about members of other religions. To really understand another person’s religious identity, and the way they experience lived religion, we have to ask a slightly different question. Instead of asking, “How Jewish is she?” we need to ask, “How is she Jewish?”
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
