gods.… I think it’s great that Hindu people can practice their religion but since we’re the Senate, we’re setting an example of what we, Idaho, believe.” Her colleague Senator Steve Vick asserted that a Hindu prayer should not be allowed because the United States was “built on the Judeo-Christian not only religion but work ethic, and I don’t want to see that undermined. I’m very supportive of the way this country was built, and I don’t want us to move away from it.”69
The message of the Capitol protestors and Idaho Senators was clear: Hindus, and indeed anyone not Christian, do not belong in “American” sacred spaces. Hinduism “undermines” American values, and handing the legislature’s microphone to a Hindu, even for a moment, is an unacceptable departure from the government’s constant and full-throated support for Christianity. As we will see in the chapter ahead, these beliefs emerge from historical antecedents that have consistently positioned Asian Americans as “forever foreigners,”70 whose physical characteristics, cultural traditions, and religious beliefs don’t fit within America. Like the resistance to Park 51, this thinking construes “others” as unwelcome in American public space because they dilute and pollute what is genuinely American: Whiteness and Christianity. In a patriotic nation, what is “American” is what is good; by implication, the nation’s goodness and light will dim if Hindus offer prayers in the Capitol building or Muslims gather to worship in lower Manhattan.
As this hysteria is amplified, false beliefs about history are created: The words “under God” are assumed to be original to the Pledge of Allegiance, when in fact they were added in 1954. Alabama’s Ten Commandments monument is assumed to be historical, when in fact it was erected in 2001 by then-Chief Justice (and later failed US Senate candidate) Roy S. Moore. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, ruling against the monument, compared Moore to “those Southern governors who attempted to defy federal court orders during an earlier era” of racial segregation.71 Like desegregation and voting rights, which Southern governors had opposed in their time, growing racial and religious diversity led to a resistance that claimed the monument as a symbol of their apprehensions and resentments, and a longing for the days when Christianity had a stranglehold on all public sacrality. What would otherwise have been an obscure, local incident involving an eccentric judge was magnified into a national movement of Christian Americans who suddenly felt besieged in the heart of the Bible belt. If a three-ton monument that quotes the Bible, placed in a State Court rotunda, is an illegal “establishment of religion,” how then would Christians mark their territory? Many Christians in Alabama and around the nation took the ruling that a Christian monument in civic space was unconstitutional as an attack on their faith, and on what they viewed as its right to occupy any US space they wished to claim as their own.
Often, the ways in which government continues to promote and protect Christianity to the exclusion of other faiths pass unseen and unacknowledged. This is part of our “optical illusion.” Legislators who resist “Shari’a law,” or city council members who try to stop construction of a mosque or gurdwara in their neighborhood, tend not to see that for 400 years Christianity has benefited from, and continues to benefit from, de facto and often de jure state sanction in virtually every aspect of society. When other religious communities and neighbors rise in solidarity to expose the specious arguments of the opposition, though they may oppose the discrimination, even they may not recognize its systemic roots.
The simultaneous weight and invisibility of this history explains why a level playing field feels so off balance to White Christians in America. The angry and virulent reaction to religious minorities, who are only seeking recognition of their faith traditions within the public religious sphere, reflects the manufactured idea that White Christianity is under assault. These activists’ and lawmakers’ efforts are palpably supremacist, given that their explicit goal is not social equity, but the return of Christianity to a place of unquestioned primacy in public and private society. In short, they “want their country back”—they want it as theirs, and theirs alone.
The Roots of Twenty-First-Century White Supremacy
While the dynamics of White Christian privilege have been in play for a long time, xenophobia and racist rhetoric experienced a new resurgence during and after the 2016 presidential campaign. Little of the rhetoric was new, but it had not been spoken by such prominent figures—including a US presidential candidate and then president, along with his political allies—in at least half a century. The stakes go up, and the very real physical and emotional risk to religious minorities is magnified, when elected officials—not schoolyard bullies or racist neighbors—use their position of authority to vilify a group. There is a causal connection between Trump’s emboldening of his anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant base and the increase in hate speech and hate crimes. Data correlating anti-Muslim rhetoric in time with terrorist attacks show barely a blip after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 or the Charlie Hebdo attack in in France in January 2015, in which journalists and cartoonists were killed by two Muslim men upset by cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. By contrast, when then-candidate Trump barnstormed the nation making xenophobic speeches in 2015, data show a dramatic jump in anti-Muslim rhetoric.72 Hostile political rhetoric increases the frequency of hate crimes targeting immigrants of all religious backgrounds, particularly Muslims.73 By contrast, when former president George W. Bush publicly defended Islam in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, hate crimes dropped.74
One of the most visible and violent manifestations of these trends took place in August of 2017. I was preparing for my fall semester classes, beginning at the end of the month. Toggling over to my social media feeds, I could hardly believe the images: White supremacists and neo-Nazis in a torchlit procession and rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The New York Times headline read “White Nationalists March on University of Virginia.”75 The chants included the Nazi slogan “blood and soil” and “Jew (You) will not replace us.” The scenes evoked memories of the Hitler Youth and the Ku Klux Klan, both paramilitary organizations that were formed to protect not just White people, but specifically White Christians.
The catalyzing event was a “Unite the Right” rally, organized by members of the “alt-right,” a loose coalition of political conservatives and White supremacist organizations, to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from a public park. They marched across the University of Virginia grounds, carrying tiki torches, swastikas, and semi-automatic rifles and chanting slogans. The rally and march turned violent when a group of counter-protestors also showed up. Incidents continued over the weekend; protesters and counter-protesters could be seen fighting until the crowds were dispersed by the police.76 On its second day the encounter turned deadly, when a White supremacist drove into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring many more. Charlottesville would later be acknowledged as the largest White supremacist gathering in a generation.77
The public discussion of these events, and their meaning, was vigorous, in particular after the president stated a moral equivalency between the neo-Nazi ralliers and their opponents: “You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent.”78 This remark, and a later comment in which the president referred to “very fine people on both sides,” signaled the president’s support of White nationalists. The president’s statements contributed to the normalization of White Christian supremacist rhetoric across the country.
But the debate and the news coverage omitted a key element of how we must think about, talk about, and understand the events in Charlottesville and the twenty-first-century American “alt-right” movement. Many different words were used to describe the rally, including “White nationalist” and “Neo-Nazis.” These terms are silent on the religious dimensions of alt-right belief. Based on the chants alone, people of color were not the only targets: so were Jews. It is clear that this was not just White supremacy but White Christian supremacy in action. We need to call it what it is. In Antisemitism Here and Now, historian and noted Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt writes:
