acknowledge those on the right who say they are merely trying to protect “European culture” as the antisemites and racists that they are. It was not by chance that those who gathered in Charlottesville in 2017 to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee also chanted “Jews will not replace us,” or that when Richard Spencer ended a speech at an alt-right conference in Washington, D.C., shortly after the 2016 presidential election with the cry “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory,” some of those in attendance responded with the Nazi salute.79
So, how did we get from Vicki’s fellow Southern Baptists, who did not like her working with my father, to the deadly violence at Charlottesville? Part of the answer is the political rhetoric of recent years. But we must recognize that Vicki’s congregation and the men in Charlottesville exist on the same spectrum of thought and approaches comprising the philosophy of White Christian supremacy. Treating supremacy as a violent project—as something the Klan does, but “kind” White Christians do not, recognizes only its extremes.
The attitudes of White Christians who would never pick up a tiki torch or fly the Confederate flag nevertheless give license to those who would. Institutions are made up of people. The problem is not limited to the elected officials who engage in explicit anti-Muslim or anti-Hindu rhetoric; it is also those officials who are less interested in the concerns of their religious minority constituents. Movements to preserve certain Confederate monuments or the Confederate flag in the name of “tradition,” resistance to diverse prayer in legislatures, and the way people look down on their religious-minority neighbors are all part of the same phenomenon. We need to acknowledge White Christian supremacy in all the places it exists, and we specifically need to see that Christianity is virtually always there alongside White supremacist thought in xenophobic movements. Finding these supremacist attitudes and rules wherever they exist in the crevasses of everyday life is the essential first step in addressing these problems.
Conclusion
This chapter has provided examples of Christian normativity and privilege as individuals experience it. It is perhaps the least invisible part of the larger superstructure of White Christian supremacy. Christians’ social power to define what is normal excludes, degrades, and harms religious minorities. The preeminence of European and Protestant influences in US culture is not just a vestige of colonialism. It is the product of centuries of social policy since then, all influenced by shifting notions of Whiteness and Christian identity. Enduring cultural norms have affected US immigration and naturalization policy since the First Congress convened in Washington. Muslims, for example, were not the first minority religious or racial group to face the kind of bias described above: Native Americans and Japanese Americans, among others, were earlier targets. Their differing appearance and beliefs implied that they were dangerous and they were rounded up, excluded, interned, or killed as a result.
Now that we have begun to see through the optical illusion of “religious freedom” in the United States, and to understand that Whiteness and Christianity coexist and mutually support each other, we will explore the social and legal history that got us here. Understanding that history will enable us to better understand the situation today. This begins with seeing the path from the European origins and American manifestations of the dichotomy between Christian and heathen through the nineteenth-century experiences of Catholic, Jewish, and Orthodox immigrants. It continues with a ride on the twentieth century’s legal roller-coaster from banning Asian immigration and stripping some Asians of their US citizenship in the roaring twenties, through to the emergence of the most diverse wave of American immigration yet after 1965. We will then see how all these developments 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
