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 territorial subjugation of others, the church, as it sought to convert non-Christians, used the Gospel message to encourage indigenous populations’ obedience to European colonial powers.17
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