Overall, a substantial majority of Americans today are still Christian, a cohort that includes a growing proportion of Black and Hispanic Christians. At the same time, the Pew Research Forum reported in 2012 that White Protestants are no longer a religious majority in the US, a status they held for more than two centuries. The Pew Research Center in 2015 and the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) in 2016 found that 43% of Americans identify as White and Christian, and 30% as White and specifically Protestant. While still the largest single racial/religious cohort by far, this is a substantial change since 1976, when roughly eight in ten (81%) Americans identified as White and Christian, and a clear majority (55%) were White Protestants. The decline in the number of people identifying as Christian is attributable to both the increasing religious diversity in the country and the growing numbers of people who identify as religiously unaffiliated. Minority religions are growing, but still represent fewer than one in ten Americans: Jewish Americans constitute 2% of the public while Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus each make up about 1% of the US population.29 Among racial groups, Asian Pacific Americans have a significantly different religious profile and are much more likely to be non-Christians.
When we speak of “religion,” we must remember that it is not merely a category—a checkbox on a form, a line of one’s personal biography, or an aggregation of thousands or millions of people. Religion has many functions, and is lived by each person in unique and individual ways. Religion is a belief system that helps adherents to make sense of this world and beyond. Religion (including the identity of “nonreligious”) crosscuts every other identity category. Sometimes religious groups function like ethnicities, linking people by a common place of origin (real or imagined), or a common language; in other cases, they do not. Either way, religion is a source of personal identity, and of connection to some larger group identity; it may be a vehicle for membership, affiliation, and solidarity. It is a common source of identity and community for immigrant groups. Religion may also be the basis for exclusion, competition, adversarial status, discrimination, or exploitation.
A Hierarchy of Christian Denominations
Members of White Protestant denominations tend to enjoy Christian privilege at its most expansive, while Christian communities of color may enjoy it in different and more constrained ways. Racism has inhibited the social power of African American, Native American, Asian American, and Latinx churches.
In addition to understanding how identities like race, gender, and sexual orientation affect experiences of Christian privilege, it is important to recognize that there are numerous Christian denominations and that a hierarchy or continuum of Christian privilege has been manifest among them. In colonial America and the early United States, for example, discrimination against Christians whose theology was at odds with Protestantism, including Anabaptist Christians (such as the Amish and Mennonites), Mormons (adherents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints), Quakers, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and believers in Christian Science, placed those Christians in a relatively disadvantaged position vis-à-vis the mainstream Protestant majority. Indeed, the question of whether these groups were “Christian” was—and to some degree remains—contested. For other Christian groups, particularly Catholics but also adherents of the many eastern Orthodox traditions, it was their immigration in large numbers and the resulting sense of insecurity among White American Protestants that led to religious discrimination and positioned these non-Protestants as lower in the social hierarchy.
The Path Forward
As long as we treat our foundational ideals of freedom of religion and “all men are created equal” as if they are realities rather than aspirations, the dominance of Protestant Christianity and Whiteness over the political and social institutions of the United States will remain invisible.
The fact that religious freedom is nominally ensconced in the First Amendment, and is applied to the states by the Fourteenth, does not mean that we have religious equality. This book debunks the fallacy of American religious freedom and offers ways to acknowledge the harder truth of White Christian supremacy, in hopes of helping to create a society with institutions and cultural practices in which all can more equitably coexist. It does so by listening to the voices and highlighting the experiences of members of religious minorities in our diverse nation, and by placing early twenty-first-century American politics and society in a long historical context. By considering the changes in thought and approach that could direct us toward a more just coexistence, this book aims to amplify the dialogue on national identity and put forward a social justice approach to religion in the US that may finally unshackle us from the legacies described in the next few chapters.
This book is not an exercise in political correctness. Its aim is to illuminate how Christianity in the US has served the needs of the dominant religious, ethnic, racialized majorities with historically greater access to institutional and cultural power than other groups. This exploration challenges deeply held myths and beliefs about American religious freedom and opportunity. Open and honest conversations are
