Читать книгу White Christian Privilege - Khyati Y. Joshi - Страница 18

The American creation myth insists that the Puritans sought religious freedom. Indeed they did, but only for themselves.¹⁷ In reality, the colonial period in the Americas was complex, with various groups in search of religious refuge caught in economic as well as religious conflict with each other. The mutual ill will and religious competition among different Protestant Christian faith traditions led the people of New Netherland to cleanse their colony of Lutherans and Quakers, and to try the same with Jews. Name any religious group, and there has been a moment when its members discovered that American “religious freedom” is enjoyed disproportionately or exclusively by Protestant Christians—or, as in New Netherland, by an even more narrowly defined group like the Dutch Reformed Church.

The Puritan presence in New England set the tone and is the basis for the Protestant Christian norms that characterize mainstream White American culture today. Even in the absence of a legally established religion, Protestant mores and ways became the “normal” manner in which things were done in civic America. Most colonial settlers were affiliated with one of a few Protestant faiths, from Puritans in New England to Anglicans, Congregationalists, Lutherans, and others, but there were also others, including Quakers and anabaptists whose “Christianity” was more contested in the eyes of the majority.

The White Protestant Christian ethos of contemporary US life is rooted in this religious competition over a homogeneous religious identity, community control, wealth, and land. Christian norms dictated the rules of political life, from mandatory Church attendance to tax-supported religious institutions. Christianity was regarded as superior to the oral religious traditions of the Native Americans; to the Islamic, animist, or other traditions of enslaved Africans and free Africans; and to the beliefs of immigrants from Jewish and other religious traditions. Even Bible-based religions outside the Protestant norm encountered hostility in government and society.

Throughout the later part of the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth century, litigation was rarely brought under the religious protection clauses of the First Amendment, either because Protestant hegemony remained unopposed or because oppressed religious minorities, such as slaves and Native Americans, lacked Constitutional protection. Also, it was not until the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, after the Civil War, that the Bill of Rights’ reach was extended to protect individuals from the acts of the state governments. Christmas became the only separately recognized federal holiday with a religious basis in 1870. Sunday, the Christian Sabbath, has been recognized as a national day of rest from colonial times; Saturday only joined Sunday as the legally recognized weekend in 1938—and that in response to the demands of organized labor, not religious minorities. From 1793 until at least 1868, the US Capitol building was used as a Christian church, which most of the elected officials attended.¹⁸

All the while, religious minorities in most cases did not challenge these policies. Even into the early decades of the twentieth century, Jews were arrested for working on the Sunday Sabbath¹⁹ and Jewish children were ostracized and harassed and their parents’ businesses boycotted if they protested public school Christian prayer or Bible readings.²⁰ Overt “No Jews Here” policies in hotels or business clubs, quotas at elite colleges and professional schools—none of these antisemitic practices were constitutionally challenged until the mid-twentieth century.²¹