Читать книгу White Christian Privilege - Khyati Y. Joshi - Страница 22

Christian supremacy has continued to thrive in White America. “[N]early sixty percent of White Tea Party movement identifiers believe America ‘has been and is now a Christian nation,’” a belief that spurs them to target minorities in hopes of maintaining their White Christian majority.⁶³ Most press coverage about the “Tea Party” movement that emerged in 2010 described it as an uprising against taxes and “big government,” but paranoia about Islam was also prominent in the movement’s rhetoric and policy agendas.⁶⁴ The movement gave a platform for mainstream politicians like Gingrich and many others to spout bigoted language and conspiracy theories from the fevered fringes of the political right. Islamic law, or Shari’a, was presented as a looming threat to the American way of life, leading legislators in states like Tennessee and Oklahoma to enact bans on the (non-existent) use of Shari’a in the state court system.

One state lawmaker in Oklahoma refused to meet with Muslim constituents unless they replied to a questionnaire asking whether they beat their wives. Elsewhere, both before and since the “Tea Party Summer” of 2010, elected officials shared hate-filled social media posts urging violence against Muslims. In 2016 alone, Arkansas state Senator Jason Rapert wrote on Facebook that Muslims “wait for every opportunity to convert Americans to Islam or kill the infidels—that is what their holy book the Koran instructs them to do”; New Hampshire lawmaker Kenneth Weyler said giving public benefits to “any person or family that practices Islam is aiding and abetting the enemy”; and Florida lawmaker Tom Goodson asked a witness representing the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a civil rights organization, whether it was safe for him to ride in the Capitol elevator with her. Others, in local office, used subtler, loaded language to smear Islam as they opposed local mosque-building projects. These and other lawmakers’ comments play on popular bigoted tropes about Islam, which paint the religion as inherently violent and incompatible with life in the United States.⁶⁵

A huge swath of White Christian America perceives the presence of religious diversity, particularly in public and civic life, as a threat to its existence. Political scientist Janelle Wong’s research, for example, shows that almost 80% of White evangelicals believe that “discrimination against Christians is now as big a problem as discrimination against other groups in America.”⁶⁶ Like the imagined threat of “Shari’a law,” the perceived need to protect White Christian dominance in public space has been a continuing source of conflict. As the Supreme Court noted and endorsed in Greece v. Galloway, Christian prayer is recited in public spaces, such as state legislatures and the US Capitol, all the time. But when minority religious faiths’ prayers are allowed into those same places, it can spark outrage. In 2007, then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid invited Rajan Zed, a Hindu priest from Reno, Nevada, to offer Hindu prayers in place of the usual Christian invocation at the opening of the US Senate. As the pandit was about to begin, Christian extremists in the Senate gallery disrupted the Senate proceedings by loudly asking for God’s forgiveness for the “abomination” of allowing “a prayer of the wicked,” of a Hindu, in the Senate chamber.⁶⁷ The organization behind the protest later wrote: “The Senate was opened with a Hindu prayer placing the false god of Hinduism on a level playing field with the One True God, Jesus Christ.… This would never have been allowed by our Founding Fathers.”⁶⁸

Eight years later, in 2015, the same pandit was invited to deliver the daily invocation for the Idaho State Senate. Three Republican lawmakers refused even to attend the prayer. Senator Sheryl Nuxoll did not attend “because she believes the United States is a Christian nation.” She added: “Hindu [sic] is a false faith with false 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.