Читать книгу White Christian Privilege - Khyati Y. Joshi - Страница 8

Any discussion of religion in the US that does not explore its intersections with race and racism is incomplete. This book takes an intersectional approach, not only grappling with Christian privilege as a single phenomenon, but also attending to the way it interacts with other structures of social, economic, and legal privilege. The advantages Christians receive are not experienced in isolation; every Christian, and every religious minority, also holds other social identities. Asian, Black, Hispanic, and Middle-Eastern Christians thus experience Christianity in America differently from the way White Christians do. Their various origins and histories in the US have given these groups different experiences. While they share many of the advantages of being Christian in America, those advantages may be harder to recognize or acknowledge, especially because of the racial discrimination and violence some groups have also faced. In this respect, their Christianity is often “othered,” just as racial minorities as such are “othered.” They may be targets of violence, a problem that Black churches, for example, have faced throughout history and continue to face. In some cases, it can be difficult for individuals to distinguish religious identity from cultural identity. The identities of Filipino Catholics, Black Protestants, and others, for example, interweave religion and culture in ways that make them virtually impossible to separate. This intimate connection between an advantaged identity (Christian) and a disadvantaged identity (racial minority) can make it difficult for Christians of color to recognize and acknowledge the advantages they do possess.

White Christian supremacy in America is the product of a centuries-long project in which notions of White racial superiority and Christian religious superiority have augmented and magnified each other. White Christian supremacy is an ideology that developed before the European “Age of Discovery” and European colonization of Africa, Arabia, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. Born from theologies that positioned White Christians at the top of a global social and economic order, White Christian supremacy looked to the Bible for rationales that supported the subjugation and genocide of Indigenous peoples, Black slavery, and a view of Asians as threatening, exotic, and heathen.⁴

These principles coalesced in a series of fifteenth-century Papal Bulls (edicts) that permitted the Portuguese monarchy to seize West Africa by deeming any land not inhabited by Christians as available to be “discovered,” claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers, and permitting the enslavement of Muslims, pagans, and other “unbelievers.” This “Doctrine of Discovery” became the basis of all European claims in the Americas as well as the foundation for the United States’ western expansion.⁵ Christianity thus permeated colonial enterprises around the world, both before and after the colonization of North America. In all of these projects, non-Christians were denied the rights to land, sovereignty, and self-determination enjoyed by Christians.

In what would become the United States, White Christian supremacy was developed, rationalized, and spread by theologians, philosophers, and scientists. At the time of the nation’s founding, most of its major universities were affiliated with the church, from Puritan Harvard and Calvinist Yale to Anglican Columbia, Presbyterian Princeton, and Baptist Brown. “Scholarship” in these institutions of higher learning helped to create and perpetuate White Christian supremacy. By reproducing and amplifying scientific theories of racial hierarchy and religious destiny, these institutions promoted theologies that rationalized land theft from native non-Christians and enslavement of Black non-Christians.⁶ Far from an anomaly in the theological discipline, Whiteness has been a dominant theological outlook by which non-White, non-Christian persons have been assessed along a hierarchy of humanity. The conquest of the US was a colonial endeavor that combined taking land with spreading the gospel of Christ. In the words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Our nation was born in genocide.… Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade.”⁷

Over the centuries, Christianity has justified race-based segregation of Whites and Blacks within the same Protestant denominations, be they Baptists or Methodists or Pentecostals. In the present day, Christian normativity perpetuates the societal exclusion of Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs through public resistance to mosques, synagogues, temples, and gurdwaras being built in their neighborhoods, among other means.⁸ The same resistance to sharing space with people of color that characterized segregation is reflected in the rejection of sharing public space with religious minorities. Both are born of the desire not to see, touch, or encounter those who are different. Today’s version directs a “NIMBY” (not in my backyard) attitude toward entire religious communities.

The Immigration Reform Act of 1965 opened the nation’s doors to immigrants of a variety of faiths who had not been permitted to enter the country for many decades. In the period since then, many members of religious minorities have arrived who trace their heritage to Asia, Africa, and the Arab world. To understand their religious experiences, we must also consider their racial minority status. My experience of growing up Hindu in the South, for example, cannot be separated from my experience of growing up brown.

Examining our history and the present day, we can see legal, historical, and everyday moments that illustrate the persistent connection and conflation of race and religion. For example, ideas of Black inferiority during slavery drew on not only notions of racial hierarchy but also on the idea that as non-Christians, Africans were depraved and barbaric. More recently, religion has become a powerful method of classifying the “enemy” or “other” in national life, in ways that affect primarily non-Christian people of color. Muslims, for example, have become particularly demonized in the US. The vicious acts of a miniscule handful of their co-religionists shaped their image in popular culture long before the events of September 11, 2001. Since that date, narratives around “terrorism” and the “war on terror” continue to associate an entire global religion, Islam, with violent, nihilistic movements. Looking more closely at many incidents, we discover that anti-Muslim bias is manifested racially. When Islam is associated with particular physical characteristics—that is, when it is racialized—South Asian Americans like me find ourselves being “randomly” selected for heightened screening at the airport because we look like we might be Muslim. South Asian American Sikhs, Hindus, and Christians, and even Hispanics have been targets of post-9/11 backlash attacks—suffering injury, and sometimes death, because of their brown skin, beards, clothing, or turbans. Their racial and cultural markers are associated with Islam in the popular mind, even though they are not Muslim.