Religion Is Raced: Understanding American Religion in the Twenty-First Century 9781479838271

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Religion Is Raced

Religion Is Raced Understanding American Religion in the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Grace Yukich and Penny Edgell

New York Universit y Press New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York www.nyupress.org © 2020 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Yukich, Grace, 1980– editor. | Edgell, Penny, 1963– editor. Title: Religion is raced : understanding American religion in the twenty-first century / edited by Grace Yukich and Penny Edgell. Description: New York : New York University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2019041703 | ISBN 9781479808670 (cloth) | ISBN 9781479808748 (paperback) | ISBN 9781479838271 (ebook) | ISBN 9781479868940 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: United States—Religion. | Race—United States. | Race—Religious aspects. Classification: LCC BL2525 .R468625 2020 | DDC 200.89/00973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041703 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

Contents

Introduction: Recognizing Raced Religion

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Grace Yukich and Penny Edgell

Part I: Raced Religion and US Politics 1. White Christian Libertarianism and the Trump Presidency

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2. Civil Religion and Black Church Political Mobilization

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3. Intersectional Politics among Atheists and Humanists of Color

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4. Assuming Whiteness in Twentieth-Century American Religion

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Gerardo Martí

Omar M. McRoberts

Sikivu Hutchinson

Rhys H. Williams

Part II: Raced Religion and Gender and Sexualities 5. Race, Religion, and Jewish Sexuality in an Age of Immigration Sarah Imhoff

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6. Race and the Religious Possibilities for Sexuality in Conservative Protestantism

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7. Gender and the Racialization of Muslims

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Kelsy Burke, Dawne Moon, and Theresa W. Tobin Ashley Garner and Z. Fareen Parvez

Part III: Raced Religion and Social Class 8. Race, Class, and the Color-Blind Social Gospel Movement Janine Giordano Drake

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v

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9. Racial and Class Gaps in Buddhist-Inspired Organizing Jaime Kucinskas

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Part IV: Raced Religion and Immigration 10. The Religious and Racial Minoritization of Asian American Voters

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11. Religion, Race, and Immigration in Community Organizing among the Formerly Incarcerated

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Russell Jeung, John Jimenez, and Eric Mar

Edward Orozco Flores

Part V: Measuring Raced Religion 12. Decentering Whiteness in Survey Research on American Religion

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13. Beyond Black and White in Measuring Racial Identity among US Muslims

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14. Race, Gender, and Avowing (or Avoiding) the Stigma of Atheism

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Conclusion: Centering Race in the Study of American Religion and Nonreligion

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Acknowledgments

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About the Contributors

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Index

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Jerry Z. Park and James Clark Davidson

Besheer Mohamed

Joseph O. Baker

Penny Edgell and Grace Yukich

Introduction Recognizing Raced Religion Grace Yukich and Penny Edgell

The early 2000s have been an interesting time for those who think and write about religion in the United States. Increasing numbers of Americans have claimed a diverse array of nonreligious identities or have become indifferent to—or critical of—religious institutions. Many assumed that this would lead to a decline in the influence of religion, not only in private life but also in politics, social policy, and public discourse. Media outlets announced the demise of the Religious Right in the wake of the legalization of same-sex marriage and declining religious affiliation, especially among millennials. Instead, White Evangelical Christians helped usher Donald Trump into the White House in 2016. Why would White Evangelical Christians, who have often championed conservative sexuality, elect a twice-divorced, sexually promiscuous man? Commentators pointed to the fact that, while on the campaign trail, Trump frequently defended the importance of Christianity in American public life and argued that in Trump, Evangelicals had found a defender of a Christian nationalism they perceived as under attack. They forecast continued politicization of religion in the United States not despite, but because of, increasing religious disaffiliation. While Christian nationalism certainly influenced the 2016 election and continues to shape American politics and culture (Whitehead, Perry, and Baker 2018), an important piece of the puzzle is often missing from discussions of these dynamics: Christian nationalism has a color, and it is White (Edgell 2016). This is not a trivial detail. It was White Evangelicals—not Evangelicals of color—who supported Trump in the 2016 presidential election (PRRI 2016; Wong 2018; Yukich 2017a). Christian nationalists do not just seek a nation guided by Christian ideals—most 1

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seek a nation guided by White Christian histories and values.1 In the United States, the historical dominance of White Christianity—and, more specifically, White Protestant Christianity—has undergirded definitions of Christianity, and more broadly of “religion,” that reflect the beliefs, practices, and traditions of White people (Jones 2016). In September 2017, the National Cathedral in Washington, DC announced its decision to remove stained glass windows celebrating confederate leaders Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.2 The windows had been donated to the cathedral in 1953 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, part of a wave of Confederate memorialization3 during an era when Black Christian leaders were beginning to call more publicly for Black civil rights, drawing on Black Christian prophetic traditions. The presence of these windows in a place designated by Congress as the “National House of Prayer” demonstrates how deeply religion and race have been intertwined in American history. It also reveals the effectiveness of White Christian nationalist leaders in infusing politics and public culture with symbols that signal inclusion for White Christians and exclude Christians of color and those of other faiths or no faith. Too often, the story of religion’s influence on American life has been told from the perspective of White Americans, leaving other experiences unexamined, and distorting our understanding of the social and political implications of religious belief, identity, and activism. Historically, scholars and commentators have tended to reproduce the language used by White religious activists and leaders, and talked as though race were incidental to, and not constitutive of, dominant understandings of Christianity and Christian nationalism in the American context (Edgell 2017). In the 1990s, the idea that there was a “culture war” between (largely religious) conservatives and (religious and secular) liberals was very influential—and hotly debated. But the various critiques of James Davison Hunter’s (1991) original statement (see Williams 1997) seldom addressed the fact that the “culture war” was waged by, and fought among, White Americans, and that the rift between religious liberals and conservatives was not affecting Black and Latinx4 communities in the same way. In this volume, Rhys H. Williams addresses how our conceptual tools for understanding major changes in twentieth-century American religion capture the experiences of White Americans while marginalizing the experiences of Americans of color.

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Fortunately, a newer generation of scholarship has given greater attention to how the combination of race, immigrant status, gender, and other factors work together to shape understandings of religious identity and to influence religiously based claims-making in the public sphere (cf. Barron and Williams 2017; Becker 1998; Chen and Jeung 2012; Edgell, Frost, and Stewart 2017; Frost and Edgell 2017; Wilde and Glassman 2016; Yukich 2013, 2017a; Yukich and Braunstein 2014). This volume builds on and expands this approach to the study of religion in the United States, focusing on the intersection of religion and race. This emphasis is rooted in the understanding that race has long been the most analytically important dimension of inequality in the United States and the one most deeply intertwined with religious identities and subcultures (cf. Jones 2016; Shelton and Emerson 2012). While multiple scholars have crafted important case studies exploring race and religion (cf. Hendrickson 2017; Kurien 2017; Morales 2018; Nelson 2004; Tarango 2014) and a few historians have published more overarching accounts of the intersection of religion and race in American history (cf. Blum and Harvey 2012; Goldschmidt and McAlister 2004; Harvey and Lum 2018; Weisenfeld 2017), scholarship on religion as a whole has not shifted to reflect the reality of religion as a raced phenomenon. This volume brings together both historical and contemporary cases to demonstrate how the legacy of White Protestantism has influenced both past and present understandings of religion and nonreligion, and how a focus on race and power helps explain religion’s influence on public life as well as whose experiences are taken seriously, talked about, and reflected in our scholarship.

Standard Approaches to Religion Scholarship on religion is varied and diverse. Still, several approaches dominate the sociology of religion, and to a lesser extent, religious studies. Historically, sociologists of religion focused on questions about religion’s relationship to society at large: where religion comes from, how religion contributes to social stability, and how it can create social change. Emile Durkheim’s 1912 classic The Elementary Forms of Religious Life examines tribal, animistic religion, identifying the “sacred” (things set

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apart) and the “profane” (the everyday) as the key distinction in understanding religious life. Durkheim argued that societies each had their own sacred objects or ideas, and that shared societal rituals—which induced a form of transcendence he called “collective effervescence”— imbued these items, and society’s structure and morals themselves, with sacrality. Because they bind people together across difference and sacralize society as is, Durkheim believed these shared rituals around the sacred were key to society’s functioning. In other words, for Durkheim, religion is central to maintaining order in society. Karl Marx was also interested in how religion functioned; like Durkheim, he believed religion played an important role in sacralizing society in its existing forms. However, unlike Durkheim, he saw this as a negative function that inhibited possible revolutions that could create more just societies. Marx argued that by focusing followers’ attention on the afterlife as the appropriate time and place for justice, religion primarily functioned as an “opiate,” keeping oppressed people from fighting for their rights in the here and now (Marx 1978). Max Weber adopted a comparative approach to studying religion, examining traditions as diverse as Protestant Christianity, Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. While he discovered commonalities, he was also struck by their differences. Weber’s interest in economics shaped his accounts of religion, which explored the ways that different religious traditions led to the development of different kinds of economic ethics and economic systems. In his most widely read text on religion, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber (2002[1905]) argued that the Calvinist doctrine of predestination motivated people to work hard and to accumulate riches, as wealth was taken as a sign that a person was one of God’s chosen (“the elect”). This accumulation of wealth was a precursor to the development of modern capitalism, and Weber saw this immense change as directly connected to widespread religious doctrines. While both Durkheim and Marx saw religion as primarily a source of social stability (for better or for worse), Weber’s work highlighted religion’s potential to create profound social change, even if that change was unintentional. While these “classical” theoretical perspectives differ in important ways, they share a focus on religion as a social, often societal, phenomenon. They highlight the ways that religion is socially embedded in

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communities; how it is enacted through a variety of shared practices that are a part of socialization and therefore often routine rather than consciously chosen, and are frequently constitutive of social life; and how religion performs political, economic, moral, and familial functions that may seem unrelated to the reproduction of a religious tradition. While race was not central to the analyses of Durkheim, Marx, or Weber regarding religion, this focus on the societal creates space for considering how societal-level issues like structural racism might be embedded into a society’s religious forms. However, this promise went largely unfulfilled. Instead, for much of the twentieth century, scholarly focus shifted to conceptualizing religion as primarily a set of individual beliefs about the supernatural. With this focus on beliefs came an emphasis on private religious choices by free agents. Though many scholars became embroiled in debates about secularization and religious vitality, even these debates considered religion to be a primarily private matter in late-modern contexts such as the United States. In line with a White Evangelical Christian focus on religious conversion (i.e., all must be “born again”), even among those raised Christian, this individual-focused approach emphasizes that religious identities and beliefs are chosen, not ascribed, and that participation in religious practices and institutions is voluntary (see Edgell 2012 for a review). According to this perspective, in contexts like the United States, religion maintains a strong public presence because it is voluntary. When they are sufficiently strong, private religious commitments lead to the creation of a strong network of religious voluntary organizations, such as churches, denominations, and even social movement organizations and charitable organizations—all of which link private religious beliefs and identities to public discourse and action. Ironically, perhaps, the growing field of secular studies has adopted a similar conception of nonreligion, with voluntaristic assumptions shaping an agenda involving mapping patterns of nonreligious belief, identification, practice, and institutional affiliation (e.g., see Blankholm 2014). Though other accounts exist, this dominant understanding of religion as voluntaristic, private, and focused on beliefs about the supernatural privileges White Evangelical Christian religiosity, which emphasizes these elements as well. Being “born again” involves an individual

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rationally assenting to certain doctrinal statements, regardless of how they were raised, as a private, free choice that is the defining characteristic of being a Christian. This dominant understanding of religion turns attention away from religion as a socially embedded phenomenon, one that may be more ascribed than chosen, that involves ritual and embodiment that are frequently very public—indeed, that the very doctrinal statements people may assent to are embedded in the social, down to the translations of the scriptures those statements may be drawn from. By privileging White Evangelical accounts of religion, we not only miss the great variety of religiosity that exists (see Bender et al. 2012; Yukich 2017b), but we also contribute to the dominance of Whiteness and of a certain way of being religious. We also obscure the ways that White Evangelical religiosity is as socially and historically constructed and as variable and contested as any religious tradition, lending it an aura of superiority that can foster exclusion of those from other religious traditions, as well as the nonreligious (Delehanty, Edgell, and Stewart 2019; Stewart, Edgell, and Delehanty 2018). Finally, we perpetuate understandings of religion that, by privileging individuals’ freely and rationally chosen beliefs, ignore how a society’s religious forms are foundationally shaped by that society, including how that society imagines and structures race. If religion is not just a cognitive phenomenon—if, instead, it involves moral performances of valued individual and collective identities— then not only might different groups of people have different conceptions of and practices related to religion, but also different groups of people will have varying degrees of “freedom” in their choices around religion. Because in society, and in religion, power matters. Cisgender and heterosexual people often have different experiences in seeking a congregation that is a good “fit” compared with LGBTQ people, as Kelsy Burke, Dawne Moon, and Theresa W. Tobin examine in their chapter in this volume. The consequences of rejecting dominant religious identities and/or embracing more “radical” religious and nonreligious identities are different for men versus women (Edgell, Frost, and Stewart 2017), and for White people versus people of color (Ellison and Sherkat 1999), as both Sikivu Hutchinson and Joseph O. Baker demonstrate in their chapters in this book. Religious minorities may be pressured to adopt “mainstream” religious forms and practices to display their patriotism and, in some cases, to be granted legal recognition as a “religious

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group,” with the rights and benefits that accompany that designation in the United States (Chen 2008; Kurien 2007). In these ways and more, the religious choices of individuals and collectivities are differently constrained by larger societal structures of power and inequality. When we focus on religion as a primarily individual, cognitive phenomenon, we also miss a primary way that religion has an effect in the public arena. People’s analyses of how their private beliefs relate to public issues do not occur in isolation. They are embedded in thought communities that creatively construct links between religious beliefs and identities and understandings of good citizenship and national identity, policy preferences, and other aspects of identity, such as partisan identity, gender identity, and racial identity (Edgell 2012). If we want to understand issues like why so many White Evangelicals voted for and continued to support Donald Trump, we cannot simply point out contradictions in their stated doctrines or scriptures, as journalists and political commentators often do. Instead, we must examine how understandings of the relationship between private beliefs and public issues are developed in the context of religious communities shaped not only by religious tradition but also by understandings of race, politics, economics, gender, sexualities, class, and national identity.

New Directions—Intersectionality and Religion as Cultural Repertoire This volume adopts a different approach to the study of religion, one that has grown in popularity in recent years and is rooted in the sociology of culture. This approach calls for a move away from treating religion as primarily cognitive factors such as belief, or as strong religious or nonreligious identities (e.g., “Evangelical” or “Muslim” or “atheist”). Instead, it views religion—and nonreligion—as providing cultural repertoires that people draw on and act upon very differently depending on their social location (Edgell 2012). Cultural repertoires include beliefs, practices, identities, and discourses that are embedded in institutional fields. These institutional fields include both arenas where people interact face-to-face (e.g., congregations) and elites (e.g., clergy, Christian authors and celebrities, theologians) who produce discourses and practices that help individuals link their repertoires with rationales

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for action in both private life (e.g., if and when and whom to marry) and public life (e.g., policy preferences, political action). In other words, religious beliefs, practices, identities, and discourses are (1) developed in specific social and institutional contexts, and (2) drawn on and acted upon in different ways in different social settings and by people from different social locations (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003; Lichterman 2012; Yukich and Braunstein 2014; Yukich, Fulton, and Wood 2019). At the same time that this approach to understanding culture has grown in popularity, theories of intersectionality have grown in dominance in the study of race and ethnicity. Intersectional frameworks highlight the ways that individuals have multiple identities and statuses that comprise their social location, such as race, gender, sexuality, class, national identity, citizenship status, and religion (Choo and Ferree 2010; Collins 1990; McCall 2005). While a person may have one privileged identity (e.g., White), she may be a member of a more marginalized group (e.g., women). Thus, the experiences of all White people are not the same, and the experiences of all women are not the same—they vary based on unique combinations of different identities and statuses. Furthermore, discrimination is not always additive: A person from two marginalized groups (e.g., a Black woman) may face less discrimination than a person from one marginalized group (e.g., a Black man) depending on the social context (e.g., looking for certain types of jobs) (Hancock 2007; King 1988). These two approaches—cultural repertoires and intersectionality— complement each other well. Indeed, the cultural repertoire approach is inherently intersectional because it recognizes how cultural repertoires and the institutions that (re)produce them are shaped by social location, including various intersecting relations of power and hierarchy. For instance, gender and sexualities are particularly central to religion because the reproduction of religion through family socialization is foundational in many religious traditions, particularly the endorsement of a heteronormative model of the family oriented toward childrearing (Edgell 2005). Because of this seemingly natural fit between the cultural repertoires and intersectionality approaches, this volume bridges them explicitly, particularly when it comes to religion and race. In the United States, because race is a central (perhaps the central) social location, race indelibly shapes how people draw on cultural

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repertoires and therefore shapes religious expression. However, sociologists of religion, and to a lesser extent, religious studies scholars, have not always paid attention to how religious repertoires in the United States are centrally about race because the dominant approach has reproduced White privilege. The analytical categories used to understand what religion is privilege White traditions and experiences (especially White Protestant Reformed traditions), so that non-White religious experiences are either left out or misunderstood, such as characterizing people as “less religious” because their religious practices differ from those valued by White Protestants. Similarly, in many non-Western religious traditions, beliefs are not key to religiosity but ritual practice is—when dominant ways of measuring religiosity focus on beliefs, this privileges White, Western traditions (Bender et al. 2012; Yukich 2017b, 2018a, 2018b). This bias toward White Protestant notions of religion, and White traditions more generally, has shaped some of the most important theorizing and data collection around religion in the last half century (Bender et al. 2012). Some of the most celebrated claims in the sociology of religion, such as arguments about the nature of civil religion, or about religious restructuring during the twentieth century (see Williams’s chapter in this volume) have been made as though they are true for all religious groups in the United States, though they are really primarily applicable to White religious groups. Additionally, when non-White religious groups act in the public arena, their action has often been treated by data collectors and analysts as being anchored in racial interests, whereas White religious action in the public arena has been assumed to be motivated by religious belief (Edgell 2016). Action motivated by religious belief is by definition understood to be moral and disinterested (Demerath and Williams 1992). As a result, how White racial interests shape White religious action in the public arena remains hidden and unexplored, even though interests and morality are intertwined in politically relevant ways (Baldassari and Goldberg 2014). This is especially a problem in the Trump era because fears about White racial decline may have driven White Evangelical support for Trump (Jones 2016), as explored by Gerardo Martí in his chapter in this volume. Sociologists of religion and religious studies scholars are increasingly recognizing that this is a problem that requires a more significant shift

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than simply studying more non-White religious groups. For instance, in sociology, the concept of “complex religion” has been developed as a way to think about religion as an intersectional phenomenon that cannot (or should not) be understood as operating in the same ways across different groups of people (Wilde and Glassman 2016). Still, this recognition has not always translated into doing things differently: to studying different kinds of groups, or theorizing, measuring, and analyzing religion in different kinds of ways. And not all sociologists who embrace the complexity of religious expression focus on issues of power and inequality. In religious studies, more progress has been made than in sociology. A recent volume on religion and race in American history, for example, interrogates how religion is raced in historical contexts (Harvey and Lum 2018), though theorization of how and why this continues to happen—as well as how it occurs in contemporary contexts—needs further development.

Call to Action People interested in religion—from religion scholars to journalists to religious leaders and laypeople—need a new way of understanding and explaining religion in the twenty-first century, one that looks at specific historically and institutionally embedded religious repertoires from an intersectional perspective. But what is most needed in this moment is a focus on the foundational and enduring importance of race in the United States. We need not only studies of non-White groups, but a focus on race as a fundamental aspect of social location and social hierarchy that shapes religious expression in the United States. Indeed, race shapes several specific aspects of religious identity and experience, such as religion and gender, religion and sexualities, religion and class, religion and immigration, and perhaps most significantly in this era, religion and politics. We need work that recognizes this reality and incorporates race centrally in analyses of religion, as well as a reflexive evaluation of the theoretical tools and methods by which we study religion—and how those need to change. This volume is a step into this new approach, a compilation of chapters explicitly analyzing the ways in which religion must be understood through the lens of racial power and identity. It travels through some of

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the most discussed and debated topics in contemporary society, asking how we might see their relationships with religion differently if we think more explicitly about the racial elements of religion. Part I, Raced Religion and US Politics, discusses religion and politics, focusing on how the intersection of people’s racial and religious identities shapes their understanding of politics and their preferences for public religious expression. These issues are examined in chapters on Christian libertarianism and the Trump presidency, Black civil religion, the activism of atheists and humanists of color, and the inadequacy of dominant theories of religion to explain the religio-political experiences of people of color. This broad discussion of religion and politics moves into the exploration of more specific issues, starting with gender and sexualities in part II, Raced Religion and Gender and Sexualities. The section has a particular focus on how race and religion intersect to shape gender ideals and practices, and how White hegemony has shaped religious approaches to sexuality. Here, the chapters explore how race and religion intersect to shape the construction of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian conceptions of gender and sexuality—both those imposed by dominant groups and those formulated in various and sometimes contested ways within these communities. Part III, Raced Religion and Social Class, explores social class, an important yet understudied topic in both religious studies and the sociology of religion, inquiring about how White dominance has shaped religious teachings and practices around poverty and inequality, as well as preferences for policies designed to ameliorate inequality. The chapters in this section explore how, despite its focus on social justice, the Social Gospel movement was divided by race, and how the primarily White, affluent backgrounds of the leaders of the Buddhist-inspired mindfulness movement have handicapped its ability to foster deeper social reform. In the contemporary United States, perhaps no other issue has been the source of greater debate than immigration, the focus of part IV, Raced Religion and Immigration. Here, we explore the intersection of religion and race through asking how immigrant religious groups are overcoming—or reproducing—seemingly intransigent racial divides in American religion. The section focuses on the two fastest-growing racial minorities in the United States, Asian and Latinx Americans.

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The chapters examine how the divisive immigration policies of Trump and similar politicians may be creating a new religio-racial voting bloc among Asian Americans, and question the inevitability of a divide between immigrant Latinx and Black Americans. Having provided multiple examples of this new approach to religion— one that takes the racialized character of religion seriously—the book’s final section, part V, Measuring Raced Religion, focuses on research methods to provide a concrete road map of how to more fully incorporate this approach into future research on religion. The chapters in this section ask how common measures of religion are constrained by White Protestant assumptions about what it means to be religious. They focus on how most survey research renders Christian racial minorities and adherents of minority religions invisible or “less religious”; how a more nuanced set of questions in polls on American religion can help unpack interactions between race, ethnicity, and religion; and how categories like “religious” and “secular” might be defined and measured differently if atheists and humanists of color were more fully recognized by researchers. The book concludes with a discussion of how following this advice, which more fully recognizes the racial aspects of religion, can shift research on religion in ways that could impact not just scholarship but also religious communities themselves and, given the reliance on polls by the media and politicians, the wider political and cultural landscape. Taken together, the work of the volume’s contributors makes a strong case for the usefulness of understanding religious expression as fundamentally intersectional, constituted by cultural repertoires that are embraced by people in different ways depending on their social location. But more than being useful, we aim to illustrate the stakes of moving away from a scholarly and popular understanding of religion that claims to be universal while being rooted in the experiences and traditions of conservative White American Christians. At stake is our capacity to understand the variety and the meaning of both religious and nonreligious commitments in our rapidly changing landscape, an understanding that is essential not only for good scholarship, but for informed citizenship. Notes

1 Adam Serwer, “The White Nationalists Are Winning,” The Atlantic, August 10, 2018, www.theatlantic.com.

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2 Emily Cochrane, “National Cathedral to Remove Windows Honoring Confederate Generals,” New York Times, September 6, 2017, www.nytimes.com. 3 Kevin Drum, “The Real Story Behind All Those Confederate Statues,” Mother Jones, August 15, 2017, www.motherjones.com. 4 A note on terminology is in order. Throughout the manuscript, religious terms (e.g., Evangelical) are typically capitalized when they are used descriptively. For example, Protestant, Catholic, and Black Church are capitalized as they refer to specific traditions and/or institutions. We capitalize the names of racial and ethnic groups when they are used descriptively, including Black and White. The term Hispanic is used when referring to specific options used in social surveys, but in most other cases, Latinx is favored as the more inclusive term. Religioracial groups (e.g., Black Catholic, White Evangelical) may be used if they refer to specific survey response categories. Whenever possible, the most inclusive term is chosen, and racial/religious groups are treated the same.

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Delehanty, Jack, Penny Edgell, and Evan Stewart. 2019. “Christian America? Secularized Evangelical Discourse and the Boundaries of National Belonging.” Social Forces 97(3):1283–1306. Demerath, N. J., III, and Rhys H. Williams. 1992. A Bridging of Faiths: Religion and Politics in a New England City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Durkheim, Emile. 1995 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press. Edgell, Penny. 2005. Religion and Family in a Changing Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2012. “A Cultural Sociology of Religion: New Directions.” Annual Review of Sociology 38:247–65. ———. 2016. “Seeing the White in Christian America.” The Society Pages. https://theso cietypages.org. ———. 2017. “Associate Editor’s Note: An Agenda for Research on American Religion in Light of the 2016 Election.” Sociology of Religion 78(1):1–8. Edgell, Penny, Jacqui Frost, and Evan Stewart. 2017. “From Existential to Social Understandings of Risk: Examining Gender Differences in Nonreligion.” Social Currents 6(4):556–74. Eliasoph, Nina, and Paul Lichterman. 2003. “Culture in Interaction.” American Journal of Sociology 108:735–94. Ellison, Christopher, and Darren Sherkat. 1999. “Identifying the Semi-Involuntary Institution: A Clarification.” Social Forces 78(2):793–802. Frost, Jacqui, and Penny Edgell. 2017. “Distinctiveness Reconsidered: Religiosity, Structural Location, and Understandings of Racial Inequality.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 56(2):277–301. Goldschmidt, Henry, and Elizabeth McAlister, eds. 2004. Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas. New York: Oxford University Press. Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2007. “When Multiplication Doesn’t Equal Quick Addition: Examining Intersectionality as a Research Paradigm.” Perspectives on Politics 5(1):63–79. Harvey, Paul, and Kathryn Gin Lum, eds. 2018. The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History. New York: Oxford University Press. Hendrickson, Brett. 2017. The Healing Power of the Santuario de Chimayó: America’s Miraculous Church. New York: NYU Press. Hunter, James Davison. 1991. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books. Jones, Robert P. 2016. The End of White Christian America. New York: Simon & Schuster. King, Deborah. 1988. “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology.” Signs 14(1):42–72. Kurien, Prema. 2007. A Place at the Multicultural Table: The Development of an American Hinduism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ———. 2017. Ethnic Church Meets Megachurch: Indian American Christianity in Motion. New York: NYU Press.

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Lichterman, Paul. 2012. “Religion in Public Action: From Actors to Settings.” Sociological Theory 30:15–36. Marx, Karl. 1978. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction.” Pp. 53–65 in The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton. McCall, Leslie. 2005. “The Complexity of Intersectionality.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30(3):1771–1800. Morales, Harold D. 2018. Latino and Muslim in America: Race, Religion, and the Making of a New Minority. New York: Oxford University Press. Nelson, Timothy. 2004. Every Time I Feel the Spirit: Religious Experience and Ritual in an African American Church. New York: NYU Press. PRRI. 2016. “White Christians Side with Trump.” Washington, DC: PRRI. Shelton, Jason E., and Michael O. Emerson. 2012. Blacks and Whites in Christian America: How Racial Discrimination Shapes Religious Convictions. New York: NYU Press. Smith, Dorothy. 1990. The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Stewart, Evan, Penny Edgell, and Jack Delehanty. 2018. “The Politics of Religious Prejudice and Tolerance for Cultural Others.” Sociological Quarterly 59(1):17–39. Tarango, Angela. 2014. Choosing the Jesus Way: American Indian Pentecostals and the Fight for the Indigenous Principle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Weber, Max. 2002 [1905]. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Penguin. Weisenfeld, Judith. 2017. New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration. New York: NYU Press. Whitehead, Andrew L., Samuel L. Perry, and Joseph O. Baker. 2018. “Make America Christian Again: Christian Nationalism and Voting for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election.” Sociology of Religion 79(2):147–71. Wilde, Melissa, and Lindsay Glassman. 2016. “How Complex Religion Can Improve Our Understanding of American Politics.” Annual Review of Sociology 42:407–25. Williams, Rhys, ed. 1997. Culture Wars in American Politics: Critical Reviews of a Popular Myth. New York: Aldine Transaction. Wong, Janelle. 2018. Immigrants, Evangelicals, and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change. New York: Russell Sage. Yukich, Grace. 2013. One Family Under God: Immigration Politics and Progressive Religion in America. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017a. “Forum: Studying Religion in the Age of Trump.” Religion and American Culture 27(1):49–56. ———. 2017b. “Progressive Activism among Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims in the U.S.” In Religion and Progressive Activism, edited by Ruth Braunstein, Todd Fuist, and Rhys H. Williams. New York: NYU Press. ———. 2018a. “Muslim American Activism in the Age of Trump.” Sociology of Religion 79(2):220–47.

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———. 2018b. “Religion, Race, and Immigration in Contemporary America.” In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History, edited by Paul Harvey and Kathryn Gin Lum. New York: Oxford University Press. Yukich, Grace, and Ruth Braunstein. 2014. “Encounters at the Religious Edge: Variation in Religious Expression Across Interfaith Advocacy and Social Movement Settings.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 53(4):791–807. Yukich, Grace, Brad R. Fulton, and Richard L. Wood. 2019. “Representative Group Styles: How Ally Immigrant Rights Organizations Promote Immigrant Involvement.” Social Problems, https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spz025.

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White Christian Libertarianism and the Trump Presidency Gerardo Martí

No one, not even his most intimate campaign advisors, anticipated the election of Donald J. Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States. Pollsters and professional political commentators converged on a decisive loss against Hillary Clinton, but as election results trickled in, predictions soured, and the brash, celebrity billionaire from New York was swept into office. Trump’s “narrow path” of victory pulled back the curtain on deep cultural strains among the American people, as exit polls from the voting booth exposed that Trump received majority support from only one racial group, Whites (58%), and overwhelming support from one religious group, White Evangelical or “born-again” Christians (81%).1 Conservative White Evangelicals felt that their interests were excluded from the Obama presidency (Parker and Barreto 2014) and that their religious convictions were under attack, especially with new initiatives on gay marriage and the open welcome of gays and transgender persons into the military. While their religious sentiments are important, new attention is being brought to Evangelicalism as a highly racialized religious orientation (Martí 2019). So, even with the waning of conservative White Christianity in America (Jones 2016), the Trump presidency reveals the strength of White Evangelicals as a voting bloc asserting themselves in distinctively racial terms. A 2016 survey resulted in a steeply sloped bar graph depicting a fascinating pattern: The greater the saliency of a person’s racial identity as “White,” the more likely that person intended to vote for Trump.2 Another survey the following year showed that when asked what racial group faced the most discrimination in America, 45% of Trump voters said White people, far more than Native Americans (17%), African Americans (16%), and Latinos (5%).3 Another year later, in April 2018, amidst the Trump administration 19

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facing forceful criticisms of racial bias (e.g., ban on Muslim refugees, ICE detentions and family separations of Latin Americans seeking asylum, lack of criticism for White supremacists, push for building “the wall” between the United States and Mexico), White Evangelical support for President Trump was at an all-time high, 75%.4 The latest data show that the most active and committed among White Evangelicals, those who attend church more than once a week, approve of Trump’s presidential performance the most—85%.5 Together, these numbers reveal that an analytical focus on Trump’s base as a religious one is insufficient. Today’s White Evangelical support, despite a barrage of controversies, criticisms, and scandals, is racially oriented and historically rooted. White Evangelical sentiments represent powerful and persistent undercurrents in American society (Delehanty, Edgell, and Stewart 2019), and their Whiteness is not merely a racial characteristic, it is implicated in religious structures woven into political and economic processes. To understand Trump support manifested among White Evangelicals involves following a larger set of religiocultural movements that grafted Christian theology onto notions of free enterprise and the American Dream. In short, this chapter argues that the legitimation of Trump’s presidency reflects the intertwining of conservative White Christianity with free market capitalism. The synthesis throughout is intentionally suggestive and provocative, laying out a series of heuristic historical developments connecting racial oppression, religious orientation, and White privilege in the United States—a White Christian libertarianism that sanctions the perpetuation of inequitable and racialized societal structures of privilege and opportunity (see Haddigan 2010; Kruse 2015; Lynerd 2014; Martí 2020).

White Christian Libertarianism On the surface, it is not difficult to see White Christian libertarianism among the Prosperity Theology preachers embraced by the Trump administration, including those appointed to his “Faith Advisory Board” and the Evangelical leaders celebrated at a special “State-like” White House dinner in their honor on August 27, 2018.6 In American Prosperity Theology, individuals are gifted by God with talent and agency and urged to exercise their freedom, trusting God to provide opportunities

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within a political system premised on the promises of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. White Christian libertarianism believes prosperity is possible through independence, hard work, and investments in capital-intensive assets (like real estate, stocks, and bonds). The Christian libertarian ideal asserts confidence in believers becoming financially self-sufficient, stimulating a productive autonomy, and gives no regard to blaming social structures for the failure to accumulate investment wealth. A prosperity church’s function is to lift people into productive participation in the private enterprise system. Keeping churches tax-exempt allows congregations to engage in social services, saving the government more money than if they imposed tax revenues. Not that churches would simply give money away—the goal for dayto-day Christianity is to produce wealth, which benefits the individual (health and autonomy), the church (tithes and offerings), and the world (stimulating the economy, paying workers, and contributing to charity). The ultimate exemplars of virtue are successful entrepreneurs like Donald Trump. White Christian libertarianism as a broad-based religious orientation gained significant ground after World War I (Grem 2016; Kruse 2015; Mulder and Martí 2020; Phillips-Fein 2009). But the coalescing of its inherent convictions dates back to the Gilded Age, when the rise of industrialization and innovations in corporate finance generated enormous wealth for a small caste of Protestant elites (Dale Carnegie, J. Paul Getty, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and others; see Trachtenberg 1982; White 2017). Conveniently ignoring how much White Americans (and immigrants who “pass” for White) benefited from the exploited work of others, they viewed the sociopolitical system as good and proper, rewarding the talents of hard-working people. As documented in the broader history of American labor, White Christian libertarianism assumed the privileges of Whiteness while overlooking the systemic oppression of Blacks and unwanted “foreigners” (Higham 1955; Trotter 2019). If obstacles to wealth appeared, an alliance of Christian clergy, politicians, businessmen, and moneyed citizens aggressively promoted such obstacles as individual obstacles, not systemic ones. When reviewing the astounding economic development of America over the course of the nineteenth century, the growing prosperity is mythologized as a mixture of ingenuity, abundant resources, and trust in

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divine providence. Left unspoken is how the enslaved, and, after Emancipation, cheap Black labor from the formerly enslaved, served state and corporate interests while systematically barring African Americans from nearly all capital-intensive financial opportunities—a blatant, consistent, and long-term denial of access to mechanisms for accumulating wealth (Baradaran 2017). Chinese migrants—integral to western mining and the completion of the transcontinental railroad—were also sources of cheap labor, yet they too were systematically excluded from paths to financial wealth and, soon, excluded not only from citizenship but even the opportunity to enter the country (Lew-Williams 2018). Mexican Americans and Mexican migrants along the southern border were also subjected to outrageous racial violence, depriving them of returns on investments and wages, rights over private property, and legal residency (Martinez 2018). Local and federal governments deeply invested in a “Whites-only” vision and determined which groups were eligible to fit into their racialized notion of a “good American.” Interestingly, White Christian libertarianism solidified as a reactionary response to theological efforts to counter it. The abuse and exploitation of labor in the early twentieth century spurred on the Social Gospel movement, a form of Christianity widely taught by clergy and theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch (1907, 1912), which biblically confronted corporate greed and argued for the needs of workers (for more, see Janine Giordano Drake’s chapter in this volume). Christian businessmen viewed Social Gospel teachings as too close to the threat of dreaded Socialism, which mobilized the CEOs of Chrysler, General Motors, and Eastern Airlines as well as eponymous businessmen (with names like Conrad Hilton, J. Howard Pew, and James L. Kraft) to channel big donations toward promoting bible-sourced teachings that endorsed legitimacy for a “Christian economics” fully embracing principles of free market enterprise (Kruse 2015). Business titans and their allied clergymen crafted a capitalist-friendly faith, feigning an apolitical pose while endorsing limited government and the beneficence of a free market. White Christian libertarian pastors refrained from confronting systemic issues, rejected political solutions to economic suffering, and railed against the excessive reach of government, choosing to approach social problems in a more relational, individualistic form, a stance that dominates among American Evangelicals today (Emerson and Smith

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2000). Rather than challenging structural sources of socioeconomic inequality and unjust political systems, their message espoused limitless opportunity, a Christian libertarian conviction instilled in their followers that urged them to realize their potential and bolstered an unfettered confidence in a laissez-faire political economy and the righteousness of the American Dream.

Historic Resistance to Racial Equality in Wealth, Ownership, and Opportunity This chapter seeks to avoid the error made by sociologists of religion (as noted by Rhys H. Williams in this volume) that perpetuate a narrative about “cultural conflict” and worry about cultural unity, thereby sidelining discussions on race and structural inequality. In contrast, this chapter strives to bring into focus the deeper cultural background leading to White Christian libertarianism—a distinctive fusion of racial, religious, and free market ideologies—that can be traced back to the beginnings of American slavery. Simply stated, all available evidence indicates that Blacks were never intended to integrate into the United States as equal citizens. Even the most progressive among the Founding Fathers refused the option of emancipation, dismissing even a gradual integration of Blacks. Instead, those most sympathetic to the condition of the enslaved population organized and raised money for colonization, an ambitious effort to physically remove all Blacks overseas. Charities, like the American Colonization Society, were established to evade the “problems” of emancipation through complete expulsion, removing freed slaves from America entirely (Guyatt 2016). Black colonization was similar to Indian removal, a solution that theoretically established homogenous societies living alongside one another for mutual benefit. But colonization was a logistical failure and morphed into more localized practices of segregation, which further worsened the already disadvantaged condition of Blacks. Believing Blacks could not successfully integrate with Whites, “separate but equal” became the status quo, often passing into law. Controversies over slavery only intensified, even more when the land area of the United States abruptly expanded. The most significant territorial gains came from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, resulting in the annexation of a vast Western territory, the spoils of war with

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Mexico. Suddenly, Mexicans found themselves in a new country without having moved an inch. Although these new Mexican American citizens were promised rights and privileges, the federal government abandoned them, creating historic tensions still evident among multigenerational Mexicans today. Understanding Latinos in the United States therefore involves much more than a border-crossing narrative (Mulder, Ramos, and Martí 2017). Free Blacks and free Mexicans were systematically deprived of equal rights and equal opportunity, not solely due to private prejudices but as official government policy. Among Mexicans, rights were simply ignored, and disputes were rarely honored. Among Blacks, the intricacies of abandonment and mistreatment were more complicated. After Emancipation, federal programs that were intended to secure economic security to the formerly enslaved, including initiatives for employment, housing, and education (like the Freedman’s Bureau), were neglected or intentionally dismantled within a few years of their creation. After President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, his vice president, Andrew Johnson, gave out massive pardons to defeated leaders of the Confederate States of America and restored lands to plantation owners who had abandoned them. These Whites, often reinstalled into their government roles at local, state, and federal levels, demurred against the worth of investing in Blacks, insisting that free Blacks earn their own way. Even though wealth had been extracted from the enslaved since before the founding of the Republic, widespread opinion, including that of Northerners and initially sympathetic Republicans, held that Blacks must work to obtain their own economic security without backing, education, protection, or support. The Civil War was fought over the expansion of slavery, but Northern motivation against the Confederacy was not based on compassion for the plight of Blacks; rather, it was based on resentment against the increased concentration of wealth among a shrinking population of slave owners and the enormous consequences of succumbing to their economic demands. (For example, proposals circulated to expand “the blessings of slavery” to include poor Whites.) The politics of Abraham Lincoln centered on the desire to provide “free soil” to White farmers who could establish their own livelihood apart from slave or wage labor. Republicans fought to keep free territories of the West from being “slave

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states” to protect the capacity of non–slaveholder Whites to attain their own modicum of wealth and comfort (Foner 1995). Indeed, free states were intended to be utopias for White labor. After the Civil War, many states, like Ohio and Oregon, authorized restrictions on the ability of free Blacks to reside in or travel through the state. Thus, after the war, Reconstruction was differently but equally oppressive for Blacks. The radical failure of Reconstruction politics is most evident in new structures of racialized power. Slave codes regulating behavior were slightly modified to become Black codes. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery but gave exception to the incarcerated, so laws restricting the freedom of Blacks (as well as Mexicans, Chinese, and Japanese) were crafted to catch them in criminalized acts, which led to imprisonment, effectively re-enslaving them. Even when the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were passed to extend rights and citizenship to former slaves, the supervision and enforcement of Black privileges and protections were unwisely left to the states. Soon, a Southernsympathetic Supreme Court reinterpreted the Fourteenth Amendment away from the citizenship rights of Blacks to stressing the freedom of states to manage elections by their own standards. Literacy, poll taxes, and criteria like possessing an upstanding character were all employed to systematically deny Blacks the ability to exercise their right to vote (Black disenfranchisement continues today; cf. Anderson 2018). Elected leaders felt little need to honor Black interests since they were being kept from voting. Further, with the formation of White-power groups, Blacks were targeted and terrorized, at times through organized activity like that of the KKK and other times through spontaneous acts of violence—a horrific period of abuse, burnings, lynchings, and rape (and, less frequently discussed, violence against Mexicans and Asians as well). The Reconstruction period therefore continued the oppression of the slaveholding era, this time leaving Blacks and other people of color to fend for themselves. Since Black mobility to other states was hindered, they were largely stuck in the South, with most legally bound a year at a time to labor under White farmers and business owners, often subject to former Confederate leaders and supporters who remained committed to their inferiority. Politically, the solid Southern Democratic bloc of congressmen effectively vetoed all initiatives put forward by Northern Republicans to alleviate the plight of Blacks. For example,

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bold civil rights legislation passed in 1875 was almost immediately dismantled, culminating in Plessy v. Ferguson which enshrined “separate but equal” segregation for decades. Rejecting all federal attempts to enforce equal access and opportunity for Blacks, the South effectively made the United States a “Southern Nation” (Bateman, Katznelson, and Lapinski 2018). Policies of outright exclusion and repression existed side by side with policies of restriction and recruitment of immigrants. Since White immigrants from Northern Europe were not viewed as degraded, they were actively recruited to take on jobs in factories of the East and to take up acreage in newly acquired lands of the West. Andrew Johnson pushed forward the Homestead Act, which gave away 160 acres to poor Whites for free (Blacks were not eligible). Moving into the twentieth century, the accommodation of new immigrants from Northern and Southern Europe, alongside the exclusion of Blacks, Mexicans, and Asians, generated questions regarding the future of “American” identity. Who is truly American? The abstract right of citizenship fused with prejudicial assumptions centered on White Protestant culture, a vigorous nativism demonstrated in the debates leading to and enactment of the National Origins Act of 1924 (Okrent 2019; Perlman 2018). Racial and religious considerations encoded over decades of immigration policy translated into some immigrant groups having easier passage into mainstream American culture, while others did not. First, formerly enslaved Africans forcibly brought to and bred in the United States were obviously deprived of their ancestral cultures and genealogies. They were certainly not considered “immigrants.” Neither were Native Americans. Catholics and Jews (as well as Hindus and Muslims) had long been denied full acceptance. Southern Europeans like Greeks and Italians—those with darker skins—struggled to be accepted as legitimately American and were restricted well into the mid-twentieth century. Groups prejudged to be more “savage” or less able to be civilized were stigmatized as perpetually foreign and unassimilable. Mexican and Asian ancestries labeled as “not White” carried significant cultural costs. Already since the 1880s, Chinese were banned from entry to the United States. The “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of 1910 had imposed similar restrictions on the Japanese. Like Australia and New Zealand, America envisioned itself as a White settler nation (Lake 2019).

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Restrictions on immigration prompted changes in identity among new migrants eager to access the benefits of full participation in American culture. Non-White Americans understood that failure to achieve Whiteness meant they would be systematically denied generous economic programs, knowing that nativism deliberately hindered access to social welfare programs intended only for White Americans (Fox 2012). Many immigrants prided themselves on not being “Black,” i.e., not being associated with the stigma of more established yet systematically degraded Black citizens. And for many, switching to Protestantism was a sign of their “becoming White.” So, while some groups initially preserved a cultural distinctiveness, their children and grandchildren subsequently faded into the White Christian mainstream to the extent their phenotypical characteristics allowed. Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, nonWhite groups were marginalized, excluded, and outright oppressed. State-sanctioned means of this marginalization included presidential orders, congressional actions, and Supreme Court decisions that willfully advanced notions of White racial superiority, often buttressed with biological arguments from the new science of eugenics, which asserted that great nations were built only with members from the strongest races (Dolmage 2018). Such beliefs were affirmed by conservative Christians and deeply influenced their attitudes toward sex, contraception, and interracial marriage (Wilde and Danielsen 2014).

Long-Standing Assertion of Business-Friendly Evangelicalism Conservative White Protestants continued through the twentieth century on a trajectory that avoided discussion of unfair and exclusionary actions toward Blacks and other devalued groups, assuming members of these groups were economically unhindered from bettering themselves. These Christians turned away from the Social Gospel in favor of a burgeoning theological orientation, one that stressed personal devotion and moral uplift—a move already begun when controversial social positions were avoided in the name of “neutrality” so as to focus on solely “spiritual” concerns (Noll 2008). Dispensationalism mingled more literal readings of the Bible with a politically conservative and business-friendly lens for interpreting it (Gloege 2017; Pietsch 2015).

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With help from notes in the Scofield Study Bible and popular preachers like J. Vernon McGee, dispensationalism encouraged Evangelicals to bracket out periods of history, stressed that they were living in the “end times,” anticipated further decline in the general society, and refused the church and the government the ability to halt the God-intended and biblically prophesied demise of our culture. This world was temporary; true believers would be “caught up” or raptured, taken out of their daily lives in an instant, saved from the wickedness of the world, leaving “the unsaved” to face the apocalyptic nightmare of the Anti-Christ and a host of disasters accompanying him (Sutton 2014). This orientation also stressed adherence to the “fundamentals” of the faith, even though everyone disagreed on specifics. The rise of dispensationalism and “the Fundamentals” among Southerners and Midwesterners (many of whom migrated to Southern California; see Dochuk 2010) combined with an anti-communist and anti-socialist, pro-capitalist and pro-market Christianity, fusing patriotism with an aggressively redefined pietism. Denying the possibility of social interventions for creating better living conditions, pietists deemed any political and economic initiatives with even a whiff of Socialism—including programs initiated under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal—as “a halfway house to Communism” (Dochuk 2010:166; see also Ruotsila 2015). The fight against Communism linked itself to a radical affirmation of individual freedom, especially standing by one’s religious convictions. As White Evangelicalism further progressed into the mid-twentieth century, it became more firmly rooted in the centrality of personal decisions and convictions, pushing against God-denying cultural dross with a God-infused righteousness and optimism. This individualistic, egoaffirming theology was encapsulated in one of the best-selling books of all time, The Power of Positive Thinking, by Norman Vincent Peale, pastor of Marble Collegiate Church in New York, where Donald Trump’s family attended. (In an NPR interview, Trump called Peale “my pastor,” adding, “he was so great.”)7 Peale and like-minded ministers across the country stressed individual dedication to ambition and hard work (exemplified in the Possibility Thinking preaching of Robert H. Schuller; see Mulder and Martí 2020). Lost amidst this lively, “can-do” attitude toward status and wealth was all concern for low-wage workers, the underprivileged, and the racially oppressed (Mathews 2017).

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The industrious, self-sufficient, and patriotic White Christian blossomed, reinforced by the notion of White Christian nationalism (Whitehead, Perry, and Baker 2018; Whitehead and Perry 2020). The more White Christian business entrepreneurs succeeded in gaining profits, the more they accentuated the rightness of their faith in tandem with the freedom of their religious convictions, culminating in a political movement in the 1950s to insert “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and add the phrase “In God We Trust” to US currency (Kruse 2015). Revivalist and primitivist notions ascended alongside morally charged positions that insisted standards of conservative Evangelical morality should become law. The expansion of Christian Reconstruction or Dominion Theology, which asserts the need to remake secular society into an interlocking set of God-honoring institutions, complemented these developments (Ingersoll 2015). Ronald Reagan’s presidency (1981–1989) coincided with the sharp rise of “born-again” Christians. The actor-turned-politician and clever Cold War warrior attracted politically moderate Americans to the GOP by merging Christian moral conservatism with a novel libertarian fiscal conservatism birthed out of his opposition to unions and sympathy for corporate management (Evans 2008). His anti-abortion/ pro-family stance and ability to mimic the rhetoric of White Evangelicalism were decisive. He appealed to groups like the Moral Majority, founded under Reverend Jerry Falwell, Sr., to further a “traditional values” agenda that effectively politicized frustrated fundamentalists and Evangelicals and fused them into a formidable voting bloc. The president who stood up to Communist Russia emboldened Christian conservatives to forcefully advocate for their own political positions on social issues, calling out culture warriors to fight for the soul of America. To be a White, Republican, capitalist-friendly “Christian” was now an all-encompassing personal identity sacredly charged as good, right, and true. The Reagan era entwined political, economic, and religious imperatives such that White Christian Evangelicalism became deeply infused with the fiscal policies of free market conservatism. Reagan aggressively cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy and attacked welfare and other direct payments to the poor and underemployed. Labor unions, already weakened under President Jimmy Carter, were further undermined.

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Minimum wage hikes were resisted. The federal debt bloated under Reagan to unprecedented levels, justified via “trickle-down economics.” These economic policies resulted in a much wider gap between the rich and the poor and a broadening of America’s underclass of chronically sick, homeless, disabled, and long-unemployed—those at the bottom being disproportionally Blacks and other racial minorities (Bartels 2016). Conservative Evangelicals and their macroeconomic assumptions and political stances stigmatized the poor and chronically unemployed, further legitimated the concentration of elite wealth, and asserted the difference as the result of the disciplined individual rather than the stark bias toward asset accumulation, the weakening of unions, and the sharp decline of government assistance. Reagan’s economic policies greatly expanded the workings of neoliberalism under a veil of Christian virtue.

Reactionary Politics and Religiously Sanctioned Wealth Accumulation Barack Obama generated as much antipathy from White Evangelicals as Reagan had generated enthusiasm. White Americans were far less likely to vote for Obama than were members of other ethno-racial groups. In 2008, about 43% of Whites voted for Obama; in 2012 the proportion fell to 39%. Support for Obama among “born-again”/Evangelical White voters was even lower: 26% voted for Obama in 2008, but only 20% did so in 2012 (the lowest among all White religious groups). Obama not only lacked White Evangelical support but also was opposed by libertarians promoting a reduction of taxes and an expansion of corporate-favoring free trade. Obama’s presidency provoked a reactionary backlash in the Tea Party movement, a loose affiliation of politicians, activists, and wealthy sympathizers who claimed that principles of small government, the free market, and reductions in federal budgeting for social programs would “fix” pervasive social problems. Award-winning research by political scientists Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto (2014) shows that the Tea Party was not solely fixated on economic conservatism but also involved deeply rooted nativist claims about who qualifies as a “real American.” A base-level racism was the true rallying point. For many Tea Partiers, “real Americans” included

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only those who were English-speaking, native-born, and Christian. It is no surprise then that Tea Party socio-demographics consist of majority White and “born-again” Evangelicals who exhibit great negativity toward Blacks and illegal immigrants (including DREAMers). Some want to repeal Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, denying automatic citizenship to anyone born in the United States. Because the American presidency is a potent political symbol, Tea Party members, activists, and supporters reacted to Obama as a Black man being the face of their country. A racialized antipathy characterized his candidacy, beginning with controversy over his Black pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who once preached from his pulpit at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago that Blacks should not sing “God bless America” but “God damn America.”8 Criticism regarding Obama’s membership in a church rooted partly in Black liberation theology soon transformed into claims that he was not even Christian at all. The unfounded belief that Obama was Muslim, rather than Christian, surged in prevalence throughout his terms in office. Public Policy Polling in 2015 found that 54% of Republicans believed him to be Muslim, and among Trump supporters that figure is raised to 66%.9 Indeed, Donald Trump was among the most aggressive advocates of the “birther movement” asserting that Obama was born in a foreign country, therefore disqualifying him from being president. Over Obama’s tenure, economic structures shifted dramatically, although few Wall Street insiders grasped the repercussions of the innovative profit mechanisms they pushed forward. Modern capitalism depends on a novel mixture of fiscal policies and private firm inventions that coalesce under an overarching ideology of neoliberalism that idealizes a free market. The economist Thomas Piketty’s (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century focused attention on the growing significance of central banks, the expansion of household debt, the creation of new financial instruments for trade, the leveraging of investment instruments based less on property or material production, and the rising propensities toward default. Not only did Piketty show that income and wealth inequality have worsened since the 1970s, he also explained it would continue to worsen as long as the wealthy continually reinvested huge surpluses (essentially inconsumable profits) back into the market, which further expands capital-based wealth at the expense of wage-based

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income. Piketty’s rigorous analysis shows that when American wages declined and unemployment expanded, corporate profits continued to increase, further revealing inequities in the system. While neoliberal boosters tout competition and public ownership of shareholders, in actuality already successful, wealthy firms are buffered from loss. Aggressive moves to continually raise profit for shareholders translate into aggressive management by corporate executives to sustain capitalistic fiefdoms and further raise executive bonuses, not worker salaries. In fact, the stock market collapse of 2007–2009 revealed that wealth and inequality are not due to uncontrollable economic conditions but rather to humanly constructed financial strategies whose origins trace back to the corporate practices of the 1950s and political interventions to preserve and expand them in the 1970s (e.g., LiPuma 2017). While favoring tax cuts benefiting the already wealthy and granting even greater freedom for corporations to supervise themselves, federal policies resisted practical economic help to the lower rungs of society. The market collapse was devastating to many families, and it hurt Blacks and other racial minorities at disproportionately high rates. In contrast, Whitedominant, conservative business and political leaders were largely unaffected, and their investments actually increased. During this time, the dominant neoliberal philosophy of conservative Christians dovetailed with the economic desires of libertarians, a political movement that cared little for conservative moral agendas and focused solely on the reduction of government and the protection of accumulated wealth (MacLean 2017). Despite the egregious fraud, misrepresentation, and greed of corporations as well as the stagnation of income and further concentration of elite wealth, conservative Christians showed no indication of turning away from neoliberal, free market ideologies, approving of generous tax cuts for big businesses and the already affluent. A religious approbation was increasingly given to the expansion of American plutocracy.

Trump’s Identity Politics and White Evangelical Support At the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association in 2017, Janelle Wong, professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, presented new data gathered by a team of more than eighty

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scholars drawn from more than 10,000 US respondents on race, religion, attitudes, and identity (eventually published in Wong 2018). Her research revealed two outstanding patterns. First, White Evangelicals are far more likely than all other religio-racial groups to believe Whites face more discrimination than any other group (like Muslims and Mexicans) in America. Second, White Evangelicals are far less likely compared to all other groups to believe any other group faces significant discrimination (like Muslims and Mexicans). The tables and charts in her presentation were conclusive and jaw-dropping. On seeing the extent of the perception gap, participants gasped—significant because everyone in the room, all international experts on race and religion, knew this mismatch in perceptions on discrimination represented a significant historical development. White Evangelical perceptions are now exceedingly skewed in relation to the actualities of discrimination racial and religious minorities face every day. The White Evangelical attitudes in evidence that day reflect the ideological framework bolstering support for Trump’s policies (Martí 2019). The list of attempted legislation and executive orders by the Trump administration—the Muslim ban on refugees from the Middle East; an office of Homeland Security dedicated to victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants; a speech at Liberty University touting religious freedom (sponsored by its president Jerry Falwell, Jr., the son of Jerry Falwell, Sr., founder of the Moral Majority); the Justice Department focusing civil rights investigation on suing universities with affirmativeaction programs deemed to discriminate against Whites; the pardoning of Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona, who was found to be in contempt for systematically ignoring a court order to stop detaining people based on racial profiling; declaring a national emergency to fund “the wall” at the southern border—all build on and further accentuate White Evangelical presumptions. Perhaps the most telling confirmation of White Evangelical attitudes involved Trump’s response to the violence at a Unite the Right “altright” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017.10 A few hundred Nazi-uniformed, Hitler-mimicking, and White-supremacist sign holders, displaying slogans and White nationalist paraphernalia, paraded through streets carrying clubs, shields, and torches, took over a park, and surrounded themselves with camouflaged White people carrying

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guns and rifles and other military gear. The rally sought to consolidate fragmented hate groups who mobilize public policies, private businesses, public schools, and other societal structures to act in racially exclusionary ways. Many had traveled from a significant distance. The fear generated that day did not come from the mere presence of White supremacists but rather from the very public and very forthright promotion of hateful beliefs. Are such sentiments becoming mainstream? To visibly counter this possibility, local residents, supported by progressive clergy and anti-fascist groups, quickly assembled, prayed together, walked to the rally site, and spoke out against it. Despite being shouted down and abused, they made their presence known, letting hate groups and the public know that such attitudes should not be tolerated. The ensuing clash ultimately resulted in the intentional killing of a White demonstrator against White supremacy, Heather Heyer. Trump’s public response to the rally and the murder of Heyer was ambiguous at best. Days later, he read prepared remarks to “condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence,” yet went off script to quickly emphasize that hatred, bigotry, and violence were present “on many sides, on many sides.” Dozens of Democratic and Republican members in both the House of Representatives and the Senate criticized the ambiguity of Trump’s statement, refusing to grant moral equivalency between White supremacists and demonstrators against hate. In contrast, social media posts from White nationalists and neo-Nazis indicated that they viewed Trump’s words approvingly, including the creator of the website The Daily Stormer, who said, “Trump comments were good. He didn’t attack us. [ . . . ] He said he loves us all.” The neo-Nazi live blog also noted Trump’s refusal to respond when a reporter asked about White nationalists who supported him. “No condemnation at all . . . When asked to condemn, [Trump] just walked out of the room. Really, really good. God bless him.” In the coming days, columnists, clergy, and commentators of all sorts stressed forceful denunciations of the alt-right. But who remained largely silent? Members of Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board. Member Jerry Falwell, Jr., instead stated, “One of the reasons I support him is because he doesn’t say what’s politically correct, he says what’s in his heart.” Although Falwell intended to defend Trump, critics believe all he did was further implicate his racism.

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The seemingly ironic support for Trump among conservative Evangelicals, despite his violations of moral standards usually associated with Christianity (like lying, bullying, lack of sympathy, extramarital affairs), can only be explained by their confidence in his backing of their own attitudes and desired policies (see Martí 2019). Trump generates strong support because of his willingness to enforce their convictions through the apparatus of the State. Trump meets with key White Evangelical leaders, avoids mainstream news outlets (with the exception of Fox News), favors Christian media (like Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network), provides access and influence to the White House and to members of Congress, and, perhaps most important, nominates Supreme Court judges who would restrict immigration, expand “religious liberty” (support for preferential treatment of White Evangelical initiatives), and further undermine Roe v. Wade. White Evangelical identity politics are not concerned with Trump’s piety but his enactment of policy. 11 As Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham, declared in 2018, “I never said he was the best example of the Christian faith. He defends the faith.”12 Trump is a fighter on their behalf, and some of his White Evangelical supporters believe that his being a religious “outsider” allows him to fight more aggressively for the causes they hold dear.

Conclusion The religious orientation of White Christian libertarianism boils down to neoliberalism with a theological shine, legitimating immense and undeniable economic inequalities across racial and ethnic groups. This chapter urges greater attention to the ethno-religious structures of inequality embedded in support for the Trump presidency, especially the unseen undercurrents that lend support to racialized political positions and programs (see Martí 2020). As Sikivu Hutchinson argues in her chapter in this volume, even when a religious culture among Whites can be discerned to be racially specific, it is too often seen as essential to that religious orientation itself rather than as a characteristic of power relations manifested through a racialized orientation. Certainly, there are religious alternatives and counter-movements to White Christian libertarianism, especially among communities of color who approach religion (and, more generally, community) as far less individualistic and

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egoistically aspirational. Future data and disciplined, systematic, and rigorous analysis should bring greater complexity to the legitimation of Donald Trump and his policies—as well as the resistance seeking to undermine it, whether carried forward by him or by his successors. Notes

1 “Election 2016: Exit Polls,” New York Times, November 8, 2016, www.nytimes.com. 2 “Support for Trump Rose with Embrace of White Identity,” New York Times, www.nytimes.com. 3 “Trump Holds Steady After Charlottesville; Supporters Think Whites, Christians Face Discrimination,” Public Policy Polling, August 23, 2017, www.publicpolicypolling.com/. 4 Robert P. Jones, “White Evangelical Support for Donald Trump at All-Time High,” April 18, 2018, www.prri.org/. 5 Ryan P. Burge, “Did Evangelicals Become More Moderate in 2018?” Religion in Public Blog, January 28, 2019, https://religioninpublic.blog/. 6 “Trump Hosts White House Dinner for Evangelical Supporters,” National Public Radio, August 29, 2018, www.npr.org/. 7 “How ‘Positive Thinking’ Helped Propel Trump to the Presidency,” National Public Radio January 19, 2017, www.npr.org/. 8 Brian Ross and Rehab El-Buri, “Obama’s Pastor: God Damn America, U.S. to Blame for 9/11,” ABC News, March 13, 2008, http://abcnews.go.com/. 9 Public Policy Polling, “Trump Supporters Think Obama Is a Muslim Born in Another Country,” September 1, 2015, www.publicpolicypolling.com. 10 Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Brian M. Rosenthal, “Man Charged After White Nationalist Rally in Charlottesville Ends in Deadly Violence,” New York Times. August 12, 2017, www.nytimes.com. 11 Sarah Churchwell, “America’s Original Identity Politics,” New York Review of Books, February 7, 2019, www.nybooks.com/. 12 “Franklin Graham: Trump ‘Defends the Faith,’” Axios, November 25, 2018, www.axios.com/.

References

Anderson, Carol. 2018. One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy. New York: Bloomsbury. Baradaran, Mehrsa. 2017. The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Bartels, Larry M. 2016. Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Second Edition. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Bateman, David A., Ira Katznelson, and John S. Lapinski. 2018. Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstruction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Delehanty, Jack, Penny Edgell, and Evan Stewart. 2019. “Christian America? Secularized Evangelical Discourse and the Boundaries of National Belonging.” Social Forces 97(3):1283–1306. Dochuk, Darren. 2010. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. New York: Norton. Dolmage, Jay Timothy. 2018. Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Eisinger, Jesse. 2017. The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives. New York: Simon & Schuster. Emerson, Michael O., and Christian Smith. 2000. Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Evans, Thomas. 2008. The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism. New York: Columbia University Press. Foner, Eric. 1995 [1970]. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. Fox, Cybelle. 2012. Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gloege, Timothy E. W. 2017. “Fundamentalism and the Business Turn.” In The Business Turn in American Religious History, edited by Amanda Porterfield, Darren Grem, and John Corrigan. New York: Oxford University Press. Grem, Darren E. 2016. The Blessings of Business: How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press. Guyatt, Nicholas. 2016. Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation. New York: Basic Books. Haddigan, Lee. 2010. “The Importance of Christian Thought for the American Libertarian Movement: Christian Libertarianism, 1950–71.” Libertarian Papers 2(14):1–31. http://mises.org. Higham, John. 1955. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Ingersoll, Julie J. 2015. Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press. Jones, Robert P. 2016. The End of White Christian America. New York: Simon & Schuster. Kruse, Kevin M. 2015. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. New York: Basic Books. Lake, Marilyn. 2019. Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lew-Williams, Beth. 2018. The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. LiPuma, Edward. 2017. The Social Life of Financial Derivatives: Markets, Risk, and Time. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Lynerd, Benjamin T. 2014. Republican Theology: The Civil Religion of American Evangelicals. New York: Oxford University Press. MacLean, Nancy. 2017. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. New York: Viking. Martí, Gerardo. 2019. “The Unexpected Orthodoxy of Donald J. Trump: White Evangelical Support for the 45th President of the United States.” Sociology of Religion 80(1):1–8. ———. 2020. American Blindspot: Race, Class, Religion, and the Trump Presidency. Landham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Martinez, Monica Muñoz. 2018. The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mathews, Mary Beth Swetnam. 2017. Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism between the Wars. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Mulder, Mark T., and Gerardo Martí. 2020. The Glass Church: Robert H. Schuller, the Crystal Cathedral, and the Strain of Megachurch Ministry. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Mulder, Mark T., Aida I. Ramos, and Gerardo Martí. 2017. Latino Protestants in America: Growing and Diverse. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield. Noll, Mark A. 2008. God and Race in American Politics: A Short History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Okrent, Daniel. 2019. The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America. New York: Scribner. Parker, Christopher S., and Matt A. Barreto. 2014. Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America (Updated Edition). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Perlmann, Joel. 2018. America Classifies the Immigrants, From Ellis Island to the 2020 Census. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Phillips-Fein, Kim. 2009. Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal. New York: Norton. Pietsch, B. M. 2015. Dispensational Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rauschenbusch, Walter. 1907. Christianity and the Social Crisis. New York: Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co. ———. 1912. Christianizing the Social Order. New York: Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co. Ross, Brian, and Rehab El-Buri. 2008. “Obama’s Pastor: God Damn America, U.S. to Blame for 9/11.” March 13, ABC News. http://abcnews.go.com. Ruotsila, Markku. 2015. Fighting Fundamentalist: Carl McIntire and the Politicization of American Fundamentalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Sutton, Matthew Avery. 2014. American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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Trachtenberg, Alan. 1982. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang. Trotter, Joe William, Jr. 2019. Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America. Berkeley: University of California Press. White, Richard. 2017. The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896. New York: Oxford University Press. Whitehead, Andrew L., and Samuel L. Perry. 2020. Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. Whitehead, Andrew L., Samuel L. Perry, and Joseph O. Baker. 2018. “Make America Christian Again: Christian Nationalism and Voting for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election.” Sociology of Religion 79(2):147–171. Wilde, Melissa J., and Sabrina Danielsen. 2014. “Fewer and Better Children: Race, Class, Religion, and Birth Control Reform in America.” American Journal of Sociology 119(6):1710–1760. Wong, Janelle. 2018. Immigrants, Evangelicals, and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change. New York: Russell Sage.

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Civil Religion and Black Church Political Mobilization Omar M. McRoberts

Civil religion is any mythological structure composed of beliefs, symbols, and sentiments that assigns transcendent meaning to national life. Civil religious rhetorics and rituals typically proffer (1) a mythically proportioned sense of people-hood; (2) an eschatological or religious teleological vision, which presents the nation’s history and destiny as divinely ordained; (3) a national theodicy, which explains periods of collective travail in terms of ultimate meaning; and (4) the ability to identify prophets who have embodied and ushered the nation toward its transcendent purpose. In an essay that famously inaugurated the discussion about civil religion in the United States, eminent sociologist Robert Bellah (1967), operating in the intellectual lineage of the political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau,1 described civil religion as a nonsectarian, unitary, and unifying cultural phenomenon typically, but not always, propagated by US presidents as part of the socially ordering activity of the state. Importantly, Bellah’s early treatment of civil religion, like many that have followed, was normative and prescriptive in nature. Bellah perceived an America torn between an authentic civil religion— emphasizing the higher judgment of God and the prophetic call to justice, liberty, and equality—and a false one that worshipped power and might and asserted a petty national exceptionalism and exclusivism. America at its best would remember the true civil religion, which unifies in broad strokes and sustains hope and faith in the nation’s highest values.2 Following closely in the tradition of Bellah, sociologist Philip Gorski (2017) meticulously traces the origins of multiple competing civil religious visions in order to distinguish the proper and authentic one from the interloping chaff. Gorski envisions an authentic civil religion in competition with an apocalyptic, ultra-sectarian 40

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“religious nationalism” on one hand and a higher authority-rejecting “radical secularism” on the other. This normative tradition of study, while foundational, obscures and precludes exploration of some very important phenomena, particularly in the field of Black religion, because it takes civil religion as a singular entity that, while most often invoked by political elites and state agents, actually stands independent from institutions and historical contexts. In the normative vision, civil religion is an articulation of Truth that operates on society, unifying it and humbling it by perpetually uplifting its highest common values over particularistic identities and interests. Normative civil religion scholarship may recognize Black exponents of “true” civil religion. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, has been recognized as one of the greatest voices in this tradition (Gorski 2017). But such scholarship does not recognize King as an exponent of a Black civil religion, because from the normative standpoint there can be no multitude of civil religions making various demands on, and perhaps even threatening the existence of, the greater polity. King’s indictments of America for its legacy of racial and economic oppression are folded into the grand normative vision as evidence of the latter’s capaciousness, its willingness to recognize and seek transcendence of the deeper national sins (for more, see Williams’s chapter in this volume). In the process, the empirical sense of King’s civil religious articulation as a political strategy and a demand for immediate action, deployed in a particular institutional and sociopolitical context in opposition to a dominant national articulation, is mostly lost. Interestingly, both the normative scholarly tradition and political elites have attempted to fold Black civil religion into their own projects, although for different reasons. Normative scholarship folds it in by way of expressing the truest national narrative. Political elites have folded it in to achieve the political effect of quelling Black agitation and securing Black allegiance to governing regimes. Both instances of “folding in” tend to negate the truly particularistic and even oppositional nature of Black civil religion. Other sociologists offering non-normative treatments of civil religion have introduced attention to a wider set of empirical possibilities, including the existence of multiple “top-down” and “bottom-up” civil religious perspectives. Robert Wuthnow (1988), noting the historical persistence

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of politically “conservative” and “liberal” civil religious strains emanating from executive administrations, suggested that there were in fact two competing top-down American civil religions. In a more pluralistic mode, N. J. Demerath and Rhys H. Williams (1985; Williams and Demerath 1991) identify civil religion as a phenomenon percolating upward from the masses as multiple social movements and interest groups use transcendent themes to generate solidarity and justify their political contentions. Civil religion, from the non-normative vantage point, is not singular in form or meaning; it is not a Truth target that Americans either hit or miss. Civil religion is an institutionally and historically situated empirical phenomenon, a topic of observable debate and exchange, which can appear either “top down” or “bottom up,” and is not in nature a perennial geist. This chapter specifies a bottom-up stream of Black civil religiosity that historically has issued from ecumenical church movements. These movements, which brought churches together across denominational lines, have historically produced civil religious meaning regarding the nationhood of Blacks, used those meanings to critique larger national narratives about the promise of America, and made justice demands on the state. These civil religious articulations have attempted to mobilize Black political action in part by identifying the particular historical juncture as the sacred time of action, when the opportunity for progress must either be taken or forfeited indefinitely. This chapter also identifies top-down civil religious pronouncements of political elites that, rather than attempting to unify the society in the broadest strokes with a focus only on common values, instead appeal strategically to the particularisms of Black civil religious formations. The goal of such appeals has been to tranquilize real Black political agitation by integrating Black civil religious themes into larger narratives of American progress.

Black Ecumenism: Unifying and Mobilizing the Religio-Racial Nation within a Nation In her seminal Black Ecumenism: Implementing the Demands of Justice, religion scholar Mary R. Sawyer observes that Black ecumenism, Unlike that of white ecumenical movements, is neither structural unity nor doctrinal consensus; rather, it is the bringing together of the manifold

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resources of the Black Church to address the circumstances of African Americans as an oppressed people. It is mission-oriented, emphasizing black development and liberation; it is directed toward securing a position of strength and self-sufficiency. (1994:8)

Sawyer documents how, from the first Black ecumenical movement, the Fraternal Council of Negro Churchmen, through the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,3 to the Congress of National Black Churches, activism on behalf of African Americans as a people has been the primary animus for national Black ecumenical activity. What Sawyer and other scholarly observers have not noticed is how much civil religious production has played into Black ecumenical activism, as such movements have tried to articulate the significance, and direct the political power, of cross-denominational unity. The Black Churches are institutionally pluralistic, divided, and even competitive, but when they join ecumenically they have often become the Black Church, a religio-racial formation to mobilize for justice on behalf of a singularized Black people. Bottom-up civil religious ideas are generated within Black ecumenical movements as they make unifying claims about Black people while making demands on a host nation that has forsaken its promise of freedom, justice, and equality. The Conference of National Black Churches will illustrate this pattern. The CNBC is an ecumenical movement formed in 2010 to gather the major Black denominations into a force capable of confronting Black sociopolitical ills in the age of President Barack Obama. At its inaugural meeting, convened under the thematic auspice “Celebrating the Ecumenical Legacy of the Black Church,” participants incorporated the board of directors for the organization, initiated conversations with a variety of secular collaborators in the corporate and nonprofit sectors, and began planning for a major national gathering in Washington, DC, in December 2010. At this gathering, entitled “For the Healing of Our People,” civil religious themes wove through formal religious ones as participants made sense of the call to transcend denominational identities to form a single religio-racial force—a people mobilized in pursuit of justice and equality. Many of the presentations drew on scripture to frame a movement of churches overcoming sectarian division to save a people. There were

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references to Ezekiel 37:1–14, where appears the parable of the “dry bones.” Here the churches, rather than banding together to prevent death, were depicted as already dead in their irrelevance to the struggles of Black people; the new banding together, the new movement, represented a coming to life of the dry bones. Also referenced was Ezekiel 36, where the prophet is instructed to write “Judah” on one stick and “Joseph” on another stick, and then told to bind the sticks together in a gesture of a united Israel. In a particularly evocative sermon, Reverend James Forbes preached both on the “dry bones” and “the sticks,” but also made quite clear through his interpretation of “the sticks” the civil religious imperative to become a nation within a nation, called to save both itself and possibly the greater nation. Shortly after comparing the Black Church nation with the Biblical Israelites in their difficulty achieving unity, Forbes preached: I (God) can gather a rag-tag bag of Bedouins and call them to gather around a mountain and establish a contract with them, and tell them “I will be your God, you will be my people, and through you all the nations of the earth will be blessed.” It comes to me, could it be that Dr. King was right? The SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] said, “It takes us to save the soul of America.” America needs saving right now . . . [Ezekiel 36] Verse 15 says, “The word of the Lord came to me: Mortal, take a stick and write on it, ‘For Judah, and the Israelites associated with it.’ Then take another stick and write on it, ‘For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim, and all the house of Israel associated with it,’ and join them.” Maybe I’m not reading this right . . . “But, Lord, I’m a Baptist.” “But, Lord, I’m a Methodist.” Get the Baptist stick and link it up with the Methodist stick, and tie it together with the Pentecostal stream, and do it with the independent ecclesiastical organizations! Are we getting those sticks together? “Oh, that they might know that I am the One God, although I have allowed denominational demarcation, I have one people! I, in a time of need, will bind the two sticks together . . .” Oh, brothers and sisters, when you go ministering in the graveyard, that’s a different kind of ministry than in your church, with the choir singing the right songs and the ushers marching right. When you go in the graveyard, you’ve got to reorganize your ministry. It’s different out

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there. Number one, you’re going to find yourself in a situation where, when you look at it, you are immediately overwhelmed by the impossibility of the task . . . If you go into a graveyard . . . if you go to the graveyard, you’re not looking for a situation that’s lively. You are not looking for extraordinary viability. You are not trying to do a feasibility study on the possibility of this being successful. When you go to the graveyard, you’re looking for signs of death. Oh, maybe that’s the ministry: the ministry of this group is to look for where there’s death, and where we find death, we have a responsibility not to back up. If there’s death in the White House, we’ve got to come up. If there’s death in the capitol on the House side, on the Senate side, we don’t back up. We organize ourselves.

Forbes invokes Dr. King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference as prophetic predecessors to the CNBC in the struggle to save the soul of the broader nation by defending the rights of African Americans.4 That people, like God, is one despite the denominational demarcations that have frequently divided Blacks. The mission of the united people is to go about finding signs of metaphorical death and raise the proverbial “dry bones.” There is death amidst the suffering people, for certain, but there are also signs of death as corruption and injustice in the halls of power— the White House, Congress, and the like—that must be confronted. The CNBC’s Black Ecumenical Litany, recited in unison at each worship service held during its national convening, is also civil religious in nature. Like Forbes’s sermon, it is also nationalistic insofar as it identifies a distinctive people within a people, but simultaneously identifies with and makes justice demands on the greater polity. The litany proceeds as follows (with the congregation exclaiming “The Lord’s name be praised, Hallelujah!” after each of the leader’s dedications): Leader: We come with Grateful hearts to give thanks to almighty God for the gifts of empowerment, liberation, and community in Jesus Christ our Lord . . . Leader: For the rebellions against slavery, for the pioneer freedom fighters, for Black prophets and all who affirm the fatherhood and parenthood of God in the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity . . .

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Leader: For the ecumenical Christian Community to which all Christians belong, sharing common origin and destiny, despite our diversity in worship, polity, and theology . . . Leader: For the founders and builders of the Black Churches who did so much, with so little, to bequeath us so rich a heritage . . . Leader: For the magnificent tradition and eloquence of Black preachers who have pointed us to the way and who call us to a deeper faith . . . Leader: For the unbelievable loyalty and support of Black lay people to the Christian Gospel through the Black Church . . . Leader: For The Conference of National Black Churches and all its participating denominations, rising above our sectarian separation . . . Leader: For the audacity of the big dream and the high aim to which The Conference of National Black Churches calls the Black Church in America All: The Lord’s name be praised, Hallelujah and Amen!

Here, the gifts of God include collective liberation and empowerment. Rebellion, freedom fighting, and the Black prophets in this lineage of struggle are elevated. The churches, too often divided by denomination, are in fact one in origin and destiny, laudable when acting as a single Black body in America with one “big dream and . . . high aim.” Its people are characterized as loyal, courageous, and eloquent. This ritual litany, and much of the preaching that occurred at the CNBC gathering, is a civil religious call to the Black Churches to behave as a nation within a nation in struggle against its condition of bondage.

Kairos and Mobilization In 1985 a group of mostly Black South African theologians met in Soweto to discuss an intensifying political crisis, “as more and more people were killed, maimed, and imprisoned, as one Black township after another revolted against the apartheid regime, as the people refused to be oppressed or cooperate with oppressors, facing death by the day, and as the apartheid army moved into the townships to rule by the barrel of the gun” (Leonard 2010:1). After multiple subsequent meetings, the

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theologians would publish a theologically grounded call to action to the churches, “The Kairos Document.” The document began: The time has come. The moment of truth has arrived. South Africa has been plunged into a crisis that is shaking the foundations and there is every indication that the crisis has only just begun and that it will deepen and become even more threatening in the months to come. It is the KAIROS or moment of truth not only for apartheid but also for the Church . . . Jesus wept over Jerusalem. He wept over the tragedy of the destruction of the city and the massacre of the people that was imminent, “and all because you did not recognize your opportunity (KAIROS) when God offered it” (Luke 19:44). (Leonard 2010:7)

The Kairos Document went on to diagnose the divided state of the church into a White Church and a Black Church, such that even churches within the same denomination could not be considered kin. It called for a “prophetic theology” that would critique and transcend the complicit theologies of both the state and church and move all people, together, toward liberating political action. The Kairos Document is an example of civil religious rhetoric rising, bottom up, from the religious fields. It described the state of people (divided) as being out of line with the deeper nature of the people (united), highlighted the intense suffering of a part of that people, and presented a vision of a just, reconciled future for the nation. But the Kairos Document was most poignant in its refusal to posit that rosy future as inevitable. An alternative eschatological vision, where vicious oppression and rigid inequality might reign indefinitely, loomed larger than the favorable one if the church failed to act now. The split eschatology of the Kairos Document hinged upon the “moment of truth,” the sacred opportunity inherent in the crisis of the now, when churchly action or inaction would determine the future.5 The Kairos Document might have been the first theological statement of its type to explicitly deploy the Greek Kairos (which contrasts with Chronos—mundane, measured chronological time) in a call to action.6 But it was not the first, and certainly has not been the last, religious statement to use the “moment of truth” trope as a call to action. Civil

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religion, percolating up especially from the field of Black religious political action in the United States, has repeatedly incorporated Kairotic themes and split eschatologies as a way to impress upon mass publics the urgency of political action at particular historical junctures.7 In his role as head of the ecumenical Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. deployed such themes to promote the strategic value of civil disobedience at that time, although scholarship on King has focused on other aspects of his civil religion. Gorski’s (2017:148–157) deeply insightful analysis of Dr. King’s civil religion, for instance, highlights his powerful articulation of the “beloved community,” his “dream” of racial equality and unity, his fundamental hope in the promise of the American experiment, and his eschatology of the long “arc of the moral universe,” which bends toward justice but heads more or less on target depending on the quality of human action. But King’s civil religion must also be read for its function as a Kairotic call to action at the critical historic juncture, lest history veer off the course of justice indefinitely. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is perhaps his strongest civil religious statement of both the Kairos and the split eschaton. The Letter was written as a response to ostensibly liberal White clergy (as well as reluctant Black clergy) who, while generally supporting the civil rights cause, were uncomfortable with the confrontational nature of the SCLC’s “untimely” activism. King’s response in the Letter explained why now was the right time for direct action and civil disobedience. In short, Black people had reached an emotional tipping point where their desire for freedom would either feed constructively into the greater liberatory “Zeitgeist” sweeping the colonized world, or explode into destructive violence, hatred, and separatism: Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice.

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The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro’s frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible “devil.”

As for the split eschaton, King saw both the relevance of the churches and the cause of justice and equality weighing in the balance: But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

The finality of these pronouncements suggests not a metaphysical moral arc of justice, bending forgivingly toward the goal despite the dawdling folly of human action, but the possibility of justice permanently lost. In the Letter, King quoted Abraham Lincoln—“This nation cannot survive half slave and half free”—to underscore the fact that the nation might not survive if it was not made in the historic moment to address the hypocrisy of its unkept promise.

Call and Response: Political Elites Appropriate Black Civil Religion It can be politically expedient for political elites—those seated in or aspiring to be seated in government—to make top-down civil religious pronouncements that incorporate the particularistic claims of bottom-up civil religions. In the throes of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and at the precipice of signing the Voting Rights Act of

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1965, President Lyndon Johnson delivered a commencement address at Howard University. In that address, Johnson spun a civil religious image aimed directly at African Americans that appealed to their sense of being a nation within a nation, even a nation in bondage. By acknowledging the nationality of Black people and the centrality of Black liberation to the redemption of the American nation, Johnson was demonstrating that he had heard the call, as it were, from the Civil Rights movement. He responded, though, with a vision that folded the civil religious claims of Black movements into itself: Our enemies may occasionally seize the day of change, but it is the banner of our revolution they take. And our own future is linked to this process of swift and turbulent change in many lands in the world. But nothing in any country touches us more profoundly, and nothing is more freighted with meaning for our own destiny than the revolution of the Negro American. In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope. In our time change has come to this Nation, too. The American Negro, acting with impressive restraint, has peacefully protested and marched, entered the courtrooms and the seats of government, demanding a justice that has long been denied. The voice of the Negro was the call to action. But it is a tribute to America that, once aroused, the courts and the Congress, the President and most of the people, have been the allies of progress. So, it is the glorious opportunity of this generation to end the one huge wrong of the American Nation and, in so doing, to find America for ourselves, with the same immense thrill of discovery which gripped those who first began to realize that here, at last, was a home for freedom.8

Even more pointedly, in a speech Johnson delivered at a joint session of Congress after the now infamous March 1965 police attacks on peaceful demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, the president actually incorporated the protest refrain “We Shall Overcome” into his civil religious gesture. Picking up on a rhetorical theme favored by Dr. King at the

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time (Miller 1998), Johnson also incorporated a reference to the unkept promise of emancipation: But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome . . . It was more than a hundred years ago that Abraham Lincoln, a great President of another party, signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but emancipation is a proclamation and not a fact . . . A century has passed since the day of promise. And the promise is unkept. The time of justice has now come. I tell you that I believe sincerely that no force can hold it back. It is right in the eyes of man and God that it should come. And when it does, I think that day will brighten the lives of every American . . . This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope to all: black and white, North and South, sharecropper and city dweller. These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They are the enemies and not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too, poverty, disease and ignorance, we shall overcome.9

In both instances, Johnson acknowledged the reality of the Black particularistic national identity, and the reality as well of Black bondage in America. He asserted, moreover, that Black struggle could win freedom, and both that struggle and freedom should be understood as part of a greater American story of redemption. Under the Johnson administration, America would keep its promise, its covenant, with the Black nation, and in the process save itself. Again, it is critical that Johnson would borrow from Black civil religious voicings of nationhood, failed promises, and overcoming in order to energize a broader American civil religion that uplifted the achievements and aspirations of his own administration.

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More recently, in the “Get the Sticks Together” sermon cited above, Reverend Forbes challenged African American churches to unite on behalf of Black people, but also challenged the halls of federal government, even Obama’s White House, where death trod as surely as it did in the streets. Many among the CNBC membership were ambivalent about the first African American president. They strongly supported him on one hand, but were wary of his seeming estrangement from the prophetic civil rights church tradition10 and strategic distancing from his Black nationalistic pastor of some twenty years, Reverend Dr. Jeremiah Wright, during his first presidential campaign.11 It was as if the promise of the first Black presidency had been partly spoiled before the election. Joshua Dubois, then director of the Office of Faith Based and Community Partnerships, spoke on Obama’s behalf at the keynote luncheon. Dubois must have been aware that a current of ambivalence about the president ran through the room—these were unabashed supporters who nonetheless awaited evidence that the president stood with the Black Church justice movement as such. Dubois’s remarks were very concrete, avoiding the loftier language of much civil religious rhetoric, but in call and response fashion still hit two notes that could have been in direct response to Forbes’s civil sermon delivered earlier at the same conference. Dubois first acknowledged and praised the CNBC’s achievement of “one voice.” He then went on to emphasize how well the president had “kept his promise”: You sent us here for a purpose. You told the president and you told me that you wanted us to work on strengthening our communities, especially in these tough times. While we have so much work left to do, this president, in close and intimate partnership with the Black Church, is delivering on those promises that he made. The story that’s often untold is how in the process of delivering on those promises he has joined handin-hand with the Black Church around the country, in very specific and tangible ways.

Dubois then described multiple social initiatives undertaken between the Obama administration and Black Churches across the country. The upshot was that Obama had not broken his promise, or covenant, with

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the Black Church religio-race. He had kept it, despite appearances to the contrary, and therefore deserved the continuing support of the churches.

Conclusion When viewed from a non-normative perspective, civil religion appears as a rhetorical and ritual field where multiple publics and political elites make claims about the nation and the place of different peoples in it. It is a space of discourse where agents of the state and various constituencies, including Black religious ones, make claims about their own connection to the nation’s ultimacy. From this perspective, even groups perceived as enemies of normative civil religion must be included as contenders in the field of civil religion. Elijah Muhammad, whom Dr. King would have identified as a nemesis of his own civil religion, would be understood nonetheless as a participant in the civil religious discursive field. White Evangelical nationalists (Goldberg 2007) would have to be seen as contenders, if American civil religion is in fact an empirical realm of debate about the American soul(s) rather than a normative conclusion about that soul. Black ecumenical movements historically have been key institutional crucibles of “bottom-up” civil religion, as they have articulated the mythic significance of Black peoplehood and their challenges to American national power. Indeed, Black ecumenism and its presentation of the race as “The Black Church” exemplifies one of the crucial ways religion has been “raced” in the United States. Their civil religious languages use Kairotic exhortations and split eschatologies, as well as linear eschatologies, as mobilizing devices. Here, civil religion presents the sacred moment of opportunity and the binary historical trajectory as justifications for immediate political action. Civil religion, then, can be a call to political action, not only as it attempts to identify and unify the people who would act, but as it marks the present as the pivotal moment for mobilization. Rather than being either a top-down or bottom-up phenomenon, civil religion is both, and also something in between as political elites and religious constituents make coded demands and claims about themselves and each other. Importantly, civil religion issuing from state agents is not just asserting the place of the nation in the world

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or affirming the unity of the nation and its purpose in the broadest strokes. Rather, civil religion is “raced”: when politically expedient, it speaks to the particular religio-racial constituency by way of assuring the place, and securing the loyalty, of that people in relationship to the state and the greater National project. Meanwhile, bottom-up proclamations from the mobilized churches may respond to the civil religious statements of political elites. In this way, civil religion is also a field of “call and response” among multiple institutional realms as social movements vie for political influence and political regimes cultivate mass constituencies. Notes

1 Rousseau actually coined the term in book four of The Social Contract (1762). There he presented civil religion as a set of core beliefs that legitimate and authorize the state and its laws by tying them to a transcendent, provident, just, and unitary Deity. 2 Bellah’s (1992) later writing on civil religion approached full-on lament, as he described America’s wholesale abandonment of the true civil religion in favor of expansionism, greed, and technical reason. 3 So central were the activist aims of the Black ecumenical movement in the 1960s that Aldon Morris (1984:77) was moved to contend that “the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was the force that developed the infrastructure of the civil rights movement and that it functioned as the decentralized arm of the black church.” 4 Snow and Benford (1992) would call this an invocation of a “master frame” in the cyclical mobilization of a movement. The CNBC actually descends from an earlier Congress of National Black Churches, which in turn took itself to be the descendent of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the even older Fraternal Council of Negro Churchmen. The current CNBC is therefore selfconsciously the revival of a cyclically recurring movement, along with its primary legitimating “frames,” such as the notion that churches mobilized on behalf of Black people are “saving the soul of the nation.” 5 My understanding of Kairos as the sacred moment of action is distinct from what Keith D. Miller (1998) has called “sacred time.” Miller’s sacred time is the practice of projecting current prophetic figures and sociopolitical predicaments back into biblical time, and vice versa. Thus, “Throughout the decades of segregation, folk preachers continued to project Biblical figures into the present, using them to understand and define the present circumstances of their congregations. Some preachers invoked sacred time by transporting themselves into the Biblical past” (23). Kairos is also distinct from Nichole Philips’s (2018) “sacred time,” which is the practice of refiguring and reinterpreting diachronic history in the synchronic

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moment. Kairotic time, by contrast to both of these ideas of “sacred time,” is about the identification of the sacred present as a key historical juncture that necessitates right action in the now. For a discussion of the distinction between action-oriented Kairos and the mundanely measured Chronos in the context of just war theory, see Thaler (2014). The importance of historical junctures for the timing of political mobilization has not been lost on social movement theorists. In his writing on the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Doug McAdam asserted that the timing of the mobilization of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference hinged partly on the nascent movement’s recognition of a shining political opportunity made possible by a potentially sympathetic US president, critical alignments in the federal legislature, the urbanization of Black religion during the great migration which reduced its dependence on Southern White religious philanthropy (McAdam 1982; Sernett 1997), and so on. But the strategic timing of civil rights mobilization also relied upon the dawning of a “cognitive liberation” among movement leadership and constituents. Cognitive liberation, in McAdam’s conceptualization, represents an optimistic psychological turn toward the notion that a movement against oppression might actually be able to succeed at that moment, and should therefore be engaged heartily. Snow and Benford (1992), who delved more deeply into the psychological processes driving movement mobilization, might have described cognitive liberation as one among several kinds of “collective action framings” that compel people to join and remain in social movements. Specifically, cognitive liberation would be both “punctuative” and “attributive”: punctuative in its sharp identification of the social injustice, and attributive in its targeting of the source of the social injustice and the course of action necessary to effectively redress that injustice (137). With this in mind, the recognition of Kairos as the historical juncture calling for immediate action can be understood as a type of cognitive liberation. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Commencement Address at Howard University: ‘To Fulfill These Rights,’” June 4, 1965, available at https://teachingamericanhistory.org/. Lyndon B. Johnson, “President Johnson’s Special Message to the Congress: The American Promise,” March 15, 1965, www.lbjlibrary.org/. At the forty-second anniversary of the Civil Rights march on Selma, Alabama, presidential candidate Obama delivered a speech at the Brown A.M.E. Chapel in Selma in the presence of civil rights luminaries such as Reverend Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, and Reverend C. T. Vivian. In the speech, Obama proclaimed the advent of the “Joshua generation,” a new wave of political engagement that would succeed the “Moses generation” of the civil rights era. While acknowledging that the relentless critique of government and protest tactics of the Moses generation had made his political career possible, he implored the Joshua generation to take up self-help and formal political participation rather than protest and prophetic critique. See transcript, “Obama, Clinton Speeches in Selma, Alabama, aired March 4, 2007,” www.cnn.com.

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11 Jeremiah Wright’s “unapologetically Christian” and “unashamedly Black” ministry committed to lift Blacks out of oppression and confront White supremacy. Obama publicly denounced Wright after clips of some of his more fiery preaching on America’s unkept promises began airing in the national media. As Wright biographer Susan Williams Smith (2013:209) recounts, “Beginning on ABC in March 2008, viewers saw an animated and angry Jeremiah Wright preaching from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ, criticizing American political actions and policies of the past and present, casting American political actions and policies of the past and present, and by extension America, in a not-so-good light. Here was prophetic preaching in all its power, in the spirit of the biblical prophets who had railed against oppressive governments and at “the faithful,” God’s chosen people, who refused to challenge oppression in the name of Yahweh, “who demanded righteousness.”

References

Bellah, Robert N. 1967. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 96(1):1–21. ———. 1992. The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Demerath, N. J., and Rhys H. Williams. 1985. “Civil Religion in an Uncivil Society.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 480:154–66. Goldberg, Michelle. 2007. Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. New York: Norton. Gorski, Philip. 2017. American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Leonard, Gary S. D., ed. 2010. The Kairos Documents. Ujamma Centre for Biblical and Theological Community Development and Research. University of KwaZulu-Natal. McAdam, Doug. 1982. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, Keith D. 1998. Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Its Sources. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Morris, Aldon D. 1984. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press. Philips, Nichole. 2018. “A ‘Spirituality of Improvisation’: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘I have a Dream’ in Rearticulating American National Identity.” In Revives My Soul Again: The Spirituality of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Lewis Baldwin and Victor Anderson. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1968. The Social Contract. New York: Penguin Books. Sawyer, Mary R. 1994. Black Ecumenism: Implementing the Demands of Justice. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International. Sernett, Milton C. 1997. Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smith, Susan K. 2013. The Book of Jeremiah: The Life and Ministry of Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. New York: Pilgrim Press.

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Snow, David, and Robert Benford. 1992. “Master Frames and Cycles of Protest.” In Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, edited by Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Thaler, Mathias. 2014. “On Time in Just War Theory: From Chronos to Kairos.” Polity 46:4. Williams, Rhys H., and N. J. Demerath. 1991. “Religion and Political Process in an American City.” American Sociological Review 56(4):417–31. Wuthnow, Robert. 1988. The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Intersectional Politics among Atheists and Humanists of Color Sikivu Hutchinson

I am a Black atheist who works in urban public schools of color that systematically funnel young people into juvenile jails and prisons. The school district I work in spends more on school police and paramilitary equipment than it does on school counselors and mental health. Meanwhile, under the privatization agenda of US Education Secretary and right-wing Evangelical crusader Betsey DeVos, the US public school system is in serious jeopardy. Is the school-to-prison pipeline an atheist issue? A secular issue? A humanist issue? If you are a White atheist with a kid in a segregated, predominantly White K-12 suburban school, chances are it isn’t. Yet, educational justice, social justice, gender justice, and economic justice are paramount to the humanist practice and secular ethos of many atheists of color. This critical difference shapes the divide between European American secularists and that of people of color within the secular movement. Some of these tensions emerge from the schism between mainstream American atheism and humanism, the former of which is associated with a predominantly White, male public face and platform, divorced from the concerns of communities of color. In light of this disparity, secularists of color must actively confront the challenge of how atheism, humanism, and secularism are relevant to their lived experiences, social history, and cultural knowledge. According to the Pew Research Center, the majority of atheists in the United States are White, male, Democrat-leaning and largely collegeeducated (Lipka 2016). Despite the rapid growth of the “nones” (Bullard 2016), a broad category that refers to religiously unaffiliated individuals, atheists as a whole represent a small, elite sliver of American society (Pew Research Center 2012). When the mainstream media talk about or portray atheist politics, it is typically through a White Eurocentric lens 58

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that exalts White male atheist gurus like authors Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and/or the late Christopher Hitchens as standard bearers. Yet, progressive secular African Americans, whether they identify as atheist, agnostic, freethinker, humanist, skeptic, or a combination of these, have always looked beyond the narrow confines of opposition to faith and religion for ethical purpose, meaning, and self-determination (Hutchinson 2018). It is no revelation that the issues progressive secularists of color care about are radically different from those of White atheists who view criticizing religion and extolling church-state separation as the end-all be-all of secular advocacy (Hutchinson 2014). Over the past decade, African American and Latinx secularists have become more visible within American atheist communities. National and regional groups such as the Black Non-Believers, Black Humanists, Black Skeptics, Latino Atheists, “Latinones,” and the Hispanic American Freethinkers Society have cropped up online and in real time. Coming from communities under siege by conservative federal policies that have deepened socioeconomic inequities in employment, housing, health care, and education, secularists of color do not limit their focus to church-state separation issues. Indeed, they are well aware that the majority of African American and Latinx people are believers who maintain deep ties with faith-based institutions. According to the Pew Research Center and the Kaiser Foundation, 87% of African Americans are religious, making African Americans among the most religious communities in the United States (Pew Research Center 2009). As the Kaiser Foundation survey notes, “in times of turmoil, about 87 percent of Black women—much more than any other group—say they turn to their faith to get through” (Washington Post 2012). Similarly, more than 80% of American Latinos are religious, with more than 55% identifying as Catholic (Cox et al. 2013; Pew Research Center 2014). And although an increasing number of American Latinos identify as nones (12%), religion remains a strong source of cultural identity, political organizing, and solidarity. As the wealth and income gap between African Americans and Whites has increased, straining an already frayed social welfare safety net, people of color are seeking faith-based assistance in greater numbers. This represents a challenge to secularists of color who want to connect with like-minded individuals in their communities. That said, in

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many respects, Trumpian right-wing religious attacks on the Johnson amendment, public education, abortion rights, reproductive justice, and LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex) rights have re-energized secular activism. Over the past decade, secular organizations like the American Humanist Association, American Atheists, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation have become more visible through conferences, membership, and legislation. Yet some Black secularists in poor and working-class African American communities are especially disdainful of liberal White atheists who bemoan the Religious Right’s grip on the Trump White House and public policy, but remain silent about the racist criminalization of communities of color or rising homelessness among Black and Latino folk (Kirabo 2017). Of course, there is an important distinction between mere atheism and humanism. While atheism is non-belief in the existence of gods or supernatural “supreme” beings, humanism is a worldview based on the idea that human beings, not gods, determine morals, values, and ethics. African American humanism in particular draws from antebellum traditions that privilege the racial struggle of enslaved Africans. Specifically, African American humanism emerges from resistance to European American notions of personhood and humanity based on White supremacist, colonialist control over the bodies, labor, and reproduction of people of color. As Anthony Pinn notes, “African American humanism has an origin different from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Ideas from these may be present in African American humanist thought, yet it is an indirect reference because African American humanism draws its strength directly from African American experience in the Americas . . . and an appreciation of African American cultural production and a perception of traditional forms of Black religiosity as having cultural importance as opposed to any type of ‘cosmic’ authority” (Pinn 2001: 9–10). Indeed, African American humanism fundamentally disrupts Eurocentric ideals of individual liberty, science, and reason that were articulated within the context of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment ideology established a hierarchy of humanity and constructed non-European cultures as the primitive Other. Western notions of logic, reason, and scientific inquiry have all historically been defined by Whites in the service of validating White bodies and White humanity (Hutchinson 2018). For example, White humanists frequently

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laud Thomas Jefferson as an exemplar of the Enlightenment and secular thought, yet his ownership of slaves and sexual exploitation of Sally Hemings were based on White supremacist beliefs that Blacks were naturally inferior to Whites in intelligence and physical beauty. Reverence for Jefferson among White humanists informs contemporary views disavowing the need for a focus on race in humanist practice and community. Thus, although humanist organizations like to paint themselves as open and inclusive, race, gender, sexuality, and cultural difference continue to be divisive flashpoints. While humanistic belief systems span cultures and ethnicities across the globe, the face of mainstream humanism in the United States has been White, most prominently represented by organizations like the American Humanist Association and Foundation Beyond Belief. In the July-August 2018 issue of The Humanist (a publication run by the American Humanist Association), the magazine’s editor apologized for publishing racist and paternalist articles in 2009 and 2010 (Bardi 2018). As Pinn, a religious studies scholar working at the intersection of theology, humanism, and African American religion, holds in his book When Colorblindness Isn’t the Answer, this tendency on the part of White humanists to discount the difference that difference makes is perhaps a symptom of “not understanding the social construction” of bodies that are simultaneously raced, gendered, sexed, and geographically prescribed (Pinn 2017: 12–15). Pinn argues that European American humanists are accustomed to basing their perceptions of the world on the “objectivity” of science and reason, while failing to grasp that these indices are themselves shaped by culturally subjective traditions and histories. For humanists of color, this “willful ignorance” on the part of the White secular community is merely a reflection of the same violence that normalizes racial segregation in the United States. White humanists who cling to myths of objectivity actively benefit from economic apartheid in wealth accumulation, employment, and access to public space. They largely control the discourse on what is considered to be “humanist” and “secular” in mainstream forums about movement organizing, public policy, and outreach (Murn 2018). They capitalize on the “wages of Whiteness” (Du Bois 1965) by divorcing secularism from the intersectional lived experiences and social histories of people of color for whom

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church-state separation—particularly when it pertains to education, LGBTQI enfranchisement, and reproductive justice—is fundamentally linked to economic justice. In this regard, secular people of color remain alienated from European American humanism and do not perceive it as a viable base for coalition-building within liberal-progressive politics. Secular social justice is a way of defining and articulating these critical differences in focus and approach. It is an overtly political model of humanism that recognizes the role social inequality plays in determining access to resources and opportunity in the United States. A secular social justice approach addresses the political implications of humanism head on. For good or for ill, Evangelical Christians and other religious groups actively organize around immigration, LGBTQI rights, abortion, taxation, and education reform. Secular social justice takes on this model with a radical-progressive spin, pushing back against the corrupt political machinations of reactionary religious partisanship. Progressive secularists of color argue that you cannot fight for economic justice in communities of color without advocating for reproductive justice, unrestricted abortion rights, and access to universal health care. You cannot preach “gender equality” without redressing the heterosexist erasure of queer and trans people of color in K–12 curricula. You cannot advocate for LGBTQI enfranchisement without confronting all of the mechanisms that criminalize queer and trans youth of color and place them at greater risk for being incarcerated, being placed in foster care, and/or becoming homeless. Secular social justice challenges humanist institutions to support the realities of our lived experiences in a “Christian nation” based on capitalist, racist, sexist, heterosexist class power. It pushes back on an atheism based on academic elites who tout “science and reason” while systematically profiting from racial segregation, White supremacy, and straight White male privilege. In 2014, I was part of a secular group of color that spearheaded the first social justice conference focusing on equity issues that are central for communities of color. The event was held in Los Angeles and drew community members, educators, and activists from across the religious and secular spectrums. Speakers presented on the school-to-prison pipeline, homophobia in the Black Church, the relevance of feminism to secularism for women of color, and ongoing racial discord in the atheist movement. The conference coincided with the Week of Resistance

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in Ferguson and a Week of Action against the school-to-prison pipeline spearheaded by the national Dignity and Schools Campaign. In the midst of massive mobilizations around state violence and police terrorism, much ink was spilled by atheist writers over whether or not social justice “conforms” to atheist orthodoxy (Myers 2014). Moving out of the insular world of social media and the Internet, the first national real-time gathering by secularists of color nationwide on social justice was groundbreaking. One of the key themes of the conference was the relevance of intersectional feminism. The “#beyondsolidarityisforwhitewomen: Feminism(s) of Color” panel highlighted the work of Los Angeles–based feminist organizers from working-class communities of color. All of the women on the panel spoke of the need for intersectional alliances and organizing strategies that recognize the complexities of class, geography, sexuality, and gender in one of the most segregated cities in the United States. Organizer Yolanda Alaniz of the socialist organization Radical Women spoke of the importance of interracial labor activism in a neoliberal economy where public employee unions—many of which are dominated by women of color members— are being gutted and demonized (see for example the Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus v. AFSCME decision). There was heated discussion about the implications of respectability politics for Black women. Moderator Angela Plaid of The Feminist Wire argued that Black women have always been constructed as sexually promiscuous “hos” and that the monomaniacal focus on sex-positivity by some White feminists is irrelevant for feminists of color fighting against criminalization and economic disenfranchisement in militarized communities. Considering schisms between Black and Latino communities over immigration, jobs, and language, the panelists also stressed the need to complicate mainstream views of undocumented communities due to the frequent exclusion of African and Asian immigrants from liberal-progressive campaigns for immigrant rights and undocumented youth advocacy. Freethought Blogs writer Heina Dadabhoy reflected on being socialized into the dominant culture’s divisive model minority myth based on the stereotype that Asian Americans bootstrap their way to success in contrast to “less highachieving” African Americans and Latinos. Some of the most heated exchanges during the event occurred at the “What’s Race Got to Do With It? Racism in the Atheist Movement”

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panel. Six atheists of color discussed the pros and cons of “inclusivity” versus “accommodation,” as well as racism and intersectionality in the atheist movement. Much of the panel unpacked the constant pressure people of color feel to educate “well-meaning” White people about their investment in racism, White privilege, and White supremacy. Panelists Georgina Capetillo of the Secular Student Alliance and Frank Anderson of Black Skeptics Chicago acknowledged the insidiousness of White privilege in the movement but argued that White allies need to be actively engaged. Raina Rhoades of Howard University, Anthony Pinn of Rice University, and Donald Wright of the Houston Black Non-Believers contended that it was incumbent upon White people to educate themselves and stop expecting people of color to play the role of native informant. Moderator Daniel Myatt of Black Skeptics Los Angeles, which I co-founded in 2010 as a resource for secular, atheist, and humanist people of African descent and people of color in South Los Angeles, asked panelists to evaluate the impact of secular organizations of color on social justice versus that of Black churches. Wright argued that, given the relative newness and scarcity of secular POC social justice organizations, it remains to be seen what impact they will have. The second conference was held in 2016 at Rice University in Houston, Texas and addressed economic justice, labor organizing, Black LGBTQI and queer activism, and cultural representations of secular people of color. The majority of the panelists and attendees were people of color from local and regional communities. The Rice event was followed up by an April 2018 conference sponsored by the American Humanist Association in Washington, DC. Although all of the presenters at the 2018 conference were people of color, the audience was predominantly White, underscoring the difficulty of attracting people of color to secular-themed events in the long term. One of the primary purposes of the Secular Social Justice conference was to address the leadership vacuum in mainstream atheist, humanist, and secular organizations. There are currently few (if any) people of color in executive management positions in major secular organizations (prominent national organizations include the Center for Inquiry, Secular Student Alliance, American Humanist Association, Foundation Beyond Belief, and American Atheists). If there are no visible leaders of color in these organizations, the secular “movement” cannot expect to

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expand or adequately reflect the changing demographics of the United States. Indeed, it can be argued that it is precisely because of anti-atheist religious bigotry, White atheist racism, and the lack of culturally responsive secular organizations that the vast majority of nonbelievers of color do not feel comfortable openly identifying as atheist (Hutchinson 2017). Because of these factors, secularists of color have forged their own path by forming local and national organizations. Black women have often been at the forefront (Cameron 2016). Many Black women atheists identify as feminists and humanists, rejecting the Christian fascism of the Religious Right and the sexism, homophobia, and gender hierarchy of the Black Church. In 2011, Mandisa Thomas founded the Black NonBelievers organization in Atlanta as a safe space for nonbelievers in the heavily Evangelical Bible Belt. Prior to that, attorney Ayanna Watson founded the Black Atheists of America organization as a national platform for Black atheists interested in connecting online and in person. Thomas and Watson partnered on the first Blackout Secular Rally in New York. Responding to the vacuum in representation for Black secularists, these groups provide safe space and solidarity in communities where Christian religious belief is presumed to be the norm. Being an openly identified atheist is especially challenging for Black women and women of color. They must grapple with biased cultural assumptions about their morality, femininity, racial and ethnic identities, and commitment to family. They must navigate the sexist connection between a woman’s faith and her cultural authenticity. And they must contend with the reality that many coalitions that address racism, social injustice, and classism in their communities are connected to faithbased organizations. In my books, Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars (2011) and Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels (2013), I argue that organized religion, specifically Christianity, has functioned as a gender-defining mechanism for African Americans. The legacies of slavery, the Enlightenment, and scientific racism have racialized gender such that Western notions of masculinity and femininity pivot on hierarchies of race. Forged in Enlightenment ideology, “New World” notions of civilized sovereign White manhood and idealized White womanhood were predicated on the antipode of the dark savage hypersexual Other.

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Hence, African Americans utilized Christianity to disrupt this regime. Paradoxically, Christianity, in the midst of Black enslavement, provided African Americans with a vehicle for arguing for their humanity in the face of White inhumanity. It provided ontological meaning and context to the Holocaust of African slavery. And it also prescribed a rigid hierarchy of masculinity and femininity based on heterosexist norms. These norms aligned African Americans with European ideals of family and domesticity, forcing Blacks to adhere to Eurocentric patriarchal structures. In contemporary life, Black women must tacitly hew to these norms in order to be considered “good” wives, mothers, caregivers, and helpmates. Central to being perceived as a good, respectable woman is fealty to God and Jesus. Women who explicitly reject God and God belief (as opposed to just rejecting organized religion and professing to be “spiritual”) are outliers, subject to scorn and ostracism. It is significant that there are virtually no prominent political or cultural African American women figures who espouse atheism. For many African American women, faith and spiritual and religious guidance often substitute for secular therapy or other mental health resources. The reliance upon faith among African Americans is similar in Latino communities. According to Pew, Latinos in the United States have high rates of religious observance, with the majority belonging to the Catholic Church or Protestant denominations (Pew Research Center 2014). That said, greater numbers of Latinos are shifting to the “none” category (Martinez and Lipka 2014). As secular researcher Juhem Navarro Rivera maintains, “Today, the largest source of Catholic decline among Latinos is the increase in the number who do not identify as religious” (Navarro Rivera and Trejo 2017: 440). Yet it is also worth noting that secularization is often driven by gender and privilege. While Black women are bound by religious traditions dictated by the Black Church, Catholicism has a strong influence on Latino gender roles. These forces deter Black women and Latinas from embracing secular identities. Commenting on this dynamic, Latina atheist Hypatia Alexandria contends, “Religion is still strongly influencing the place Latinas have in the community. Although Hispanics are no longer under the rule of the conquistadors, many are still Catholic . . . Priests and deacons remind congregants that men are the head of the household and women are to serve them . . . daughters are pushed to be nurturing,

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submissive, devoted to father first and their husband later” (Alexandria 2018). The patriarchal notion of the good woman, or “Buena mujer,” is a key factor in the way Latina women are perceived. Catholic traditions demanding female purity, chastity, and submission to fathers and husbands have a strong influence on the social construction of Latina femininity. This model of purity, chastity, and sacrifice is exemplified by the concept of “marianismo.” According to Sonya Arreola, “Marianismo holds that women should be nurturing, self-sacrificing, virtuous and virgins when they marry, characteristics associated with the Virgin Mary” (Arreola 2010). Within Catholic traditions, the ubiquitous image of the pure as the driven snow, self-sacrificing Virgin Mary is the ultimate feminine ideal. But the Virgin’s “White” purity is only validated by the “fallen” dark whore: the Black, Asian, Latina, or Native American woman whose body is “the sign of sexual experience” (hooks 1992). Reflecting on her Catholic family upbringing, writer Yasmin DaviddsGarrido notes, “It often seemed to me that unless I behaved just like the Virgin Mary I wouldn’t be good enough to win God’s approval. In order to be considered a good girl, I had to be quiet, submissive, and obedient . . . This is one way Catholicism coerces young girls to mute their voices” (Davidds-Garrido 2001). Thus, restrictive Catholic/Christian traditions of feminine purity and piety are major deterrents to Latina secularism and atheism. Prohibitions on Latina sexuality and sexual freedom practically dictate that “good women” be faith-based or, at the very least, “spiritual.” Commenting on sexist moral prohibitions that lead Latinas to feel ashamed about displaying their bodies, Sandra Cisneros notes in “Guadalupe: The Sex Goddess”: In high school I marveled at how white women strutted around the locker room, nude as pearls, as unashamed of their brilliant bodies as the Nike of Samothrace. Maybe they were hiding terrible secrets like bulimia or anorexia, but, to my naïve eye then, I thought of them as women comfortable in their skin. You could always tell us Latinas. We hid when we undressed, modestly facing a wall, or, in my case, dressing in a bathroom stall. We were the ones who still used bulky sanitary pads instead of tampons, thinking ourselves morally superior to our white classmates. (Cisneros 1996: 46)

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Cisneros’s passage highlights why religious mores and racial politics continue to be key in shaping gender norms among women of color. White women are the cultural, moral, and aesthetic standard against which all women of color are judged. White femininity is the global beauty ideal that all girls of color are socialized to believe they should emulate. Lighter skin is prized as a symbol of feminine innocence and desirability. White women are “comfortable” in their skin and in their bodies because the dark hypersexual “Jezebel,” the antithesis of pure White femininity, is always marked as the immoral other. As feminist theorist bell hooks notes, White women are essentially free to be sexual adventurers because they are not marked as universally promiscuous (hooks 1992). All of these factors weigh heavily on women of color, contributing to their higher levels of religiosity. Bucking religion, gender norms, and deeply ingrained codes of moral respectability, Black and Latinx women who explicitly embrace atheism and humanism do so at great social cost. Hypatia Alexandria, co-founder of the Hispanic Freethought Association, an advocacy organization that provides secular education and community resources, challenges Latinas to give up religion because of the Catholic Church’s colonialist, racist, misogynist legacy of power and control in Latino communities. In her article “Why Latinas Should Abandon Religion,” she asks: What would Latinas lose and gain if they gave up religion? I have walked this path myself and work with many other Latinas who choose it too . . . By abandoning religion . . . they will lose the ability to justify every event in their lives as either a test to their faith . . . or god’s blessing . . . some Latinas say they fear losing their families . . . (but) I have observed that when Latino women decided to break from religion and get more involved in other personal and community activities they gain a more relaxed outlook on life due to the fact that they no longer . . . have the constant fear of going to hell if they do not please god when they deviate from “moral” behaviors dictated by religion. (Alexandria 2018: 226–27)

Alexandria explicitly criticizes the Catholic and patriarchal socialization of boys and young men to be stoic, aggressive, and non-nurturing. She discusses the need for more reproductive health education (for all

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genders) and Latinas’ right to self-determination vis-à-vis birth control, abortion, and economic independence. She also advocates greater involvement of Latinas in STEM education and politics, noting that patriarchal religious conventions often hinder immigrant and nonimmigrant Latinas from pursuing these fields. Georgina Capetillo of the Secular Student Alliance contends that the right to abortion should be a leading humanist issue for Latinas breaking free from religion.1 She cites the disproportionately young age at which Latinas have children as a major barrier to their education and workforce participation. Capetillo believes that there is less sexism and misogyny in secular societies. While this is a matter of degree, what is less debatable is the fact that, in secularized societies (like Western Europe) with a more equitable balance between the private and public spheres, women may enjoy greater personal freedom and professional mobility. Hence, secularism in and of itself does not provide greater gender parity, but the benefits of a comprehensive social welfare safety net do. Secularism in a capitalist economy without unlimited access to reproductive health care, living-wage jobs, transportation, housing, and education is especially untenable for women of color. For this reason, secular humanist activism and organizing must take into account the resources faith institutions provide in a hyper-segregated society based on vast disparities in wealth. As I have argued previously, women of color are tethered to faith institutions not only due to dogma and ideology, but aslo because of the social services and solidarity they provide. In low- to middle-income communities of color, neighborhood churches may be the primary centers for recreation, counseling, food donations, utilities assistance, and basic meeting space. These resources may be inaccessible because nonprofit or secular facilities that offer these services are few and far between in hyper-segregated communities. This is why some secularists of color choose to work in “interfaith” partnerships, despite stigma from religious groups. During a 2012 discussion at Zion Hill Baptist Church in Los Angeles, community members repeatedly questioned speakers from Black Skeptics Los Angeles, an organization I founded in 2010, on their supposed lack of morals. The discussion addressed contemporary Black atheist/humanist beliefs as well as the social justice legacy of secular civil rights figures such as A. Philip Randolph, Hubert Henry Harrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and

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James Forman. Making connections to these legacies of struggle is important because they debunk the enduring myth that all Black resistance traditions derive from the Black Church. Many of the aforementioned thinkers were openly critical of Black Church traditions and urged Black folk to seek ethical and moral guidance in political resistance, not biblical teachings and dogma. Contextualizing Black humanist traditions for believers of color helps provide greater insight into the contributions secularists have made and continue to make to the Black liberation struggle. These viewpoints are critical for the Black women secular activists featured in the July–August 2018 issue of The Humanist magazine. The Humanist was the first secular magazine to feature Black women on its cover and did so after years of backlash about the exclusion of people of color in secular publications. After communicating my concerns about the Whiteness of The Humanist’s coverage to the magazine’s editor, she agreed to run essays by me and four other African American women discussing race and gender politics in the secular movement and intersectional activism. For example, in her piece on the importance of secular humanism to her social justice and food justice activism, Liz Ross commented that: I came to identify as an atheist after exploring the question of why there is so much senseless suffering, and recognizing ways in which white supremacy, patriarchy and anti-LGBTQ sentiment is embedded in religious doctrine and in our culture. The experience also played a pivotal role in liberating my mind from negative reflections of myself. The god that I was brought up to worship was not a reflection of myself. Nor did the tenets of its holy book, and the society in which I was raised, offer me support to fully recognize my dignity as Black, female, and not heterosexual. Recently, my focus has included both human and animal rights in our food system and working towards creating sustainable food systems. Our current food system implements policies and practices that work to maintain political and corporate power. Those most negatively affected, locally and globally, are Black and Brown people. In addition, this violent food system creates another group of victims that is rarely discussed, namely, the nonhuman animals we exploit. Living consistently with my values means working toward creating fair food systems that also

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challenge a “speciesist” mindset that perpetuates domination, control and violence toward animals who suffer like us. (Ross 2018: 15)

Ross’s work around sustainability and redressing environmental racism in food access is informed by her commitment to secular humanism. Ross is also involved in Black Skeptics Los Angeles (BSLA). BSLA has supported culturally responsive feminist youth programming in South LA around college readiness, redressing sexual violence and sexual harassment, dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline, STEM education, and LGBTQI youth empowerment. In 2013, the organization spearheaded a scholarship fund for undocumented, homeless, LGBTQI, and foster care youth. Foster care youth of color and undocumented youth are among the most underserved and unprotected populations when it comes to having access to college preparation resources. Undocumented youth are not eligible for federal financial aid and thus must rely on private scholarships and funding. Moreover, high rates of prison pipelining, scant college readiness resources, and curricula that do not reflect the histories and lived experiences of students of color prevent students of color from going to college in the same numbers as White youth. The Trump administration’s efforts to privatize education, as reflected in the policies of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, will only exacerbate these disparities.

Conclusion Although data show that greater numbers of Americans of all ethnicities are rejecting organized religion, the rise of the “nones” will only be a footnote for segregated communities of color if the balance of institutional power does not change. In this sense, nonreligion and the politics associated with atheist and humanist communities are profoundly raced. The “intersectional heathens” who base their secular humanist activism on social and gender justice draw from a long tradition of progressive resistance. In a climate of draconian right-wing attacks on civil and human rights, these secularists are boldly challenging the dogmas of both organized religion and mainstream White atheism and secular humanism, challenging the realities that make women of color more reticent about identifying as atheist, as Joseph O. Baker further documents

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in his chapter in this volume. Forgoing a limited focus on church-state separation issues, secularists of color view redressing economic, gender, and racial inequities as crucial to their work. Taking the everyday realities of communities of color into account, they seek to provide visibility and validation to long marginalized freethought perspectives on ethics, women’s rights, and humanist education. Note

1 Capetillo provided this response in a survey I conducted in 2012.

References

Alexandria, Hypatia. 2018. “Why Hispanic Women Should Abandon Religion.” Women vs. Religion: The Case Against Faith and For Freedom. Durham, NC: Pitchstone. Arreola, Sonya Grant. 2010. “Latina/o Childhood Sexuality.” In Latina/o Sexualities: Probing Powers, Practices, Passions and Policies, edited by Marisol Ascencio. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bardi, Jennifer. 2018. “Editor’s Note.” The Humanist, July–August, 3. Bullard, Gabe. 2016. “The World’s Newest Major Religion: No Religion.” National Geographic, April 22, www.news.nationalgeographic.com. Cameron, Christopher. 2016. “Black Atheists Matter: How Women Freethinkers Take on Religion.” Aeon, December 1, https://aeon.co. Cisneros, Sandra. 1996. “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess.” In Diosa de las Americas, edited by Ana Castillos, 46. New York: Riverhead Books. Cox, Daniel, Juhem Navarro Rivera, and Robert P. Jones. 2013. “How Shifting Religious Identities and Experiences Are Influencing Hispanic Approaches to Politics.” Public Religion Research Institute, September 27, www.prri.org. Davidds-Garrido, Yasmin. 2001. Empowering Latinas: Breaking Boundaries, Freeing Lives. Granite Bay, CA: Penmarin Books. Du Bois, W.E.B. 1965. Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. New York: Free Press. hooks, bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press. Hutchinson, Sikivu. 2011. Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars. Los Angeles: Infidel Books. ———. 2013. Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels. Los Angeles: Infidel Books. ———. 2014. “Atheism Has a Big Race Problem that No One’s Talking About.” Washington Post, June 16, www.washingtonpost.com. ———. 2017. “Atheism So White: Atheists of Color Rock Social Justice.” Huffington Post, January 26, www.huffpost.com. ———. 2018a. “Why ‘Five Fierce Humanists’? A Comment on White Supremacy and the ‘Movement’.” The Humanist, July–August, 17.

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———. 2018b. “Atheists of Color Transcend Opposition to Religion and White Atheist Privilege in Working for Social Justice.” Religion Dispatches, http://religiondispatches.org. Kirabo, Sincere. 2017. “Dear White Progressives.” The Humanist, May 9, www.thehumanist.com. Lipka, Michael. 2016. “10 Facts About Atheists.” Pew Research Center, June 1, www.pewresearch.org. Luciano, Michael. 2014. “Atheists Don’t Owe Your Social Justice Agenda a Damn Thing.” The Daily Banter, October 9, www.thedailybanter.com. Martinez, Jessica, and Michael Lipka. 2014. “Hispanic Millennials Are Less Religious than Older Hispanics.” May 8, www.pewforum.org. Murn, Charles. 2018. “White Privilege and Humanist Leadership.” The Humanist, July–August, 18–21. Myers, P. Z. 2014. “Sunday Sacrilege: The Responsible Atheist.” Pharyngula, October 12, www.freethoughtblogs.com. Navarro Rivera, Juhem, and Yazmin A. Garcia Trejo. 2017. “Secularism, Race and Political Affiliation in America.” The Oxford Handbook of Secularism. London: Oxford University Press. Pew Research Center. 2009. “A Religious Portrait of African Americans.” January 23, www.pewforum.org. ———. 2012. “Nones on the Rise.” October 9, www.pewforum.org. ———. 2014. “The Shifting Religious Identity of Latinos in the United States.” May 5, www.pewforum.org. Pinn, Anthony. 2001. By These Hands: A Documentary History of African American Humanism. New York: New York University Press. ———. 2012. The End of God Talk: A Humanist Philosophy. London: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017. When Colorblindness Isn’t the Answer: Humanism and the Challenge of Race. Durham, NC: Pitchstone Press. Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation Poll of Black Women in America. 2012. January 23, www.washingtonpost.com. Winston, Kimberly. 2012. “Blacks Say Atheists Were Unseen Civil Rights Heroes.” Washington Post. February 22, www.washingtonpost.com.

4

Assuming Whiteness in Twentieth-Century American Religion Rhys H. Williams

Just over fifty years ago, noted sociologist Robert Bellah published a now-classic essay, “Civil Religion in America” (1967). It kicked off a cascade of sociological analysis of religion in American public life and national identity, with the concept making its way into the vocabulary of the political punditry. Thirty years ago, the leading sociologist of religion of his era, Robert Wuthnow, published the enormously influential The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (1988), also an examination of religion in American public life. His analysis, somewhat amended, is generally accepted wisdom in sociology currently, and set the stage for much of the thinking about religious and political “polarization” in contemporary America. These two ideas—“civil religion” and “restructuring”—have been centrally influential concepts for understanding religion in American society over the past half-century. There are ways in which the messages of those two important pieces are antithetical to each other—Bellah’s civil religion was understood as reaching across American social and religious divisions to provide a web of religious meanings that could unite Americans in a sense of nationhood. He posited a religion that sacralized the nation and was an expression of, and helped produce, national identity and social cohesion. In contrast, Wuthnow examined the changing nature of divisions within American religion, arguing that they had restructured, especially since the 1960s, from being along confessional lines (e.g., Protestant, Catholic, Jew) to being along a liberal/conservative axis that cut across affiliational categories—such that conservative Protestants have more in common with conservative Catholics than they do with liberal Protestants, for example. Included in Wuthnow’s analysis was a chapter on civil religion, in which Wuthnow described 74

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a bifurcation of the religious meaning of national identity, again along this new divide. He titled that chapter “two cheers” for America and examined liberal and conservative civil religious ideologies. What neither scholar engaged fundamentally was the extent to which American religion is raced. Bellah was concerned about the ways in which religious understandings could provide a basis for social unity for Americans, even as the country was divided by political and social events of the 1960s. But he did not recognize that what we call “racialized” social structures are so integral both to American history and to contemporary public life that they simply cannot be sidelined when thinking about religion in national identity. Wuthnow focused on the composition and causes of religious differences and how they were changing in the social dynamics of post–World War II society. But Wuthnow tells the story of White Christian America as if it is all of “American” religion and thus misses the ways in which race structures religio-political divisions. Issues involving race and ethno-racial differences appear in the work of both scholars (more in Bellah than Wuthnow). However, fundamentally, religion is not raced for either author—they stopped short of thinking of an intersectional reality where religious identities are tightly interwoven with racial identities, and they overly identified “American” religion with what White Americans were doing and believing. However, if we keep religion and race in the picture together—and show their interdependencies in terms of sociopolitical dynamics—we get a different image of how American religion has functioned and changed in the last half-century. Whether understanding civil religion’s centrality to national identity and its deep entwining with the nation’s dominant narrative, or understanding how religion has changed and contributes to, or challenges, political and social differences, sociological approaches must more fully explore how religion and race are intertwined. This chapter will engage the concepts of civil religion and restructuring and will consider how their lack of attention to race has missed fuller understandings of race, religion, and American life.

Civil Religion and Unity within Diversity “Civil religion,” like many popular and useful sociological concepts, has a number of different definitions, all of which overlap, but often with

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important distinctions or differences in their implications. In his 1967 essay, Bellah did not offer an explicit definition of the idea but called civil religion “a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things” (1967:9) that focused on the American nation. Bellah’s student John A. Coleman (1970:70) defined civil religion as “the set of beliefs, rites, and symbols which relates a man’s [sic] role as citizen and his society’s place in space, time, and history to the conditions of ultimate existence and meaning.” These approaches treat civil religion much like any confessional religion but say little directly about civil religion’s actual political content. However, the Bellah tradition assumed that civil religion was a source of social cohesion and unity in a modern nation, particularly one where the polity was formally secular (see Williams and Fuist 2014) and open to all citizens. Much of the debate about civil religion’s political consequences discusses whether it is inherently conservative (i.e., a “priestly” elevation of the nation-state as sacred) or whether it can be a force for progressive social change—what could be called “prophetic” politics. Bellah was adamant about the prophetic potential of civil religion, and many of those following his conceptual lead, most notably sociologist Philip Gorski (2017), agree. One of the most important (and for Gorski, defining) things about civil religion is its capacity to be a force leading the nation to be better than it is. National self-worship, or religious nationalism, is not truly “civil religion” for Bellah and Gorski. The debate on the political cast of civil religion has pushed to the background the fact that it is overwhelmingly understood to have cohesive and unifying properties. But a basic sociological characteristic of social and symbolic boundaries is that they exclude as well as include—any social identity that creates an in-group creates out-groups as well. The unifying properties of civil religion may well help create an American national identity, but they simultaneously, if often implicitly, put some social identities into an “other” category. And in US history and society, the major “other” categories have involved race. By contrast, fewer of those writing about civil religion have taken its exclusionary and divisive potential seriously, particularly regarding race (but see McRoberts in this volume; Phillips 2018; Reed et al. 2016; Williams 2013). Bellah was not blind when thinking about race in American life. His writings on civil religion considered slavery as America’s “original sin”

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and racial discrimination as a continuing stain on the nation’s history. He envisioned the Civil War that ended slavery and the Civil Rights movement that challenged Jim Crow as “times of trial” for the nation (1975). Without saying so directly, Bellah basically elevated Abraham Lincoln to the premier position in the civil religious pantheon for his work preserving the nation while ending slavery and for his words of redemption and reconciliation toward the South after the war. Lincoln confronted racial injustice but overcame it to keep a reunited nation on the path to fulfilling its promise. However, while Bellah saw racial inequality and racism as a stain on the nation’s history, I think it fair to say he did not think it a permanent stain on the national character. It was not fundamental to the United States; it was a flaw in the nation, not a constitutive feature of it (see also Edwards 2016). Bellah saw in civil religion a tool for transcending racism and perhaps even race. That the promise of civil religion might be different, at a basic level, for people of color was not part of civil religion as Bellah imagined it, in large part because of Bellah’s own commitments to its unifying and transcendent properties. Bellah’s understanding of civil religion as a unifying dimension of American public culture emerged from the French social theorist Emile Durkheim’s assumption that all societies need some form of cultural glue that helps to form a moral community. Bellah wondered how that could work in the United States, a “new” nation with less rootedness in ethno-religious conceptions of peoplehood and having a formally secular state. In a society not only marked by religious diversity, but one that had also grown to self-consciously celebrate such diversity, that cultural glue could not come from confessional or sectarian faiths. Thus, Bellah considered the ways in which the nation’s history, destiny, and identity were infused with sacred meaning, both by the nation’s political leaders and by the American populace generally. Bellah mostly thought of civil religion as a “creed” and found it articulated in public speeches and documents, primarily by national political leaders. Others, such as social anthropologist William Lloyd Warner (1959), focused on public rituals like Memorial Day. Still others in this tradition have centered their analyses on public monuments (e.g., Gardella 2014; Riley 2015), formal theologies or political philosophies (e.g., Atchinson et al. 2018; Beiner 2011), or nontextual symbols such

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as flags (Marvin and Ingle 1999). But social unity is assumed to be civil religion’s primary function. For Bellah, civil religion had a prophetic content. That is, civil religion, rightly understood, transcends narrow partisan self-interest in domestic politics and national self-interest in global affairs, and points to a greater morality and social justice. Examples drawn from Presidents Lincoln and John Kennedy, or the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., showed these leaders urging the nation to fulfill a sacred duty to pursue justice and more perfectly embody its destiny and identity as a good society. Bellah was clear that civil religion was not “national self-worship” (Richey and Jones 1974:15–16); using it that way was a corruption of the ideal. Bellah reaffirmed that in a seldom-noted piece on civil religion just seven years after the original essay (1974). Quoting from Richard Nixon’s second inaugural address, Bellah pointed to themes of self-satisfaction, uncritical exceptionalism, and a type of personalist hubris in Nixon’s speech. Bellah explicitly stated that there was not just “one” civil religion and considered Nixon’s to be a different sort of national understanding than what he thought the nation should have. In The Broken Covenant (1975), he called Nixon’s version an “empty shell” of American civil religion. Bellah believed the nation had a prophetic and rich self-understanding, and he cautioned against civil religion being defined too narrowly. In the 1974 essay he argued that civil religion should be as symbolically empty—or open—as possible. He reasoned that too much specificity or substantive particularity would in effect exclude “significant groups of people who could not share overspecific symbols” (258). Again, Bellah favored the prophetic cast, but was concerned about maintaining civil religion’s unifying capacity. He was, in this passage, specifically approving of historian Martin Marty’s (1974) distinction between civil religion and “public theology,” but one can see how Bellah would think openness is crucial in civil religion. He believed civil religion was a force for unifying a diverse society and wanted it to be flexible enough to accommodate a multitude of subcultures, whether religious or ethnic. There is sense in that position, as the importance of an “artful ambiguity” in public claims (Williams 1999) is well established. Such imprecision provides generalized ideas or public symbols that many different groups can fill in to suit themselves, according to their own cultural understandings. Different groups of people do, in fact, fill in the content

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according to their own lights. But it is important to remember that those lights have been color-coded in American history. American civil religion has been open enough to allow abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., and President Barack Obama to make contributions to our understandings of the nation (Gorski 2017). But many groups of Americans have had no trouble with an implicit reading of “American” that continues to paint it White (Williams 2013). Bellah’s and Gorski’s commitment to civil religion’s inclusive potential does not fundamentally engage the deeply ingrained racial exclusion in American institutions and political culture. The centrality of functional unity in thinking about civil religion, and the relative lack of consideration of race, is clearly apparent in the scholarly tradition that followed Bellah. For example, Peter Gardella (2014), working thoroughly within Bellah’s framework, offers many examples of where he sees American civil religion as open to self-reform and adjustment, including an accommodation to the United States as a “post-ethnic” society (363). He tells the story of the redevelopment of the Liberty Bell site in Philadelphia by the National Park Service and its incorporation of interpretive material regarding the colonial-era slave quarters that once existed, and were well-preserved, where the new “shrine” for the Bell was developed (75–78). The story demonstrates the difficult issues involved in fitting slavery into the American civil religious narrative but portrays them as capable of being absorbed without changing fundamental values or functions. Other examples include Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle (1999) and Raymond Haberski (2012), who recognize how central war and blood sacrifice are in embodying civil religion—“sacrifice for the nation” can be central to civil religion’s unifying functions. The call to war can call the nation together. There is another stream of civil religion literature that explores the ways in which civil religion is not so unified, nor necessarily unifying. Sociologists N. J. Demerath and Rhys H. Williams (1985) discuss “civil religious discourse” as a type of political rationale and framing that is available to many different social movements and contentious causes. Martin Marty (1974) delineates “two kinds of two kinds” of civil religion, and notes the extent to which analysts’ normative commitments help lead them to posit whether any given expression represents the “true” civil religion (yet Marty does not foreground the relationship to political

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power and social exclusion). Michael Hughey (1983) is critical of Bellah’s argument that self-transcending aspects of American civic culture help make it a religious ethos for the whole society, rather than merely an ideology of a particular, and once-dominant, social strata. Wuthnow (1988) describes two versions of civil religion emerging out of the cultural changes following the 1960s—a conservative version that celebrates “one nation under God” and a liberal version that calls for “liberty and justice for all.” These approaches recognize that civil religion may have multiple meanings, but they portray the situation as one where an ideology can have variations that adherents choose, based on their social locations or circumstances. One of those circumstances, of course, could be racial or ethnic identity. But the civil religion tradition, for the most part, treats that difference as functionally equivalent to whether one is liberal or conservative, Protestant or Catholic. Different civil religious traditions are understood as mostly a matter of the patterned interpretations that people perform in their expressions of culture and values. That access to civil religious understandings might be differentiated by race, or that the racialized nature of American social structure might definitively shape the substance and form that the nation’s civil religion could take, makes no appearance in these critiques. However, there is some scholarship that understands one of the constituent features of civil religion to be its exclusionary properties. In an examination of the history of American Exceptionalism, John Wilsey (2015) distinguishes between a “closed” and an “open” version of exceptionalist ideology. The closed version, such as publisher John L. O’Sullivan’s “manifest destiny,” coupled sacred notions of the American covenant with Anglo-American supremacy. For O’Sullivan in particular, this was not only a social assumption but also an intellectual conclusion emerging out of his evolutionary thinking about the progress of civilizations. Wilsey also finds a grounding assumption of exclusion, particularly racial exclusion, in several other historical versions of “closed” exceptionalisms. He contrasts this with the “open” exceptionalisms of leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, who may have had patronizing and prejudicial attitudes about Black Americans, but was committed to a vision of the nation that could include all—and indeed had a duty to include all—as citizens. In many nineteenth-century political issues,

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the future of slavery was a prominent concern. Thus, the very nature of who was excluded was central to the exceptionalisms that constituted the United States. Richard T. Hughes, a religious studies scholar, writes about the “myths America lives by” (2003). He does not call them a “civil religion,” but he examines cultural and religious themes that many have thought of as expressions of civil religion—such as the myth of the “chosen nation” and the myth of the “Christian nation.” For Hughes these myths provide a national story, connected to higher purpose and historic destiny, in ways analogous to civil religion. He offers them as something of an historical development, describing each myth as it emerged in a particular period of national history, and then as they change and sustain thereafter. It is a much more fluid and historicized version of American selfunderstanding than Bellah’s treatment (more similar to Gorski’s 2017 approach). Bellah provided the forward to Hughes’s book, and indicated his sympathy with the analysis. Crucially, in each chapter Hughes presents a critique of the myth in question, specifically framed through African Americans. African American experiences in North America, or Black American writers, artists, political leaders, and the like, provide a counter-perspective to the dominant stories. Civil religious understanding is thus not presented as overly unified and is shown to have been different for African Americans, leading to disputed understandings of the nation. Hughes limits the critique to African Americans, rather than opening it to other possible ethno-racial or religious minorities, partly for the distinct ways in which slavery and Jim Crow were aimed at Africans and their descendants, and partly because of their historical place as the United States’ largest minority. This is a welcome analysis. Hughes recognizes the multiplicity of cultural voices and the centrality of racial inequality in national history. The format feels a bit contrived at times, and Hughes does not explore whether the critiques of each myth cohere into a fuller counternarrative. Because the focus is on African Americans specifically, there is not a conception of race that is seen as centrally built into the myths; rather it is a portrayal of where and for whom the myths got it “wrong.” Nor does Hughes wrestle with the idea that a racialized society must, almost by necessity, have a racialized civil religion. Hughes does note that a

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self-understanding of “chosen-ness” means that some others are decidedly not chosen, and he recognizes the exclusionary potential. This is similar to Gorski’s (2017) analysis of the ways in which the Puritan covenant left many out as the Puritans proclaimed themselves the New Hebrews. Indeed, Gorski posits an important moment when the covenant became racialized, as Increase Mather connected the blood of the Puritans with the covenant with God, and this was reinforced by King Philip’s War in the late seventeenth century (2017:55–57). This helped build a dimension of blood and conquest into the national story that remains active, and often vibrant, today. Yet, Gorski wants to separate the conquest narrative, however grounded it might be in scriptural interpretation or embedded in American history, from “civil religion” properly understood. For him, the exclusionary properties of this self-understanding become part of the “religious nationalism” thread in American political culture. It is real, but lamentable, and not the way that Americans are best served understanding the connections between their religious culture and their national political story. Gorski, like Bellah, wants civil religion to be prophetic and republican, with the right mixture of de-sectarianized religious understandings mixed with a democratic form of civic republicanism that can be inclusive. But I am wary of an analytic stance that considers only the religiopolitical connections of which I approve to be truly “civil religion.” I am sympathetic to Gorski’s normative project in many ways, but I don’t believe it takes the civil religion concept to where it needs to go analytically. When the civil religion literature engages American racial inequality, it too often treats it as a “problem” for the nation. Many then hope that civil religion can be part of a cultural discourse that could help right those past wrongs and further unify the country. But racialized social structures, including our national religious life, are too integral to the nation, to our history, and to our self-understandings to be sidelined from civil religious understandings. As I have argued previously (Williams 2013), the connections between blood and land are too central to religion for the United States to completely shun the “tribal” character embedded in our civil religious understandings. The Protestant religious responses to immigration, from the early nineteenth century to this moment, show how deeply American national identity is sacralized around

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the experiences and identities of a particular people—the Western and Northern European Protestants who for so long dominated national life. The responses to the presidency of Barack Obama, in particular the stubborn insistence that he was Muslim as a way of emphasizing that he was not a “real American,” show how tightly religion and race remain linked to national identity. Thus, if we are to grasp adequately the ways in which American religion is raced, we have to understand how our sacralized conception of the nation—our civil religious culture—weaves the two together. A similar claim can be made about sociological analyses of recent religious change. While often emphasizing division rather than unity, they need to incorporate the intersection of race and religion more integrally.

Religious Divisions and Postwar Restructuring Like Bellah’s civil religion narrative, Wuthnow’s restructuring was in many ways a story about White America. While not framed this way explicitly, Wuthnow’s thesis continued religious scholar Will Herberg’s (1955) story of the “de-ethnitization” of White America, even as it challenged Herberg’s consensus-based story of what constituted “American” religion. Ethno-religious identities among White Americans, such as Dutch Calvinist, Swedish Lutheran, or Italian Catholic, had been documented at a scholarly level since social ethicist H. Richard Niebuhr’s The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929). Both Herberg and Wuthnow show that these ethnic denominational identities became decreasingly important socially, residentially, politically, and in terms of marital choice. Wuthnow tells this story persuasively with multiple sources of evidence. As the United States experienced a quarter-century of prosperity after the end of World War II, some fundamental changes occurred in social and cultural arrangements. The Great Depression, then the war mobilization, had created demands for domesticity and ordered home lives among many Americans. Good paying jobs, along with government assistance such as the GI bill, led to increasing education and the ability to buy a first house. People left crowded city neighborhoods and started families, and suburbs grew rapidly. Transportation infrastructure facilitated the commute from suburbs to central business districts and

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jobs. One result was an increase in the “mixing” of White Americans in new neighborhoods, new public schools, and expanding middleclass professions. This followed, it should be noted, the mixing of White American men in the US military in World War II. State-level military mobilizations gave way to a national mobilization that put men from different regions, ethnicities, and religions in the same units. The classic cliché of the Hollywood World War II movie—a squad with a farm boy from Iowa, a Jewish kid from Brooklyn, an Italian Catholic son of recent immigrants, and an Irish American sergeant, was not a complete fabrication (especially as the officers remained thoroughly WASP-y). America’s collective horror at the Nazi Holocaust helped lead to a decline in the acceptability of public expressions of anti-Semitism, and American Jews also moved out of ethnic neighborhoods in the Northeast to the West Coast and Florida (Moore 1994). There they experienced living in predominantly Protestant settings, rather than close to ethnic Catholic neighbors. In all, Catholics and Jews slowly became less “other” in American life. Rates of intermarriage rose. Institutions of higher education became less religiously segregated. Eventually, a Roman Catholic was even elected president of the United States (not, of course, without some concern from Protestant nativists). And during this entire period there were very low, legally mandated, immigration levels. So the story that Wuthnow, like Herberg, tells is an increasing mixing of the White American population and a decline in ethno-religious specificity. As historian Wendy Wall documents (2007), this was accompanied by a self-conscious construction of a “politics of consensus,” symbolizing this new cultural landscape. The 1960s and its aftermath changed much of that. Wuthnow argues, along with others (e.g., Hammond 1992; Roof 1999; Wuthnow 1998), that differences in higher education, experiences with diversity, increased geographic and social mobility, and levels of affluence produced new religious and sociopolitical divisions. The war in Vietnam, the Civil Rights and other liberation movements, and a general challenge to the mores and folkways of White middle-class America cast the nation into a whirlwind of cultural and political conflict (this was the context in which Bellah was writing about civil religion). The basic divisions in American religion began to align with these differences. Whether one was liberal or conservative, educated and urban or working-class and small-town,

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exposed to elite culture and cultural diversity or not, became central differences in religious practice as well as political orientation. These differences, among Protestants, had roots in the fundamentalist-modernist conflict of the early twentieth century, but Wuthnow’s argument clearly implicates Catholics (and Jews) as well (even if those differences get much less attention in his empirical data). The restructuring argument held that by the 1980s, when it came to religion and public politics, liberal Protestants had more in common with liberal Catholics than they did with conservative Protestants, and conservative Catholics were closer to conservative Protestants in many ways than they were to liberal Catholics. Conservative sociologist James Davison Hunter, inspired by the restructuring argument, drew on developments in highly visible moral-political issues such as abortion to expand the restructuring claim into a thesis about a “culture war” enveloping all public life and built on rival moral worldviews (1991). Despite its wild popularity in political commentary, scholars found a number of reasons to dispute the expansiveness of Hunter’s claims (see Williams 1997). Nonetheless, there was recognition of a general realignment of religio-social differences and a recognition that liberal and conservative political coalitions had rival constructions of both economic and social issues (see Wuthnow’s 1996 re-analysis). More recently, political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell (2010) and sociologist Mark Chaves (2017) have noted both polarization in American religion and an increasing alignment between religiosity and political commitments. However, there was, and continues to be, a huge hole in this argument. Black Americans did not “restructure” in the same way White Americans had; they have retained a distinct combination of conservative theology, particularly around issues of sexuality and a Christcentered theology, along with liberal economic and political views, particularly about government intervention to assist the less fortunate (e.g., Lockerbie 2013). Moreover, research has also found that a significant driver of the restructuring of religio-political attitudes among White Christians has been issues connected to race and governmental assistance to minorities—the “culture war” was not limited to concerns about sexuality and family morality (e.g., Olson 2008). There clearly is a liberal/conservative division among American Catholics, as there is among Protestants. However, many of the

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differences among Catholics on social and political issues have, in the last three decades, increasingly aligned with differences between Latinx and White non-Hispanic Catholics (see Ellison et al. 2011; Hunt 2001) and between Latinx Protestants and Catholics. That is, ethno-racial differences among Catholics remain significant, and Latinx groups have not “restructured” within Protestant or Catholic affiliations; rather, the increasing political divisions among American Hispanics align with Protestant and Catholic differences. Latinx Protestants are more likely to be politically and socially conservative as compared to Latinx Catholics. And among all American Catholics, Latinx Catholics are more likely to be politically liberal—especially on immigration and economic issues— than are White, non-Hispanic Catholics, even if they share some socially conservative attitudes (Bartkowski et al. 2012). Granted, the thirty years since Wuthnow wrote his book have been marked by high levels of immigration, particularly among people from Latin America. This immigration has deeply affected the landscape of American Catholicism. It has become less “European” in orientation and more global, with significant populations of Latin Americans, Filipino/as, and Africans now in the United States. While perhaps unfair to have expected Wuthnow to have anticipated this development, nonetheless the restructuring argument among Catholics is less true than it was three decades ago. The restructuring argument was overwhelmingly supported by data on White Americans and basically has been an argument about the religio-political commitments of White Americans. It is a story of the de-ethnicization of White America after World War II that fundamentally does not recognize the ways in which race continues to divide and structure American religion. My critique of the restructuring argument and its development is, on a basic level, a criticism that Wuthnow’s initial claim did not think systematically enough about non-White Americans. Things often vary by race and ethnicity, and such variation was not systematically explored. That said, I do recognize that making big arguments with survey data has problems accommodating many different types of minority populations. Samples often do not pick up enough respondents to enable meaningful statistics or findings. And I fully recognize that there is usefulness in studying the majority—knowing what White Americans are doing religiously is important because so many Americans are indeed “White.”

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But there is nonetheless a too-easy conflation of the religious beliefs, practices, and identities of White Americans with an over-encompassing “American religion.” Scholars too often talk about “American” religion when they are basically talking about White Americans. Americans from ethno-racial minorities, or from minority religions, often practice their religions, or think about their commitments, differently, and scholars fail to recognize that with an unreflective use of “American.” However, beyond just variation across racial and ethnic categories—making race a more central “variable”—scholars are not thinking systematically enough about the ways in which religion is shaped by minority status and power relations. In the United States, few social structures have been more marked by intense hierarchies and power relationships than race. American religion, like American society generally, has been built on structures of racial disparities and precariousness. That needs to be taken into account more systematically in empirical work and more centrally in theoretical development. This is not only about the “restructuring” thesis. A number of conceptual approaches to American religion have a similar blind spot. For example, the “religious economies” understanding of religious commitment focused a great deal of energy on the dynamics of “choice” as exercised by members and believers. The idea is that in a relatively unregulated civil sphere, a religious market develops that acts much like markets in other industries. “Firms” must compete for customers/ members and thus innovate and accommodate in order to meet market demand. From the perspective of the religious individual, the emphasis is on assessing benefits and costs, and thus balancing “loyalty” or “exit” in remaining in, or leaving, any particular religious organization. Membership often becomes “client-like,” with satisfaction and voluntary choice as guiding principles. But a number of empirical studies show that African Americans often do not understand their organizational commitments from such an individualized, choice-based framework. Sociologists Jessica Barron and Rhys H. Williams (2017) and Rhys H. Williams, Courtney Ann Irby, and R. Stephen Warner (2016) found that, compared to similarly situated White parishioners, Black church members articulated their religious belonging with a distinctly different discourse—using a language of “calling” and family, with its connotation of obligation, rather

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than choice or need-satisfaction. Sociologists Christopher Ellison and Darren Sherkat (1995) make a similar point when they examine regional differences in African Americans’ participation in the “Black Church”—which they describe as a “semi-voluntary institution,” recognizing that it meets the need for community in particular ways and as a result plays a distinct role in Black communities (see also Hutchinson’s chapter in this volume). Several studies of the religious practices of new immigrant groups (e.g., Yang and Ebaugh 2001) also reveal how congregations, as communities, can provide both much needed social services as well as a cultural and social space that offers insulation and protection from an often-hostile society. They can offer some protection from outside threats—one can imagine that happening for Muslims currently, given rising Islamophobia—and they offer a bulwark against the internal fracturing of the community. All of this implies that we need a more thorough integration in how we think about religion and race. It is not just that Blacks and Whites understand religious commitment differently, although they often do. It involves understanding how religion helps to structure the lives of minority communities, even as those dynamics emerge from the racial structuring of social life. Too often religion is treated as if it were distinct from race—divorced from it as both an identity and a way of being in the world. Anthropologist Nancy Foner (2015) and sociologist R. Stephen Warner (2015) have both compared anti-immigrant sentiments in Western Europe with those in the United States. The short form of the argument is that race is to the United States what religion is in Western Europe—a mark of otherness that becomes a basis for discrimination. Thus, England, France, and Germany struggle with recent immigration through disputes over religious practice and identity (overwhelmingly Muslim), whereas race is the crucial hierarchy in America and immigrants are evaluated based on that rather than their religion—hence the hostility to Mexican immigrants, even though they are Christian. I do think that America’s history of religious diversity, and often the acceptance of religious pluralism, has offered many immigrant groups some freedom to accommodate themselves in the United States even as they maintain a cultural ethno-religion. But pushing that argument too far misses connections by not using a more integrated understanding of discrimination and power as they are expressed in the intersections

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of race and religion. For example, the history of anti-Catholicism in American nativism in the nineteenth century is significant and needs to be emphasized. But who Catholics were, ethnically and in relation to the Protestants then in the mainstream, matters. The Irish, Italian, and Greek Catholics (or Polish Jews) who came here were regularly conceptualized as being racially distinct as well. Of course, the conceptualization of race has changed—it was thought about differently when people could refer to the “Italian race” or the “Jewish race”—but this shows even more clearly the fuzzy boundaries between ethno-racial and religious identities. Many of the religious groups who came to North America and settled no doubt understood their religiousness in terms of “peoplehood”—as what we would call an ethno-religious category. In the contemporary United States, scholars such as sociologist Gerardo Martí (2005) have demonstrated persuasively that there are circumstances where people in religious communities can build subjective identities that transcend ethno-racial categories. Not only is that significant but also we might be able to make a case that the United States offers a setting, as both multiethnic and religiously pluralist, that makes that distinctly possible compared to other nations. But often that does not happen. Even when it does, do objective identities that people inhabit—how they are coded by others as they navigate their lives— change as significantly as their subjective identities? It bears repeating that for reasons of collective security and community identity, ethnoracial minorities are less likely to separate religion from ethnicity. We often see how congregations can be safe spaces for African Americans or new immigrant communities. That only reinforces the mutual dependence and intersection of the dynamics of race and those of religion.

Conclusion Religion is not a separate sphere where people live in isolation. Social analysts cannot treat the religious realm as if it has its own dynamics that hold everything else constant—as if it were some kind of “beta” coefficient in a multiple regression equation, an isolated cause or effect that has its distinct realm. “Ceterus paribus” is more often a hypothetical than a real-life, on-the-ground situation. People’s race and religion are intertwined in their identities—just as the United States’

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racial structures and history are intertwined with religious stories in our national identity. This is clearly central to the idea that “religion is raced.” When analyzing “American religion,” whether as a set of cultural institutions or as a narrative that defines the nation as a people, intersections between religion and race must be both conceptualized and considered empirically. We cannot discuss “the American experience” by only referencing the descendants of Western European countries, or only Protestants, or now, only Christians. “American” cannot be so overly and unreflectively inclusive that all get swept into a White Protestant story. We cannot assume “Whiteness” when studying the religion of all Americans. Beyond just looking for the differences in the experiences of ethno-religious minorities, we must understand how these social groups are racial and religious “others,” that is, how structured inequalities and ongoing power relations push them into invisibility or a coerced assimilative conformity. This will often challenge who we think about when we think about “Americans.” Our coming century will demand that change. References

Atchison, Liam J., Keith Bates, and Darin D. Lenz, eds. 2018. Civil Religion and American Christianity. Mountain Home, AR: BorderStone Press. Barron, Jessica M., and Rhys H. Williams. 2017. The Urban Church Imagined: Religion, Race, and Authenticity in the City. New York: New York University Press. Bartkowski, John P., Aida I. Ramos-Wada, Chris E. Ellison, and Gabriel A. Acevedo. 2012. “Faith, Race-Ethnicity, and Public Policy Preferences: Religious Schemas and Abortion Attitudes Among U.S. Latinos.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 51 (2): 343–358. Beiner, Ronald. 2011. Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bellah, Robert N. 1967. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 96: 1–21. ———. 1974. “American Civil Religion in the 1970s.” In American Civil Religion, edited by R. E. Richey and D. G. Jones, 255–272. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1975. The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial. New York: Seabury Press. Chaves, Mark. 2017. American Religion: Contemporary Trends. 2nd edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Coleman, John A. 1970. “Civil Religion.” Sociological Analysis 31: 67–77. Demerath, N. J. III, and Rhys H. Williams. 1985. “Civil Religion in an Uncivil Society.” ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 480: 154–166.

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Edwards, Korie L. 2016. “Expanding Our View: Seeing Bellah’s American Civil Religion through a Black Feminist Lens.” Presented at Center for the Study of Religion & American Culture, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (November). Ellison, Christopher G., Gabriel A. Acevedo, and Aida I. Ramos-Wada. 2011. “Religion and Attitudes Toward Same-Sex Marriage Among U.S. Latinos.” Social Science Quarterly 92 (1): 35–56. Ellison, Christopher G., and Darren Sherkat. 1995. “The ‘Semi-Voluntary’ Institution Revisited: Regional Variations in Church Participation among Black Americans.” Social Forces 73 (4): 1415. Foner, Nancy. 2015. “Is Islam in Western Europe Like Race in the United States?” Sociological Forum 30 (4): 885–899. Gardella, Peter. 2014. American Civil Religion: What Americans Hold Sacred. New York: Oxford University Press. Gorski, Philip E. 2017. American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Haberski, Raymond J., Jr. 2012. God and War: Civil Religion since 1945. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hammond, Philip E. 1992. Religion and Personal Autonomy. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Herberg, Will. 1955. Protestant-Catholic-Jew. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday. Hughes, Richard T. 2003. Myths America Lives By. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hughey, Michael W. 1983. Civil Religion and Moral Order. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Hunt, Larry L. 2001. “Religion, Gender and the Hispanic Experience in the United States: Catholic/Protestant Differences in Religious Involvement, Social Status, and Gender-Role Attitudes.” Review of Religious Research 43 (2): 139–160. Hunter, James Davison. 1991. Culture Wars. New York: Basic Books. Lockerbie, Brad. 2013. “Race and Religion: Voting Behavior and Political Attitudes.” Social Science Quarterly 94 (4): 1145–1158. Martí, Gerardo. 2005. A Mosaic of Believers: Diversity and Innovation in a Multiethnic Church. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Marty, Martin E. 1974. “Two Kinds of Civil Religion.” In American Civil Religion, edited by R. E. Richey and D. G. Jones. New York: Harper & Row. Marvin, Carolyn, and David W. Ingle. 1999. Blood Sacrifice and the Nation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Moore, Deborah Dash. 1994. To the Golden Cities. New York: Free Press. Niebuhr, H. Richard. 1929. The Social Sources of Denominationalism. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Olson, Joel. 2008. “Whiteness and the Polarization of American Politics.” Political Research Quarterly 61 (4): 704–718. Phillips, Nichole Renee. 2018. Patriotism Black and White: The Color of American Exceptionalism. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.

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Putnam, Robert D., and David E. Campbell. 2010. American Grace: How Religion Unites and Divides Us. New York: Simon & Schuster. Reed, Jean-Pierre, Rhys H. Williams, and Kathryn B. Ward. 2016. “Civil Religious Contention in Cairo, Illinois: Priestly and Prophetic Ideologies in a ‘Northern’ Civil Rights Struggle.” Theory & Society 45 (1): 25–55. Richey, Russell E., and Donald G. Jones, eds. 1974. American Civil Religion. New York: Harper & Row. Riley, Alexander T. 2015. Angel Patriots: The Crash of United Flight 93 and the Myth of America. New York: New York University Press. Roof, Wade Clark. 1999. Spiritual Marketplace. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wall, Wendy L. 2007. Inventing the “American Way.” New York: Oxford University Press. Warner, R. Stephen. 2015. “Race Is to the U.S. as Religion Is to Europe.” Invited lecture at Chautauqua Institution, New York, July 13. Warner, William Lloyd. 1959. The Living and the Dead: A Study of the Symbolic Life of Americans. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Williams, Rhys H., ed. 1997. Cultural Wars in American Politics: Critical Reviews of a Popular Myth. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. ———. 1999. “Public Religion and Hegemony: Contesting the Language of the Common Good.” In The Power of Religious Publics, edited by W. H. Swatos, Jr. and J. K. Wellman, 169–186. Westport, CT: Praeger. ———. 2013. “Civil Religion and the Cultural Politics of National Identity in Obama’s America.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 52 (2): 239–257. Williams, Rhys H., and Todd Nicholas Fuist. 2014. “Civil Religion and National Politics in a Neoliberal Era.” Sociology Compass 8 (7): 929–938. Williams, Rhys H., Courtney Ann Irby, and R. Stephen Warner. 2016. “‘Church’ in Black and White: The Organizational Lives of Young Adults.” Religions 7 (7): 90. Wilsey, John D. 2015. American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic. Wuthnow, Robert 1988. The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1996. “Restructuring of American Religion: Further Evidence.” Sociological Inquiry 66 (3): 303–329. ———. 1998. After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press. Yang, Fenggang, and Helen Rose Ebaugh. 2001. “Transformations in New Immigrant Religions and Their Global Implications.” American Sociological Review 66 (2): 269–288.

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Race, Religion, and Jewish Sexuality in an Age of Immigration Sarah Imhoff

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jews in the United States were religiously a minority, but they were racially White. Or were they? There was no doubt that the practice of Judaism was part of what made Jews different from their White neighbors. But racial difference also haunted American Jewishness. Muckraking journalists and reformists pointed to “the Jewish race” as the main operatives in the “White slave trade”—a sensationalized phrase for the organized prostitution of White women. How could Jews be a separate despised race but also be included in the category of White? Nativists did not hesitate to refer to other immigrants with slurs that marked them as non-White. Jean Turner Zimmerman wrote White or Yellow? A Story of America’s Great White Slave Trade with Asia (1916), and Ernest Bell’s book repeatedly referred to “the yellow slave trade” (1910) to smear Asian Americans for their supposed promotion of prostitution. These authors emphasized that their subjects were not White, and so it is clear that they understood “White slavery” as having specific racial reference. But Jews did not face these off-color slurs: When Jewish men and women were implicated as White slavers and Jewish women were accused of being prostitutes, even nativists and xenophobes rarely contested the implication that Jews were White. Those same nativists and xenophobes, however, saw Jews as both racially and religious other. One pastor complained that they were “too bigoted to surrender any racial traditions,” by which he actually seemed to mean religious traditions (Urofsky 1995). These conversations about prostitution highlight two apparent paradoxes. First, Jewishness has functioned simultaneously as a racial classification and a religious classification, and second, Jews could be simultaneously White and racially other. 95

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To explore these paradoxes, this chapter considers public characters who teetered between Americanness and otherness. Rosie Hertz, Emma Goldman, and Rose Pastor Stokes all found themselves in the public eye and under legal scrutiny—and the discussions about them swirled around cultural assumptions about Jewish sexuality. Unlike African American men who were feared to have excessive and aggressive sexuality, Jewish men were alternately praised and derided for their gentleness, which, it seemed, could also be linked to perversion. Jewish women were both praised for mothering and criticized for their aggressive and manly participation in radical politics. Jews of both sexes were accused of participating in organized prostitution, which implied abnormal and immoral sexuality. Both Jews and non-Jews discussed what it meant to be Jewish, and though these many voices often disagreed, most of them did agree that Jewish gender and sexuality were not identical to normative White American gender and sexuality (Imhoff 2017). At once racially other and one of “the White races,” Jews appeared in the public eye as outsiders who also showed signs of being a model minority. Though the story of the race, religion, and sexuality of American Jews is a story about both men and women, here I focus on women. This is because the existing historical scholarship about Jews and race largely focuses on men. Some of it does so explicitly by using masculinity and the “feminization of the Jew” as concepts (Gilman 1991; Presner 2007; Boyarin 1998), and some does so implicitly by centering examples of Jewish men more than women (Goldstein 2006; Jacobson 1998). To see a fuller picture of the Jewish intersections of race, religion, and sexuality, then, we need to look at Jewish women. This chapter centers on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because it was a formative time both for US conversations about race and for American Jews. About two million Jews came to the United States between 1880 and 1924. Established American Jewish communities were outnumbered by these new immigrants, but they held more financial and social capital, and they often tried to mold the new immigrants in their own image—an image that they saw as modern, American, and with exemplary morals and religious views (Hyman 1995). The United States more generally plunged itself into conversations about the physical and social characteristics of different races and ideological questions about which of these races should make up the nation.

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This chapter also considers public discussion of crime—and in particular, the sensational crime of White slavery and the political crime of anarchy—because those represented moments when writers felt free to express nativist sentiments and emphasize Jewish difference (see also Joselit 1983). In this way, much of the newspaper and magazine material here shows the aspects of US culture that did more explicit racializing, sexualizing, and othering of Jews than we might see in other sectors, such as education or entertainment. Moreover, the sensationalizing antisemitic voices did not go uncontested: Some social reformers and Progressives spoke out against nativist and antisemitic sentiments. Yet the racialization and religious othering we see in these printed media discussions had significant implications in many areas of American life, from medicine to social work to immigration policy. The combination of newspaper and magazine material here also allows us to include two lenses—the regional, fast-paced focus of a daily newspaper and the national, investigative focus of a monthly magazine. Though much of the action took place in New York and Chicago, then, these publications help paint a broader picture of American ideas about Jewish gender, sexuality, and race.

American Jewish Whiteness in Context As talk of the “White slave trade” suggests, Jews were White—but as the racial antisemitism surrounding it shows, they were racially other. How could Jews be White but also experience racialization? In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most Americans, both Jewish and non-Jewish, saw humankind as made up of many races, including multiple White races. Like non-White races, these each had their individual characteristics, which people deemed superior or inferior. In short, some of the White races were better than others. Because of this, Jews could be a White race without being the normative White race. Even when writers did exclude Jews from the White races, they still tended to uphold the idea that there were multiple, unequal White races. Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color against White Supremacy, explained, “the white race divides into three main subspecies—the Nordics, the Alpines, and the Mediterraneans. All three are good stocks, ranking in genetic worth well above the various colored

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races. However, there seems to be no question that the Nordic is far and away the most valuable type; standing, indeed, at the head of the whole human genus” (Stoddard 1920:162). Stoddard, a Harvard PhD, also quoted notorious racist Madison Grant, who bemoaned “The Passing of the Great Race” in a book of that title. The “great race” he identified was the Nordic race—one of the White races, but never the sole White race (Grant 1916). These men expressed antisemitic sentiment, and Stoddard suggested Jews were “Asiatic,” and yet they contributed to a racial landscape in which others could fit Jews into an overarching category of Whiteness because lesser “sub-species” of Whiteness were still racially inferior. This messy landscape of racial construction has drawn the attention of scholars of American Jews. American Studies scholar Matthew Frye Jacobson sees “variegated Whiteness” from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1920s (Jacobsen 1998). Historian Karen Brodkin attributes the “temporary darkening” of Jews to economics and class, explaining, “for almost half a century [Jews] were treated as racially not-quite-white” (Brodkin 1998:56). These scholars are surely correct to point to racially antisemitic discourse: The Jewish race was cunning, the Jewish race was physically inferior, and the Jewish race was inclined to economics over morals, many Americans claimed. But the cases in which non-Jewish Americans denigrated Jews by explicitly saying they were not White were relatively rare. Legally, Jews had appeared as White since colonial days. Neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi Jews could be enslaved, as Native Americans and Blacks could be, and Jews were permitted entry under a 1790 law allowing “free White persons” to immigrate. Yet many people, including Jews themselves, saw Jews as a distinctive race. Still, there was a lot of disagreement about what precisely this meant, and by the early twentieth century, it had reached a new level of complexity. For example, for a 1911 report, a US immigration commission wrote to Jewish communal leaders asking about whether Jews were a race. (The fact that so many of the leaders they chose were rabbis indicates how thoroughly intertwined were the notions of Jewishness as a race and Jewishness as a religion.) Yes, said Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler: “Ethnologically, the Jews certainly represent a race, since both their religion and history ever kept them apart from the rest of the people of the country they inhabit.” No, said

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Cyrus Adler, a scholar of ancient Judaism and then president of his large Philadelphia synagogue: “Assuming for the moment that a race is an ethnical stock, a great division of mankind having in common certain distinguishing physical peculiarities appearing to be derived from a distinct primitive source, I should say that in this sense the Jews were not, strictly speaking, a race.” In some ways, explained Morris Jastrow: “In my opinion the Jew represents neither a nation nor a race, in a political sense, but he does represent a race for anthropological and sociological purposes.”1 They all agreed that Jewishness was religiously distinctive, but they never reached a consensus about race. Kohler, Adler, and Jastrow represented common positions within the Jewish community: Race could be a useful way to talk about Jewishness, but too much race talk might emphasize otherness. Understanding Jewish race, then, is partly about understanding Whiteness, but also partly about understanding the way Jews were racialized in a shifting field of race, where even Jews disagreed among themselves whether there was a Jewish race and what its characteristics might be. Even being classified as White was not sufficient to mean racially normative or desirable. This complex landscape of racial constructions also suggests how Jewish women could be seen as both bombthrowing Bolsheviks and excellent mothers, and Jewish men could be simultaneously gentle and sexually deviant.

White Slavery: The Scandal of Jews, Sex, and Money Sometimes lauded for their willingness to assimilate or their zeal for education, and sometimes demeaned for their pushiness, Jews had a mixed reputation in the press. On one hand, most Americans thought that the “Jewish race” was not “prone to alcoholism or syphilis,” problems that were a sign of masculine vice and sexual vice, respectively.2 A doctor wrote to New Era magazine to say that Jews were not, in fact, immune to consumption as it had suggested, but rather he credited “the great care which the poor Jewish mother bestows upon her children, the pronounced home life, characteristic sobriety, the unusually good and well-prepared food,” a nod to both good womanhood and perhaps the Jewish religious practice of keeping kosher (Knopf 1905:197; see also Antler 2007). Elsewhere others also attributed these values to the

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practice of a scientifically sound Judaism (Hart 2007). These images often differentiated Jewish women from the women of other immigrant groups, such as Irish women, who some considered bad mothers (Skok 2007). On the other hand, when it came to crime reporting, both daily newspapers and national monthlies tended toward the negative. A close look at these negative portraits reveals a surprising valence. They represented both Jewish men and Jewish women as having non-normative gender and sexuality. Men were weak and cowardly—not like those brave and brawny Greek or Italian criminals, as some sources explicitly compared them—and chose inappropriate sexual objects (Imhoff 2017). Some Jewish women seemed hyper-feminine, while others seemed almost manly. The portrayals often insinuated that Jewish women’s sexuality could be properly oriented around motherhood but could also be disorderly. Sometimes it could even be both. The most common public occasions to discuss the gender and sexuality of Jewish women involved concerns about the problem of prostitution or, in the term of the times, “White slavery.” The very phrase “White slavery” implies that White people couldn’t possibly be chattel slaves, as Black Americans had been—if White people were enslaved, it must be something different. People in the United States and Britain occasionally used the phrase to mean things such as “wage slavery,” but prostitution was its main referent (Soderlund 2013). Including Jews in White slavery rhetoric, indeed, making them the center of the conversation, reinforced the idea that Jews were White people. Nevertheless, this association with Whiteness existed right alongside blaming Jewish men and women for prostitution, a rhetorical move that contributed to their non-normative gendering and sexualizing. In 1909, journalist George Kibbe Turner wrote an expose in McClure’s Magazine. Unlike the articles of most of his fellow muckrakers, Turner’s reporting had a nativist bent which painted immigrants in general, and Jews in particular, as a political scourge. The article also suggested that Jews were inclined toward criminality in a particularly gendered way: “Little boys of ten and twelve were carefully trained as pickpockets in the Jewish district; and little girls of thirteen and fifteen started as prostitutes” (Turner 1909a:122). Perpetuating antisemitic stereotypes, Turner explained that Jewish boys were continuing the Jewish racial tradition of money obsession and deception, while Jewish girls were continuing the

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tradition of sexual deviance. In this article and another two years earlier, he blamed New York and Chicago prostitution on Jews. “The largest regular business in furnishing women, however,” he wrote “is done by a company of men, largely composed of Russian Jews, who supply women of that nationality to the trade” (Turner 1907:122). Male pimps demonstrated both their own disorderly sexuality and the errant sexuality of the Jewish women they managed. Unlike the regional readership of newspapers, people across the nation subscribed to the widely popular McClure’s and slowly paged through its long-form journalism, serialized fiction, and other features. Its editor, Samuel McClure, shared many of the same inclinations as his author Turner. McClure’s upbringing, “steeped in evangelism, abolitionism, and temperance,” all profoundly Christian, suited him to both the reform-mindedness of muckrakers and the Christian- centered worldview of some reformers (Soderlund 2013:103–4). A 1909 article penned by McClure himself lamented the decline of American civilization: “Great masses of primitive peoples from the farms of Europe, transported to this country as laborers, together with a considerable portion of Negro slaves liberated by the Civil War, have struggled to degrade the standards and guarantees of civilization in America.” In particular, he maligned Jewish women for becoming prostitutes. “There has grown up,” he went on, “as an adjunct of this herd of female wretchedness [women involved in sex work], a fraternity of fetid male vermin (nearly all of them being Russian or Polish Jews), who are unmatchable for impudence and bestiality” (McClure 1909:118). In a later article, Turner narrated the connection between Jewishness and White slavery: “Out of the racial slum of Europe has come for unnumbered years the Jewish kaftan [pimp] leading the miserable Jewish girl from European civilization . . . He comes out of Galicia and Russian Poland with his white hair and long beard—the badge of his ancient faith—and wanders across the face of the earth” (Turner 1909b:45). Turner linked the trope of the wandering Jew with the deviant sexualizing of both the old, white-bearded Jewish man and the young, miserable Jewish girl. The man’s Jewishness was both racial (“out of the racial slum”) and religious (his beard, his “ancient faith”), categories which Turner’s account blended seamlessly.

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Similarly, in his 1910 Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; or War on the White Slave Trade, Ernest Bell, social activist and nativist, claimed that “Jew traders” would import and install “Polish Jewesses, and any others who will make money for them.” He called on the “whole Christian conscience” to “save us from the importation of ” this “foreign pollution, which is already corrupting the manhood and youth of every large city in this nation” (Bell 1910:260). Both Jewish men and Jewish women demonstrated deviance in Bell’s picture. Jewish men simply wanted to profit from sex, even if it meant selling “their” women, and Jewish women corrupted American manhood. Yet he did not think this of all immigrant groups. For example, he wrote, “The Italian, unlike the Jew, rarely puts women of his own race into the awful life” (Bell 1910:187). He saw Jews as others not merely because they were immigrants or racially other, but also because they were religiously different. It is no coincidence that the cover of Bell’s book depicted a White, Christian woman in a flowing white dress behind bars praying, “My God! If only I could get out of here!” Even Jewish communities worried about prostitution as a serious communal liability (Bristow 1983). Emil Hirsch, a prominent Reform rabbi in Chicago, responded directly to the accusations of McClure’s from his pulpit: “Over on the West Side, the worst thing has occurred that has ever happened to our race. The name of God and Jew has been profaned as never before” (McClure 1909:123). In his response, Hirsch framed the antisemitism in both racial and religious terms: the accusations maligned “our race” and also “the name of God and Jew.” Other Jewish publications suggested the problem was Jewish women. In 1909, a popular advice column in the Yiddish daily newspaper The Forward responded to a distressed young woman who had been kidnapped and forced into prostitution by insisting that it might help other women avoid “choosing” the same destiny: Such letters from victims of “white slavery” come to our attention quite often, but we do not publish them. We are disgusted by this plague on society, and dislike bringing it to the attention of our readers. But as we read this letter we felt we dare not discard it, because it can serve as a warning for other girls. They must, in their dreary lives, attempt to withstand these temptations and guard themselves from going astray. (Metzker 1990:104–5)

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Even apart from this particularly egregious case of blaming the victim, or blaming a woman who made an economic decision, this demonstrates the extent to which both men and women in the Jewish community were constantly on their guard to protect women from entering the business of prostitution. This advice column sometimes invented its letters, so whether they actually received a letter from a regretful former thrill-seeking sex worker is unknown, but it is clear that the editors wanted to take a stand on what kind of behaviors and sexuality were appropriate for Jewish women in the United States. Rosie Hertz, in contrast, did not seem to regret her station in life. She lived with her husband Jacob, her two brothers, and two of her cousins at 7 East First Street in Manhattan. In that building, known as the Columbia Hotel, she ran a “disorderly house,” where men paid to have sex with women. All told, Hertz made her living as “the proprietress of several White slave dens,” as the New York Times explained when she was sentenced to jail.3 And quite a significant living it was: She reportedly gave a yearly sum of $1,000 each to the local Democratic and Republican parties. Some of the men who patronized the place were Jewish, some of the women who worked there were, and Rosie and her family were too. The LA Times explained, in phrasing that was typical, that she was a “wealthy and notorious keeper of disorderly resorts.”4 At the same time it also suggested that her own sexuality was disorderly. She had begun as a “disorderly woman” herself,5 and although she had gained money and property, she had never managed to embody proper womanhood, even if she ceased having sex for money. Other Jewish women criminals had maternal-sounding nicknames that referenced gender norms ironically, like the fence Frederika “Marm” Mandelbaum who was at once manly and motherly. A New York Times reporter described her in the courtroom: “Mother Mandelbaum” was “a gross woman, a German Jewess, with heavy, almost masculine features, restless Black eyes, and a dark, unhealthy looking complexion.”6 Hertz was especially dangerous because of her ability to pass as an appropriate woman, that is, a nurturing mother. Many of her clients and prostitutes knew her as “Mother Hertz,” and an acquaintance described her: “She wears a wig as a pious Jewess would, and a large white apron, and when she smiles . . . she pinches your cheek in a motherly fashion.”7 As a married woman, her wig signaled her obedience to religious tradition and

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Jewish law, and her apron signaled a modest home-making wife, but underneath lurked an egregious violation of those same norms. According to the daily press, Hertz had substituted an inappropriate sexuality for nurturing and raising a family. Thus, both her gender and sexuality were indicted as disorderly, just like her “disorderly home,” a formula that played upon the double notion of a home as a woman’s sphere and her “home” for men seeking sex for money. One article called Hertz the “general godmother for prostitutes on the East Side” (Corrigan 1912:5), and another explained that she was imprisoned for “running a house for immoral purposes”; that is, she ran a house (proper for women) but she ran it incorrectly, which constituted a deformation of her womanhood.8 Instead of breeding and incubating children, she was “one of the most infamous breeders and incubators of prostitutes this city has ever had.”9 Instead of building a home with a man, she destroyed homes, health, and sexual virtue: “firesides have been crumbled, hearts have been broken—virginity has been polluted—virtue has been contaminated—and the very east side leprously disgraced.” Polluting virginity and virtue was a vice coded masculine, while being feminine meant protecting chastity. These public conversations about White slavery portrayed both Jewish men and Jewish women as non-normatively gendered and sexualized. Appropriate sexuality did not involve money, women should not seek out sex publicly, and men should have sex with their wives and not other women. These conversations even suggested that Jews—at least the Jews involved in such matters—were abnormally gendered too.

Emma Goldman, Rose Pastor Stokes, and the Gender of Anarchy The anarchist and Jewish immigrant Emma Goldman garnered a reputation as a rebellious woman. She did, after all, conspire to kill the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, illegally distribute literature about birth control, and encourage people not to register for the compulsory draft in 1917. She became a dynamic speaker in both Yiddish and English and advocated anarchy, and because of her violation of the Comstock Laws and the content of her speeches, she caught the attention of law enforcement in every city she visited. She would be deported from the United

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States in 1919 after the Department of Labor ruled that her citizenship had been revoked by virtue of her husband’s citizenship being revoked. In truth, Goldman did represent a threat to American ideals of the normal. Her anarchism threatened political norms, her public persona and advocacy of women’s participation in political action threatened gender norms, and her frank speeches about sex and birth control threatened sexual norms. She also had something to say about Jews and White slavery. In “The Traffic in Women,” a 1910 essay, Goldman came to the defense of both the Jewish community and the women themselves. She denounced those who put the blame on Jews, calling it “absurd” to “proclaim the myth that the Jews furnish the largest contingent of willing prey.” Goldman noted her own allegiances, or lack thereof. She was no categorical defender of Judaism, but she felt it necessary to come to the defense of Jewish women who had been coerced or forced into prostitution. Given her distance from both “nationalistic tendencies” and “Judaistic sympathies,” Goldman explained, she was an unlikely defender of either the United States or Jewish women. But the facts had compelled her to defend both, she argued. In response to rhetoric from activists like Bell, who had written that it was “absolute fact that Jews are the backbone of this loathsome trade in women” (Bell 1910:188), Goldman countered: “No one but the most superficial will claim that Jewish girls migrate to strange lands, unless they have some tie or relation that brings them there. The Jewish girl is not adventurous . . . There may be exceptions, of course, but to state that large numbers of Jewish girls are imported for prostitution, or any other purpose, is simply not to know Jewish psychology” (Goldman 1911:197–98). Prostitution, in Goldman’s view, was decidedly un-Jewish. Her reasoning did not preclude stereotyping; in fact, it relied on generalizations about Jewish women’s psychology. Countering the assertion that Jewish women had a predisposition to desire the “excitement” of prostitution, Goldman insisted that European Jewish traditions had instilled norms for women that mirrored American norms in their proscription of independent, pioneering, or dangerous activities. The media did not dwell upon Goldman’s Jewishness, but it also did not need to. The stereotype of the bomb-throwing anarchist Jew, so popular in Russia and parts of Europe, also appeared in the United States. Goldman became one of the most recognizable figures of the anarchist

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movement and was tied to several acts of violence in the name of anarchism. Most media assumed that there was something essentially Jewish about “Red Emma,” as they called her, even when she denounced all religion. The Washington Post described Goldman as “about five feet two or three inches high, pale complexion, thin features, and weight about 140. She has a heavy head of hair, slightly Roman nose, Jewish cast of countenance, and rather full lips. She is dressy and stylish in appearance, and she wears spectacles.”10 It is unclear what the author meant by “Jewish cast of countenance” if not the stereotypical large nose, darker complexion, or heavy features. This journalist just seemed to think there was something Jewish about her. Although she neither looked Jewish nor practiced Judaism, Goldman’s Jewishness was inseparable from her image as a woman anarchist. Even during Goldman’s own time, some noticed this association. A journalist sympathetic to her cause noted: “They describe her with unnecessary emphasis as a ‘Russian Jewess.’ She is that, but there is so little of either the Russian or the Jewess about her looks that if she were introduced to you as a descendant of John Alden or Miles Standish you would not be able to detect the fraud” (Thompson 1909 cited in Falk 2005:432). There was nothing that signaled her Jewishness either racially or religiously. This passing was one of the aspects that made Goldman most dangerous: Not only could she physically pass for American, but she also consistently “passed” for a normal woman. One FBI agent assigned to follow her explained: “She is doing tremendous damage. She is womanly, a remarkable orator, tremendously sincere, and carries conviction. If she is allowed to continue here she cannot help but have great influence” (Frey 1917 cited in Wexler 1984:168–69). If she were not womanly, he implied, she would be much less dangerous because people would see her non-normative gender and therefore outsider status. But others insisted that she only seemed womanly, and that was part of what made her un-American. After her deportation, Life magazine proposed fixing the “Emma problem”: “Why not introduce her to Society? Let her be a dulcet debutante, going to teas and giving them. Then, instead of tossing a bomb in Madam Vandersneezer’s window, if she doesn’t like her, she’ll merely cut her at the Ritz.” Rather than throwing bombs—a destructive, masculine criminal activity—Goldman should attend tea parties and learn the art of entertaining, and if she

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were displeased with a person she should proceed with the appropriate feminine response: social snubbing. It continued: “Oh, we know she will be very happy. And her rather hostile-looking hair ought to cause quite a splash in the social whirlpool.” Her hair, somehow combative and unfit for society, was another indication of her deviation from gender norms. If she could just look and act like a real woman, then she would be “happy” (J.D. 1922:2). The media did not hesitate to sexualize Goldman, but it did so by insinuation rather than explicit discussion of her sexual activities. One account of the arrest of Goldman and her compatriot Alexander Berkman said: “She gave her address as 308 East Twenty-Sixth Street, and Berkman gave the same number as his residence. In giving her pedigree Emma Goldman said she was unmarried. Berkman said he was single.”11 Although at this point she and Berkman lived under the same roof, the apartment also served as their headquarters for activism and their new magazine Mother Earth. The press managed to insinuate a sexual relationship even where there was none. The media also referred to her as “the Goldman woman” at least as often as it called her “Emma Goldman.” She never shared a last name with a husband, so this was not to differentiate her from another Goldman, but it emphasized the supposed disconnect between her activities and normative femininity. Oddly enough, the press could have maligned Goldman for flaunting sexual norms because of her divorce or her advocacy of birth control, but it generally avoided the topics. Perhaps in part because the very discussion of birth control was considered obscene (and sometimes prosecuted under the Comstock Laws), the press may simply have considered the entire matter too unsavory to print. Although the most notorious, Goldman was not the only Jewish woman spotlighted for her political activism. Rose Pastor Stokes was an outspoken Socialist Party member and birth control advocate. In 1918, her public writings criticizing the US government resulted in a trial, conviction, and thirty-year sentence under a 1917 Espionage Act. It was eventually overturned on appeal. In other ways, however, she emulated some of the norms of middle-class American womanhood. She had worked in a New York social settlement and married a well-to-do American-born Christian man she met there. He defended her in the press by saying: “She is a Jewess the way the Apostles were Jews—a Christian by faith,”

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and the two married in a church, though she never converted (McGinity 2009:38–39). By the late 1910s, however, she had divorced her husband and become an outspoken critic of settlement work. Well before her criminal trial, the public took notice of her activism— and also her appearance. According to a New York Times article, Stokes had a “boyish look” that was “oddly pleasant.” In this account, she managed to be both not quite feminine but also sexually appealing. The author discussed, in a similar tone to Goldman’s defenders, how Stokes was not typically Jewish: “There is little of the Jewess about Rose Pastor Stokes, except the melancholy associated with her race.” However, she was able to play the male gender role in a way that the author found disquieting. She was forced “to educate herself, she was not only driven to get for herself the means of support, a thing supposed to be given by the father, but she was also obliged to take the place of that father as best she could to her mother and six small children.”12 Stokes took on tasks meant for a man, and eventually had to “take the place” of a father. Despite this journalist’s admiration, others saw her activities as the willful usurping of male political power. Just after her 1918 trial, the lead Life article identified Stokes with all that was bad about Jews. “Mrs. Stokes, as everyone knows, is a Jewess from Russia, and the radical reformatory Jewish mind is a very obstreperous quantity. It has no political or national tradition, and usually regards government as an obstacle to improvement, and sails in promptly either to capture or upset it” (Life 1918:915). The language slid back and forth between Jewish people and “the Jewish mind,” implying that Jewish people (plural) were interchangeable with the Jewish mind (singular, and in this case, Rose Pastor Stokes). Stokes’s image was not appropriately feminine. Whereas proper women would be concerned with human welfare, and proper men would aspire to political stature, “the Jewish mind” apparently did both to undesirable ends. As another Life article credited to E. S. Martin averred: “It is the most destructive mind in the world, the most grasping and unabashed, one of the ablest, one of the most aspiring, and, in its own view, the most concerned for human welfare. It is the mind, one type of which was exhibited the other day in Kansas City at the trial of Rose Pastor Stokes for violation of the Espionage Act. Mrs. Stokes is a Jewess, born in Russia” (Martin 1918a:983). “To be sure, Mrs. Stokes’s

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opinions are not important in themselves,” Martin wrote, “but as a typical Jewish agitator she is interesting, and useful to illustrate what species of mind it is, whence derived and with what tradition, that is working in these days so busily and in such numbers to influence and medicate our civilization” (ibid.). Stokes, according to Martin, should be ignored as a thinker but studied as a paragon of destructive influence on society. It was not antisemitic to say that Jews are destructive, he explained: “Is it censure or compliment to call the Jewish mind destructive? Let us think about that. It is not rude to speak of gunpowder as destructive. Nobody thinks less of gunpowder for being destructive. On the contrary, when one is bent on destroying something” (Martin 1918b:166). Destructiveness, then, was the essential quality of “the Jewish mind,” which Rose Pastor Stokes embodied. Even beyond Goldman and Stokes, the press often represented radical left-wing Jews as having improper gender and sexuality. One article on the “Red” threat in New York’s Lower East Side (a Jewish neighborhood) explained, “Its men let their hair grow long, and its women cut their hair short” (Mitchell 1919:445, 450). The men were “feverish, hysterical, reckless,” and some had “stooping shoulders and spreading, uncombed beards, mottled with food—men ever gesticulating and talking in strange tongues.” This recycled tropes about Orthodox Jewish men— that they spent too much time studying Talmud and were therefore weak and hunched over. The old men were feeble and un-American, but the younger men were worse: “tawdrily foppish, all a little brazen and flaunting in their manner”; these men had taken American “freedom” and used it to flaunt gender norms. The women were a more diverse group, though equally unable to perform gender norms properly: “these girls, somberly dressed and garishly dressed, the women workers from the sweat shops and factories.” Sexualization of these Jews often included indictments of both their political practices and their sexual desires. The author referred to the Lower East Side as the “breeding place of revolt” and “the great Red breeder,” characterizations that were picked up in several other publications, including the Catholic weekly America (Mitchell 1919; “Breeding Places of Revolt” 1919). Demonstrating the intertwined nature of race and religion, America described New York’s Lower East Side Jews as “a race that has gone infidel.” “Infidel” connotes primarily religious othering—after all, its literal meaning is

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“unfaithful” and has long been used by Christians to denigrate others. Here, instead of creating children, these groups created violence and revolt. They flaunted sexual norms, according to these accusations. They wanted laws “which would permit them to indulge all their vicious passions” (Mitchell 1919:446). This image of politically radical Jews went beyond politics. It also implied that Jews were both racially and religiously disposed to improper gender and sexuality. For American Jews, gender and sexuality were integral to racialization. “White slavery” exposés suggested that both Jewish men and women not only engaged in sexuality improperly, but also spread that improper sexuality to others. When Emma Goldman and Rose Pastor Stokes publicly advocated anarchism, many Americans saw them to be upsetting the norms of what good White women should do. And yet these existed alongside other texts praising Jewish women for their care of children and the home according to religious traditions. Judaism, Whiteness, the “Jewish race,” gender, and sexuality, then, all intersected to shape American ideas of what it meant to be Jewish.

Conclusion Though scholarship on Jews has considered the categories of both religion and race, more than some other adjacent fields, it has often focused on one or the other rather than seeing them simultaneously. This chapter has begun to show the ways that race and religion intersected for American Jews in an age of immigration. It demonstrates how popular print sources depicted Jewish men and women as both racially and religiously distinctive from other White Americans, and how promoting stereotypes about gender and sexuality was one path to this end. As Kelsy Burke, Dawne Moon, and Theresa W. Tobin show in this volume, religio-racial minorities are often depicted as hypersexual or sexually deviant. But these chapters also remind us that the particulars of these depictions can be quite different: Exclusion and othering with regard to sexuality come in many colors. They also show the ways that religious categories are racialized and sexualized. Notes

1 Reports of the Immigration Commission, pp. 292, 289, 288. 2 “Society Proceedings.”

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“Woman White Slaver.” “Book of Graft.” “Thinks Mrs. Hertz.” “Robber’s Merchant Suit.” “Vice Report,” as cited in Joselit 1983:47. “Tells of 30 Years Graft.” “Vice Report.” “Cabinet and Anarchy.” “Emma Goldman Arrested.” “Rose Stokes.”

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Antler, Joyce. 2007. You Never Call! You Never Write! A History of the Jewish Mother. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bell, Ernest, ed. 1910. Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls, or War on the White Slave Trade. Chicago: GS Ball. “The Book of Graft.” 1913. Los Angeles Times, March 11. Boyarin, Daniel. 1998. “What Does a Jew Want?; or, the Political Meaning of the Phallus.” Pp. 211–40 in The Psychoanalysis of Race, edited by Christopher Lane. New York: Columbia University Press. “Breeding Places of Revolt.” 1919. America: A Catholic Review of the Week (April 26): 84. Bristow, Edward. 1983. Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery 1870–1939. New York: Schocken. Brodkin, Karen. 1998. How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says about Race in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. “Cabinet and Anarchy.” 1901. Washington Post, September 10. Corrigan, Joseph. 1912. “Magnates of Crime.” McClure’s 40 (November). D., J. 1922. “Our Emma.” Life, February 9, 2. “Emma Goldman Arrested for Talking Violence.” 1907. New York Times, January 7, 16. Falk, Candace, ed. 2005. Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, Making Speech Free, 1902–1909. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Frey, Charles Daniel to Justice Department. 1917. April 24, FBI files, OG15446. Gilman, Sander. 1991. The Jew’s Body. New York: Routledge. Goldman, Emma. 1911. Anarchism and Other Essays. Second Revised Edition. New York: Mother Earth. Goldstein, Eric. 2006. The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Grant, Madison. 1916. Passing of the Great Race. New York: Scribners. Hart, M. B. 2007. The Healthy Jew: The Symbiosis of Judaism and Modern Medicine. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Hyman, Paula. 1995. Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: Roles and Representations of Women. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

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Imhoff, Sarah. 2017. Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. 1998. Whiteness of a Different Color. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Joselit, Jenna Weissman. 1983. Our Gang: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Knopf, S. A. 1905. “Jewish Immunity from Consumption.” New Era Illustrated Magazine, August 7. Martin, Edward. 1918a. “The Jewish Mind in these States.” Life, June 20. ———. 1918b. “More About the Jewish Mind.” Life, August 1. McClure, Samuel. 1909. “The Tammanyizing of a Civilization.” McClure’s Magazine 34 (November): 117–18. McGinity, Keren. 2009. Still Jewish: A History of Women and Intermarriage in America. New York: NYU Press. Metzker, Isaac. 1990. A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward. New York: Schocken. Mitchell, John. 1919. “‘Reds’ in New York Slums: How Insidious Doctrines Are Propagated in New York’s East Side.” Forum, April. Presner, Todd. 2007. Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration. New York: Routledge. Reports of the Immigration Commission: Statements and Recommendations Submitted by Societies and Organizations Interested in the Subject of Immigration. 1911. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. “A Robber’s Merchant Suit.” 1884. New York Times, January 24. “Rose Stokes in the Shirtwaist Strike.” 1910. New York Times, January 2. Skok, Deborah. 2007. More Than Neighbors: Catholic Settlements and Day Nurseries in Chicago, 1893–1930. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. “Society Proceedings.” 1909. Journal of the American Medical Association (December 18): 2124. Soderlund, Gretchen. 2013. Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stoddard, Lothrop. 1920. The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. “Tells of 30 Years’ Graft.” 1913. Washington Post, March 11, 9. “Thinks Mrs. Hertz Will Tell of Graft.” 1913. New York Times, February 21. Thompson, Charles Willis. 1909. “What She Is Like and What She Believes—An Interview with Emma Goldman.” New York Times, May 30. Turner, George Kibbe. 1907. “The City of Chicago: A Study of Great Immoralities.” McClure’s Magazine 28 (April). ———. 1909a. “Tammany’s Control of New York by Professional Criminals.” McClure’s Magazine 33 (June). ———. 1909b. “Daughters of the Poor.” McClure’s Magazine (November).

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Urofsky, Melvin. 1995. American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust. Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 301–302. “Vice Report.” 1913. Judah Magnes Archives. Central Archives of the History of the Jewish People, November 14. Wexler, Alice. 1984. Emma Goldman: An Intimate Life. New York: Pantheon Books. “Woman White Slaver Goes to Jail.” 1913. New York Times, July 6. Zimmerman, Jean Turner. 1916. White or Yellow? A Story of America’s Great White Slave Trade with Asia. Chicago: np.

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Race and the Religious Possibilities for Sexuality in Conservative Protestantism Kelsy Burke, Dawne Moon, and Theresa W. Tobin

The definition of sin has varied through Christian history, but Christians have used sexual behavior (and sometimes feelings) to indicate a person’s morality (or immorality) perhaps more consistently than any other indicator. Historian of religion Mark Jordan (2002:78) notes that these sins “have included [ . . . ] every erotic or quasi-erotic action that can be performed by human bodies except penile-vaginal intercourse between two partners who are not primarily seeking pleasure and who do not intend to prevent conception.” What has been allowed sexually has, for much of Christian history, been an extremely narrow category, making Christians vulnerable to sexual shame. In the United States today, Christian communities embrace varied understandings of appropriate sexual behavior, and social inequalities affect Christians’ experiences of sexual shame and require them to take different paths to overcome it. Conservative Protestant churches—those that encourage a personal relationship with Jesus, hold a “high view” of Scripture, and adhere to characteristic Evangelical doctrines such as substitutionary atonement (Bebbington 1989)—tend to define same-sex sexuality and variant experiences of gender (being transgender, for instance) as sinful because of their belief in a doctrine known as gender complementarianism.1 At its core, this doctrine posits that God created two opposite sexes, male and female, for the purpose of completing each other in marriage—either anatomically, reproductively, or in a gender hierarchy (Brownson 2013). In effect, conventional conservative Protestant teachings treat binary gender as a commandment, preceding the Ten Commandments in time and importance, so anything that challenges this doctrine or reveals it to be socially constructed appears as a sinful rebellion against God (Moon and Tobin 2018). Colonialism and White supremacy have been 114

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rationalized in part by suggesting that non-European ways of understanding gender and sexuality are morally deficient compared to European ways. We draw from two sociological studies to understand how conservative Protestants’ experiences of sexual shame are shaped by particular intersections of race, sexuality, and gender.2 The first is an ethnographic study of conservative Protestants who are engaging in conversations about their churches’ spiritual violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) people and their routes to reconciliation (Moon and Tobin 2018). Between 2014 and 2018, Moon and Tobin conducted 489 hours of participant observation of LGBTQI Evangelical organizations and conferences, intensive semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of 102 participants (40 of which were conducted with LGBTQ Christians of color by Black, queer, justice educator, and movement participant Alicia T. Crosby), and analysis of published statements (blogs, columns) by participants. Here we focus on the experiences of Black LGBTQ Protestants.3 The second study is a multi-method examination of the genre of Christian sex advice (Burke 2016), which, as we explain below, is firmly rooted within a White, conservative Evangelical tradition. Burke conducted a virtual ethnography between 2010 and 2012 through in-depth content analysis of a sample of twelve websites (six blogs, one message board, five stores); fifty interviews with mostly White, cisgender,4 heterosexual website creators and users; and an online survey completed by 768 users of five websites. To supplement online data, she analyzed the content of eighteen published Christian sex advice books and observed three face-to-face conferences related to Christian sexuality. We analyze and compare data from opposite ends of what pioneering Black feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins (1990) calls the “matrix of domination,” or the social organization of race, class, gender, and sexuality as overlapping hierarchies. By examining the experiences of Black LGBTQ Christians alongside White cis/heterosexual married Christians, we are able to highlight the role that White hetero-patriarchy plays in shaping sexual possibilities for conservative Protestants. We use “White hetero-patriarchy” to specify a system of White supremacy that produces and is produced by heterosexual, male domination. We first examine the experiences of Black LGBTQ Christians to illustrate the role

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of sexual shame in America’s racialized history. Black LGBTQ Christians must navigate the conflict between relying on the Black Church for support and relief from racist society and being seen as a “race traitor” if they acknowledge their sexual or gender difference. The overwhelming experience of sexual stigmatization produced by racist stereotypes illuminates the peculiar entitlement to sexual pleasure enjoyed by many White, cisgender, heterosexual Evangelicals—particularly men. We then examine the sexual entitlement presented in Christian sex advice that privileges White cisgender heterosexual men’s experiences and fosters certain forms of sexual agency for White cisgender heterosexual women. Together, these examples illustrate how race, gender, and sexuality shape American Christians’ experiences of sexual shame and sexual entitlement.

Stigmatized Sexuality: Being Black, Being LGBTQ Conservative Christians tend to see shame as potentially redeeming; feeling shame over a personal quality that has led someone to violate others’ trust, such as lust or greed, can inspire them to become a better person, worthy of relationship. Thus, they see shame as re-integrating, aiming to protect relationship and belonging, and often try to dispense it with love, assuring the shamed person that they will once again belong (Braithwaite 1989). Given their complementarian church culture, conventionally conservative Protestants tend to see sexual/gender variation as sinful, so they shame it, intending to inspire change. However, people generally cannot will their sexual orientation and gender identity to change, so this shame becomes perpetual. Living in perpetual shame about one’s capacity to love others and know oneself impedes all relationships. Christians who shame LGBTQI people may intend for them to change and be re-integrated, but that shame perpetually brands them as unworthy (Moon and Tobin 2018). In predominantly White conservative Protestant churches, being LGBTQI is likely to be treated as an individual problem or pathology. A church may make collective efforts to address it, such as organized prayer teams or ministries for sex addicts or “reparative” therapy, which can at least provide a sense of community for an individual in the depths of shame (Gerber 2011). What’s more, many conservative Protestant

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churches are beginning to recognize that singling out LGBTQI people comes across not as loving so much as hateful. Even the staunchly antiLGBTQI Southern Baptist Convention has tried to “show the love of Christ to gay family members or neighbors” and “repent of anti-gay rhetoric” (Ford 2014). But, unlike White Americans, African Americans have been subject to collective sexual shaming through White supremacy, shaping a Black Church culture that produces distinct kinds of shaming experiences. Since the beginning of European conquest, European Christians have defined non-White and non-Christian peoples as inferior partly on the basis of real or imagined sexual/gender differences (for illustrative examples, see chapters by Sarah Imhoff, and Ashley Garner and Z. Fareen Parvez, in this volume). Racist ideology erroneously associates Black men with sexual violence, Black women with sexual promiscuity and moral corruption, and both as closer to animals’ shameless public sexuality than Whites (Collins 1990, 2005; Douglas 1999). Because Blackness is “read off ” of a racialized body, this form of stigmatization generates an experience of perpetual exposure and constant White surveillance and judgment (Harris-Perry 2011:111; see also Collins 1990, 2005; Fanon 1967; Ferguson 2004; Goffman 1963; Snorton 2014). Political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry (2011) defines anti-Black racism in the United States as a form of political shaming whereby the state dispenses shame toward a whole group of people, defining Blackness as malignant and encoding that stigma in law and policy (Alexander 2010; Davis 2003). While some shame may re-integrate people into their community, racist shame does not re-integrate people of color into White supremacist society because racial difference does not violate relationships (racism does), and White supremacy is premised on exclusion and exploitation. Recognizing that stereotypes of Black sexual deviancy drive racism, the Black Church has long preached “respectability,” especially around marriage and sexuality (Higginbotham 1994). Instead of directly challenging norms about sexual “purity” rooted in White hetero-patriarchy, respectability politics holds Black people accountable for living up to these ideals. In many Black Church contexts, respectability politics may sanction anyone who might be perceived as confirming racist stereotypes about Black sexual deviancy, including people with HIV/AIDS; gay, lesbian, or bisexual people; single mothers; transgender people;

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and anyone who might tarnish the Black community’s image of sexual morality (Cohen 1999; Collins 1990, 2005; Harris-Perry 2011; Higginbotham 1994; Morrison 1992). Because respectability answers to White hetero-patriarchal norms, it has a distinctive impact on Black women and LGBTQI people. Scholars and respondents alike mention the traditional pattern of churches forcing teenage mothers, not fathers, to publicly apologize in front of the congregation (Higginbotham 1994; Snorton 2014). Other scholars comment on the tendency of Black men and women to see Black women as race traitors if they publicly hold prominent Black men accountable for sexual violence (Collins 2005; Crenshaw 1991; Harris-Perry 2011; Morrison 1992). Black denominations vary in terms of their official teachings and members’ politics (Shelton and Cobb 2017), but Black LGBTQ and same-gender-loving respondents from a wide range of churches reported shared experiences not reported by White people. The repackaging of White hetero-patriarchy as respectability in some churches has resulted in particular ridicule of LGBTQI people, even from the pulpit (Collins 2005; Douglas 1999; Snorton 2014). Many Black respondents spoke of a double standard confronting visible sexual or gender nonconformity relative to other sins. Bishop Harold Robinson, recognized as a leader in ending the double standard against LGBT people among Black churches in Chicago, reflected on the climate when he was younger: It was the one sin where you could laugh—laughingly talk about it and disparage the people in a mocking way. [ . . . ] So you could always get a laugh about sissies or, you know, men sleeping with men or whatever, you’d get a laugh and you could call ’em nasty, you could call ’em filthy. [ . . . ] See, I just have to acknowledge it because you did not mock other people the same way. Whether you preached against it or not, they wasn’t mocked, they wasn’t shamed, and they certainly wasn’t made to feel that they weren’t welcome. So fornicator is there and the adulterer’s there and the one with the drinking problem is there, and all of that—all of them are there on Sunday morning. None of them feel like that they couldn’t come to church except for, like I said, the way that particular community was treated.

Collins (2005:108) reflects on such attitudes: “Holding fast to dominant ideology, many African American ministers believe that homosexuality

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is unnatural for Blacks and is actually a ‘White disease.’” She argues that this anti-LGBTQ response paradoxically maintains White heteropatriarchy as the standard for belonging, for rights, and in the case of the church, for membership in the church and God’s kingdom. Respectability politics gave hetero-patriarchy a different shape in Black churches than in predominantly White ones. To overcome heteronormative shame to the point of being able to serve God and other people, some White LGBTQ conservative Protestants eventually accept and claim their LGBTQ identities. This allows them to restore relationships, even if they accept their church’s teachings about sex and marriage and pursue celibacy. But under the weight of respectability for Black LGBTQ people, claiming such identities can be particularly fraught: not simply challenging heteronormativity, but at times seeming to justify the White hetero-patriarchal equation of Blackness with sexual deviance. Respondents who had experienced both predominantly White and Black or multiethnic church settings could make explicit comparisons. Aurora, a Black, twenty-six-year-old trans woman, spoke of having grown up in predominantly Black or multiracial churches and schools until her mother died when she was sixteen, at which point she moved and began attending her stepmother’s predominantly White, Assemblies of God church. As conservative as the White church was, her experience captures the focus on an outward presentation of respectability in predominantly Black churches and multiracial Christian schools she attended. Reflecting on her youth, when others saw her as a feminine boy, she said: I felt more accepted [at the predominantly White church] because [ . . . ] it seemed as though gender was the currency in the Black spaces. In the White spaces the gender expression wasn’t as big of a deal as the sexuality. What I mean by that is, they didn’t necessarily care that I was more flamboyant in say, my hand gestures or more eclectic in my style of dress, as long as they knew privately that I was not sexually engaging in anything that would be considered deviant. [ . . . ] Whereas, you know, in Black spaces it seemed to be [ . . . ] opposite, [ . . . ] where you needed to have an outward gender expression that was cis[gender], while what you did privately wasn’t as much of a concern. I still didn’t feel liberated because I knew I couldn’t be who I really was. Definitely not openly without being rejected.

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This focus on outward display could have the effect of silencing Black LGBTQ Christians or making them invisible. Instead of the ex-gay ministries or church prayer teams that White respondents reported experiencing, Black participants in the movement were more likely to report enduring hours of physical exorcism efforts or a pastor’s private efforts to purge their “demon.” While many White LGBTQ conservative Christians have been sent to group ministries to seek “repair,” Darren Calhoun, for instance, reports having lived for nearly two years in his pastor’s out- of- state church building, away from friends and family, fasting twice weekly, sleeping on the altar, and cleaning the building in exchange for $50 a week in an effort to stop being gay (Keating 2018). The need to diminish the collective stigmatization of Black people distinctly shaped the experiences of Black LGBTQ Christians compared to White LGBTQ Christians. Black respondents struggled with the desire to cultivate respectability out of love and responsibility for their families. For instance, Imani shared her concern that her bisexuality could bring trouble to her mother, whose prominence in the church meant that they were always in the spotlight, and whose own mother (Imani’s grandmother) was highly critical in enforcing respectability: I was scared of embarrassing my mother. [ . . . ] My parents got divorced when I was a kid, and that got real interesting at church [laughs], and I kind of felt like our family had had enough. [ . . . ] I mean, everybody knew my mother, everybody. [ . . . ] [when] my grandmother was still alive, she went to the church. [ . . . ] all I could think about was the swirling doom that would be, if people found out. [ . . . ] I never even thought for a second that [coming out] was an option.

White respondents also described fear that coming out as LGBTQ would embarrass or bring stigma on their parents, but Imani feared that her whole family’s belonging within the community, and indeed her whole community’s respectable standing, depended on her remaining silent about her sexuality. Because being LGBTQ in predominantly White churches is treated as an individual pathology, White participants did not tend to describe the same risk that their disclosure would impinge on their families, their churches, or on all White people.

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Because racist stigma is based on appearances, community respectability demands silence and invisibility with regard to any variation from dominant gender and sexual ideals. Imani experienced that silence as a child and teenager, trying to make sense of feelings of difference. She recalled: Because I got all that information filtered through [older relatives], it was still very hushed and words people wouldn’t use. And people’s partners were their “friend” and, [ . . . ] no matter how clear the people were about who they were and who they loved, everybody else talked about it as if they could create a secret out of something that wasn’t a secret. And then [my cousin] who was in the same congregation, came out. Her mama had a fit, and their relationship was so strained I didn’t even see her for a while.

Under the weight of respectability, Black LGBTQ shame is kept within the individual, preferably, or failing that, within the family, or failing that, within the church, and people who fail to keep it quiet simply “disappear.” In fact, Imani feared that if she came out, she might “disappear” too, perhaps being exiled by her family. Strikingly, Imani actually grew up in the United Church of Christ, a denomination that officially affirms LGBTQI identities and same-sex marriage. Her pastor even said supportive things about LGBT people from the pulpit, but the politics of respectability superseded denominational policy. Under the weight of respectability, she couldn’t hear these things until she remembered them years later, after she claimed her identity as a bisexual person. In response to this stigma, many “compartmentalize” their racial/ Christian identities from their sexual identities, expressing each at different times, which strains both romantic and platonic relationships (Pitt 2010). A gay respondent, Jamal, observed: [T]here’s about four churches that are pretty much known as where all the [Black] gays go in Chicago and they’ve all been very publicly, actively, politically anti-gay. On any given Sunday somebody might be praying against the spirit of homosexuality or encouraging some hyper-masculine behavior and response to a more effeminate or a less

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manly expression. [ . . . ] In those churches I have lots of friends and when I talk to them about [ . . . ] the culture of their church the response I get over and over again is that, “Well, I know they’re going to be that way. I know they’re going to act that way, but I like the music, or I like the sermons, and so when they do that I just tune out.” What I’m hearing them say is that they’re effectively leaving entire parts of themselves and their experience at the door, bottling that up, compartmentalizing it.

Respectability politics leaves many Black LGBTQ people feeling like they must choose which oppression to resist and which to endure. For our respondents, compartmentalizing wasn’t limited to non-affirming churches. When they found LGBTQI-affirming churches, they were often predominantly White communities that failed to minister to them as Black people, sometimes with overt racism or ignorance (King 2016). They experienced a double bind that left them feeling like they had to compartmentalize in any faith community, an experience one respondent described as “spiritual homelessness.” However, the Black Church’s focus on a God who loves and liberates the oppressed, coupled with the personal relationships with God that many conservative churches cultivate, allowed some to live confident that God made them and loves them just as they are and wants them to share that unconditional love with others. At LGBTQI Evangelical conferences, a number of Black participants testified to hearing God tell them to embrace “who he created me to be,” and one Black Apostolic same-gender-loving respondent from the oversample reflected on God’s response to her marriage to a woman: I didn’t think that the church would be approving, but I always felt that God always loved me. Every time I would talk to God, he was never mad at me. He never made me feel like he didn’t love me, or that I was a bad person. So I was able to separate my relationship with God with the teachings of the church. [ . . . ] If I had honestly felt that God told me “This is wrong, I don’t want you to do this,” then I would have had another set of choices to make, but I didn’t feel that God told me that, and I really am being honest. I’m not pretending he didn’t tell me. [ . . . ] He didn’t say that to me. He never has.

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She felt somewhat welcome in church when people would ask how her wife was doing, but she was still afraid to ask them to christen her children, lest they say no.

White Sexual Entitlement and Christian Sex Advice In contrast to sexualities constrained by racism and heteronormativity, White married cisgender heterosexual Christians can today enjoy a relatively shameless sexual existence. Titles of published Christian sex advice books—A Celebration of Sex (Rosenau 1994), The Gift of Sex (Penner and Penner 1973), Holy Sex (Wier 1999)—prominently display the belief that God creates sex as an extraordinary and blessed form of intimacy (DeRogatis 2015). Online, Christians can find blogs and message boards to share their sexual stories, ask questions, and get advice from others. They can find Christian online stores that sell sex toys promising customers that they will not encounter pornographic or other forbidden material but that they will find resources to increase their sexual satisfaction (Burke 2016). Conservative Christians who write about sex, both in print and online, gain access to a contemporary and permissive understanding of sexual identities, practices, and desires, alongside conservative religious beliefs. Both secular and religious sex advice as an industry emerged in the 1970s and have flourished ever since, reflecting what some scholars call “therapeutic culture,” which prioritizes improving the “self ” in order to optimize emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being (Wuthnow 1994). Both promote the idea that good sex is an important part of achieving personal fulfillment. The “goodness” of good sex for Evangelical Christians incorporates dual meanings—good as normal, allowed, and sanctioned by God and good as feelings of pleasure and satisfaction. For Evangelicals who write Christian sex advice, God created sex to be enjoyed by married couples, regardless of race. As Evangelicals who believe a conversation with God and the Bible should be their sole authorities when it comes to making even the most practical decisions for their lives, their interpretation is influenced by a particular social context. What sociologist Joe Feagin (2010) calls a “White racial frame” influences the stories these authors tell, the emotions and feelings they display, along with their religious convictions. The entitlement to

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pleasurable and fulfilling sexuality comes from their racialized perspective and the privileges commonly granted to Whites. And, as Sarah Imhoff illustrates in her chapter on race, sexuality, and American Judaism, White Evangelicals also draw from Protestants’ dominance throughout US history to confidently assert their claim to normal sexuality. Both dimensions of “good sex” reflect White and Christian privileges associated with free will, autonomy, and personal taste. The Whiteness of Christian sex advice as a genre typically goes unmarked. Published books are marketed to the generic “married Christian.” Online, users interact without seeing photographs of one another. When Burke observed Pastor Mark Driscoll on a speaking tour for his latest book, Real Marriage: The Truth about Sex, Friendship, and Life Together (Driscoll and Driscoll 2012), she wrote in her fieldnotes the following description of the pastor of a megachurch in Georgia who introduced Driscoll: “jeans, polo shirt, muscles, White.” For the audience description: “VERY WHITE. Over 1,000 participants. Counting 4 people who are not White from where I am sitting.” Over the next two days, she made half a dozen tally marks noting additional people of color she noticed in the audience. This pattern was consistent for all Christian sexuality conferences she attended. For the sample of eighteen Christian sex advice books she analyzed, 100% were penned by White authors. Many Black preachers have found success in contemporary and mediated forms of Protestantism—from the Christian self-help industry to televangelism (Harrison 2005)—yet their presence in the Christian sex advice industry is virtually non-existent. For example, T. D. Jakes, one of America’s most famous Black megachurch preachers, has authored a number of spiritual self-help books that discuss gender and marriage but treat sex and sexuality as peripheral. Though he has made several statements regarding homosexuality (as nearly all celebrity preachers have been asked to do), he does not tend to discuss the act of sex directly. In his book, Lose that Man and Let Him Go (1995:78), he playfully writes, “stay out of the missionary position!” to make his point that men should not be “missionaries” who feel entitled to change their wives. Referencing sex euphemistically maintains Black Church “respectability,” which is in stark contrast to dozens of books dedicated entirely and directly to improving one’s sex life authored by White Evangelicals. Of course, Black Protestants may read these sex advice books by White authors

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that are generically marketed to all Christians. Still, on the Christian sex advice websites Burke studied, non-White users appeared to be few. Of the fifty website users she interviewed, 91% were White. For the 768 Christian sexuality website users who responded to her online survey, 92% were White. The most visible and mainstream celebrations of sex within Christianity are clearly a White phenomenon. Yet, it is only recently that White conservative Christians have claimed sexual pleasure as part of their religious framework, and still many leaders and writers in this tradition avoid the topic. Evangelical purity culture, or the abstinence movement, offers one example of the push and pull of sexual temptations for White, straight believers (Irby 2013). Through groups and organizations led by mostly White Evangelicals, teens are encouraged to pledge to postpone sexual intercourse until marriage and have the opportunity to attend meet-ups and conferences to affirm their commitments and celebrate with fellow believers. Abstinence groups reify gender difference, framing teenage boys’ sexual pursuits as inevitable and natural (if undesirable) and girls’ sexual activities as shameful and permanently destructive— whether they choose them or not (Diefendorf 2015). These groups frame abstinence as an individual choice that teenagers can make, despite societal pressures to give into sexual temptation (Gardner 2011). Especially for women, US Evangelicals focus on the ways in which abstinence can be empowering—modesty as women’s power against men and selfesteem a result of a high self-worth associated with sexual purity. This individualized empowerment narrative reflects a racialized sense of entitlement and agency available to Whites and paves the way for a White entitlement to sexual pleasure within marriage. Amidst stories about the repercussions and negative consequences of premarital sex, abstinence groups frame sex in marriage as both the goal of and reward for premarital chastity (ibid.). Christian sex advice thrives as a market because sexual inhibitions and shame about desires for intimacy—once required to live a Godly life according to Christian beliefs—are hard to shed on or after the wedding day. Evangelical sex advice capitalizes on the paradox of these inhibitions as couples struggle to achieve the sexual pleasure they believe God wants for their marriages. For instance, Dinah, a White BetweenTheSheets. com member, says that before she became a Christian, she was sexually

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“promiscuous,” participated in sex work, and suffered from low selfesteem. After she married, she was “born again” and learned God’s plan for marital sexuality, but her sex life continued to suffer. She remarked: My poor husband was lucky if we had sex once every three months. I believe this was because when I was with my husband, I was plagued with memories I didn’t want. I felt that if I ever felt sexual, my husband would lose respect for me. I knew God created sex for enjoyment between husband and wife, but I couldn’t apply it to my life.

Dinah’s story reflects a White hetero-patriarchy that equates female and non-White bodies that are overtly sexual with a lack of respectability. The key for Dinah, who is White, is that she was able to overcome the shame she felt about her sinful past so she could have a successful sex life in marriage. Online, what users call “sexual awakening stories” are well established in the vernacular of Christian sexuality websites. Like Evangelical salvation narratives or testimonies, they follow a distinct formula: a time of sin and suffering that is overcome by believing in God who has the power to transform believers’ sexual lives. LustyChristianLadies.com, a blog written by and for Christian women, offers an instructional blog post, “How to Have a Sexual Awakening,” that describes the experience as “a sudden revelation of God’s intention to have a richer sexual relationship with [one’s] husband.” Blogger Kitty describes the early years of her marriage when she had but a “minor interest in sex” and didn’t communicate about it with her husband. Then, “quite all of a sudden and surprisingly” she experienced a sexual awakening. She credits God with her transformation, and tells her readers that faithfulness is key to achieving sexual fulfillment: The most practical thing you can do to change is to pray continually for God to change you. He is on your side. He wants your spouse to be free even more than you do. Ask him to make you who you need to be in order to be a blessing to your spouse. Do all that he leads you to do.

While placing change and transformation ultimately in the hands of a divine creator, Kitty also tells her readers to actively pray and that they

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must do all that God leads them to do—for their husbands. Such public talk of sexuality, even behind the veil of Internet anonymity, would be unthinkable for many Black Christians, given the stigmatization of Black people on the basis of supposed sexual excess. This comparison reveals the Whiteness of these spaces, where Christians feel comfortable speaking openly and frankly about sexual pleasure. For White women using Christian sex advice websites, sexual awakening stories, like salvation stories, deftly combine a sense of agency with submission to God and their husbands. As historian Virginia Brereton (1991) argues about salvation narratives, conversion requires an actor: someone who “accepts Christ” rather than “is accepted by Christ,” giving individuals responsibility for their own eternal fate. How White believers imagine themselves as actors, rather than acted upon, reflects a racialized history whereby they imagine possibilities and opportunities, rather than obstacles. When it comes to sexuality, White women can draw from this racial frame to imagine vast possibilities and overcome shame. Contrast this with Black LGBTQ Christians from Moon and Tobin’s study, who experienced pressures to truncate or compartmentalize their sexual agency in the pursuit of racial justice. Respectability’s extreme emphasis on moral perfection to counter racist stereotypes connects to a Black Church vision of a God who judges racists and other sinners harshly. The fierce liberator God who smites evildoers who perpetuate White supremacy, might just smite the Black person with samegender attractions or feelings of gender difference for their betrayal of respectability. Under the weight of respectability and accountability to White hetero-patriarchal complementarity, racism works to stifle sexual agency and authenticity. Christian sexuality websites present language that appears genderequal but that still privileges White men’s sexual knowledge and experiences. Though formal rules about who is allowed to have and enjoy sex are no different for men or women, men who completed Burke’s survey were more likely than women to report multiple sexual partners and to masturbate. Online discussions on Christian sex advice websites often describe women’s sex appeal as something that women must do and men’s appeal as something that men are. For instance, LustyChristianLadies bloggers frame women’s sex appeal as something they can accomplish through the right clothes and accessories, asking readers

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to respond to the “Fill in the Blank”: “I feel really sexy whenever I put on_________.” This is in contrast to the LustyChristianLadies “Fill in the Blank” asking about men’s sex appeal: “My husband doesn’t realize how sexy I find his_________.” Readers respond to these statements differently according to the prompts. For women, their sexiness comes from stiletto heels and miniskirts. For men, their sexiness comes from their broad shoulders, biceps, butts, or chests. Men’s bodies, by default, are what women describe as appealing, whereas women describe having to “put on” what makes them sexy. The patriarchal beliefs and practices of Evangelicalism shape how White men and women express sexual entitlement. Driscoll’s writings and teachings offer an illuminating example of the pervasive but often invisible relationship between Whiteness, patriarchy, and sexual entitlement. He has gained celebrity status with a style that is simultaneously ultra-modern (technologically savvy and stylized), ultra-masculine, and ultra-conservative. For instance, in one sermon quoted in a Christianity Today article in 2008, Driscoll defines “real Christian men” as “dudes: heterosexual, win- a- fight, punch-you-in-the-nose dudes” (O’Brien 2008). Real Marriage, the sex advice book authored by Driscoll and his wife, tells couples to experiment sexually to find practices that optimize their pleasure, including oral or anal sex or sex toys. They interpret the Song of Solomon as biblical support for a range of sexual acts, including “kissing (1:2), oral/fellatio—her initiative (2:3), manual stimulation—her invitation (2:6), erotic striptease (6:13–7:9), and new places and positions, including outdoors—her initiative (7:11–13)” (Driscoll and Driscoll 2012, 171–172). Though not without controversy (Driscoll resigned following a scandal at Mars Hills Church, which he founded), Driscoll’s writings resemble the messages presented in most twenty-first-century Christian sex advice forums. On the websites Burke studied, writers commonly referred to Hebrews 13:4 (King James Version): “Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled.” The guidelines presented by most Evangelicals who write or talk about sex recognize the subjective nature of sexual desire and, therefore, leave open a vast space of permissible sex within Christian marriages. As popular author Kevin Leman (2002:165) writes, “The Bible is amazingly free in what it allows and even encourages a

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married couple to do in bed.” Put another way, one reader of a popular blog, LustyChristianLadies.com, comments, “There are far more things that you can enjoy together, than those you cannot.” This White Evangelical sexual logic has broad implications. Consider Driscoll, whose theology reflects a form of Calvinism known as Reformed Protestantism. For Driscoll and others who share this theology, God has chosen his elect to receive salvation and enter into heaven. The idea of “irresistible grace” means that people who have been chosen will come to know that they are chosen as they are guided to live a life of faithfulness and obedience. In other words, some are more worthy than others. Consider this theology alongside the nearly all- White audiences at the three conferences Burke attended, the White authors of Christian sex advice books, and the vast majority of White participants of Christian sex advice websites. Though implicit, the message is clear: It is a group of White, cis/ heterosexual believers who share and celebrate the idea that God encourages their sexual pleasure and that God has ultimately chosen them, not others, to inherit the kingdom of God. This seems especially stark when we consider how gender complementarianism has historically rationalized White supremacy. As racism defines Black people in terms of sexual excess and deviance from gender complementarianism, it appears that not even Black married heterosexuals can speak publicly about “sexual awakenings” or the blessing of sexual pleasure, much less the links between sexual oppression and racial oppression (see Douglas 1999).

Conclusion As each chapter in this section of the book describes, examining the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality reveals how systems of power shape religious experiences. This chapter brings together two studies to showcase how race and racism remain central to the experiences of cis/heterosexual White Evangelicals and Black LGBTQ Protestants in the United States. In turn, it illustrates how religion is raced, even and especially for those who appear racially invisible in America’s racial system. While sexual sin (and thus experiences of sexual shame) affect both Black and White Evangelicals, the potential to overcome or disrupt

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sexual shame is shaped by alignment with White hetero-patriarchal norms. This is why conservative Protestants may celebrate White, cisgender, heterosexual, married Christians’ (particularly husbands’) sexual desires, curiosity, and adventurousness, while stigmatizing and marginalizing LGBTQI experiences and relationships. This stigma is especially persistent for Black LGBTQ Protestants who face constraints of racist stereotypes about their sexuality and pressures of “respectability” within their church communities. Scholars who study Whiteness focus on its supposed racial unmarkedness and neutrality, the privileges it accrues, and the way people treat it as the standard from which others deviate (Desmond and Emirbayer 2009; Feagin 2010). We add to these definitions that even for many Christians who hold conservative beliefs about sexuality, Whiteness includes a sense of entitlement to sexual pleasure, particularly for White men. For these groups, sexual pleasure can be not just acceptable, but pleasing to God. Compared to White heterosexuals, Black heterosexual life appears remarkably devoid of entitlement even from the standpoint of Black LGBTQ people, and any Christian who defies the White complementarian narrative, however unintentionally, is cast as sinful and shameful. The same interlocking systems of power also shape the routes available to acceptance of oneself as a whole person—with unique experiences of sexuality, race, and gender. By examining the social context of these Christian discussions about sexuality, we can observe how conservative Protestantism is both product and producer of White supremacy. Notes

1 While it is possible to be conservative in some ways and still support LGBTQI identities, same-sex marriage, and gender transitions, here we use “conservative Protestant” as a broad umbrella for Protestant religious traditions that support essentialist gender/sexual ideals, including many Black Protestant and predominantly White fundamentalist, Evangelical, and conservative mainline churches. 2 Respondents referred to by first name only are given pseudonyms. We also refer to Christian sex advice websites pseudonymously to protect the privacy of users. 3 Other racialized/oppressed groups have their own histories of racism and sexual stereotyping, which may share some features with the oppression of Black people. The movement studied is often referred to as LGBTQI, but we do not draw from

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the experiences of intersex African Americans and cannot make claims about their experiences here. We therefore use LGBTQ to reference the identities of our study’s participants. 4 Cisgender refers to people who agree with the sex category they were assigned at birth; i.e., not transgender. We also use “cis” as a common shorthand (e.g., cis/ heterosexual).

References

Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Name of Colorblindness. New York: New Press. Bebbington, David W. 1989. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge. Braithwaite, John. 1989. Crime, Shame, and Reintegration. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Brereton, Virginia Lieson. 1991. From Sin to Salvation: Stories of Women’s Conversions, 1800 to the Present. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Brownson, James V. 2013. Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church’s Debate on Same-Sex Relationships. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Burke, Kelsy. 2016. Christians Under Covers: Evangelicals and Sexual Pleasure on the Internet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cohen, Cathy. 1999. The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. ———. 2005. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43: 1241–99. Davis, Angela. 2003. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Penguin Random House. DeRogatis, Amy. 2015. Saving Sex: Sexuality and Salvation in American Evangelicalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Desmond, Matthew, and Mustafa Emirbayer. 2009. “What Is Racial Domination?” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 6: 335–55. Diefendorf, Sarah. 2015. “After the Wedding Night: Sexual Abstinence and Masculinities over the Life Course.” Gender & Society 29: 647–69. Douglas, Kelly Brown. 1999. Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Driscoll, Mark, and Grace G. Driscoll. 2012. Real Marriage: The Truth about Sex, Friendship, and Life Together. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press. Feagin, Joe. 2010. The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and CounterFraming. New York: Routledge.

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Ferguson, Roderick. 2004. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ford, Zack. 2014. “Single, Married, Celibate, Sexual, Ex-Gay: The Southern Baptists’ Mixed Messages on Homosexuality.” Think Progress, November 4, http://thinkprogress.org. Gardner, Christine J. 2011. Making Chastity Sexy: The Rhetoric of Evangelical Abstinence Campaigns. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gerber, Lynne. 2011. Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Harris-Perry, Melissa. 2011. Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Harrison, Milmon F. 2005. Righteous Riches: The Word of Faith Movement in Contemporary African American Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. 1994. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Irby, Courtney Ann. 2013. “‘We Didn’t Call It Dating’: The Disrupted Landscape of Relationship Advice for Evangelical Protestant Youth.” Critical Research on Religion 1: 177–94. Jakes, T. D. 1995. Loose that Man and Let Him Go! Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House. Jordan, Mark D. 2002. The Ethics of Sex. Oxford: Blackwell. Keating, Caitlin. 2018. “Conversion Therapy Survivor Recalls Surrendering His Life to His Pastor for Two Years.” People. November 12, https://people.com. King, Eronica. 2016. And Their Home Receives Them Not: Exploring the Double Consciousness of Being Black and Gay in the Black Church Experience. Long Beach: The Reformation Project. Leman, Kevin. 2002. Sheet Music: Uncovering the Secrets of Sexual Intimacy in Marriage. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House. Moon, Dawne, and Theresa W. Tobin. 2018. “Sunsets and Solidarity: Overcoming Sacramental Shame in Conservative Christian Churches to Forge a Queer Vision of Love and Justice.” Hypatia 33: 451–68. Morrison, Toni, ed. 1992. Race-ing Justice, En-gender-ing Power: Essays on Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, and the Construction of Social Reality. New York: Pantheon. O’Brien, Brandon. 2008. “A Jesus for Real Men: What the New Masculinity Movement Gets Right and Wrong.” Christianity Today, April 18, www.christianitytoday.com. Penner, Clifford, and Joyce Penner. [1973] 2003. The Gift of Sex: A Guide to Sexual Fulfillment. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson. Pitt, Richard N. 2010. “‘Still Looking for My Jonathan’: Gay Black Men’s Management of Religious and Sexual Identity Conflicts.” Journal of Homosexuality 57 (January): 39–53. Rosenau, Douglas E. [1994] 2002. A Celebration of Sex. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson.

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Shelton, Jason E., and Ryon J. Cobb. 2017. “Black Reltrad: Measuring Religious Diversity and Commonality Among African Americans.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 56: 737–64. Snorton, C. Riley. 2014. Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wier, Terry. 1999. Holy Sex: God’s Purpose and Plan for Our Sexuality. New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House. Wuthnow, Robert. 1994. Sharing the Journey: Support Groups and America’s New Quest for Community. New York: Free Press.

7

Gender and the Racialization of Muslims Ashley Garner and Z. Fareen Parvez

“Yes, Islam is not racist but that doesn’t mean there isn’t racism going on. Drinking [alcohol] is haram [forbidden], right? But that doesn’t mean there aren’t people who are drinking, so we should still address that,” said Maryam, a Nigerian American Muslim. Maryam readily agreed to meet me over her lunch break, saying that she never gets a chance to talk about this “stuff,” despite working in the diversity department for a major sports organization. She continued, “I’ve been to certain qhutbas [sermons] where they’ve talked about Muslims who drink or Muslims who go to clubs. I’ve heard them talk about those kinds of things, but I’ve never heard them say ‘oh yeah, even though Islam is not racist, you should treat your Black Muslim brother or sister with respect. I never hear them say that. It’s more so like ‘you should never feel like you’re being disrespected’ . . . You’re telling me don’t feel that way, but I do feel that way. It’s just like when we talk to White people! I am feeling this way. So now what?” Shaping Maryam’s frustration with confronting racism both within and outside of the Black community was the tenet “there is no racism in Islam.” This tenet alludes to the Prophet Muhammed’s last sermon that Muslims often use to effectively deny racism between Muslims. Later in the interview, Maryam returned to this tenet but emphasized its misuse within the community. Drawing an analogy with the sinful behavior of drinking alcohol, she pointed to differences between religious requirements and everyday realities and, in her view, the Muslim community’s ability to selectively acknowledge those differences. As a Black Muslim woman whose family immigrated to the United States, Maryam felt especially caught between the varied narratives of Muslim racialization. Black Muslim immigrants are often excluded from scholarly accounts around so-called immigrant Islam, and she did not 134

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fully connect with the African American Muslim narratives often organized around experiences with conversion. Maryam’s experience is one of liminality. Within the non-Black Muslim community she sees the immigrant experience affirmed, yet she is not able to claim a stake in that narrative or relate fully to the African American Muslim experience despite shared racial and religious identities. While Maryam’s case is especially difficult, Black Muslim women must constantly negotiate the bounds of their conditional acceptance into their racial and religious communities. Their frustrations are often dismissed, and many like Maryam rely on broadening their base of Islamic knowledge to help them cope with or challenge competing racializations. Turning more deeply to Islamic practice as a source of meaning and resistance is a phenomenon that exists across many different societies. But the specific ways and reasons why this occurs depend on national contexts. This chapter presents a cross-national comparison of a number of Muslim women in the United States with those in France to draw attention to the ways national context determines the racial processes and experiences of Muslim minority women. Maryam’s liminality, for example, contrasts with the types of frustration faced by Asma, an Afro-French Muslim woman, whose religious needs often collide with the French state and public sphere. “There’s always some dysfunction with me,” Asma said dryly, as she complained about her medical problems and difficulties with the doctors in the French public hospital. We were driving back to our homes from a lesson at the mosque in Vénissieux, a working-class suburb of Lyon. Asma is in her twenties and rigorous and serious in her Islamic practice. She wears a jelbab, a loose, full body covering of everything except the hands and face, and bears the daily stigma and discrimination that goes along with this. She was recounting her embarrassment and trials when she tried to get medical help for her debilitating menstrual cramps and back pain. When she insisted to the doctor that she was not prepared to undergo an internal medical exam, the doctor was annoyed and told her she had a psychological problem. She cried throughout the appointment. As she listened to her tell the story, Fatima, Asma’s good friend, gently touched her knee and said compassionately, “You can’t refuse an internal exam. It’s natural. No, no, Asma.” “I’m pious, Fatima,” she replied with gravity. “I want to stay that way.” Asma refused to go back to

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the hospital and instead started asking Fatima and fellow women at the mosque for information about traditional practices, like hijama (cupping). She started reading about these practices while also citing prayer, or God’s intervention, as the only real solution. Asma’s estrangement from the medical system represents a number of things about the predicament of some religious Muslim women in France. In a militantly secular society with anti-veiling legislation, Muslim women often feel disrespected because of their religious practice, specifically around dress and gender relations. In a hospital setting, discussing one’s religious wishes and circumstances is often unsuccessful or stigmatized. In this case, it is quite possible that had the doctor taken the time to compassionately explain to Asma what an internal exam entailed, the experience would not have been as traumatic. Yet it is also typically the case that if a White and “secular” French woman expresses specific requests (such as a female doctor) or concerns and fears, she can be accommodated and treated respectfully. Asma’s experience represents the stigma specifically against Islam and the general racialization of Muslims. In her case she is racialized as a Muslim as well as for being Black. These intersecting forms of racialization have particular consequences for women like Asma. They also push her to find meaning, solutions, and healing primarily within her religious community and tradition. Asma’s experiences, and the case of Muslims in France more broadly, may be unique because of France’s particular type of secularism, laïcité, which favors assimilation and state regulation of religion (Baubérot 2006). But even in other contexts, including the United States, which has relatively robust religious freedoms, anti-Muslim sentiment and hate crimes have grown in recent years according to research by the Pew Research Center (Kishi 2017). Especially for Black Muslim women in the United States, although their communities have long suffered discrimination, they face various forms of vulnerability in the current climate.1 In both the French and American cases, race and religion intersect in the sense that anti-Islam discrimination against an already racialized minority adds another dimension to the oppressions faced by Muslims of color. At the same time that Muslim identity (or descent) itself is becoming racialized—as a set of essential and immutable characteristics— White converts to Islam are also experiencing anti-Muslim racism (Galonnier 2015).

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In the US and French cases, the effect of this interaction on gender is complex. Muslim women strive to attain the ideal of pious womanhood, which includes strong faith as well as modesty. How they do so and the challenges they face have much to do with the nationally specific ways in which racializing processes and racism operate. Black American Muslim women occupy a space of liminality, where they confront not only White racism but also lack of recognition by Black non-Muslims and by non-Black Muslims. Theirs is a space of “nonbelonging.” As they try to protect their ideal of a pious woman and modesty, they must (1) skillfully navigate stereotypes of Black women within non-Black Muslim communities, and (2) manage the consequences of wearing the hijab in Black non-Muslim spaces. In France, as Muslim women struggle to defend their communities from attacks by the racializing state, many (1) increase their religious and intellectual leadership and (2) reproduce and augment practices of gender segregation as well as develop greater conviction in these practices. In other words, gender ideals are defined in large part by piety and religious knowledge, and this develops best when women have their own protected space away from men. In both places, women’s religious convictions themselves are viewed as a form of radicalization and, more broadly, a threat to or aberration of liberalism and Western democracy. However, the conception of race and acceptable displays of religiosity differ. As previously stated, France’s interpretation of secularism restricts the display of religious markers in public space, creating physical, spatial barriers for Salafi-identified women like Asma, who are often unwilling to compromise their piety and thus de facto exit public space. In the United States, ever-growing instances of Islamophobic violence, including the controversial “Muslim Ban,” still foster barriers between American Muslim women and their relationship to public space, but these are less obstructive than in France. And the legal emphasis on religious freedom creates a modicum of protection. Additionally, the differential trajectories of colonialism in France and slavery in the United States produce differing constructions of race despite the universality of anti-Blackness. France’s colonial relationship with Algeria, particularly, led to an understanding of race that is fundamentally imbricated with Islam and Arab identity (Fanon et al. 2004[1961]).

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The following discussion on the racialization of Muslims draws on Garner’s ongoing interviews with Black Muslim women in the United States, mostly in the Northeast, and Parvez’s two years of ethnographic research in Lyon, France. Garner presents five different women and their stories to illustrate the challenges faced at the intersection of race, religion, and gender. In Lyon, Parvez focused much of the participant observation among communities of Salafi women, who have a highly disciplined practice of Islam that includes wearing the jelbab. Only a very small minority of Muslim women, outside of Salafi communities, wear the jelbab. It is not officially the target of any legislation, though it remains highly stigmatized. In both cases, the women this chapter discusses face a particularly exacerbated form of racialization, or double stigma, as minorities within a minority. In presenting these cases, this chapter departs from approaches that portray gender ideologies as rooted in some essential belief system among Muslims. Instead, it shows how the racialization of Muslims both within and outside the community has impacted gender roles and practices as well as strategies to manage and resist racism.

Racialized Bodies and the Boundaries of Citizenship Racialization and religion intersect to shape gender ideals and gendered practices across religious traditions and around the globe. One can study these intersections in historical periods, such as the colonial impositions of Christianity and its gender norms onto native populations (see Mercado 2018), as well as in the contemporary era. Scholars have covered a range of contemporary cases such as the discipline and ethics of gendered boundaries among Hasidic girls in Brooklyn (Fader 2009); how American Latina Pentecostal women embrace traditional gender norms (Sánchez Walsh 2003); interracial marriages among Muslims in the United States (Grewal 2009); or shifting gender roles among minority Muslims in post-communist Eastern Europe (Ghodsee 2010). Indeed, in some social science disciplines such as history and anthropology, gender and race have arguably moved from the margin to the center of scholarship on religion (Jemison 2018:81); and in scholarship on the United States, the traditional focus on White Protestant

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history and congregations has shifted to include African American and indigenous spiritual histories (ibid.). Sociology, however, has lagged behind in these important shifts (see Avishai, Jafar, and Rinaldo 2015). These include, in general, embracing an intersectional approach that recognizes gender and race as social structure rather than merely variables; looking beyond official definitions of religion as well as institutionalized spaces (Jemison 2018); and shedding light on the ethical frameworks around which religious women orient their lives and communities. Yet taking such an approach is increasingly urgent when it comes to the case of Islam and racialized Muslims in particular. On this subject, the question of gender has been a central fixation, both in the popular imaginary as well as political discourses emanating from the War on Terror. Perhaps most infamously, former First Lady Laura Bush and President George Bush cited the need to rescue “women of cover” from the Taliban as justification for military invasion of Afghanistan (Abu-Lughod 2002). Because they packaged this savior narrative as an inherently feminist pursuit, it was able to gain widespread currency while detracting from the widening fissures between the “mainstream” feminist movement and the unmet needs of Black and “third-world” feminists domestically (ChanMalik 2011). To the American public, this move helped cement the belief that Muslims are perpetually foreign and obfuscated the reality of overlap between the needs of Black and Muslim women. Similar instances of “femonationalism,” in which political parties and leaders coopt easily digestible feminist messages to justify racist, xenophobic policymaking, have been studied in France and other parts of Europe (Farris 2017). While this type of gendered racialization of Muslims took on particular salience in the post–9/11 era, in fact it has a long history embedded in Western imperial projects and related histories of slavery. Specifically, Arab and African Muslim women were depicted in exoticized and/or hypersexualized manners. (These share similarities with the historical sexualization of both Jewish women and Black women, as discussed by Sarah Imhoff, as well as Kelsy Burke, Dawne Moon, and Theresa W. Tobin, in their chapters in this volume.) The specific nature of these gender and racial ideologies of Muslims varied across different nationalist and imperial projects.

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In response to political and scholarly approaches to Islam and to Muslim women that were saturated in the long history of orientalism, a number of feminist social anthropologists and ethnographers have tried to shift the intellectual terrain by offering new perspectives and visions of Islam and gender. They examined the forms of agency and ethical life-worlds of communities of pious Muslim women around the world, from the United States (Karim 2008) to Paris (Fernando 2014) to Jakarta (Rinaldo 2013). While gender has gained some critical scholarly attention, it is relatively recently that race as an analytical concept has been paired with Muslims and Islamophobia.2 And it remains rare for these works to consider the role of anti-Blackness as central to the proliferation of Islamophobia.3 This is in spite of a historical legacy that firmly roots Islam within the scope and tradition of Black revolution. In an era of growing anti-Muslim hate crimes, the language of race has allowed for greater coalition-building with other racial minorities and anti-racism mobilizing among Muslims (Love 2017; Khabeer 2016) who otherwise viewed themselves as external to a Black/White paradigmatic understanding of race (Selod and Embrick 2013). But what exactly does it mean to think of Islamophobia as racism? Some scholars have argued that Islamophobia is a form of cultural racism, or hostility based on cultural traditions, religion, and ethnicity (Fekete 2009; Green 2015). Cultural racism is deeply connected to the idea of race as biological, since culture and religion are often understood as part of one’s lineage and inheritance. Thinking of Muslims as a racial category, according to Islamic Studies scholar Juliane Hammer, “rests on the assumption that Muslimness is inscribed onto racialized bodies” (Hammer 2018:218). For example, Muslims become identified and profiled by bodily comportment like growing a beard or wearing hijab. And religion is often assumed to be the cause of all their actions. Finally, thinking of Muslims in terms of race ties crucially into questions of American foreign policy. When US military actions and government sanctions in recent years have taken the lives of millions of Muslims, it appears like a systematic racial targeting of a specific population (see Kundnani 2014).4 Gender figures centrally in this racialization process, because Islam and Muslims are often equated with sexism. Especially in Europe, the

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racialization of Muslim immigrants has significantly to do with assumptions of Muslim men committing violence against women (Korteweg and Yurdakul 2012). These assumptions fundamentally serve to create boundaries around European citizenship, excluding Muslims as fundamentally unable to assimilate to the dominant society due to their innate beliefs in gender inequality—and thereby support an ethnoracial conception of citizenship (see Mack 2017).5 In the United States too, Muslims and Blacks are understood to be inassimilable. Yet it is important to point out that the notion of a “failed assimilation” (Kibria, Watson, and Selod 2017) felt in some Muslim circles is not the same source of anxiety for the African American Muslim.6 In this context of racialization, the effects on Muslim women themselves are often complicated. Efforts to seek justice for them become entangled with Islamophobic politics and racist discourses. For example, many Muslim women seldom receive justice in matters of family law, sparking polarized debates about the relative effectiveness of Islamic law versus civil law in places like India and Canada. Looking at debates over whether to allow sharia courts in Ontario, scholars have shown how the media, activists, and politicians created a caricature of Muslim women as victims of their culture and religion who can only be saved by the White, Western state (Zine 2012). As to religion itself, it can be a source and site of oppression for women as well as a means to struggle against oppression in the domain of family relations (280)—but the context of racialization, whether in Canada, the United States, or France, drowns out these important nuances.

Liminality and Black Muslims in the United States Even though 51% of Muslims whose families have been in the United States for at least three generations are Black, and 20% of the total US Muslim population is Black (Pew Research Center 2011), the contemporary racialization of Muslims elides Blackness. African American, Black African, and other Afro-Muslim peoples across ethnic groups who possess markers of visible Muslimness, such as wearing hijab or having an Islamic name, experience the intersection of a de-Islamification and a de-Negroification (GhaneaBassiri 2010). Black Muslims are less recognizable as Black in the eyes of Black non-Muslims, and given

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their Blackness, they are less visible as Muslim in the eyes of non-Black Muslims. This perceived incompatibility of racial and religious identity creates a space of non-belonging in which millions of Black Muslims navigate their lives. This space of tension shapes the gendered practices that emerge for Black Muslim women. As women regulate access to the community via community event planning, performing the labor of arranging marriages, and aiding in the integration of new converts, their performance of boundary-making and enforcement can be viewed as a gendered practice. Markers of religiosity function like passports, granting or denying access across religious and racial terrains. For women, the foremost religious symbol is the personal decision whether to observe hijab, which is often used to measure an individual’s overall piety. For Black Muslim women in the United States, deciding to veil and thus become publicly recognizable as a Muslim woman can also mean that they are now less recognizable to non-Muslim Blacks as Black women. As one interviewee, Sara, added, she lost access to shared Black camaraderie, such as the head nod exchanged between Black strangers in public space. This loss was worsened by the reluctance on the part of Arab and South Asian women to exchange salams with her, the Islamic greeting of peace, and thereby recognize her as Muslim. Her solution was to be proactive about initiating a greeting. While some fellow Muslims snubbed her, many expressions softened before returning the greeting. In her interpretation, even though she observed hijab, they were genuinely confused about whether she was Muslim. Another participant, however, described the hesitancy to exchange salams or the inquiry as to whether she was Muslim as “outright ignorance.” Gesturing to her hijab, she said, “Why else would I have this [on] and [wear] long-sleeves in 110-degree weather? . . . No, we don’t get to be Muslim to them.” This simultaneous rejection of the women’s racial and religious identities made them protective of those identities and keen to defend against cooptation and negation. Women who either converted to Islam later in life or veiled later in adulthood, clearly demarcated between a pre-hijab versus post-hijab period. Prior to veiling, the Black women the first author interviewed believed that all discrimination was a result of anti-Black racism and misogynoir, the convergence of anti-Blackness and misogyny uniquely

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experienced by Black women; but they were more uncertain after they began observing hijab. Respondents also linked their decisions to wear the hijab with the realization that they would also need to protect themselves from the larger Muslim community itself. For most of the women who were interviewed, their decisions to wear hijab did not feel like decisions, per se. Rather, they believed that it was fard, or obligatory, for women to veil, just as they believed it was fard to pray five times daily. Just as one’s ability to adhere to their prayers depended upon their religiosity, one’s commitment to observing hijab needed to be cultivated. In that sense, veiling was experienced only as one inevitable result of their journey toward piety. For those who were raised Muslim, their frustration tended to be more palpable, because the demarcation between their “pre- and post-hijab” periods made apparent how other Muslims had discounted their religious identities and other aspects of their faith journeys until they began covering full-time. Recounting her own experiences in this journey, Maryam, a Nigerian American Muslim, expressed her irritation over the uptick of interactions with Arab or South Asian Muslims who asked whether she was in the Nation of Islam or if she converted after she began wearing hijab. Importantly, her frustration was not with the implied assumption that every Black Muslim is a convert or has roots in the Nation. She thought that if she were an African American Muslim, she might find this question annoying but not offensive, given how foundational the Nation was to the spread of Islam throughout the Black community. Rather, she was disappointed in their lack of religious knowledge, citing that every Muslim should be able to recognize that nearly half of Nigeria’s population are Muslims and the Nation of Islam as a specifically American movement. Although Nigerian in descent, Maryam’s response echoed the tensions scholars have captured over the struggle to define which groups are the arbiters of the most authentic religious knowledge (Karim 2005). Expressing her anger at this line of questioning served as a mode of self-protection. “There’s no one in my family who isn’t Muslim, born and raised, like for generations and generations,” she pronounced. “Islam is our identity. Even if you go to extended family and friends, they’ll say that we always knew the [family name] to be Muslims.” Scholars have noted that gesturing toward a familial legacy of Islam is often deployed by Arab and/or Desi Muslims as a way to elevate their status

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as “authentically” Muslim relative to African Americans who are more likely converts, especially in the midst of theological debates (Karim 2008). Here, Maryam uses this same strategy but with the dual purpose of defending against attempts to undercut her Muslim identity with her Blackness as well as to express disappointment in an overall lack of religious knowledge among Muslims. Another domain in which Black Muslim women navigate a liminal space involves protecting the community against caricatures of Black identity. Discussing “mixed”7 Muslim youth events, Maryam noted how uncomfortable she felt when non-Black youth would speak using African American vernacular English or listen to rap music, because she thought they were “acting out” or misusing “slang” words. On one hand, scholars argue that hip-hop culture is deeply ingrained in the Muslim community and that non-Black Muslims also inherit this legacy and incorporate it into their spiritual activism (Khabeer 2016). Maryam, however, experienced this as appropriation; yet, she chose not to criticize the youth in these instances. This was not because she feared addressing racism within the Muslim community but because she saw her primary role as a Muslim woman as upholding the notion of “one ummah,” or unified global community of believers. For Maryam, this aligned with her religious desire to enact an ideal Islam in which the community, regardless of race or ethnic background, is harmonious. So she embraced the gendered obligations of performing such peacekeeping labor. At the core of this gendered peacekeeping was the preservation of the often-recited principle of “there is no racism in Islam.” For Maryam, this was more important than publicly addressing what she viewed as caricatures of Blackness for the sake of entertainment. It is possible she preferred to do such peacekeeping labor (or self-silencing) in a mixedgender setting, whereas she felt more comfortable voicing her concerns among only women. Captured in the opening vignette, Maryam also invoked “there is no racism in Islam” to lament how religious leaders misappropriate the phrase taken from the Prophet Muhammed’s last sermon to silence Black community members when they attempt to address (or avoid having to address) discrimination within the religious community. By far the area that required the most boundary work by women was the topic of marriage. This was especially true for women who did

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not belong to Black-majority mosque communities, as they had fewer prospects for marriage. Marriage-related discussions, more than others, most clearly expressed racial biases. While marriage is an important cultural event across religious groups, in Muslim communities where dating is taboo and arranged marriages rely on the networks of other female community members, conversations of marriage can dominate women’s social gatherings and conversations. A consistent theme observed by the first author (Garner) was of Black women as the least desirable partners for marriage in terms of overall physical attractiveness, cultural fit, and identities as converts. One respondent revealed the gendered nature of this issue, remarking, “All the Arab and Desi girls are getting married, but the Black ones are still just there, unless your mosque is predominately Black. But those Black men still want the Arab and Desi girls so . . . the Black Muslim woman will not be someone who is looked at as attractive for marriage. Well, maybe attractive, but not for marriage.” Zainab, a twenty-five-year-old Muslim woman, discussed the difficulty she was having with the family of the Egyptian man she wanted to marry. She heard through other women in the community that his mother was against their marriage, believing that her son would eventually regret marrying both a convert and non-Arab. His mother insisted that the two would have nothing in common despite attending the same university. As a convert, she did not have Muslim family in the community to advocate on her behalf to his family, and she felt increasingly alienated from those who sympathetically relayed information to her but did not express disagreement with the mother and refused to intervene in the situation. Hajira, another respondent, aged twenty-eight, was beginning to worry about marriage but refused to consider men who inquired about her marital status directly via social media or even in person. She commented that men knew the etiquette of not directly approaching other women—meaning non-Black women—and she would not want to be involved with a man who thought contacting her directly was okay. While this type of non-normative contact could reflect a lack of respect for her based on her race, as she appeared to believe, it is also likely connected to the resistance of non-Black older community women to suggest her as a marriage partner. If the “matchmakers” do not view Black

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women as suitable matches, then men in the community may take the initiative themselves even if it is the unorthodox option. On top of these challenges to finding marriage partners, Sara also worried that her future husband would be shocked by her hair texture. While the act of removing one’s scarf for the first time in front of one’s husband is a common anxiety for many veiled women, Sara’s fear was at the nexus of race and gender given her tacit acknowledgment that her “natural,” coarse texture did not meet normative beauty standards and that her husband might be “disappointed.” During the interview, the first author did not ask why she assumed that her hypothetical future partner would somehow be ignorant of Black hair texture. A final domain in which Black Muslim women occupy a space of “non-belonging” and confront racially charged stereotypes is in the workplace. Outside of work, Maryam’s friends and acquaintances would refer to her as “sassy”—a controlling image associated with misogynoir and a classification that Maryam personally did not identify with. At work, however, her colleagues called her “serious,” a description she also did not agree with and which felt entirely in opposition to her personality. According to Maryam, her hijab created an expectation of docility, or the gendered image of the submissive Muslim woman. She attributed this to her colleagues not expecting a woman in hijab to push them toward racial discomfort (although as a diversity officer, she was hired expressly for this purpose), in contrast to the behaviors of a non-Muslim, “sassy” Black woman. The way she is differentially read is indicative of the way social contexts function to enforce liminality or encourage singular-identity “passing.” In other words, physical space dictates which racialization will be more dominant. At Maryam’s majority White, male workplace, presumably a space in which there is not a broader familiarity with the Muslim community, her identity as Muslim is the most salient and is not negated by her Blackness since her co-workers do not readily identify a tension between those identities. For all of the women interviewed, learning to live in the limbo of their differential racializations marked a process, requiring a negotiation of sometimes contrasting ideals for racial justice and religious harmony. The experiences of these women merit the questioning of sociological race theorists who assert race as the master social categorization (Omi and Winant 2015). While race still functioned as the most enduring

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marker of social difference, their piety meant that they strove to privilege Islam as their true “master category.” This shift often came across as incomplete, or at the very least unpredictable, in terms of when they would assert either frame. Converts especially struggled with the introduction of a new frame in their adult lives through which they might interpret their interactions with others. In fact, boundary work for American Black Muslim women seemed to be characterized by this tension between race as the socially imposed master category and a religious one which rejects racial difference. To adapt the words of James Baldwin on the use of Black English, Black Muslim women in the United States are asked to “enter a limbo in which [they] can no longer be black, and in which [they] know that [they] can never become white” (Baldwin 1979).

Intersections of Race, Gender, and Islam in France Those of Muslim origin in France have been racialized in various ways in different historical periods beginning with colonial rule. During the period of French colonial rule in North Africa, the state viewed its colonial subjects primarily through the lens of Islam. Muslims were seen as controlled by their allegiance to daily, embodied religious rituals and thus intrinsically exotic as well as backward (Davidson 2012). In the metropole of Paris, the state created separate social assistance programs and medical services for Muslims, claiming religious sensitivity but ultimately instituting a segregationist approach to them. Eventually, in the postcolonial era, North Africans were racialized as immigrés (immigrants) and later, as Maghrébins (those from the Maghreb). This type of categorization manifested in urban development and housing policy such that those of North African descent suffered higher rates of segregation and poor housing conditions. In the 1990s, with media manipulation as well as international wars and political crises, problems of urban welfare as well as socialeconomic uprisings in the working-class urban periphery came to be conflated with Islam. Whether urban rebellions or sexual violence, these issues were seen as stemming from inherent tendencies of “Muslims.” At this time, concern over French laïcité (secularism) began to grow into a fervor, and everyday practices of some Muslims were

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construed as violations of laïcité. The French state began legislating against certain practices that clearly targeted Muslim communities. In the name of laïcité it passed a ban on “ostentatious religious symbols” in public schools, thereby banning the headscarf in public schools. In 2010 it criminalized wearing the niqab in all public space. Since then, various municipalities tried also to prohibit the “burkini” at public beaches, drawing international attention and criticism against the obvious physical targeting of Muslim women. As some have argued, “laïcité” became nearly a euphemism for anti-Muslim racism (Louati 2016). This context has had serious consequences for many Muslims of all orientations, regardless of their ethnic origins or to what degree they practice Islam. In addition to experiences of racism and discrimination against Maghrébin and Black Muslims, again regardless of their practice (see Valfort 2015), there has also developed a racialization of White converts to Islam (Galonnier 2015). During the second author’s (Parvez’s) fieldwork in the banlieues of Lyon, approximately a third of her participants in a Salafi women’s mosque community were converts. Dressed in their jelbabs, they faced similar stigma and harassment in the streets as Salafi women of color. Moreover, they tended to marry religious men of sub-Saharan or North African background. At the same time, it is important to point out, although they share similar experiences as nonWhite Salafi Muslims, they had not grown up feeling excluded as racial minorities, conscious of their inferiority, or bearing the weight of family histories under colonial rule. Within the community of young Salafi women, whether White or non-White, the second author’s participants assigned little importance to differences of origin and color. Firm in their faith in Islamic ideals, they believed in the unifying force of their faith as far as transcending race and nation. They also shared a levity and humor around their ethnic origins, teasing each other about being from Comoro or Algeria and taking ownership of the stereotypes against them—while sharing an understanding that they were all victims of rising anti-Muslim attitudes. The second author saw interracial marriages planned (of Black Muslim men with White Muslim women) as well as conversations at the mosque explicitly downplaying the importance of ethnicity. As one mosque teacher emphatically stated in the middle of a lesson, with regard to

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authenticity of one’s Muslim identity, “It doesn’t matter if you’re Arab, or if your name is Muhammed or Abdullah.” Pointing out this dynamic is not to deny the existence of racial hierarchies or practices of ethnic segregation among Muslims in France, or structural differences among them. Rather, it is to emphasize (a) that the community of Salafi women actively sought to undermine such differences in accordance with their universalist ideology, and (b) that Muslims of all backgrounds were being racialized similarly, as Muslims. Indeed, experiences with aggression and discrimination owing specifically to the hijab or jelbab were ubiquitous. On several occasions the second author saw women mocked, interrogated, and physically pushed by strangers on the bus and train. Some of the close participants, including Asma, were fired from their jobs, usually in domestic carework. A number of Salafi women had dropped out of school when the 2004 law against the headscarf passed. Amal, a twenty-four-year-old woman of Tunisian origin who did manage to complete high school, was castigated by a professor in a large lecture hall when she decided to stop university. Although born and raised in France, Amal, Asma, and many other women the second author knew were racialized religious minorities, excluded from the symbolic benefits of citizenship. How have they coped with this exclusion, and with what effect on gender roles and ideals? They have retreated into their mosque community in the banlieue to protect their private sphere and augment their faith. This involves hours every week at mosque study circles that include 50–100 women, private Islamic study circles in each other’s homes, and daily work of reading and reciting prayers. Over a period of five years, Parvez watched several women expand their knowledge of Islam, Arabic literacy and recitation skills, abilities to perform exegesis, and philosophical reflections. In the process of collective study, several developed into skilled teachers in their own right. Malika, for example, of Algerian background, developed into a charismatic teacher and spiritual guide for many women. Her weekly lessons, vast knowledge of the Qur’an and traditions of the Prophet Muhammed, and careful advice she offered in various personal and ethical matters made her a highly valued member of the community. With this focus on religious study, gender ideals in this community revolve around knowledge, wisdom, and moral reflection—in short, a

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particular understanding of piety. Women thus must struggle toward ethical integrity and virtue, which involved all types of behavior, from respecting people’s privacy to refraining from boasting of one’s successes. In teaching these ideals, Malika sometimes invoked gender stereotypes. “Women have a love of gossip,” she would laugh, before shaking her head and discussing the harms of gossip and excessive talking. She and other teachers tried actively to invert what they viewed as dominant gender norms, like gossip, petty jealousies, or dabbling in impious practices like astrology. As for male gender ideals, these also rested on notions of pious behavior of men: respect for one’s wife, economic provision for the family, refraining from sinful things like drugs and alcohol, and honoring the contractual bond and obligations of marriage. Above all, men could not rightfully obstruct their wives’ religious practice. Indeed, in a few cases men did not want their wives to wear the hijab or jelbab, and women were counseled to challenge their husbands and “disobey” if necessary. For women, developing intellectual confidence and leadership was likely only possible given the traditional gender segregation that structures many mosque communities and especially Salafi-oriented mosques. The culture of gender segregation among Salafi Muslims meant in fact that women had their own space, free of men’s interference, where they might feel safe and less self-conscious about their attempts to read, recite, and interpret their religion. Gathering sometimes in large numbers, the women collectively posed a vague threat to male authority or created a sense of unease among some male worshippers. During the second author’s fieldwork, rumors circulated that a few men resented the women’s presence and the leadership of some of the teachers, including Malika. Salafi women are clearly unsettling traditional gender roles in asserting their rights to religious education. Yet they also reproduce and reinforce traditional roles and norms. As mentioned, they embrace and defend strict veiling practices sometimes even against the wishes of their parents and husbands. In this sense they emphasize the importance of women’s modesty and chastity as an ideal to strive toward. They also appeal to marriage and the financial support that would come from having a husband. Although the desire for marriage and children was not

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exactly particular to this community, these goals were held in special regard, given the limited professional and economic options for Salafi women. The most secure and gratifying role, therefore, would be that of wife and mother. As Salafi Muslim women are pushed against a wall by the French state, anti-veiling legislation, and employer discrimination, they cannot freely pursue education and careers. White converts to this mode of Islamic practice join this racialized community and begin to face its challenges. Women resist their situation by focusing on Islamic self-education in community with each other, largely segregated from men. This nourishes their confidence, sense of purpose, and leadership. They are protecting their religious faith from the French state’s attempts to control and regulate Islamic practice and making the best of their situations. The state’s racializing of Muslims has had paradoxical effects on gender ideals: It has clinched Salafi women’s faith in their gendered practices, encouraged the desire to marry, and also facilitated their moral convictions about their right to challenge their husbands.

Conclusion The French and American cases show how the relationship between race, religion, and gender is not straightforward. The lack of recognition and respect they receive—whether by the state, society, or from fellow Muslims—leads women toward more resilient identities and stronger convictions in the ideal of the pious woman. This can both unsettle as well as reproduce traditional gender roles. As Muslim women are racialized in various ways, they look for solutions to find meaning and dignity and strategies to resist this racialization. These strategies look different in each case, as they emerge fundamentally from particular, nationally specific racial histories and processes. In the United States, where secularism still tends to protect religious freedom, the categorical targeting of visibly religious bodies from public space is impossible. On the other hand, French laïcité introduces a legalized hostility toward Muslims made possible through the militant interpretation of secularism. This critical difference shapes Muslim women’s responses to their racialization: American Black

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Muslim women must challenge how other non-Black Muslim women understand racial hierarchy (although this hierarchy is itself partially a product of a state racializing project). French Muslim women must more directly confront the state, as Asma’s vignette illustrates. These processes, in turn, intersect with histories of class. In the United States, Muslims are especially racially diverse and have dramatically varying class backgrounds. In the American context, therefore, the racialization of Blacks is sometimes reproduced by non-Black Muslims who carry racial stereotypes and who overlook, remain ignorant to, or as some Black Muslims assert, dismiss the legitimacy of the intimate historical ties between Islam and Blackness. This differs from France, where anti-Arab/-immigrant/-Muslim racism overlaps with the stigma against those who are poor and concentrated in working-class territories. Although French Muslims are ethnically diverse, they are predominantly of North African background and working-class. While there certainly exist tensions among and within Muslim communities, these seldom fall along racial lines. Maryam’s frustration in the opening vignette that protesting racial discrimination to religious leadership and community members is just as exhausting and circular as it is when talking to White people highlights how religion operates as a raced phenomenon. For Muslims, religion is often used to universalize race, particularly as Islamophobia becomes more widely understood as racism and Muslims as a race. As the French case of this chapter highlights, maintaining racial harmony within the religious community is more straightforward when the state enacts racial/religious exclusion. However, in the American case, exclusion and boundary-making is performed fitfully within the community by members who possess varying degrees of liminal Whiteness (Maghbouleh 2017). Therefore, addressing racism within the community could feel “just like when talking to White people” for Maryam because she likely was talking to what the state might situationally define as White people. Yet it was her religious frame that obscured her ability to see them as such and their same religious frame that prohibited them from viewing their own actions as potentially complicitous with racism. In both contexts for Muslim women who wear the hijab or other forms of veiling, they suffer particular consequences of racial discrimination.

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These occur in domains of employment, education, marriage, social life, and even the enjoyment of public space. But as sociologist Patricia Hill Collins reminds us with regard to Black feminist thought, marginality can be a source of insight and creativity (1986). For example, a new generation of American Muslim feminist rap and performance artists have managed to inspire political consciousness, coalition-building, and anti-racist work (Khabeer 2016). Shahd Batal, Nadirah Pierre, and Mona Haydar are some of the individuals who have carved out spaces online to challenge racial and gender stereotypes of Muslims while also raising political consciousness of marginalized communities around the globe. The avenues that each of these women pursue, beauty/modest fashion, political comedy, and conscious rap, respectively, also subvert the particular gendered stereotypes Muslim women face. In the process, we might argue, they are recrafting Muslim gender ideals to align them with the goals of Islamic piety as well as social justice. This type of creativity by feminists may prove critical to the complex work of dismantling antiMuslim racism both in America and abroad, and more swiftly, breaking down boundaries that exist between Muslim women of differing racial and ethnic backgrounds. Notes

1 See Akinyi Ochieng, “Black Muslims Face Double Jeopardy, Anxiety in The Heartland,” NPR, February 25, 2017. www.npr.org/. 2 See Love, Islamophobia and Racism in America (2017) for an analysis of American racial formations as they relate to Muslims. 3 See Beydoun, American Islamophobia (2018) as a notable exception. 4 See Nafeez Ahmed, “Unworthy Victims: Western Wars Have Killed Four Million Muslims since 1990,” Middle East Eye, April 18, 2016. www.middleeasteye.net. 5 As Mohammed Mack argues, “This type of cultural xenophobia, however, ignores the many ways through which African and Arab minorities in France have queered or deviated from normative French understandings of sexuality, both heterosexual and homosexual” (2017:2). 6 The idea of “failed assimilation” is itself evidence of an investment in racial hierarchy. Scholars have described failed assimilation as a state- and media-led narrative ascribed to American Muslims wherein those Muslims who are unable to become fully Americanized “turn to Islam” (Kibria, Watson, and Selod 2018). In these instances, American and Muslim identities are two opposites in a binary relationship. Others have also discussed the desire for “assimilation” within nonBlack Muslim communities (Curtis 2007).

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7 “Mixed” is the term often used to describe spaces where both Muslim men and women are present. “Free mixing” is discouraged in many Muslim communities; however, exceptions are often made for weddings or other large-scale events.

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8

Race, Class, and the Color-Blind Social Gospel Movement Janine Giordano Drake

At the dawn of the twentieth century, working-class Whites and African Americans struggled together. Both Blacks and Whites, in all corners of the country, found themselves working 60–80-hour workweeks as both farm hands and industrial workers, and still barely making ends meet. Soon after 1900, large numbers of both Whites and Blacks began to leave their impoverished farms to seek wage work in cities and along the railroad. African American sharecroppers were especially eager to escape Jim Crow laws and earn cash wages. Yet, Gilded Age industrial jobs provided little more job security than farms. Cyclical unemployment was common. Cities were also infested with disease and other dangers; rich people were exiting them as quickly as immigrants and rural transplants moved in. Some radicals, like those in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), encouraged Whites and Blacks to organize together. But, for most American reformers, including ministers, the challenges of the White poor and the Black poor were separate problems. Many White ministers cared sincerely about the welfare of people of color, but they also did little to resist the color line. Let us take, for example, the work of Charles Stelzle, a German American minister. As a leader within the Social Gospel movement, he continually emphasized the inability of many poor people to support themselves on their meager wages and called for Christians to unite in serving their weaker brothers and sisters with better opportunities for social mobility. In his 1912 book, American Social and Religious Conditions, Stelzle introduced White, middle-class audiences to the daily life of poverty. However, Stelzle did not see a mass of proletarianized workers and tenant-farmers which spanned racial boundaries. Much to the contrary, Stelzle framed his book as a sequel to Josiah Strong’s Our Country. 159

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In organizing his study of poverty around racial categories, Stelzle suggested that different “races” of people needed different solutions to their social problems. Chapters on “The Indian,” “The Immigrant” (assumed to be European), “The Spanish-American” (Mexican), and “Country Life Problems” complemented his chapter on “The Negro.” In this chapter on African American poverty, he wrote, “There are probably as many different opinions with regard to the solution to the negro problem as there are students of this perplexing question” (Stelzle 1912:123). Stelzle reminded his audiences that African Americans lived in some of the most impoverished sections of Northern cities and that they suffered from disease and death at a higher rate than any other category of urban dwellers. But, though he maintained relationships with Black ministers, at times inviting them to address his congregations and even endorsing their ideas on social equality, Stelzle respected and rarely problematized the color line. After all, segregation in residential neighborhoods and categories of jobs only increased the proximity of White evangelists to the White industrial workers they wanted in their churches. In this chapter, I illustrate that the Social Gospel movement was not an intentionally racist movement. Many White Social Gospel ministers, like Stelzle, collaborated on early civil rights commissions and spoke up about the oppression of people of color. However, forged in a moment of profound segregation between Whites and Blacks, the very color blindness of the White Social Gospel quietly reinforced White hegemony. While White and Black social gospel ministers mobilized similar, if not identical, theologies of social sin and social salvation, they spent most of their time in their own, respective segregated worlds, and their priorities for social change reflected this segmentation. African American ministers consistently emphasized the need for African Americans to lead their own communities in education, religion, and social reform. Legally, they concentrated efforts to end lynching and expand opportunities for education and jobs among the poor and aspiring middle classes. Meanwhile, White Social Gospel ministers, concentrating on Northern urban space, prioritized reforms relating to wages and working conditions. By the 1930s, some White ministers had begun to address the problem of the color line, but most doctrinal statements on behalf of social justice did little to emphasize the fact that the White poor had many more opportunities for social mobility than the Black poor. Through the

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bulk of the twentieth century, the White Social Gospel agenda was accomplished more quickly and completely than the Black Social Gospel.

The Black Social Gospel Most Black Protestants believed in some elements of structural, social sin and the possibility of Black redemption through social mobility. Booker T. Washington, one of the most popular Black leaders of his day, inspired Black audiences with a message of uplift through strategic alliances with White Christians and their investment in Black communities. Founder of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, an agricultural and industrial training school for African Americans, he was known as a “race leader” and agent of racial reconciliation. Washington had such a following among Blacks and Whites that, as Gary Dorrien put it, “many Bookerites believed there was no such thing as a legitimate alternative or opposition” (Dorrien 2015:5). Through African American education in the trades, Washington believed, African Americans would earn White respect and, eventually, social and economic equality with Whites. Nannie Burroughs’s strategy for Black uplift within her Women’s Convention of the National Baptist Convention largely coincided with that of Washington. The Women’s Convention “emphasized reform of individual behavior and attitudes both as a goal in itself and as a strategy for reform of the entire structural system of American race relations” (Higginbotham 1994:187). Sometimes using the phrase, “lifting as we climb,” Black Baptist churchwomen believed they “lifted” others out of poverty as they “climbed” the social hierarchy themselves. They dedicated themselves to solving the social problems that plagued the Black poor within their communities, including city health and hygiene, education, and moral behavior. In 1909, Burroughs established the National Training School for Women and Girls to teach young women the “three B’s”: “Bible, the bath, and the broom” (Harvey 2011:91). To Burroughs, cleanliness, frugality, chastity, and hard work were important Christian virtues, but they were especially key to winning African American respect within a White supremacist society. True to Washington’s call for racial advancement on its own terms, the Knights of Labor claimed 116 exclusively Black assemblies, and an additional nineteen mixed-race assemblies (Gerteis 2007:41). Many

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African American Knights saw themselves not only as deserving, Christian “producers” for the republic. They also believed in a similar Social Gospel to that of many White Knights, including the Christian virtues of sobriety, thrift, and hard work, and believed that African Americans deserved the rights to govern their own unions. However, as many factory foremen segmented work processes according to race, with the lowest-skilled jobs reserved for Blacks and other people of color, Black Knights still struggled against the highly skilled, White artisans who formed their own craft unions. Moreover, interracial solidarity on the picket line was limited. Some African American Christians critiqued Washington’s strategy for Black advancement as one that revolved around the desire for White approval. W.E.B. Du Bois, for example, emphasized the structural “sin” of Jim Crow and the necessity of redeeming that sin on a world scale, but he doubted that White respect would ever be earned. In Pan African Congresses in 1919, 1921, and 1927, Du Bois gathered with Africans from the United States and around the world and thought through the potential of full civil rights and social equality with White Europeans. Still others, such as the Rev. Henry McNeal Turner and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion denomination, or Marcus Garvey and his followers, argued that the only path for true African American liberation was in their rebellion from the incorporated United States. Especially as the United States mobilized to enter the Great War, many African Americans believed that only through access to their own land and leadership over their own communities, possibly in Africa, would descendants of the Black diaspora finally be able to live in freedom. Many of the most elite Black ministers in the country, including those at Howard University’s School of Religion, saw themselves as leaders in a new Black Social Gospel which celebrated Black distinctiveness while also supporting many Progressive reforms. Mordecai Johnson was a mixed-race student of Walter Rauschenbusch, the German American author of the acclaimed Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) and Christianizing the Social Order (1912). Like many of his White colleagues, he supported workers’ cooperatives and supported the dream of the League of Nations to end war through peacetime arbitration. Benjamin Elijah Mays, Johnson’s colleague in the religion department at Howard, was trained under Shailer Matthews, the well-known University of Chicago

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Social Gospel “liberal” theologian. Like many working-class folks of his day, Mays saw the heart of the gospel message in strands of Christian pacifism and Christian Socialism. He supported the charismatic labor organizer and Socialist Party leader, Eugene Debs. Debs often referenced Scripture in his pleas for the poor, and repeatedly stood up for interracial solidarity. Mays reflected, “Eugene Debs has shaped my sensitivity to the poor, the diseased and those who have given their lives for the good of those sick and poor, the great and the small, the high and the low” (Dorrien 2018:103). Mays, like many working-class African American Christians, believed that some form of social democracy was the most Christian solution to the problems of industrial poverty and Black disenfranchisement. But, unlike many of their White ministerial counterparts in the Socialist Party of America, African American Social Gospelers were rarely content with gradual, legislative reforms at the local level. Many Black ministers advocated for a pan-Africanist approach to the problem of Black oppression because they saw the fate of African Americans tied with those of other Africans of the diaspora. They wanted, for example, to see Africans within French, British, German, and Dutch colonies take up the rights of self-determination, land ownership, and voting rights. When most White Catholic and Protestant ministers came out in support of World War I and displayed the American flag with pride, many Black Social Gospel leaders stood with labor radicals and pacifists in support for ethnic minorities still suffering under colonial rule. Radicals around the world, and within American organizations such as the FOR and the IWW, protested the Great War as a conflict among capitalist countries in which the working classes had little to gain. Johnson’s, Mays’s, and Thurman’s support for Christian internationalism and peace were sometimes mistaken for support for communism. This accusation was not entirely unreasonable, for the Communist Party appealed to many workers of color (Kelley 1990; Gellman and Roll 2011; Dorrien 2018:90). While White ministers often put their trust in the US military to accomplish justice around the world, African American ministers often offered critiques of American participation in European colonial projects. After W.E.B. Du Bois’s Pan African Congresses in the early twentieth century, Black churchgoers often maintained doubts about the potential of the US military to establish democracy within or outside the United

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States. Howard Thurman and James Farmer each identified as Christian pacifists. They believed that the gospel held out the promise of personal, spiritual, and societal transformation through the power of God’s love. Only that love could fully transform and rebuild societies; anything less would not lead to a truly transformed world. Thurman traveled internationally with the interracial Student Christian Movement and had an opportunity to meet Gandhi and discuss the philosophy of nonviolence in the 1930s. In 1949, the newly independent nation of India invited Johnson to speak at the Interfaith World Pacifist Meeting (Dorrien 2015:82). These ministers supported some of the work of their White ministerial counterparts, but for good reasons, they were often critical of the US federal government’s ability, especially as expressed through the military, to do justice. The one “White space” in the United States that African American ministers and church members trusted that justice would eventually prevail was the American legal system. Black ministers largely supported the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a legal advocacy group founded by W.E.B. Du Bois and others in opposition to the legal oppression and disenfranchisement of African Americans. In 1915, the release of Birth of a Nation, a dramatization of the dangers of carpetbaggers to slave-owning families, helped build momentum behind the rise of a second Ku Klux Klan. White Protestant ministers affiliated with the Klan preached on the sanctity of racial apartheid, the dangers of Catholics, Jews, and other outsiders to the social fabric of the nation, and the need to re-establish Christian morality within the law. Southern Whites who hoped to “redeem” their state governments from the interracial coalitions that had ruled during Reconstruction relied upon various forms of legal voter suppression. They created a Southern culture of racial apartheid (called “Jim Crow”). African Americans were consigned to separate schools, bathrooms, lunch counters, neighborhoods, professions, and sections of buses and trains. When African Americans dared to work through the legal barriers and attempt to vote, purchase property, or move within White space, they risked being targeted for vigilante violence. The NAACP formed in 1909 with the ambition to build a legal case, locally and eventually nationally, to defend the social and civic equality guaranteed to Blacks under the law. In the platform statement of their

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National Negro Committee, they wrote, “we demand for the Negroes, as for all others, a free and complete education,” as well as the rights of Black workers within their encounters with organized White workers (NAACP 1909). Others worked on securing Black voting rights or an anti-lynching amendment to the Constitution. Black ministers had been publicly condemning lynching long before the formation of this powerful legal lobby (Foley 2018). In many respects, the NAACP carried on the public advocacy of Black ministers at a national level. The NAACP’s legal advocacy against lynching and other suppressions of due process and civil rights was one of the greatest achievements of the Black Social Gospel. However, the emphasis on testing racist laws and law enforcement against the promises of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had its blind spots. By the early twentieth century, many African Americans, even if they worked in mines and along the railroads, suffered from rural poverty shared with White farmers, farmhands, and sharecroppers. More than 2.3 million African Americans were listed as agricultural laborers in 1912 (Stelzle 1912:127). Black farmers and labor leaders were inordinately targeted by White vigilante groups when they began to exhibit signs of economic success. But the sources of poverty they suffered (limited access to education, to credit, and to job training) often overlapped. In their efforts to identify problems common to Black people, the “aspiring classes” of African Americans sometimes minimized the extent to which interracial labor and political organizing could help remedy the targeting of working-class African Americans by working-class Whites. There were a small handful of African American leaders who mobilized unions in the language of the Black Social Gospel. For example, Asa Phillip Randolph led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union of African American men who worked as porters and personal assistants on sleeper rail cars. He collaborated with the Federal Council of Churches on some alliances they built with unions and demanded—in a common, churchly vernacular—equal pay for White and Black workers. But Randolph grew frustrated with many Black ministers for their silence on labor organizing (Dorrien 2018:110). The color line loomed so large, and accusations of “socialism” and “communism” flowed so easily from suggestions for interracial solidarity, that—until the Civil Rights Era—many African American Christians shied from suggesting

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remedies for Black oppression that required collaboration across the color line. Howard University professors who did so were repeatedly admonished by their own administration for communist sympathies. In part because the color line prevented most Whites and Blacks from entering each other’s worlds, many religious leaders simply concluded that White and Black problems were different. White and Black ministers proceeded to address their segregated congregations with separate agendas for reform.

The White Social Gospel Meanwhile, in the rapidly industrializing North, the Social Gospel movement was emerging in the early twentieth century as a color-blind effort to address urban poverty, especially as it expressed itself in inadequate housing, dangerous working conditions, long working hours, child labor, and low wages. White Social Gospel leaders usually came from one of two traditions. The first was the long history of Protestant “missions” to the poor, including “home missions” to poor regions of the continental United States—like the South and West after the Civil War, or urban tenements and “foreign missions” in the Gilded Age. Every Protestant denomination had missions’ boards that sponsored missionaries around the world. In the Gilded Age, American missionaries were an especially significant presence in the newly acquired territories of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Alaska, as well as zones of American influence in the Philippines, China, Japan, and India. Home and foreign missions operated similarly (Jacobson 2000). Both at home and abroad, missionaries purchased land for schools, hospitals, and orphanages within frontier posts and poor areas of prosperous cities. The other tradition that formed White Social Gospel leaders was the international critique of capitalism as an economic system that could serve justice and promote democracy. As the historian Henry May characterized the movement in 1949, there were Social Gospel ministers across the political spectrum, but all “were moved by a sense of social crisis, and all believed in the necessity and possibility of a Christian solution” (May 1949:163). Both in the United States and Great Britain, ministers illustrated the fact that many poor people could not pull themselves out of poverty despite working long hours. Workers were mired in debt

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to company stores and landlords, and still lived in substandard housing. They suffered from inadequate ventilation and sewage in their homes and risked their lives in unsafe factories and mines. Some determined that unions, labor parties, high taxes, and Christian Socialist collectives were the appropriate, Christian responses to what seemed like the systematic oppression of the poor. Some built settlement houses and lived alongside the poor, critiquing urban missions for failing to address the structural problems leading to poverty. Other Social Gospel ministers rejected unions, labor parties, and any arguments that seemed socialist with claims that private property was sacred, and God never intended social and economic equality. However, even ministers on the “Social Gospel’s Right,” as Henry May characterized them, still supported significant philanthropy. As May put it, they “admitted the existence of serious unsolved problems and joined in the search for answers” (1949:169). The Northern, urban Social Gospel movement offered a constellation of suggestions for social and political reforms to alleviate poverty. As individual churches and individual denominations, churches took charge of particular neighborhoods, surveyed demographic data (especially for their donors), and then invited men, women, and children to church activities and opportunities for Bible study. Women were invited to sewing classes, parenting classes, and other classes on hygiene. Men were invited to Sunday evening services and lecture clubs to discuss books, movies, and new ideas. Children were invited to youth groups and sports within newly built church gymnasia. Young adults were sometimes invited to church dance halls (to keep them out of the taverns). When thirty-three denominations of Protestants came together in 1908 as the Federal Council of Churches, Protestant leaders pledged to continue to support one another’s work in evangelizing the urban poor and “alleviating” poverty. They adopted the Social Creed of the Churches, a set of Christian principles for social action that Harry Ward had written for the Methodist denomination a few years earlier. They also established the Committee on Church and Social Service, an interdenominational committee of the Federal Council that would coordinate efforts across the denominations to do both evangelism and “social service.” Sometimes, this social service consisted of making contacts with workingclass community leaders. At other times, this social service involved lobbying on behalf of reforms such as hygienic sewage removal, Sunday

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rest from work, shorter workdays, the end to child labor, and special protections for women workers. Still other times, this social service involved the type of work historically performed by missions, including the establishment and expansion of religious schools, orphanages, and hospitals which served the poor. Before 1918, the Federal Council offered no public statements on African American rights to voting, education, or equal protection under the law. Many Anglo-American ministers subscribed to the idea that there were many dozens of races, each corresponding to particular languages and cultures. Urban space was often mapped according to culture and nationality, and ministers often saw majority African American neighborhoods as natural. By the 1910s, with the rise of the automobile and commuter rail, many middle-class Whites were moving into homes in the newly built suburbs. Suburbs often involved residential prohibitions according to race, with particular towns prohibiting Blacks, Jews, or Catholics. While notable ministers did discourage middle-class Whites from moving out of city centers, rarely did they offer any comments on suburban, residential segregation. Most leaders of Protestant denominations saw it as their responsibility to “uplift” and “civilize” the poor, not to level wealth or privilege. The 1908 Social Creed of the Churches illustrates many of the foundational principles of the White, Protestant Social Gospel movement. The churches agreed they stood: For equal rights and complete justice for all men in all stations of life. For the abolition of child-labor. For such regulation of the conditions of toil for women as shall safeguard the physical and moral health of the community. For the suppression of the “Sweating System.” For the gradual and reasonable reduction of the hours of labor to the lowest practicable point, and for that degree of leisure for all which is the condition of the highest human life. For a release from employment one day in seven. For the right of all men to the opportunity for self-maintenance, a right ever to be wisely and strongly safeguarded against encroachments of every kind. For the right of workers to some protection against the hardships often resulting from the swift crises of industrial change.

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For a living wage as a minimum in every industry, and for the highest wage that each industry can afford. For the protection of the worker from dangerous machinery, occupational disease, injuries, and mortality. For suitable provision for the old age of the workers and for those incapacitated by injury. For the principle of conciliation and arbitration in industrial dissensions. For the abatement of poverty. For the most equitable division of the products of industry that can ultimately be devised. (Ward 1914:6)

When the Methodist minister Harry Ward wrote that he supported “equal rights and complete justice” for “all men in all stations of life,” he was probably thinking of both Whites and Blacks. He would soon become a founding member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the same Christian pacifist organization to which African American ministers Howard Thurman and James Farmer belonged. Ward allied himself with many radicals and pacifists, even when Woodrow Wilson began to censor and jail such dissenters during World War I (Duke 2006:97). Ward’s list of proposed reforms included various measures to give poor urban dwellers more pay, shorter workdays, a healthier work environment, justice within union negotiations, and some kind of public pension for disability. Many of these reforms came directly from the labor movement. For example, his rejection of the “sweating system” and “child labor” called for an end to the practice of dividing work tasks into smaller and less skilled tasks, effectually rendering skilled workers obsolete. However, the omissions in the 1908 Social Creed, especially in light of its 1912 revised version, remind us that the document was bounded by White ministers’ missions-centered ambitions for industrial reform. For example, even though the struggle to get unions recognized was one of the most persistent concerns among working people, nowhere in the 1908 Creed was there mention of the right of workers’ rights to organize unions. If such language had been introduced, it might have signaled support for African American men and women to organize unions, a topic that would have been very unpopular among some ministers, especially in the South. It may also have signaled the rights of

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poor immigrant men and women to organize across multiple plants—a pattern that frightened Christian business leaders. The closest the Creed came to honoring unions’ rights was its support for the “principle of conciliation and arbitration in industrial dissensions.” Who, however, did Ward expect to arbitrate strikes? He expected that ministers of the Federal Council, and especially those most local to industrial disputes, would play the role of arbitrators. The Federal Council arbitrated more than a dozen strikes between 1905 and 1919 (Drake 2014). Many workers were distressed by this constant intervention of ministers into negotiations that they wanted to win on their own (Drake 2017). The ministers did not declare in their Creed that workers deserve a living wage whether or not industrial leaders believed they could afford to offer such high wages. The Creed suggested “the highest wage that each industry can afford.” In omitting the leadership of unions in helping to determine what each industry could afford, the Creed ultimately granted arbitrators— not workers—the highest authority within labor disputes. The 1908 Creed also made no mention of the rights of workers to free speech, freedom of assembly, or freedom of the press. Much to the contrary, the 1912 revision of the Social Creed called for an increase in social reforms which protected a traditional, patriarchal family. As their revised Creed described it, the whole Social Gospel movement was grounded in “the protection of the family, by the single standard of purity, uniform divorce laws, proper regulation of marriage, and proper housing.” This amounted to a statement against prostitution, extramarital sex, the use of birth control, and any easy access to divorce. Part and parcel of this protection of the family unit was their expanded call for protective legislation for women (limiting women’s work hours), for the stated purpose of “safeguard[ing] the physical and moral health of the community,” and their explicit resolution against the “social, economic and moral waste of the liquor traffic.” Ministers often claimed that they wanted fathers and husbands to be able to provide for the women and children who depended upon their wages to support the family, and they believed curtailing the sale of alcohol alongside an increase in wages would do just this. The 1912 revision also added language on children. It called for the “fullest possible development of every child, especially by the provision of proper education and recreation,” but offered no specific mention of legally segregated schools across the South.

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In some respects, this 1912 revision offered little substantial change. However, if we consider why the Federal Council felt the need to restate its principles in terms of “family protection,” only four years after its initial statement, the social and political context of the statement becomes relevant. After the turn of the century, “moral legislation” was becoming very important to White Southern Protestants eager to regain control of working-class White and African American families. While women temperance advocates, popular in the South, advocated personal oaths of abstinence alongside laws protecting women’s health, women’s suffrage, and defending women’s leadership within the home and society, Southern Protestant ministers led a different type of battle. They centered their struggle in shutting down businesses that allowed alcohol, gambling, prostitution, and other vices. It is true that taverns made space for such behavior. But taverns were also the types of places where poor Whites and Blacks mingled, discussed politics, and tried to organize labor unions. In both the North and the South, struggles to close these working-class recreational establishments were not simply about ending “the liquor traffic.” These efforts were also about eliminating working-class business owners (often immigrants and African Americans) who effectually managed working-class community life through their ownership of the primary recreational facilities for working-class people. In participating in this call for moral legislation, White Social Gospel ministers cooperated with segregationists’ efforts to solidify the color line. Many ministers spoke of hopes that their own urban missions, community centers, and church gymnasia would instead take on the role of bars within working-class communities. Many hoped that this would help “Americanize” immigrants and other rural transplants—teach them English, American customs, and US civics within a healthy, Christian environment (Drake 2014). At their best, urban missions did this: They offered job training, space for socializing, and other types of resources without the obvious costs (and dangers) of alcohol use. However, the Social Gospel vision for what an “Americanized” immigrant looked like was formed in ministers’ own image of an ideal, White Protestant church congregation. Their understandings of “American customs” and “the principle of democracy” often differed from that of the Irish American and German American union officials who were simultaneously working to organize the industrial working classes (Barrett 1992).

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Finally, even though the Federal Council of Churches did consider African Americans as part of their ministry, and even established a “Department of Race Relations” in 1918, they did not update the Social Creed to address race. The historians Ralph Luker and Edward Blum have framed this blind spot as a carryover from Reconstruction, when “reunion” between Northern and Southern Protestant denominations came at the cost of open discussions on race relations (Blum 2007; Luker 1998). However, even to the small extent that Northern and Southern White Protestants did stand together in the Progressive Era, Southern White denominational leaders were often hesitant to take strong stands on matters of racial equality. After 1920, White nondenominational churches were growing in popularity through the rise of Fundamentalism and the flowering of the Holiness-Pentecostal movement. As leaders of major denominations collected pew rents and blamed poor people’s bad habits for their penury, working-class Christians were increasingly looking to the leadership of the Moody Bible Institute and traveling evangelists rather than any leaders in the Federal Council (Gloege 2015). It is likely that Federal Council leaders thought that they would build a stronger foundation for interdenominational collaboration if they offered no overt critique of racial segregation, a practice many Southerners believed was supported with Scripture. An unintended result, however, was the further distancing between Protestant denominational ministers and leaders of the Christian Left. For, despite the Federal Council’s bold steps to defend principles of the labor and socialist movements before the Great War, their decision to support Wilson’s intervention into the World War distanced the ministers from elements of the labor movement. In remaining silent on Woodrow Wilson’s very oppressive Sedition Act of 1918, they cooperated in the federal and state governments’ raids on union headquarters, suppression of socialist reading material, and deportation of radical immigrants. The Fellowship of Reconciliation and several other interracial Christian groups critiqued the US entry into the war, but their position was not defended by the Federal Council. After 1918, the interracial, nondenominational Christian Left struggled to find the funding, union support, and morale to continue their ministries, union organizing, and lobbying efforts (Early 1997; Danielson 2014).

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Father John Ryan, professor of moral theology and political science at Catholic University, offered a similar vision of Christian reform to that of the Federal Council. In 1909, Ryan published a “Programme of Social Reform by Legislation.” Its six agenda items for legislative reform pushed beyond the Social Creed. Instead of leaving wages up to arbitrators and the good graces of industrial leaders, Ryan called for a federally set “legal minimum wage,” for, he said “the state has both the right and the duty to protect its citizens in their right to a decent livelihood. In doing so it no more exceeds its proper functions than when it legislates for the safety of life and limb, or for the physical and moral health of the community.” Instead of calling for a general reduction in workdays, he called for an “Eight Hour Law” which he hoped would limit workdays and spread work opportunities to the unemployed. Even more significantly, he called for legislation which would protect striking workers in “peaceful picketing, persuasion and boycotting.” As he put it, “The principle of the boycott is employed now and again by all classes, and within certain limits it is entirely lawful morally. Even the so-called secondary boycott, although peculiarly liable to abuse, is not essentially immoral” (Ryan 1909:439). Ryan defended workers’ rights to secure their own industrial justice and called for state boards to investigate and arbitrate disputes. Finally, Ryan called for unemployment relief through the establishment of state-supported employment agencies, a suggestion widely popular among socialists of his day. When, in 1917, American bishops united as the National Catholic War Council, they adopted much of Ryan’s agenda into their Bishops’ Plan for Social Reconstruction. In this plan, the bishops stood with Ryan in calling for all these principles as well as several more. They emphasized the importance of subsidized housing for workers, cost-of-living controls (like rent and price controls), vocational training, a wide net of social insurance, and even the foundations of a universal basic income. The bishops held that what was necessary was not simply “universal living wages,” but the “opportunity of obtaining something more than that amount for all who are willing to work hard and faithfully” (National Catholic 1919:37). They went on, “the employer has a right to get a reasonable living out of his business, but he has no right to interest on his investment until his employees have obtained at least living wages. This

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is the human and Christian, in contrast to purely commercial and pagan, ethics of industry” (ibid.:40). In 1919, the Bishops’ call for reform was more specific, and perhaps therefore more radical, than the calls for reform among most Protestant ministers. Though many laypeople, Protestant and Catholic, worried about the radicalism of the clergy, radical American clergy were not far from their European counterparts in calling on the state to administer justice for all. However, the American Catholic Bishops, like many White reformers, took for granted the idea that state and national employment agencies, wage and price controls, and social insurance would not set terms that would discriminate on the basis of race. Indeed, many Marxists had argued that race and racism would fade away with statedriven policies that addressed the root causes of poverty. Yet, even state agencies intending to remediate poverty continued to discriminate on the basis of race. The 1930s saw the rebirth of a broad, Christian initiative to pass into law many of the principles of the Social Creed and the Catholics’ Bishops’ Plan for Social Reconstruction. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal included programs for unemployment insurance, old age pensions, limited workdays, support for education, a minimum wage, and concerted efforts to provide the “highest wages each industry can afford” by connecting wage rates to prices. This legislation was largely the result of the lobbying efforts of White Catholic and Protestant ministers inside and outside the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The New Deal offered the promise of financial stability for many families with no savings or hope for social mobility, White and Black. However, in part because the New Deal’s sponsors were heavily based in the labor movement and the community of White Catholic and Protestant ministers, the New Deal greatly favored the social mobility of White people. It offered White men and White veterans myriad opportunities for personal and professional growth, while it did little to challenge racial segregation in housing or work opportunities. It empowered some African American labor unions and propelled African Americans into labor leadership, but it did little to change the system of racial segregation. Many Whites emerged from the Depression with high wages and federally subsidized mortgages in prosperous new neighborhoods. Many African Americans, meanwhile, emerged from the Depression still

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working in majority-Black industries and confined to racially segmented work and neighborhoods. In large part because of the “color blindness” of White Protestant and Catholic ministers’ agenda for a welfare state, the New Deal equated to affirmative action for the White poor (Katznelson 2006). The Fellowship of Reconciliation and other interracial coalitions offered alternate Social Gospel visions for legislative reform throughout this era, but they remained underfunded and suppressed by larger lobbying groups (Danielson 2014).

Conclusion In the end, the Social Gospel movement played a similar function to the White, elite-led “mindfulness movement” that Jaime Kucinskas discusses in the next chapter in this volume. Despite its emphasis on social and economic justice, in practice, the mindfulness movement made room for the emotional fulfillment of White people without fully addressing the racial and material inequalities at the heart of the elite-led movement. Similarly, though it sought to address poverty and economic inequality, the Social Gospel movement made more room for the social mobility of White people than of people of color. Thus, the relationship between religion and class, and the shape of faith-based projects to dismantle economic inequalities, varies based on the racial contexts in which they occur, including the racial backgrounds of the people involved in such efforts. The White supremacy inscribed by the larger Social Gospel movement did not stem from the personal prejudice of individual ministers or the congregations they served. Both Protestant and Catholic reformers maintained relationships with African American counterparts throughout their lives. In fact, many White ministers of the Social Gospel era went on to morally, personally, and financially support the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Some even stood behind declarations of African American clergy in the 1960s that their White churches had not done enough to address the color line (Cressler 2017; Deppe 2017; Pimblott 2016). Thus, it was not explicit racial prejudice that motivated the special, social promotion for Whites which grew out of the early-twentieth-century Social Gospel movements. Rather, the priorities of Black and White social gospel ministers reflected the

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segregated worlds which they each mostly took for granted, and White people had more power and resources at their own disposal. Not only despite but because White Social Gospel teachings often had nothing to do with race, they enforced the fact of White hegemony over African Americans. References

Barrett, James. 1992. “Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880–1930.” Journal of American History 75(23): 996–1020. Blum, Edward. 2007. W.E.B. Du Bois: American Prophet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Cressler, Matthew. 2017. Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration. New York: New York University Press. Danielson, Leilah. 2014. American Gandhi: A. J. Mustre and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Deppe, Martin. 2017. Operation Breadbasket: An Untold History of Civil Rights in Chicago, 1966–1971. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Dorrien, Gary. 2015. The New Abolition: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 2018. Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Drake, Janine Giordano. 2014. “Between Religion and Politics: The Working-Class Religious Left, 1880–1920.” PhD dissertation, University of Illinois. ———. 2017. “War for the Soul of the Christian Nation: Christian Socialists Versus the Federal Council of Churches, 1901–1912.” Labor 14(3): 55–80. Duke, David Nelson. 2006. In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx: Harry F. Ward and the Struggle for Social Justice. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Early, Frances H. 1997. A World Without War: How US Feminists and Pacifists Resisted World War I. New York: Syracuse University Press. Foley, Malcolm. 2018. “Black Pastors Defending Black Bodies: Lynching and the Church.” Presented at Conference on Faith and History, Grand Rapids, October. Gellman, Erik, and Jarod Roll. 2011. Gospel of the Working Class. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gerteis, Joseph. 2007. Class and the Color Line: Interracial Class Coalition in the Knights of Labor and the Populist Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gloege, Timothy. 2015. Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Harvey, Paul. 2011. Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. 1994. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Jacobson, Matthew Frye. 2000. Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad. New York: Hill & Wang. Katznelson, Ira. 2006. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Norton. Kelley, Robin. 1990. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press. Luker, Ralph. 1998. The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885–1912. Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press. May, Henry. 1949. Protestant Churches and Industrial America. New York: Harper & Brothers. NAACP. Platform of the National Negro Committee, 1909. NAACP Records, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (024.00.00) Courtesy of the NAACP. Digital ID # na0024. National Catholic Welfare Council. 1919. “Bishops’ Plan for Social Reconstruction: A General Review of the Problems and Survey of Remedies.” Washington, DC: National Catholic Welfare Conference. Pimblott, Kerry. 2016. Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Ryan, John. 1909. “A Programme of Social Reform by Legislation.” Catholic World (July 1909). Stelzle, Charles. 1912. American Social and Religious Conditions. New York: Fleming H. Revel Co. Ward, Harry. 1914. The Social Creed of the Churches. New York: Abingdon Press.

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Racial and Class Gaps in Buddhist-Inspired Organizing Jaime Kucinskas

George Mumford’s work is well known among the mindfulness community. Coined by a Huffington Post article as “The N.B.A.’s Mindfulness Whisperer,” Mumford has famously brought mindfulness to Phil Jackson’s basketball teams, and the likes of Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Shaquille O’Neal (Fernandez 2016). When I met Mumford, a tall former basketball player with a friendly, unimposing demeanor, at a mindfulness conference in 2015, the subject of race came up. To me, this was not surprising given that Mumford was the only Black man in the room of hundreds of conference attendees, and that I was one of the few Asian attendees, and a sociologist of spirituality and inequality. Mumford’s experience in the mindfulness community as one of its only Black leaders was challenging for him; in the community his awareness of race was “a constant,” he said. Despite being one of the early mindfulness teachers at the most well-known mindfulness center in the world and having taught mindfulness to so many NBA greats as well as to prisoners and young people around the country, he admitted he was “still not completely comfortable” in this scene. He was still treated as marginal to the movement, which was apparent to him at a recent tech spirituality conference, Wisdom 2.0., where he was given the smallest table and fewer people came to talk to him than other speakers. Mumford was not alone. The two other Black male leaders of the mindfulness movement I met while tracking the expansion of the movement, Ali and Atman Smith, told me of how they also had been treated differently at times based on their race. At a recent mindfulness retreat, as “the only African American people doing a mindfulness teaching” at an elite conference center, people mistook them for being in the band. Rather than being recognized as mindfulness teachers or retreat attendees, because of their race, they were assumed to be there in an 178

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inferior capacity to serve the predominantly White meditators as the entertainment. From talking to these men, it seemed that they largely just shrugged off racially charged prejudicial or discriminatory incidents as an implicit cost of being in predominantly White mindfulness spaces. To broach such an uncomfortable subject directly when it occurred would challenge a characteristic trait of the mindful elite and elite social circles more generally: a sense of ease. As sociologist Shamus Khan discusses in his 2011 book Privilege, in contemporary elite culture, privilege is often displayed by a strong sense of self and a sense of ease in interacting with anyone, regardless of whether they are a billionaire investor or a janitor. This form of self-presentation is cultivated from an early age in middle and upper-class families, schools, and other social spaces, and is typically easier for those occupying multiple privileged positions—such as affluent, White, men—to successfully pull off (Lareau 2011; Khan 2011; Rivera 2016). In the higher echelons of the mindfulness movement, leaders had this confident sense of self and ease in spades. For these traits—of being self-aware, accomplished, passionate, poised, and inspiring the confidence of others—were not only markers of elite culture, but they were also markers of having done the self-work required in extensive mindfulness training. To seem strained, or weighted down with life’s inequalities and burdens, contradicted the idealized blissful, serene image of what an accomplished meditator was supposed to be and what mindful leaders typically projected in their public events.1 As Black leaders of the predominantly White mindfulness movement, these men stood out as different, and experienced race as a palpable, prejudicial force around them. These challenges were in direct contrast to the White conference and retreat attendees’ experiences that the world was color-blind and fair. To the latter, race seemed invisible because of the unconscious privileges they enjoyed due to the color of their skin. One of the challenges with identifying privilege is that, typically, if you have it, you cannot see it clearly. Often it takes the perspective of an outsider who lacks such privileges, and/or a particular historical juncture, which dramatically disrupts assumptions and the dominant narratives of the status quo (Sewell 2005), to shed light among majority groups on the unspoken privileges they hold to the detriment of others.

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The mindfulness gatherings I attended were White spaces, which were part of a larger “White habitus” that comprises many middle- and upper-class American settings. Abiding in a “White habitus,” in which “a racialized, uninterrupted socialization process” conditions and creates “Whites’ racial taste, perceptions, feelings, and emotions and their views on racial matters” (Bonilla-Silva 2003:104), leads to Whites lacking understandings of and empathy for racial and ethnic minority groups’ different and unequal experiences. Whiteness is taught and reinforced through cultural discourse and ideology, such as the use of “White racial frames,” which dominate White spaces. White racial frames typically ignore racial and class privileges, racial oppression, and, in ways both subtle and explicit, glorify Whiteness as a norm. These frames are deeply entwined in people’s beliefs, and in their cognitive assessments of self, others, and sensory (e.g., visual or auditory) cues, and can lead to prejudicial and/or discriminatory actions (Feagin 2013; Withers 2017). As cultures of Whiteness often are all White people know, they fail to see and acknowledge racial and ethnic inequality. They consciously and subconsciously support and perpetuate a hierarchical White culture that systematically privileges Whites (Bonilla-Silva 2003; Doane and BonillaSilva 2003; Feagin 2013; Perry 2012). This chapter just begins to scratch the surface on some of the mechanisms through which racial and class-based privileges persist in middleand upper-class popular spirituality in America, as evident in the case of the elite-driven mindfulness meditation movement. Drawing upon preceding American spiritual, religious, and scientific movements such as Transcendentalism, Zen, Insight Meditation, and humanist psychology, leaders of the mindfulness movement have been popularizing Buddhistinspired meditation as a tool for personal health and well-being, as well as progressive social change, since 1979, when Jon Kabat-Zinn began teaching a mindfulness-based stress reduction program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Shrewsbury. Since then, other organizations, such as the Mind and Life Institute and the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, have emerged to bring Buddhist-inspired contemplative practices into a variety of other fields, such as science, education, law, business, and even the military. I studied the emergence of the mindfulness movement from 2011 to 2015, using a combination of semi-structured, in-depth interviews,

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participant observation at their conferences and meetings, and content analysis of their documents and public postings on social media, to track the movement’s rapid expansion into powerful, highly esteemed secular organizations and fields.2 By then, the mindfulness movement had been remarkably successful in legitimizing and spreading mindfulness and other Buddhist-inspired practices in elite universities, hospitals, schools, and renowned businesses around the country. The contemplative leaders I spoke with thought that mindfulness was an important tool in promoting progressive aims such as enhanced well-being, equality, compassionate action, critical thinking, and deeper problem-solving. Founders of central contemplative organizations, such as Jon Kabat-Zinn of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Healthcare and Society, and Adam Engle of the Mind and Life Institute, were concerned about the prevalence of selfishness, greed, materialism, and inequality under capitalism, and hoped that teaching mindfulness would promote a new “consciousness,” with increased self-awareness and sensitivity to one’s interdependence with others; they thought these shifts would naturally lead people to cultivate a society more oriented to the “greater good” of all. Although the movement ostensibly seeks to create healthier, more selfaware individuals and a stronger, more inclusive democratic civil society, the movement was established and developed mainly by highly educated, middle- and upper-class White meditators. Even as many contemplative leaders aspired for their work to empower a wide range of people experiencing suffering, and to more generally improve society, only a small minority of leaders actually mentioned reducing racism as one of their explicit aims. Among this group of predominantly White leaders, class and educational inequality was more visible and top of mind. Similar to the color-blind White religious leaders of the Social Gospel movement in Janine Giordano Drake’s chapter, because the White majority of the leaders of the mindfulness movement did not experience—and thereby did not see—racial inequality, it was not made a top priority in their efforts at social reform.

Mobilizing through Elite Networks Even though mindfulness advocates sought to produce a more just, equal, thriving society, in striving to spread mindfulness, racial and class

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inequality often seemed to fall by the wayside. Instead, the elite mindful leaders actively drew upon their affluent personal and professional networks to promote and legitimize meditation. Above all, the mindful elite prioritized legitimizing mindfulness as an effective, healthy practice among esteemed secular audiences across a variety of powerful, well-resourced institutions, such as health care, science, education, the military, and business. To make mindfulness appealing across professional institutions, the founding members of the mindfulness movement chose four key strategies (Kucinskas 2019): (1) they built their network around reputable people they, or those in their networks, knew who were interested in meditation and worked in important institutions (such as Fortune 500 companies and prestigious Ivy League and flagship research universities); (2) they collaborated with institutional insiders to create mindful intervention programs associated with respected organizations; (3) they gave wide latitude with respect to how program leaders could adapt and secularize Buddhist meditation practices in situ; and (4) no single official regulatory body was developed to design and implement standards delimiting who could lead mindfulness programs and how such programs could be adapted.

Largely as a result of the mindfulness movement, mindfulness has become a popular panacea for a wide array of personal and social problems among religious and secular audiences in the United States and internationally. Although the elite-led popularization of mindfulness was effective in spreading meditation far and wide, beginning in 2014, a backlash arose among scholars, Buddhist practitioners, and journalists in the popular media. Critics raised questions about the many claims made about the benefits of mindfulness and the considerable ways in which Buddhist meditation was altered to cater to professionals’ needs and interests. They wondered whether the individualized, “accommodationist” approach to change taken by the mindfulness movement led to cooptation by capitalist interests, rather than social reform (Purser and Loy 2013; cf. King and Carrette 2004). The shortcomings of the movement tied directly to the strategies the mindful elite used to popularize their contemplative practices. In

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building their movement through largely racially homophilous elite intellectual, spiritual networks, the mindful elite failed to sufficiently account for the perspectives of others unintentionally excluded from their strategic planning processes. As evident in events that have transpired since, as they built the movement, the mindful elite lacked perspectives of those less intellectually, economically, and racially privileged than they were. Consequently, while many facets of their movement culture and programs appealed to powerful institutions, mindfulness largely failed to directly address materialism and social problems such as inequality, as the founders of the movement had initially hoped it would. Although some of the early mindfulness teachers, such as Mumford and the Smith brothers mentioned above, had worked with underrepresented, economically and racially disadvantaged communities during the emergence of the mindfulness movement, they were not at the helm of the main mindfulness organizations. But even if they had been in the room, people of color comprised a scant minority of mindful leaders; when minority groups’ proportions are so small in historically and culturally White spaces, it can inhibit members of minority groups from bringing attention to themselves and their minority status by bringing up racial inequality or inequity (Kanter 1977). It was not until after the Black Lives Matters movement took hold in the wake of a series of untimely, publicly visible deaths of Black people at the hands of American police officers, that the mindfulness movement, led by a select few of their non-White members, began to seriously consider racial inequality within and outside the movement; the 2015 meeting at which I met George Mumford was the first time they decided to collectively broach the subject of race.

Tilting Programming toward Individualized and Institutional Goals As Herbert Simon wrote, a person “does not live for months or years in a particular position in an organization, exposed to some streams of communication, shielded from others, without the most profound effects on what he knows, believes, attends to, hopes, wishes, emphasizes, fears, and proposes” (1976:xvi). In working with insiders within powerful secular organizations, mindfulness advocates adapted their intervention

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programs in manifold ways. To introduce mindfulness programs into companies, schools, clinics, and other organizations, the mindful elite leaders altered Buddhist meditation to align with the purposes and needs of targeted organizational audiences. Particularly in certain sectors, such as business, law, and academia, they tended to work with and adapt their programs for relatively affluent, privileged audiences. For example, founders of the Google Search Inside Yourself program appealed to Googlers by pitching mindfulness as an emotional intelligence tool, which would help nerdy engineers from all over the world work well together in teams. They then created lessons on useful skills for the workplace, such as mindful emailing. Mindful leaders continually adapted their programs to better serve their clients. For example, rather than giving intensive retreats typically offered in Buddhist centers, over the years, programs such as the Google Search Inside Yourself program developed abbreviated lessons they could use to introduce new employees with limited time to mindfulness. Mirabai Bush, founder of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, one of the leading organizations of the mindfulness movement and co-founder of various mindful business programs at companies such as Google and the seed company Monsanto, recognized how her perspective on business shifted through her work with companies. Whereas she had previously made a distinction between “us”—moral meditators and “them”—profit-seeking corporate employees, in working with business clients, she grew more sympathetic to their employees’ perspectives and needs. While working with Monsanto, Bush shifted from viewing their employees as exploiters of the environment and of poorer farmers around the world, to seeing them as people, who had “kids in college,” “car payments,” and who were living “in St. Louis where there weren’t any jobs.” They were “the first in their families to have gone to college” and were “trying to feed the world.” After working with Monsanto’s corporate leadership in the late 1990s, Bush began to trust that their “intentions were good.”3 While building relationships with different clients, contemplative leaders came to better understand clients’ perspectives and developed empathy for where they were coming from. With this knowledge, they gradually adapted their mindfulness programs to appeal to clients and fit their needs. Yet, questions remain: By working with institutional

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insiders and leaders, whose voices tended to be excluded? And how did this affect the efficacy of the movement in attaining their goals to create a more inclusive, compassionate democracy?

The Missing Perspectives of Outsiders The contemplative leaders in my sample (n=80), were far more privileged than the typical American in terms of their educational attainment, occupations, income, and race and ethnicity. Although I reached members of the mindfulness movement through a combination of purposive and snowball sampling, which did not yield a representative sample, but rather captured perspectives of core leadership across primary mindful organizations and perspectives of some newer members (n=28), the class and racial and ethnic backgrounds of respondents were similar to what I observed at various mindfulness events. Of the leaders I spoke with, nearly half (49%) had the highest degree in their field, such as a PhD, a JD, or an MD. An additional 24% had a master’s degree, and all but three contemplative leaders had a college education. Nearly twofifths of contemplative leaders were professors or researchers, and nearly two-thirds held a leadership or management position in their organization. The contemplative leaders I spoke with also tended to be male (63%) and White (85%). Nearly 9% of my sample was Asian. Blacks and Latinos each comprised an additional 3% of the contemplative leaders with whom I spoke.4 Given the overall affluence of the movement, certain perspectives, such as that of the working or lower classes, or that of people of color, rarely made it into leadership meetings. Because of this, these alternative perspectives were seldom considered by leadership during most of my data collection from 2011 to 2014. Beginning around 2014, critiques of the movement arose from outside its bounds. For example, in a 2017 Humans of New York episode, a middle-aged Black woman discussed her experience with mindfulness at work: [E]veryone’s looking in and doing all of this inward reflection. If you’re unhappy, it’s because of you. Your unhappiness isn’t a reflection of any systemic imbalance that we could address together. It’s a “you” problem.

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I worked the most shit job when I moved back to New York last year. I was told instead of me becoming upset, because someone’s spoken to me in a way that’s horrifically disrespectful, unprofessional, and above all probably illegal, I was told, “Just take a few deep breaths. Maybe you should get the Mindful app, the meditation app.” Are you serious? The things you are saying are not only not relevant to the job. Why are you commenting on my body? Why are you commenting on my weight? Why are you commenting on my hair? Don’t tell me to meditate my frustration away because my frustration is valid and it’s real and it’s coming from a genuine place. I wouldn’t be frustrated if it didn’t matter.

For this woman, mindfulness was a tool of exploitation used by her employer, rather than a tool of personal and professional liberation, as the mindful elites had hoped it would be. Rather than address the gendered and racial prejudice at her workplace, her employer used mindfulness to put the onus on her to find a way to be happy at work, regardless of the prejudicial behavior she endured. Many of the contemplative leaders I spoke with never considered the possibility that Buddhist-inspired meditation could be used as a tool to exploit workers and avoid direct confrontation of structural problems and inequalities. For the majority of the mindfulness movement’s founding leaders, racial and gender inequality were not a top priority; this is not surprising given their socio-demographic characteristics. In many ways, the contemplative leaders took their own knowledge, values, and experiences for granted. Many of the early contemplative leaders had been meditating for decades, guided by some of the world’s most wellknown Buddhist meditation instructors. They assumed that, like them, newer instructors would be committed to their own personal practice and to the positive values tied to Buddhist meditation, such as kindness, compassion, and “right action” by Buddhist ethical standards. Mindful leaders failed to fully account for their own blind spots from occupying so many positions of privilege. The mindful elite took for granted that others advocating their cause would be like them and share their underlying values. They never imagined that when managers knew little about contemplative practices or did not uphold the progressive, inclusive spirit of Buddhist modernism, the practices could be misconstrued to blame workers for failing to thrive in toxic work environments.

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Mindfulness leaders and teachers also had focused on passing their practices and insights along to others through a chain of direct transmission. By teaching and modeling their practices to others, they hoped mindfulness would spread more broadly. With this approach, leaders’ attention largely focused on intrapersonal work on the meditation cushion and interpersonal work within contemplative programs. For example, during a lesson to UCLA students on mindfulness practices, Dr. Marvin Belzer, the Associate Director for the university’s Mindful Awareness Research Center, taught several practices commonly used in mindfulness programs. First, he began by guiding students in a sitting meditation, in which they were instructed to focus on “neutral objects,” like the sounds in the room and the rising and falling of their breath. In Buddhism, such practices are intended to develop one’s equanimity and attention. By paying attention to positive stimuli, which trigger pleasant emotional or cognitive responses that cause a person to seek further experiences, or negative stimuli, which can cause discomfort and lead to avoidance, one experiences an emotional roller coaster. By instead focusing on neutral objects, Buddhists and meditators believe that one can experience a pause from this emotional and cognitive roller coaster, learn to distinguish these different states more clearly, and slowly gain more control over one’s life. Second, Belzer facilitated an interpersonal activity between partners, intended to develop caring, which in Buddhism is often referred to as loving-kindness. In the activity, each partner identified a person they cared about, and then shared what they liked about the person. The listener then replied, “Thank you,” and they switched roles. After the activity, Belzer had everyone close their eyes, and wish peace, happiness, and safety for the person they had thought of, for their partner, for their partner’s person, and for themselves. While program attendees seemed to enjoy these practices and find them beneficial in fostering self-awareness and experiences of caring for others, the practices paid little attention to larger structural social forces. In this respect, the mindfulness movement was similar to White Christian conservative movements, which approach social problems from an individualistic, relational perspective, rather than more directly confronting structural systems of inequality (Emerson and Smith 2000; Perry 2017; Smith 1998). As Gerardo Martí’s chapter in this volume conveys, by not acknowledging and challenging the structures

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of socioeconomic inequality, a religious cultural movement instead assumes and promotes a belief in seeing “limitless opportunity” (23) in the present political economy—a Christian libertarian conviction inculcated to followers to realize their potential, which builds upon the long-standing American belief that with hard work, people can achieve the American Dream. This myopic focus is only possible for White movements, whose White members enjoy considerable racial privileges. In contrast to people of color, many of whom regularly encountered larger structural and cultural prejudicial and discriminatory barriers in White spaces, Whites are accustomed to inhabiting spaces where they are seen as “normal.” As philosopher Shannon Sullivan (2006) describes, as a dominant racial group in many spaces in American society, Whites enjoy ontological expansiveness: They assume that all cultural, social and figurative spaces are governed by White racial frames, norms, and practices, and open to them. Furthermore, in these White privileged spaces, an epistemology of ignorance, which fails to consider long-standing systematic racial oppression, tends to be not only possible, but pervasive (Cabrera, Watson, and Franklin 2016). In lacking awareness of their racial and class-based privileges, contemplative leaders failed to regulate who promoted mindfulness, how they did so, and the contemplative content taught. Given that many facets of Buddhist meditation and its associated ethics were cut out or altered to appeal to new institutional audiences, the mindful leaders’ tactics could all too easily be co-opted for alternative institutional purposes or could unintentionally lead to discriminatory outcomes, like the woman’s experience above.

A Notable Exception in Response to Tragedy: Bringing the Outside In It often takes a social rupture to unearth people’s privileges and the taken-for-granted assumptions that often coincide with them. One way this can occur is through a disruptive external event, which problematizes and cracks open people’s typical worldviews (Sewell 2005). During the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society’s (CfM) 2015 annual conference, one of the movement’s

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few Black leaders, University of San Francisco law professor Rhonda Magee, evoked the tragic death of Eric Garner, a Black New Yorker, at the hands of several police officers in 2014, in an effort to raise awareness of racial injustice in the United States and the lack of attention to racial inequality within the mindfulness movement. Prior to Magee’s presentation, racial and ethnic inequality had not been collectively acknowledged by the mainly White community of mindfulness practitioners, the majority of whom abided in a White habitus, dominated by ontological expansiveness and its concurrent White racial frames, norms, and practices. Most White mindfulness practitioners failed to see and understand the many historical and enduring forms of racial and ethnic discrimination and prejudice in American society. With her lesson, Magee used the example of Garner’s death to create a crack in the audience’s assumptions of a fair, color-blind, and/ or post-racial society: She wanted to question the culture of Whiteness, which typically portrays police as fair officials who serve members of the American public equally. Furthermore, Magee hoped her lesson would pose “a radical question” to the mindfulness community about how they could engage issues of racial injustice. In her lesson, she then modeled an answer to her own question, showing how “we might infuse some of our teachings of MBSR [Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction programs] with at least some of these kinds of practices” to bear witness, and raise awareness of suffering not only in “our daily communities,” but also among people experiencing “some of the hardest” suffering “at the bottom of a system of ongoing, historically generated oppression.” Prior to showing the video of Garner’s death, Magee led a brief mindfulness practice, inviting the audience to settle “into the depth of your practice right now as a support for turning toward . . . the suffering around this issue.” Drawing on her own contemplative experience, she then explained that she directly applied “the insights of the practices” in navigating her “sense of the right and wrongness of the actions that I need to take in the world.” She said the practices had brought her a greater sense of “the interconnectedness of every single entity of all of us,” “a joy that comes from love and a deep kind of abiding sense of love that is coming from that sense of interconnectedness,” and a sense of “spaciousness.” More concretely, she advised the audience to focus on their breath, and practice turning toward the racism “together with the

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support of this community,” and to notice “what arises for you as we turn toward this right now.” After showing the video clip, Magee was visibly upset. “Fourteen times, they say, he said, ‘I can’t breathe,’” she said, as Garner was lying on the ground handcuffed and held in a headlock by a police officer for the alleged misdemeanor of selling loose cigarettes on the street. We need to “turn toward this as an example of what is actually happening in our communities and what people who come to our classes in MBSR, who we meet on the street, have witnessed, might be carrying with them,” she said. “You’d be surprised how many people have experienced some version of painful interaction with the police.” She continued, emphasizing the need for the mindfulness movement to bring “mindfulness into the world, looking where the suffering is and asking . . . How can we bring these practices to bear?” Magee then provided suggestions of how mindfulness could help people ameliorate the effects of personal experiences with racism, deeply socialized implicit and explicit racism in interactions, and systemic racism in institutions. At a personal level, for example, mindfulness could be used to counter stereotype threat. “Stereotype threat,” she explained, “is a psychological concept that helps us understand what happens when you’re afraid you’re going to be stereotyped. All your energies start to go toward avoiding being stereotyped. They get in the way of performing well in school . . . [and] all kinds of areas.” This contributed to persisting performance gaps between Black and White American students. Mindfulness, she thought, would help reduce subtle forms of racism in education and stereotype threat by helping practitioners “recognize both when we might be stereotyping someone and check that and when we might be starting to feel the effects as a victim or target of stereotype.” There is “at least one really good study,” she said, “that indicates that a bit of training in mindfulness can help inoculate against the effects of stereotype threat.” Magee provided other examples, such as how mindfulness could be taught to police officers and to people of color to develop “focus, concentration, . . . understanding,” and emotional regulation in the face of anxiety that could help prevent more deaths of people of color, as well as the negative repercussions that officers face from such actions, like jail time. Last, in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh’s engaged Buddhism,

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Magee advocated for a bold new vision of mindfulness training, in which mindfulness practice would combine with other social justice traditions, such as indigenous and South African restorative justice circles, to more directly address systemic injustice and inequality. The predominantly White audience of CfM members was captivated by Magee’s talk. She had created a space in which they largely felt comfortable, surrounded by others with similar values and contemplative practices, and willing to learn about a difficult, unjust event in which, by virtue of their own White identities and cultures, they were implicated. Afterward, the audience expressed their lack of understanding and attention to racial inequality in America in a question and answer session and a subsequent afternoon breakout session, which gave participants the opportunity to have an extended conversation about Magee’s lessons and their implications on the mindfulness community’s lack of attention to racial inequality. Attendees shared what they had experienced emotionally during her lesson, and what they had learned about racism in America that they did not know before. One woman, for example, expressed a “thirst” to know more, and said that the talk made her realize she had been carrying a symbolic internal Buddhist “knot” concerning race relations. A few others reflected on the privileges they had, which others lacked due to the color of their skin, such as feeling safe around police. They also expressed the desire to contemplatively sit and further reflect on the profound, emotional lessons they had learned, and to integrate what they were learning into the mindfulness movement when they were ready. One older man noted the tensions between his desire to “want to hear from,” as well as “be with and have this feeling with” everyone, “AND . . . [have] this wonderful opportunity to . . . give suggestions back to the center.” Several women mentioned the “urgency” of creating a plan as soon as possible, suggesting that CfM work to increase the number of practitioners of color in the mindfulness community, as well as incorporate more content on social diversity and inequality in course content. Others pushed back, urging the group to “sit for a few minutes,” in meditation, before jumping into direct action. This example shows how skilled orators can breach cultures of Whiteness during times of social unrest, when dramatic, all too often tragic, incidents, can be used to show the unequal racial fissures American society rests upon to unaware privileged audiences. Magee was skillful

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in building her discussion around a shared spiritual practice and values, which she knew she had in common with her audience. Following the video, she showed sympathy and acknowledged the injustice of the situation but did not espouse anger or blame. Instead, she focused on her proposed solution: how mindfulness training could be directed to addressing racial inequalities and injustice, and how the content of the programs would have to be adapted to be more inclusive and to be brought to bear on such social problems. Magee’s talk was successful in directly broaching racial injustice in America for the first time as a primary event at a national mindfulness conference. Racial injustice had never come to the fore at prior events, likely because the movement’s mainly White leadership had not been paying attention to this kind of inequality. This was possible because, as members of a dominant racial group, they did not experience their race as salient and as a cause of being treated differently on a regular basis. With her talk, Magee was just beginning to scratch the surface of the problem; she was merely raising the topic and trying to get the White base of the movement—who were largely uninformed about racial and ethnic inequality—to see and care about the issue. This possibility for broaching the topic was likely possible only because of the multiple unjust deaths of Black people over the preceding year at the hands of police officers, which had been highly publicized by the media and the mass protests across the country that followed. However, this incident also reveals that the contemplative skills mindfulness programs foster do not naturally lead to direct efforts for larger social change. The mindfulness skills taught translate more easily into individual and collective reflection and thoughtful discussion, but not necessarily into skillful collective action that directly addresses complex, structural social problems. As a participant in the collective breakout group, I left feeling that the conversations following Magee’s talk were earnest but had meandered around and ultimately failed to produce pragmatic plans for action. I was not contacted by anyone after the meeting to follow up the discussion with additional collective action. Since Magee’s talk, and with her assistance, CfM and other contemplative organizations in the mindfulness movement have taken some steps to increase membership of people of color and integrate insights from more diverse perspectives into their community. At this point in time,

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it is too early to tell whether these efforts have made substantial impacts on the overall movement culture and decision-making processes.

Conclusion What do we learn about how religion is raced from these different glimpses of the mindfulness movement’s relationship with affluent White privilege and racial inequality? The movement shows how groups led mainly by racially homophilous, privileged people who occupy positions of power may lead them to think and act in ways that help others like them, even if their stated goals are to aid others and address inequality. White people raised in a White habitus inhabiting White spaces typically cannot see race and racial inequality, which leads to it not being in their realm of conscious thought. Affluent, racially and ethnically privileged leaders are not likely to address problems which are not readily and regularly visible in their experiences and that of their clients—which in the case of the mindfulness movement largely led mindfulness leaders to cater to the affluent desire for meaningfulness, spiritual and professional achievement, and health, while failing to sufficiently raise and address problems related to racial and class-based inequality. The problematic seeming invisibility of inequalities within privileged groups is not limited to those within such groups. It is also a problem for scholars of race and inequality, whether they identify as White or otherwise. Such inequalities can be hard to discern, beyond the shadow of doubt, in socially homogenous spaces. Clearly identifying racial, class-based, and other inequalities typically requires comparisons with the experiences of people from different social groups. Future research on religious and spiritual groups can become more sensitized to broader power structures and inequalities by broadening the aperture of research design. Comparisons can be levied by oversampling minority groups’ experiences in larger dominant groups, or by comparing homogenous dominant groups with experiences of alternative groups in other locations on the broader social hierarchy. For example, rather than simply focusing on members of predominantly White Christian churches, Jewish synagogues, or other religious institutions, researchers can branch out and speak with other organizations that the groups studied interface with, the people religious organizations serve

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outside of their community, and other outside stakeholders. Similar to 360-degree business reviews which recognize that employees often cannot recognize their own strengths and weaknesses and instead seek feedback from those with whom they interface, scholars of religion can include perspectives of those on the boundaries of the group studied to gain more information on the group’s broader sociological context and how its position may affect members’ perspectives. Of course, incorporating outside perspectives will likely introduce a combination of useful insights and others distorted by out-group prejudices, which the analyst will have to assess within the purview of the larger social context and in light of all information gathered. As in this chapter, scholars can then more clearly identify whose voices are attended to, and whose perspectives lack consideration. Of those ethnic, racial, and class-based perspectives not typically deemed important by central majority group members, whose perspectives might lend useful insights or alternative ways of understanding the groups under investigation? Inclusion of alternative perspectives from other stakeholders occupying different positions in a social hierarchy can shed light on the privileges, and associated assumptions, that a group holds, of which its most powerful members lack awareness. Because contemplative leaders and teachers at the core of the movement spent most of their time working within their organizations or mindfulness courses, they lacked awareness of how mindfulness was represented and used by some managers outside of their immediate circles. As the Black woman in the Humans of New York clip reported, in companies extolling the individual benefits of mindfulness, the practices could all too easily become tools of repression rather than transcendence, which shifted blame for systemic problems onto the shoulders of employees. Examining the mindfulness movement’s racial and class-based treatment of racial inequality within and outside of the movement also reveals how disruptive historical events can be used by socially skilled actors, who couch their claims in shared spiritual and religious practices and ideologies, to unearth unequal social foundations in privileged groups. Social ruptures are interesting to examine because they not only reveal some groups’ taken-for-granted assumptions and privileges, but they also can initiate processes of change, in which members renegotiate and revise their understandings, practices, and even identities (Peek

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2011). Such ruptures can provide interesting cases to study how privileged groups, such as the mindfulness movement, become aware of their privileges, seek to understand how their positions bias their worldview, and lead to collective action to address their shortcomings and better align with their spiritual and social missions. More attention to religious and spiritual situations like Magee’s talk, in which Whiteness was skillfully breached and an opening was created for Whites to start to see the inequities they had been missing, should be examined further. Such studies should incorporate recent scholarship on how members of marginalized groups, such as Black people in America, can creatively foster new empowering experiences and meaning together, even in the face of adversity (Hunter et al. 2016).5 Alternatively, rather than incorporate outsiders’ perspectives, disruptive events can reveal how some groups experience such events as threats, which cause them to stand behind and fortify their previous religious and racialized beliefs, attitudes, and practices. Comparisons of how different groups respond to jarring external events which bring systemic inequalities to the fore will help develop understandings of the triggers and mechanisms through which groups choose inclusion and change, or alternatively, avoid such issues and reinforce the status quo. Notes

1 Although accomplished practitioners would readily acknowledge that this is an unrealistic aim, this assumed, often subconscious, ideal of adept meditators perpetually abiding in equanimity and calm surfaced throughout my interviews and interactions in the mindfulness community. 2 More details on the methodology for this project are presented in The Mindful Elite: Mobilizing Change from the Inside Out (2019). 3 Bush’s comment applied only to the team she worked with under CEO Bob Shapiro’s leadership. 4 As a multiethnic White/Asian woman completing a PhD at the time, who had spent a lot of time in predominantly White spaces such as in elite colleges and universities, my race was not particularly salient to me as I collected data. Another multiethnic female mindfulness teacher, Peggy, discussed a similar experience at the 2015 Center for Mindfulness annual conference. “As a half-Asian [American] woman,” she thought “in this particular gathering that that has some value . . . I don’t forget that I look different, I don’t forget that I may be perceived differently, so that in itself gives an awareness, it’s this color insight kind of thing, that doesn’t go away.” She noted the prevalence of implicit bias based on how people look, but then acknowledged that the many privileges she had, like being

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educated, helped her fit in. Like Peggy, being part Asian held some value in Buddhist circles, as I could point to my Chinese Buddhist cultural heritage, which was a source of authenticity among Buddhist practitioners. For both Peggy and me, being half-Asian enabled us to span social boundaries more easily than other non-White groups: We seemed to fit in without drawing attention in White groups, but also were able to empathize with experiences of other non-White members who were viewed differently. What was most salient to me while moving among the mindfulness crowd was class background. Even as a PhD student with educational credentials, many people I talked with were far more economically affluent and had attained higher educational and professional credentials than I had at the time. 5 I am grateful to Jelani Ince and Grace Yukich for their insightful theoretical and substantive feedback on this chapter.

References

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2003. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Cabrera, Nolan L., Jesse S. Watson, and Jeremy D. Franklin. 2016. “Whiteness in Higher Education: The Invisible Missing Link in Diversity and Racial Analyses.” ASHE Higher Education Report 42 (January):7–125. Doane, A. W., and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, eds. 2003. White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism. New York: Routledge. Emerson, Michael O., and Christian Smith. 2000. Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Feagin, Joe R. 2013. The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and CounterFraming. New York: Routledge. Fernandez, Erick. 2016. “Meet George Mumford, the N.B.A.’s Mindfulness Whisperer.” Huffington Post, March 3, www.huffingtonpost.com. Humans of New York, The Series. 2017. November 26, www.facebook.com. Hunter, Marcus Anthony, Mary Pattillo, Zandria F. Robinson, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. 2016. “Black Placemaking: Celebration, Play, and Poetry.” Theory, Culture & Society 33 (March):31–56. Kanter, Rosabeth. 1977. “Some Effects of Proportions on Group Life: Skewed Sex Ratios and Responses to Token Women.” American Journal of Sociology 82 (March):965–90. Khan, Shamus. 2011. Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 14–15. King, Richard, and Jeremy Carrette. 2004. Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion. New York: Routledge. Kucinskas, Jaime. 2019. The Mindful Elite: Mobilizing Change from the Inside Out. New York: Oxford University Press. Lareau, Annette. 2011. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Peek, Lori. 2011. Behind the Backlash: Muslim Americans after 9/11. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Perry, Samuel L. 2012. “Racial Habitus, Moral Conflict, and White Moral Hegemony within Interracial Evangelical Organizations.” Qualitative Sociology 35 (January):89–108. ———. 2017. Growing God’s Family: The Global Orphan Care Movement and the Limits of Evangelical Activism. New York: NYU Press. Purser, Ron, and David Loy. 2013. “Beyond McMindfulness.” Huffington Post, August 31, www.huffingtonpost.com. Rivera, Lauren A. 2016. Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sewell Jr., William H. 2005. Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simon, Herbert A. 1976. Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization, 3rd ed. New York: Free Press. Smith, Christian. 1998. American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sullivan, Shannon. 2006. Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Withers, Erik T. 2017. “Whiteness and Culture.” Sociology Compass 11 (April).

10

The Religious and Racial Minoritization of Asian American Voters Russell Jeung, John Jimenez, and Eric Mar Asian Americans, A Sleeping Political Giant —New York Times, April 5, 2018

This national headline highlights the huge growth of the Asian American electorate and its potential as a racial voting bloc. In his article, David Leonhardt additionally notes the low national turnout—at 27%— of Asian Americans for midterm elections. Together, these statistics reveal how Asian Americans are a potential and as yet unmobilized key political swing vote in American elections. For the past four decades, academics, reporters, and politicians have employed this metaphor of a “sleeping giant” for Asian American voters (Ong, Ong, and Ong 2016). Unfortunately, it evokes two Orientalized stereotypes of this racial group, which is comprised of many immigrants: that they are politically apathetic and docile, and that they are a fearful, hostile horde if roused. In reality, Asian Americans have long been politically active, especially transnationally, and rather than being a disloyal enemy, they have contributed mightily to the American political fabric (Aoki and Takeda 2008). The “sleeping giant” metaphor is also incorrect in another way, for Asian American voters actually have been awake and on the move in the last seven presidential elections. Since 1992, Asian Americans have increasingly voted as a bloc for Democratic nominees. While less than one in three Asian American voters (31%) voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, more than half (55%) voted for Al Gore in 2000, and almost three in four (73%) voted for Barack Obama in 2012. In the 2016 election, about two-thirds (65%) of Asian Americans voted for Hilary Clinton (Fuchs 2016). 201

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What explains this movement to the left, as a distinct and unified voting bloc, of Asian Americans over the past seven election cycles? How do intersections of race and religion shape Asian American political preferences? And how does this intersect with immigration, since many Asian Americans are first- or second-generation immigrants? This chapter confirms that four key factors help determine the Asian American presidential vote: partisanship, racial and ethnic interests, religion, and migration status. In particular, it highlights a key process that explains why Asian Americans have increasingly voted for Democratic presidential candidates. Minority status, whether racial or religious, leads Asian Americans to support the Democratic Party, though different intersections of religion and race influence political preferences in different ways. Furthermore, while immigrant status shapes political preferences, with US-born Asian Americans often more politically progressive than their immigrant counterparts, this is not true for all Asian Americans, particularly Asian American Evangelicals. This suggests that understanding the effect of immigrant status on politics requires recognizing the intersection of religion and race.

The Intersections of Race, Religion, and Immigration Four main factors shape Asian Americans’ political behaviors: (1) their partisanship, (2) their racial and ethnic interests, (3) their religious orientation, and (4) their immigrant status. Even though Asian Americans are the racial group most likely to not identify with a political party, partisan politics and policies have both pulled Asian Americans toward the Democratic Party and pushed them away from the Republican Party. Indeed, Asian Americans as a racial group and as non-White ethnic minorities develop distinct issue orientations and concerns. Given these interests, they have acted rationally in pursuing their concerns and voting for Democratic candidates. Religion is also a determining factor in how Asian Americans vote, and Asian Americans’ racial and religious identities and interests intersect in important ways. Finally, since Asian Americans are predominantly an immigrant group, they have been politically socialized differently in their homelands than native-born Americans are, which subsequently affects their partisanship and political decision-making. Further, their adaptation in the

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United States—including their language proficiency, length of time in the United States, and their economic mobility—shape their American political participation.

Partisan Politics and Asian Americans Despite the overall lack of partisan identification among Asian Americans, partisan politics do exert push and pull forces among the Asian American electorate that sways their vote (Lee et al. 2009). For those who identify with a party, affiliation with the Democratic Party correlates with voting for Democratic presidential candidates. Indeed, party identification and issue preferences largely determined how Asian Americans voted in the 2008 presidential election (ibid.). Longer periods of time spent in the United States, higher income, and higher educational attainment are significant factors that support party affiliation among Asian Americans (Phan and Garcia 2009). In addition, ethnic subgroups have differential rates of partisanship, with Koreans, Filipinos, Japanese, and Indian/Pakistanis being less likely to affiliate as compared to Vietnamese (ibid.). In general, assimilation into the United States, which involves greater experience with and knowledge of its political system, spurs partisanship (Audette, Brockway, and Weaver 2017). Similarly, religious conversion to Christianity and change in group identity—another indicator of assimilation—results in acquisition of partisanship (ibid.). Push factors that direct Asian Americans away from the Republican Party are its political ideology that espouses conservatism and embraces the idea of the United States as a traditionally Christian nation (Lim, Barry-Goodman, and Branham 2006). Although a large percentage of Asian Americans have a high socioeconomic status and should prefer lower taxes, this group tends to hold liberal attitudes, including a preference for government support for health care and education (Wong et al. 2011). Not only do Asian Americans’ preferences differ from Republican conservative stances on issues, they also feel that the Republican Party “excludes them from the American social fabric” (Kuo, Malhotra, and Mo 2017). Republican rhetoric that constructs the United States as a White nation discourages Asian Americans from believing that the Republican Party advocates for their group interests (Wong 2018). Further,

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the privilege that Republicans confer to Evangelical Christianity drives Asian American non-Christians from the party (Prasad and Norlund 2010). Beyond these push factors away from the Republican Party, the Democratic Party has been more proactive in pulling Asian Americans toward its candidates with targeted outreach (DeSipio, Masuoka, and Stout 2008; Diaz 2012; Wong 2005). Along with Asian American ethnic organizations, it has invested more resources in organizing and mobilizing the Asian American community, and these efforts have proven effective (Alvarez, Hopkins, and Sinclair 2010; Diaz 2012; Kiang and Tang 2006). For instance, political scientist Janelle Wong conducted field research in which randomly selected Asian American registered voters received telephone calls and mail encouraging people to vote. Through this multilingual outreach campaign, she was able to increase turnout among these voters by 2–3%, which may actually be enough to sway an election (Wong 2005). Similarly, Filipino and Korean ethnic activists have been relatively successful in mobilizing their communities around immigrant issues, indicating that organizations dedicated to political participation spur higher Asian American political engagement; in general, these ethnic organizations tend to be progressive and support liberal issues and candidates (Rim 2009; Villanueva 2015). To summarize, partisan affiliation is a primary factor in how Asian Americans get out to vote and why they vote. Because a large proportion of Asian Americans are not aligned with either the Democratic or Republican Party, they are less likely to obtain campaign information, receive political education, or be encouraged to get out to vote.

Racial and Ethnic Interests Along with partisanship and political mobilization, development of a racialized group identity as Asian Americans coincides with support for Democratic presidential candidates. This pan-ethnic identity that encourages this partisan affiliation includes two aspects: a sense of group discrimination and a shared concern for ethnic interests. Since Asian Americans see Democrats as the party supporting racial minorities, and they share issue preferences with Democrats, they are more likely to vote with this political party.

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First, a racialized consciousness, in which Asian Americans are aware of the marginalization and discrimination they face collectively as a pan-ethnic group, significantly correlates with Democratic partisanship. However, pan-ethnicity could lower voting participation while also increasing nonvoting political engagement (Min 2014). Overall, Asian Americans have about the same measure of racial group identity as African Americans. For instance, Vietnamese Americans in Orange County not only are more likely to support co-ethnics but are also more inclined to choose other Asian American candidates over White ones (Collet 2005). Likewise, Asian Americans vote not only for themselves as individuals, but for perceived group benefits as a racial group (Jang 2009). This group consciousness stems from perceptions and experiences of the discrimination Asian Americans face as members of a racial minority group. Racialized identity based on social exclusion helps explain why Asian Americans overwhelmingly identify with Democratic candidates (Kuo, Malhotra, and Mo 2017). Second, Asian Americans with a racialized consciousness vote with race-based considerations and for ethnic interests, even against their own economic self-interests (Masuoka 2006; Lee et al. 2009; Bloodworth 2017). Since their racial attitudes shape their issue preferences, the racial identity of Asian Americans indirectly affects their vote and aligns them with the Democratic Party. A poll comparing Latino and Asian American voters in California on statewide issues found that in 1992, only 42% of Asian Californians voted for Democrat Bill Clinton, but by 2012, 79% of this group voted for Barack Obama (DiCamillo 2014). On a range of issues, from taxing the wealthy and the role of government to same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization, Asian Californians were more liberal than their White counterparts. In particular, Asian Californians were much more likely to support the Affordable Care Act (63%) than were Whites (44%). Younger generations of ethnic voters are even more liberal, which bodes ill for the Republican Party. Racialization processes that promote an Asian American group consciousness thus have two consequences. Asian Americans recognize their marginalization in the United States, and they subsequently affiliate with the Democratic Party to address their concerns as minorities. Not only does racialization as ethnic minorities affect the Asian American vote, but also racialization as religious minorities—a different process

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in which racial characteristics become ascribed to religious groupings— impacts their partisanship.

Religion Religion appears to make a difference in political behaviors in three primary ways. First, religious identity, especially in terms of one’s sense of national boundaries and the United States as a Christian nation, aligns voters with certain parties and political concerns (Whitehead, Perry, and Baker 2018). Second, one’s religious context—through congregational attendance and religious participation—influences the types of messages one hears and receives, serving as the filter on developing political viewpoints (Jelen and Chandler 1996). Third, different religious beliefs and values translate into different positions on specific political issues, such as immigration, abortion, economics, or same-sex relationships (Morgan, Skitka, and Wisneski 2010; Wilcox and Robinson 2010; also see Martí’s chapter in this volume on the relationship between religion and economic ideologies). This section will examine how religious identity, religious context, and religious values shape the Asian American vote. The “God gap” thesis contends that those who are highly religious will tend to vote Republican, and those who are not will be more likely to vote Democrat (Smidt 2010). Data showing that Asian Americans, who have the highest rates of religious nonaffiliation, are more likely to vote Democrat seem to fit with this thesis. However, other data complicate this picture. Asian Americans who are highly religious are more politically engaged than nonreligious Asian Americans, and they may or may not vote Democrat, suggesting that the God gap theory does not fit as well for Asian American voters in explaining the relationship between religion and partisanship (Wong et al. 2011). Asian Americans’ religious identities intersect with their racial identities in that, just as Asian Americans are “othered” racially, they are also more likely to feel excluded from the American mainstream religiously, as a group of people from a variety of diverse religious and nonreligious backgrounds. For instance, American Muslims face high levels of discrimination and racialization as terrorists. Those who develop a strong feeling of belonging and connectedness to the American Muslim community, perhaps in part because of shared experiences of racialization

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as Muslims, are much more likely to share a sense of linked group fate, to vote, and to vote Democratic (Ocampo, Dana, and Barreto 2018). Further, Asian American Evangelicals, despite being more theologically conservative and religiously devout than White Evangelicals, are more liberal than White Evangelicals—and even Whites overall—on a range of social issues (Wong 2018). Many White Evangelicals, worried that the United States as a White, Christian nation is imperiled, voted for Trump, whom they believed would advocate for White Evangelical Christian interests. In contrast, non-White Evangelicals have a different sense of national community, one that includes non-Christians, so they are much less likely to adopt conservative positions on immigration and race compared with White Evangelicals. Identification as a religio-racial minority that shares concerns with other religio-racial minorities that might be harmed by conservative policies subsequently leads to Democratic Party affiliation (Lim et al. 2006). In addition to religious identity, religious contexts shape political socialization. Places of worship have long been ethnic community centers for Asian Americans, especially for new immigrants, and provide the bases for political engagement. These sites seem to promote skills that facilitate political involvement, such as civic engagement and leadership development (Wong et al. 2011). Frequent religious service attendance among Asian Americans is significantly linked to party affiliation; in contrast, those who do not attend places of worship have the highest rate of nonpartisan identification (Lien, Conway, and Wong 2004). Finally, certain Asian American religious values translate into political conservatism, while other religious beliefs and values may lead followers to progressive political positions. For instance, Asian American born-again Evangelicals are more than twice as likely (37% vs. 16%) to be against same-sex marriage as other Asian Americans. Similarly, they were more likely to vote for Trump (37%) than other Asian Americans (20%) (Wong 2018). In contrast, while little research has been conducted on the Hindu vote, political columnist Akhilesh Pillalamarri suggests that Hindu teachings align more with those who are spiritual but not religious, and therefore Hindu Americans share some of the political attitudes of this liberal group (Pillalamarri 2017). This reference to the spiritual but not religious is significant, because Asian Americans have the highest rate of religious “nones” of any racial

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group, and those who are secular have become disenchanted with the Republican Party (Baker and Smith 2015). Political scientist Karthick Ramakrishnan writes that one “development pushing Asian Americans away from the GOP has been the rise of Christian conservatism in the Republican Party” (Ramakrishnan 2016:65). Religiously unaffiliated Asian Americans, as well as Hindus and Muslims, may find it increasingly hard to support Republican candidates in light of the GOP’s embrace of Christian nationalism, clearly evidenced during the 2016 election in its support for a candidate (Trump) who promoted strongly anti-Muslim views. Further evidence indicates that Hindus, as members of a minority religion, align with the Democratic Party because the Republican Party is so tied to Christian institutions (Prasad and Nordlund 2010). Given these three ways that religion shapes political behaviors, Asian Americans who are religiously affiliated and committed in religious attendance are more likely to vote. How they vote, however, depends on their religious identity, religious contexts, the salience of their religious values, and the content of those values.

Immigration Status and Asian Americans On one hand, three factors limit Asian American immigrants’ active political participation in the United States: their political socialization in their homelands, their adaptation to the United States, and their language access to voting rights. On the other hand, their status as transnational political actors does not preclude them from interest or engagement in the domestic political scene. First, since 59% of the Asian American population is foreign-born, their political socialization in their home countries shapes their subsequent nonaffiliation with political parties in the United States. In general, Asian Americans’ lack of familiarity with the American political system, including uncertainty about their own political ideology, leads to mistrust of and misinformation about political parties (Hajnal and Lee 2006). For specific subgroups, negative political experiences with parties in their home countries contribute to nonpartisanship (BarryGoodman and Branham 2006). Indian American nonpartisanship may be a reaction against the hegemony of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, or

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Indian People’s Party) in India, whose dominance includes anti-Muslim sentiment (Kurien 2007). Similarly, political scientist Pei-te Lien found that Chinese Americans from the People’s Republic of China, as compared to those from Taiwan or Hong Kong, had a lower political participation rate in the United States because they came from a relatively closed political system (Lien 2010). Second, an analysis of a national survey of Asian Americans demonstrates that how immigrants adapt to their new situation in the United States highly impacts their political participation (Wong et al. 2011). On a range of measures, including voting, contacting or contributing to politicians, and community engagement, increased assimilation results in higher political participation. Subsequently, native-born Asian Americans participate more than foreign-born Asian Americans, and the longer an Asian immigrant lives in the United States, the more likely they are to participate. In contrast, researchers found that those with less English proficiency were less likely to vote. Third, one clear barrier to Asian American immigrant political participation is lack of language access, which hampers both voter registration and going to the polls (Xu 2005). For example, the advocacy group, Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAAJ 2016), monitored polls in California for the November 2016 elections and reported that 8.2% of the polling places didn’t provide bilingual workers, as required by Section 2013 of the Voting Rights Act. In addition, translated materials required by state law were missing in 25% of polling locations (ibid.). These structural issues, therefore, pose strong barriers to Asian American immigrant political participation. Although these barriers exist, one purported stereotype about Asian American immigrants does not affect their political participation. Part of the sleeping giant metaphor is the mistaken notion that Asians focus on transnational, homeland politics more than they would on US domestic politics. Due to ethnic and local roots, linguistic access, and political capital, Asian migrants might be more actively engaged with their homeland issues and thus be less politically engaged in the United States. However, political scientists Christian Collett and Pei-te Lien, in The Transnational Politics of Asian Americans (2009), highlight that Asian American immigrants who are politically active transnationally also tend to be more engaged in the United States as well. Likewise,

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other scholars have found that transnational engagement did not necessarily hamper American engagement of Asian American migrants, but actually fostered it (Mishra 2016; Sui and Paul 2017). Thus, immigration status shapes both whether Asian Americans vote and how they vote. But it also likely intersects with race and religion in ways that are not yet well understood. This chapter seeks to illuminate some of those connections.

The Asian American Electorate: Religion, Race, and Immigration Status This chapter employs data from the National Asian American Survey 2016 Pre-Election Survey of 2,238 Asian American and 305 Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) adult interviews (Ramakrishnan et al. 2017). Conducted by telephone in multiple languages, the survey focused on registered voters of the six largest Asian American ethnic groups. The following findings reveal emerging trends of this community by comparing its religious groupings. Our sample of registered voters included nine Asian American and Pacific Islander ethnic groups. Of the Christians, 21% are Catholic; 18% are Evangelical; and 3% are Mainline. Among the non-Christian religious traditions, Buddhists make up 18% of the sample; Hindus, 5%; and Muslims comprise only 1%. Religious nones constitute 19% of the overall sample, including agnostics (1%); atheists (4%); and nones (14%). Due to different sample sizes, this chapter highlights the largest groups: (1)  Catholic; (2) Evangelical; (3) Buddhist; (4) Hindu; (5) Atheist/ Agnostic; and (6) Nones. Results of the 2016 Pre-Election Survey demonstrate clear differences in the voting preferences of Asian American religious groups. Overall, Asian Americans preferred Democratic presidential candidate Hilary Clinton (52%) almost four times more than the Republican Party nominee, Donald Trump (14%). At the time of the pre-election survey, conducted from August through October 2016, 15% of Asian Americans remained undecided. Hindus were the religious group most likely to vote for Clinton, with 63% supporting her. They were almost eight percentage points more likely to vote Democrat than the next group, Atheists/Agnostics, 55% of

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whom supported Clinton. In contrast, Buddhists were the least likely to vote for Clinton, at 48%. This group had the highest percentage of individuals who were still unsure of how they would vote, with almost one in four still undecided weeks before the election. Half of Asian American Evangelicals indicated support for Clinton, much higher than their White Evangelical counterparts, 81% of whom voted for Trump. At the same time, Trump received the most support (21%) in the Asian American community from Evangelicals.

Presidential Preference and Partisanship As predicted, partisanship largely structures how Asian American Democrats planned to vote. Four out of five Asian American Democrats supported Clinton (80%), with only 8% undecided. However, Asian American Republicans were much less likely to support their party candidate, Donald Trump, with only 52% of them planning to vote for him. Instead, 17% of Republicans remained undecided and another 15% were going to cross over partisan lines and vote for Democrats. Religious affiliation did little to overcome partisan trends in that Asian American Democrats voted Democratic. Three out of four Buddhist Democrats (76%) planned to vote for Clinton, as compared to Agnostic/Atheist Democrats, the most partisan group, at 84%. Asian American Republicans were much less apt to vote Republican, as only 42% of Republican Buddhists and 41% of Republican nones supported the party ticket. Indeed, Asian American Republicans were more likely to cross partisan lines and vote for Clinton, with 5% voting for her. Of the Asian American Republicans, nones were most likely to cross over, with 36% of the immigrant nones and 13% of the US-born nones preferring Clinton. Asian Americans who affiliate as Independents also illustrate the push factors away from Trump support. They were more than two times more likely to vote for Clinton than for Trump. Furthermore, they remained as undecided about whom to support as Republicans. Their religious affiliation did make some difference, as Asian American Evangelicals who reported themselves as Independent were much less likely than other Independents to support Clinton. Only 29% of this group indicated they would vote for her.

Total Asian Americans

Atheist/ Agnostic

Buddhist

Catholic

Evangelical

Hindu

45

49

US-Born

Immigrant

US-Born

Immigrant

52

59

58

56

Immigrant

US-Born

55

53

US-Born

Immigrant

US-Born

Immigrant

57

64

85

Clinton

Trump

Other

14

10

7

12

9

15

15

Don’t Know

8

21

14

52

Immigrant

US-Born

14

60%

53

50%

US-Born

40%

6

10

10 23

Refused

15

11

7

70%

Presidential Preference by Religion and Immigration Status 30% 13

20% 53

10%

Immigrant

0%

Figure 10.1: Presidential Preference by Religion and Immigration Status

Nothing in Particular

7

5

18

15

15

28

13

15

25

80%

17

0

13

23

21

18

11

11

10

10

9

90%

6

14

8

3

6

6

4

5

4

5

0

100%

3

4

5

6

6

6

Agnostic/ Atheist

Buddhist

Catholic

Evangelical

Hindu

US-Born

Immigrant

US-Born

Immigrant

US-Born

Immigrant

US-Born

87

85

Trump

77

76

78

76

74

79

40%

82

Clinton

30% 91

Other

94

50%

Don’t Know

60%

Refused

70%

Presidential Preference by Religion and Political Party (Democrat)

Immigrant

20%

81

10%

US-Born

Immigrant

US-Born

Immigrant

0%

Figure 10.2: Presidential Preference by Religion and Political Party (Democrat)

Nothing in Particular

2

6

2

5

2

2

80%

5

9

5

13

1

8

11 10

1 3

2

15

5

11

10

8

11

12

0 3

90%

5

3

0

7

7

6

3

3

3

3

2

3

3

4

5

0

100% 3 0 4

3

Agnostic/ Atheist

Buddhist

Catholic

Evangelical

Hindu

8

US-Born

Immigrant

US-Born 0

Immigrant

US-Born

Immigrant

US-Born

Immigrant

US-Born

10

13

14

15

US-Born

Immigrant

14

Immigrant

0%

19

18

20

10%

36

20%

Clinton

30%

45

54

71

43

Trump

65

48

54

40

40%

Other

100

71

50%

Don’t Know

36

69

60%

3

Refused

11

26

9

20

29

70%

Presidential Preference by Religion and Political Party (Republican)

Figure 10.3: Presidential Preference by Religion and Political Party (Republican)

Nothing in Particular

4

8

11

80%

28

24 29

6

21

14

14

16

6

10

16

90%

10

6

2

2

3

4

5

0

0

0

0

0

100%

Agnostic/ Atheist

Buddhist

Catholic

Evangelical

Hindu

26

US-Born

Immigrant

US-Born

Immigrant

35

35

US-Born

Immigrant

33 35

10%

US-Born

Immigrant

US-Born

Immigrant

US-Born

Immigrant

0%

39

42

20%

48

46

46

57

Clinton

30%

83

16

Trump

10

26

16

40%

11

Other

24

15

10

50%

11

15

14

30

Don’t Know

15

8

60% 14

15

Refused

16

30

39

70%

26

23

Presidential Preference by Religion and Political Party (Independent)

Figure 10.4: Presidential Preference by Religion and Political Party (Independent)

Nothing in Particular

4

7

28

29

30

80%

0

19

19

18

4

13

9

17

90% 23

12

11

8

6

6

6

5

6

6

5

0

0

100%

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Political party contact encourages Asian American voters to go to the polls. According to respondents, Asian Americans were almost three times more likely to be contacted by the Democratic Party than they were by the Republican Party. Asian American Democrats included 57% who were contacted by their own party, and 7% were also contacted by the Republican Party. Asian American Republicans, on the other hand, were contacted by the opposing party three times more than Democrats were. Of these Republican Party members, 19% received communication from the Democratic Party and 43% had their own Republican Party reach out to them. These figures reveal how the Democratic Party has made a more concerted effort in contacting Asian American voters.

Presidential Preference and the Intersection of Race and Religion Identifying strongly as an Asian American increased the probability that Asian Americans would vote Democratic by 12 percentage points. Among those who saw themselves with this racial identity, 56% planned to vote for Clinton, while only 43% of those who did not identify as Asian American said they would do so. Similarly, those who did not see themselves as a racial minority were more likely to vote for Trump (17%) than those who claimed an Asian American identity (11%). This trend shows that Asian Americans who see themselves as members of a racial minority group tend to affiliate with the Democratic Party and vote with its nominee. Significantly, an Asian American racialized identity that intersects with a religious one mediates Democratic support as well. Among each of the religious groups, those with strong racial identities preferred Clinton at a higher rate than those who did not identify as Asian American. For instance, Evangelicals with a strong Asian American identity preferred Clinton at a higher rate (60%) than those Evangelicals who didn’t identify as a minority (48%). Likewise, those of other religious traditions followed the same pattern: Buddhists whose Asian American identity was important to them were 18% more likely to prefer Clinton than those whose race was unimportant; Catholics were 10% more likely; Hindus were 15% more likely; and nones were 7% more likely. Respondents’ issue preferences corresponded to which candidate they preferred, and issue preference did sway Asian Americans with

Total Asian Americans

Atheist/ Agnostic

Buddhist

Catholic

Evangelical

Hindu

Important

Not Important

Important

Not Important

Important

Not Important

Important

Not Important

Important

Not Important

Important

Not Important

Important

Not Important

0%

10%

31

38

49

48

46

45

43

20%

52

53

53

56

55

60

68

Clinton

30%

15

Trump

5

40%

Other

7

17

50%

18

28

12

Don’t Know

8

19

11

15

11

60%

21

20

7

Refused

11

23

9

47

17

70%

12

14

11

13

Presidential Preference by Religion and Salience of Racial Identity

Figure 10.5: Presidential Preference by Religion and Salience of Racial Identity

Nothing in Particular

3

4

13

12

14

23

80%

35

9

7

14

14

14

16

14 16

11

12

90%

12

12

13 5

7

5

5

5

6

6

7

8

7

3

0

100%

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regard to their support for Trump. For instance, those surveyed were asked whether they support greater government funding on college education. Those who supported government spending also favored Clinton over Trump 8 to 1. Respondents against government spending favored Trump, but only slightly (32% for Clinton vs. 34% for Trump). This issue did lead some religious groups to be more likely to vote for Trump. For example, Evangelicals who opposed government spending were 3.7 times more likely to vote Trump than Asian Americans overall (51% vs. 14%). In contrast, Buddhists who opposed government spending still favored Clinton (49%) over Trump (23%). These figures indicate that certain issue preferences affect specific religious subgroups, but not all Asian Americans.

How the Intersection of Race and Religion Shapes the Effect of Being Immigrant Asian Americans are the fastest-growing immigrant group in the United States, with 73% of adult Asian Americans being foreign-born (Lopez, Ruiz, and Patten 2017). Because this sample comprised registered voters who are US citizens, slightly more than half of these Asian American respondents were US-born (52%) and only 48% were foreign-born. The sample’s restriction to registered voters who are US citizens likely impacted the findings—non-registered voters, or immigrants who are not US citizens, may hold different political views compared to those who are more assimilated, though their views arguably have a diminished impact on the political system due to their inability to vote. Immigrants in the sample were twice as likely to be undecided (21%) compared with US-born Asian Americans (9%), indicating that, even among registered voters, immigrants were less familiar with and more uninformed about the candidates at the time of the survey. In contrast, native-born Asian Americans were more likely than immigrants to prefer candidates other than either the Democratic or Republican nominee (18% vs. 7% of immigrants). When looking at Asian Americans as a whole, immigration status appears to have little bearing on political preferences. As figure 10.5 shows, foreign-born and US-born Asian Americans express almost identical levels of support for Clinton versus Trump. However, once religion is

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considered as well, the results become much more complex. Significantly, for religious minorities, being born in the United States appears to make Asian Americans more progressive. Among Hindus, 60% of immigrants expressed support for Clinton, but an overwhelming 85% of US-born Hindus supported her. Although the sample size of US-born Hindus is small, it does suggest an important difference. Similarly, only 45% of foreign-born Buddhists reported preference for Clinton, as compared to 63% of US-born Buddhists. Foreign-born Buddhists were also the most likely to remain undecided, with 28% stating no preference. These patterns suggest that US-born Asian American Hindus and Buddhists, who have experienced religio-racial marginalization for longer periods of time than their foreign-born counterparts, are more likely to align with the party supporting religious and racial minorities. However, there is an exception to this general pattern. While religiously unaffiliated people are also a minority in the United States, immigration status works differently for different groups of religiously unaffiliated Asian Americans. US-born atheists/agnostics are more liberal than are foreign-born, but US-born “nothing in particulars” are slightly less progressive than those born outside the United States. It is possible that members of the “nothing in particular” group, by virtue of not claiming or avoiding any particular identity, do not face the same level of marginalization as other religious minorities—such as Hindus, Buddhists, and atheists/agnostics—leading religion to function differently for them in shaping their political preferences. The intersection of race, religion, and immigration status is different for members of the Christian majority. Among Asian Americans, immigrant and US-born Catholics support Clinton at very similar levels. And, more significantly, US-born Asian American Evangelicals report significantly more support for Trump compared with foreign-born Evangelicals. Together, these patterns suggest that the effect of being an immigrant— of moving to the United States versus residing in the United States for one’s entire life—does not appear to have the same impact for all Asian Americans. Rather, whether one becomes more politically conservative or more progressive over time varies based on religion, highlighting the importance of considering religion and race together when seeking to understand American Evangelicals, immigrants’ political views, and Asian Americans as a pan-ethnic group.

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Just as immigration status shapes the vote of Asian Americans differently based on their religious affiliation, their religiosity, as indicated by their attendance at temples and churches, also plays a role in their presidential preference. Asian Americans who attended church or temple once a week or more were more likely to vote for Trump than those who rarely attended. For example, 16% of Catholics who attended mass weekly, versus 13% who did not attend weekly, supported Trump. Similarly, 16% of Hindus who attended temple weekly supported Trump, as compared to just 10% of Hindus who attended temple less. Surprisingly, Asian American Evangelicals who attended church weekly were not much different from those who attended less frequently in their Trump support (19% vs. 20%). In contrast to religious attendance, religious salience—measured by how important religion is to an individual—did not make as much difference. Overall, Asian Americans who said their religion was important to them preferred Clinton at about the same rate as those who did not view their religion as important (54% vs. 51%). The two religious groups for which religious salience made an impact were Catholics and Hindus. Catholics who t00k their religion seriously sided with Clinton much more than those who cared less about their religion (57% vs. 43%). In contrast, secularized Hindus were more Democratic than those who found their religion to be significant (83% vs. 63%). In summary, most Asian Americans are identifying racially as marginalized minorities, and therefore are moving more toward the Democratic Party. This is particularly the case for members of religious minorities, as they likely experience discrimination as both racial and religious minorities. However, Asian American Evangelicals are an important outlier. Unlike most Asian Americans, US-born Asian American Evangelicals are more conservative, not less, than their foreign-born Evangelical counterparts.

Conclusion Asian American religious groups, for the most part, are reinforcing racial divides in American politics. Asian American Buddhists, Hindus, and religious nones are double minorities—both religiously and racially. These identities are intersectional, in that their religious

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difference shapes their racial identity, and their racialized identity marks their religious one. Consequently, they are more aware of their marginalization in the United States and align more with the Democratic Party. These factors, along with the high number of religiously unaffiliated Asian Americans, have likely contributed to the liberal voting shift of Asian Americans over the past few decades. This is especially the case for US-born Asian American religious minorities, who are more progressive than their immigrant counterparts. As Edward Orozco Flores’s chapter in this volume shows regarding the role of public, civic-oriented religious practices in shaping racial and immigrant identity among Mexican Americans and African Americans, understanding religion as “raced” and race as indelibly shaped by religion helps illuminate when, how, and why immigration status matters in social life. Asian American Evangelicals, on the other hand, are much more likely than other religious groups to hold conservative views, and therefore side with Republicans. Furthermore, as the Republican Party platform more explicitly embraces Christian nationalism, an ideology that excludes many Asian Americans because of their religious backgrounds, Asian American Evangelicals may not support this aspect of the platform, but they may also feel more able to overlook it, since as Christians, they are included. Even for Evangelicals, however, race continues to greatly shape their political behaviors, such that Asian American Evangelicals in our sample supported Clinton (50%) more than twice as much as they did Trump (21%), and supported Clinton at much higher rates than did White Evangelicals. As the fastest growing racial group in the United States, Asian Americans are poised to become a significant swing vote within the American electorate. Demographic projections indicate that the Asian American electorate will likely double to about 12 million, or 7% of the US electorate, by 2040 (Ong et al. 2015). Their movement to the left as an even more cohesive and unified voting bloc over the past seven election cycles has been caused by the combined factors of partisanship, racial and ethnic interests, religion, and immigration status, which this chapter has shown often intersect in interesting and perhaps surprising ways. Despite Asian Americans’ higher than average religiosity, they have also been repulsed by the Republican Party’s demonization of immigrants,

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anti-immigration policy proposals, and “America First” rhetoric. Religious minoritization combined with the racialization of Asian American and immigrant voters has become a powerful unifying force that has pushed immigrant and “minority” voters away from the Republican Party. How will religion and race affect future elections? Trump’s new immigration policies are reducing the ethnic and class diversity of immigrants, as the number of refugees and those entering through family reunification has declined. Consequently, Asian newcomers enter through selective immigration processes that privilege primarily those who are professional and educated. These Asian migrants are more likely to come from India, China, and the Philippines. The new migrants from these particular Asian nations will reshape the American religious landscape, and relatedly, the political arena. As Jerry Z. Park and James Clark Davidson’s chapter in this book concludes, analyses of religious groups such as Evangelicals or nones must take into account the different attitudes of new groups, especially immigrant and racial ones. The Democratic Party’s concerted efforts to effectively engage Asian American voters can shift their voting behavior. Because the majority of Asian American voters are foreign-born, political parties and the government need to engage many Asian American voters with effective language access. Further research on the issues that mobilize Asian Americans, such as affirmative action or immigration policy, will assist parties in activating this constituency. The turn toward the Democratic Party by Asian Americans, including those of foreign-born status, highlights the role of racialization and religious minoritization in forming American political identities. Asian Americans’ recognition of their minority status, rather than seeking mainstream assimilation, leads to the question of whether they would build further coalitions with other people of color. Edward Orozco Flores’s chapter identifies how some religio-racial minorities are building coalitions to address common public issues, such as the challenges facing incarcerated and formerly incarcerated persons. It remains to be seen, however, how Asian Americans can adopt American civil religion in similar ways to Latinos and African Americans in common pursuits for justice. Overall, the trend for Asian Americans is clear. The building of an Asian American voting bloc has been effective—despite the group’s

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religious and ethnic diversity—and the metaphor of the sleeping giant should be changed to one of an awakening giant. References

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11

Religion, Race, and Immigration in Community Organizing among the Formerly Incarcerated Edward Orozco Flores When I walked in, I realized where I was at, and it broke me . . . What happened is that I left that last piece of hatred there. I realized that we were in the same struggle together, whether it be Latinos, African Americans, white people, who saw the value in being part of the struggle. —Jose Osuna, Homeboys Local Organizing Committee (LOC) leader, recounting his visit to Ebenezer Baptist Church

Jose Osuna, a forty-two-year-old, second-generation Mexican American, was the Homeboy Industries-Local Organizing Committee’s (LOC) founding member. The Homeboys LOC, a civic group, had become involved with the Los Angeles Fair Chance campaign in June 2014, seeking to implement the most comprehensive “ban-the-box” ordinance in the nation. The proposed ordinance would prohibit the placement of the felony conviction question on applications for employment and housing in the City of Los Angeles, as well as regulate how criminal background checks would be used in employment searches. However, the Fair Chance campaign was significant for another reason as well: It was a racially and religiously diverse coalition that brought together Blacks, Latina/os, and Whites, as well as persons from Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim backgrounds. The Fair Chance campaign demonstrated how public displays of religion draw upon inherently racialized meanings and practices—such as the marginalized immigrant or formerly incarcerated person—but also how they transform race relations from antagonistic to collaborative. 227

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Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s (1994[1986]) theory of racial formation has suggested that race is “an unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings, constantly being transformed by political struggle” (55). The challenges that Jose’s family encountered in 1970s Southern California—in a context of anti-immigrant “Latino Threat” (Chavez 2008) discourse—illustrates the racial formation perspective. Jose’s parents were undocumented, low-wage laborers from westerncentral Mexico and had settled in a segregated Los Angeles neighborhood. As a child, Jose was bused to schools in more affluent communities but remained marginalized—despite testing into gifted education—due to the stigma of race, his parents’ immigration status, and poverty. As a teen, Jose joined a Mexican American street gang, became addicted to drugs, and experienced two stints of incarceration. Jose rose through California’s racially segregated prison system to become a “shot-caller” with a dominant Mexican prison gang. After being released from prison a second time, however, Jose’s oldest son was murdered in a racially motivated killing by rival Black gang members. Jose harbored negative sentiments toward Blacks for many years after. As Jose struggled with racial oppression in America—through his parents’ undocumented status, and his experiences with poverty, segregation, and gangs—Jose cultivated a clearly defined Mexican American racial identity. The racial formation perspective has also suggested that it is not just racial oppression that shapes racial meanings, but that struggle against oppression also shapes meanings (Omi and Winant 1994[1986]; Glenn 2002). This is best illustrated through Jose’s experiences with faithbased recovery. Following release from his second prison stint, Jose entered Homeboy Industries, a nonprofit organization that employed five hundred former or current gang members (e.g., Flores 2014). Jose entered Homeboy Industries because he sought work and drug treatment, and it was the only place to provide him with either. There, he demonstrated leadership skills while interacting with Homeboys of all races. In turn, Homeboy Industries’ founder, Father Greg, asked Jose to serve as Homeboy Industries’ representative to LA Voice, a local, faith-based organizing affiliate of the PICO National Network.1 Jose was subsequently asked to attend a PICO National Network training in Atlanta, through his work with LA Voice. (The PICO National Network provided trainings and actions aimed at mobilizing diverse groups in localities across

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the nation; the Lifelines to Healing campaign, for example, advocated against mandatory minimum sentencing and immigrant deportations, and supported violence prevention, social programming, and ban-thebox measures.) At the training, Jose visited Ebenezer Baptist Church, the site where Martin Luther King, Jr. first proposed his idea of a multiracial Poor People’s campaign, and his final resting place. There, as the quote at the beginning of this chapter suggests, Jose was finally able to embrace Black people. Jose said of the experience, I realized [there] that we all were deeply wounded, and we all needed healing, and I found healing there. It became a moment of redemption for me. I think that’s the moment where I was able to lay my son to rest internally. It was a beautiful experience. I wouldn’t have had it if I wasn’t part of the LOC, if I wasn’t part of LA Voice, a member of the community at Homeboy Industries, if I hadn’t been impassioned around community organizing. So it brought me that great moment of redemption, too, to walk out of there free.

The racial struggles that Jose experienced had scarred him—especially after his second prison stint—and he sought healing and redemption. Jose first experienced healing and redemption through faith-based spaces—first through recovery at Homeboy Industries, and then (as the quote above suggests) through community organizing with LA Voice and PICO. As Jose suggested, these experiences were made possible through public displays of faith at Homeboy Industries, LA Voice, and PICO. In turn, such spaces enabled Jose to rearticulate the meaning of his relationships with Blacks, from antagonistic to collaborative. Thus, experiences with racial oppression led Jose to seek out healing and redemption in faith and religious spaces, and those spaces, in turn, reshaped Jose’s relationships with Blacks. Indeed, it was the public, civil religious traditions in which Jose participated that shaped his own racial identity, his relationship with racial “others,” and his identity as a second-generation immigrant differently compared with Mexican Americans who may have practiced religion solely in more private, traditional ways. The racial formation perspective is not without its critics. Political scientist Claire Jean Kim (1999) has critiqued the racial formation perspective for suggesting that each race group has a separate racial

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trajectory. Kim instead argued in favor of a “field of racial positions” in which differential racialization is conceptualized as mutually constitutive (106). In this framework, immigrants are simultaneously valorized against native Blacks and ostracized from civic membership. Jose’s experiences illuminate such a perspective. While Mexican Americans may be valorized compared to native Blacks, they remain perpetual targets of “Latino Threat” discourse, policing, and deportation (i.e., Chavez 2008). Mexican immigrants (and Mexican Americans) remain ostracized as foreigners and perceived threats to the nation—especially in the post–9/11 era (Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2013; Ramirez and Flores 2010). Critical race scholars have increasingly acknowledged the interdependence of differential racialization—though there remains little theorization indicating how such differences may be collectively overcome. Jose’s involvement with LA Voice and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Ordinance demonstrated that racial meanings could be rearticulated, and that certain kinds of religion—perhaps especially public, civil religious discourses and practices—may play a central role. Similarly, research in Los Angeles and California has indicated that broad-based campaigns around issues such as wages, housing, incarceration, education, and immigrant rights create axes of racial solidarity with great potential for change (i.e., Bloom 2010; Gilmore 2007; Soja 2014; Wood and Fulton 2015). Such research has acknowledged the role of faith-based organizing for addressing inequalities, but with less focus on implications for race relations. This chapter draws from qualitative research at two sites, in Chicago and Los Angeles, to examine how American faith-based community organizing reshapes race relations, particularly between Blacks and immigrant-origin (first- or second-generation) Latina/os. It examines how faith-based organizing and the public religious practices it typically entails enabled coalitions, between Blacks and Latina/os from immigrant backgrounds, around campaigns to expand the rights of the formerly incarcerated, immigrants, and the poor. How does faithbased community organizing facilitate campaigns to expand the rights of the marginalized? How do formerly incarcerated persons participate in organizing? How does this reshape race relations between Blacks and Latina/os from immigrant families? And how does public and/or

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civic religious involvement shape racial identity and race relations differently compared with more private forms of religious practice? Participant observation was conducted in Chicago with the Community Renewal Society (CRS), a faith-based community organizing institution, from December 2012 to April 2014. CRS had supported the development of the formerly-incarcerated-led civic group Fighting to Overcome Records and Create Equality (FORCE). Participant observation was also conducted in Los Angeles with LA Voice, a faith-based community organizing institution, from June 2014 to November 2015. LA Voice had supported the development of the Homeboy Industriesaffiliated, formerly-incarcerated-led Homeboys Local Organizing Committee (LOC). In addition, thirty-four semi-structured interviews were conducted (with twenty-four CRS and FORCE members and ten Homeboys LOC members) and transcribed, ranging in length from sixty to ninety minutes. Findings suggest that faith-based community organizing helps to transform race relations between diverse racial groups. First, faithbased community organizing draws upon theologies that are inherently racial—encouraging members to embrace “the other” and to support structural change. Second, faith-based community organizing draws upon diverse religious practices to facilitate the participation of persons from racially marginalized groups, such as formerly incarcerated persons or immigrants. Third, faith-based community organizing reshapes race relations by fostering immigrant integration into diverse—and contested—American traditions in religion and public life (i.e., Braunstein 2018; McRoberts chapter in this volume; Williams chapter in this volume). In sum, civic religious organizations not only draw upon racialized meanings and practices to mobilize diverse groups of people, they also transform race relations through such public displays.

Race, Religion, and American Community Organizing CRS’s and LA Voice’s efforts were a form of “progressive prophetic activism” (Slessarev-Jamir 2011:4), rooted in diverse racial and religious traditions. Helene Slessarev-Jamir, a theologian who has studied American faith-based community organizing, employed the term “prophetic” in reference to “a religious understanding of politics defined

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by its inclusiveness, its concern for the other, for those who are marginalized” (ibid.). Drawing from the work of David Gutterman (2005), Slessarev-Jamir has argued that “varied ways of framing the prophetic have historically been used in the United States either to enhance or restrict . . . the space necessary for a democratic politics (2010:676).” CRS’s and LA Voice’s campaigns advanced progressive articulations of the prophetic: a concern for those living on the margins, including the poor, the formerly incarcerated, and immigrants. CRS and LA Voice built upon a theological perspective explicitly concerned with the marginalized “other,” seeking to restore power to those who had little of it (Hart 2001; Slessarev-Jamir 2011:4).2 CRS’s and LA Voice’s efforts were rooted in American community organizing’s long struggles against racial oppression and nativism—of which religion has played a central role. As sociologist Omar McRoberts suggests in this volume, public displays of religion operate as a “rhetorical and ritual field where multiple publics and political elites make claims about the nation and the place of different peoples in it” (53). Such public displays of religion held a central place in race and immigrant politics throughout the late twentieth century. For example, after Saul Alinsky recruited Fred Ross and Edward Roybal to form the Community Service Organization (CSO) in Los Angeles in 1947, the CSO formed several chapters and trained United Farm Worker (UFW) leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta with the help of Catholic priests (Ganz 2009). In turn, after UFW leaders implemented crucial tactics involving religious leaders, key staff exported these tactics to influence the rise of spatial struggles in Los Angeles (e.g., Milkman 2006; Shaw 2008). Justice for Janitors, for example, was at the leading edge of various twenty-first century “spatial struggles” to radically expanded social justice efforts from singular issues toward broad-based efforts (Soja 2014:219). This created common ground for native-born Blacks and immigrant Latina/os to later organize together (e.g., Bloom 2010; Gilmore 2007; Saito 2015). CRS and LA Voice both engaged in these radically shifting approaches to community organizing—from single-issue to multiracial and broad-based. LA Voice’s participation in the Los Angeles Fair Chance campaign was part of a larger PICO Lifelines to Healing campaign, which advocated against mandatory minimum sentencing, and

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supported ban-the-box policies, violence prevention, and immigration reform (Wood and Fulton 2015).3 Both LA Voice and CRS also supported the racially diverse, SEIU-led Fight for 15 campaign to raise the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour. Thus, CRS and LA Voice both existed within broader rhetorical and ritual fields undergoing recent, rapid change in favor of broad-based, multiracial organizing efforts.

Faith-Based Community Organizing for the Formerly Incarcerated CRS and LA Voice carried out prophetic activism through faith-based community organizing practices that Braunstein, Fulton, and Wood (2014:713-14) have found to serve as cultural bridging activities: interfaith prayers, “prefigurative prayers” that outlined a vision of an inclusive democracy, or prayer forms that “enact[ed] relationships” or allowed members to share practices. Leaders drew from prophetic teachings to encourage members—some of them privileged and from the suburbs—to accept and advocate for the less fortunate. At a CRS leadership assembly, a poor elderly woman spoke passionately about organizing for housing reform and quoted Luke 10, beseeching members to be a neighbor to others. She urged us to be the good Samaritan, warning that “it doesn’t take a lot to become the man who fell among thieves.” CRS and LA Voice leaders drew from religion—such as the elderly woman’s use of the parable of the good Samaritan—to create a sense of belonging and build racially diverse campaigns; they framed persons from disadvantaged groups as the “other,” gave them a platform, and urged members to practice “faith in action” by supporting the campaign in question. CRS’s institutional mission emphasized “racial and social justice,” celebrated its association with the United Church of Christ and the Amistad slave ship mutiny, and drew from historically Black Protestant church practices to facilitate members’ “coming out of Babylon.” CRS held major worship assemblies twice a year, presenting legislative campaigns through song and prayer, with elected officials in attendance. At biannual worship assemblies, a pastor would lead us in an opening prayer, long and stream of consciousness, with a focus on love and justice. After members collectively said “amen,” a church choir would punctuate the silence with loud, ecstatic music and singing. Songs included traditional

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and popular hymns such as “He Has Done Marvelous Things,” “Lord You Are Good,” and “Freedom.” Drawing from the Black Church’s strong tradition of call-and-response dialogue, after the opening music a pastor usually led members in a “responsive reading,” such as John Corrado’s “Hey Ain’t That Good News.” Throughout the event, music continued to be used generously, interspersed between agenda items or to highlight legislative updates (e.g., the “litany of victories”). LA Voice’s institutional mission drew heavily from Catholic social teachings on religious ecumenism and the importance of “human dignity,” claiming to teach those in “greatest need” how to “engage in the public arena.” LA Voice was formed in 2004 from two Los Angeles–based organizations: the Hollywood Interfaith Sponsoring Committee and Community Voice. LA Voice worked with twenty congregations across Los Angeles, as part of the PICO National Network, which was founded in 1972 and had chapters working in one hundred fifty cities across the country. In contrast to CRS, LA Voice had a very modest website, decorated with a collage of many dated photos, with Black, Latino, and White people smiling, standing together, and holding banners. The website mentioned LA Voice’s emphasis on learning political strategy and addressing health care, neighborhood safety, education, housing, and voter turnout. CRS and LA Voice conducted public policy research, coordinated meetings with partnering community-based organizations, trained members in community organizing, and held leadership assemblies. Both also led marches, walks, and rallies, held meetings with elected officials, and mobilized members for lobbying elected officials. Nonetheless, they did so through contrasting religious displays. While CRS drew largely from religious displays rooted in the Black Protestant church, LA Voice drew largely from religious displays rooted in Catholic teachings on ecumenism and dignity.

Community Renewal Society CRS assemblies were large gatherings, often attended by hundreds of members, and rotated between member churches. Church music could be heard outside of the church walls, and as members trickled in late, they would find a church crowded with members standing, singing, and clapping to the music—and eagerly greeting each other in awkward

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spaces such as the crowded pews or narrow walkways. Organizers also handed out an event program, often with a cover adorned with a provocative image of Martin Luther King, Jr., shouting and with a clenched fist. The program contained an agenda, with times listed next to items, and responsive readings. In the pews, a few members held up signs with progressive messages, such as “Justice Is What Love Looks Like in Public,” “Doctors for Rehabilitation Not Incarceration,” and “Jobs Not Jails.” Just before the assembly got started, a CRS leader would rehearse the litany of the day with members. One such litany, in support of reducing jail wait times and building peace hubs, began with the leader shouting “Repair!,” after which the congregation responded with “Justice!” They rehearsed litanies—Repair! Justice! Restore! Lives! Rebuild! Communities!—several times as the event officially began. CRS members engaged in an insurgent manifestation of prophetic, progressive activism—displaying inclusivity to those on the margins and hostility toward those with tremendous amounts of power. CRS leaders adapted traditional church songs, as well as the responsive reading, to denounce oppressions and demonstrate solidarity with marginalized persons. Once, the CRS choir played the old civil rights hymn “Victory Is Mine” as a projector displayed stanzas that replaced “I told Satan to get thee behind” with various public figures and offices, such as “the Governor,” “IHDA” (the Illinois Housing Development Authority), and “Rahm” (Chicago’s mayor). On another occasion, the CRS choir played “This Little Light of Mine,” with references to Illinois, “families torn apart,” and “violence in our streets.” At the fall 2012 worship assembly, Pastor Knox led the congregation in singing from the text in our programs, adapting popular Christian songs by replacing lyrics in the text with terms such as “poverty,” “racism,” and “economic inequality.” CRS leaders communicated notions of community organizing as high-conflict and polarizing through their use of metaphors. During the fall 2012 worship assembly, as the opening song came to a close, Pastor Knox triumphantly announced CRS’s recent “victories.” He thrust both fists in the air and likened CRS to “a world-class athlete” who had been “in training.” He asked, “Who was with me in Springfield?!” Amidst waves of clapping and cheering, several persons took turns walking to the altar and announcing CRS’s recent public policy accomplishments—the most notable of which was the acquisition of $15

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million in affordable housing from the governor. For every accomplishment, the choir and congregation erupted into an adapted version of “Victory Is Mine.” As the song came to an end, Knox acknowledged the new CRS-affiliated congregations with representatives in attendance. Proclaiming that CRS’s power was growing, the pastor yelled that he wanted CRS to be stronger, unstoppable. CRS’s worship assemblies created a space in which marginalized people could engage in the key discursive practices of community organizing. Formerly incarcerated persons—in addition to other CRS members—rotated leadership positions. This included serving as an assembly “chairperson”—announcing the start of the assembly, formally presenting the pastor, and presenting the “guideline for the agenda.” This also included other activities at assemblies, such as presenting legislative campaigns during the “presentation of the platform,” giving testimonies to gain support for their campaigns, and announcing organizing “wins” during the “litany of victories.” CRS extended its campaign work from the poor, children, and the homeless to issues concerning the formerly incarcerated. At the time FORCE became part of CRS, CRS centered on expanding the social rights of those furthest on the margins (in largely Black and Latina/o immigrant neighborhoods) through campaigns focused on gun control (e.g., “Stopping Illegal Gun Trafficking”), progressive tax reform (e.g., “Fair Tax for Education Funding”), economic development (e.g., “Employment”), and housing (e.g., “Land Banks”). CRS partnered with FORCE, and campaigns grew to include Illinois HB 5723/3061 (the Sealing Bill), Restorative Justice Peace Hubs, Opposing Mandatory Minimums, the Reclaim Campaign (reducing the maximum time a person can be held before a preliminary hearing from thirty to ten days), and the Absolute Bars campaign to remove lifetime bans against the formerly incarcerated in health care, education, and parks and recreation. CRS also provided support for the development of FORCE. Eddie Bocanegra, a thirty-four-year-old, second-generation Mexican American, was from Little Village—one of Chicago’s most heavily Mexican neighborhoods. Eddie’s parents had been from Mexico, and although he had gotten involved with the Latin Kings as a youth, Eddie became a violence prevention worker later in life. He had gained so much visibility working in the Latina/o community that he had been

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recruited to help found FORCE, as well as to work as a CRS community organizer. Eddie agreed under the condition that one-third of his time could be spent organizing FORCE members—a racially diverse group of mostly Black and Latino men (as well as a few women, and one person of Middle Eastern parentage). One of FORCE’s first campaigns focused on the criminal conviction question in private-sector employment.4 At FORCE’s launch meeting, Alex (a lead organizer with CRS assigned to FORCE) and Eddie asked members to compile a list of businesses to potentially target for a ban-the-box campaign. After they chose to target Walgreens, Alex and Eddie directed FORCE members to submit employment applications to Walgreens and to note whether they received interview call-backs. In addition, Alex and Eddie directed FORCE members to conduct research on Walgreens’ board members—compiling their affiliations in education, work, religion, and associations—in order to identify powerful board members and avenues that might be used to place social pressure on them. FORCE members targeted Walgreens’ diversity officer, Steve Pemberton—who had written a rags-to-riches story about his rise through the corporate world— holding meetings with him (and other Walgreens officials) and urging them to remove the felony conviction question from their employment application. They argued that Walgreens’ diversity policy—claiming to hire people representative of the neighborhoods they served—was at odds with their hiring practices. After several tense negotiations—some of which included lies, accusations of threats, and the use of legal counsel—CRS staged their fall 2013 worship assembly at Mr. Pemberton’s church, Glenview Community Church. Eddie took to the microphone, delivering his testimony after CRS members sang and clapped to CRS’s performance of “Victory Is Mine,” an old civil rights hymn. Eddie stated that he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, had spoken at the United Nations, and had received an award from the governor—but that Walgreens had not called him for a job interview. Eddie emphasized, “Not one call,” as some members murmured as to shame Walgreens. Eddie also told the assembly that FORCE tried to get Walgreens to partner with three prominent prisoner reentry programs (Safer, Westside, and St. Leonard’s), but that the company had never made a phone call to any applicant from these sites. However, Eddie also announced that FORCE

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had met with US congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, state representative Danny Davis, and Cook County president Toni Preckwinkle. In turn, Preckwinkle called a meeting with Walgreens to support FORCE. To this, Eddie rejoiced, and CRS members broke out singing and clapping “Victory Is Ours.” CRS’s strategy—utilizing practices from the historically Black Protestant church and the Civil Rights movement, together with strategic research—was successful. By March 2014, Walgreens had conceded not only to remove the felony conviction question from employment applications, but to form a partnership with several local halfway houses that provided training and jobs for formerly incarcerated persons. At the same time, however, the significance of FORCE’s Walgreens campaign spanned further than the campaign victories. Years after the Walgreens campaign, Eddie was hired to work as a director for the largest nonprofit organization in the Midwest, and he immediately recruited two other FORCE leaders for well-paying, senior-level positions. Thus, CRS/FORCE political activity—through its focus on building coalitions among people from the most marginalized communities—fostered the formation of racially diverse relationships that carried over into prominent arenas of public life.

LA Voice LA Voice and the Homeboys LOC waged two campaigns aiming to expand the rights of the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated. As mentioned earlier, in Los Angeles, in June 2014, several organizations organized for a citywide Fair Hiring (later Fair Chance) Ordinance—the most ambitious of its kind in the nation. In addition, later the same summer, LA Voice solicited the Homeboys LOC for participation in organizing for California Proposition 47. Prop 47 aimed to reclassify some nonserious, nonviolent “wobbler” felony crimes into misdemeanors. Prop 47 sought to reduce sentence length for an estimated forty thousand offenders per year, creating an annual savings of $300 million—most of which would be redirected to support mental health and drug abuse treatment services. LA Voice members engaged in a pastoral manifestation of prophetic, progressive activism—emphasizing the importance of “human dignity” and claiming to teach those in “greatest need” how to “engage in

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the public arena.” LA Voice’s organizational culture was further influenced by Catholic ideals of ecumenism, enabling enacted relationships through activities that involved a diversity of churches and member organizations. A large leadership assembly, with about seventy-five persons in attendance, typically represented several churches—Catholic, Episcopalian, and Mormon—as well as Muslim and Jewish religious and faith-based groups. Meetings began with “sharing a meal,” a “call to order,” and a “welcome.” LA Voice leaders articulated visions of inclusive democracy through reflections at the beginning of meetings. At a training for Prop 47, Imam Marcus mentioned Maya Angelou’s concept of a “diversity tapestry,” and quoted Qur’an verse 49:13. He told us that God made us different with the purpose of finding the “other,” and that as we found the “other” in each other we were drawn closer to God. Yet in another instance, Imam Marcus rallied a crowd by citing a study that claimed that the State of California spent $39 billion annually on incarceration. He told us that we needed to reinvest that money into “prisoner reentry” and jobs. He quoted the Prophet Muhammad and told us that we were like a body— when one part hurt, the rest of us could feel it—and asked us to support a ban-the-box ordinance. LA Voice leaders urged us to participate in a wide variety of civic action—such as leadership assemblies, trainings, voter education drives, and rallies—to expand the rights of marginalized groups and realize visions of inclusive democracy. Jose drew from LA Voice’s emphasis on the term “voice” to communicate collective notions of power to Homeboys LOC members. He emphasized that large, public settings magnified one’s voice. In preparation for the Fair Chance march to City Hall, Jose had told members that the purpose of the action was to “show our voice” and that our “voice counts.” Furthermore, Jose told us that the march would be “historic” because we would be advocating to implement the most comprehensive Fair Chance Ordinance in the nation. The Homeboys readily adapted the language Jose used. They incorporated terms like “voice” and “being heard” into their vernacular and spoke in awe of public action. At debriefs following organizing activities when leaders asked members what they learned, members often stated that they learned they “had a voice.” Jose would also communicate LA Voice’s lesson, that an important component of voice was multiculturalism, and he would ask Homeboys

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to discuss their experiences. Homeboys contrasted their experiences in diverse public settings—with congregants from Westside Jewish synagogues to Catholic and Methodist churches—with their lived experiences in low-income East or South LA neighborhoods and in prison. They were “in awe” of Whites, Blacks, and Latinas/os as well as people of different faiths—Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, and Protestant—coming together, fostering a sense of belonging that they had desired but often failed to experience as formerly incarcerated persons. The most frequent comment when members reflected on participation in LA Voice events was the “diversity.” Members expressed “beauty” in “people coming together,” “breaking bread,” and “breaking down preconceived notions.” They spoke proudly of not being intimidated to speak with someone of a different faith or race. They expressed joy in seeing so many people who were “interested” in and “cared” about mass incarceration and who wanted to be “involved with the movement” to dismantle the scourge. In turn, they experienced belonging. As they spoke to people who did not share their background about their experiences with incarceration and records discrimination, Homeboys LOC members felt that their “voice” was heard. LA Voice’s faith-based community organizing practices facilitated cultural bridging. LA Voice meetings opened with interfaith prayers and/or reflections focused on justice, love, multiculturalism, and inclusion. At a leadership assembly, Hoover commented on the “wonderful group of beautiful people” in the room, before introducing Jose Osuna, who then introduced a Muslim LA Voice member, Imam Marcus, for the prayer. Imam Marcus, with an unrestrained passion, told us that his brother had been convicted at age sixteen for a felony drug offense, could not find work—even just to pick up trash—and was now back in jail. Imam Marcus decried the injustice, quoted the Qur’an—telling us to be “just to others, even if unfair to the self ”—and asked us to support Prop 47. In 2015, LA Voice held a prayer vigil in front of the Los Angeles County Jail, in support of the Fair Chance campaign as well as local immigration reform (i.e., to get ICE out of the Los Angeles County Jail). The event drew heavily from its religious culture of ecumenism and human dignity, emphasizing racial and religious diversity and standing with the other. It started with a march from Homeboy Industries and—because Pope Francis had just visited the United States—a projector displayed an image of Pope Francis on a screen as dozens of people

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trickled in and took a seat on the lawn. The event started with a Muslim call to prayer and increased in intensity as a woman from a Catholic church admonished the “brokenness” of the justice system for the exclusion it created. Participants prayed in different faiths and languages, representing a range of interests—from immigration reform and raising the minimum wage, to reducing incarceration and passing the Fair Chance Ordinance, to housing. Event organizers made an announcement, asking and reminding us to sign cards with two Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors measures: one to restrict ICE in the Los Angeles County jail, another to redirect a $100 million surplus in the county budget toward affordable housing. The LA County prayer vigil provided a platform for members to give testimony and bear witness to inequality. A White woman from LA Voice spoke in English and Spanish about “transforming the city” and “human dignity,” and used the projector to show the large number of organizations represented by people in attendance. Lively speeches, music, and testimonies followed. An elderly White clergy member played his guitar and sang, “I Woke Up This Morning with My Mind on Freedom.” A dean from a local evangelical seminary referenced the pope’s visit and spoke a few words about love in Spanish. A woman from an LA Voice– affiliated Catholic church reported about her recent trip to Philadelphia to see the pope, and drew from that experience for a reflective prayer; she cited scripture from the book of Genesis, and asked us to say aloud “We see you” (“Te vemos” in Spanish) after every testimony. Several persons gave testimony drawing from scripture—or referencing the pope’s visit—to advocate for greater social rights for the marginalized. An older Latino man, who had already served twenty-nine years in Folsom Prison, spoke about having been forgiven by the mother of the boy he had killed. He explained that the boy’s mother said she saw God in Mary—because Mary had forgiven Jesus’s murderers. In turn, he said he was able to see God through the boy’s mother. Sensing our forgiveness toward him, he then encouraged us to support the Fair Chance Ordinance. He told us, “This is what Fair Chance looks like.” In unison, we responded with the reflection refrain, “We see you.” A Latina SEIU 1877–affiliated janitor followed with a testimony urging us to advocate for others, because she had once been further on the margins—fleeing the El Salvadoran civil war. Now, she was fighting for

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a $15 minimum wage. She too spoke about “lifting others,” dignity, and Pope Francis. Again, we said, “We see you.” Thereafter, several speakers displayed prophetic activism. They advocated for others, lamenting immigration deportations, ICE raids, low wages, and the lack of affordable housing. After every testimony, we said, “We see you.” The prayer vigil then finished with a foot-washing—a symbolic gesture in the Catholic faith meant to demonstrate inclusivity and paying forward good deeds—as Father Greg Boyle washed the feet of the man who had served time in Folsom. The LA County Jail prayer vigil, though not a momentous action for any particular campaign, demonstrated the central role of religion in contemporary broad-based organizing efforts. The initiative to remove ICE from the County Jail elicited support from people engaged in various other campaigns—efforts that sought to improve the lives of Blacks, immigrants, and native-born Latina/os. Organizers used the vigil as a space to support the Los Angeles Fair Chance ordinance, which stood to benefit formerly incarcerated populations that were disproportionately Black and Latina/o. They also drew upon momentum from the Fight for 15 movement (which had already passed an ordinance for a $15-an-hour wage in Los Angeles) to articulate the need for ongoing labor struggle—benefiting low-wage workers who are disproportionately Black, Latina/o, and immigrant. Last, organizers also used the vigil as a space to advocate for reallocating funding for affordable housing development—which would improve living conditions for a homeless population that was predominantly Black and Latina/o.

Conclusion CRS/FORCE and LA Voice/Homeboys LOC demonstrate how public displays of religion utilize racialized meanings and practices, but also how they transform meanings of race. Formerly incarcerated persons, such as Jose and Eddie, had experienced racialization into Mexican American or Latina/o identity through struggles with immigration, poverty, and segregation, which in turn had shaped distinct racial trajectories, through street gangs, violence, and incarceration. It was through such struggle that triangulated Mexican American identity had been formed, and shaped antagonistic race relations well into adulthood.

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Faith-based community organizing, on the other hand, provided the space for healing and redemption. In turn, formerly incarcerated persons sought out such spaces just as they sought healing. As a result, such spaces not only provided healing but also transformed race relations from being antagonistic to being collaborative. The public and civic-oriented religious discourses and practices involved in faith-based organizing resulted in racial identities and race relations that differed significantly from those often produced by other forms of religious practice and participation, demonstrating how not only religious affiliation but also specific religious discourses and practices (i.e., specific religious repertoires) intersect with race and immigration status to construct race in different ways. CRS and LA Voice both articulated resistance against racial inequalities through a much longer history of American resistance against racial oppression. CRS’s institutional mission articulated “racial and social justice,” celebrated its association with the United Church of Christ and the Amistad slave ship mutiny, and drew from historically Black Protestant church practices to facilitate members’ “coming out of Babylon.” In contrast, LA Voice’s institutional mission articulated the PICO National Network’s emphasis on the importance of “human dignity,” and claimed to teach those in “greatest need” how to “engage in the public arena.” CRS and LA Voice articulated these values through campaigns that sought to expand the rights of those furthest on the margins—such as marginalized immigrants or formerly incarcerated people—through support for banthe-box policies, and reform for wage, housing, and immigration policies. CRS and LA Voice also drew upon much deeper American civic traditions through public displays of religiosity. At both organizations, leaders exhorted members to embrace “the other,” a key feature of what has been conceptualized to be progressive, prophetic activism. However, at times, CRS and LA Voice drew upon distinct religious traditions. CRS leaders engaged in an insurgent manifestation of prophetic, progressive activism, drawn largely from religious displays rooted in the Black Protestant church; they communicated notions of community organizing as high-conflict and polarizing; displayed inclusivity to those on the margins; and fostered ecstatic worship through music, dance, and prayer. In contrast, LA Voice leaders engaged in a pastoral manifestation of prophetic, progressive activism, drawn largely from religious displays rooted

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in the Catholic Church; and they communicated notions of ecumenism and dignity, such as opening meetings with interfaith prayers and/or reflections focused on justice, love, multiculturalism, and inclusion. Thus, multiple kinds of religious theologies, traditions, and practices can intersect with race to produce new ways of thinking about relationships between racial groups, or between immigrants and nonimmigrants. As in Russell Jeung, John Jiminez, and Eric Mar’s chapter in this volume, this chapter demonstrates how the relationship of race to immigrant status, and even racial identity itself, is profoundly shaped by the types of religious traditions and practices in which a person participates. The case studies in this chapter suggest that, despite their religious differences, the common elements of religious form and content in CRS and LA Voice—public, prophetic, diverse—were important in enabling them both to reshape race relations. Private, traditional religious practices may not have the same ability to build bridges between racial and ethnic groups whose relations are typically antagonistic. These case studies of CRS and LA Voice suggest that collective and political action may reshape race relations. Previous research on faithbased community organizing has indicated that cultural bridging— through interfaith prayers, prayers that outlined a vision of inclusive democracy, and shared practices—may foster collective action among distinct racial and religious groups (Braunstein, Fulton, and Wood 2014:713–14). What this study has attempted to illustrate is how these specific incarnations of religion may reshape race relations among triangulated racial groups, such as Blacks and Latina/os of immigrant backgrounds. CRS and LA Voice held community organizing trainings, meetings, and assemblies, as well as marches, walks, and rallies, and lobbied elected officials. These settings allowed for coalition-building around varied interests for marginalized groups. In turn, as secondgeneration immigrants held a presence in key roles (such as leading FORCE and the Homeboys LOC), they experienced race relations with other marginalized groups not as antagonistic but as collaborative— integrating into diverse American traditions of religion and public life. Notes

1 Homeboy Industries’ model of recovery depended on fostering the development of members’ testimonies of reform; this foregrounded dominant notions of

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deservingness in ways that fit with a “model movement strategy” (Yukich 2013) but was not tied to strategic campaigning. In my most recent work, however, I examine how Community Renewal Society and LA Voice employed particular organizing strategies and tactics to de-privatize personal testimonies for collective and political action (Flores and Cossyleon 2016; Flores 2018). 2 While the focus here is on faith-based community organizing, the trope of the “other” looms large in faith-based traditions and in marginalized, immigrant communities—even without explicit mobilizing efforts. Jeung, Jimenez, and Mar’s chapter in this volume suggests that Asian Americans—and especially Asian American religious minorities—are more likely to vote for progressive candidates. 3 The focus in this chapter is on campaigns that involve persons of immigrant background, though there are several more notable examples of community organizing for the rights of the formerly incarcerated (e.g., Owens 2014; Owens and Walker 2018). 4 Research suggests that more than 65 million Americans have a criminal record, but that most employment-related criminal background searches appear to run afoul of the Civil Rights Act (Rodriguez and Avery 2017).

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Soja, Edward W. 2014. My Los Angeles: From Urban Restructuring to Regional Urbanization. Berkeley: University of California Press. Toney, Mark Warren. 2007. “A Second Chance—For the First Time: Movement Formation among Formerly Incarcerated People.” PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Wood, Richard, and Brad Fulton. 2015. A Shared Future: Faith-Based Organizing for Racial Equity and Ethical Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Yukich, Grace. 2013. “Constructing the Model Immigrant: Movement Strategy and Immigrant Deservingness in the New Sanctuary Movement.” Social Problems 60(3): 302–320. Zhou, Min, and Carl L. Bankston. 1998. Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States. New York: Russell Sage.

12

Decentering Whiteness in Survey Research on American Religion Jerry Z. Park and James Clark Davidson

A number of news stories surrounding the 2016 US presidential election made the claim that the most committed group of Trump voters were Evangelical Christians.1 But some scholars, including sociologist Penny Edgell (2017), noted that these stories overlooked a more influential predictor of support for the GOP: race. It was not Evangelicals at large that served as the main electorate supporting Trump, but White Evangelicals. This distinction is not a minor detail. It is a social reality sorely overlooked in our research on the impact of religion in American society.

Why Race Matters in American Religion Race and evangelicalism have a complex history. White Evangelicals played both resisting and supporting roles in the enslavement of Africans in the United States (Harlow 2017; Stewart 1997). Most evangelical congregations practiced segregation during the period of slavery and the Jim Crow era, and up through the end of the twentieth century (DeYoung et al. 2003). Even now, as multiracial congregations are becoming a larger percentage of US congregations (Dougherty and Emerson 2018), faith communities are overwhelmingly racially homogenous (Chaves and Eagle 2015). This segregation led to the formation of the Black Church (Lincoln and Mamiya 1990), a distinctly Black form of American Protestantism with roots in the 1700s which comprises about 7% of all US congregations and about 53% of the African American population (G. A. Smith et al. 2015). Similarly, the rise of Latinx and Asian populations,2 and selective Christian migration to the United States (Connor 2012), has resulted in a proliferation of Asian and Latinx Protestant communities (Funk et al. 2012, 2014). 251

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That being said, accounting for racial-religious diversity is more than having an accurate sense of religious demography. Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2004) has argued that racial difference is not a matter of accounting for categories, but an understanding of one’s social position with regard to power, access to opportunities, upward mobility, and interpretations of everyday experiences. He proposed a framework wherein racial groups in the United States might be roughly positioned in a racial trichotomy. Native non-Latinx Whites stand at the top of this hierarchy alongside some Asian American groups, light-skinned Latinx Americans, and assimilated immigrant Whites. At the bottom of this hierarchy is the “collective Black”: the majority of African Americans, some southeast Asian groups, and Latinx Americans with darker skin. In the middle are most Asian groups, Latinx Americans, and most multiracial Americans, called “honorary Whites.” From this view, racial difference has sociological significance: Society is stratified by skin color and racial identity. This racial stratification also applies within religious categories (Emerson, Korver-Glenn, and Douds 2015). Sociologists Melissa Wilde and Patricia Tevington find that across every religious tradition save evangelicalism and Black Protestantism, Whites have higher rates of educational attainment than Blacks (2017). This finding also holds among Muslim and unaffiliated Americans. Wilde and Tevington situate these findings in a larger argument that inequality by religion and race intersect and create what they term “complex religion.” That is, White Christians (with some exception for Evangelical Protestants) may have more opportunities for upward mobility than their non-White Christian counterparts. African American Christians may have the fewest opportunities (Keister 2011). Asian and Latinx American Christians vary, but complex religion would predict they sit between White and Black Christians. As we can see, the religio-racial hierarchy mirrors that of the overall US racial order of opportunity. There is also an inter-religious racial hierarchy that can be seen when observing minority religions in the United States (Davidson and Pyle 2011). For example, Jewish Americans, most of whom identify as White today (Brodkin 1998), constitute 3% of the population, but exhibit some of the highest SES outcomes. Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims have large Asian (i.e., honorary White) populations and also show

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fairly high SES outcomes. Sociologist Besheer Mohamed’s chapter in this book explicates the racial complexity of American Islam. In sum, sociologists of religion have shown that within the racialized stratification system of the United States, religious affiliation reveals further, unique stratification. This chapter focuses on a further examination of the intersection of race and religion. Attitudes toward social stratification are linked to one’s position in the racial hierarchy. Social psychologists have noted upwardly mobile individuals tend to view society as fair (Oldmeadow and Fiske 2007; Tajfel and Turner 1986), and White Americans are more likely to attribute racial inequality to individual failings (DiTomaso 2013). This attitude is a central tenet of the Republican Party.3 In keeping with the religio-racial hierarchy discussed above, White Evangelicals regularly show high rates of individualist attribution and GOP affiliation (Emerson and Smith 2000). But what about racial minorities within this hierarchy? Recent work by political scientist Janelle Wong (2018) examined the political views of Evangelicals from a variety of racial backgrounds in the 2008 and 2016 elections. She found that White Evangelicals tended toward conservative views on most “culture wars” issues, but non-White Evangelicals, especially Black Evangelicals, were not as conservative. We intend to expand this research, disaggregating religious groups by race to reveal social and political attitudinal differences that have gone unexplored previously. Why do reports about US religion and social attitudes still gloss over racial difference? We identify two major problems present in current US religious research: White Christian normativity (Joshi 2006) and sampling issues.

Rendered Invisible and Inferior: The Devil in the (Methodological) Details In the United States, Christianity remains the predominant religion— and predominantly White non-Latinx, though this varies between denominations (Lipka 2015). As such, most reports on American religion largely focus on White, non-Latinx Christianity. Social science research on American religion holds non-White Christians and nonChristian believers to a White Christian standard (Bender et al. 2013).

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For example, the General Social Survey (GSS) asks: “How often do you attend religious services?” Other surveys, like ones produced by the Pew Research Center, specify further: “Aside from weddings and funerals, how often do you attend religious services?” Most research that uses this behavioral measure assumes that regular attendance of services is an integral part of the religious experience. However, not all major world religions emphasize formal collective experience of the sacred. Buddhism and Hinduism include worship at temples as a feature of their traditions, but these temples do not parallel Christian congregations. The temple is not the central space in which the sacred is engaged for many of these practitioners. For example, religious studies scholar Sharon Suh’s (2004) study of Korean American Buddhists in southern California showed that women’s informal gatherings to discuss the sutras was a primary collective sacred practice. Other practices exercised with some regularity, such as meditation, contemplation, veneration, and chanting, may have similar effects to attendance for non-Christians. But these potentially comparable metrics are rarely measured, rendering these important forms of religious expression invisible to most scholars interested in non-Christian religion in the United States. Practices aside, surveys that ask about religious beliefs also reveal a Christian bias. These include both questions about Christian Scriptures and questions about a God who fits the Judeo-Christian framework. With few exceptions, such as the Pew Research Center’s Asian American Survey (2012) and the Muslim American surveys (2007, 2011, 2017), questions about other sacred texts are difficult to find in research on US religions. Consequently, studies that analyze “religious belief effects” suffer from measurement error when the sample includes non-Christians, since the measures used largely apply to Christians. This kind of error misrepresents non-White respondents and non-Christians generally, but it disproportionally affects Asian and Black responses because larger segments of these populations identify with a religion other than Christianity. One of the more common and well-vetted measures of religious affiliation is the RELTRAD classification scheme (Steensland et al. 2000). This method of grouping religious identity works well for larger Judeo-Christian religious groups. However, minority religions are often lumped into an “other religion” category that holds little potential for

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meaningful analysis. RELTRAD also relies on a Judeo-Christian conception of religious affiliation as contingent upon attendance at a collective performance or experience in a specific location outside the home (Putnam and Campbell 2010). A Buddhist or Hindu who practices privately or attends temple regularly may not conceive of themselves as affiliated with a religious organization in the same sense that a Methodist or Presbyterian might,4 since Buddhism and Hinduism tend to be communally (i.e., apart from the temple) rather than congregationally produced (Sharot 2002). This difference in the interpretation and meaning behind affiliation questions could explain why Asian Americans are often overrepresented as “Nones” (religiously nonaffiliated) in the RELTRAD classification (Iwamura et al. 2014; Jeung 2012).5 For the 40% of Asian Americans who practice a faith other than Christianity (e.g., Buddhism, folk religions, Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism) (Funk et al. 2012), questions about attendance, beliefs, and affiliation may be misinterpreted, resulting in findings that portray them as religiously inferior in the face of religiosity metrics designed with White Christians in mind (Iwamura et al. 2014).

Sample Size Problems and Language Access in Survey Research The second problem with racial-religious research in the United States lies in the way we conduct “representative” surveys of the US population. From the Census we know the US population is approximately 63% non-Latinx White, 16% Latinx, 12% African American, 6% Asian and Pacific Islander, and about 3% multiracial and Native American. So, a random sample of 1,000 people should yield 630 White non-Hispanics, 160 Latinx, 120 Black, 60 Asian, and 30 mixed-race and other Americans. A minimum of about forty respondents for a particular category or characteristic is required to have sufficient statistical power or confidence in the results, and the larger the response category, the better (Ghasemi and Zahediasl 2012). Since no religion is racially homogenous, any fine-grained examination of religious group difference among racial minorities is hampered in representative samples. Native and Asian Americans immediately fall below the minimum threshold for analysis when simply differentiated into Christian and non-Christian.6

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In addition to the racial minority sampling problem, there is a religious minority sampling problem. While survey instruments account for multiple world religions, small proportions of the US population identify with a religion outside of Christianity. The Pew Religious Landscape Survey in 2014 found that Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and other non-Christian groups constitute less than 6% of adult religious affiliates. The largest group, Jewish Americans, comprises only 2% of all adult Americans (G. A. Smith et al. 2015). This, combined with suboptimal racial representation in probabilistic samples, results in many racialreligious minority respondents being classified as “Other Religion,” a category dominated by White respondents. Non-Latinx White Christian-focused methodologies and insufficient survey samples of minority non-Christian religions combine to render racial minorities invisible and/or inferior to the “strong” practices and beliefs of White Christians. In short, even if our theories for defining religiosity and religion were more inclusive, we face the reality that minority groups—whether racial, religious, or both—are harder to analyze because they do not meet minimal numbers required for typical quantitative analyses. Another dimension to the structural problem of our surveys is the language in which we administer the instruments themselves. Racialized groups in society that have a large number of non-English fluent immigrants, such as Asian and Latinx Americans, will not complete English-only surveys. Fluency in the dominant language is typically an indicator of assimilation. Greater fluency in English increases access to American institutions such as employment, health care, education, and financial management. Surveys that do not account for language fluency make invisible the realities of those of lower socioeconomic standing and distort racial group findings to reflect primarily those who are the most upwardly mobile and the most assimilated. For example, the GSS is a stratified random and, in theory, representative survey of the non-institutionalized adult US population. But buried in the notation that accompanies the data, we find that data collection was conducted only in English for most surveys prior to 2006 (T. W. Smith 2007). In other words, the 9% of Americans who are not fluent in English (or about 19 million adults) were excluded.7 This results

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in biased response rates, especially for racialized groups that have a preponderance of non-English-fluent speakers. The two racialized groups for whom this is most consequential are Latinx and Asian Americans. An estimated 12 million Latinx adults (or 22% of the Latinx population) lack English proficiency and are unlikely to complete a survey administered only in English. This results in a biased impression of Latinx religious affiliation and practice favoring those who are English-fluent and more assimilated. More difficult to reach are the 4 million non-English-fluent Asian Americans (about 25% of all Asian Americans) who are excluded from these surveys. Asian Americans originate from numerous nations with different languages (Ramakrishnan and Ahmad 2014). At least seven translations may be needed to cover the largest groups among Asian Americans.8 Similar to the Latinx population, it is unclear whether there is a difference between those who are fluent and those who are not fluent in English when it comes to Asian American religious belief, practice, and affiliation. We do not know whether attitudinal and behavioral correlates associated with belief, practice, and affiliation (e.g., political and social attitudes) vary between those who are or are not English-proficient. Consider the racial distribution of American Buddhists using data from the Pew Research Center. The 35,000+ respondent Religious Landscape Survey of 2014, which only offered a Spanish translation, estimated that 0.7% of the population identified as Buddhist—that is about 1.7 million adults. In this survey, 44% of Buddhists identified as White, 33% identified as Asian (for a total population of 565,950 Asian Buddhists in the population), and the remaining 23% were Blacks, Latinx, and racial Others (G. A. Smith et al. 2015). The Pew Research Center conducted an Asian American survey in 2012, which included seven translations, which estimated that the Asian American Buddhist population was about 14% of all adult Asian Americans (Funk et al. 2012), which would indicate there were 1.7 million Asian American Buddhists alone. When we replace the undercounted Asian American Buddhist figure in the Landscape data with the Asian American survey estimate, we have a Buddhist population of around 2.9 million. Asian American Buddhists are now 60% of all American Buddhists, and White Buddhists make

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up only 26% of this religious population. Without survey translation, scholars not only undercount American Buddhists, but they perceive American Buddhism as primarily White followed by Asian. With translation, the picture is reversed. In sum, reports on religion that account for race typically resort to comparisons between Whites and Blacks as a result of insufficient sample sizes.9 Asian and Latinx populations are rendered invisible by standard survey practices, even in the highest quality surveys administered. The General Social Survey undersampled Latinx respondents until it introduced translation in 2006 (T. W. Smith 2013) and continues to undersample Asian Americans today.10 From 2006 to 2016, the GSS included in its “Other Religion” category 121 Buddhists, 65 Hindus, 97 Muslims, 159 labeled “Other,” and 25 respondents generically classified as “Other Eastern” (Sherkat 1999).11 When disaggregating this category by race we find Whites (41% overall), followed by Asians (31%), Blacks (9%), multiracials (9%), Latinx (4%), Native Americans (3%), and racial others (2%). Even in this pooled sample there is only one religious group for which we have the minimum sample size for comparison by race: Buddhism (43 White, 62 Asian). These low sample sizes are likely to result in unreliable or non-findings.

A Search for Structural Solutions: Language Access, Oversampling, Pooling Data Overcoming these structural problems was critical to our analysis. Potential solutions include translating survey instruments, conducting oversampling, or pooling data. Unfortunately, translation and oversampling (collecting over-representative samples of minorities so that one has the numbers to disaggregate minorities into usable subgroups) are outside the realm of possibility for secondary data analysis. Surveys such as the Pew Research Center’s Latino survey (2012) and Asian American survey (2012) respond to both problems.12 However, few scholars and news outlets make use of these surveys when making claims about religion in America. The third potential solution is to pool data. While the GSS includes only a Spanish translation, their survey is administered every two years, using many of the same questions. As we are not studying year-specific phenomena (such as voting during an election year), we can combine

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responses from multiple years to get enough minority respondents that we can examine smaller subgroups.

Examples from the GSS Pooled Sample, 2006–2016 This chapter uses pooled data from the 2006 to 2016 waves of the GSS, every survey in which translation was available in Spanish. This yielded 15,857 respondents with subsamples of Black (N=2061), Latinx (N=1976), Asian (N=436), and Multiracial adults (N=889).13 This latter figure is surprisingly high: between 2006 and 2016, the GSS proportion of respondents who selected more than one race was between 4.1% and 6.9%, whereas the 2010 Census estimates are around 2.9% (Jones and Bullock 2012; Parker et al. 2015). Additionally, the GSS still has a non-representative sample of Latinx respondents (about 12%) despite translation. Asian Americans (about 2.5%) are even more underrepresented in the absence of Asian language translation. As mentioned earlier, the marginalized among these racialized populations have been undersampled. Thus, our findings will skew toward more assimilated Asian and Latinx Americans. What do pooled GSS data tell us about religion and race in America? Racial minorities participate in a variety of religious traditions,

Table 12.1: Religious Traditions with Insufficient Minimal Samples of Minorities Sample Size of Racial Minority Groups per Religious Tradition Religious Traditions

White

Black

Latinx

Asian

Native American/ Other Race

Mixed Race

Total

Evangelical

2758

313

300

56

27 / 11

264

3729

Mainline

1818

81

39

19

14 / 4

77

2052

29

1041

13

2

3/1

111

1200

2238

119

1180

78

22 / 5

92

3734

254

7

2

2

0/2

5

272

Black Church Catholic Jewish Other Faiths

496

86

62

139

17 / 10

75

885

Nonaffiliated

2045

287

282

115

19 / 5

188

2941

10349

2061

1976

436

104 / 42

889

15857

Total

Note: Shaded cells reflect counts below accepted minimums for bivariate analyses.

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58.0 51.8 60.3

48.4

50.0

46.8

49.2

60.0

63.0

70.0

63.3

80.0

67.0

90.0

70.0

88.1 78.7 83.9

100.0

69.4

sometimes in congregations that are dominated by Whites, or by their specific ethnic group or in multiracial spaces. According to the GSS, the largest religious traditions in the United States remain Christian, specifically Protestantism (and its three major substrands, Evangelical (about 24%), Mainline (about 13%), and historically Black (about 8%)) and Catholicism (about 23%). “Nones” compose the next largest category (about 19%), followed by Jews and members of other faith traditions (about 7% combined). Pooling data allow us to examine some racial diversity in the major Christian traditions in the United States. However, there are sample size limits on Native American Christians, and the Asian American subsample remains too small for some analyses. This chapter disaggregates Christian traditions, but non-Christian religious groups still do not meet the minimum size requirement for disaggregation and must retain the catchall “Other Religion” (Steensland et al. 2000). In every Christian tradition save the Black Church, White non-Latinx are the majority by far. About 75% of Evangelicals, 89% of Mainline Protestants, and 60% of Catholics are White. Those groups for which we did not have enough respondents to disaggregate—Native American Christians, non-White Jews, and non-Black Black Church members—are

40.0 30.0 20.0 10.0 0.0

Evangelical

Mainline White

Black

Black Protestant LatinX

Asian

Catholic

Multiracial

Figure 12.1: Percentage Monthly Church Attendance or More by Race within Christian Religious Tradition

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omitted from our analysis. Surprisingly, “mixed-race” respondents, those who identified with more than one race, were large enough to constitute a specific racial category alongside White non-Latinx, Black non-Latinx, and Asian non-Latinx. The following discussion presents four examples of what can be learned about American religiosity from examining this pooled data, and how racial minority status shapes social and political attitudes. It focuses on American Christians and religiously unaffiliated Americans since these are the religious groups that have sufficient minimal counts of racial minorities.

Religious Service Attendance With the potential normative assumptions about measures of attendance in mind, we investigated the racial differences in monthly attendance for respondents who identified with a Christian religious tradition. As figure 12.1 shows, there are major differences between racial groups. Among Evangelicals, 67% of White non-Latinx attended church monthly or more as compared to 88% of Black Evangelicals, 79% of Latinx Evangelicals, and 84% of Asian American Evangelicals. In this pooled sample, Evangelicals are the only group with a sufficient minimum sample for five major racial categories. In the Protestant Mainline, monthly or more church attendance for Whites is about 49%, but 63% of Black Mainline Protestants attend church monthly or more. Within the Black Protestant tradition, self-identified African Americans and mixed-race respondents attended church monthly or more at about the same rate (about 70%). About 48% of White Catholics and 52% of Latinx Catholics attended monthly or more, but Black and Asian American Catholics attended monthly at considerably higher rates (58% and 60% respectively). These findings illustrate the considerable racial variation in this particular practice among followers of the same Christian traditions. Figures that aggregate all members of a tradition mask this variation since most of these affiliations are dominated by White non-Latinx Americans. The largest variation in attendance is found between traditions (e.g., the lowest monthly attendance among Evangelical groups is higher than the highest monthly attendance among Mainline groups). In this sense, tradition-specific religious norms appear to condition attendance

6.8 Black Protestant Black

LatinX

Catholic Asian

35.9

31.6

26.9

37.8

40.7 White

14.4

16.4

23.1

Mainline Protestant

21.1 6.3 12.1 13.9 6.4

Evangelical Protestant

8.4 11.5 17.3

0.0

3.8

10.0

8.3

20.0

18.5

30.0

26.3

40.0

11.8 16.4

50.0

47.7

51.8

60.0

| Jerry Z. Park and James Clark Davidson 55.9

262

Other Religion

No Affiliation

Multiracial

Figure 12.2: Percentage Republican Affiliates by Race within Religious Affiliation

rates for White and non-White Christians. However, multiracial Protestants and Latinx Catholics are the only groups with similar attendance rates to the non-Latinx Whites in their tradition. Non-White Christians exhibit higher communal observance compared to Whites, yet many studies of “American” religion ignore this difference.

Political Affiliation Racial differences within religious traditions are also significant when looking at political affiliation. Figure 12.2 presents the rates of Republican affiliation by race within major religious traditions. Evangelical Protestants have received the most attention here in popular media: In our pooled sample, 56% of White Evangelicals identify as Republican. With the exception of (English-fluent) Asian American Evangelicals (52% of whom identify as Republican), no more than 26% of any other minority Evangelical group identifies as Republican. Recent work by Janelle Wong (2018) contradicts these estimates, providing another example of the problems that arise from undersampling and inadequate language translation. Using data from the Cooperative Multiracial Post-Election Survey 2017, Wong found that about 69% of White “born-again or Evangelical Christian” respondents identified as Republican (+17 percentage points) as compared to 8% of Black born-agains (no difference), 26% of Latinx born-agains (no

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difference), and 32% of Asian born-agains (−20 percentage points) (2018:21). While Asian American Evangelicals have the second highest rate of Republican affiliation, their rate is closer to other minority Evangelicals than to White Evangelicals. For a more in-depth look at political affiliation and Asian Americans, see Russell Jeung, John Jiminez, Eric Mar’s chapter in this volume. Turning back to the GSS, the pattern of Republican affiliation among Mainline Protestants is nearly identical to that of Evangelicals (there were too few Asian Americans to comment). Similar to figure 12.1, the only two groups with sufficient sample size among Black Protestants are African Americans and multiracial Americans. Notably, less than 7% of African Americans in the Black Church identify as Republican, but 14% of multiracial Black Church affiliates report being Republican. Catholic affiliations with the GOP vary slightly: 41% of White Catholics identify as Republican, followed by 38% of multiracial Catholics. Among Black, Latinx, and Asian Catholics, no more than 27% identify as GOP.14 A higher percentage of Whites within religious minority affiliations identify with the Republican Party relative to non-Whites and the same holds for those who identify as nonaffiliated. The only group where more than half of Whites are Republicans is Evangelicals. Another pattern is the strength of certain racial lines with respect to party identification. Only 6–12% of African Americans in any religious affiliation (including the nonaffiliated) identify as Republican. Among Latinx respondents, the range of Republican affiliates goes from a high of 26% (Latinx Evangelicals) to a low of 12% (among other religion and nonaffiliated). With the exception of Asian American Evangelicals, Republican affiliation among Asian Americans ranges from 27% (Catholic) to 14% (nonaffiliated). In sum, these findings show: (1) a general difference between White and non-White co-religious peers when it comes to Republican affiliation where Whites favor the GOP across religious groups more so than their non-White peers; (2) relative parity among all African Americans; and (3) a modest range of affiliation rates for Latinx and Asian Americans. Of the latter, Protestant and Catholic Republican affiliation rates tend to be higher than non-Christian and nonreligious rates. Similar to the church attendance patterns, disaggregation of GOP membership reveals important racial divides within religious affiliations. But unlike

56.8 53.7

50.8 37.7

50.0 38.8

41.4 48.6

29.0

34.4

41.0

41.2

39.9 28.4

30.0

21.8

40.0

24.6

50.0

50.1

60.0

44.0

70.0

44.1 49.1

70.6

80.0

69.1 64.0

264 | Jerry Z. Park and James Clark Davidson

20.0 10.0 0.0

Evangelical

Mainline White

Black Protestant Black

LatinX

Catholic Asian

Other Religion

No Affiliation

Multiracial

Figure 12.3: Abortion Under Any Circumstance Is OK

church attendance, the ranges of GOP affiliation rates reflect racial boundaries more so than religious ones. In other words, the GOP affiliation rates tend to follow same-race respondents regardless of religion. The same limitations on what we know apply here: White, Black, and Latinx respondents are numerous enough in a pooled sample for between-group comparisons in multiple Christian traditions. Asian American Christians are still not visible in the Protestant Mainline, and Native Americans are completely invisible in these analyses.

Abortion Attitudes Perhaps no single issue has received constant attention both within the media and in social science research than abortion attitudes. Nearly all of it focuses on White conservative Christians or “American Christians” when there is no disaggregation by race. Studies in the late 1980s portray an “Evangelical equals conservative abortion views” and “Mainline equals liberal on abortion” dichotomy (Hunter 1991; Wuthnow 1988). The Black Protestant tradition is absent from these analyses.15 In figure 12.3 we show GSS respondents’ agreement with the statement: “It should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if the woman wants it for any reason.” As the graph depicts, Latinx Evangelicals have

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the lowest level of agreement (22%). But alongside them are White nonLatinx Evangelicals (25%) and multiracial Evangelicals (28%). Black Evangelicals stand apart among their Evangelical brethren, with 40% supporting abortion under any circumstance. By contrast, White Mainliners have the highest support for unrestricted abortion (50%) while Black Mainliners have the lowest among Mainliners (41%), with multiracial Mainliners slightly more favorable (44%). The Black Evangelical and Black Mainline affiliates are virtually identical to one another and to their African American peers in the Black Church (41%). Black Catholics show the highest support (49%) for unrestricted abortion among Black Christian groups. A significant minority of unaffiliated (44%) and Blacks of other religions (38%) support unrestricted abortion. With the possible exception of Black Catholics, African Americans across the religious spectrum hold remarkably similar views on unrestricted abortion, whereas their White, Latinx, and multiracial counterparts show dramatic shifts on this topic depending on their affiliation. Latinx adherents vary in their support on unrestricted abortion, but within each religious affiliation, and among the nonaffiliated, they are relatively low in support on this issue. Only 22% of Latinx Evangelicals and 29% of Latinx Catholics support this position, the lowest among all Evangelicals and Catholics; while 49% of nonaffiliated Latinx agree on this, they are the second lowest in agreement (joining nonaffiliated African Americans) among the nonaffiliated. For Asian Americans, the spread in their support for unrestricted abortion ranges considerably, from a low of 39% (Catholic) to majority support at 69% (for the unaffiliated). They are, along with multiracial respondents, the only racial minority group to show majority support for unrestricted abortion within a religious category (Other Religion) (57%). This also holds for the nonaffiliated Asian American and multiracial respondents. In sum, while research and media coverage of abortion attitudes pits Evangelicals and nonaffiliates against one another, a nuanced view shows that much of this struggle is fought between White Evangelicals and White nonaffiliates. This mirrors Rhys H. Williams’s argument in his chapter in this volume regarding how much of the twentieth-century discussion of “the restructuring of American religion” (Wuthnow 1988)

54.7 52.7 58.6

Other Religion

No Affiliation

40.0

33.4

40.8

60.0

58.8

73.0 72.3 56.5 51.1

54.1

58.3

71.5

55.8

43.0 50.5

50.0

45.0

60.0

57.4

70.0

70.6

80.0

| Jerry Z. Park and James Clark Davidson

48.9

266

30.0 20.0 10.0 0.0

Evangelical

Mainline White

Black Protestant Black

LatinX

Catholic Asian

Multiracial

Figure 12.4: Percentage Individualist Explanations for Black-White Racial Inequality by Race within Religious Affiliations

along liberal and conservative lines ignored race and was, in fact, a phenomenon primarily occurring among White Americans. Multiracial Americans follow a similar pattern: African American and Latinx views are largely the same regardless of Christian affiliation. Among Christian Americans we only have sufficient samples of Catholic Asian Americans, and their support level for unrestricted abortion is about the same as White Catholics’. On this subject, “other religion” respondents and the nonaffiliated show greater similarity, with the notable exception of African Americans in these two religious categories. Disaggregation reveals a consistent racialized low support for unrestricted abortion among African Americans, while the boundaries between Christian and non-Christian vary most for White, Latinx, and Asian respondents.

Racial Inequality Explanations Finally, this analysis examines GSS responses to the problem of racial inequality in socioeconomic outcomes, which has been asked since the 1980s. These survey questions begin with the prompt, “On average Blacks have worse jobs, income, and housing than White people.”

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Interviewers then continue: “Is this because of . . .” and present four possible explanations, two of which reflect structural factors (“lack of chance for education that it takes to rise out of poverty” and “discrimination”) and two of which reflect individual-level characteristics (“don’t have motivation or will power to pull themselves out of poverty” and “less in-born ability to learn”). Previous research has emphasized the propensity of White Evangelicals to espouse individualist explanations far more than other Americans (Emerson and Smith 2000; Edgell and Tranby 2007). There is also evidence of this with respect to non-Evangelical White Christians (Hinojosa and Park 2004). About 71% of White Evangelicals endorsed the individualist explanations compared to 56% of White Mainline Protestants and White Catholics. Endorsement of individualist explanations for Black inequality was shared by White Christians generally, with White Evangelicals showing more consistent support. Given that the target group of the inequality question is African Americans, we expected that a low percentage of self-identified Black respondents might support individualist explanations for racial inequality. But African American responses yielded another unexpected result. We found that 58% of African Americans in the Black Church supported this view, as did almost 49% of Black Evangelicals, 51% of Black Catholics, and 45% of Black Mainline Protestants. Of all Black Christian respondents, Black Church affiliates had the highest support for this individualist explanation. Apart from the higher support among Black Church affiliates, other Black Christians had consistently lower support for this view compared to their White counterparts. We conjecture that perhaps Black respondents view this question differently. Where non-Black Americans might interpret individualist explanations as outsiders critiquing the Black community, African Americans might interpret this as insiders who see multiple causes of inequality. That is, while non-Black respondents see individualist explanations as inferring primary cause, Black respondents may take this explanation to be part of a complex series of causes that also include structural explanations. The moderately high rate of support may also reflect the effect of participating in institutions which W.E.B. Du Bois argued was a formal collective expression of “double consciousness” (Lincoln and Mamiya 1990:228).

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Latinx Evangelical (72%) and Catholic (73%) support for individualist explanations of Black inequality suggests a more consistent Latinx Christian view that rivals White non-Latinx Evangelicals. While we lack sufficient sample size to examine Asian American Protestants, we found that this rate of endorsement was just as high among Asian American Catholics. The similarity of support among these three racial minority Christian groups compared to White Evangelicals suggests that they may have adopted some or much of the White Evangelical cultural toolkit (Alumkal 2004). If these minority Christian groups are “closer” in viewpoint to White Evangelicals, multiracial Christians seem more similar to Black Christians. Slight majorities of multiracial Evangelicals (57%), Black Protestants (54%), and Catholics (59%) supported the individualist explanations of Black inequality. As noted earlier, White Mainline Protestants and Catholics share this same lower, though still majority, support for this inequality explanation. The nonaffiliated respondents, particularly Blacks, Latinx, and Asians, also supported individualist explanations at a rate similar to Black and multiracial Christians. But notably, White (41%) and multiracial (33%) nonaffiliates were the only groups to have a minority support individualist explanations. As a first observation we notice three levels of support (around 70%, 55%, and less than 50%) for individualist explanations, but they do not correspond neatly to Bonilla-Silva’s racial trichotomy. White Evangelicals, Latinx, and Asian Christians share similarly high levels of endorsement of this inequality explanation; Black Mainline Protestants, and White and multiracial nonaffiliates show low levels of support; and all other Christian and nonaffiliated groups fit somewhere in between. In short, by disaggregating racial minorities from Whites within Christian traditions and among those with no affiliation, we find significant variation in religiosity, political party affiliation, culture wars opinions, and racial attitudes. Research and media claims that point to a religious group difference mask important distinctions between Whites and several major racial minority groups. Nevertheless, our best surveys continue to fall short in including large enough racial and religious minorities to differentiate along these lines. This prevents us from fully

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assessing the effect of racial and religious complex variations in religious affiliation.

Conclusion This chapter illustrates the importance of identifying racial minorities in American Christianity, and in American religion more generally. Our current definitions of religion and religiosity suffer from White American Christian biases at both the conceptual and instrumental levels. Future research should investigate the extent of this problem. Beyond this substantive set of problems, we note that the typical survey conventions we follow result in unusable small racial and religious minority subsamples. The GSS, considered by many to be the gold standard in survey research, reflects these problems with low sample counts and Christian-biased measures. Bundled with these dynamics is the problem of language access to surveys which has only recently begun to be addressed with the inclusion of Spanish. Exclusion of non-Englishfluent respondents suppresses racial minority estimates, including their religious affiliations, beliefs, practices, and other covariates, and those biases inflate the attitudes and experiences of more assimilated racial minorities. Non-White Christians and religious non-Christians either remain invisible or resemble their White Christian contemporaries. We provided examples of how racial disaggregation within religion reveals important cleavages in American social and political attitudes. Similarly, Besheer Mohamed’s chapter in this volume demonstrates the importance of racial disaggregation for understanding social and political differences among US Muslims; and Joseph O. Baker’s chapter shows how understanding nonreligion in survey research requires racial disaggregation as well. American media frequently neglects to recognize these gaps, which provide important context and texture to American life. Differences between White and Black Christians in particular stand out most often where African Americans are both more active in their faith communities compared to Whites and also more progressive in their social and political views (Shelton and Emerson 2012). Asian and Latinx Christians resemble African Americans with higher religiosity rates compared to Whites and more progressive political affiliation.

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But they differ on certain social issues, including resisting unrestricted abortion and endorsing a commitment to American meritocracy. When accounting for race, religious cleavages are often less significant in comparison to racial cleavages, and sometimes those religious cleavages conceal differences between racial groups. Religion is indeed raced, and quantitative research on religion must account for these complex intersections more effectively. Notes

1 Some major examples appeared in the New York Times (Gabriel and Luo 2017), and the Wall Street Journal (Hook and Dawsey 2016; Levitz and Haddon 2016). 2 Between 2000 and 2010, nearly half of the population growth of the United States was due to the increase in the Hispanic population. Asians comprised 4.8% of the population in 2010 but were responsible for more than 16% of growth from 2000 to 2010. 3 For example, page 4 of the 2008 Republican Party Platform explicitly states, “In our multiethnic nation, everyone—immigrants and native-born alike—must embrace our core values of liberty, equality, meritocracy, and respect for human dignity and the rights of women.” www.gop.com. 4 According to Pew’s Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faith, 12% of Asian American Buddhists attend services weekly; however, 57% have a personal shrine in their home. www.pewforum.org. 5 Apart from the interrogation of the “Nones” category among Asian Americans, no study has examined the racial intersections within the growing population of Americans who claim no religious affiliation. Joseph O. Baker’s study on atheism addresses this with respect to those who do not profess belief in a god, a group that constitutes a significant slice of the unaffiliated population. 6 In the example mentioned above, this would result in 12 Protestants, 12 Catholics, 24 Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims, and the remainder nonreligious. 7 Statistics obtained from www.census.gov. 8 Specifically, one would need translations in Cantonese, Mandarin (for Chinese Americans), Hindi (Indian), Japanese, Korean, Tagalog (Filipino), and Vietnamese to cover more than 70% of all Asian Americans. 9 If Spanish translation is available, such studies might expand to include Latinx. 10 While the Latinx sample is nearing parity in the GSS (averaging about 14% of the sample), the Asian American subsample GSS repeatedly remained below 4% even in 2016. 11 Sherkat’s study showed that nearly one-third of GSS respondents between 1973 and 1996 that selected “Other Religion” were in fact Christian whether in the generic sense, or orthodox, or an ethnic Christian denomination. Where many researchers assumed that “Other Religion” meant “non-Christian” it was not quite the case, and one could argue that religious minorities classified as Other were in

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a sense Christianized owing to the presence of so many Christians who did not select “Protestant” or “Catholic.” Subsequently the GSS included the terms “Christian” and “Orthodox-Christian” as well as multiple non-Christian world religions mentioned earlier when asking respondents about their religious preference. From www.pewhispanic.org and www.pewsocialtrends.org, respectively. The pooled sample also includes 102 respondents who identified as Native American exclusively, and an additional 38 who we classified as “Other race” since they did not select any of the given racial designations but also claimed no more than one race. Both of these groups total less than 1% of the GSS pooled sample. Here again the CMPS findings differ for Asian American Catholics; about 24% of Asian American Catholics in the CMPS identify as Republican compared to 27% in the GSS. The smaller gap suggests that English fluency may be more prevalent among this religious constituency relative to Asian American Evangelicals. Rhys H. Williams elaborates further on the racialized assumptions in Wuthnow’s view of the restructuring of religion in America where religion for African Americans did not undergo a polarization as did White Protestants.

References

Alumkal, Antony W. 2004. “American Evangelicalism in the Post-Civil Rights Era: A Racial Formation Theory Analysis.” Sociology of Religion 65 (3): 195–214. Bender, Courtney, Wendy Cadge, Peggy Levitt, and David Smilde, eds. 2013. Religion on the Edge: De-Centering and Re-Centering the Sociology of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2004. “From Bi-Racial to Tri-Racial: Towards a New System of Racial Stratification in the USA.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 27 (6): 931–50. Bowen, Patrick D. 2013. “U.S. Latina/o Muslims Since 1920: From ‘Moors’ to ‘Latino Muslims.’” Journal of Religious History 37 (2): 165–84. Brodkin, Karen. 1998. How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Chaves, Mark, and Alison Eagle. 2015. “Religious Congregations in 21st Century America.” Durham, NC: National Congregations Study. Connor, Phillip. 2012. “Faith on the Move: The Religious Affiliation of International Migrants.” Washington DC: Pew Research Center Forum on Religion and Public Life. Davidson, James D., and Ralph E. Pyle. 2011. Ranking Faiths: Religious Stratification in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. DeYoung, Curtiss Paul, Michael O. Emerson, George Yancey, and Karen Chai Kim. 2003. United by Faith: The Multiracial Congregation as an Answer to the Problem of Race. New York: Oxford University Press. DiTomaso, Nancy. 2013. The American Non-Dilemma: Racial Inequality Without Racism. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Dougherty, Kevin D., and Michael O. Emerson. 2018. “The Changing Complexion of American Congregations.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 57 (1): 24–38.

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Edgell, Penny. 2017. “An Agenda for Research on American Religion in Light of the 2016 Election.” Sociology of Religion 78 (1): 1–8. Edgell, Penny, and Eric Tranby. 2007. “Religious Influences on Understandings of Racial Inequality in the United States.” Social Problems 54: 263–88. Emerson, Michael O., Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, and Kiara W. Douds. 2015. “Studying Race and Religion: A Critical Assessment.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1 (3): 349–59. Emerson, Michael O., and Christian Smith. 2000. Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Espinosa, Gastón, Harold Morales, and Juan Galvan. 2017. “Latino Muslims in the United States.” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion 8 (1): 1–48. Funk, Cary, Luis Lugo, Alan Cooperman, Gregory A. Smith, Jessica Hamar Martinez, Besheer Mohamed, Neha Sahgal, Noble Kuriakose, and Elizabeth Podrebarac. 2012. “Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths.” Washington DC: Pew Research Center Forum on Religion and Public Life. Funk, Cary, Jessica Hamar Martinez, Alan Cooperman, Gregory A. Smith, Elizabeth Sciupac, Juan Carlos Esparza Ochoa, Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, et al. 2014. “The Shifting Religious Identity of Latinos in the United States: Nearly One-in-Four Latinos Are Former Catholics.” Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Gabriel, Trip, and Michael Luo. 2017. “A Born-Again Donald Trump? Believe It, Evangelical Leader Says.” New York Times, December 21, sec. US, www.nytimes.com/. Ghasemi, Asghar, and Saleh Zahediasl. 2012. “Normality Tests for Statistical Analysis: A Guide for Non-Statisticians.” International Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism 10 (2): 486–89. Harlow, Luke E. 2017. “The Civil War and the Making of Conservative American Evangelicalism.” In Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism, edited by Heath W. Carter and Laura Rominger Porter, 107–32. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. Hinojosa, Victor, and Jerry Z. Park. 2004. “Religion and the Paradox of Racial Inequality Attitudes.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43 (2): 229–38. Hook, Janet, and Josh Dawsey. 2016. “Election 2016: GOP Hopefuls Court Evangelicals.” Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, February 13. Hunt, Larry L. 1999. “Hispanic Protestantism in the United States: Trends by Decade and Generation.” Social Forces 77 (4): 1601–23. Hunter, James Davison. 1991. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America: Making Sense of the Battles Over the Family, Art, Education, Law, and Politics. New York: Basic Books. Iwamura, Jane Naomi, Khyati Y. Joshi, Sharon A. Suh, and Janelle Wong. 2014. “Reflections on the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths Data and Report.” Amerasia Journal 40: 1–16. Jeung, Russell. 2012. “Second-Generation Chinese Americans: The Familism of the Nonreligious.” In Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion Among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation. New York: New York University Press.

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Jones, Nicholas A., and Jungmiwha Bullock. 2012. “The Two or More Races Population: 2010.” C2010BR-13. 2010 Census Briefs. Washington, DC: US Census Bureau. Joshi, Khyati Y. 2006. New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Keister, Lisa A. 2011. Faith and Money: How Religion Contributes to Wealth and Poverty. New York: Cambridge University Press. Levitz, Jennifer, and Heather Haddon. 2016. “Election 2016: Evangelicals Mobilize for New Hampshire Vote.” Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, February 4. Lincoln, Eric C., and Lawrence H. Mamiya. 1990. The Black Church in the African American Experience. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lipka, Michael. 2015. “The Most and Least Racially Diverse U.S. Religious Groups.” Pew Research Center (blog). July 27. www.pewresearch.org/. Mulder, Mark T., Aida I. Ramos, and Gerardo Marti. 2017. Latino Protestants in America: Growing and Diverse. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Oldmeadow, Julian, and Susan T. Fiske. 2007. “System-Justifying Ideologies Moderate Status = Competence Stereotypes: Roles for Belief in a Just World and Social Dominance Orientation.” European Journal of Social Psychology 37 (6): 1135–48. Parker, Kim, Rich Morin, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, and Mark Hugo Lopez. 2015. “Multiracial in America: Proud, Diverse and Growing in Numbers.” Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Pew Research Center. 2011. “Muslim-American Survey Dataset.” Available at www.pewforum.org. _____. 2012. “Asian American Survey Dataset.” Washington, DC. Available at www.pewsocialtrends.org. _____. 2012. “National Survey of Latinos Dataset.” Washington, DC. Available at www.pewresearch.org. _____. 2017. “Survey of US Muslims Dataset.” Washington, DC. Available at www.pewforum.org. Putnam, Robert D., and David E. Campbell. 2010. American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. New York: Simon & Schuster. Ramakrishnan, S. Karthick, and Farah Z. Ahmad. 2014. “Language Diversity and English Proficiency.” State of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Center for American Progress. Sharot, Stephen. 2002. “Beyond Christianity: A Critique of the Rational Choice Theory of Religion from a Weberian and Comparative Religions Perspective.” Sociology of Religion 63 (4): 427–54. Shelton, Jason E., and Michael O. Emerson. 2012. Blacks and Whites in Christian America: How Racial Discrimination Shapes Religious Convictions. New York: New York University Press. Sherkat, Darren E. 1999. “Tracking the ‘Other’: Dynamics and Composition of ‘Other’ Religions in the General Social Survey, 1973–1996.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 38 (4): 551–60.

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Smith, Gregory A., Alan Cooperman, Jessica Martinez, Elizabeth Sciupac, Conrad Hackett, Besheer Mohamed, Becka Alper, Claire Gecewicz, and Juan Carlos Esparza Ochoa. 2015. “America’s Changing Religious Landscape: Christians Decline Sharply as Share of Population; Unaffiliated and Other Faiths Continue to Grow.” Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Smith, Tom W. 2007. “An Evaluation of Spanish Questions on the 2006 General Social Survey.” GSS Methodological Reports. Chicago, IL: NORC/ University of Chicago. ———. 2013. “An Evaluation of Spanish Questions on the 2006 and 2008 US General Social Surveys.” In Surveying Ethnic Minorities and Immigrant Populations: Methodological Challenges and Research Strategies, edited by Joan Font and Monica Mendez, 219–40. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press. Steensland, Brian, Jerry Z. Park, Mark D. Regnerus, Lynn D. Robinson, W. Bradford Wilcox, and Robert D. Woodberry. 2000. “The Measure of American Religion: Toward Improving the State of the Art.” Social Forces 79 (1): 291–318. Stewart, James Brewer. 1997. Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery. New York: Hill and Wang. Suh, Sharon A. 2004. Being Buddhist in a Christian World: Gender and Community in a Korean American Temple. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Tajfel, Henri, and John Turner. 1986. “The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior.” In Psychology of Intergroup Relations, 7–24. Chicago: Nelson-Hall. Wilde, Melissa J., and Patricia Tevington. 2017. “Complex Religion: Toward a Better Understanding of the Ways in Which Religion Intersects with Inequality.” In Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 1–14. New York: Wiley. Wong, Janelle S. 2018. Immigrants, Evangelicals, and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Wuthnow, Robert. 1988. The Restructuring of American Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Beyond Black and White in Measuring Racial Identity among US Muslims Besheer Mohamed

Analyzing national surveys can give us valuable insight into religious groups. But if researchers are not attentive to racial and ethnic diversity, then the analysis can obscure as much as it reveals. For example, as Jerry Z. Park and James Clark Davidson point out in their chapter in this volume, there has been substantial talk about support for President Donald Trump among Evangelical Christians, however, more careful analysis suggests that this support is primarily concentrated among White Evangelical Christians. Looking at religion among White Evangelical Christians separately from Black or Asian American Evangelicals is an important step toward a more complete understanding of this pattern. But this basic classification scheme ignores important diversity within these racial groups. For example, the White racial category includes Arabs, European immigrants, Egyptians, Iranians, and many Latinx, according to the US Census Bureau (and, by extension, nearly all national surveys). What does it mean for all of these groups to be coded as White? There is little reason to believe that the patterns found among “Whites” apply in the same ways to US-born Christians of European descent, Christian immigrants from the Middle East, and Muslim immigrants from Iran, all of whom count as White under the Census classification scheme. And it is even less reasonable to assume the same mechanisms will be in play for all of these groups. White respondents often are analyzed as a single group by social scientists, but it is not because social scientists assume all White people (or Asian or Black people) share a single essential racial essence or because we are interested in capturing immutable genetic characteristics. Race,

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as social scientists examine it, is a social construct, and who is included or excluded from a racial category changes with time and context. When examining its link to religion, race is often acting as a proxy for a complex constellation of issues such as a racialized sense of identity, community belonging, and the way individuals are perceived by the society in which they are situated. For some analyses, White is a racial category that can capture much of this underlying variation, but for others it fails to do so. For example, 92% of all White American Christians were born in the United States, while only 32% of all White American Muslims were born in the United States. In fact, there is no single country or region of the world that accounts for more than about one-third of all White Muslims. This suggests that an approach to capturing racialized identity and community that works for US Christians may not work well for US Muslims. Muslims are one of the most diverse religious groups in the United States. There is no single racial majority, there are sizable shares of both US-born and foreign-born adults, and no region of the world accounts for a majority of foreign-born Muslims. Understanding the racialized patterns within these communities requires a look not only at race, but also ethnicity and country of birth. Creating categories that take multiple factors into account can allow scholars to describe more coherent communities and offer more powerful analytical tools for understanding the views and attitudes of US Muslims. The diversity captured by these more complex racialized identity categories is especially crucial for anyone interested in going beyond basic descriptive statistics and hoping to understand the mechanisms for difference between US Muslims. Unfortunately, this more complex classification requires more data than is routinely collected in national surveys. Most surveys designed to measure race and religion in the United States do not foreground the tools needed to analyze Muslims. To further complicate matters, Muslims are a small enough group (about 1% of the US public) that most datasets do not have enough Muslims to support any real effort to understand variation among them. This chapter draws upon two national surveys, conducted in 2011 and 2017, which were designed specifically to understand the US Muslim population. They each have more than one thousand Muslim respondents, and were conducted

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not just in English, but also in the languages most common for Muslim immigrants—Arabic, Urdu, and Farsi.

Contrasting Racial Composition of Muslims and Christians in the United States The commonly used racial categories of Black, White, and Asian are more efficient and adequate for understanding American Christians than for understanding Muslims.1 One reason for this is the relatively large share of US Muslims who are foreign-born. For these immigrant Muslims, the country or region of the world where they were born may be a better indicator of racialized identity than a simple race question. And while the vast majority of American Christians (86%) were born in the United States, 60% of US Muslim adults were born in a different country. This higher share of immigrants makes it much more problematic to ignore the region of birth when analyzing Muslims in America than it does when analyzing Christians in America. At a minimum we need to distinguish between Muslims born in the United States and immigrants from other countries. But combining all foreign-born Muslims— whether they are from the Middle East or South America—in a single category is problematic. While most foreign-born Christians are from Central or South America, there are large shares of foreign-born Muslims from South Asia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and Iran. Assuming that White race indicates being born in the United States and of European descent would be a gross generalization among Christians. However, most White Christians were born in the United States, and many of them do trace their heritage to Europe. In contrast, most White Muslims are Arab, coming from the Middle East or North Africa. US-born Whites account for only 11% of all Muslims (and 31% of White Muslims). Nearly as many Muslims come from Iran. And while the largest share of Christian immigrants to the United States comes from other parts of North or South America, only 2% of US Muslims are immigrants from the Americas. The distinctive demographic characteristics of US Muslims lend themselves to somewhat different analytical subgroups and stand in stark contrast to a number of the implicit assumptions scholars sometimes make about who is White.

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Table 13.1: Race and Ethnicity among US Muslims and Christians Muslims

Christians

%

%

US-born

40

86

White

11

65

Black

14

12

Asian

4

1

Hispanic

6

7

Other/No answer

5

7

60

14

South Asian

18