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

By Grace Yukich and Penny Edgell

Demonstrates how race and power help to explain American religion in the twenty-first century

When White people of faith act in a particular way, their motivations are almost always attributed to their religious orientation. Yet when religious people of color act in a particular way, their motivations are usually attributed to their racial positioning.

Religion Is Raced makes the case that religion in America has generally been understood in ways that center White Christian experiences of religion, and argues that all religion must be acknowledged as a raced phenomenon. When we overlook the role race plays in religious belief and action, and how religion in turn spurs public and political action, we lose sight of a key way in which race influences religiously-based claims-making in the public sphere.

With contributions exploring a variety of religious traditions, from Buddhism and Islam to Judaism and Protestantism, as well as pieces on atheists and humanists, Religion Is Raced brings discussions about the racialized nature of religion from the margins of scholarly and religious debate to the center. The volume offers a new model for thinking about religion that emphasizes how racial dynamics interact with religious identity, and how we can in turn better understand the roles religion—and Whiteness—play in politics and public life, especially in the United States. It includes clear recommendations for researchers, including pollsters, on how to better recognize moving forward that religion is a raced phenomenon.

With contributions by Joseph O. Baker, Kelsy Burke, James Clark Davidson, Janine Giordano Drake, Ashley Garner, Edward Orozco Flores, Sikivu Hutchinson, Sarah Imhoff, Russell Jeung, John Jimenez, Jaime Kucinskas, Eric Mar, Gerardo Martí, Omar M. McRoberts, Besheer Mohamed, Dawne Moon, Jerry Z. Park, Z. Fareen Parvez, Theresa W. Tobin, and Rhys H. Williams.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781479868940

Book preview

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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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.

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. Religio-racial 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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