THE PROMISING PRACTICE OF ANTIRACIST APPROACHES TO INTERFAITH STUDIES

Jeannine Hill Fletcher

As a socially engaged project, interfaith studies might be conceptualized as a discipline dedicated to positively shaping our world by increasing knowledge of diverse faiths and encouraging cooperation among people of different convictions. These particular aims are relevant to both public and private education as the North American citizenry in which this field emerges is among the most religiously diverse in the world.¹ But in order for our project to find a home among other interdisciplinary efforts of critical pedagogy, we must see clearly the structural transformations that are necessary to create the conditions for the possibility of interfaith solidarity.² That is, we must recognize the weight of America’s history as a White Christian nation as it continues to privilege some persons and disadvantage others. This chapter invites us to attend closely to our nation’s legal history that provided an advantage for White Christians and to consider how those advantages persist today. It is only with a clear sense of how religio-racial projects constructed the US as a White Christian nation that interfaith studies can contribute to religio-racial projects that today will be transformative for the thriving of all persons in a multiracial, multireligious America.

To see our work as part of this moment’s religio-racial project, we need a sense of what such a project is (theoretically) and how it has worked historically. The idea of a religio-racial project is adapted from the work of sociologists and critical race theorists Michael Omi and Howard Winant in their investigation of America’s racial projects.³ With Omi and Winant, we might see race as a functional fiction and racial projects as the means by which race is constructed, assigned, applied, and enforced. At any given moment in our nation’s history, we can look at how the categories of “the races” were proposed (“White,” “Black,” “Indian,” “Hispanic,” and more), how persons were sorted into them (on the basis of skin color, country of origin, an imagined blood line, and so forth), and the material benefits that a person was granted or denied on the basis of them (citizenship, education, ownership, and more).⁴ Naming this dynamic as racial “projects,” these sociologists help us to see how ideas about race were generated in a given time and place and how legislation was enacted on the basis of these imagined races. But we can also study how racial projects were challenged and how they changed. As scholars have shown, the dynamic racial projects of any given time were manufactured through political speech, popular press, education systems, legislation, and other vehicles by which ideas about “the races” gained currency. The laws enacted both contributed to and reflected what was in the air at the time. By extending the sociologists’ work to the idea of a religio-racial project, we can train our eyes to see the way religion functioned—for example, in sermons, religious tracts, and actions of religious bodies—within a given racial project, as well as how it functions today. A chronicle of America’s dominant religio-racial project as a White Christian nation can function simultaneously as illuminating the theoretical concept and as an impetus for transforming our nation with new religio-racial projects of diversity.

The original religio-racial project of what would become the United States was fostered at a time when European racial discourse was emerging in the service of colonization and when, in the words of James W. Perkinson, “Christian supremacy gave birth to white supremacy.”⁵ The rules of engagement for the exploring nations of Europe was that if the land they “discovered” was inhabited by a Christian nation, then they had no right to it, but if the land was inhabited by a non-Christian nation, Christians had the right to lay claim to the land either through economic negotiations or military action. This protocol is reflected in writings like Pope Alexander VI’s Inter Caetera in which Christian rulers and religious leaders collaborated in expanding Christendom. Subsequently, as European nations began settling colonies in what would become the United States, religious ideologies of Christian supremacy directed land grants to “all Christian peoples.”⁶ Governing authority of the land was rooted in reasoning found in Christian scripture.⁷ In this era, a growing sense of the resistance of Native peoples to Christian rule caused missionaries to construct them as a different race of humanity. Seeing resistance as entailing a “pagan” mind-set, missionaries saw Native peoples as misunderstanding God’s directive to subdue and cultivate the land. Tracing this back to religious ideologies, the racial project named Native peoples “red” on account of the body paint they wore on sacred occasions.⁸ Thus named as different from the White Christian colonizers, the humanity of Native peoples could be further called into question. The original religio-racial project in the land that would become the United States was to claim priority for Christians and to racialize others on account of their divergent religious ways and practices.

As colonial education systems expanded, educators (often religiously affiliated) fueled religio-racial projects where a White Christian nation was seen as part of God’s design. Historian Craig Wilder recounts: “In a 1783 sermon celebrating the American Revolution, Yale president Ezra Stiles lauded the rise of the ‘whites’ whose numerical growth alone proved divine favoritism toward the children of Europe. God intended the Americas for ‘a new enlargement of Japhet,’ the minister began, invoking the curse of Ham, and Europe’s children were quickly filling the continents.”⁹

This religio-racial project of White Christian supremacy was written into law when citizenship was restricted to “free White persons” and Christians were privileged in the system of landownership. The latter was made possible legally through the case of Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), which ruled that Native peoples’ “right to occupancy”—as non-Christian “pagans”—was superseded by Christian nations’ “right to title.”¹⁰ Claims about the supremacy of Christianity translated into economic advantage that gave title and prosperity to Christians as land ownership formed the basis for the accumulation of wealth. As law scholar Eric Kades describes, “The rule of Johnson v. M’Intosh ensured that Europeans would not transfer wealth to the tribes in the process of competing against each other to buy land.”¹¹ Without economic and political power, Native peoples were at a disadvantage to the White Christian nation as it pursued “Manifest Destiny,” passed legislation to remove Indians from lands east of the Mississippi in the nineteenth century, and moved the original inhabitants to smaller and smaller sites of land “reserved” for them. The “doctrine of discovery” still disempowers indigenous peoples in their struggles for sovereignty today.¹² Yet, throughout this history, we also see religio-racial projects of resistance to White supremacy in the Ghost Dance of the nineteenth century, the American Indian Movement of the twentieth century, and the water protectors of today.

Simultaneous to the dispossession of non-Christian Native peoples and the racialization of indigenous populations drawn from their religious expressions, the disempowerment and disadvantage of African peoples was similarly rooted in a religiously grounded racialization. Like the land theft that brought the United States of America into being, the labor theft of enslavement was employed to build the nation. This social and economic reality was fueled by a religio-racial project that marked Black skin as a sign of (the Christian) God’s curse and African practices (including Islam) as inferior to Christian ones. As David Whitford explains, the logic of “the curse of Ham” was a set of “interlocking tropes that gave the slave trade not only justification but a veneer of nobleness to the slave trader and owner.” He describes:

The Matrix consisted of three fundamental elements: 1) that black skin is the result of God’s curse and is therefore a signal and sign of the African’s cursedness to slavery; 2) that Africans embodied this cursed nature through hypersexuality and libidinousness; and 3) that these sinful and cursed Africans were also uncivilized brutes and heathens who were helped by slavery because they were exposed to culture and the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ. . . . This Matrix was then used for more than two centuries to repel any attack against the practice of African slavery in the English colonies of America.¹³

As the new nation borrowed ideologies from European Christian thinking, legislation was put in place to cement the dispossession of non-White others based on their non-Christian heritage. In 1682, legislation in Virginia named as slaves virtually “all servants . . . who and whose parentage and native country are not Christian at the time of their first purchase.”¹⁴ It was on the basis of religious and racial superiority that White Christians argued over hundreds of years that enslavement was justified. It is important to see that it was not simply uneducated slave owners who mobilized these arguments. Rather, this was mainstream Christian theology manufactured by and disseminated from scholarly and pastoral systems.¹⁵ Such Christian theological production endured even into the nineteenth century, as the nation’s dominant religio-racial project offered religious justification for enslavement that also eliminated religious diversity as it imposed a Christian hegemony.¹⁶ While such reasoning supported legislation right up to emancipation in 1863, we remember also the religion of resistance that was another thread among the nation’s religio-racial projects. The dominant refrain of America as a White Christian nation has always been challenged through the voices of courageous people such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and countless others.

The project of a White Christian nation was not only focused on the dispossession and disempowerment of Native peoples, Africans, and African Americans, it was mobilized to exclude some people altogether even while it used their lives to build the nation’s future. In the late nineteenth century, people shaped by Asian religious traditions had already arrived in large numbers on the US West Coast. They helped to settle the land only recently acquired through a military conflict with Mexico, and their labors connected this new part of the nation to the old through the transcontinental railroad. Yet, in 1873, on the floor of the US Senate, Senator A. A. Sargent rolled out a plan to ban immigration to the US from China. His argument was that by their customs, their way of life, and their religion, the Chinese were inassimilable to a White Christian nation. His plan was that Christian missionaries should travel to China, “wash their robes and make them white in the blood of the Lamb.”¹⁷ Then being fit for citizenship, the Chinese might apply to immigrate. Sargent’s religio-racial project of America as a White Christian nation was made reasonable by the many diverse scholarly and pastoral productions of figures like Jesuit priest James Bouchard and Methodist minister Otis Gibson, who publicly debated the possibility of the Chinese assimilating and then disseminated widely a published account of their exchange. While Bouchard, the son of a Delaware man and a captive French woman adopted into the Delaware people, mobilized his argument to oppose the citizenship of “the immoral, vicious, pagan Chinese,” Gibson supported their citizenship but nonetheless upheld the notion of America as a Christian nation. In his words, “All invidious legislation should be repealed, and Christian men and women must multiply their efforts to uplift and Christianize these people.”¹⁸ Such efforts by Christian ministers toward non-White, non-Christian others was grounded in the ideology and theology of White Christian supremacy that was in the national discourse at this time, circulating even at the origins of the modern interfaith movement in Chicago at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions. There Rev. Alexander McKenzie invited the international delegates to see clearly the exceptional nature of the United States, where Christian citizens in their churches and schools had been “manufacturing a republic—taking the black material of humanity and building it up into noble men and women; taking the red material, wild with every savage instinct, and making it into respectable men.”¹⁹ In popular writings of the time we see a wider public sharing the same sentiment that it was the duty of white Christians to uplift non-White others.²⁰

The religio-racial project of America as a white Christian nation was legislated further with an immigration ban on the Asiatic Zone (1917) and with restrictive quotas (1924).²¹ Thus, from 1924 to 1965 immigration policies curtailed the arrival of persons deemed unassimilable to the culture of the White Christian nation, including African, Asian, southern European, and eastern European immigrants.²²

Though today’s efforts to promote religious diversity arise from within systems of immigration and naturalization that were transformed by the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, the residual effects of an ideology of America as a White Christian nation remains. Islamophobia, backlash against the civil rights gains for African Americans, and resistance to immigration give evidence of what’s popular in today’s religio-racial projects.²³ But what exists structurally is even more insidious. The structural reality that White Christians still enjoy material benefits from earlier exclusions must be part of our analysis of systems in need of transformation. A crucial component of our nation’s historical religio-racial project of a White Christian supremacy was to assign material benefits on the basis of a Whiteness that had been deeply entwined with Christianness. Native peoples were denied the material benefits of land ownership, which was granted to Whites. African Americans were denied the generational benefits of education, fair employment, and full enfranchisement, which were defended for White citizens. Asian populations were denied the foundational benefit of citizenship. And the underlying ideology of America as a country for “free White persons” persists. Through many acts of legislation, material well-being for White populations was secured, but the same well-being was denied to America’s non-White, non-Christian others. The generational effect of these decisions is a structural reality of White supremacy, where White Christians continue to hold greater economic resources and positions of influence.²⁴ Situated in the context of the United States and its project of White Christian supremacy, interfaith studies has the capacity to contribute to a new religio-racial project in a multireligious, multiracial nation, but we must recognize this imbalance to effectively do our work.

Interfaith studies might aim at transforming systems through which a religio-racial project of multiracial, multireligious America might thrive. Given our roles as educators, we might think of our work as transforming the very system of education with new content and pedagogies that affirm the importance of the many religious ideologies and communities within our nation. Given the ways in which Christian religious education has functioned historically to produce and disseminate a religio-racial project of White Christian supremacy, special attention might be given to the transformation of religious education in this country. Additionally, because of the ways in which historical dispossessions have disadvantaged people of color in the United States, the structures and systems we aim to transform might include reparations and reforms so that more people of color and diverse faiths might be part of the educational process within our classrooms. Finally, given the close association we’ve seen between the institution of citizenship and the ideology of White Christian supremacy, we need to be vigilant in our attention to the intersection of our role in the systems of education, including religious education, with other systems of enfranchisement, including, but not limited to, immigration, naturalization, and voting rights.

INTERFAITH STUDIES AS ANTIRACIST PRACTICE IN A WHITE CHRISTIAN NATION

As we learn from history to see the actors whose choices created the conditions of privileging some persons in a White Christian nation, we are empowered to understand the uneven playing field that is our inheritance. But we might also find tools to analyze the flow of power and to understand who are the actors (including ourselves) who might re-create our religio-racial project for the flourishing of all. In the field of interfaith studies, we are scholars and educators, researchers and teachers, not lawmakers. Yet the knowledge that we produce does impact the wider sphere of national ideology and ultimately the rights and privileges conferred.

Historian Craig Wilder shows how the ideology of White Christian supremacy, which underwrote legislation prioritizing White Christian well-being, was manufactured in the educational systems of America’s first colleges.²⁵ It was the ideologies and theologies of White Christian supremacy, manufactured in America’s educational systems, that made legislation dispossessing people of other faiths appear reasonable. In that same spirit, scholars in interfaith studies may be empowered to do our work cognizant of the way we might contribute to a new national discourse. By asking questions about who holds resources (both symbolic and material) and who is afforded power and control of those resources, we might see ourselves as agents of social change. Seeing more clearly the flow of power and the role of decision-makers in systems of power, educators in the field of interfaith studies can be more aware of their own gatekeeper function, whereby we hold power to provide access or limit access for people of color and people of all faiths.²⁶

While critically aware of the legislated privileges of White Christians in America, antiracist practice asks us to see this history as impoverishing our nation. In their antiracist training, the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond promotes the sharing of culture as a positive response to this history of impoverishment. As the institute describes, “Culture is the life support of a community. If a community’s culture is respected and nurtured, the community’s power will grow.”²⁷ The application of this antiracist principle in the work of interfaith studies is twofold. By fostering the growth of a community’s religious culture, communities disempowered by our uneven playing field might find resources for thriving. Simultaneously, by sharing culture across communities of religious difference we create networks of appreciation that nurture the power of solidarity. From a social perspective, culture sharing fosters the power and empowerment of solidarity. From a theological perspective, the sharing (and appreciation) of religio-racial difference helps to destabilize the Christian theologies of supremacy that have underwritten legislation that has structured America as a White Christian nation.

As we together develop curricula of interfaith studies we might be guided by questions that help us remain attentive to a critical pedagogy and our role in a new religio-racial project. These questions might include the following:

• Learning from History

• Where does your religious tradition fit within the history of America as a White Christian nation?

• How does the history of structural dispossession and generational inheritance shape the current religio-racial landscape of your community?

• Mapping Power

• Who holds the resources in your community? Are the anchor institutions (schools, hospitals, houses of worship, etc.) religiously affiliated? Is there diverse religious representation in legislative bodies?

• How is your religious affiliation related to resource-holding institutions and individuals?

• Gatekeeping

• Where do you have power to inform the knowledge production of your community?

• Where do you have power in relation to the material resources of your community?

• Where do you have power in relation to the political resources of your community?

• Sharing Culture

• How does your work positively inform the creation of a multiracial, multireligious culture?

• What are the sites of resistance to the creation of multiracial, multireligious cultures (theologically, politically, socially, practically)?

As we work to transform the systems and structures of White supremacy in our nation, interfaith studies might be a leader in critically analyzing our historic failures and forming our future in a truly multiracial, multireligious country.