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Religion, Race, and Racism: A (Very) Brief Introduction

• Religion, Race, and Racism: Resources
• Violence Against Asian Americans - Religious Studies Department Statement
• Tell Abu Shusha Excavation in Israel
• Religyinz: Mapping Religious Pittsburgh
• Footprints: Jewish Books in Time and Place
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June 1, 2020

Over the last few weeks, we have seen a spate of racist incidents across the country. These include, but are not limited to, the vigilante lynching of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, the killing of George Floyd by police in Minnesota, and the killing of Breonna Taylor by police while she lay asleep in her home in Kentucky. Peaceful protests have been met with police brutality including tear-gassing, cruelly preventing protestors from breathing while protesting a man choked to death. We have seen otherwise peaceful protests led by African-American communities co-opted and exploited by white men committing violence, whether they be white supremacists, anarchists, or other agents-provocateurs. At every turn, we have been reminded of white privilege and of the weaponization of racism, most dramatically perhaps in Amy Cooper’s false 911 call in New York City. These events have taken place against the backdrop of disproportionate number of deaths of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people from Coronavirus due to decades of institutionalized racism.

As educators in religion, we are mindful of the ways in which religion has a long, complicated, and interconnected relationship with the legacy of racism. Religions, religious institutions, and the academic study of religion have been (and continue to be) utilized to uphold white supremacy and justify racism and ethnic discrimination. Religion is neither practiced nor studied in a vacuum. Rather, it is always informed by social contexts and social conditions. Hence, religion often functions as a mirror of society’s broader assumptions and attempts to divide and discriminate, whether that be based on race, ethnicity, class, social status, nationality, religion, (dis)ability, gender, or sexuality.

The continued oppression and marginalization of African-Americans is preceded by centuries of religious speculation about the human status of Black and Indigenous people by European colonialists and theologians. The concept of a hierarchy of human races was developed throughout the long sixteenth century by white Christian Europeans who then used it to justify the enslavement of Africans and their colonialist endeavors against the indigenous peoples of the Americas. This concept was preceded by (among many events) the papal bull Dum Diversas (1452), which granted divine authority to Spain and Portugal to capture Africans and subject them to lifetime servitude; by the forced conversion or expulsion of Jews and Muslims in Spain and Portugal; by Columbus’s declaration that the inhabitants of Hispaniola were a “people without religion” and subsequent enslavement and torture of the Taino people (1493); and by the Valldolid trial (1552), which debated whether people of color were barbarians that could be “civilized” by Christian conversion, or worse, people without souls irreparably damned. White supremacy was used to justify enslavement by many of the most powerful Christian leaders in America, including Rev. Cotton Mather, Rev. Jonathan Edwards, Rev. George Whitfield, Bishop John Carroll, and Rev. Robert Lewis Dabney, not to mention 12 of America’s Presidents who owned slaves and had varying levels of commitment to Christianity. Racist assumptions were read back into sacred texts, most prominently in the so-called “curse of Ham,” and they led to the development of the “slave Bible,” a version of the text enslavers gave to slaves (when they were allowed to read) that redacted references to liberty and freedom from slavery. Religious institutions like Princeton University and Georgetown University materially benefited from the exploitation of Black bodies. Almost every major denomination had rules about whether Black people could be in religious buildings and policed efforts by Black people to have freedom of religious assembly. White supremacy was preached from the pulpit by the tens of thousands of clergymen that were members of the KKK. Denominations such as the Southern Baptist Church, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the Southern Presbyterian Church owe their existence to support for slavery. White mobs scheduled lynchings on Sunday afternoons so the entire town could attend as a form of entertainment, and did so on the lawns of Black churches as a form of intimidation and domestic terrorism. Throughout the twentieth century, religious leaders were at the forefront of supporting Jim Crow, segregation, and anti-miscegenation laws. And white supremacist assumptions undergird the religio-political mythologies of the Doctrine of Discovery, the “City on a Hill,” Manifest Destiny, and American Exceptionalism.

At the same time, religion and spirituality have long been utilized as a rich resource for hope and subversive resistance by those who find themselves under the boot of Empire. Abolitionists, Civil Rights activists, and defenders of Black liberation under threat of racism—from Richard Allen to David Walker to Nat Turner to Sojourner Truth to Harriet Tubman to Frederick Douglass to Ida B. Wells to Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King Jr. to Malcolm X to James Cone to Nelson Mandela to Desmond Tutu to Alice Walker to Cornel West to Delores Williams—have both appealed to and creatively innovated their religious traditions in order to advocate for justice and to highlight the unique aspects of the Black experience. 

As educators in Religious Studies, our goal is to develop students into culturally literate citizens and compassionate professionals. Through the study of the ways that diverse individuals and groups have found purpose and value, we offer an academic opportunity for students to engage with life’s most pressing questions. As such, it is our collective responsibility to amplify voices that have historically been excluded within the academic community, to educate students about the ways in which the history and practice of religion has been intertwined with the legacy of racism, and to be advocates and resources to our students who are particularly affected by these recent events and are daily marginalized by both individual and institutionalized acts of racism.

We see you.

We are listening.

We are committed to learning how to be better advocates of anti-racism.

It is not difficult to make a statement condemning racism and white supremacy; in fact, even our position to do so reveals a social capital that has long been accrued through various kinds of white privilege. It is much harder to proactively commit to solidarity with the marginalized, to unlearn the ways in which white supremacy has been habituated into our embodied ways of being in the world, and to decolonize the institutions and social structures that perpetuate whiteness as the assumed norm.

There is a lot of work to be done. 

While we are in no position to replace religious communities and pastoral resources, we know that religious thinkers and scholars of religion have offered many resources for thinking about race, racism, and related issues. An evolving bibliography and resource list is available on our department website.  

- Dr. Brock Bahler, Department of Religious Studies

Race, Ethnicity, Family and Religion Essay

Race, ethnicity, family and religion are important aspects in the lives of people. These define who the people are and what they value or appreciate. Furthermore, they determine the behaviour, which helps in differentiating people from others.

Even though these aspects are important, over the years they have elicited mixed reactions from different parties. They have been associated with the discrimination and sufferings that people have undergone. Therefore, their analysis is important in determining how they can be used in a positive way to enhance cohesion and diversity in the global scene.

According to Oh, race is referred to as a group of people who are related in terms of their hereditary mechanism or descent (1027). These people are united by common history, language and culture traits among other attributes. They may also share some physical characteristics such as skin color, eye shape or even facial forms.

Oh argues that the notion of race on physical trait is inconsistent with the historical understanding of the term that served as a basis of the Reconstruction Amendments (Oh 1028). Race in the framers of the reconstruction amendments was based on corporation that masked certain people in a certain manner.

In the past, race was used as a tool of discrimination. Even in current times, race is still an obstacle in reaching cohesion among many people as it serves as a discrimination tool. Perceptions that people form on other people because of their colour or place of origin has been the core cause of discrimination (Macionis 52).

This discrimination has led to crop up of affirmative actions and other human rights activism to protect those people or groups that are discriminated.

Further, ethnicity helps in defining the communities around their countries. Ethnicity is an identity with or membership in a given racial, cultural or national group and observance, and practice of the belief, customs and language of that particular group. An ethnic group is unified by their way of doing things, resemblance and common cases in various aspects that forms their identity in the entire community.

For instance, in America, many minority groups maintain a high level of ethnic identity especially in towns as immigrants get attracted to their ethnic communities that have established themselves in America. Therefore, ethnicity is a key role in enhancing unity as it acts as a sense of belonging.

Ethnicity refers to the selected cultural aspects and some time physical traits that are used in classifying people in various categories or groups, which are considered significantly different from others (Carter and Fenton 2).

For instance, in America, the most recognized ethnic groups include the Latinos, African Americas, American Indians, Europe Americans and many others. Some ethnic groups are subcultures of other ethnic with shared body of tradition and language, for example, the newly arriving immigrants in the USA.

Ethnicity enables people to feel themselves bound together by a number of common attributes including, geographical location, language, values, norms, behaviors and traditions. It helps to foster strong sense of identity among people and make them value people hood and unity. Ethnicity also serves as a function of circumstantiality by serving the economic and political interests of individuals.

Therefore, ethnicity is more of a convenience, especially in times of struggling for power and support. The political class uses the influence and the support from their various ethnic groups to raise to the leadership positions. It is also developed based on marginalizing or assimilation.

A minority ethnic group that is perceived to be an outsider by a dominant ethnic group may maintain a strong ethnic identity as a way of demonstrating unity and any form of retaliation or mistreatments that might be perpetrate by the dominant culture.

Ethnic groups can last for a very long or a short period and can merge or disappear due to assimilation and other related factors. Most of the groups that assimilate have weak or under developed ethnic identities and therefore they confide into those ethnic identity of the dominant cultures. The surrounding, culture and environment may contribute to this shift.

Therefore, ethnic self-identification in an ascribed ethnic group is important in that they help in controlling and /or enhancing opportunities for well being of the society. Ethnic identity also helps in the predicting of educational and professional outcomes, economic status, networking opportunities, partner selection, marital success and living conditions.

Family and religion are yet other important components that govern and guide people in their day-to-day lives. Family is a smallest unit of a society that constitutes the larger society. Therefore, family is important in maintaining generation. The moral values and traits that are indoctrinated in children at the family level transcends to the wider behaviors, values and beliefs of an entire, clan, ethnicity and nation.

Over the past decades, there have been drastic changes in configuration of family units, culture, and the social pressure in the family structures. Religion on the other hand, is important as it forms the basis of ideologies that a given people would ascribe to family. Hence, it is therefore a key role or an influential arm, which determine the religion affiliation of the entire community.

Religion and family have relations and they borrow from each other, for instance, the role of religion in the family varies from one context to another. Some societies value religion while others do not. The family unit ascribes to these orientations, which is mandate to instill and guide the children on the specific line of religions.

People observing or practicing certain religious ideologies have been introduced to such doctrines by their family unit. For instance, the history of people also dictated the type of religion they prophesy, which is passed down the generation by their parents. Take an example of African countries.

During their colonization, many western nations came and spread their religious doctrines making them to adapt and change to such. Since then, these religious ideologies have been passed onto the new generations.

According to Mark, religion is important in fostering or strengthening the family unity. For example, Jewish families’ observance to certain rituals such as celebration of Sabbath and lightening of candles helps in enhancing positive relationship between the family members. This demonstrates that religion can go greater miles in cementing good family foundation, which may transcend to the entire society (608).

Therefore, religious practices among families are important and beneficial to marriage and relationship between child-parent in many families and individuals. At the family level, it enhances positive relationship and promotes understanding. However, compulsory family worship may have negative effects. Parents should not compel their children or other people to worship, as this is a choice of an individual (Witte 87).

In the family set up, more women engage in religious practices often than men and are mostly likely to be religious as opposed to men. In most instances, men are influenced by religion than women.

Hence, these religious beliefs are important in influencing or promoting long term marriages to ensure marriage satisfaction and marital quality in those families that both partners believe in a religious practice. However, this may not be good to those families where one of the partners is non-religious (Mark 614).

Over the past, religion affiliations have contributed to formation of stereotypes among the society. There exists discrimination in terms of religion with some people calling other religions inferior. These differences in ideologies have seen terrorists’ attacks and conflicts ensuing among different people. This occurrence shows how religion is dear and important to the lives of people.

However, the conflicts that happen between people believing in these religion affiliations should not be tolerated but rather, leaders should use their positions to call for peace and respect of other religions. This will foster unity and togetherness among different people with different religious perspectives and ideologies.

In conclusion, it is apparent that race, ethnicity, family and religious are important aspects and factors that serve as our sense of identity and define who we are. They help in building unity, understanding and enhance a spirit of togetherness among people in a certain segment. However, it is apparent that some of these attributes have been used in a bad manner, for example in occasions like discriminating against some people.

Race and ethnicity have been used to discriminate against people perceived to be inferior and in possession of different attributes not exhibited by the major ethnic groups. On the other hand, family is an important unit in the entire society as it forms the basis of the larger community. Therefore, values, beliefs, norms that are passed onto the children from the family are important in defining their religious affiliation.

Some of the problems that emanate from racial discrimination should be handled by government and any other parties with vested interests to ensure that race and ethnicity serves positive function of creating unity and promoting the welfare and wellbeing of the entire society.

Works Cited

Carter, Bob, and Fenton Steve . Journal Not Thinking Ethnicity: A Critique of the Ethnicity Paradigm in an Over-Ethicized Sociology. For the Theory of Social Behaviour, 40 .1 (2010): 1-18. Print.

Macionis, John. Society: The Basics . Pearson Education Canada, 2008. Print.

Mark, Loren. Religion and Family Relational Health: An Overview and Conceptual Model. Journal of Religion & Health, 45 .4(2006):603-618. Print.

Oh, Reginald. On account of race or color: race as corporation and the original understanding of race. Albany Law Review, 72 .4 (2009): 1027-1040. Print.

Witte, John. Exploring the frontiers of law, religion, and family life. Emory Law Journal, 58. 2 (2008): 87-102. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2019, July 3). Race, Ethnicity, Family and Religion. https://ivypanda.com/essays/race-ethnicity-family-and-religion/

"Race, Ethnicity, Family and Religion." IvyPanda , 3 July 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/race-ethnicity-family-and-religion/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Race, Ethnicity, Family and Religion'. 3 July.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Race, Ethnicity, Family and Religion." July 3, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/race-ethnicity-family-and-religion/.

1. IvyPanda . "Race, Ethnicity, Family and Religion." July 3, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/race-ethnicity-family-and-religion/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Race, Ethnicity, Family and Religion." July 3, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/race-ethnicity-family-and-religion/.

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• Exploring Race and Ethnicity
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• Analysis of Race and Ethnicity in U.S. Immigration History
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“Race and the Priesthood,” Gospel Topics Essays (2016)

“Race and the Priesthood,” Gospel Topics Essays

Race and the Priesthood

In theology and practice, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints embraces the universal human family. Latter-day Saint scripture and teachings affirm that God loves all of His children and makes salvation available to all. God created the many diverse races and ethnicities and esteems them all equally. As the Book of Mormon puts it, “all are alike unto God.” 1

The structure and organization of the Church encourage racial integration. Latter-day Saints attend Church services according to the geographical boundaries of their local ward, or congregation. By definition, this means that the racial, economic, and demographic composition of Latter-day Saint congregations generally mirrors that of the wider local community. 2 The Church’s lay ministry also tends to facilitate integration: a black bishop may preside over a mostly white congregation; a Hispanic woman may be paired with an Asian woman to visit the homes of a racially diverse membership. Church members of different races and ethnicities regularly minister in one another’s homes and serve alongside one another as teachers, as youth leaders, and in myriad other assignments in their local congregations. Such practices make The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a thoroughly integrated faith .

Despite this modern reality, for much of its history—from the mid-1800s until 1978—the Church did not ordain men of black African descent to its priesthood or allow black men or women to participate in temple endowment or sealing ordinances.

The Church was established in 1830, during an era of great racial division in the United States. At the time, many people of African descent lived in slavery, and racial distinctions and prejudice were not just common but customary among white Americans. Those realities, though unfamiliar and disturbing today, influenced all aspects of people’s lives, including their religion. Many Christian churches of that era, for instance, were segregated along racial lines. From the beginnings of the Church, people of every race and ethnicity could be baptized and received as members. Toward the end of his life, Church founder Joseph Smith openly opposed slavery. There has never been a Churchwide policy of segregated congregations. 3

During the first two decades of the Church’s existence, a few black men were ordained to the priesthood. One of these men, Elijah Abel, also participated in temple ceremonies in Kirtland, Ohio, and was later baptized as proxy for deceased relatives in Nauvoo, Illinois. There is no reliable evidence that any black men were denied the priesthood during Joseph Smith’s lifetime. In a private Church council three years after Joseph Smith’s death, Brigham Young praised Q. Walker Lewis, a black man who had been ordained to the priesthood, saying, “We have one of the best Elders, an African.” 4

In 1852, President Brigham Young publicly announced that men of black African descent could no longer be ordained to the priesthood, though thereafter blacks continued to join the Church through baptism and receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost. Following the death of Brigham Young, subsequent Church presidents restricted blacks from receiving the temple endowment or being married in the temple . Over time, Church leaders and members advanced many theories to explain the priesthood and temple restrictions. None of these explanations is accepted today as the official doctrine of the Church.

The Church in an American Racial Culture

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was restored amidst a highly contentious racial culture in which whites were afforded great privilege. In 1790, the U.S. Congress limited citizenship to “free white person[s].” 5 Over the next half century, issues of race divided the country—while slave labor was legal in the more agrarian South, it was eventually banned in the more urbanized North. Even so, racial discrimination was widespread in the North as well as the South, and many states implemented laws banning interracial marriage. 6 In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that blacks possessed “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” 7 A generation after the Civil War (1861–65) led to the end of slavery in the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional, a decision that legalized a host of public color barriers until the Court reversed itself in 1954. 8 Not until 1967 did the Court strike down laws forbidding interracial marriage.

In 1850, the U.S. Congress created Utah Territory, and the U.S. president appointed Brigham Young to the position of territorial governor. Southerners who had converted to the Church and migrated to Utah with their slaves raised the question of slavery’s legal status in the territory. In two speeches delivered before the Utah territorial legislature in January and February 1852, Brigham Young announced a policy restricting men of black African descent from priesthood ordination. At the same time, President Young said that at some future day, black Church members would “have [all] the privilege and more” enjoyed by other members. 9

The justifications for this restriction echoed the widespread ideas about racial inferiority that had been used to argue for the legalization of black “servitude” in the Territory of Utah. 10 According to one view, which had been promulgated in the United States from at least the 1730s, blacks descended from the same lineage as the biblical Cain, who slew his brother Abel. 11 Those who accepted this view believed that God’s “curse” on Cain was the mark of a dark skin. Black servitude was sometimes viewed as a second curse placed upon Noah’s grandson Canaan as a result of Ham’s indiscretion toward his father. 12 Although slavery was not a significant factor in Utah’s economy and was soon abolished, the restriction on priesthood ordinations remained.

Removing the Restriction

Even after 1852, at least two black Latter-day Saints continued to hold the priesthood. When one of these men, Elijah Abel, petitioned to receive his temple endowment in 1879, his request was denied. Jane Manning James, a faithful black member who crossed the plains and lived in Salt Lake City until her death in 1908, similarly asked to enter the temple; she was allowed to perform baptisms for the dead for her ancestors but was not allowed to participate in other ordinances. 13 The curse of Cain was often put forward as justification for the priesthood and temple restrictions. Around the turn of the century, another explanation gained currency: blacks were said to have been less than fully valiant in the premortal battle against Lucifer and, as a consequence, were restricted from priesthood and temple blessings. 14

By the late 1940s and 1950s, racial integration was becoming more common in American life. Church President David O. McKay emphasized that the restriction extended only to men of black African descent. The Church had always allowed Pacific Islanders to hold the priesthood, and President McKay clarified that black Fijians and Australian Aborigines could also be ordained to the priesthood and instituted missionary work among them. In South Africa, President McKay reversed a prior policy that required prospective priesthood holders to trace their lineage out of Africa. 15

Nevertheless, given the long history of withholding the priesthood from men of black African descent, Church leaders believed that a revelation from God was needed to alter the policy, and they made ongoing efforts to understand what should be done. After praying for guidance, President McKay did not feel impressed to lift the ban. 16

As the Church grew worldwide, its overarching mission to “go ye therefore, and teach all nations” 17 seemed increasingly incompatible with the priesthood and temple restrictions. The Book of Mormon declared that the gospel message of salvation should go forth to “every nation, kindred, tongue, and people.” 18 While there were no limits on whom the Lord invited to “partake of his goodness” through baptism, 19 the priesthood and temple restrictions created significant barriers, a point made increasingly evident as the Church spread in international locations with diverse and mixed racial heritages.

Brazil in particular presented many challenges. Unlike the United States and South Africa where legal and de facto racism led to deeply segregated societies, Brazil prided itself on its open, integrated, and mixed racial heritage. In 1975, the Church announced that a temple would be built in São Paulo, Brazil. As the temple construction proceeded, Church authorities encountered faithful black and mixed-ancestry Latter-day Saints who had contributed financially and in other ways to the building of the São Paulo temple, a sanctuary they realized they would not be allowed to enter once it was completed. Their sacrifices, as well as the conversions of thousands of Nigerians and Ghanaians in the 1960s and early 1970s, moved Church leaders. 20

Church leaders pondered promises made by prophets such as Brigham Young that black members would one day receive priesthood and temple blessings. In June 1978, after “spending many hours in the Upper Room of the [Salt Lake] Temple supplicating the Lord for divine guidance,” Church President Spencer W. Kimball, his counselors in the First Presidency , and members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles received a revelation. “He has heard our prayers, and by revelation has confirmed that the long-promised day has come,” the First Presidency announced on June 8. The First Presidency stated that they were “aware of the promises made by the prophets and presidents of the Church who have preceded us” that “all of our brethren who are worthy may receive the priesthood.” 21 The revelation rescinded the restriction on priesthood ordination. It also extended the blessings of the temple to all worthy Latter-day Saints, men and women. The First Presidency statement regarding the revelation was canonized in the Doctrine and Covenants as Official Declaration 2 .

This “revelation on the priesthood,” as it is commonly known in the Church, was a landmark revelation and a historic event. Those who were present at the time described it in reverent terms. Gordon B. Hinckley, then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, remembered it this way: “There was a hallowed and sanctified atmosphere in the room. For me, it felt as if a conduit opened between the heavenly throne and the kneeling, pleading prophet of God who was joined by his Brethren. … Every man in that circle, by the power of the Holy Ghost, knew the same thing. … Not one of us who was present on that occasion was ever quite the same after that. Nor has the Church been quite the same.” 22

Reaction worldwide was overwhelmingly positive among Church members of all races. Many Latter-day Saints wept for joy at the news. Some reported feeling a collective weight lifted from their shoulders. The Church began priesthood ordinations for men of African descent immediately, and black men and women entered temples throughout the world. Soon after the revelation, Elder Bruce R. McConkie, an apostle, spoke of new “light and knowledge” that had erased previously “limited understanding.” 23

The Church Today

Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in a premortal life; that mixed-race marriages are a sin; or that blacks or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else. Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form. 24

Since that day in 1978, the Church has looked to the future, as membership among Africans, African Americans and others of African descent has continued to grow rapidly. While Church records for individual members do not indicate an individual’s race or ethnicity, the number of Church members of African descent is now in the hundreds of thousands.

The Church proclaims that redemption through Jesus Christ is available to the entire human family on the conditions God has prescribed. It affirms that God is “no respecter of persons” 25 and emphatically declares that anyone who is righteous—regardless of race—is favored of Him. The teachings of the Church in relation to God’s children are epitomized by a verse in the second book of Nephi: “[The Lord] denieth none that cometh unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; … all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile.” 26

• Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter: Essays on a Moment and a Movement

In this Book

• Christopher Cameron
• Published by: Vanderbilt University Press
• Series: Black Lives and Liberation
• Table of Contents

• Title Page, Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• pp. vii-viii
• Introduction
• Christopher Cameron & Phillip Luke Sinitiere
• Part One: Historical Foundations
• Chapter 1: A Secular Civil Rights Movement?: How Black Power and Black Catholics Help Us Rethink the Religion in Black Lives Matter
• Matthew J. Cressler
• Chapter 2: Beyond De-Christianization : Rethinking the Religious Landscapes and Legacies of Black Power in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter
• Kerry Pimblott
• Chapter 3: MOVE, Mourning, and Memory
• Richard Kent Evans
• Chapter 4: Black Lives Matter and the New Materialism: Past Truths, Present Struggles, and Future Promises
• Carol Wayne White
• Chapter 5: The Faith of the Future: Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism
• pp. 125-146
• Part Two: Contemporary Connections
• pp. 147-148
• Chapter 6: Death, Spirituality, and the Matter of Blackness
• Joseph Winters
• pp. 149-174
• Chapter 7: "A Song That Speaks the Language of the Times": Muslim and Christian Homiletic Responses to the Black Lives Matter Movement and the Need for a Spiritual Vocabulary of Admonition
• Marjorie Corbman
• pp. 175-205
• Chapter 8: "Islam Is Black Lives Matter": The Role of Gender and Religion in Muslim Women’s BLM Activism
• Iman AbdoulKarim
• pp. 206-222
• Chapter 9: The Need for a Bulletproof Black Man: Luke Cage and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Religion in Black Communities
• Alex Stucky
• pp. 223-245
• Chapter 10: The Sounds of Hope: Black Humanism, Deep Democracy, and Black Lives Matter
• Alexandra Hartmann
• pp. 246-275
• Chapter 11: Black Lives Matter and American Evangelicalism: Conflict and Consonance in History and Culture
• Phillip Luke Sinitiere
• pp. 276-304
• Contributors
• pp. 305-310
• pp. 311-328

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17 Race, Ethnicity, and Religion

George Yancey is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Texas.

• Published: 02 January 2011
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What was the role of religion in the origin and perpetuation of slavery in the United States? How did religion affect the cruel treatment of Native Americans? Has religion had an impact on the fate of immigrants of color as they entered the nation? In short, did religious ideology in general, and Christianity in particular, challenge or support the historically overt racist social structure of the United States? The answer heavily depends on one’s perspective on the role of religion. Some might argue that religion is a detriment to U.S. society. 1 For example, there is sufficient evidence that Christianity was one of the social-ideological constructs buttressing the white-supremacy ideology connected to chattel slavery (Swartley 1983 ; Wood 1991 ). However, those who argue for the benefits gained from religion can point out the presence of groups such as the Quakers, who were among the first to challenge slavery. Both groups are factually correct; thus, the answer to whether religion supported or challenged racist social structure is not an either/or but a both/and.

Looking at the past is not just an interesting exercise. Patterns picked up from historical encounters provide insight, allowing us to understand the contemporary relationship between race and religion. The exercise allows us to ask about the role of religious ideology in the more subtle contemporary racist social structures. Religious ideology plays the same role it has always played in the past: reinforcing the social and economic interest of the racial or ethnic group in which it originated.

I will explore more fully the idea that a particular religion has been generally used to promote the interests of the racial/ethnic group that promotes it. Given this reality, religion can be perceived as beneficial if it satisfies the needs of a valued group or detrimental if it is used by a group that is hostile to a valued group. While religious ideology might develop outside the interest of a particular social group, this is the exception and not the rule. For the most part, religious belief has been used to promote the desires and needs of a particular group. This chapter is not just an exploration of the relationship of religion and race/ethnic groups but also an exploration of the nature of religion itself.

Religion as a System of Justification

To understand the potential role of religion in meeting the needs of racial groups, it is vital to comprehend the general purpose of religion. While a variety of definitions of religion are available, I have always tended to favor the ones that focused on religion as a way of answering questions of meaning (Niebuhr 1960 ; Tillich 1957 ; Yinger 1970 ). Questions of meaning deal with issues such as purpose and direction, making sense of tragedy, the meaning of good and evil, and so on. The drive to deal with such questions is overwhelming, and different religious systems enable individuals to find answers that comfort and sustain them in an uncertain social world.

It is not just that individuals need such answers. Societies and communities must provide answers about the purpose of their group, what is desirable about the group’s culture, how to handle the unique challenges of the group, and so on. The religious beliefs within a group help to provide such answers. Rituals embed those answers among the group members and remind them of how questions of meaning should be addressed. 2 Clearly, certain members of the group deviate from the general meanings provided by that group’s religious ideology; however, this does not eliminate the need for subcultures to provide these answers.

Racial groups are important subcultures for the development of answers to questions of meaning. One of the criteria for being a subculture that creates answers for questions of meaning is the sharing of similar social and cultural interests with the other members of one’s group. One of the definitions of belonging to a minority group is the sharing of common burdens (Wagley and Harris 1958 ). Research in whiteness studies has demonstrated that majority group members tend to share similar social and cultural concerns (Dalton 2002 ; Dyer 1997 ; Twine 1997 ; Wildman and Davis 2002 ). These social concerns can be buttressed or opposed by a given religious belief system, and whether that system is adopted by minority or majority group members depends on its support, or nonsupport, of those social interests.

Early Christianity and White Supremacy

Racism is a relatively new system of oppression in human history (Jordan 1968 ; Mosse 1985 ). Before its development, oppression had been based on cultural, regional, and/or religious differences but not on the idea of biological superiority. However, the development of the slave trade produced a need to justify notions of the innate inferiority of Africans. Quite simply, it was economically profitable to use the labor of the Africans without having to pay the true costs of that labor. This led to the development of the ideology of white supremacy (Jordan 1968 ; Wilson 1973 ). Soon this ideology was applied in relation not only to Africans but to all groups that were not considered part of the superior race, even southern and western European ethnic groups.

Materialist considerations were unlikely to provide sufficient justification for this status system. There was a powerful need to develop a moral system that allowed majority group members to turn blind eyes toward racial inequality. The dominant way that questions of meaning were addressed by the early Europeans and European-Americans was through Christian expressions. Teachings within Christian traditions also developed to legitimize racial oppression. Such teachings allowed majority group members to perceive the mistreatment of people of color as aligned with the will of God, rather than as an expression of their own economic greed and social arrogance.

For example, in the nineteenth century, a good deal of Christian literature was written to provide a systematic defense of slavery (Genovese 1998 ; Tise 1987 ; Wood 1991 ). This literature argued that the Bible does not overtly oppose slavery and thus indirectly supports the practice. Evangelists were allowed to convert slaves to Christianity if they also taught that obedience to their masters was an important part of their faith (Lincoln 1999 ). Native Americans suffered from a teaching called British Israelism (Barkun 1994 ; Callahan 2006 ), which perceived Europeans and European-Americans as the new chosen people and Indians as the enemies to be eliminated. This philosophy led to the ideology of the Manifest Destiny, which helped to enrich majority group members at the expense of the land and resources that indigenous peoples once controlled. Likewise, Hispanic and Asian immigrants encountered a Christian philosophy among majority group members that denigrated elements of their own culture and elevated the perceived value of European and European-American cultures. The Christianity practiced by majority group members in the early history of the United States served the interests of that majority group quite well.

However, it is a mistake to perceive Christianity merely as the promoter of white supremacy, since Christian expressions have also been used to resist racism. The Quakers provided the first organizational opposition to the institution of slavery. Christians such as the Grimke sisters and Catharine Beecher also made their opposition to racial brutality well known. Such moral challenges helped eventually to set up the Civil War, which ended the practice of slavery, although it did not impede the spread of white supremacy. As economic and ideological alterations created new racial understandings that moved away from a complete acceptance of majority group dominance, new religious structures also developed to justify those alterations.

The Emergence of White Racial Identity and Modern Racism

Since the emergence of the modern civil rights movement, there has been a sharp decline in the level of acceptance of white-supremacy ideology (Kluegel 1990 ; Schuman et al. 1997 ). Recent research in race and ethnicity illustrates the modern forms of racism that still fuel contemporary racial conflict (Bobo, Kluegel, and Smith 1997 ; Bonilla-Silva 1999 ; McConahay 1986 ; Sears 1988 ). These forms of modern racism condemn overt actions of racial bias but still work to support a status quo that maintains the advantages of majority group members. Majority group members base much of their rejection of governmental efforts to deal with racial inequality on a modern racism philosophy that minimizes the existence and damage done by institutional racism. In this way, they can deny that overt racism is their motivation for rejecting such policies.

In conjunction with this new philosophy has been the development of white racial identity. The theory of white racial identity asserts that majority group members develop values that aid them in the maintenance of their racial privileges. Some of these values include color-blindness, cultural Eurocentrism, individualism, and comfortableness in American society (Dyer 1997 ; Twine 1997 ; Wildman and Davis 2002 ; Yancey 2003b ). By holding on to these values, majority group members can avoid the charge of racism while they still justify resisting overt efforts to deal with institutional racism (affirmative action, anti-racial-profiling legislation).

Emerson and Smith ( 2000 ) provide evidence that contemporary white evangelicals support at least one critical element of white racial identity, which is a strong adherence to free-will individualism. White evangelicals have a higher degree of adherence to individualism than whites in general. This individualism links the misfortune of the marginalized to their individual shortcomings, a philosophy that dismisses problems created by institutional racism. So white evangelicals are less open to structural alterations that promote racial justice than other majority group members. They have an expression of Christianity that condemns overt racism but supports the maintenance of a racial system that provides them with racially based social benefits. Future research might be able to document other elements of white racial identity, such as cultural Eurocentrism and color-blindness, disproportionately supported by white Christians. Yet even without such research, it can be asserted that contemporary Christianity among majority group members is used to support white racial identity and majority groups’ social interest.

Christianity of Color

But Christianity is not merely a vehicle for majority group members. It has also been used to meet the needs of people of color. For example, the black church was the first institution that Africans and African-Americans were able to control. As such, early community leaders in the African-American communities were also church leaders. The Christian religion of slaves taught blacks to relate to the children of Israel as slaves whom God would eventually free (Raboteau 2004 ; Wilmore 1998 ). After the Civil War, an activist propensity continued to flourish in the African-American community and led to the development of a “black theology,” an Afrocentric version of Christianity that envisions a Jesus sympathetic to the oppressed rather than the oppressors (Cone 1990 ). Black theology became a Christian expression justifying the resistance of African-Americans against institutional racism.

Christian ideology that supports people of color is not limited to African-Americans. Modern Native American Christians have promoted the concept of contextualization (Nicholls 2003 ; Woodley 2004 ), which is based on the notion that Christianity has to be contextualized to each unique culture. More than any other racial group in the United States, Native Americans are threatened with a loss of their cultural identity as a result of the intrusion of European-Americans. While many Native American Christians also discuss the need to deal with institutional racism (Kidwell, Noley, and Tinker 2001 ; Treat 1996 ; Woodley 2004 ), their emphasis on cultural maintenance somewhat separates them from other people of color and enables them to have a Christianity that meets their own unique cultural and historical needs.

There is also evidence that the Christianity practiced among Hispanic-Americans is reflective of the unique needs of their communities. Hispanic-American Christians have immigrated to the United States from several developing countries. Given the poverty in these societies, Marxian ideals are naturally attractive. This has allowed for the development of liberation theology among Hispanic Christians (Boff and Boff 1987 ; Espin 1995 ; Gutierrez 2001 ), which is a Marxian expression of Christian faith. In addition to the poverty Hispanics experience, they also have emerged from a society in which racial and cultural mixing is commonplace. This has produced a type of “mestizo Christianity,” which emphasizes symbols and practices not limited to a single ethnic group (Aquino 1993 ; Banuelas 1995 ; Elizondo 1988 ; Goizueta 1989 ).

Finally, the unique experience of Asian-American Christians is also reflected in their version of Christianity. For example, Yang ( 1999 ) illustrates how Chinese Christians maintain elements of their native culture and values that help their transition into their new American culture. Thus, they develop a Christianity that helps them to meet their social needs of becoming “Americans” even while they maintain enough of their original culture to remain comfortable. Research into second-generation Koreans has suggested that those in ethnic-specific churches still utilize their churches as a way to enter the mainstream of the general society (Ecklund   2006 ). As a result, it is fair to assert that Asian-American Christianity has been used to help Asian-Americans make the transition from an immigrant group to a core constituency within modern society.

Christianity is a religion that can serve the needs of the dominant group, or it can buttress the interests of marginalized groups. Particular interpretations of Christian tenets can provide support for a given racial or ethnic group. Thus, how racialized Christians understand their faith is funneled through the perceived needs of their racial group.

Non-Christian Expressions of Racial Protests

Given the above assertions, there is a temptation to conclude that unique qualities found within Christianity might account for how it developed in ways that meet the needs of particular racial groups. Yet it is only because of the predominance of Christianity in the United States that such examples are so easy to illustrate. Certainly, other religions can be utilized in such a manner.

The clearest example of this phenomenon in a non-Christian setting in the United States is the emergence of black Muslims, who would later become the Nation of Islam. This religious tradition contains racial elements rejected by traditional Islamic groups. Those racial elements postulate African-Americans as victims of the evil actions of majority group members. African-Americans are exhorted to be suspicious of majority group individuals and institutions. At the same time, they are encouraged to live moral lives and personally to overcome barriers they face in the United States. Such a religious ideology supported the efforts of African-Americans to deal with the oppressive racism they faced in the 1960s. The continuing existence of the Nation of Islam is a reflection of the indirect institutional racism that African-Americans still face. The lessons of mistrusting majority group members and of personal self-responsibility provide methods by which African-Americans can participate in their own liberation in a racialized society.

This pattern can be seen in some of the adaptations of the Eastern religions of many Asian-Americans. Gudykunst ( 2001 ) finds that the Buddhism of many Japanese was useful for helping them to maintain their ethnic heritage. However, these institutions also became somewhat Americanized in that they moved from Japanese to English in language and began to hold Sunday services. The Eastern religious tradition of the Japanese-Americans worked both to reaffirm their own cultural traditions and to help accommodate their transition into the dominant culture. A similar conclusion was drawn by Yang and Ebaugh ( 2001 ), who examined a Chinese Buddhist church that allowed its members to retain a secure Chinese identity even as the temple strove to develop an American identity. Jo ( 1999 ) documents how Korean-Americans utilized their Confucian beliefs to maintain their traditional family systems and their culture-normative structure in a non-Asian society. And Yang ( 1999 ) illustrates how Confucian beliefs can be used to buttress the economic success of Asian-Americans. Asian non-Christian religious institutions face the tasks of providing cultural support for Asian-Americans who are adjusting to the United States and helping those individuals become more acculturated. This is not much different from the way Christian churches in Yang’s research aided both ethnic cultural maintenance and acculturation.

Sometimes ethnic groups create a religious expression that is a mixture of the dominant religion and their own non-Christian faith. This is seen in the emergence of the Ghost Dance among Native Americans in the 1890s (Brown 1971 ). This religious expression combined elements of Catholicism with the magical beliefs many Native Americans maintained from their own religion. It was believed that the performance of this dance would bring about spiritual powers that would reverse their losses in land, materials, and lives at the hands of the majority group. This expression was a reaction to the oppression and deprivation that the Native Americans suffered and the current social status quo (Jorgensen 1985 ).

These examples illustrate that the tendency to use religion to promote the interest of a racial/ethnic group is not limited to Christianity. Rather, racial/ethnic groups tend to adjust whatever religious belief system they currently have to create an ideology that serves their own group interest. Rather than being limited to Christian ideology specifically, it is the purpose of religion, generally, to promote systems of meaning that lend religion its power to support the interests of racial groups. The power to shape perspectives on issues of meaning is an important one that racial/ethnic groups are naturally eager to use.

New Horizons: Multiracial Churches and Racial Identity

According to Dougherty ( 2003 ), 42.9 percent of all religious congregations contain members of only a single racial group. The powerful tendency of individuals to worship with only members of their own race makes sense if religious institutions are used to promote the interest of the racial groups. But what happens when there is no dominant racial group? While the vast majority of religious institutions in the United States are racially homogeneous, there is a small group of religious institutions that are racially diverse. Religious organizations that are racially mixed have to meet the needs of more than one racial group and cannot easily sustain theologies and practices that work to the advantage of certain racial groups at the expense of other ones. It is important to understand what religion might look like when multiple racial-group interests shape them.

There is evidence that churches in which the numerical majority racial group accounts for less than 80 percent of the population have distinct racial dynamics that others lack (Emerson 2006 ; Yancey 2001 ; Yancey 2007 ). It is unclear whether such differences are related to the theology taught in such institutions. However, the institutional practices of these congregations are different from those of other congregations. Elsewhere (Yancey 2003a ), I documented that multiracial churches are likely to create a racially diverse leadership structure, to have a worship style inclusive of different racial groups, and to have organizational flexibility that helps the members of these churches to deal with the cultural challenges that the different groups bring.

There is evidence that these differences are related to very real outcomes for those who attend these institutions. Previous work of mine (Yancey 1999 ; Yancey 2001 ) indicates that majority group members in such churches are more likely to have progressive racial attitudes than other majority group members, and people of color who attend these churches are more likely to enjoy economic and educational success than other people of color. 3 Those who attend multiracial churches have a different lifestyle or racial perspective from other individuals, and these churches likely help to shape such differences. These churches can provide racial information for majority group members and educational/economic social capital for people of color. In this sense, such religious institutions do not follow the similar pattern noted in other religious institutions by which they merely reinforce the social desires of a particular racial group. If the racial information and the economic/educational social capital that the majority and minority group members respectively receive from these churches are of value, then multiracial churches have evolved to answer the social needs of both majority and minority group members.

In addition, multiracial churches might serve group interests just as much as racially homogeneous churches. They might do this by serving the interest of a group that is not based on racial categories. For example, Marti ( 2005 ) documents a multiracial church concentrating on serving the entertainment community in Southern California. Such a church has become racially diverse in large part because of the fact that this entertainment community is also multiracial. Race no longer becomes the dividing factor; rather, whether a person has an identity as an “innovator” is what differentiates members of this church. In this way, this church can be inclusive of different racial groups and seeks to meet the needs of those of different races but can disregard the concerns of those who do not fit the social identity of innovators.

Whether a religious organization can be inclusive of social groups to such a degree that there is no significant out group rejected by the members of that organization is a question that has not yet been fully answered. It is possible that no religious institutions can be attractive to members of all social groups. Religious institutions that are racially inclusive are not necessarily inclusive across other social groups. If this is true, then all religious institutions might have a tendency to regard their own social group as important and disregard the needs of those in other social groups. Religious institutions are not unique in this propensity, but because it is within religious institutions that we deal with issues of meaning, we should be mindful of the power of this propensity. It allows groups to justify their existences as morally superior to all other groups. For this reason, it is vital to examine religious organizations as a potential source of ethnocentrism in society.

Conclusions

This chapter has focused on patterns of race and religion as they play themselves out in the United States. The concentration on the United States might bias arguments toward the type of religious and racial needs linkages made in this chapter, but these sorts of linkages should be found outside the United States as well. For example, there is no reason Islamic theology has to have the degree of anti-Semitism it currently has in many Middle Eastern countries. In fact, it has been pointed out that at certain points in world history, Jews were better served living in Muslim rather than Christian societies (Cohen 1995 ; Gil 2004 ; Lewis 1987 ). Yet contemporary Christian cultures exist a sizable geographical distance away from Israel, while some Muslim cultures have Israel in their own backyard. Because of this distance, the potential for a global Jewish/Muslim conflict over resources is much more plausible than conflict along Jewish/Christian lines. Thus, it is not surprising that contemporary Muslim theology is generally more overtly anti-Semitic than modern Christian theology.

Other examples would undoubtedly spring up with a careful analysis of other religious conflicts in the world. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to investigate such instances fully. However, linkage of religions and racial-group interests does not uniquely trouble the United States. It is more likely that the reaction of religious ideology and racial position is merely reflective of the general tendencies of religions to be used by social groups for their own ends. These groups do not have to be based on racial distinctions. In fact, racial differences, as they are understood in the United States, are not the most important social dimensions in many other countries. However, the social dimensions that serve to segment the citizens of a particular society or nation can also serve to create different religious expressions and ideologies that promote the social and economic interests of those particular groups.

Because of the power of religion to shape the legitimization forces of a society, it is quite useful for the promotion of these social groups. However, I am not so deterministic as to state that this is the fate of all expressions of faith. There are those, such as the early white abolitionists, who express their faith in such a way that it operates against their own group interest. In doing so, they exhibit the possibility that religion offers an overarching legitimization construct that can guide individuals into making decisions that are for the betterment of the entire society and not just their own racial or social group.

The work done to date suggests that religion generally does not enable individuals to rise above their own group interests, but there are exceptions to even this powerful sociological rule. My interviews with pastors of multiracial churches have indicated several instances of individuals creating churches that do not always support their own group interest. Several white pastors were quite willing to accommodate the needs of people of color through community activism, cultural adjustments within their churches, and incorporation of antiracism or multicultural programs. Some of the pastors of color I interviewed also showed sensitivity to concerns of majority group members in their formation of ministries and public expressions. My interviews confirmed that these efforts were intentional in nature (Yancey 2003a ). Religion can be used to overcome some of the ethnocentric racial tendencies in our society if members of religious faiths are encouraged to interact with racial out groups.

A recent group of atheist books have made this argument (Dawkins 2006 ; Harris 2005 ; Hitchens 2007 ). They contend that religion is a major factor behind many of the dysfunctions in U.S. society. As this chapter will show, some expressions of faith do exploit others, but religion can also be used to meet important sociopsychological needs.

Religious answers do not have to be based on supernaturalist expressions of faith. Certain social groups might address questions of meaning without reliance on the supernatural. For example, it is well established that belief in traditional religious expressions is low within the humanities and among social scientists (Ladd and Lipset 1975 ). Supernatural expressions might be a competitor for expression of morality to the scientific assertions of such individuals (Dynes 1974 ; Glock and Stark 1965 ; Waldo 1961 ), and more secular ideologies such as Marxism or feminism might replace supernatural religion as answers to questions of meaning among academics.

Some of these results may be the result of a self-selection effect in which racially progressive whites and economically, educationally successful people of color are more likely to attend multiracial congregations. But a significant amount of research debunks the notion that all of the effects can be explained by self-selection (Dixon and Rosenbaum 2004 ; Ellison and Powers 1994 ; Pettigrew and Tropp 2000 ).

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For Further Reading

Lincoln, C. Eric, and Lawrence H. Mamiya. 1990 . The Black Church in the African American Experience . Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press

Smith, Christian. 1998 . American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Villafane, Eldin. 1992 . The Liberating Spirit: Toward an Hispanic American Pentecostal Social Ethic . Lanham, Md.: University Press of America.

Weaver, Jace. 1998 . “From I-Hermeneutics to We-Hermeneutics.” In Jace Weaver. ed., Native American Religious Identity: Unforgotten Gods . Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis.

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Religion and Race: A Historical and Contemporary Perspective

Some of the nation’s leading journalists gathered in Key West, Fla., in December 2008 for the Pew Forum’s biannual Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life.

Eddie S.Glaude Jr., author of In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America , discussed religion and race in America. Specifically, he described historical and contemporary appeals for religious pluralism and explored the ways these efforts have been undermined, particularly when they relate to race. Professor Glaude also examined the 2008 presidential campaign controversy surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and spoke to the challenges President-elect Barack Obama might face when he takes office in January.

Speaker: Eddie S. Glaude Jr. , Professor of Religion and African-American Studies, Princeton University

Moderator: Michael Cromartie , Vice President, Ethics & Public Policy Center; Senior Advisor, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

Navigate this Transcript: President-elect Obama’s religious tolerance speech Governor Romney’s religious tolerance speech Neuhaus’ case for making religious commitments accessible to public reason The limiting nature of public arguments for faith communities Overview of religious intolerance in American history Black power and black liberation theology Q & A with participants

Event Transcript

MICHAEL CROMARTIE:   We are very fortunate to have Professor Eddie Glaude with us. I have a friend, a colleague, a professor of religion at Princeton who Eddie works with. When I called him and asked him if would Eddie be a good speaker in Key West, you’d be glad to know, Eric raved on about you. So you owe him one.

Professor Glaude is a professor of religion and African-American studies at Princeton University. He did his Ph.D. at Princeton under Cornel West , with whom he now team-teaches several courses. His most recent book is In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America . We asked Professor Glaude to speak to this whole question of religion and race, put it in historical perspective and obviously bring it around to contemporary significance of our recent years in politics; and he readily agreed to do so. If you want to know more about Eddie, his bio is in your packet. Eddie, we’re delighted you could be with us; thank you for coming to Key West. I know you are in the middle of exams at this time. He was able to work out something to be here, and I’m grateful for that.

EDDIE GLAUDE:   Thanks, Mike. Appreciate it. Thank you. This has been great, it’s been wonderful, and it’s going to be difficult to follow Brother Vali and that extraordinary conversation. It’s kind of daunting to be in the room with the fourth estate. Or at least, as E.J. told me, a representation of the fourth estate. So my thanks.

Let me give you a little backdrop to my remarks and in some ways, what drives what I’m going to say. That has a lot to do with trying to figure out President-elect Obama’s appeal to religious liberty as he talks about religion and religious tolerance against the backdrop of a history of American intolerance to religious difference. How that intolerance played itself out: specifically in relation to race, or more specifically in relation to Jeremiah Wright , and now in relation to this pressing question about which church will President-elect Obama attend.

And so what I want to do is to tell a story – or, it’s not quite a story. The talk is divided into three parts; I am a philosopher after all. I’m not a historian, so I’ve got to tell you what I’m going to do, and then I’ll do it. I’ll tell you what I did, and then you tell me whether or not I did it well or not. So the first part is kind of philosophical. I’m trying to think about appeals to religious tolerance or religious pluralism in relation to some notion of public reason and how such religious commitments play themselves out in the public domain. The subject of that section will be Obama’stalk in June of 2006 and Governor Romney’s talk; both of whom appealed, although in very different ways, to the tradition of religious liberty.

Then I’m going to tell a brief story historically. A brief historical account about how this has – this notion of religious pluralism and the distinct ways we undermine it – how this has always been the case since our inception as a nation, particularly when it comes to race. At the end I’ll glance at the difficult case of Jeremiah Wright and the question of which church will President-elect Obama attend. Is that okay? Now, I’m also in the Baptist tradition, although I was raised Catholic and went to Morehouse , so we’re going to have to have dialogue. I’m a professor, this is kind of like a seminar room, and we can talk back to one another, okay? So I’ll have to get used to you typing as I talk.

So let me direct your attention to two important moments during the presidential primaries. One involved President-elect Obama’s fascinating talk at the Call to Renewal conference in June of 2006. The other is Mitt Romney’s important speech about religion in December of 2007. Both candidates sought to address the incredibly difficult topic of the role of religion in the public square. Obama’s remarks served as a call of sorts to Democrats to take seriously religious commitments. He asserted the claim that folks like Alan Keyes , or more generally the religious right, do not hold a monopoly on religion. It was okay, particularly for progressives, to declare one’s Christian commitments in the public domain. His Christian commitments were even further specified in terms of the central and prophetic role of historically black churches.

Obama noted, “I still believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change, a power made real by some of the leaders here today. Because of its past, the black church understands in an intimate way the biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities.” This is 2006; this is pre-Jeremiah Wright. “Because of its past, and in its historical struggles for freedom and the rights of man,” Barack Obama goes on to say, “I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active hope palpable, an active palpable agent in the world as a source of hope.” I won’t linger here for the moment, but you can imagine where I will go with this quotation a bit later. Jeremiah Wright is coming soon.

So Obama recognizes the power of religious belief in the lives of persons and grants that those beliefs animate, and in some cases ought to animate, public deliberation. But he insisted in this talk, which is really interesting, “Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal rather than religion-specific values.” So you could hold your commitments as long as those commitments are translatable into something that’s more universal, that’s not sectarian. In other words, religious adherents cannot retreat behind the inerrancy of their faith – the inerrancy of their truth claims in public. Those claims, like all reasons according to Obama, must be subjected to public scrutiny. And here Obama appeals to a grand tradition of religious pluralism that requires, in some significant way, a deliberative language that allows us to talk across sectarian differences. So even as President-elect Obama insists on the role of religious beliefs in the public square, he circumscribes how appeals to those beliefs must work in democratic conversation. I’m not quite sure what he resolves in this move.

Now, interestingly enough, Governor Romney made a similar move. Romney of course struggled mightily during the primary to shake off a standing suspicion, particularly among the base of the Republican Party, about his Mormonism. For many, Romney’s candidacy was shrouded in the mystery of his religious commitments. Is Mormonism a cult? Will Romney be beholden to the religious leaders of his church? We’ve heard these questions before. Many of you have covered them. He sought to allay any concerns about his faith by appealing to the legacy of religious liberty and pluralism in the United States. He insisted on the centrality of his faith to how he understands himself and the world, but that faith was consonant, in his view, with a commonly shared creed of moral convictions that define the nation.

As he noted, “Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history. These are not bases for criticism but rather a test of our tolerance. Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle,” Romney goes on to say, “Indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree. And where the affairs of our nation are concerned, it’s usually a sound rule to focus on the great moral principles that urge us all on a common course. Whether it was the cause of abolition or civil rights or the right to life itself, no movement of conscience can succeed in America that cannot speak to the convictions of religious people.” But that “speaking” must exemplify a commitment to religious liberty and democratic value. So in similar ways, he makes a similar move to Obama. Now, I’m not so convinced that either move – that President-elect Obama’s take on the role of religious commitments in public deliberation clarifies much. In fact, his position – I’m sorry that this is so academic, but I wanted to go through this. Is this all right?

CROMARTIE:   We’re handling it fine.

GLAUDE:   Y’all follow? All right, because you’re looking at me like I’m, like – well, anyway. All right, you go, brother? Okay, all right, there you go. Yeah, I feel better now. All right, good. All right, now. (Laughter.) His position sounds a lot like that of Father Richard Neuhaus ’ in his classic or infamous work, The Naked Public Square – classic.

CROMARTIE:   Classic.

GLAUDE:   Infamous for some – in which Father Neuhaus argues, among other things, that we Christians have an obligation to translate our commitments into terms accessible as far as possible to our fellows who happen not to hold those commitments. Now, of course, there are different kinds of religious claims: those that reason is fully competent to justify and those that derive their force, at least in part, from revelation. So there are obviously enough, even among those faith communities that unite in resisting liberalism, different theological reasons for their positions. There may even be, in the end, substantive disagreement about policy outcomes based in those theological differences that many appeal, for example, to different sorts of authority to justify their public acts. For example, the authority of revelation ought to be singled out. So there’s a sense in which Neuhaus and, if I’m right, President-elect Obama insist that religious claims, or more specifically Christian claims that have public implications, must be accessible to public reason.

Now, this may be a bit worrisome because it runs up against the stated commitment to religious tolerance and plurality that supposedly frame the discussion in the first place. Such a view denies an important plurality and the possible conflicts that might emerge from that among religious believers, who are themselves critical of liberalism. Now, what do I mean by that? That is to say, there are only certain kinds of religious commitments – those that can be justified by natural lawyers that can gain access to the public space. But those folk who justify their political positions in light of certain kinds of religious claims that are not subject to public reason – the authority of revelation according to Neuhaus and I believe according to Obama – they have to engage in some kind of translation or otherwise, they can’t speak. This doesn’t resolve anything. In fact, this is the exact spur in the side of certain religious communities to mobilize in light of liberalism’s attack against it. Lauren, you had your hand up.

LAUREN GREEN, FOX NEWS:   Oh, that’s fast.

CROMARTIE:  No, no, no, no, no, she was just getting in line.

GLAUDE:   Oh, she was just getting in line. Okay. See, it’s a seminar kind of context. Okay, all right. She was like, that’s a fast talk.

CROMARTIE:   You want to take interjections?

GLAUDE:   Sure, of course.

CROMARTIE:   On that one point, Lauren?

GREEN:  I want to make sure this is clear what you’re saying: You can’t bring your religious beliefs to the public square unless you can translate it to an understanding of reason.

GLAUDE:   Public reason. But it has to be subject –

GREEN:   Public reason, but there are many people in the public square that say that religion has no reason, so you can’t bring your beliefs to the public square. And that debate is not yet happening.

GLAUDE:   Well, part of what I’m trying to say here is that Senator Obama – then Senator Obama, now President-elect Obama, took himself to be making an intervention. And that intervention had everything to do with saying that Democrats can be believers too. The Christian right doesn’t hold a monopoly on what it means to be a professed believer in public. And so he urges Democrats to take up faith claims. But then he says, you must take them up in a particular sort of way. That particular sort of way means that it has to be subject to a certain kind of public scrutiny. So I can’t just simply say that X is wrong because the Bible tells me so. That’s not enough. Yes?

KIRSTEN POWERS, NEW YORK POST :   I think what he’s saying is that you can say X is wrong in your own life, you just can’t say X is wrong for the government. We live in a secular society, we don’t live in a theocracy.

GLAUDE:  See, now we’re getting to the point.

POWERS:  So I think that I actually disagree. I think most things, at least as a Christian, in the Bible can be explained by reason. For example if you oppose abortion, I think you could make a scientific argument against it. You don’t have to say it’s because God says it, and I think that that’s what Obama was appealing to.

GLAUDE:   Let me finish the argument, and then you’ll see what I’m doing. What I’m trying to suggest here is that there’s a way in which this appeal to public reason actually does a certain kind of work vis-à-vis a certain kind of religious expression. So if we begin to take, for example – and I’m getting a little off track here – but if we begin to take the role of a certain kind of fundamentalist voice in the public domain, what footing might it have on Obama’s view? Or has Obama in interesting sorts of ways, like Neuhaus, said that they can only talk to those who are similarly committed. As opposed to them talking to us in the public space. But we’ll get to that so we can talk.

So it seems to me in the end that, like the political theorist William Galston , Obama seems to argue that, “If religion is to shape public life, including public law, through the exercise of public reason, then it would seem that the content of public reason is in principle accessible to adherents of all faiths equally and to those who espouse no religious faith at all. If so, then it is hard to see how religion, as opposed to philosophical natural law, is playing a distinctive public role. On the other hand, if the content of specific revelation is to play that role, it can only be by breaching the boundaries of public reason as Father Neuhaus defines it.” Given Obama’s commitment to pluralism, he argues that we can only justify coercive public law across the boundary of diverse faith communities through public reason. Those who offer claims based, on revelation however, those claims are only relevant and institutionally binding to those who share in the commitment. Propositions based on revelation matter only within the relevant communities.

So, in the end, only those Christians who can offer public arguments for their positions are allowed a public role. Others are relegated to their own communities, to talking with those, at least when they are invoking revelation or making certain kinds of faith claims, who share their commitment. And I think we should remember Father Neuhaus’ words here, because they ironically informed President-elect Obama’s position. “A public argument is not derived from sources of revelation or disposition that are essentially private” – Kirsten – “essentially private and arbitrary. The perplexity of fundamentalism,” Father Neuhaus writes, “in public is that its self-understanding is premised upon a view of religion that is emphatically not public in character.” Fundamentalist leaders rail against secular humanists for creating what Father Neuhaus has called “the naked public square.” “In fact,” he goes on to write, “fundamentalism is an indispensable collaborator in that creation.” So even though Obama and Romney assert the value of religious toleration and pluralism, they do so in a way that, in my view, constrains certain expressions of religious faith. And we have to talk about that constraint. Yes, Lauren?

GREEN:   I just wanted to add – (inaudible, off mic) – months ago about religion in the public square is that many people don’t understand – are trying to say that some people have religious faith and other people don’t. And what the discussion has never gotten to, which is what the religious right – I think religious people in general are cutting themselves off and shortchanging themselves and saying, wait a second, don’t tell me not to bring my religious beliefs into the public square, because you’re doing the same thing. We understand religious beliefs to mean a set of beliefs, whether you believe in a god or this or whatever, it is the same thing. So aren’t religious people shortchanging themselves, and even Father Neuhaus doing the same thing, saying, we have to make it so that our religious beliefs translate into some kind of accessibility in the secular world?

CROMARTIE:   Let me just say this. Time out, time out, time out. Could we do this? I think I know where the argument’s going, I think we should let Professor finish the argument.

GREEN:   Okay.

CROMARTIE:   And then at the end of the argument, have these interventions, if I may. I think we might have opened it up a little bit when you said it was a seminar, but –

GLAUDE:   Oh, my bad.

CROMARTIE:   I want to hear you go ahead and –

GLAUDE:   My bad.

CROMARTIE:  I want to go ahead and hear you finish the argument, because it’s very intriguing and I think I know where you’re going and –

GLAUDE:  Okay, let’s see where we go. Let’s see what we can do.

CROMARTIE:  And then I’ll fit you all in, okay?

GLAUDE:  You got it. You’re the veteran. The last sentence I read was that even though Obama and Romney assert the value of religious toleration and pluralism, they do so in a way that constrains certain expressions of religious faith. Now, in fact, one could go as far as to question the distinctiveness of religious claims that are in fact accessible to public reason. It becomes very hard. And this is kind of muddled, but I just wanted to throw this out to be provocative. It becomes very hard, for example, to distinguish what kind of public work religious claims are doing if someone who happens not to hold those commitments still has access to them. So if as a Christian the beatitudes inform how I think about certain policy initiatives, and those commitments result in my support of policies that are compelling to my left-leaning, atheist, secular friend, it is difficult to see how religion is playing a distinctive role here. I’m not quite sure what work religion is doing in this public sense.

Obama’s insistence on public accessibility results, again, if I’m right, in religion doing very little work or certain kinds of religious claims doing very little work in the public domain, even as he’s opening it up. Now, let me wrap this up really quickly, because I’m beginning to ramble. In the end, appeals to public reason or universal value as a response to the diversity of religious claims – those who appeal to revelation, again, are relegated to the remainder of social space filled by diverse communities attending to their internal affairs – limit, it seems to me, religious voices. This is contrary to the stated aim in such a way that fails to address the dissatisfaction with public life of many members of faith communities; and it results in, it seems to me, oftentimes in an anemic conception of the public good. Beyond this, I worry that these attempts to tidy up the mess of democratic conversation – because this accessibility is an attempt to tidy up the mess of democratic conversation, especially when it comes to religious claims – might result in bad faith on the part of many who hold religious beliefs based on revelation and who nevertheless want to impact public life beyond their specific communities. I worry that the Christian, like my evangelical sister who believes that homosexuality is a sin and is prohibited by scripture, will not offer that as the reason for her opposition against same-sex marriage. But who instead will appeal to some notion of the sanctity of marriage. I worry that it will lead folk – decent folk with commitments that we may or may not agree with – to mislead in order to secure their desired ends. And to my mind, that would be a terribly unchristian result.

So I direct your attention here because both President-elect Obama and Governor Romney appeal to a certain story about America’s religious history in order to put forward this value of toleration and pluralism. I believe, like the scholar Robert Orsi , I am convinced that American religious history is American political history and American political history is American religious history. They’re intertwined. So this story is grounded in the toleration of religious differences; let’s take this up for a moment. What is the typical story of America’s religious beginnings? Now, as my good friend, the religious historian David Wills writes, “The most common way of telling the story of the United States’ religious past is to center it on the theme of pluralism and toleration, the existence of religious variety in America and the degree to which it has or has not been tolerated and even affirmed.”

Now, there are several versions of this story. One version is that religious liberty was placed at the center of our nation’s religious life the moment the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Another is that the adoption of the Constitution and the passage of the First Amendment instantiated a normative religious pluralism in our nation; or the story goes that the Constitutional separation of church and state initiated a process in which the nation would come to embrace genuine religious plurality, and perhaps this embrace was made in the 1960s, “when we were all feeling good about ourselves.” But I must say that at no point in our nation’s history, no matter how the story is written – and I’ve tried to show this even in President-elect Obama’s case – has the mere fact of religious plurality yielded an uncontested normative vision of pluralism. Rather, as Wills writes, “At every point, normative conceptions of religious plurality, which inevitably embrace some forms of religious belief and practice while excluding others, have been a central point of contestation.”

To be sure, in our nation’s early history, Protestants had come to accept doctrinal differences among themselves as a kind of acceptable diversity, but rarely was this tolerance extended to others, like Catholics or Jews or Mormons on the same basis. When George Washington , for example, assumed the presidency in 1789, many worried about the nation’s commitment to genuine religious liberty. Could such a commitment survive the realities of politics? Roman Catholics were keenly aware of “the force of laws against potpourri and against receiving immigrants from Catholic countries.” Some even wrote President Washington congratulating him on his election and inquiring concerning their status under a new form of government. Washington replied on March 1, 1790, that he hoped to see “America among the foremost nations in examples of justice and liberality.” In response to Newport’s Hebrew congregation, who wondered if the nation would continue to “offer an asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every nation and religion,” Washington replied, “We no longer speak of toleration but rather of inherent rights.” And that “happily, the government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” It’s kind of funny, when you think about the moment.

Washington’s belief that an old age of intolerance had passed away, however, betrayed a naïve optimism about this fragile democracy. I’m reminded here of a powerful remark by the black abolitionist Sojourner Truth . She said, “I take hold of this Constitution and it looks mighty big. And I feel for my rights, but there ain’t any there.” So obviously, Washington knew of the many forms of religious bigotry in the new nation. Perhaps, like Jefferson and Madison, he hoped that enlightened persons would eventually shed such prejudices and be satisfied to practice their religion in private.

But we know this isn’t or wasn’t the case. In many states, some form of establishment continued well into the 19th century. Connecticut and Massachusetts, for example, continued to encourage local governments to make suitable provision “for the institution of the public worship of God and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality.” For these Congregationalists, the idea of a religious grounding in our public living was central to how they imagine the relationship between religion and the state. A holy commonwealth is the phrase that comes to mind.

So what I’m suggesting here, however clumsily, is that when we situate the discussion of religious pluralism within the larger context of American religious history, at least two themes emerge: First, we see the difficulties surrounding religious and cultural difference. Difference is not managed “by a narrative of American triumphalism.” We have difference erupting, disrupting a certain kind of American imagery. And second, we see religiously-informed efforts – I suppose this is part of our Puritan inheritance – to define and achieve some exemplary state of public morality. Now, one can immediately see that efforts to define public morality in terms of a specific religious tradition militate against affirming religious pluralism. In fact, such efforts often work to solidify the status of “Other,” capital “O,” for those from different traditions.

But let me quickly mention a third theme that might emerge. What can be called, as David Wills, the historian at Amherst, says, “the encounter between black and white.” Now you can begin to see, I’m beginning to turn back to that body that Obama inhabits. Here we have a group of Christians – and we’re talking about a particular religious tradition, obviously. We have a group of Christians who are for the most part within the dominant religious traditions of the nation. They are, at least religiously, a part of us. Yet because of their color, status as slaves and subsequently second-class citizens, they are often viewed as wholly other. What is interesting is how these peculiar modern folk to whom religious freedom was neither offered nor given seized upon the idea of religious liberty and forged an independent church movement. As the historian Will Gravely notes, they “appeal successfully and unsuccessfully in court for their rights to religious independence. The legal structures within which they worked were newly enacted so that they tested and expanded the state’s role in religious litigation.”

The presence of black Christians in American religious history indeed complicates the story of our nation’s religious past and present. That history, that religious history on the part of these black folk is crucial to how we tell our political history. All we need to do is think about, for example, that extraordinary moment in November of 1787 in St. George’s Church in Philadelphia. Richard Allen and Absalom Jones – and these guys are literally praying at the altar – are snatched from their knees in the middle of prayer and told to go to what was called “the n— pews.” They walk out, and as a result we see formed by 1794 the first African-American congregation in the city, St. Thomas Episcopal. Later on, we see the African-Methodist Episcopal Church founded in the early part of the 19th century. Then later on we see African-Methodist Episcopal Zion formed in New York with James Varick .

Part of what we see here are the very ways in which race over-determined how one understands one’s relationship to God and how that over-determination then impacted the very ways in which these particular Christians could articulate their commitments in public – precisely because race impacted the very ways in which they were understood to be Christian. There’s a wonderful phrase by Howard Thurman in which he says, “The slaves dared to redeem a religion profaned in their midst.” And so Stanley Hauerwas , the great theologian, was constantly looking back to first-century Christians to find a kind of authentic expression of Christianity when he could just simply look to these American slaves: the folks who were trying to reclaim, in interesting sorts of ways, the essence of the faith. And this tradition, in some significant way – remember, we have to understand African-American religion or African-American Christian churches in some substantive way as the site of black civil society because they are locked out politically, locked out economically, locked out demographically. African-American religious institutions become the site whereby the infrastructure of black communities begins to take shape, the germ of them.

So education institutions – my own beloved Morehouse was founded in a Baptist church in Augusta. We begin to think about voluntary associations, burial societies : black folk who attended predominantly white churches could not bury their dead in the same burial grounds. So white supremacy cuts so deep that it even went to the grave. So part of this tradition of African-American Christian expression involves an institutional space that’s reflective of a kind of marginal status. That institutional space bearing the imprimatur of a kind of evangelical tradition – there’s this wonderful image, if you look at it – wish I had it with me – of the Great Awakening . There is this interesting kind of interracial religious fervor that’s being expressed, and you see white fellow brothers and sisters engaged in ecstatic worship. Right behind the picture of the pastor at the pulpit, or the preacher, are these African-Americans engaged in ecstatic worship as well.

And so there’s this intimate relationship that’s kind of, shall we say, partitioned by the realities of race. Even though they are seen, they are not known. Even though they’re seen, they’re not known. They’re wholly other. There’s this tradition of Christianity within the United States, the African-American tradition that has this prophetic wing. It proceeds on the assumption that white Christianity is idolatry. The adjectives matter. There is an investment in whiteness that over-determines one’s commitment to God. This tradition begins to define in interesting sorts of ways the African-American church that was once an invisible institution and in post- Reconstruction becomes a visible institution. It is then transformed with the Great Migration as these folks move from rural countrysides to urban spaces in the south: going from country-rural side of Mississippi to Mobile, Alabama and then moving from Mobile to places like Chicago, to places like New York – and having a different sound, a different timber. It was becoming in interesting sorts of ways this unique American expression. What’s striking about the 1970s – I’m skipping, trying to get to something here. What’s striking about the 1960s and ’70s, of course, is that this religious backdrop – the prophetic black church of the 19th century – takes on a much more pronounced role.

And we see African-American religion informing African-American struggle in interesting sorts of ways. But there’s a moment in the context of black power in which African-American Christianity is characterized as the religion of white folks, that it’s conservative. And what do you see? You see people like James Cone in 1969 beginning to translate the prophetic black church tradition into the idiom of black power. So he publishes a text in 1969 entitled Black Theology and Black Power . He publishes it a year before Gutierrez publishes A Theology of Liberation. This is really important, because everyone wants to say that black liberation theology is derivative of Latin-American liberation theologies, and that’s not true historically.

And what happens is that Cone takes the prophetic dimensions of black Christianity, and he places it in the language of black power where God is on the side of black people. Jesus is on the side of the oppressed; and wherever there is evil, wherever there are oppressed people, that’s where we find Jesus. Jesus is not locked into some distant past; he’s present in the lives of those who suffer. And so there is this interesting kind of a reinterpretation of the Bible – there’s a high Christology in black liberation theology. There is a sense that this particular iteration of the black church tradition takes on a particular kind of life in light of the kind of register of African-American politics at the moment. Jeremiah Wright comes out of this tradition, and so I want to make a turn to him for a brief moment.

Wright’s Christianity for some served as a proxy for the claim about Obama’s otherness. So I’m really struck. The argument is kind of loose; it’s not really tight. Obama appeals to pluralism as a way to allow for religious belief, but then he sanctions, he cordons it off. He constrains it by appeal to public reason. You tell a story about religious toleration and pluralism in the United States; that story reveals a highly racialized religious landscape in which blackness and Christianity are disciplined in particular sorts of ways. We tell a story about how that particular form of Christianity erupts in the public domain to challenge the state in light of the second-class status of black folks. And then it gets rearticulated in a particular sort of way, let’s call it black liberation theology. And so here we have Obama claiming in the beginning the power of the black church, and then here we have Jeremiah Wright coming back on the backside. I can’t wait until we talk about this.

Wright’s version of African-American Christianity bore the imprimatur not of Martin Luther King’s message of love but of the fiery rhetoric of black power – the effort on the part of black theologians to translate the African-American church tradition into the idiom of black power. And it’s precisely in Obama’s connection to the so-called “rabid sectarian voices of black power” that potentially undermined for some his claims to universality. Remember Patrick Buchanan’s blog, “A Brief for Whitey,” which said that we’ve seen this before. This is just simply the shakedown politics of black power. He, that is Obama, unlike his marketed image, is really black. And is therefore a candidate only for them, because black candidates can only be niche candidates. We can only represent black people, right?

In this instance, the theological orientation of Wright stands in for African-American Christian communities as such. How many times did we see, not only on the part of Wright – I’m defending the black church – that the press represented in interesting sorts of ways Jeremiah Wright as a stand-in for African-American churches. And what is obscured by such broad strokes, it seems to me, is the amazing religious diversity of African-American communities. Part of – what we’ve talked about last time, nuance and complexity – part of what we have to do is begin to tell a story about African-American religion that’s not reducible to King. There’s a story of African-American religion that actually accounts for people like T.D. Jakes , that accounts for folks like Creflo Dollar – people you might not know– for example, Carlton Pearson . Some of you might know him. Or let’s talk about someone like Reverend Ike of the ’60s and ’70s. Reverend Ike actually lifted particular dimensions of his biography from Oral Roberts.

There is an interesting cross-fertilization between certain expressions of African-American Christianity, particularly African-American religious fundamentalism, a story that hasn’t been told, with mainstream white fundamentalism that goes all the way back to the ’20s and ’30s. But we can’t tell that story because of the hegemony of a certain vision of what African-American Christianity is. That is, it’s always already tied to a certain understanding of King, that prophetic tradition. There is much more diversity, even in the story that I told earlier. There is much more diversity there. And this becomes really interesting when you think about – just yesterday, I was reading an op-ed piece in The New York Times by Caitlin Flanagan and Benjamin Schwarz. It was about the “Showdown in the Big Tent,” about Proposition 8 . And folk are trying to figure out how could these black folk vote for Proposition 8 given this particular understanding of black Christianity? And we saw in the data, the Pew data , how mainline black denominations are as conservative as Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses . But there’s a tendency to think that mainline black Christians are, by definition, progressive and prophetic.

So we have to begin to disrupt a certain kind of narrative. Now, we see, I think a similar logic – and of course, all of this kind of just gestures to what we should talk about. We see a similar logic at work in the rather crazed attention – I’m shifting – given to the question about which church will President Obama and his family attend? Will he join a black church or not, and what might it suggest if he does or does not? Such questions, I believe are freighted with the weight of our current national malaise, not just our economic woes. But there is the fact – and a dangerous fact it is – that we can no longer without fear of recrimination talk about race explicitly, at least when it comes to President-elect Obama. So the choice of place of worship, its cultural locus, becomes a critical site for the continued interrogation of his identification. Is he really black after all? And what better way to signal his true identity than his presence in a place, during the “most segregated hour” in American life. But if he decides not to attend a black church, learning the so-called lessons of his Trinity experience, is this an indication that we have truly arrived at a post-racial moment?

The somewhat manic character of this hand wringing bears the burden of a historic neurosis: the fantasy of a black-less America. As Ralph Ellison noted, not with a hint of the vitriol of Jeremiah Wright, “ It is a fantasy borne not merely of racism but of petulance, of exasperation, of moral fatigue. It is like a boil bursting forth from impurities in the bloodstream of democracy.” This wishful fantasy of absolving our national sins by getting shut of blackness has reached a crescendo with Obama’s ascendance, only to be snatched back to the ground by the ever-present realities of race in our daily doings, and, in this case, our worshipping. But as Ellison noted, and as I believe with all my heart in this most critical of moments, that the nation could not survive – I think this is true – the nation could not survive, “deprived of their presence because, by the irony implicit in the dynamics of American democracy, they, black folk, symbolize both its most stringent testing and the possibility of its greatest human freedom.” And it’s precisely within this paradox that we find ourselves at this moment; and once again as it has always been, or often been, religion stands as a primary space where the mess gets worked out.

(Applause.)

CROMARTIE:   Thank you, doctor. Thank you.

GLAUDE:   That’s a lot.

CROMARTIE:  Well, we have – that’s a lot, and we’re looking forward to getting into it here. And we’ll start with Kevin; you’re up first. Pull the mic and I’ll point.

KEVIN ECKSTROM, RELIGION NEWS SERVICE:   Just to follow up on what you were just talking about: about Obama and Prop. 8 and homophobia within the black church. Obama himself has been a little skittish on the gay question, and he doesn’t want to get into it very much. But at the same time, he’s also talked about when he addresses black clergy, he says that they need to get over their own homophobia. And they need to – there’s work to do there in the black church. But if you look at the exit polls from Prop. 8, it was black churchgoers who really voted for this in whole heart. So I guess my question is, do you see any of that changing under Obama? Will he be able to move the black church on these issues at all? Will he even want to or try to? I’m just sort of curious, with him in the bully pulpit, if any of this is going to change?

GLAUDE:   Given his skittishness, I don’t think so. I think part of what needs to happen – and I’ve said this publicly – is that there needs to be a much more vibrant conversation among progressive black Christians with other Christians who hold positions that lead them to vote for Proposition 8. We have a conversation within the black community that’s driven by two extremes: revulsion or indifference. That frames how the discussion takes place in interesting sorts of ways within African-American religious communities. And this is particularly dangerous given the AIDS epidemic that’s destroying communities across the nation – not to identify AIDS with gay communities. But there is a sense that unless we begin to have a much more vibrant conversation within black churches about sexuality, more broadly, we can’t muster up the resources to respond to the epidemic or the crisis that’s really consuming our communities.

So that said, I don’t know if President-elect or President Obama will lead the way in this conversation precisely because I think he’s a bit skittish, not only on the gay issue. I think he’s a bit skittish in terms of being identified with a certain, particular kind of cultural locus. That is to say, if he finds himself in the middle of that discussion, he’s going to find himself in the middle of a much broader discussion about race. I think there’s a kind of general evasiveness vis-à-vis this issue. This is why the issue of which church he’s going to attend is so freighted, it seems to me.

Part of what I’m suggesting here is that I don’t want to suggest to someone like my sister that she cannot hold the position that she holds, and she cannot make the argument in the way that she wants to make the argument about the position she wants to hold. I think I can make a counterargument on Christian grounds to her as to why she ought not to hold that position. That’s a different kind of move to say – in order for her to put forward her position in public space, she must translate it in the way that it’s publicly accessible. That’s a different kind of move to me. So, but –

CROMARTIE:  Mike Allen, you’re up next, Mike Allen, and then I think Lauren and Kirsten – I don’t know, maybe you got your questions in earlier but Mike Allen’s up.

MIKE ALLEN, POLITICO :   Professor, thank you for challenging us. And you seem to be skeptical of the idea that it’s still true that Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week and I was just hoping you could just talk a little bit about how true or untrue that still is.

GLAUDE:  Well, I was just trying to hedge my – my instinct – my intuition is that it’s still – Friday night’s probably as segregated too; Saturday night too. I just don’t have the exact figures so I didn’t want to just state it, you know.

ALLEN:   Okay, thank you. And I was – I was very intrigued by what you said about the former customs about burials. And I wonder if you could talk about other –

GLAUDE:   I’m sorry, I didn’t hear that one.

ALLEN:   You pointed out that it used to be that African-Americans would not be buried in white – by white congregations. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about other remnants that we still see of practices like that.

GLAUDE:  Well, I mean, there are remnants of it – there are senses in which burial grounds are often associated with particular religious institutions, yes? And those institutions bear the characteristics of a legacy of racial segregation. And so the very ways in which Americans, to this day, recognize their dead – the various rituals that we engage in – are often rituals that take place within very segregated physical spaces. And that’s still today.

ALLEN:   Right. And then, more broadly, are there other customs like that, other practices where we still see the remnants of segregation – the customs and practices of our churches?

GLAUDE:   I suspect that there probably are but I would say less so. I have to think a little bit more about so I can give you an example. It will come to me in a minute.

CROMARTIE:   Okay, Rachel Martin is next.

RACHEL MARTIN, ABC NEWS:  I have a couple of questions. The first – you’ll forgive me as I try to talk through I think what you were saying. I hear you saying – and that’s more a statement of my inability to grasp, not your clarity. I hear you saying –

GLAUDE:  That was nice of you.

MARTIN:   – if religion shapes or informs your opinion about an issue like abortion, then you owe it to your religion to make that argument in the public sphere in that way using that language and basing it on those religious tenets.

GLAUDE:   Absolutely.

MARTIN:   If you don’t, you are somehow being un-Christian, A, and number two, you’re actually never going to resolve the differences because you haven’t argued it in an authentic way that truly represents your opinion. And if I’m hearing that correctly, how does – and I think this is speaking to what you were saying as well, Kirsten, earlier – how does that work in a secular society?

GLAUDE:   Well, let’s just challenge the premise.

CROMARTIE:   In 25 words or less.

GLAUDE:  Yeah. In 25 words or less?

CROMARTIE: �� I’m just kidding.

GLAUDE:  We have to challenge the premise that it’s actually secular, that’s the first thing. We know that “god talk” organizes much of our deliberations – even though there is a kind of presumption of methodical atheism informing public deliberation. We know “god talk” circulates throughout. So I want to challenge the notion that we live in a secular society that requires, in some significant way, the disciplining of “non-secular commitments.” Part of what I’m trying to suggest is that if we are going to create a space for genuine democratic deliberation, people need to be explicit about the reasons that they actually hold for the positions that they are taking. And we need to be able to engage in a kind of conversation about those reasons. It is incumbent upon me, or me as a kind of “secularist” to make an effort to understand the position of the non-secularist who is putting forward a view that same-sex marriage is evil or homosexuality is an abomination.

And I think there are resources available to folks who are not Christian and folks who are Christian. For example, to engage them on the grounds in which they’re putting forth the argument. I don’t think it resolves much if you ban those sorts of claims from the public domain. We just have to deal with it, it seems to me.

MARTIN:  And then, I have second question that’s about the role of –

GLAUDE:  Sure – that’s not satisfying, I’m sure.

MARTIN:  No, but we’ll take it up later. (Chuckles.) I wanted to ask you about the role of black churches, understanding that there’s a lot of diversity when I say that. If this country is to ever get to a point where it has made peace with its past and its present, when it comes to racial divides, what is the role of religion and in particular the black church. Can we have segregated churches at all and be in a country where racism doesn’t exist. In order for racism to not exist, can the black church exist, if it is premised upon this division. If it came about as a result of white supremacy, does it need to go away before we can become something different and better hopefully.

GLAUDE:   It’s an interesting question. So the same holds for white churches?

MARTIN:   Yeah.

GLAUDE:  It just seems to me that part of what we have to be very careful of as we aspire to a genuine post-racial moment, is that we not lose sight of the cultural differences that matter. I am African-American, I’ve been raised in a particular tradition; there’s a particular tradition of struggle that’s crucial to how I understand myself. It offers me a certain set of moral vocabularies in order to understand the world and my interactions with my fellows. And I don’t think that tradition is reducible to racism. It might be an outgrowth – it might be an outcome of racist practices but it’s not reducible to it. So I could still make the case for culturally specific institutions that are valuable – that are treasures – but are not reproductions of a certain kind of racist logic.

It’s almost like – there’s an old19th-century argument William Whipper and others used to use that we need to rid ourselves of race language if we’re going to rid ourselves of racism. We can’t identify difference. We need to stop using language of black, white, color and these sorts of things. And beyond portraying a kind of peculiar sense of the way in which language works, in some significant way, you rob yourself of the kinds of tools to specify the specific conditions under which you live your life. So part of what I’m saying is that we don’t need to get beyond cultural, specific institutions that have rich histories that are meaningful in order to get to a post-racial moment. We need to begin to think about how these can be valued apart from the hierarchical arrangements that white supremacy instantiates.

If we can do that, then I could be black and proud without that being interpreted in a particular sort of way. Does that make sense? All right? Because what worries me is that folk are constantly wanting – how can I put this, and I’m going to put this in as visceral a way that I can. Folks are constantly urging – and I’ll just say “Me,” and that’s a big “Me”, capital “M,” – that in order for us to get to where we need to be, I need to give up “Me.” In order for President Obama to be president of the United States, he has to evade the body he inhabits, which is impossible. We have to – this is the fantasy of a black-less America that Ellison was talking about. And if that’s the precondition for us being released from the sins of our past, then we are doomed to Dante’s hell.

CROMARTIE:  Let me tell you where we are real quickly because there are a lot of you that have got your hands up: Carl Cannon, Kirsten, Lauren, Matt, Jacqui, Mark, Sally, David, Cathy, Barbara.

GLAUDE:  Wow!

CROMARTIE:  And so I’m going to – I’m going to –

GLAUDE:  I’m leaving now, so –

CROMARTIE:   No, I’m not – and there comes E.J., Richard. Here comes everybody. And so I’m going to play my role as moderator to interrupt some a little bit to keep us moving along. I want to get everybody in, and I know a lot of people have got a lot to ask, so – yeah, meaning interrupt the speaker. But also the long-winded questions too, if they get that way. Go ahead, Carl, you’re up next.

CARL CANNON, READER’S DIGEST :   I have a long-winded question. (Laughter.) Eddie, I’d like to contrast two statements of President Bush : one when he was running for president and the other when he’s leaving office – to try and amplify this unease that Kirsten and Rachel and I have with “god talk” that risks sounding exclusive. The first one was December ’99. It’s a debate in Iowa ; some of us were there. Bush is asked for the political philosopher or thinker he most identified with.

GLAUDE:   (Chuckles.) Yeah, I remember that.

CANNON:   He says Christ because he changed my heart. Now – parenthetically – the next day in The Des Moines Register , he said, I thought who had had the most influence on my life – that’s what he heard. Apparently in these debates, they do some wool-gathering. But I’ll give him that. The point is, then the moderator, John Bachman, came back and said, you know, that really wasn’t an answer. He said, well, what do you mean? And Bush said, when you turn your heart and your life over to Christ and you accept Christ as your Savior, it changes your heart. It changes your life and that’s what happened to me. It’s like, you know, it’s a white thing, you wouldn’t understand that kind of answer, you know. (Laughter.) But this electrified evangelical Christians – they talked about it. But it alienated Libertarian conservatives and mainstream Protestants and alarmed Jews because it seemed exclusive.

Now, real quick, last week, Michael and I went to an event , Rick Warren gave President Bush a medal . And he was extolled by Bono and former President Clinton and by Barack Obama in these testimonials for saving or extending the lives of 2 or 3 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. And then he was asked why he did it. And he was asked by Rick Warren of all – isn’t there a national security component to all this money in AIDS and HIV/AIDS? And Bush allows that there was: that if terrorism takes root when there’s no hope and in these communities there could be no hope. Bush said, there’s an economic thing too. He said, having these thriving African economies would help our country and theirs. But then the third reason he said, the biggest is morality. And he started to – he sort of did this flight of fancy that Bush does. He said, you know, there’s a higher government. And he realized that didn’t sound quite right. He said a higher calling, and then he just goes – God. (Laughter.)

Nobody would be offended by that. And he’d given these other two reasons. I submit to you that in the public square, the Bush in 2008 has this about right and the Bush in 1999 alarmed people. But I’d like you to respond.

GLAUDE:  Right, part of the question I would have to ask is how – what are we to do with the earlier Bush. What are we to say to him? You can’t say that? And on what grounds can we say that? And then what happens when we make that move? So I’ll give you an example. There is an interesting way in which the religious right coalesced around how it was characterized. What it began to – or shall we saw form it’s claims and complaints in a way that bore resemblance to civil rights claims. Our exclusion constitutes a violation on the lines of civil rights exclusions. I can’t be who I am in this particular space because you won’t allow me to. What follows from that for the meaning of democracy?

Interestingly enough, some of them are anti-liberal at their heart – aren’t necessarily committed to a liberal project in any specific sense.

CROMARTIE:  You mean liberal, small “l” –

GLAUDE:   Small “l.” Yeah, small “l,” not liberal in terms of –

CROMARTIE:  Right.

GLAUDE:  So part of what I’m thinking – no. No, I’m talking about anti-liberal in terms of liberalism.

CROMARTIE:   That’s what I mean.

GLAUDE:  No, okay, all right. Great – I just wanted to make sure. The question becomes now, what do we do? I’m asking it again, what do we do with fellow citizens whose genuine reason, for not necessarily not answering the question – direct question, but giving you an expression of what motivates her to act in the public domain. What then do we do? Could it be necessary at that point to ask a subsequent question to begin to get – I’m sorry, go ahead.

CROMARTIE:   No, no – you – I’ve just got about four people doing this to me –

GLAUDE:  Well, that’s good! (Inaudible) – them out.

CROMARTIE:   – and that means they want to – they want to – and I’m – Rachel and Cathy and then others are waiting.

MARTIN:   Does the president, though, as the president, abdicate his right to do that? It’s one thing for “Joe Six-Pack” to say –

GLAUDE:  He wasn’t the president then – at the moment though.

CROMARTIE:   He was a candidate.

MARTIN:   In general, I would put to you, as the president, do you – maybe – you don’t get to do that anymore. You don’t get to make arguments with that language because you represent something bigger.

CROMARTIE:  Don’t answer yet, I’m going to get a few people in.

MARTIN:  Sorry.

CROMARTIE:   No, no – Kirsten and then Cathy I’ve got you down. You’re on the list. I’ve got about six people saying they have little point.

POWERS: I’ll be brief. I just keep hearing you say that people are being kept from saying something. I just don’t think people are being kept from saying anything. I think Christians are free to say whatever they want. Muslims are free to say whatever they want. The idea that they don’t have to offer any other reason I think is problematic. For example, let’s take gay marriage. They can say, well, the Bible says that it shouldn’t be allowed and therefore it shouldn’t be allowed. The Bible also says that you shouldn’t get divorced except under very narrow circumstances, and we don’t change our laws to reflect that. In fact, we have no-fault divorce throughout the country. I could go through a lot of other things that happen in the Bible. I find it a little disingenuous, frankly, when people do come out – and I’m very serious Christian, so I’m not saying this being judgmental against Christians – but I have a problem when people cherry-pick issues. They come out and just announce, we have to have laws against this; we have change the constitution because I believe this.

GLAUDE:  This is precisely the kind of response I think is requisite. I want to disagree with your initial claim because how I framed it was the very ways in which Senator – then Senator Obama, now President-elect Obama’s arguments around how religious claims make their way into public deliberation. He put some constraints on it. He said that in order to make a certain kind of claim that’s informed by religious reasoning, that religious reasoning has to be publicly accessible – it has to be universalizable. That’s what he said. To that extent, he’s just like Neuhaus. Neuhaus says very clearly that one cannot rely on the authority of revelation as a way of making certain kinds of public claims.

POWERS:  And do you disagree with that or agree with it?

GLAUDE:   I’m trying to say that that move doesn’t resolve the initial problem. The initial problem is religious difference – religious plurality, religious claims bumping up against each other. You don’t tidy up the mess by excluding certain kinds of claims from bumping up against each other. We have to create a much more vibrant deliberative space so that we can begin to interrogate those sorts of claims to ask for further reasoning. What I don’t want are folk retreating to their private domains and then entering the public domain stealthily – doing things under the guise of different kinds of reasons as opposed for the reasons that they actually hold.

CROMARTIE: I know Father Neuhaus’ work very well also, and I just want to make clarification that Neuhaus was saying the fundamentalists bring public arguments, not just biblical arguments. I thought I heard then-Senator Obama say the same thing. You’re disagreeing with both of those.

GLAUDE:  No, I’m just saying it’s not sufficient.

CROMARTIE:  Okay, it’s not sufficient.

JACOB WEISBERG, SLATE GROUP:  (Inaudible) – brought up a point here – if you hope to be persuasive to people who don’t share a religious view – if you have to figure out a way to generalize the claim, which is not the same thing as saying it’s inadmissible or unacceptable – you know that speech better than I do, but I vaguely remember it from the time. He was speaking to a group of liberal religious leaders and he was saying, what is the place of your views? He was saying, if you hope to have a bigger voice, you have to be able to speak to people who don’t share them. And the way to do that is to generalize the plan.

GLAUDE:  I thought it was a stronger version of the claim.

CROMARTIE:  I think you’re right.

GLAUDE:  That weaker claim was there but I think a stronger version of the claim was actually in the – (inaudible, cross talk).

CROMARTIE:  Let me get a few more people in here before we get too deeply philosophical, which is fine with me, but I just got about 12 hands up and everybody’s doing like this, so.

GLAUDE:  I might quit.

CROMARTIE:   My next person is Lauren and then Matt and Jacqui and Sally and Mark and others. But Lauren Green.

GREEN:  Let’s go to the black church. Are the black churches – are black people black first or are they Christian first? And I pose that even to the white churches. Are they white first or are they Christians first? Is their main vent to preach the gospel or is their main vent to preach the gospel of whiteness or blackness?

GLAUDE:   I think it’s important to understand any witness historically and contextually. I tried to make the argument that the adjectives matter –in the sense that there is something called African-American or black Christianity. It, in its particulars, stands as a refutation of white Christianity. It’s a claim that white Christianity is idolatrous, at its root. To the extent to which we can begin to flesh out theological positions, to begin to flesh out liturgical kinds of differences and the like, we could. But the basic claim is that historically, African-American Christianity emerges within the context in which they are literally expelled from the ecclesia of white Christianity – of white Christian institutions.

GREEN:  But do the blacks just run the risk of doing the same thing, of creating –

GLAUDE:  I don’t think so, absolutely not. No, I don’t think so.

CROMARTIE:   Matt? Matt is next and then Jackie.

MATTHEW CONTINETTI, THE WEEKLY STANDARD :   I find it a little bit hard to believe that Christ wasn’t adopted or appropriated to – on behalf of the oppressed up until James Cone wrote his book. I’m a little bit worried –

GLAUDE:   I didn’t make that claim.

CONTINETTI:   Well, you said that this was the first time that this happened, that that’s what he’s expressing. What are some of the precedents leading into black liberation theology? What else was in the political mix when he wrote his book in the middle of the 20th century? Then, speak to the larger black church today, besides the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. He’s clearly descended from that line of theological thinking, but clearly, he’s not the only option. So what are some of the alternative options? Those are my two questions.

GLAUDE: So the first point was that Cone writes in 1969 Black Theology and Black Power , and it’s an effort to translate, as I said, the prophetic black church tradition into the idiom of black power. It’s a response, in interesting sorts of ways, to the secularization of black public space. And what I mean by secularization is not the privatization of religious belief, but the kind of pluralization of belief. One of the interesting references in that text is to Ron Karenga’s “Us Movement” and the kinds of new pieties of black power that were emerging – Kwanzaa , a certain kind of indebtedness to the sources of one’s being. So these new rituals of blackness that were emerging at the time that, in some significant way, called into question the relevance of a certain kind of Christian witness – black preachers as hucksters, as hustlers and the like. We saw that visual representation throughout the time – just think about Richard Pryor’s representation of the preacher in Car Wash . I hope you remember that.

CROMARTIE:  Oh, yeah. I can do the scene.

GLAUDE:   Oh good, well, I can, too. (Laughter.) What’s interesting about that moment when Daddy Rich sits on the shoeshine box – on his right shoulder is a picture of King and on his left shoulder is a picture of Daddy Rich. So there are these different kinds of traditions of black Christianity that are coming. I think the context is this really interesting moment where we have to begin to ask where black Christianity is being de-centered.

CROMARTIE:  What’s the center? What’s it being de-centered from?

GLAUDE:  It’s being de-centered from being the center of black life – it’s being pushed aside; it’s competing with other dimensions of black life.

CROMARTIE:   Like politics.

GLAUDE:   Exactly. The second question was, what are some of the alternatives? Remember, I said that one of the interesting things about the Jeremiah Wright instance is that not only did he say that he was defending the black church, in which there was an identity established between him and the black church as such, he became a stand-in for the black church – a shorthand among those of us who were writing about this moment. What happened as a result was a kind of a flattening of all of the differences within black church life. So the fact is that we have black televangelism, the black electronic church – folk like T.D. Jakes, folk like Creflo Dollar, folk like Bishop Eddie Long – a kind of interesting development within black religious life that’s not reducible to some kind of socially charged, liberal, Christian orientation.

CROMARTIE:   The point was, Senator Obama was a member of one church, not all those churches. So that’s why there was this utter preoccupation with Jeremiah Wright.

CONTINETTI:  And it’s Wright who was saying he was the black church.

GLAUDE:   Right, and that’s what I’m saying. In both instances, his claim led to a flattening. Remember, I said, you see, but – you don’t know. Part of it was, listen to what he’s saying but, more importantly, look at them! They’re shouting! There was this, in terms of the framing, of just how the worship service was taking place and how that was then characterized in interesting sort of ways: this is a site where something very strange is going on. And it’s interesting, too, the same kind of reaction – not same – but a similar kind of reaction was taking place around Sarah Palin’s Pentecostalism. We didn’t know what to make of that. These folks are speaking tongues and doing all this other stuff –

CONTINETTI:   But I think it really was what they were saying, and I’ll give you an example. Father Pflager , for example, was just as controversial – he’s white, and he’s saying exactly –

GLAUDE:   Depending on who you talk to.

CONTINETTI:   (Chuckles.) But he’s saying the same things and equally offensive to wide swaths of America. So it’s not necessarily –

GLAUDE:  In the black church tradition, I mean, Father Pflager in Chicago is a specific – even though he’s represented in a particular sort of way – when that footage shows him doing that and crying and then they cut –

CONTINETTI:   But you would agree that if Obama had been a member of Reverend Jake’s congregation, that controversy would have – there would have been no controversy. It was –

GLAUDE:  More than – yeah, probably, because you wouldn’t have had the loop.

CONTINETTI:  Wouldn’t have had what?

GLAUDE:  You wouldn’t have had those sermons, more than likely. It’s just different –

CONTINETTI:  Yeah, but it was what was being said that was the –

GLAUDE:   But it’s not reducible to what is being said, in my view. You think it’s simply that; I’m trying to suggest to you that it became much more than that. Maybe I’m wrong, but I –

CROMARTIE:  Okay, let’s get some other in here. Jacqui, you’re next and then Mark and Sally. What’s that? Yeah, you’re on there. And others are on there, I promise – Cathy, Barbara, E.J., Richard – David’s in there.

JACQUI SALMON, THE WASHINGTON POST :  I wanted to circle back around to your discussion of the stories that were done about what church Obama was going to go to. As someone who wrote one of those stories, I was curious about something.

We called – we must have called probably 16 or 18 churches in Washington, D.C., and talked to them. The white churches responded. They showed us the letters they were sending him; they really wanted him to come to their church, made a pitch. Black churches wouldn’t play. They did not return our phone calls. When they did, they said they hadn’t written those letters, didn’t want anything to do with this. They didn’t want to go anywhere near this. And I don’t mean to appoint you the spokesman for Washington area black churches –

GLAUDE:  Thank you.

SALMON:  But I wanted to know, given your background, whether you had any insights on this. Why were they uncomfortable with this?

GLAUDE:   I can’t say anything definitive about why they were uncomfortable. My intuition is a kind of suspicion about the motivation driving the question.

SALMON:  Of us? The motivation of us?

GLAUDE:  Yeah. Especially given what happened at Trinity.

SALMON:  In other words, unpack that a little bit. What do you mean?

GLAUDE:  That is to say there is a certain characterization of black church practice that can – that could have easily fallen into a certain characterization, of President-elect Obama, of the church itself, and black communities generally.

SALMON:  They didn’t trust us?

GLAUDE:  No, not at all. That’s my intuition.

UNIDENTIFIED:  We’d go through their tapes. We’d sit through their service.

GLAUDE:  Right. And then you’ll just start showing up to the church.

UNIDENTIFIED :  Yeah.

GLAUDE:  And start, you know, looking at, you know the bulletin and showing up to funerals. Yeah, you know, these sorts of things. So, I think there’s just a general hermeneutic of suspicion.

UNIDENTIFIED :  Mm-hmm.

GLAUDE:  A healthy hermeneutic of suspicion in this regard. (Chuckles.)

CROMARTIE:  Okay. Mark? Mark’s next and then Sally Quinn.

MARK KATKOV, CBS NEWS:  If I could get back to the beginning of your talk, when you were presenting Romney and Obama in the same group – this notion that religiosity and revelation can be separated in the public sphere. During the campaign, I talked to a lot of both liberal and conservative evangelicals after those speeches. And, the liberal evangelicals said, yes absolutely right. The conservative evangelicals, by and large, were very cynical about both of them. They said, no, what they’re really saying is that their revelation is not our revelation.

GLAUDE:   Hmm.

KATKOV:  It’s a false claim, and it’s unsustainable. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow from John whether – how that played out in the actual vote. How would you respond to their response? Are they right?

GLAUDE:   No, I think at that point it becomes the occasion to begin to have an argument, to begin to have a conversation. On what grounds would you say – that their revelation is not your revelation. Both of you identify as Christians. How would you then differentiate your view from theirs? Are you making the claim that they’re not Christian? If not, then what role might their understanding of revelation play? In other words, it becomes the occasion for a substantive and hopefully nuanced discussion. Now, the assumption is that, typically, folks who hold that view are not up to nuanced discussions. At that point their views, as the late Richard Rorty would say, constitutes a conversation stopper. Maybe I, naively perhaps, am not committed to that notion. You frown.

CROMARTIE:  No, I’m not frowning. I never frown in Key West.

GLAUDE:  (Chuckles.) You see how I’m beginning to answer the question, or am I evading it? Those moments of marking hard differences for me become moments for democratic deliberation, not moments to shut down democratic deliberation – even though our typical response is that those moments are actually shutting down deliberation. Right? I want to say it’s precisely at that moment that the hard work of democratic conversation begins.

CROMARTIE:   And let me just make an advertisement for strong democratic deliberation. If you go to pewresearch.org/pewresearch-org/religion – (laughter) – you can read the deliberation that we had here a couple of years ago with the leading authority on Mormonism in America, Richard Bushman – for three hours on Mormonism. That was a very civil moment of democratic deliberation. I do want to say that we did a whole session on Mormonism with Bushman. It was outstanding. But anyway, Sally, I’m sorry did –

GLAUDE:  Did that get at the answer to your question or no?

KATKOV:   Yeah, at this point. At lot of the folks I spoke to said it was really just a play for votes. And they were deeply cynical about it.

GLAUDE:  Oh, yeah. And you know, on a certain level, you have to say that perhaps they’re right. But for me – I said this at lunch today – if your interest is not about who wins the White House but rather about democracy as such. My interest has always been throughout this process:  how do we talk about the civic energies, civic democratic energies, requisite to take – to keep us from falling over the precipice? How can we begin to talk about everyday, ordinary folk engaging in a democratic process in such a way where they not only feel invested, but they’re making meaningful decisions and engaged in meaningful exchange about their well-being? And part of what I want to say is that my sister – she would be so angry with me right now – but my sister and I have heated discussions –

CROMARTIE:   On the record?

GLAUDE:   On the record. We have heated discussions, and I think many of us have those sorts of discussions in our families, in our personal relationships. I can see how those can be modeled more broadly so that we don’t have what we have in California right now around Proposition 8.

CROMARTIE:  Sally Quinn is next.

GLAUDE:  But maybe that’s –

CROMARTIE:  And then Richard Starr and Cathy Grossman.

SALLY QUINN, THE WASHINGTON POST :  I want to get back to your opening statement about Obama’s speech because, again, I’m not totally sure I understand what you were talking about. I read that speech a lot. I read it again about two weeks ago. I read it because I thought it was at the time pitch-perfect. I’m speaking as someone who was an atheist until about two or three years ago, and so I’m always – I’ve got my ear out always for any kind of –

CROMARTIE:  Pitch-perfect speeches?

QUINN:  Yeah. (Laughter.) What he did was – first of all, the point he was making which I thought was brilliant to a group of Democrats – say we’re not going to let the Republicans own this. We’re going to take it back in the same way that he took back the flag. It was like the Republicans owned religion and the flag. Excuse me, but you don’t own it. We’re going to take it back. It seemed to me that that was more or less the simple message. But the other message is that this is a country that’s founded on freedom of religion, and that’s what we’re here for. We will accept everybody, and he specifically talked about believers and non-believers. I didn’t feel that there was any exclusion in any way. I also didn’t feel that it was tolerant because I think tolerant is a bad word. I think tolerant is sort of an arrogant word: we will tolerate you but not totally accept you.

GLAUDE:  Mm-hmm.

QUINN:  I thought it was completely embracing of everyone and totally pluralistic in a way that I have never heard anybody speak about religion – any sort of public personality speak about religion in this country. Compared to Romney’s speech, which I thought essentially disenfranchised anybody in this country who basically was not a Christian –

GLAUDE:  Really?

QUINN:   Certainly – I felt that way when I listened to it. That was my perception. Not only that, but certainly not people who were secular in any way. Did he not make a statement that there is no –

GLAUDE:  Now, that –

QUINN:   – freedom without religion, there is no religion without freedom.

GLAUDE:  Right.

QUINN:  I thought that was appalling. I couldn’t believe that anybody had said that. That’s what I mean about disenfranchising a huge number of people because of – there are probably 13 percent of this country who are non-believers and a lot more who are non-believers who won’t admit it.

CROMARTIE:  By the way, I would say quickly, Sally. Governor Romney did come out about three months ago and say, I made a big mistake in that speech.

QUINN:  Yeah.

CROMARTIE:  One thing I did was – I didn’t say you’re also free not to believe.

QUINN:  Right. It was a big mistake.

CROMARTIE:   Yup.

QUINN:  And it was –

CROMARTIE:  Big mistake.

QUINN:  But I –

CROMARTIE:  If he’d come to this seminar, he wouldn’t have made that mistake.

(Laughter.)

QUINN:   I don’t think you can – I couldn’t compare the two but also because I didn’t feel anything that was at all exclusive about Obama’s speech –

GLAUDE:   Wow.

QUINN:  – even if I had been a devout Christian from any denomination. Also, I just want to ask you one more question. Where do you think Obama should go to church?

GLAUDE:  Let me answer the – the latter one is easier.

QUINN:  Answer the first one and then – yeah.

GLAUDE:   Whatever, wherever is best for his babies.

QUINN:  What?

CROMARTIE:   His children.

GLAUDE:  Wherever, whatever is best for his children.

QUINN:   Oh.

GLAUDE:  I know he’s a politician, but I’m a religious naturalist in the great tradition of George Santayana .

QUINN:  What does that mean?

GLAUDE:  I don’t necessarily need a transcendent god in order to understand the beauty of the world, but I like these stories. These stories mean so much to me.

QUINN:  Mm-hmm.

GLAUDE:   They orient me to the world. They become the source of what I take to be the beautiful. They allow me to understand myself as an ethical and moral agent as well. But I understand how religious vocabularies provide us with the languages requisite to weather the storms. As he’s raising these babies, I hope he takes that as the paramount consideration as opposed to the political question. But that’s, again, me being naïve.

In terms of the first question, I can concede this claim that Obama’s speech was pitched perfectly and Romney’s was off-key. I can concede that. But I think there are elements of exclusion in the strong version – I’ll take Jacob’s point, at its face, if you don’t mind me calling –

WEISBERG:  (Inaudible.)

GLAUDE:  (Chuckles.) If there was a weaker claim, that it was about persuasiveness, I’ll grant that. But my thinking is that the stronger claim is that religious claims in public spaces must be subjected – must be accessible to public reason. To the extent that he’s making that claim, a certain kind of fundamentalist belief will have a hard time being expressed in the public space, and that’s an exclusion.

QUINN:  I’m just interested in Jacob’s and E.J.’s and Jeffrey’s view of that. I mean, both of you being Jewish and E.J. being Catholic.

WEISBERG:   I remember thinking about that – (inaudible) – speech was brilliant for a bunch of reasons. I mean, it was –

CROMARTIE:  Pull the mic over please, Jacob.

WEISBERG:  It was one of Obama’s greatest speeches, but it – two things – did what you said. It took back the political ground that liberals have conceded to conservatives, and it – the point of it as I understood – was trying to give liberals a way to talk about religion and politics. I thought it did that very effectively. But I also thought, as someone who identifies more as an atheist and a secularist than as someone who’s Jewish – although I am, that it was the first thing I’d read in a long time that articulated a way that religious people could talk to me. You know, in a way that I would find persuasive, that we could enter into a dialogue on sort of neutral terms as it were.

E.J. DIONNE, THE WASHINGTON POST :  Can I just for the sake of the record – I found this relevant passage in Obama’s speech. What he says is, “This brings to me to my second point. Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal rather than religion-specific values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or invoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.”

QUINN:  Right, right.

DIONNE:  So it’s a strong claim he makes. I agree with what Jacob said about his speech. I think it’s certainly the best speech any Democrat has given on this since I can remember.

WEISBERG:  Yeah, I grant that.

DIONNE:  I thought that the problem with Romney’s speech is he was trying to do two things at the same time that were incompatible: He didn’t want people to judge him on his Mormonism, but he couldn’t give Kennedy’s speech and say religion is a private thing because the evangelical conservatives whose votes he was seeking in Iowa do not believe that. And so there was a contradiction at the heart of Romney’s speech that he never resolved. That’s why I think even if he had come to our sessions, he still would have said the same thing. Because what was on his mind was, how do I get through the Iowa caucuses? And he was right – as it turned out – he was right to worry about getting through the Iowa caucuses.

CROMARTIE:  Okay, back to – did we finish? I think we got an answer out of Sally’s question.

GLAUDE:  I hope so.

CROMARTIE:  I’ll keep moving with Richard Starr and then David and Cathy.

RICHARD STARR, THE WEEKLY STANDARD :   I have a short-winded question.

CROMARTIE:  Oh good, good.

STARR:  It may complicate the discussion, but it is short-winded. Is it not the case that the strong claim is not simply something that pastor Neuhaus and candidate Obama are making but is in fact embedded in modern jurisprudence? Such that if your sister came forth and won that argument with you, basing it on scripture, and persuaded millions like her, this is an invitation to a judge to say, I’m overturning this because this is an improper basis on which to make public policy.

GLAUDE:   Yes.

CROMARTIE:  Your answer is yes? Well, that’s one of the shortest questions and the shortest answers we’ve ever had. Thank you, Richard.

GLAUDE:  Nevertheless, though, folks still give those sorts of reasons, yes?

STARR:  Sure, I actually am sympathetic to your point about believers coming clean on the reasons for their arguments. But by doing so, they may in fact be guaranteeing that they will lose the argument in the public square. They may win it democratically. They may persuade a majority of their fellow citizens, but they may have guaranteed a public policy loss by winning it in that way. I think that may have been part of the motivation for – certainly for Neuhaus and his book.

CROMARTIE:  Mm-hmm. It’s clear that we need to do another session for those who are staying after Tuesday afternoon on natural law and the history of Christian understanding of the natural law, both Protestant and Catholic. We’ll do that next May, a session on understanding public reason, natural law, in the Protestant, Catholic and Jewish tradition – and Islamic tradition also. We’ll cover everybody. David, you’re next and then Cathy Grossman.

DAVID KUHN, POLITICO :  How you doing? We actually got into some of this last night.

GLAUDE:   Last night.

KUHN:  Jumping off some of your comments today – my questions have changed as the day has progressed, in the last half hour – on the subject of black churches. I think you have to separate the movement that Wright comes from – which comes from this more aggressive, assertive, civil rights response – those who felt King wasn’t moving fast enough and so on. He was a theological – it was a theological, Malcom X -esque religious movement that is very recent from the other discussion about the black church.

And the reason I say that is that there seems to be this – and I don’t know what you’re saying on this front – but there seems to be odd point if you’re – obviously the black church eventually rose out of the fact they couldn’t worship with whites. But there was also immediately a cultural component. It wasn’t simply segregation: like the call and response comes from indigenous African religious, like modern Christianity or Judaism. They have vestiges of early pagan religions that they formed out of, like Easter has it, Passover.

These – and by pagan I should say animist or polytheistic. My question for you is that you would argue though today that these traditions aren’t simply racially based, but they’re in fact a form – or would you argue this – but they’re a form of cultural – they’re almost a branch of Christianity themselves in a very small sense. And therefore, as we become more integrated and if a white person goes to these churches. Just because a white person would go to these churches, it’ll still maybe be a different form of Christianity in practice in how the church service goes than the white Methodist service occurring two miles away. And I’m sorry if this is confusing but –

GLAUDE:   No, no. I thought my answer to Rachel in some ways echoed this point, when she said that should we see the disappearance of –

CROMARTIE:   Would you mind speaking up?

GLAUDE:   – would we see the disappearance of the black church if we reached this particular moment in our history? And I said no, I still think of it as a cultural institution that bears the imprint of a certain kind of history that has meanings that aren’t reducible to racist practices. I thought that’s what I was saying there. And so there’s also a story that – and I didn’t quite emphasize it but I do so in my work – there is of course a way to talk about the emergence of black denominationalism as being an outgrowth of racist practices within white-American churches.

But those denominations are also reflective of an increasing maturation of black communities within the United States. When we begin to think about black churches as the site for the formation of the beginnings of black civil society, they’re not reducible to racist practices but they cannot be talked about apart from them. Because in fact it is that context which calls it all into being. So black churches provide in interesting sorts of ways the first public space for African-Americans to engage in the kind of deliberations around the circumstances of their conditions of living.

And to that extent it becomes a site for a certain kind of exercise of citizenship, a certain kind of democratic participation.

KUHN:  So let me just very quickly then, and I’ll then let go of the questions –

KUHN:  If you accept that there is a cultural component to these churches certainly that came out of racial segregation, they are not that today. Though visually they are, as you point out – the most segregated hour. And so that’s the question: Do you think it’s incumbent on Barack Obama to not attend a mostly African-American church because of the visual symbolism it gives out at a superficial level certainly? And if it’s not, isn’t this a question that any minority group in any way faces when they assume the presidency – it has to deal with a “majority.”

In other words, are political reasons –

GLAUDE:   Right.

KUHN:  – he’s now a politician, he’s the president-elect then soon president. And so –

KUHN:  – symbolism matters, no?

GLAUDE:  Right, it – absolutely. But couldn’t it very well be as symbolically meaningful for Obama to say I’m attending a black church and it shouldn’t matter to you?

KUHN:   Certainly. I guess I’m curious what you think.

GLAUDE:  Well, I think –

KUHN:   I think that that’s a –

GLAUDE:   – that would be a great gesture.

KUHN:  Okay.

GLAUDE:  I’m going to go to this black church, we’re going to worship and you know what America? It doesn’t mean that much.

KUHN:   But would you prefer that he did that?

GLAUDE:  I would prefer that he did that. But I would also prefer that he goes to – attends a church, whether it’s black, white, green, purple or yellow, that fills his soul; that fills his needs. Because he’s the most powerful man in the world, and he’s going to need some soul-filling – some soul tender-care – (laughter) – some tender care of his soul.

There’s a second part of your question where you talked about – you wanted to make a hard distinction between black liberation theology and this other tradition. That hard distinction has to be called into question. It’s not that hard. It’s just like we make a hard distinction between black power and the civil rights movement when most of the participants in black power were veterans of the civil rights movement. So we have to begin to see this as much more continuous, as opposed to discontinuous. It’s just a particular iteration of it that’s really, really fascinating.

CROMARTIE:   Cathy Grossman is next.

CATHY GROSSMAN, USA TODAY :  Okay, first I’m going to deal with what was my short follow-up question to an earlier question, where I think it was Carl who brought up – was it Carl or Rachel – who brought up the – when George Bush –

GLAUDE:  Carl.

GROSSMAN:  – talked about Jesus Christ and then later on – recently – attributed things to God. And I actually think and I wonder if you agree or disagree, that people react very differently when a politician says Jesus Christ than they do when they say God.

GLAUDE:  Yeah.

GROSSMAN:  Because virtually 90-something-plus America has some idea of God, but not everybody agrees about Jesus.

GLAUDE:   I agree.

GROSSMAN:   People react very differently to those terms. I’ll go to my original question, which was: The people who opposed Proposition 8 , the people who did not want to see Proposition 8 pass, and did not manage to recognize with the clear onrush of black vote, Hispanic vote, Mormon vote in various corners that there needed to be some communication with those communities – was their failure to reach out to these communities just ignorance? They just thought, well, black people are going to vote for this and we don’t have to worry about it. Or was it racism or just incompetence on their part that they did not speak to these concerns and make their case to the evangelical block and Hispanic communities?

GLAUDE: I don’t think it was racism – to remove the second issue. I think there was a sense in which the proponents for Proposition 8 out-organized the opponents. I can’t remember – as I recall there was a last-minute effort that recast the initiative in such a way that inclined people to vote for it. In other words, I thought that what’s at the heart of it is that they were outspent and they were out-mobilized. Thirdly, there was and there remains a decidedly conservative dimension to African-American evangelicals and African-American churchgoers who came out in dramatic numbers in support of Obama and that extended to their position on Proposition 8.

Part of what needs to happen, of course, is a kind of vibrant debate among African-American Christians who opposed Proposition 8 and their friends, with their fellow citizens on this issue. That’s how I would begin to answer that question. I think they were out-organized.

CROMARTIE:   We’re about to go on a break in a moment but we have Barbara Bradley Hagerty and then Byron York and E.J. – did you get your –

DIONNE:   Go ahead and kick me over the break, I’ll – (inaudible).

CROMARTIE:  I might kick you over the break but no, I – (laughter) – we’ll see if we can get Barbara and Byron in and then we’ll take a break.

BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO:   Really, really interesting talk – thank you so much.

HAGERTY:  I’m going to ask two brief questions.

GLAUDE:  Sure.

HAGERTY:  Well, they may or not – they may be brief and they may not. But let me just – when I was thinking about the race speech , you know, what then-Senator Obama said was Jeremiah Wright’s mistake was basically that he didn’t acknowledge the progress that’s occurred.

GLAUDE:  Right – (Chuckles.)

HAGERTY:   I’m wondering what kind of percentage of the black church would side with Wright or would agree with Wright versus Obama. You know, Obama casts himself as kind of a Joshua generation. So how big is the Joshua generation versus the more liberation theology Moses generation? Go ahead – and do you mind if I follow up after that?

CROMARTIE:  Go ahead and give the follow-up now.

GLAUDE:  And that’s a powerful question.

HAGERTY:  The second one is – and maybe it’s just I’m over interpreting – I’d love to know if my colleagues think I’m right – but I really did notice something fundamentally different in this election. That was something I thought would never really happen, except in the mind of Jim Wallace , which was the rise of the religious left . You heard about the Matthew 25 Network and you saw white Protestants, many of them white evangelicals, organizing around this notion of social gospel – which is huge in the black church. Then on the other side we have seen in the last couple elections conservative black leaders, religious leaders, siding with more of the evangelicals – mainly on the gay rights issue and on abortion . What I’m wondering is: Are we actually seeing a kind of realignment or a more powerful knitting together of progressive black and progressive whites – motivated by social gospel ideas on the one side – and then the knitting together of conservatives on the other?

CROMARTIE:  Before you answer that, let me say that I think that John Green will have the data on that for us, won’t we, John?

HAGERTY:  My sense is that like 90 percent of blacks voted for Obama, and I don’t think that’s because of religion. I think there were other issues there, but maybe I’m wrong.

GLAUDE:  (Chuckles.)

HAGERTY:   So but –

GLAUDE:  Yep.

CROMARTIE:  But a lot of the data on your question is one of the things that we’re discussing in your session tomorrow, am I right John? Okay.

HAGERTY:  Okay.

GLAUDE:   Just really quickly I think, you know, in just a shameless plug for my book In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America , the last chapter of that –

CROMARTIE:   Say the title again?

GLAUDE:  In a Shade of Blue –

CROMARTIE:  (Laughter.) In a Shade of Blue –

GLAUDE:  Pragmatism – that’s shameless, isn’t it?

CROMARTIE:  No, that’s me doing that, not you.

GLAUDE:  Oh, okay.

CROMARTIE:  In a Shade of Blue , is that what you said?

GLAUDE:  Yeah, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism – (laughter) – and the Politics of Black America .

CROMARTIE:  Okay.

GLAUDE:  I have a chapter in there –

CROMARTIE:   University of Chicago Press? (Laughter.) Got it.

GLAUDE:  The book actually came about as a result of my work with Tavis Smiley on the Covenant with Black America . I went around the country – really having town-hall meetings with folk all around the country trying to create a deliberative space for African-Americans to reflect on their condition. It was a really fascinating moment. The last chapter of that book is titled “The Eclipse of a Black Public”, where I take on John Dewey’s notion of The Public and Its Problems as a kind of framework to describe the moment that we’re in. And the moment that I think we’re in – in black communities – is that the languages, the vocabularies of struggle that were generated under the conditions of the ’60s and ’70s have been fundamentally transformed by the successes and failures of the ’60s and ’70s and by the transformations in the material conditions of black living since then.

So what has happened is that you’ve produced folk like me. I mean I grew up in a household with my mom who had her first baby in the eighth grade and my dad never graduated – graduated only from high school and delivered mail. Now I have an endowed professorship at the age of 40 at Princeton. And Cornel – and I talk with Cory Booker and Cory Booker talks about his journey. Or you talk about Michael Nutter or Adrian Fenty or you talk about all of these folk – these Harvard folk – who are behind the scenes of Obama – the Harvard black cabal, as it were.

There’s this interesting sense that something has fundamentally changed and transformed that we’re trying to mark. The term post-racial, as I said earlier, is a kind of lazy, American way of marking something that’s shifted. When Obama talked about Jeremiah Wright as not acknowledging the progress, he was in an interesting sort of way marking – however deliberately and strategically – marking a generational divide that is confounding black communities right now. That’s really confused an established black political class that is really impacting the various ways in which people imagine struggle. Black folk, particularly Obama, are now using the language of governance as opposed to the language of struggle. So that’s – it’s really a fascinating moment of transition.

HAGERTY:  And do you have a sense for how many, I mean –

GLAUDE:  No, I don’t have a sense of the percentages. But it’s happening in Trinity.

HAGERTY:  Yeah.

GLAUDE: Jeremiah Wright returned to Trinity to reclaim his church, his pulpit; and my classmate, Otis Moss III , who’s just a couple of years younger than I am, is having to deal with a church that’s divided in very fascinating ways between those who were shaped – I call them post-soul babies, and those who were shaped in the context of the struggles of the ’60s and ’70s. This is a really fascinating –

CROMARTIE:  You say Reverend Wright just returned –

GLAUDE:  He’s just returned, he’s not – Otis has not officially –

CROMARTIE:  Is he trying to take himself out of retirement?

GLAUDE:  He’s not – Otis has not officially been appointed.

CROMARTIE:   Uh-oh. Byron you were next and I think –

BYRON YORK, NATIONAL REVIEW :  Well, he didn’t entirely – (inaudible). I remember – I visited Trinity and –

YORK:   I called in June, I think, the person who I had worked with arranging my visit. A couple of weeks later, I called. This was the first person that Reverend Moss had hired, and I call her on her cell phone not at the office. And she says, I’m no longer with Trinity; we’re having a bit of a problem. There’s a deep division and, they had the handoff to Reverend Moss and then Reverend Wright kind of came storming back.

GLAUDE:   I don’t know if that’s been resolved as of yet – John you might know. I’m not sure if that’s been resolved, but it might have by now. I do know that there was an interesting tension there.

CROMARTIE:  Anyway, on this Reverend Wright business –

CROMARTIE:  I mean, the incendiary stuff – the killer words were –

GLAUDE:   “Goddamn America.”

CROMARTIE:   – “Goddamn America” and “chickens coming home to roost.” And after Obama gives his race –

HAGERTY:   I’m sorry, are you starting a new question?

CROMARTIE:  I’m sorry, is it – oh, I’m sorry; you weren’t finished.

HAGERTY:   (Inaudible.)

GLAUDE:  Remind me of the second question again.

HAGERTY:  Do we see this new –

CROMARTIE:  I’m sorry, Barbara.

HAGERTY:  – do we see this new alliance between white and black?

GLAUDE:  Oh, yes. Absolutely, yes. Actually, what’s interesting is that precisely because then-Senator Obama, now President-elect Obama has ascended to the White House, it will fundamentally change the very nature of African-American politics. We know that the voting trends have shown that African-American voters when you control for race tend to actually trend to the right in interesting sorts of ways around issues – around capital punishment, around, shall we say, core social value issues. African-American communities tend to trend towards the right in terms of ideological spectrum.

Now what happens with Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency – it actually releases them in interesting sorts of ways to be a cultivated constituency, in ways that Ken Mehlman understood, but was then dropped in interesting sorts of ways. There is an interesting alignment – I actually blog when I can on Beliefnet.com , a progressive blog of religious and, you know –

CROMARTIE:   Beliefnet.com.

GLAUDE:   Beliefnet.com. You know, Robert Thurman , the Buddhist scholar at Columbia blogs on there as well. There’s a sense in which there are progressive energies among those who hold religious commitments, even those of us who are rather strange in the very ways in which we profess our religious commitments, to say that this is not the sole purview of a particular ideological current. It has led to an interesting kind of alignment. But what’s striking is that we’re beginning to see – it’s starting now, it has to become more intense than that particular strand – engaging in much more substantive conversations with the more evangelical, conservative strand. We must begin to have these kind of internal arguments as to what we mean by Christian witness, as to what we might mean by living the life of Jesus in public. This is a conversation that is beginning to be had, and I hope that the substantive outcomes will be to the benefit of democracy in the U.S.

CROMARTIE:  Byron, you’ll take us into the break and then we’ll take a break at –

GLAUDE:  Back to this Reverend Wright matter.

CROMARTIE:   Yes.

YORK:  Anyway, the incendiary, the killer words were “goddamn America” and “chickens coming home to roost.” So Obama gives this race speech. I remember after the race speech as they were filing out of the room in Philadelphia, I asked a number of black ministers, what their reaction was –

CROMARTIE:   Were you there, Byron?

YORK:  Yeah. And they all defended Reverend Wright a lot; and they said you’ve just got to understand the prophetic tradition, you’ve just got to understand this. But now Obama had basically in the speech declared these remarks – the specific ones that he said he didn’t hear – to be completely off-limits. He said that’s beyond the pale. On the one hand – and he wouldn’t distance himself or disown Reverend Wright at the time because, he said, of all the good things that Reverend Wright had done.

On the one hand I had these people telling me you’ve just got to understand, don’t forget the context and all of this stuff. And on the other hand you had Obama kind of declaring that this stuff was beyond the pale. And I think I heard you earlier making a little reference to them being, you know, pulled out of context. What is it in your view?

GLAUDE:   When we look at that speech – that sermon in its entirety, that moment is a particularly powerful and incendiary moment, of course. But it is an interestingly powerful meditation on the concept of love in a very fascinating way he’s making. So I think there’s this role for prophetic language, within the black church particularly, that will always express – and see, I’m going to say it. I’m going to be very, very incendiary here – that white folks just got to wrap their minds around.

That is that there is an abiding, intelligible and reasonable suspicion about the American nation-state vis-à-vis black folk. That suspicion can find itself articulated in the pulpits in very powerful ways. The fact that these particular folk are suspicious of the nation-state – because you see it and don’t know it, surprises folk. At the very same moment when folk express the suspicions of the nation-state from the pulpit of John Hagee , or Rod Parsley ’s – because I remember saying this on Hannity & Colmes , and Sean tried to –

CROMARTIE:   You were the first person that called Sean Hannity “Brother Hannity.”

GLAUDE:   We’re both Catholic boys. Part of what I was trying to suggest at that moment is that, first give folks in the pews a little more credit. They’re discerning; they’re making distinctions all the time. And suspicions about the state emanate from pulpits that are black and white all the time. It’s just why are these suspicions singled out as opposed to these sorts of suspicions singled out.

And I remember this question – I forget who said it – are we going to – it was in the media – are we going to start vetting all of the things said in American pulpits? Is this the road we’re going down? And then suddenly it went silent.

YORK:   Let me ask you this: What was your –

GLAUDE:   Am I right in that? (Chuckles.)

YORK:  What was your personal reaction – what was your first reaction when you first saw the sound bites of Reverend Wright like all of us saw them?

GLAUDE:  I said Obama’s in trouble. (Laughter.) My first reaction was a political one: They got him. And I was trying to figure out why didn’t this show up earlier – who was doing the oppositional research in the primary? I was just wondering why was this so late in the game? And secondly I thought –

CROMARTIE:  You remember it was the Senator Clinton campaign that helped get it going.

G LAUDE:   Yeah, yeah but it was still –

CROMARTIE:   But also it was –

YORK:  It was in March.

GLAUDE: That’s not proven.

CROMARTIE: Unproven, yeah.

GLAUDE: (Chuckles.)

YORK:   But anyway – your personal reaction?

CROMARTIE:  Keep going.

GLAUDE:  My personal reaction was, there’s some truth here. If it is the case – and Jeffrey said it. You said in your remarks that – in response to I think Kirsten’s question about America’s role – that we’ve done some good, we’ve done some bad and we’ve done some evil. If we have done some evil, then “goddamn America” makes sense on Christian grounds, rhetorically. It doesn’t fly well politically, but it makes sense. Now, whether not America is a source of AIDS and all that other stuff – that’s absurd.

But I could understand a person who preaches the gospel, and I’m willing to say that and accept the responsibility of what that might mean. If our nation is a purveyor of evil in the world – if one is a believer – it is not, shall we say, oblivious to the judgment of God – no matter how we tell the story of America being the shining city on the hill, it seems to me. My personal reaction, Byron, was they got him, oh my goodness; and then my second reaction was okay, oh – he’s says something that’s not too – let me go back and see the sermon.

CROMARTIE:  But why do I wonder that you didn’t think that when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson did the same thing?

GLAUDE:  What do you mean?

CROMARTIE:   After post-9/11 Falwell and Robertson were rightly and roundly condemned for blaming the attacks on the twin towers for America’s social condition.

GLAUDE:   Right. There’s a theological difference there.

GREEN:  Yeah, I think he blamed it on homosexuals and –

GLAUDE:   Yeah.

CROMARTIE:  No, my point is simply this: Whatever you blame it on, it’s theologically probably incorrect to try to speak what the mind of God is in a tragic situation and give it sort of – (inaudible).

GLAUDE:   Right, but what I was saying is that it’s a theologically different claim to say if one’s state is the purveyor of evil that it will be subject to the judgment of God.

CROMARTIE:  As opposed to the culture.

DIONNE:  As opposed to somebody flying planes into buildings.

GLAUDE:   Yeah. I think those are qualitatively different theological claims, that America is suffering the judgment of God because of its culture of sin has defined –

CROMARTIE:   Right, right, yep.

GLAUDE:   – I think that’s a very different claim. And maybe – am I wrong in – I think those are two different sorts of claims.

CROMARTIE:  No, we’ll open that up after the break because we’re past break time.

CROMARTIE:  Okay. Thank you for being so prompt. Michael?

MICHAEL PAULSON, THE BOSTON GLOBE :   This a slightly self-interested question, but we were talking a little over lunch about the impact of the Obama election on African-American studies. Then I was listening to your – what seemed like – somewhat unhappy critique of the focus on Obama’s church, and it made me wonder. For those of us whose responsibility it is to write about religion in politics, what do you think we ought to be watching, vis-à-vis Obama and the black church over the next few months and years? What is it that we should be doing instead of chasing down where he’ll worship?

GLAUDE:  The big issue for me is what Barbara alluded to in her question – the first part of your question. There’s an extraordinary transformation taking place within African-American churches that is not only formal – the way the churches actually look –the data showing that these mega-churches are showing up in vast numbers. And they’re non-denominational. We’re beginning to see the Pentecostalization of much of African-American religious life – that the worship services are bearing the imprimatur of the impact of Pentecostalism in interesting sorts of ways.

There is a place like New Birth in Atlanta with Bishop Eddie Long – it’s a Baptist church, and you should already hear the incongruity – Bishop Eddie Long in a Baptist church. And he explicitly says that he – what the Catholic Church got right was the structure. And so he’s trying to dismiss deacon boards – it’s just really fascinating in terms of what’s going on. The relationship between market, media, theology and the generational impact is really having a substantive impact on the form and content of African-American religious life. How do we think about that in relation to President Obama? I’m not sure. But it certainly suggests that this institution that has historically been seen as the site for so much political work – recognizable political work – is changing dramatically. And so then we have to ask ourselves, what sorts of political work will follow from that?

PAULSON:  Let me just ask a follow-up. You were talking about the transformation taking place within the church. You referred several times, earlier, to liberation theology and the black church; so what happens, theologically, when Joshua gets to the promised land? Does liberation theology still animate those churches, or does something new happen because here we are?

GLAUDE:   Well, the basic premise of liberation theology as I understand it was that Jesus sides with the oppressed. And to the extent to which there is always oppression in it’s first instantiation or iteration, Cone locates the oppressed among black people, particularly in the United States and in the ghettos. But now he kind of correlates, with questions around patriarchy, questions around the circulation of capital – so wherever there is oppression, Jesus speaks. And so to that extent, liberation theology – at least how I read Cone – always has a place and a role. But one of the interesting things about it is that liberation theology never really found its footing in actual pulpits; you can actually almost count the number of folks who self-identify, like Jeremiah Wright, on two hands.

So one of the critiques, for example, by his brother, Cecil Cone, of James Cone, was that this was just simply white theology in blackface and that it didn’t have indigenous roots in black, religious institutions. And so Cone writes The Spirituals and the Blues – the book on the spirituals and the blues – as a source for theological reflection.

We’re moving in a moment. I don’t teach in a seminary; I teach in a religious studies department. We’re now finding African-American religious studies beginning to emerge out from under the hegemony of black liberation theology. So people are beginning to write much more complicated works – studies of black religion – that are not driven by the telos of black liberation theology. So we’re going to see, over the course of the next few years, a body of literature that will really help us understand this unique formation in all of its complexity. That’s a long-winded answer.

CROMARTIE:  We have, next, Perry Bacon. And then E.J. and then Eleanor.

PERRY BACON, THE WASHINGTON POST :  Two questions: The first is, traditionally, a white politician who’s trying to win a lot of black voters would go and meet the religious leaders in the community: appeal to the Charlie Rangel or whoever of that community and so on. Hillary Clinton did all of this and got a lot of black pastors to endorse her, a lot of congressman that were black endorsed her, and won a very, very small percentage of the black vote – more than you would have expected, even. And the question is, do you think that’s going to change how the politicians appeal to the black vote?

And then, two, how the religious leaders – traditional people who are older – how their power is perceived and how they’re perceived now? Does Charlie Rangel have less power in his community because he endorsed the wrong person? How do you think it affects these traditional leaders in both churches and African-American leaders in politics as well? And the second question – this is sort of unrelated – is what kind of role do you think someone like a T.D. Jakes will play in politics in the next five or 10 years? Does he avoid that? Does he get into that, and so on?

GLAUDE:  Well, I think black churches will remain extraordinarily important sites for political organizing and mobilizing. There is – and in some circles I’m a pariah figure for saying this –nothing about black religious institutions that is inherently progressive or prophetic. I think the prophetic voice is always in the minor key, and that’s just a theological position that I hold. And so these churches are not inherently anything; they’re made something by the people who inhabit them – and the person who leads that institution.

The extent to which these churches are important to communities – although, they’re increasingly not important to the communities in which they’re located. We’ve seen the disappearance of the niche church in interesting sorts of ways; the neighborhood church is quickly disappearing because people drive in from outside the place to go to their churches as opposed to the church being down the street like it used to be – but it’s still a site for organizing. What we see, also, is that even within major – even within mega-churches or large congregations – that the members are making decisions reflective of their interests, that they’re not just blind followers. The pastor, from the pulpit, could say I’m going to support Republican candidate X, Y, and Z, which a lot of mega-church pastors did not do this past election cycle, but the election cycle before. We saw in interesting ways that the congregants didn’t follow them. People were saying mega-churches are inherently conservative, but there’s some interesting data to make that a little more complex.

You still have to organize; so they’re going to remain a site of organization. Going back to the claim that I’m making about generational shifts – the post-soul babies, of which I’m one – we’re all finding our political voices now, our intellectual voices now. There will be an array of challenges to an established, black political class in every locale. One of the collateral effects of Obama’s run is that he’s made space for a new generation – a different cadre – of political voices. So the traditional brokers of African-American politics are vulnerable. They’re vulnerable in very interesting sorts of ways, in my view. Go ahead.

BACON:  Vulnerable in the sense that they’ll have primary opponents or vulnerable in the sense that they just don’t have any influence, or what does that –

GLAUDE:  In each instance, there will be vulnerability. They will have much more viable challengers. Constituencies will be much more critical. Precisely because the demographics of those constituencies are changing, given this kind of influx of young, new voters as we saw in the national election. That’s going to play itself out in local areas in very interesting ways. In terms of the kind of cultural logic within which politics plays out, the kind of cultural space, it’s beginning to take on a kind of tone – timbre, pitch, resonance – that’s not reducible to the aesthetic of a ’60s-inflected struggle. Does that make sense?

Part of what we’re beginning to see is that those of us who were shaped under different conditions and who have, historically, been locked out of black politics because we didn’t march, or because we didn’t – we hadn’t earned our bona fides by virtue of participating in Selma – we now have Ph.D.s and J.D.s. And not only that, we’re also starting non-profits and grassroots organizations around hip-hop. It’s going to be a really complicated moment, and at every level, they’re vulnerable, it seems to me.

CROMARTIE:   Okay. E.J. Dionne is next, and then Eleanor and Kevin. And Jeffrey, did I see you nod to me? And Peter Boyer, you haven’t had your hand up, but I know you have a question.

PETER BOYER, THE NEW YORKER : I did have just one tiny thing I guess, maybe, I could –

CROMARTIE:  No, but I’ll put you on the list. You want to let him ahead?

DIONNE:   I don’t mind, he can go ahead.

CROMARTIE: Okay, pull the – Peter Boyer over here, because you’ve been doing some interesting body language things, and I thought we probably should – (laughter) – we probably should call on you no matter what.

DIONNE: Does that go on the transcript? Interesting body language things?

CROMARTIE: I know, that part is probably –

GOLDBERG: So then you could do a Google search, Peter Boyer, Key West, interesting body language.

BOYER: Because of the transcript, E.J., is why I’ve limited myself, so far, to body language. (Laughter.) I will say, but just, I hate to bring back up the subject of Jeremiah Wright, but following up a little bit on what Michael asked, let me put the question this way: That strain of the prophetic tradition, as expressed by Jeremiah Wright at Trinity – just in the particular case of Trinity – now that in Jeffrey’s term, “evil-doing America” has elected –

JEFFREY GOLDBERG, THE ATLANTIC :   All right, all right. (Laughter.)

BOYER:  – has elected a black man, but not just any black man, but a congregant at Trinity to the highest office in the land. Does that rob that strain of its juice?

GLAUDE:  It certainly complicates it, Peter. You know, we’ve just experienced this extraordinary ritual of racial expiation called the Obama campaign, where we tried to shed the ghost of our racial past in this really fascinating way. To the extent that he’s won, the question of how will black suffering speak publicly is now a pressing one. Whether or not the traditional rhetorical modes will be as effective – I hope they will be – we would have reached an interesting phase in the maturation of African-American politics if one could rail against Obama as one has railed against Bush, without recourse to language, which historically has been the language of racial authenticity.

Instead of us saying, Clarence Thomas is wrong, those of us who might disagree with his judicial philosophy – too many people find themselves saying that Clarence Thomas is a sell-out. The latter sort of formulation isn’t helpful; it’s about drawing boundaries of inside and outside; it’s about policing the diversity of black positions. So I think there will be a role for prophetic voices; wherever power is operating, there’s a role for the prophetic voice. It’s going to be complicated because there’s a black man running the empire.

BOYER:   But that particular strain – forgive me, and I hear you and I hope that it’s – dare I say, pray – that it’s true. But that particular strain that also contains maybe even as aspect of conspiratorial thinking, that talked about the CIA and AIDS and stuff, of which, one gathered, there was something of a receptive ear. That’s premised on a certain view of this country – a country that, perhaps, God might indeed damn. And now that that country has –

GLAUDE:  Redeemed its soul.

BOYER:  Well, in the flawed sort of way that it can – I mean, you know, we express ourselves in sundry ways in public life, and one of them is electing the person who leads us and makes policy. And now that, again, it’s so striking to me that he wasn’t just a black guy; he was a black guy who was in this congregation – this preacher with that strain of theology – reared up his babies. Now that this country has chosen that man to lead it, what happens to that particularly, in my view virulent, strain of thought? Does that go away, now?

GLAUDE:   No. I don’t think so. It’s going to express itself at various registers. There’s a wonderful book by an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, John Jackson , entitled Racial Paranoia . And I don’t see, with the election of Obama, the end of that. And to the extent to which a kind of paranoia – you know, Baldwin had this wonderful moment in The Fire Next Time , where he says that African-Americans didn’t – could not risk themselves believing that a white person would, shall we say, hold their humanity as more important than their whiteness. And so that moment, was in effect, a kind of moment that you had to brace yourself before the – it’s at the heart of the certain kind of paranoia that Baldwin was so wonderful in exploring.

So I think that will remain, precisely because the Pew data has already shown us, or demonstrated, this extraordinary gap between those African-Americans who are living in hyper-concentrated spaces of poverty, where, as William Julius Wilson says, work has simply disappeared, and those of us who have gained access to mainstream social capital in ways that black America could never have imagined. And so among those folks who are living in resource-deprived communities, blackness is still circulating in particular sorts of ways – a certain kind of ministry continues to work, continues to have power. So I don’t see it disappearing anytime soon.

CROMARTIE:   In the same way, if I might add, that certain right-wing conspiracy theories didn’t disappear under Reagan or Bush, am I right? But they weren’t rooted in prophetic traditions, or some of those weren’t. Okay, I’m sorry, I jumped in the line; I forgive myself. E.J. Dionne, you’re up next.

GLAUDE:  You’re forgiven.

CROMARTIE:   Thank you, father.

DIONNE:  Two quick thoughts – one’s quasi-theoretical. I want to go all the way back to the beginning about this whole public reason debate, which has driven me crazy for some years now. On the one hand, I do think there’s an obligation on the part of a believer to express his or her political views in ways that are accessible – his proposals or her proposals – in a way that is accessible to nonbelievers or people who don’t share the faith tradition. On the other hand, I also think that people should be free to – and may even have an obligation – to say that they, in fact, have religious reasons for taking a particular political position. I sense you’re struggling with this sort of contradiction, too; I’d just love to hear you out more on that.

And then, the other one is, again, just to go back to Jeremiah Wright. I remain, at the end of all this, mystified by the Wright we ended up seeing. I’d like your sense of him, before he became really famous. If you talk to an awful lot of people in the church writ-large, including some fairly conservative people, there was a lot of respect for Jeremiah Wright floating around out there. Again, it wasn’t just people who agreed with liberation theology. Yet, you can’t square what you’ve heard about him from some of those folks with the Wright, especially, you saw at the National Press Club that day . So I’d love it – even go – forgive me, Michael – even go off the record; I’d just love your insight on, who is this man as far as you know. How do you square this person we saw, especially, toward the end of that controversy with the person you heard described by an awful lot of people in rather positive terms over a very long period of time?

GLAUDE:   Right, I mean, let me take that first one – the last one first. And some of it can be on the record or off the record, I don’t –

CROMARTIE:  Okay, well, we’re on the record until you say off.

GLAUDE:   Yeah. One of the striking things about Jeremiah Wright’s ministry is that it’s within UCC. I mean, and there’s like –

CROMARTIE:  Say what UCC is.

GLAUDE:   United Church of Christ .

CROMARTIE:   Yeah, I just want to be sure.

GLAUDE:   Right. And I mean, what’s the percentage of black folk in UCC? So I mean, obviously, Jeremiah Wright was doing something – I mean, he hadn’t just simply brokered this little space within UCC just for himself and Trinity to do weird things. So there was a kind of interracial dialogue that was taking place within that denomination that Jeremiah Wright was at the forefront of. So he’s a very complicated figure; he has an extraordinary social ministry that has done amazing work in Chicago, where he’s garnered extraordinary respect. But Chicago is a unique space, particularly in terms of African-American politics.

And so part of what – let me give you the answer that was said among my friends, who happen to be preachers. They said, you leave the pews at church, and what happened is, at the National Press Club, he brought the pews with him. (Laughter.) And he didn’t get in trouble until the question and answer period, would you say? Remember? And there was this kind of antiphonal moment – “Yes sir, say it!” – and he got caught up in the moment. That’s when he started misbehaving – you know, the kind of bodily theatrics, and not only the content, but the kind of performance of what he was saying just got him in trouble.

CROMARTIE:   I don’t start doing that until tomorrow.

GLAUDE:  Right. So part of what happened is that in any church, in any black church – and of course, I would say, in any church setting – there’s an insider’s discourse and an outsider’s discourse. There are ways in which we talk at home, and then there are ways in which we talk outside. And that line was blurred, and he suddenly became Louis Farrakhan . I mean, he was elevated to the kind of figure in the American public imagination, that – you mention Jeremiah Wright’s name, and he becomes as much of a lightning rod as mentioning Louis Farrakhan’s name. So much so that in the blogosphere, there was this slideshow of Obama and Jeremiah Wright, Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright, Obama and Jeremiah Wright, Farrakhan – it was this really interesting thing.

I think what happened was a ministry that had been defined in interesting sort of ways by a profound commitment to the social gospel. It was often articulated within the context of a black community that is subject to particular kinds of forces, a ministry that is also influenced by the languages of black nationalism. Through his own theological orientation, it went public; and it went public in the National Press Club and got in all sorts of trouble. So I would want to say, E.J., that those elements were always a part of his ministry. It’s just, when they’re voiced publicly, certain elements stand out and others don’t. So we see and hear that which is recognized as incendiary language, as opposed to seeing and hearing what’s often said alongside of it – that which we might be committed to as well. So that’s a very long-winded answer to that.

The second – the first question is that you’re absolutely right; I’m struggling with it in a very – I think all of my colleagues at Princeton, we’re all struggling with this. And the kind of – you know, I get this from the philosopher Robert Brandom – and Jeffrey Stout has channeled this through his own work, Democracy and Tradition – he is a colleague of mine. What we’re committed to is expressive democracy.

CROMARTIE:   Expressive democracy.

GLAUDE:   Expressive democracy, and part of expressive democracy –it involves, for the most part, this insistence on the exchange of reasons. And what Jeffrey Stout does so well is that he’s so attentive to theological voices – whether it’s Hauerwas or the orthodox folks. He’s just very – trying in some significant way to engage them in light of these democratic values, which he believes – and I think rightly so – that his interlocutors share. And to the extent to which I can believe that fellow Christians who express their commitments differently than I do are committed to democracy, I want to engage them in a way that doesn’t force them to deny who they are, at root. Attention is there, but the overriding value, again, is my commitment to expressive democracy. That’s not an answer, but that’s how I’m struggling.

CROMARTIE:   Eleanor Clift is next, and then I’ve got Kevin and Sally and Rachel.

ELEANOR CLIFT, NEWSWEEK :   The tradition, in this country, when a new president is sworn in is that his full name is used – James Earl Carter, William Jefferson Clinton – you know where I’m going with this. Assuming –

UNIDENTIFIED:   When he was sworn in, it was Jimmy Carter.

CLIFT:  Oh. Interesting. I stand corrected, but I don’t think he’s going to say, I’m Barry, that way. (Laughter.) I’m assuming he’s going to go with his full name; I just wonder what your perspective is on the message that sends, mostly around the world, but also here at home?

GLAUDE:   I think it sends a powerful message. During the campaign, I was waiting for the Obama campaign to say what Colin Powell said on Meet the Press . I was waiting for them to say it. They move Muslims from the photo op. I was waiting for the Obama campaign to speak powerfully in the very way that General Powell spoke, and I think by having Barack Hussein Obama said as his hand is on a Bible will be a profound symbolic moment. I know my son will revel in it, and I will revel in it with him. So I think it will be wonderful. And for some, it will be a sign of the apocalypse – (chuckles) – but that’s okay, that’s okay.

KUHN:  Do you not think he repudiates himself if he then chooses this official occasion – the most official of occasions – to use his middle name? Does he then repudiate his campaign’s vociferous effort, often off the record, to not have this appear at all in the political discourse. If it did appear, it was immediately considered the dirtiest of dirty politics.

GLAUDE :  Right. It’s a repudiation that I would welcome, David.

KUHN:  Okay, that’s well said.

CROMARTIE:   Okay, Kevin and then Sally and Rachel and Byron.

ECKSTROM:  I’m wondering if we can just go back to something we were talking about earlier – Obama’s relationship with the black church. Specifically, what do you see happening over the next four or however many years, in terms of how he deals with them and how, perhaps, the black church deals with him? Do you think the black church, as diverse as it is, – but in a general sense – do they expect something from him, since he’s sort of one of their own? Do they have an ally there, or is he under any sort of special obligation to reach out to them? I’m just curious what you see of that delicate dance in the coming years.

GLAUDE:  First, you’ve framed it; it’s going to be a delicate dance. But he’s going to be attentive in interesting sorts of ways, and I’m going to flesh out something I said earlier to an earlier version of this question. And what comes to mind is, Obama allowing Ebony to have him on the cover as the man of the year. And doing it in interesting sorts of ways – he had to be mindful – his folks had to be mindful of how that would be perceived. You know, Ebony is like, our magazine. “Our” magazine – (laughter) – and so for him to do that is to suggest that he will be attentive to various institutional manifestations of the black community.

I think he’s going to engage in a kind of interesting cost-benefit analysis of that connection; it doesn’t cost him much to be on the cover of Ebony . What will it cost him to affiliate with particular black churches, when he hasn’t seen all of the tapes of that particular minister, he might be attending? So that’s the first thing. The second thing is that I think African-American communities have already been primed to not expect anything from Senator Obama, or President-elect Obama.

CROMARTIE:   Primed by his campaign or primed in general?

GLAUDE:  Primed by his campaign, because the campaign provided African-American communities with this response when African-American communities wanted him to specifically address their issues. What was the response? “I cannot be the president of black America. I am the president of America. I will be the president of America.” That kind of formulation, has, in interesting sorts of ways – and I don’t think this is a good thing for African-American politics, by any stretch of the imagination. I will go on record as saying I think we might have seen the Obama campaign set African-American politics back a generation.

And let me explain what I mean, because I just saw Jeffrey’s face. What I mean by that is for the first time in 40 years, we had an opportunity to re-imagine African-American politics apart from the issues and themes and personalities of the 1960s and ’70s. There was a gaping hole there. And Obama’s campaign stepped in with a kind of wink-and-nod politics. That wink-and-nod politics was, in effect, I can’t be a black politician; but he appealed to the sentiments that have driven African-American politics for generations, for decades. So at that very moment in which we had an opening in order to generate a more vibrant deliberative space for black folk of a variety of interests to engage in the back and forth, Obama would come into black communities and talk about personal responsibility as opposed to policy. He would come into black communities and one time, at Howard University , he gives that extraordinary talk about the criminal justice system; we don’t hear any more about it.

We don’t hear about how his healthcare policies actually impact these folk whose infant mortality rates, hypertension, diabetes – we can go down the line. And when black folk wanted to ask, specifically, how these policies will affect black communities, the response was, “I can’t be the president of black America; I’m the president of America.” And so that becomes an interesting – at the moment in which space is open, it contracts almost immediately. I think communities have been primed not to expect anything, because he can’t give it. That was the condition for him being elected. I really believe that. Now, are those costs too high? I think so.

CROMARTIE:   We’re about to come up to our break, but we’ve got three more to get in and I think we can do it.

GLAUDE:  And I’ll be briefer.

CROMARTIE:   Sally, you’re next, then Rachel and Byron.

QUINN:  Can you – is my mic working? I want to go back to Jeremiah Wright. (Laughter.)

GLAUDE:   Our national obsession.

QUINN:  I think in all of my years of journalism, I don’t think I have seen a story covered as badly as this story was – by everybody, print, television, radio. But also, I didn’t see the black community standing up for Jeremiah Wright in a way that one might have thought. This is a guy who is unbelievably distinguished, who, for 36 years, had this extraordinary career, who is a real intellectual – he’s a linguist, he’s a philosopher. The projects that he did in community outreach were extraordinary. He had this fantastic – and in two, 20-minute sound bites, his entire career was destroyed. When you look at what he said – because I went back and looked at some of the other quotes from other religious leaders. When he was particularly talking about chickens coming home to roost and goddamn America, Martin Luther King said almost exactly the same thing about Vietnam , that God is going to punish us for what we did – I don’t have the exact quote in front of me –in Vietnam.

What’s his name – Bill Clinton’s spiritual advisor – Tony Campolo , after 9/11, virtually said we brought this on ourselves. He basically was saying, the chickens have come home to roost. In the Bible, Jeremiah talks about the Israelis saying, if you don’t shape up, we’re going to – God will destroy the temple. One right after the other, these people have said exactly the same thing that he said. The language was – and if you took it out of context, I don’t think they played the whole speech the way they should have, but when you heard it in context – it wasn’t nearly as inflammatory as it sounded just by those sound bites. But I also think that Jeremiah – he, in a way, was representing, as everyone knows, an older group. Barack Obama was not a child or an ancestor of a slave, so he didn’t come in with that perspective.

I went to the National Press Club the day that Jeremiah Wright spoke, and I was there as a guest, and so I was not in the press – the press balcony was up there. Lisa Miller, my colleague – several of my colleagues were sitting up in the balcony with the press, and I was sitting downstairs. Almost everybody downstairs was black because they were all Jeremiah Wright’s friends and colleagues and all that. And his speech was really good, smart, very on-the-money. Then the Q&A started, and the questions were coming. The people I was sitting around were responding like, “Say it, say it, brother! Go ahead! Tell it!” And people were laughing and they were clapping and they were screaming, and you could just see him just turn into this – oh my god, you know, look at me, right in the National Press Club.

I kind of thought it was funny until I walked outside, and Lisa and all the press came downstairs saying, oh my god, this is the biggest disaster they’ve ever seen in their entire lives. And it was so amazing to me that my perspective was so completely different from theirs because of where I was sitting and the response of the crowd that I was listening to. I then went over to the Shiloh Baptist Church, where they –

CROMARTIE:   Sally, we are running out of time, but this is very interesting.

QUINN:   Well, no, no, I’m sorry. There was an entire day, from 9:30 until 10:30 that night, of appreciation for Jeremiah Wright. His whole family was there. One after the other of educated Ph.D.s, lawyers – but older blacks talking. Each one spoke about slavery and the pain of slavery, each one. But after – what I’m asking you is, I don’t see that happening any more. That’s why I’m interested in this whole fight in the Trinity church between Otis Moss and Jeremiah Wright and how he’s managed to ease his way back in. Because Otis Moss is clearly the voice of the future, and this thing of slavery and where we’ve come from just doesn’t seem to be relevant – as Peter was saying – just doesn’t seem to be relevant any more.

GLAUDE:   We have a challenge, and the challenge is that we’re about to see, for the first time in the history of the African-American sojourn in the United States, a cadre of leadership that has no biographical experience of slavery or Jim Crow . It’s the first time ever. And so we sound differently, we look differently, the rhythm of our speech – our tone – our voices are different. And so folks are having a difficult time wrapping their minds around it. I always say this, very quickly: I was confused by Reverend Wright’s mini-tour. I said to myself, if he had the right advisors, somebody would have told him, sign the book contract for six figures, write the book, and then the book tour will justify you being out there.

You will be pushing your book and you can defend yourself – I didn’t understand why he went out there so soon. And I think a lot of folks in the African-American community asked – why are you going out, doing this? Why are you feeling the need to defend yourself in this way, at this moment? You’re jeopardizing his candidacy; disappear for a moment. And so there was support but there was also a kind of confusion about his motivation and whether or not ego got in the way.

CROMARTIE:   Can you explain, quickly, his relationship to Louis Farrakhan – his friendship?

GLAUDE:  No, Farrakhan was honored in his church, and as a member of the community in which he lives. To understand the black community on the south side of Chicago is to understand the role of the Nation of Islam in that community, and there’s no way that you can disentangle them. Part of this litmus test of acceptability is, what’s your position on Louis Farrakhan – he simply rejected out of hand. It got him in a whole lot of trouble, obviously, because now he’s just like him – persona non grata.

CROMARTIE:   Rachel Martin and then Byron.

MARTIN:  This builds on the current conversation. You keep saying that Reverend Wright needs to leave the pews in the church; how does that jibe with what your thesis is, about being able to speak authentically in public spaces and about religion?

GLAUDE:   (Chuckles.) Rachel, touché.

MARTIN:   Truly, I mean, divorced from the political implications, which I understand –

GLAUDE:  No, I think my point was not about the substance of his claim, but the performance of the claim. Part of what I was saying is that in the Q&A, which Sally witnessed, there was a kind of environment of insularity that felt like home and that environment allowed for a certain kind of insider discourse to make itself known. That’s not so much about the – what I mean by that is that at that moment, in that venue, to perform a certain kind of blackness on that stage was to place himself and Obama in jeopardy. So prudentially, it wasn’t a good move.

CROMARTIE:   At that time.

GLAUDE:   At that moment.

MARTIN:  So you concede that there are certain moments when it might not be in your best interest to speak authentically about the religious motivations that inform your opinions and values?

GLAUDE:   I’m distinguishing – because I didn’t think the content of what he said was the issue; it was how he said it, how he performed it. Most people would say he looked like a buffoon – look at how he’s acting. That moment when he looks this way, and then he runs back to the thing – and so there was a sense in which –

CROMARTIE:  But there were words, too.

GLAUDE:  There were some words, but I don’t think those words were the equivalent of faith claims in the public domain. I think I’m resisting the conflation of those two moments.

CROMARTIE:  Before I go to Byron York, a quick point, if Peter could get his permission. He wanted to make a small, quick intervention and they’re both next to each other, Brett.

BOYER:  (Inaudible, off mic) – I mean, it seems that –

GLAUDE:  And by the way, he’s a homeboy, from Gulfport. (Chuckles.) That’s right.

BOYER:  That’s why you can’t get too far from me, Professor. But on Rachel’s point, it seems to me that in the same – even if Reverend Wright had contained his physical expression that day, the actual words that he said. In other words, had he made a defense of his theology, it still wouldn’t have gone over so good, I would suggest. And I would go further, not to suppose motivation for your thesis, professor. But it seems to me that if theologically motivated – if faith-motivated folks go into the public arena and make a faith-based argument. Let’s just say that you believe what you believe as your poor, abused sister, to bring her back into the conversation. If she believes what she believes about Proposition 8 for reasons of revelation, but gets it that you can’t make that argument in the public square, isn’t your argument for making it in the public square on those terms, which is to say, reasons of revelation – the Bible tells me it’s wrong – isn’t part of that just setting up an a—kicking, as we saw what happened with the Reverend Wright?

If you actually go into the public square and actually preach what you believe, which we have also seen, as Michael pointed out, from Pat Robertson and all those guys, you lose. It only stands a chance of winning if, in fact, you find a way that it can be cast in terms of reason and stripped of its spiritual aspect.

GLAUDE:  This is a species of Richard’s point that I’m engaging in a sleight-of-hand, that I’m trying to set religious folks up to be defeated in the public domain on democratic grounds, trying to rid the democratic process of certain kinds of dissimilation in order to get to some ends that I might –

BOYER: But can you imagine your sister winning that argument on the terms that you would have her argue it – I guess is what I’m asking?

GLAUDE:   I imagine – no, probably not – but I imagine my sister having a conversation with those of us who might not hold her position whereby she’s asked to explain more fully what she believes and how I could engage her, and you might engage her, on different grounds. So, for example, she might make the case that scripture views homosexuality as an abomination, and I might argue with the resources of Eugene Rogers , a professor at the University of North Carolina, who makes the case that on scriptural grounds, same-sex love is actually justified – on scriptural grounds.

And so there could be an argument on public grounds, if I’m sensitive enough to engage her as a Christian on her own terms, so that we could, perhaps, generate conclusions that she might be willing, if she lost in the debate, to concede to – as opposed to simply being excluded from the deliberative process so that she has no buy-in, in terms of the conclusions, and then winds up blowing up stuff. You get the point? In that sense, I might be trying to generate consensus disingenuously, but I might not concede that just yet. In the case of –

CROMARTIE:   This is a deeply, deeply theoretical proposition and point, and I think it best, would be continued over drinks.

GLAUDE:   Beautifully done! Beautifully done.

CROMARTIE: At seven. Well, we actually did this some years ago – we had Rick Warren here and the conversation just kept going and going and going, and finally, I said, well, we could have this over cocktails, of which Rick did not join.

GLAUDE : I will join them.

CROMARTIE: He joined the talks, but not the drinks.

GLAUDE: I’ve got to call my mom and tell her I was compared to Rick Warren.

CROMARTIE: That’s a good point. But Byron, you can be the person to give us the – take us into the break –

YORK:  I want to move away from Reverend Wright. Pollsters often ask the question, what do you think is the most important issue that the new president or the new Congress ought to address? It’s an open-ended question; they don’t give any choices. Race relations, from the polls I’ve read, is always right down at the bottom – maybe 1 percent, maybe 2 percent. We all know the issues in this election with the economy and before that, gas prices and Iraq and Bush-fatigue the whole time. And then you called the election of Obama – and I think it’s a quote – you called it, “an extraordinary act of racial expiation.” So my question is, to what extent do you think this election was about race?

GLAUDE:  It was all about race. That’s why we were all crying – many of us were crying when we saw him in Grant Park . We couldn’t say it was about race during the election, but it’s historic, why? It’s historic precisely because he’s the first black man to be elected to the office, so it was all about race, in my view. The question is, how do we deal with the ghastly ghosts of our past? America has this extraordinary ability to retreat into its innocence – or its perceived innocence. These ghosts are constantly reminding us of how earthly and human this fragile experiment in democracy has been. So I think it was all about race. I think his election, for African-American communities in particular and for the nation more generally, is a signal that the true work now begins, as opposed to, we should all pat ourselves on the back. I think the true work begins January 20.

CROMARTIE:  Ladies and gentlemen, again, it’s a mark of a great session when we even go into our break time and people are not getting up and leaving and running to the beach. Let’s thank Professor Glaude for a wonderful presentation.

This written transcript has been edited for clarity, spelling, grammar and accuracy by Cheryl Jackson.

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Religion, race and nationality – what are our prejudices and how can we overcome them?

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What do you think of your neighbours? And what do they think of you? Concerns around increasing division and polarisation in the UK have persisted stubbornly since the EU referendum in 2016. We hear a lot from academics, politicians and journalists about a supposedly fractured nation. But how divided is Britain? Our new report – the largest study of attitudes to diversity in England and Wales – gives some interesting insight.

The report, published by the Woolf Institute, presented findings from a survey conducted by Survation of more than 11,000 adults that asked a series of questions concerning ethnic, national and religious diversity. Has diversity been good for Britain and for your local community? How would you feel if a close relative married someone from a different ethnic, national or religious background? How diverse are your friends and workplaces?

Our statistical analysis revealed that religious intolerance – such as antisemitism and Islamophobia – is a bigger driver of prejudice than ethnicity or nationality. Data from the survey strongly suggests that religion is perhaps one of the last prejudices people are comfortable expressing openly .

And according to our data, religious diversity remains the least popular form of diversity. When asked the question above about marriage, non-Muslim respondents were least comfortable about a close relative marrying a Muslim person. Attitudes between faith groups also tend to be less positive than between ethnic groups.

Our findings also revealed that people in work tend to be more positive towards diversity and more likely to have diverse friendship groups than both unemployed and economically inactive people. One big concern is that COVID, lockdowns and working from home threaten people’s opportunities to encounter others and difference in the workplace.

General attitudes

But what about general attitudes towards diversity among the public? Here the data provided an intriguing puzzle.

On the one hand, attitudes towards diversity are largely positive. Thinking nationally, a majority within the survey agreed that ethnic diversity is good for British society. More than twice as many agreed than disagreed that migrants are good for British society. In fact, and despite the explosiveness of issues around immigration, migrants appeared more popular than religious diversity. Thinking more locally, nearly two thirds agreed that ethnic diversity is good for the local community and majorities agreed that migrants and religious diversity are good for it. That’s the good news.

On the other hand, 60% agreed that the number of migrants in Britain has increased too quickly in the last ten years. Over twice as many agreed than disagreed that ethnic and religious diversity has increased too quickly. In terms of local communities, a majority agreed that increases in the number of migrants have been too quick.

Our report describes this as an “emerging national consensus”. But what type of consensus are we talking about? Over a third of those who expressed an opinion and agreed that ethnic diversity is good for Britain also agreed that it has increased too quickly. So, a majority think diversity is a good thing but around a third of that majority think things are moving too quickly. In other words, one large group of people who are positive about diversity is made up of two smaller groups – one positive about change, one less so.

Reaching a new consensus

For many, this third of people who think diversity has increased too quickly represents a problem. Academics and journalists are far more likely to be highly educated, liberal and mobile ( “anywheres” rather than “somewheres” ). It is unsurprising that opposition to change from those less educated, less liberal and less mobile is seen as problematic. That said, defining negative attitudes to local change – small-c conservatism – as forms of hostility or bigotry is unlikely to bring different groups back together anytime soon.

But there may be another way. Perhaps the data are telling us something hopeful about possible routes out of divided and divisive circumstances and away from further polarisation. No one single argument, and especially none around race, ethnicity or immigration, will appeal to everyone. But, as previous reports have suggested , perhaps consensus is achievable.

Take anti-racism, it has become a powerful force in British politics, with mainstream buy-in (footballers taking a knee before games, for example). This, and our data, suggest a public in tune with racial equality.

What our data also suggest is that stronger forms of activism may represent the right approach for some Britons who value diversity, but not all. Issues such as institutional racism could be tackled more effectively by recognising the common ground between people whose lifestyles and worldviews are very different but who share the same basic position – in this case, that diversity is a good thing.

This is the common ground on which large-scale societal change can be built, especially around election times. But to start building, we need to loosen the requirements for ideological purity on these issues. Doing so will help us forge a broader consensus among those who share some, but not all, of our views.

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Race, gender, sexuality, and religion in north america.

• Anthony Petro Anthony Petro Boston University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.488
• Published online: 27 February 2017

The history of religion in the United States cannot be understood without attending to histories of race, gender, and sexuality. Since the 1960s, social and political movements for civil rights have ignited interest in the politics of identity, especially those tied to movements for racial justice, women’s rights, and LGBT rights. These movements have in turn informed scholarly practice, not least by prompting the formation of new academic fields, such as Women’s Studies and African American studies, and new forms of analysis, such as intersectionality, critical race theory, and feminist and queer theory. These movements have transformed how scholars of religion in colonial North America and the United States approach intersections of race, gender, and sexuality.

From the colonial period to the present, these discourses of difference have shaped religious practice and belief. Religion has likewise shaped how people understand race, gender, and sexuality. The way that most people in the United States think about identity, especially in terms of race, gender, or sexuality, has a longer history forged out of encounters among European Christians, Native Americans, and people of African descent in the colonial world. European Christians brought with them a number of assumptions about the connection between civilization and Christian ideals of gender and sexuality. Many saw their role in the Americas as one of Christianization, a process that included not only religious but also sexual and cultural conversion, as these went hand in hand. Assumptions about religion and sexuality proved central to how European colonists understood the people they encountered as “heathens” or “pagans.” Religion likewise informed how they interpreted the enslavement of Africans, which was often justified through theological readings of the Bible. Native Americans and African Americans also drew upon religion to understand and to resist the violence of European colonialism and enslavement. In the modern United States, languages of religion, race, gender, and sexuality continue to inform one another as they define the boundaries of normative “modernity,” including the role of religion in politics and the relationship between religious versus secular arguments about race, gender, and sexuality.

• intersectionality
• critical race theory

Scholars who set out to study religion in colonial North America and the United States confront an immediate difficulty: the religion of the people they seek to study is already shot through with various kinds of difference. These differences may include gender, sex, nationality, race, age, class status, or ability, among others. Studying race, gender, and sexuality in American religion forces the scholar to ask a series of more fundamental questions. How did we come to this set of interests or concerns? What do these analytical categories mean, both for scholars and for the people who ostensibly inhabit, possess, or enact some aspect of religion, race, gender, and sexuality in the areas that scholars study? What is at stake in thinking about these terms together, rather than separately? And, of course, the question of definition: How did these categories come about and what do they mean?

This article addresses each of these questions. It starts not with definitions, as scholars often do, but with two examples from the archives of American religion. The first recalls a Native American woman encountering white Protestant missionaries in the early 19th century . In the summer of 1817 , Catharine Brown arrived at Brainerd, a mission school in Tennessee, where she asked to enroll. Brown was a young woman at the time and came from an elite Cherokee family. She dressed much like other Cherokee women of her status and like other Indians living in the Southeast, donning an eclectic mix of indigenous and European clothes and accoutrements. Brown wore “earrings and knobs, rings, and a large necklace” that put her at home among other indigenous women in this region, but that caused alarm for the white missionaries at Brainerd, for whom it looked “like ‘Indian superabundance’ of finery, something excessive.” 1 The missionaries found her character wanting, complaining that she was “proud and haughty, loaded with earrings and jewelry.” 2 Aesthetic extravagance also portended a sexual license unbecoming of white womanhood. Even still, white missionaries also recognized what they considered good traits in Catharine Brown. One recalled her “fair complexion” and described her appearance as “genteel and prepossessing.” 3

The missionaries accepted Brown into the school, and as she deepened her involvement with Christianity over time, her dress became more modest, shorn of its previous adornments, and more similar to that of pious white Christian women. Several years later, a traveler named Lucius Verus Bierce encountered Brown at her father’s inn in Alabama. He commented on her appearance: “She was probably one fourth Indian, beautiful form, thick set for one of her tribe, dressed in the American style, and but for the small, dark eye, prominent cheek bones and glossy hair would have passed well for an American lady.” 4 As historian Joel Martin notes, another way of putting Bierce’s description would be to say that he saw Brown “as almost, but not quite, ‘white.’” 5 In this historical example, Martin introduces a powerful, if all too routine, encounter between a Cherokee woman and white Christian missionaries, underscoring the negotiations of racial reading that transpire. This narrative of Christian conversion cannot be understood apart from one of gendered racial conversion, however incomplete the latter winds up being. Catharine Brown’s story becomes, in Martin’s telling, a vivid demonstration of how different forms of identity come together—that is, a story that could not be told without accounting for the ways that religion, race, gender, and sexuality were woven together.

The second example comes from historian Robert Orsi’s discussion of journalist Dennis Covington’s Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia . Covington spent two years living among a group of mostly poor evangelicals in the southeastern United States in the early 1990s. They drew upon snake handling as part of their evangelical religious practice, as a way to live within a context of “violence and danger.” 6 Orsi lauds Covington for the sensitivity of his portrayal of these communities, at least until Covington describes his last night among them, which he spent at the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ in Kingston, Georgia. On that night, a dispute breaks out over the role of women in the church, and Covington is silenced when he attempts to argue for the equality of women. At that point, another preacher called Punkin’ Brown enters the scene in Covington’s narrative. He reaches into the snake box, pulls out a rattler, and wraps it around his shoulders. “As he does so,” Orsi writes, marking Covington’s words in quotation marks:

Punkin’ Brown makes a sound that Covington records as “haaagh,” an explosive, angry grunt, and as he bears down into his nasty, woman-hating sermon, the preacher uses the sound to set the cadence of his attack and to underscore his rage. Covington makes sure we hear this. “Haaagh” appears ten times on a single page—and it is thus—“haaagh!”—that he reestablishes the border between himself and the handlers that he has up until then so courageously been tearing down . . . The evangelist [Punkin’ Brown] brushes his lips with the serpent and wipes his face with it and always there is the brutal “haaagh!” like “steam escaping from an underground vent.” Punkin’ Brown has become a nightmare, a subterranean creature, a snake himself. 7

Orsi reflects on this narrative turn: “The work of rendering Punkin’ Brown into ‘Punkin’ Brown’ first secures the identity of the observer as safely separate from the other and then establishes the observer’s superiority.” 8 Here, Orsi captures the transformation of the person Punkin’ Brown into the character “Punkin’ Brown,” now marked off by scare quotes. His analysis of Covington’s narrative foregrounds the role of representation—the ways that language constitutes people or religions (or genders, sexualities, or races) in particular and contingent ways. It also indexes longer histories of racialized and gendered norms for defining what constitutes “good” or “true” religion, as Orsi demonstrates the ways that Covington finally casts Brown’s religious practice outside the boundaries of proper belief.

These accounts underscore two points to keep in mind moving forward: the mutual imbrications of religion, race, gender, and sexuality at different points in North American history and the role of representation and narrative in the constitution of religion. Scholars have retold the history of American religion with various forms of race, gender, or sexuality at the center. In some of the best examples of this work, scholars find they often cannot examine one of these categories (say, gender) without attention to others (say, race or sexuality). This article looks to the various theoretical and methodological models that have informed how critical race and feminist scholars in particular have approached religion, race, gender, and sexuality not only as discrete categories but also as overlapping and mutually constituting analytics. Toward this end, I attend to two of the most influential approaches in the humanities and social science: intersectional studies of identity and poststructuralist analysis of social formations and representation. Granted, these approaches overlap, and I tease them apart in this discussion for heuristic reasons. The second half of this article covers a genealogical sketch of American religion that foregrounds attention to race, gender, and sexuality. My choices here are intended to be suggestive rather than comprehensive.

The Politics of Identity

In the contemporary United States, terms of religion, race, gender, and sexuality have become crucial to the ways that people understand themselves. Modern surveys, census questionnaires, and daily paperwork filled out for jobs or other sorts of applications commonly ask questions about racial identity and about sex or gender. They sometimes ask about religious affiliation or sexual orientation as well. These categories form the bedrock of modern ways of identifying oneself. Yet scholars across the humanities and the social sciences disagree about how to approach each individually, much less how they come together. One difficulty that arises concerns the very ways that people use these terms, which can include colloquial usage or analytical ways of employing them. Scholars attentive to such categories suggest two points about the ways that Americans think about identity. First, the categories most commonly used today have not been consistent or stable throughout the history of colonial America and the United States. And second, the very concern that many Americans today have with understanding and naming identity or identities is itself a more recent development. In other words, the extent to which “identity” has become an important way for Americans to understand themselves and to engage in political and public discourse has its own history. 9

Struggles for civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s advanced a series of political movements motivated by identity. These decades saw activists fighting for the rights of African Americans, women, Native Americans, Chicanos, workers and union members, LGBT people, and many others. Historians have suggested, sometimes pejoratively, that these movements replaced earlier emphases on class struggle with a new cultural politics based on identities—women, men, black, white, straight, gay, and so forth. Indeed, the 1960s and 1970s did witness new forms of investment in the politics of identity, especially as they related to identities demarcated by race, gender, and sexuality in need of legal and social protections against discrimination. Religion has been implicated in this history in various ways. While some black activists found empowerment in African American traditions of Christianity or Islam that bolstered black rights movements, white feminist and queer activists often targeted religious institutions as sites of oppression. Historians of the women’s rights and LGBT movements have regularly slotted religion on the side of conservatism, overlooking moderate and progressive movements within religious groups. 10 Scholars of religion have commented on the explosion of interest in Asian religions in this period, in addition to new immigration, that likewise reshaped the politics of religious demographics.

Scholars of religion who study race, gender, and sexuality do not fall outside of this social context. At their best, however, they try to be attentive to this history—or, more accurately, the historicity—of identity terms. What does this mean? If today most people living in the United States employ terms related to gender, race, and sexuality to name identity, colonial Americans more commonly identified themselves according to their kin relationships, their occupation, their place of birth, their status as free or unfree, or their religion, which most often meant a denomination of Protestantism (Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Anglican, and so forth). This observation may seem minor or obvious, but it leads to two important points. Different kinds of identity become more important in different historical periods. And, second, some identities very important for people living in the United States today did not exist in earlier periods.

Religious and racial identities have shifted over the course of American history. Since the mid- 20th century , people in the United States have moved away from denominational markers (Methodist, Baptist, and Lutheran) toward broader categories, like Christian, Catholic, or Jewish, or claims to being spiritual or atheist. Specific denominational identities have given way to theologically broader terms of identity, as theological distinctions have become less important than differences in political and cultural values. Racial identities, too, have shifted greatly. The emergence of the black power movement placed racial identity at the center of national (and international) political movements. It also inspired movements for Red Power among Native Americans, as well as identity movements based on gender (women’s rights and later transgender rights) and sexuality (lesbian and gay rights). The emphasis on racial identity also prompted many white Americans to revisit their own ethnic pasts, contributing to what historian Matthew Jacobsen Frye has called a “white ethnic revival,” a push to reassert white ethnic identities such as Italian American or Irish American. 11

Gender and sexual identities have likewise changed over time. It is very common today to hear a person identify as straight or gay. In the past five years, identifying as transgender or cisgender has also entered public discourse, especially with the attention given in media and popular culture to transgender celebrities, such as Chaz Bono, Caitlyn Jenner, and Laverne Cox. These are good examples of categories that did not exist two hundred years ago. This is not to say that colonial or indigenous people living in the Americas did not sometimes embody gender roles in non-normative ways. But there was no concept of a transgender identity as such. Following the work of philosopher Michel Foucault, historians have shown how terms like “homosexual” and later “heterosexual” were not invented until the late 19th century . 12 Even then, they were not terms people used as identities but rather categories constructed by psychiatrists and sexologists. “Homosexuals” were named as a particular kind of people—those who were gender “inverts” or who slept with others of the same sex—but those people often did not see themselves as part of a community. Often, they thought of themselves as sick and in need of medical attention. Over the course of the 20th century , and once named by these medical experts as a kind of people, homosexuals in turn began to organize politically and to see themselves as particular kinds of persons, as lesbians or gays for instance. This is not to say that no one had same-sex sex before the late 19th century . Of course, many did. But they did not see themselves as “gay” or “lesbian”—or as belonging to LGBT communities—as many people do today.

Gender terms also have more recent histories within the English language. In colloquial settings, people use gender and sex interchangeably, but these terms have changed over time to mean different things, depending on context. Gender is commonly used to designate the cultural and social expression often but not always tied to sex, male or female. Common expectations align female persons with femininity and male persons with masculinity, though these arrangements are never quite so fixed. Sex usually names the biological or genetic sex of a person (in most cases, male or female, though the category intersex has become important in the latter half of the 20th century to name certain kinds of sexual variation). While the two-sex model is common today, historians have shown that other models have existed. A number of feminists and queer theorists and historians of science have challenged this dichotomy between gender and sex and have argued that sex, too, is a category constituted through cultural discourse, including the discourse of science. 13

Approaching Intersections

The political and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s also shaped academic analysis, sparking the emergence of new fields like African American studies, women’s studies, Chicano studies, Asian American studies, and LGBT studies—fields that would develop into institutional programs or departments in later decades. A number of participants realized early on that these academic and political movements would need to develop better ways to approach the politics of identity, especially how diverse forms of identity intersect.

Black feminists paved the way in theorizing intersections of identities through groups like the Combahee River Collective, which formed in 1974 to create space for thinking about the intersections of race, gender, and lesbianism. Intersectional analysis gained greater visibility as an academic method following the publication of two essays by feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw: “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” published in 1989 , and “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” published in 1991 . 14 In these essays, Crenshaw called for analysis of the intersections between patriarchal and racist oppression, between feminist and anti-racist organizing, and between different types of representational practice, including racial and gender stereotypes. 15 Intersectional analysis pushed against the tendency for critical race studies and second wave feminist theory to ignore the experiences and needs of black women, in particular. Through the 1980s and 1990s, intersectionality became one of the most important, if not dominant, methods of feminist and anti-racist analysis across a number of fields in the humanities and social sciences.

Although religion has not been one of the most prominent categories of analysis for intersectional thinking, scholars of religion and womanist and feminist theologians have brought religious experience and practice into these conversations. Take, for instance, the publication of Weaving the Visions: New Patterns of Feminist Spirituality , edited by Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow. Published in 1989 , this collection of essays expanded the discussion of feminist spirituality started with Christ and Plaskow’s groundbreaking 1979 collection Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader , which brought together an array of Christian, Jewish, and other spiritual voices to consider the relationships among women, religion, and patriarchy. As important as that book was, Christ and Plaskow noted some of its shortcomings, including “the absence of voices of woman of color, the invisibility of lesbians, and (with the exception of an essay by Sheila Collins) a failure to discuss issues of class and educational background.” They also diagnosed the unintended but no less negative impact of these limitations, which had the “effect of identifying ‘women’s experience’ with the experiences of primarily white, heterosexual, and middle-class women.” 16 Weaving the Visions diversified these conversations, including contributions by womanist theologian Dolores Williams and Chicana thinker Gloria Anzaldúa, for instance, whose work pushed readers to think about the multiple dimensions of human experience, especially for woman of color.

Alongside feminist and womanist theologians, historians and religious studies scholars have also worked toward intersectional forms of analysis. Since the 1970s, women’s historians have pushed against older trends in the field that emphasized political and intellectual histories foregrounding the role of male elites. Recovering the history of women has forced scholars to examine the domestic sphere alongside the public sphere and to reassess the boundaries of what is considered “political.” In a now-classic essay, “Women’s History Is American Religious History,” Ann Braude demonstrated how attention to the presence of women in religious institutions, rather than the absence of men, upended narratives of religious declension and complicated anxieties about the feminization of American Christianity. 17 Scholars of African American history have likewise challenged accounts of America’s past that downplay or ignore the role of slavery and racial oppression or that relegate blacks merely to the status of slaves or actors in the civil rights movement. In the 1980s and 1990s, historians like Hazel Carby and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham challenged two fronts in American history: they called women’s historians to better account for the role of race and pressed scholars of African American history to include women and attention to gender and sexuality in their work. 18 They also offered new models for examining intersectional forms of identity.

From Identity to Identification

Intersectional analysis emerged alongside and in conversation with feminist theoretical writing in the 1980s and 1990s that questioned commonly received categories, like “woman,” asking whether there was something essential about women or whether such a category was contingent upon linguistic, social, and cultural forces. Scholars who have engaged in intersectional work have been quite attentive to metaphors of intersectionality, understanding that how we imagine such intersecting to take place matters for how we do history and how we engage in the politics of identity. It is helpful to consider the application of intersectional analysis to American history alongside overlapping feminist theoretical and critical race studies scholarship that has pressed against the very categories that historians have depended upon to write history.

In “The Evidence of Experience,” historian Joan Scott draws on poststructuralist and postcolonial theory to challenge historians’ reliance upon shared experience as a foundation for claims to identity. Scott worries that efforts to recover the history of marginalized groups—such as women, African Americans, lesbians, and gay men—too often relies upon ungrounded assumptions of common experience across history. The legitimacy of women’s history, in this way of thinking, depends upon positing a universal category of “woman” (or black, or gay, or working-class) that could serve as a foundation for explaining women’s experience across cultural and historical difference. The problem with this approach is that it all too often assumes the universality of white women’s experience and, consequently, either ignores the history of nonwhite women or assimilates their histories under the sign of a universalized but unmarked white womanhood. For Scott, this approach essentializes the role of experience, which becomes the basis for claims to shared identity, rather than exploring the history of experience itself. “Talking about experience in these ways,” she explains, “leads us to take the existence of individuals for granted (experience is something people have) rather than to ask how conceptions of selves (of subjects and their identities) are produced.” 19

Higginbotham draws upon Elizabeth Spelman’s Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought to explain how universalizing or essentializing a shared experience based on modern categories of identity runs into further problems when scholars attempt intersectional analysis. White feminists, she writes, “typically discern two separate identities for black women, the racial and the gender, and conclude that the gender identity of black women is the same as their own.” 20 This approach sees differences in race and gender as discrete identities that can intersect, like two (or more) roads crossing at a given point. In this model, identity is additive: one can be white, and a woman, and lesbian, and a Methodist. Historians like Higginbotham and Scott reject this way of understanding identity and experience, proposing that scholars examine not the convergence of discrete identities but rather their co-constitution. In other words, they shift our attention from identity to the work of identification, that is, to the set of historical and linguistic processes through which identity comes to seem natural. In the first model, one can layer any number of identities, but the assumption is that what it means to be “woman” or “black” or “Methodist” is fixed. The second method points out that these terms are co-constituted, such that none of the terms are inherently stable, but shift when they intersect. Critical race studies and feminist scholars in the 1980s and 1990s often turned to poststructuralist analyses of discourse to understand how subjects are constituted through language and what feminist philosopher Judith Butler would call “performativity.” 21 Scholars of American religion have likewise joined these conversations, insisting that categories of religion also shape these social discourses and the formation of identity. Consider histories of race.

In the contemporary United States, race seems to be self-evident, something that we know when we see it. Indeed, for most Americans, one of the primary signs of race is visual—the color one’s skin. Yet, at various points in U.S. history, visual evidence has proven faulty, as when “blacks” have “passed” as “white,” or when Native Americans, like Catharine Brown, appear “almost white.” Historians of whiteness have also demonstrated how some people usually identified as “white” in modern America were understood as nonwhite in the not too distant past. Irish Americans and European Jews in the 19th century , and Italians in the first half of the 20th, fell short of normative standards of whiteness, a failure that was often depicted through visual metaphors and representations. Nineteenth-century Anglo-Americans caricatured Irish Americans by depicting them with “primitive” or apelike facial features that suggested a lower level of evolution. Jewish, Italian, and Irish American whiteness was not a given, but rather a cultural process and an ongoing negotiation. Such examples suggest that while race appears self-evident, and while visual evidence is often the basis for reading race, it has a long and contentious history.

In “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Higginbotham asserts that race is a socially constructed category, just like religion, gender, and sexuality. “More than this,” she explains, “race is a highly contested representation of relations of power between social categories by which individuals are identified and identify themselves.” 22 Higginbotham insists upon understanding race not in isolation but in relation to other social categories, and in this essay she demonstrates racial constructions of gender, class, and sexuality. She also points to the doubling of these social categories. They become tools for naming the racial characteristics of certain kinds of people in relationship to others but also the means through which people come to understand themselves. In this way, social categories of race operate both at the level of representation and in the very production of personal experience (as Joan Scott has also observed). To translate this observation to the language of Michel Foucault, Higginbotham and Scott insist that subjects are constituted through discourses of race, gender, sexuality, and religion at the very same time that this formation as a subject offers the possibility for understanding oneself in particular ways (such as in terms of identity for modern Americans) and to understanding others through the power of representation. Finally, as Higginbotham argues, one cannot discuss race without attention to power. Racial variation (like differences in religion, gender, and sexuality) has rarely been treated as benign; more often, variation has been plotted onto social hierarchies that have manifested through colonial relations and the oppression of those deemed below the threshold of civilization. An approach to American religion that holds together social categories of race, gender, and sexuality shows us new ways of imagining this history, including ways that upend conventional narratives of American religion that have emphasized the role of white Christianity and of male participants, which have often gone unmarked.

American Myths

The biases of American religious history are deeply entrenched in historical myths of the United States. One approach to telling this national history—a pedagogical ritual that Americans reenact every November—begins with conflating the Pilgrims and the Puritans fleeing religious persecution in Great Britain. They resettle in New England, where they established their own “city upon a hill,” to borrow from the sermon that John Winthrop delivered to his fellow Puritans in Massachusetts in 1630 . The phrase, now ubiquitous in American national and political rhetoric, comes from the Gospel of Matthew (5:14), just after Jesus refers to his followers as “the light of the world.” For centuries, Americans have drawn upon this phrase to draw a direct connection among those early Puritan colonies in New England, the predestined formation of the United States, and that country’s status as a divinely sanctioned (Christian) nation. This narrative marks the modern nation not only as Christian (and specifically Protestant), at least historically, but also as dominantly white, as least at its founding. Indigenous Americans play a minor role in this national myth, in euphemistic Thanksgiving stories of reciprocity, while the presence of enslaved Africans is often entirely erased. So too does this account leave out the earliest European colonizers, the Catholic Spanish who settled in Florida and in the southwestern regions of the contemporary United States. 23

Historians of American religion have done much to challenge this oversimplified narrative. We cannot begin to talk about the history of religion in the United States without first acknowledging that the United States was founded as a nation on land that was colonized by Europeans, the vast majority of whom were Protestant and Catholic. European colonists encountered indigenous people already living on these lands. They also brought with them a great number of African people held captive as slaves. At their best, historians of religion in colonial America now tell this story not as a benevolent narrative about Puritans escaping persecution to found what would become a free nation, but rather as a history of contact, negotiation, and conflict among various kinds of people living on these lands since the late 15th century . The United States, in such accounts, no longer materialized from the courageous intentions of the Puritans; it emerges as much, if not more so, from histories of colonization and oppression, including the mass genocide of indigenous peoples and their forced relocation in the 19th century ; the enslavement and later legal and social oppression of people of African descent; the exclusion of people of Asian descent from American citizenship in the late 19th and much of the 20th century ; and the slow and uneven advance of full citizenship for nonwhites, women, and sexual minorities.

Discourses of religion, race, gender, and sexuality have intimately shaped this history. We can see this point more clearly by returning to the history of race. Colloquial usage of this term today often suggests scientific differences among humans on the basis of skin color or popular science. Two of the most common ways for talking about race, black and white, reveal the emphasis upon visual evidence and skin color as key determinates. But other terms—like Hispanic, Latino, Anglo-Saxon, Asian American, or African American—point to a shared language or geographic origin. These differences betray the social origins of the category of race. Indeed, historians of race and racism have traced the history of these concepts back to medieval Europe, through the Reformation, and through the development of modern nations. Throughout this history, discourses of religion have played an important role in shaping race and racism, one further compounded by assumptions concerning gender and sexuality.

Religious Genealogies of Race and Modernity

In his history of racism, George Frederickson explains how European Christians in the 12th and 13th centuries added to their long-standing hostility toward Jews new forms of Christian anti-Jewishness. After the doctrine of transubstantiation was officially espoused during the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 , Christians increasingly accused Jews of stealing the consecrated Host and inflicting upon it the same kinds of torture they ostensibly exacted upon Jesus—in effect, repeating this crime against Christians. These myths of Host-stealing and desecration fueled popular representations of Jews as not merely unconverted but actually evil. “The terminology and frame of reference continued to be religious,” Fredrickson writes, “but the conception of Jews as willing accomplices of Satan meant, at least to the unsophisticated, that they were beyond redemption and should probably be killed or at least expelled from Christendom.” 24

European Catholic animus against non-Christians accelerated in the 15th and early 16th centuries , when the Spanish decreed that Jews and Muslims had either to convert to Christianity or leave. A number of Jews converted, but Spanish Catholics remained anxious about the status of these conversions. And “the Inquisition proceeded,” Frederickson explains, “from the assumption that Jewish ancestry per se justified the suspicion of covert ‘judaizing.’” 25 Such worries about Christian heresy or “judaizing” issued from Catholic assumptions about Jewish blood—indeed, anxieties about “ limpieza de sangre ,” or the purity of blood, would continue to justify discrimination even against the next generation of Christian children born to Jewish converts, including those who had intermarried with non-Jews. Spanish anxieties about the purity of blood would contribute to the idea that “to be truly Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one had to claim to be of pure Christian descent.” 26 The Spanish were not alone in such proto-racial thinking. The Irish in Britain occupied a somewhat analogous role to the Jews and Moors in Spain—cast as the “others” against which an “us” could be consolidated. 27

We should read Frederickson’s account of Spanish anxieties about the purity of blood alongside Higginbotham’s observation that, in the 15th and 16th centuries , “the concept of ‘race’ came increasingly to articulate a nationalist ideology.” 28 “Racial representations of nation,” she explains, led to the idea of the “French,” the “Germans,” or, as we have seen, “the Spanish,” as national groupings—as kinds of people whose lineages could be traced and whose national histories could be told. The rise of nation-states was fueled in part by theological and political disagreements about Christianity, by the fractures opened between Catholics and Protestants (and among the various sects of Protestantism itself).

What we today call “modernity” was very much forged amidst these fights among Christians, with their encounters with non-Christians living in Europe, and through contact with the peoples of Africa and of the Americas. Unpacking the assumptions of what Robert Orsi calls the “paradigm of normative ‘modern religion’” requires us to understand that against which the modern was staged. For Orsi, that “other” included to a considerable degree “the rejection of the Catholic doctrine of the real presence”—the idea that God or the divine could materialize in the everyday world—“and its relegation to a (Catholic) past out of step with modernity.” 29 Protestant and later British Enlightenment assumptions about the ontology of religion cast aside (or into “the past”) Catholic practices that would find the divine in the sacred Host or centuries later in the waters of Our Lady of Lourdes Grotto in the Bronx, New York, a replica of the grotto in Lourdes, France, where Mary appeared in 1859 to Bernadette Soubirous. 30 The disenchantments of the Protestant Reformation joined the exultation of reason, and of reasonable religion, during the Age of Enlightenment. Reasonable religion was a matter of the mind, a commitment of belief. It rose above what Scottish philosopher David Hume criticized as the enthusiasm of those Protestants who were too fervent, too emotional, and the superstition of Catholics, impressed by the magic of priests who supposedly conjured Christ in the Eucharist. 31

This articulation of reason as one of the bases for normative conceptions of modern religion was from the start both racialized and gendered. “Religious distinctions and racial taxonomies went hand in hand,” Orsi writes, “as much as religion was racialized, race was religionized.” 32 For Orsi, the axis of presence and absence central to Catholic and Protestant battles in Europe would animate ongoing Protestant hostility toward Catholics in America, but it would also shape European Protestants’ encounters with non-Christians, including Native Americans and peoples from Africa, whose religious practices assumed divine presences that would be deemed pre-modern or irrational. They would continue to define non-Protestants against normative but naturalized assumptions that pitted moderns against non-moderns, masculine reason against feminine emotion, modest desires against immodest ones, and white bodies against non-white bodies.

Religion, Sex, and Civilization in the “New World”

In “Sexuality in American Religious History,” historian Ann Taves puts the “sexual body” at the center of narratives of American religion. She organizes her essay around questions of legitimacy—what is legitimate sex, legitimate marriage, and, one could add, a legitimate American or Christian?—and their role in the formation of the U.S. nation-state. 33 Taves’s inquiry into the sexual history of American religion becomes just as much a racial and gender history. The native inhabitants of the Americas enjoyed great diversity, both culturally and linguistically. But they did not operate with anything like the modern concept of race until well after Europeans first invaded these territories. European Protestants and Catholics brought with them to the Americas a host of assumptions about cultural and religious difference that informed their views of racial difference. These assumptions often tethered racial superiority to signs of civilization, which for Protestant and Catholic Europeans alike were tied to Christian sexual morals and modes of dress. Indeed, before the advance of scientific models of racism in the 19th century , these religious and cultural markers proved more dominant. For English and Spanish colonizers alike, Taves writes, “the primary distinctions between the native peoples and the colonizers” did not issue from modern notions of racial difference. Rather, they were “religious (pagan, heathen), cultural (savage, wild-men, barbarian), and geographical (native, Indian, aborigine).” 34

When the Spanish traveled to the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries , they drew upon two interpretive traditions to assimilate the native inhabitants of these lands to their own worldviews. They could be viewed as subhuman or monstrous creatures or they could be understood as “simple children of nature,” as “noble savages” who could be educated or civilized as Christians. 35 The latter tradition won out in church and colonial policy, and Spanish colonization often included the conversion of native peoples (not that this emphasis dampened the violence of colonial rule that native people experienced). Indians were understood as pagans “who had never heard the word of Christ” rather than “infidels, like Jews and Muslims, who had been exposed to the gospel but had rejected it.” 36 Thus, the Spanish did not see Indians as “racially” distinct in a modern or proto-modern sense, as they did Jews, and so they set themselves the task of converting Indians to Christianity. With few exceptions, British and French missionaries along the eastern seaboard likewise expected to Christianize Native Americans, a process that involved not merely what we might today consider a change in “belief” but rather the adoption of European cultural practices that were part and parcel of what Europeans considered “civilization.” Sexual mores were key among them.

European Christians were often shocked by the cultural and sexual customs of Native Americans, which they took as signs of paganism and lack of civilization. Of course, indigenous Americans varied greatly in their gender and sexual practices, but Europeans often found their dress inappropriate and their commitments to monogamy too lax (some Native American groups, including the Pueblo, Narragansett, and Massachusetts Indians were mostly monogamous). 37 For Catholics and Protestants alike, proper sexual expression proved central to being a Christian and thus an essential element in the process of conversion. “Sexual fidelity in monogamous marriage was a primary metaphor for the relationship between the converted Christian and a monotheistic god,” writes Taves. “Sexual infidelity in marriage (adultery), nonprocreative sex (sodomy, buggery), and sex outside of marriage (whoredome, fornication),” she continues, “were metaphorically linked to religious infidelity or heresy (blasphemy, atheism, witchcraft).” 38 Taves suggests the powerful connection between this “constellation of ideas” that links together “particular beliefs about sexuality, gender, marriage, and Christian civilization” and 20th-century rhetoric about “traditional family values.” Since at least the 1970s, conservative Christians have drawn upon the language of family values to articulate a critique of modern American sexual liberalism—they have found the seeds of America’s downfall in loosening sexual morals, including sex before marriage and the acceptance of LGBT people, alongside advances in women’s equality and support for transgender inclusion. This rhetoric continues the long tradition of moral jeremiads that draw together the American nation-state with (sometimes secularized) assumptions about Protestant Christian purity. 39 As Taves suggests, more recent articulations of family values and moral purity draw from much longer histories of Christian colonialism and the emergence of religious and cultural assumptions about racial difference.

American Religion and the Emergence of Modern Racism

Considering contact in North America requires that we look at how European Americans changed as well through encounters with Indians and people of African descent. Anglo-American Protestants created “new traditions of meaning” when they came into contact with Native Americans. One way concerned how they read their Bibles. Christians have long read the Bible as a living document, one through which they can readily understand their own lives (as opposed to reading it purely as a historical or literary document, practices that become more common and authoritative in the shift toward modernity). Anglo-American Protestants could read their escape from religious persecution in Europe as analogous to Israelites fleeing bondage in Egypt. Their arrival in the New World resonated with Israelites settling in the promised land. Such readings led Anglo-American Protestants to compare indigenous Americans to peoples in the Bible, including Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, and Canaanites—all groups that “the Lord blotted out so that Israel could enjoy a land flowing with milk and honey.” 40 This new biblical comparison bolstered Anglo-American Protestants’ belief in their own religious and racial superiority and justified violence against Indians. As one 19th-century Methodist bishop wrote: “Now, it may be that this rapid disappearance [of Indians] before a superior race is in the order of an overruling Providence. It is declared in the book from which there is no appeal, ‘For the nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish.’” 41

Such biblical readings also shaped how white Christians understood people of African descent. In the 17th and 18th centuries , the idea that African people were descended from Ham became increasingly common as a justification for their enslavement. This theological move leaned upon the biblical account of Ham, the son of Noah. After Noah had become drunk and passed out, Ham “saw the nakedness of his father” (Gen 9:22) and told his brothers. Once Noah learned of Ham’s transgression, he cursed Ham’s son Canaan by declaring, “lowest of the slaves shall he be to his brothers” (Gen 9:25). Here, a (mysterious) sexual transgression justified the oppression and enslavement of an entire people, thereafter marked for this sin by the darkness of their skin. This theological reading also shaped constructions of whiteness, as whites became “the people of God,” those who would uphold order and honor, including sexual propriety. 42

But whites were not the only Americans to draw upon the Bible to understand their place in life. African Americans developed a long tradition of seeing themselves in the story of Exodus, though here America was no longer the “New Canaan” that Puritans had imagined but rather Egypt, the site of enslavement. Blacks identified themselves with the Israelites, escaping slavery and searching for a new promised land. As Eddie Glaude as shown, 19th-century black Americans developed through such readings a sense of their own chosenness and destiny, which propelled black nationalist movements and sustained critiques of the (white) American state. In such movements, Glaude writes, “the nation is imagined not alongside religion but precisely through the precepts of black Christianity.” 43 This history demonstrates the flexibility of rhetorical and religious constructions, which could be used to mobilize social movements and social critique even as they framed the national contexts in which those movements emerged.

Theological readings of race allowed European Christians to engage differently with Indians than they did with people of African descent. By the early 19th century , as we saw with the example of Catharine Brown, Indian converts could become “almost white.” Theological assumptions about racial difference precluded Africans from ever approximating Christian “whiteness” in such a way. European Christians debated whether Africans could even be converted—a debate essentially about whether Africans were human and thus capable of the reason necessary for conversion. Others worried that conversion of African slaves, which would make them brothers in Christ, would necessitate granting their freedom. The racial attitudes that European Americans harbored toward Africans were far from inevitable. Medieval European representations of sub-Saharan Africans ranged in the 15th century from “the monstrous and horrifying to the saintly and heroic.” 44 But in the midst of the Atlantic slave trade, European conceptions of African religious and cultural difference—the idea that Africans were “heathens” or “savages”—took on new racialist logics to justify enslavement. If people were enslaved because they were heathens, then Christian conversion would necessitate granting their freedom. “Once their enslavement was rationalized on the basis of race—on the basis of a ‘divinely ordained’ hierarchy of biologically distinguishable human groups,” Taves explains, “then salvation and enslavement could coexist.” 45 Fredrickson describes the justification as changing from “heathenism to heathen ancestry.” 46

Assumptions about differences in “blood” and the need to maintain the purity of white or Christian blood shaped both the emergence of anti-black racism and subsequent fears, especially in British America, of interracial sex and marriage. This fear drove “anti-miscegenation” laws and fears about racial mixing in British America in ways that did not prevail in other parts of the Americas, where interracial relationships were more common. These differences led to somewhat distinctive genealogies of race and racism in the United States, especially compared to countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. The history of black slavery and struggles for freedom (first from slavery and then and now for racial quality) have been constitutive of U.S. racial and religious politics, forging “the metalanguage of race” that Higginbotham so aptly observed. While some historians have insisted upon a break between the pre-history of race, indebted to religious views of difference, and modern forms of racism, Henry Goldschmidt pushes against any such “clear distinction.” “Distinctions between race and religion,” he writes, “may ultimately rest on the popular equation of modernity with secularization, a reductive contrast between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition.’” 47

Indeed, constellations of race, religion, gender, and sexuality did not disappear with the ascendance of biological notions of race in the 19th century nor with the emergence of American “modernity.” Nor did it collapse all racial difference into a simple black‒white binary. The ascendance of racial categories and racialist thinking across the 19th century did work to contain the civilizing powers of Christian conversion. “In the age of [Andrew] Jackson,” Martin concludes his essay on Catherine Brown, no matter how sincere her prayer or “how properly she behaved, her eye would always remain ‘dark,’ her cheekbones ‘prominent,’ and her hair ‘glossy.’” 48 Not only African Americans but also Native Americans, Asians, and other non-European peoples would be cast outside the bounds of whiteness, no matter how close they came.

Whiteness itself, though, has also remained a contested category. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries , Irish and then Italian Catholics who immigrated to the United States found themselves subject to racialized otherness. Anglo-Protestant Americans commonly depicted Irish Americans with ape-like features, suggesting a lower level of evolution. While these depictions drew from long-standing assumptions about the degeneracy of Irish blood, prejudice against Irish Catholicism was just as influential. Deemed superstitious and backward, Irish Catholics (and later Italians), some worried, were unfit for American democracy. Mormons also fell short of normative whiteness, largely because of their religious practices of polygamy, which fell outside Christian ideals of sexual propriety that emphasized monogamy. 49 Still, one of the biggest threats to whiteness was the possibility that blacks and whites would intermarry. The problem here, as Taves points out, was not only that blacks and whites might have sex and bear children but that such relationships might be legitimated by American law and by social and religious customs.

White anxieties about racial mixing have continued to shape legal discourse and political and religious rhetoric, including the language of “traditional family values” that Taves has named. These entanglements surfaced, for instance, in American debates about public school segregation leading up to and following the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka , which overturned the case of Plessy v. Ferguson ( 1896 ) that allowed for state-sanctioned segregation. 50 “The most common argument” against desegregation, historian Jane Dailey has argued, “was theological: integration encouraged miscegenation, which contradicted divine Word.” 51 The architects of Brown , she explains, went to great lengths to make this case look “to be about anything but sex and marriage.” 52

The Court followed the strategy of the NAACP to bring down segregation, which included sidestepping or downplaying how such a case might affect long-standing Jim Crow restrictions on interracial sex and marriage—at the time, marriage or sex between whites and blacks was illegal in twenty-seven states. The racial animus here was not merely legitimated by religious beliefs but constituted through racial theologies that developed over the course of American history, including theologies of segregation that developed with the collapse of legal slavery. For many white southerners, Brown was most certainly and explicitly concerned with sex, Dailey insists. They feared that allowing students to take classes together would usher in a new age of leniency that would encourage the formation of mixed race relationships, including romantic and sexual ones. 53 One Christian southerner wrote to Governor Stanley in 1954 :

I believe that the integration of the races in our public schools will result in intermarriage of the negro and white races, and I am sure that the NAACP will next try to have the law repealed prohibiting intermarriage of the two races. I believe that the Lord would have made us all one color if he had intended that we be one race. 54

Brown could not be disentangled from theological arguments about race and sexuality. For many white southerners, Dailey shows, racial mixing would mean the end of Christian purity, of the moral status of whiteness, and indeed of American civilization—not merely because they thought it was bad for blacks and whites to mix but because, for these white Christians, it went against divine order.

Asian Americans, Asian Religions, and American Race

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries , white Americans grew anxious about immigrants arriving from Asia. Two Supreme Court cases in the 1920s defined Asians outside the limits of whiteness and suggest the power of legal and religious discourse to shape race, even as the Court exhibited a lack of consistency in the arguments used to maintain these boundaries. In Ozawa v. United States ( 1922 ), the Court ruled against eligibility for naturalization for Japanese-born Takao Ozawa, who had been living in the United States for two decades. 55 He had applied for U.S. citizenship under the Naturalization Act of 1906 , which applied to “aliens being free white persons, and to aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.” 56 Ozawa claimed his skin was “white,” especially compared to various “whites” of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian descent, whose skin was often darker than that of Anglo and German American whites. 57 In its decision, the Court qualified the meaning of “white,” arguing that it referred to only those of “Caucasian” background. By this system of categorization, one bolstered by early 20th-century ethnologists, Ozawa was not white but “Mongolian.” 58

The next year, the Supreme Court decided in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind ( 1923 ) that Thind, who was born in India but had moved to the United States in 1913 and had fought for the United States in World War I, was not “white” and was thus ineligible for American citizenship. 59 During the trial, Thind’s lawyers argued that he was “Caucasian” and therefore legally “white.” According to ethnological science, there were two subtypes of whiteness: Semitic and Aryan. The category of Aryan included people in Europe but also extended to parts of northern India, where Thind was from. They drew upon his “Hindooism” to stake this claim for Thind’s status as a Caucasian, as the marriage laws of the Hindu caste system would have prevented intermarriage, thus keeping pure his bloodline, which could be traced back to Aryans living in India. This argument was not unusual at the time. As Jennifer Snow writes, “the genealogical argument for the ‘whiteness’ of ‘Hindus’ had been used repeatedly in citizenship cases—and it had always been successful.” 60 The Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization challenged this argument, claiming that a “Hindoo” could never be “white.” Chief Justice Sutherland followed this argument in his decision, unanimously approved, in which he insisted that Caucasian or not, Thind was a “Hindoo” and thus not “white” and unable to assimilate to American civilization. 61 Concepts of race, religion, and civilization became entangled in this case, Snow argues. Indeed, at that time, clear distinctions between the three would have made no sense. “These inseparable links between race and religion,” she writes, “were inescapable in the America of Bhagat Singh Thind—tying ‘whiteness’ to rationalist Christianity and ‘nonwhiteness’ to heathen imagination and emotion, or else to spiritual wisdom transcending rationality.” 62

In 1965 , the United States lifted previous restrictions on immigration and witnessed an influx of Asians, Latin Americans, and people from the Middle East. Since the 1960s, white Americans have also become far more curious about religious traditions that emerged in Asia, including Hinduism and Buddhism in particular. The “East” served as a source of potential spiritual fulfillment for the “West.” Asians (and Asian religions) were represented as sources of wisdom and insight—as the premodern and feminine antidote to American industry and the spirit of capitalism. As Jane Iwamura has argued, American popular culture has readily consumed and reproduced Asian religions through the lens of a “virtual orientalism.” Americans have translated and negotiated this cultural fascination with Asian religious and racial otherness through iconic symbols like the “Oriental Monk,” which has ranged from the popularity of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi since the 1970s, through teachers like Yoda in Star Wars and Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid , to the character Po in the animated movie Kung Fu Panda . 63

New immigration laws also paved the way for a greater number of Muslims to enter the United States from the Middle East and South Asia. Muslims had long lived in the United States—they were brought to the shores of North America as enslaved Africans, and black Americans developed organized and highly visible religious and racial movements aligned with Islam during the 20th century . But immigrant Muslims faced different kinds of challenges in the United States, especially following attacks on the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001 . In popular news media, Muslims were often racialized and represented as hypersexual as well as anti-modern or regressive in their oppressive attitudes toward women and LGBT people. Queer or feminist Muslims became unintelligible in this logic of representation. In Terrorist Assemblages , queer studies scholar Jasbir Puar describes new alignments among sexuality, race, gender, religion, and nationalism through which some lesbian and gay Americans (those “good gays” who value American norms of marriage and family) have moved toward cultural and religious acceptance. But this acceptance has been consolidated through the creation of new forms of sexualized and racialized otherness, namely the conflation of Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabs as threats to the American nation-state. 64 Conflations of the U.S. “War on Terror” with the history of European Christian “crusades” against Muslims—President George W. Bush used this term in speeches following 9/11—continue to shape American assumptions about religion, race, gender, and sexuality. 65

Religion, Secularism, and the Precarity of Race

This article opened with two examples of gender, sexuality, and race coming together in the history of American religion. Allow me to clarify the stakes for including the story about Punkin’ Brown, a story that on the surface does not appear explicitly concerned with questions of race. Covington’s narration of Punkin’ Brown points to the ability for modern understandings of religion to continue to destabilize racial identifications. Racial difference and religious difference have often gone hand in hand. As Kathryn Lofton has observed, for instance, historians and scholars of religion cannot seem to shake the notion of the “perpetual primitive” in accounts of African American religion—the notion that there is something authentically religious, authentically ecstatic, in the religious practices of black people. These studies remain haunted by traces of a racial essentialism that reproduces African American religious experience as the religiously real and the religiously real as a vestige of primitivism. 66

These representations work in the other direction as well, pushing on the boundaries of whiteness through expressions of “primitive” religiosity. We see one example of this in the religious fervor of Punkin’ Brown, whose evangelical snake handling combined with his sexism (and class status and regional location) to exclude him from one journalist’s vision of the sacred, of “true” or “good” religion. By representing Brown as a hissing snake, as Orsi notes, Covington challenged Brown’s status not only as a Christian, but as a human. Punkin’ Brown’s religious practices—of which his views about women were constitutive, not additive—pushed against the boundaries of liberal acceptance, of enlightened citizenship, indeed of whiteness itself. 67 Within the racial etiquette of liberal journalism, and of educated America, Covington could not mark Brown as nonwhite, but he could render him a snake. Historically, of course, depictions of some people as being closer to nature, or closer to animals, has long functioned as a source for racial othering. The conversion of Catherine Brown rendered her “almost white” to some Christian missionaries in the 19th century ; the devotions of Punkin’ Brown, which pressed against the politics of white respectability and reason, no doubt cast him, we might say, as “almost not white”—as the elasticity of race and the limits of whiteness were tested through the embodiments of religion.

Review of the Literature

The study of race, gender, and sexuality is not a subfield within American religion so much as a set of theoretically informed approaches to thinking about history and culture. They build upon social and political movements that re-examine American culture and politics with attention to those often left out of national or dominant narratives. Some scholars working at the intersections of these identity categories have also moved toward genealogical or discursive studies. These approaches are as concerned with how subjects of race, gender, sexuality, and religion are constituted and represented through social discourse as they are with the recovery or inclusion of subaltern voices.

Scholarship in American religion, especially since the 1990s, has been usefully informed by both moves. A number of edited collections, and individual essays in such collections, have presented these approaches most effectively. 68 There is also a rich and growing body of monographs that tackle these topics over the course of American religious history. 69 More recently, scholars have begun to include greater attention to visual, aural, and material religion and to the role of objects, animals, and environments in American religion. 70 Scholarship drawing upon these new approaches, in addition to theoretical work coming out of queer of color critique and theories of “assemblage,” has opened new avenues to consider social categories of identity and difference in ways that build upon but also move beyond intersectional and poststructuralist approaches. 71

But approaches that hold together social categories of difference, especially those focused on gender, racial, sexual, and religious minorities, have not moved toward the center of scholarship on American religion. Like many other fields of history, work in American religion now includes a larger and more diverse cast of historical subjects, and most scholars today make some effort to gesture toward the history of women and of African Americans (and less often to other racial minorities). But these changes seem to be additive rather than transformative. Despite rich, emerging bodies of work in fields like American Judaism, American Catholicism, LGBT religion, Latinx religions, and African American religions, publications in American religion continue to foreground dominant national narratives centered on the history of white Protestants. And they continue to take as given the normative status of categories like whiteness or heterosexuality rather than asking how they have been formed through or alongside discourses of American religion. Historian Catherine Brekus’s remark about the difficulty of “finding” women in much recent work on American religion rings true for scholarship on race, gender, and sexuality more generally. It is not that scholars are “hostile” to such approaches so much as “dismissive of it, treating it as a separate topic that they can safely ignore.” 72 Future scholarship will no doubt benefit from the rich bibliography of work that already exists in the study of religion, race, gender, and sexuality in colonial America and the United States, but it will be important to find ways to bring this research from the margins to the center—even to allow this attention to difference to push against the very idea of a center, as new modes of difference open onto new angles of analysis.

Further Reading

• Anzaldúa, Gloria . Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . 3rd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007.
• Beliso-De Jesus , Aisha. Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion . New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
• Best, Wallace D. Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915–1952 . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
• Brown, Karen McCarthy . Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
• Brown, Kathleen . Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
• Butler, Judith . Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity . New York: Routledge, 1990.
• Collins, Patricia Hill . Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment . New York: Routledge, 2000.
• Dailey, Jane . “Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred after Brown.” Journal of American History 91, no. 1 (June 2004): 119–144.
• Dorsey, Bruce . Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002.
• Foucault, Michel . The History of Sexuality . vol. 1, An Introduction . New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
• Godbeer, Richard . Sexual Revolution in Early America . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
• Goldschmidt, Henry , and Elizabeth McAlister . Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas . New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Griffith, R. Marie . Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
• Gutiérrez, Ramón A. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.
• Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks . “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race.” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 17, no. 2 (1992): 251–274.
• Iwamura, Jane . Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture . New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Lofton, Kathryn . Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
• McClintock, Anne . Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest . New York: Routledge, 1995.
• Scott, Joan . “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 773–797.
• Spillers, Hortense J. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
• Taves, Ann . “Sexuality and American Religious History.” In Retelling U.S. Religious History . Edited by Thomas A. Tweed , 27–56. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
• Weisenfeld, Judith . New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration . New York: New York University Press, 2016.

1. Joel Martin , “Almost White: The Ambivalent Promise of Christian Missions among the Cherokees,” in Religion and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity , ed. Craig Prentiss (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 43–60, quotations from 45.

2. Quoted in ibid. , 43.

3. Quoted in ibid. , 44.

4. Quoted in ibid. , 48–49.

5. Ibid. , 49.

6. Robert A. Orsi , “Snakes Alive: Religious Studies between Heaven and Earth,” in Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them , ed. Robert A. Orsi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 180; and Dennis Covington , Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995).

7. Orsi, “Snakes Alive,” 181, emphasis added.

8. Ibid. , 182.

9. Linda Nicholson , Identity before Identity Politics (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

10. For exceptions to this trend, see Ann Braude , Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Leigh Eric Schmidt , Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman (New York: Basic Books, 2010); Heather Rachelle White , Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); and Anthony Petro , After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

11. Matthew Jacobsen Frye , Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post‒Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

12. Michel Foucault , The History of Sexuality , vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990); and Jonathan Ned Katz , The Invention of Heterosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

13. Thomas Laqueur , Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Judith Butler , Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Sarah S. Richardson , Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); and Ann Fausto Sterling , Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

14. Crenshaw, Kimberlé , “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum Volume: Feminism in the Law: Theory, Practice and Criticism (1989): 139–167; and “ Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 6 (1991): 1241–1299.

15. Jasbir Puar , “‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess’: Intersectionality, Assemblage, and Affective Politics,” EIPCP: European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies .

16. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow , Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), viii (both quotations); and Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ , Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality (New York: HarperCollins, 1989).

17. Ann Braude , “Women’s History Is American Religious History,” in Retelling U.S. Religious History , ed. Thomas A. Tweed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 87–107; on revising notions of the political, see Judith Weisenfeld , “Invisible Women: On Women and Gender in the Study of African American Religious History,” Journal of Africana Religions 1, no. 1 (2013): 133–149.

18. Hazel V. Carby , “‘On the Threshold of Women’s Era’: Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 262–277; and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham , “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 17, no. 2 (1992): 251–274.

19. Joan Scott , “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Summer, 1991): 782.

20. Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History,” 255.

21. Butler, Gender Trouble .

22. Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History,” 253. On the powerful axis of black‒white racial representations, see Toni Morrison , Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993).

23. James W. Baker , Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday (Lebanon: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009).

24. George Fredrickson , Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 21–22.

25. Ibid. , 32.

26. Ibid. , 35.

27. Robert Bartlett , The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Ann Taves , “Sexuality and American Religious History,” in Retelling U.S. Religious History , ed. Thomas A. Tweed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 36.

28. Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History,” 269.

29. Robert A. Orsi , History and Presence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 3–4.

30. Ibid. , 51–52; Ruth Harris , Lourdes: Body and Spirit in a Secular Age (New York: Viking, 1999).

31. David Hume , “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm,” in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary , ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1987).

32. Orsi, History and Presence , 3.

33. Taves, “Sexuality and American Religious History.”

34. Ibid. , 36.

35. Fredrickson, Racism , 36.

36. Ibid. , 37.

37. Taves, “Sexuality and American Religious History,” 33.

38. Ibid. , 35.

39. Sara Moslener , Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Seth Dowland , Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); and Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini , Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (New York: New York University Press, 2003).

40. Joel Martin , “Indians, Contact, and Colonialism in the Deep South: Themes for a Postcolonial History of American Religion,” in Retelling U.S. Religious History , ed. Thomas A. Tweed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 160. This paragraph is drawn from Martin’s account.

41. Quoted in ibid. , 271n31. The Bishop was T. A. Morris and this quotation is drawn from his introduction to Henry C. Benson , Life among the Choctaw Indians and Sketches of the South-West (Cincinnati: L. Swormstedt and A. Poe, 1860), 8.

42. The phrase is from Sylvester Johnson , The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

43. Eddie S. Glaude , Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 6. On the idea that “African Americans invented themselves, not as a race, but as a nation,” see also Barbara Jeanne Fields , “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of American,” New Left Review , no. 181 (May‒June 1990), 115 (quoted in Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History,” 268).

44. Fredrickson, Racism , 26.

45. Taves, “Sexuality and American Religious History,” 38.

46. Fredrickson, Racism , 45.

47. Henry Goldschmidt , “Introduction: Race, Nation, and Religion,” in Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas , eds. Henry Goldschmidt and Elizabeth McAlister (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 14.

48. Martin, “Almost White,” 56.

49. See, for instance, Jenny Franchot , Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Robert Orsi , “The Religious Boundaries of an Inbetween People: Street Feste and the Problem of the Dark-Skinned Other in Italian Harlem, 1920‒1990,” American Quarterly 44, no. 3 (September 1, 1992): 313–347; W. Paul Reeve , Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); on Jewish negotiations of religion and race, see Eric Goldstein , The Price of Whiteness: Race, Jews, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); and Henry Goldschmidt , Race and Religion among the Chosen People of Crown Heights (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006).

50. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954); and Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

51. Jane Dailey , “Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred after Brown,” Journal of American History 91, no. 1 (June 2004): 126; and Thaddeus Russell , “The Color of Discipline: Civil Rights and Black Sexuality,” American Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2008): 101–128.

52. Dailey, “Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred,” 127.

54. Quoted in ibid. , 134.

55. Takao Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922).

56. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Division of Naturalization, “Naturalization Laws and Regulations of October, 1906” (Washington Government Printing Office, 1906), 3.

57. Roberto Treviño , “Ethnicity,” in Themes in Religion and American Culture , eds. Philip Goff and Paul Harvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 166.

59. United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923).

60. Jennifer Snow , “The Civilization of White Men: The Race of the Hindu in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind ,” in Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas , eds. Henry Goldschmidt and Elizabeth McAlister (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 261. As Snow notes, Thind was actually Sikh, but this distinction did not matter for his lawyer or, indeed, for most Americans at the time.

61. Ibid. , 261–263.

62. Ibid. , 277.

63. Jane Iwamura , Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

64. Jasbir Puar , Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Rosemary Corbett has compelling challenged Puar’s emphasis upon the “racialization of religion,” prompting her to consider how extant religious categories, especially “fundamentalism,” have been mobilized to “religionize” various races. Rosemary R. Corbett , “Meta0data, Same-Sex Marriage and the ‘Making of Terrorists,’” Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal 15, no. 2 (2014): 187–197.

65. See, for instance, George W. Bush , “Remarks by the President upon Arrival,” September 16, 2001.

66. Kathryn Lofton , “The Perpetual Primitive in African American Religious Historiography,” in The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions , eds. Edward E. Curtis IV and Danielle Brune Singler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 171–191.

67. Also see Susan Harding , “Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant Cultural Other,” Social Research 58, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 373–393.

68. For edited collections, see especially Henry Goldschmidt and Elizabeth McAlister , eds., Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); R. Marie Griffith and Barbara Savage , Women and Religion in the African Diaspora: Knowledge, Power, and Performance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2006); Tracy Fessenden , Nicholas F. Radel , and Magdalena J. Zaborowska , eds., The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature (New York: Routledge, 2001); Judith Weisenfeld and Richard Newman , The Far by Faith: Readings in African American Women’s Religious Biography (New York: Routledge, 1995); Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter , A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Catherine A. Brekus , The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); key essays include Ann Taves , “Sexuality and American Religious History,” Retelling U.S. Religious History , ed. Thomas A. Tweed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 27–56; Joan Scott , “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Summer, 1991): 773–797; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham , “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 17, no. 2 (1992): 251–274; Susan Juster , “The Spirit and the Flesh: Gender, Language, and Sexuality in American Protestantism,” in New Directions in American Religious History , eds. Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 334–361; and Judith Weisenfeld , “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks: Margins, Centers, and Bridges in African American Religious History,” in New Directions in American Religious History , eds. Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 417–444.

69. The list is suggestive rather than comprehensive. On colonial religions, see Ann Marie Plane , Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in New England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Carol Devens , Countering Colonization: Native American Women and Great Lakes Missions, 1630–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); María Elena Martínez , Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Kathleen M. Brown , Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Martha Finch , Dissenting Bodies: Corporealities in Early New England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); and Michelene E. Pesantubbee , Choctaw Women in a Chaotic World: The Clash of Cultures in the Colonial Southeast (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005). On religion in the United States, see Catherine A. Brekus , Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Ann Taves , Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experience Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Robert A. Orsi , The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Andrea Smith , Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham , Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Theresa Delgadillo , Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion, Gender, Race, and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Kristy Nabhan-Warren , The Virgin of El Barrio: Marian Apparitions, Catholic Evangelizing, and Mexican American Activism (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Tisa Wenger , We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Eric Goldstein , The Price of Whiteness: Race, Jews, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Sally Engle Merry , Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Jodi Eichler-Levine , Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature (New York: New York University Press, 2013). For a fuller historiography, see Anthony M. Petro , “Religion, Gender, and Sexuality,” in The Columbia Guide to Religion in American History , eds. Paul Harvey and Edward J. Blum (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 188–212.

70. This work frequently foregrounds the religious body (including the work of bodies and representations of bodies) in important ways. See, for instance, David Morgan and Sally Promey , eds., The Visual Culture of American Religions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Colleen McDannell , Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Sally M. Promey , ed., Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Judith Weisenfeld , Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Donovan O. Schaeffer , Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

71. For a recent work that uses theories of assemblage, see Aisha Beliso-De Jesús , Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). On intersectional and assemblage as theoretical approaches, see Jasbir Puar, “‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess’: Intersectionality, Assemblage, and Affective Politics,” EIPCP: European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies , January 2011. On queer of color critique, see Roderick A. Ferguson , Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); and José Esteban Muñoz , Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

72. Catherine A. Brekus , “Introduction: Searching for Women in Narratives of American Religious History,” in The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 1.

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Three Essays on Religion

Author:  King, Martin Luther, Jr.

Date:  September 1, 1948 to May 31, 1951 ?

Location:  Chester, Pa. ?

Genre:  Essay

Topic:  Martin Luther King, Jr. - Education

In the following three essays, King wrestles with the role of religion in modern society. In the first assignment, he calls science and religion “different though converging truths” that both “spring from the same seeds of vital human needs.” King emphasizes an awareness of God’s presence in the second document, noting that religion’s purpose “is not to perpetuate a dogma or a theology; but to produce living witnesses and testimonies to the power of God in human experience.” In the final handwritten essay King acknowledges the life-affirming nature of Christianity, observing that its adherents have consistently “looked forward for a time to come when the law of love becomes the law of life.”

"Science and Religion"

There is widespread belief in the minds of many that there is a conflict between science and religion. But there is no fundamental issue between the two. While the conflict has been waged long and furiously, it has been on issues utterly unrelated either to religion or to science. The conflict has been largely one of trespassing, and as soon as religion and science discover their legitimate spheres the conflict ceases.

Religion, of course, has been very slow and loath to surrender its claim to sovereignty in all departments of human life; and science overjoyed with recent victories, has been quick to lay claim to a similar sovereignty. Hence the conflict.

But there was never a conflict between religion and science as such. There cannot be. Their respective worlds are different. Their methods are dissimilar and their immediate objectives are not the same. The method of science is observation, that of religion contemplation. Science investigates. Religion interprets. One seeks causes, the other ends. Science thinks in terms of history, religion in terms of teleology. One is a survey, the other an outlook.

The conflict was always between superstition disguised as religion and materialism disguised as science, between pseudo-science and pseudo-religion.

Religion and science are two hemispheres of human thought. They are different though converging truths. Both science and religion spring from the same seeds of vital human needs.

Science is the response to the human need of knowledge and power. Religion is the response to the human need for hope and certitude. One is an outreaching for mastery, the other for perfection. Both are man-made, and like man himself, are hedged about with limitations. Neither science nor religion, by itself, is sufficient for man. Science is not civilization. Science is organized knowledge; but civilization which is the art of noble and progressive communal living requires much more than knowledge. It needs beauty which is art, and faith and moral aspiration which are religion. It needs artistic and spiritual values along with the intellectual.

Man cannot live by facts alone. What we know is little enough. What we are likely to know will always be little in comparison with what there is to know. But man has a wish-life which must build inverted pyramids upon the apexes of known facts. This is not logical. It is, however, psychological.

Science and religion are not rivals. It is only when one attempts to be the oracle at the others shrine that confusion arises. Whan the scientist from his laboratory, on the basis of alleged scientific knowledge presumes to issue pronouncements on God, on the origin and destiny of life, and on man's place in the scheme of things he is [ passing? ] out worthless checks. When the religionist delivers ultimatums to the scientist on the basis of certain cosomologies embedded in the sacred text then he is a sorry spectacle indeed.

When religion, however, on the strength of its own postulates, speaks to men of God and the moral order of the universe, when it utters its prophetic burden of justice and love and holiness and peace, then its voice is the voice of the eternal spiritual truth, irrefutable and invincible.,

"The Purpose of Religion"

What is the purpose of religion? 1  Is it to perpetuate an idea about God? Is it totally dependent upon revelation? What part does psychological experience play? Is religion synonymous with theology?

Harry Emerson Fosdick says that the most hopeful thing about any system of theology is that it will not last. 2  This statement will shock some. But is the purpose of religion the perpetuation of theological ideas? Religion is not validated by ideas, but by experience.

This automatically raises the question of salvation. Is the basis for salvation in creeds and dogmas or in experience. Catholics would have us believe the former. For them, the church, its creeds, its popes and bishops have recited the essence of religion and that is all there is to it. On the other hand we say that each soul must make its own reconciliation to God; that no creed can take the place of that personal experience. This was expressed by Paul Tillich when he said, “There is natural religion which belongs to man by nature. But there is also a revealed religion which man receives from a supernatural reality.” 3 Relevant religion therefore, comes through revelation from God, on the one hand; and through repentance and acceptance of salvation on the other hand. 4  Dogma as an agent in salvation has no essential place.

This is the secret of our religion. This is what makes the saints move on in spite of problems and perplexities of life that they must face. This religion of experience by which man is aware of God seeking him and saving him helps him to see the hands of God moving through history.

Religion has to be interpreted for each age; stated in terms that that age can understand. But the essential purpose of religion remains the same. It is not to perpetuate a dogma or theology; but to produce living witnesses and testimonies to the power of God in human experience.

[ signed ] M. L. King Jr. 5

"The Philosophy of Life Undergirding Christianity and the Christian Ministry"

Basically Christianity is a value philosophy. It insists that there are eternal values of intrinsic, self-evidencing validity and worth, embracing the true and the beautiful and consummated in the Good. This value content is embodied in the life of Christ. So that Christian philosophy is first and foremost Christocentric. It begins and ends with the assumption that Christ is the revelation of God. 6

We might ask what are some of the specific values that Christianity seeks to conserve? First Christianity speaks of the value of the world. In its conception of the world, it is not negative; it stands over against the asceticisms, world denials, and world flights, for example, of the religions of India, and is world-affirming, life affirming, life creating. Gautama bids us flee from the world, but Jesus would have us use it, because God has made it for our sustenance, our discipline, and our happiness. 7  So that the Christian view of the world can be summed up by saying that it is a place in which God is fitting men and women for the Kingdom of God.

Christianity also insists on the value of persons. All human personality is supremely worthful. This is something of what Schweitzer has called “reverence for life.” 8  Hunan being must always be used as ends; never as means. I realize that there have been times that Christianity has short at this point. There have been periods in Christians history that persons have been dealt with as if they were means rather than ends. But Christianity at its highest and best has always insisted that persons are intrinsically valuable. And so it is the job of the Christian to love every man because God love love. We must not love men merely because of their social or economic position or because of their cultural contribution, but we are to love them because  God  they are of value to God.

Christianity is also concerned about the value of life itself. Christianity is concerned about the good life for every  child,  man,  and  woman and child. This concern for the good life and the value of life is no where better expressed than in the words of Jesus in the gospel of John: “I came that you might have life and that you might have it more abundantly.” 9  This emphasis has run throughout the Christian tradition. Christianity has always had a concern for the elimination of disease and pestilence. This is seen in the great interest that it has taken in the hospital movement.

Christianity is concerned about increasing value. The whole concept of the kingdom of God on earth expressing a concern for increasing value. We need not go into a dicussion of the nature and meaning of the Kingdom of God, only to say that Christians throughout the ages have held tenaciouly to this concept. They have looked forward for a time to come when the law of love becomes the law of life.

In the light of all that we have said about Christianity as a value philosophy, where does the ministry come into the picture? 10

1.  King may have also considered the purpose of religion in a Morehouse paper that is no longer extant, as he began a third Morehouse paper, “Last week we attempted to discuss the purpose of religion” (King, “The Purpose of Education,” September 1946-February 1947, in  Papers  1:122).

2.  “Harry Emerson Fosdick” in  American Spiritual Autobiographies: Fifteen Self-Portraits,  ed. Louis Finkelstein (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), p. 114: “The theology of any generation cannot be understood, apart from the conditioning social matrix in which it is formulated. All systems of theology are as transient as the cultures they are patterned from.”

3.  King further developed this theme in his dissertation: “[Tillich] finds a basis for God's transcendence in the conception of God as abyss. There is a basic inconsistency in Tillich's thought at this point. On the one hand he speaks as a religious naturalist making God wholly immanent in nature. On the other hand he speaks as an extreme supernaturalist making God almost comparable to the Barthian ‘wholly other’” (King, “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman,” 15 April 1955, in  Papers  2:535).

4.  Commas were added after the words “religion” and “salvation.”

5.  King folded this assignment lengthwise and signed his name on the verso of the last page.

6.  King also penned a brief outline with this title (King, “The Philosophy of Life Undergirding Christianity and the Christian Ministry,” Outline, September 1948-May 1951). In the outline, King included the reference “see Enc. Of Religion p. 162.” This entry in  An Encyclopedia of Religion,  ed. Vergilius Ferm (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946) contains a definition of Christianity as “Christo-centric” and as consisting “of eternal values of intrinsic, self-evidencing validity and worth, embracing the true and the beautiful and consummated in the Good.” King kept this book in his personal library.

7.  Siddhartha Gautama (ca. 563-ca. 483 BCE) was the historical Buddha.

8.  For an example of Schweitzer's use of the phrase “reverence for life,” see Albert Schweitzer, “The Ethics of Reverence for Life,”  Christendom  1 (1936): 225-239.

9.  John 10:10.

10.  In his outline for this paper, King elaborated: “The Ministry provides leadership in helping men to recognize and accept the eternal values in the Xty religion. a. The necessity of a call b. The necessity for disinterested love c. The [ necessity ] for moral uprightness” (King, “Philosophy of Life,” Outline, September 1948-May 1951).

Source:  CSKC-INP, Coretta Scott King Collection, In Private Hands, Sermon file.

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Humanism: Essays on Race, Religion and Popular Culture Hardcover – August 27, 2015

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Who are the "Nones"? What does humanism say about race, religion and popular culture? How do race, religion and popular culture inform and affect humanism? The demographics of the United States are changing, marked most profoundly by the religiously unaffiliated, or what we have to come to call the "Nones". Spread across generations in the United States, this group encompasses a wide range of philosophical and ideological perspectives, from some in line with various forms of theism to those who are atheistic, and all sorts of combinations in between. Similar changes to demographics are taking place in Europe and elsewhere. Humanism: Essays on Race, Religion and Popular Culture provides a much-needed humanities-based analysis and description of humanism in relation to these cultural markers. Whereas most existing analysis attempts to explain humanism through the natural and social sciences (the "what" of life), Anthony B. Pinn explores humanism in relation to "how" life is arranged, socialized, ritualized, and framed. This ground-breaking publication brings together old and new essays on a wide range of topics and themes, from the African-American experience, to the development of humanist churches, and the lyrics of Jay Z.

• Print length 184 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date August 27, 2015
• Dimensions 6.51 x 0.62 x 9.62 inches
• ISBN-10 1472581415
• ISBN-13 978-1472581419
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Editorial Reviews

“Thoughtful and timely, insightful and compelling, this collection of essays takes humanism in new and needed directions. To be warmly welcomed.” ―Phil Zuckerman, Professor of Sociology and Secular Studies, Pitzer College, USA, and author of Living the Secular Life (2014) “As humanism grows and develops, the evolving field of humanist studies needs to catch up with both its growing diversity and its intellectual rigor. Professor Pinn is in the vanguard of this endeavor and these essays are an essential contribution to this academic debate.” ―Andrew Copson, Chief Executive, British Humanist Association, UK “This is classic Tony Pinn, eloquently and effortlessly exploring religion as human meaning making through the prisms of race, religion, ritual and popular culture; criticizing the ways that theism has limited human flourishing and community; and encouraging secular and humanist thinkers to take up a more positive and constructive engagement with the religious, even with the Bible. Such a deeply moral, deeply positive humanism is exactly where we should be at this cultural and political moment, “somewhere,” as he puts it, “between absurdity and happiness.” ―Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion, Rice University, USA, and author of Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion

Book Description

About the author.

Anthony B. Pinn is Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities, Professor of Religious Studies, and Director of the Center for Engaged Research and Collaborative Learning (CERCL) at Rice University, USA. Anthony B. Pinn Anthony B. Pinn is the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University. Pinn is the author/editor of fifteen books, including: Varieties of African American Religious Experience (1998), The Black Church in the Post-Civil Rights Era (2002), and Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion (2003).

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury Academic (August 27, 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 184 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1472581415
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1472581419
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.6 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.51 x 0.62 x 9.62 inches
• #3,664 in Atheism (Books)
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Young Latines are leaving organized religion. This divided family is learning to cope

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GENERACIONES

This series is part of a collaboration between De Los and Boyle Heights Beat . Youth reporters interviewed young Latinos and their parents to explore how generational differences shape their identity and how they’re bridging divides.

For Gisselle Palomera, growing up in a Jehovah’s Witness household often felt isolating. There were no gatherings with cumbias blaring or primos and tías exchanging banter because most celebrations, including birthdays, were frowned upon. Learning about their Mexican and Colombian heritage took a backseat to religious teachings. Even friendships with people outside their faith were discouraged, Palomera said.

“I didn’t have any friends who were my longtime friends. I didn’t have any close cousins,” the 26-year-old multimedia journalist recalled. “We didn’t share any of those memories growing up ... because we were always kept away from that.”

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Without close family or friends, and a lack of cultural perspective, Palomera struggled to find their identity during their teen years. When they came out as queer, their mother sent in church elders for an intervention, then largely avoided the conversation. As a nonbinary person, Palomera felt they had no place in a congregation that denied their identity and enforced traditional gender roles.

At 15 years old, Palomera decided to leave the religion.

“Those were the most formative years. That’s when you’re figuring out who you are, when you’re hoping you have friends to fall back on that guide you toward life, or you have family who also care about you,” said Palomera. “It was really crazy to get out of that church and realize that I had nothing.”

Gisselle’s mother, Gloria Palomera, says it was hard to understand why they would want to leave the faith. For her, the congregation provided what she missed most from her hometown in Colombia: community and family. In 1973, Gloria immigrated to the U.S., landing in West L.A. with her mother and sister. After her parents separated, she blamed herself and wondered why her family fell apart.

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“Lo que buscaba, era una familia. Qué hacer yo para que mi familia estuviera unida, viviéramos en paz, viviéramos felices?” Gloria said, fighting back tears as she retold her family’s immigrant story. “Lo más difícil fue la separación. … Nos arrancaron de nuestras raíces.”

In her search for answers, Gloria found Jehovah’s Witnesses. After two marriages and four children, she continues to be a devoted member of the congregation, even though, along the way, that devotion has caused rifts between her and her family.

Much like Gisselle, Latinos are increasingly leaving organized religion. About 30% of Latino adults in the U.S. are not religiously affiliated, up from 10% in 2010, according to a report by the Pew Research Center .

The rate is much higher among younger generations, with half of U.S.-born Latinos between the ages of 18 and 29 saying they don’t identify with any religion.

Gloria sees those changes as the result of a younger generation’s “selfishness” and isolation, saying communities and families were much more united during her time. While the pair acknowledges that generational differences affect the way they understand each other, they admit that acceptance and support will have to go both ways, especially now that they’re living together again after almost two years apart.

We sat down with Gisselle and Gloria to have a candid conversation about the role religion has played in their family dynamic and how they continue to work through generational differences to understand each other. The interview has been edited for length and clarity and kept in its original language to preserve the quality of the reporting.

How do you think being raised in a strict religious household shaped your cultural identity?

Gisselle: [It made] me feel like I should push away any part of my culture and just assimilate, which is what I think my mom’s generation did —parents that tend to strive for us to assimilate to this life because they think that’s the best thing for us rather than knowing who you are and accepting your cultural differences. … It’s taken me a lot more time to realize, “Oh, I love being Colombian, I love being Mexican.”

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What do you think it takes to see each other’s point of view?

Gisselle: I think conversations like this. It’s taken a lot of understanding, education, reading, networking with people that are different from me. ... I understand that as a woman with no education, with all these cultural norms and expectations that her mom had for her as one of the eldest, she was dealt a really sh— life.

Gloria: Ayudar, tenerle paciencia, hablar con ella, escucharla. Pero a veces no podemos hablar. Ella se enoja o yo me enojo o ella grita o yo grito. … Yo quisiera que viviéramos en paz, con respeto, con armonía, como amigas. Que a pesar de todos los problemas que hemos vivido, que ella entienda mi posición y situación.

What is something your generations don’t understand about each other?

Gisselle: I think that her generation is very OK with how things were and how things are, and accepting, for example, of gender roles. But I’ve had to rethink that entirely because I’m queer. I don’t fit into these gender roles, and I never liked it because of the religious way that I grew up.

Gloria: No es que no entienda, sino que es muy diferente a como nosotros éramos, como crecimos. [Eramos] más unidos, las familias compartíamos y convivíamos. Hoy día hay como un poquito de egoísmo.

Do you have advice for young people in similar situations?

Gisselle: If I could say anything to anybody in my generation struggling with the same issues with their parents and different generations is that you have to be the one to take a step back and try to look at the bigger picture. In doing so, I think you really can understand the traumas, the dynamics, the insane issues that all went into how your parents were raised, and [how] that all affects you.

Kathryn Mora is a graduating senior at Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez High School and youth reporter for the Boyle Heights Beat. She will be attending college in the fall and double majoring in philosophy and English.

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Iowa lawmakers address immigration, religious freedom and taxes in 2024 session

FILE - The Iowa Capitol is visible before sunrise, Jan. 12, 2024, in Des Moines, Iowa. After a marathon day that stretched into the early hours of Saturday, April 20, Iowa lawmakers wrapped up a four-month legislative session that was focused on reforming the way special education is managed and speeding up tax cuts. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)

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DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — After a marathon day that stretched into Saturday’s early hours, Iowa lawmakers wrapped up a four-month legislative session that focused on reforming the way special education is managed and speeding up tax cuts. The Republican-led General Assembly also waded into issues like immigration and religious freedom , which have proven core to the party’s 2024 campaign message.

Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, pushed many priorities through the Legislature after submitting 18 requests for bill drafts, more than any other year of her tenure and any other governor since 2006, publicly available data shows.

Here’s a look at the issues that made headlines:

REYNOLDS’ PRIORITIES DOMINATE SESSION

Education was a key issue for Reynolds this session, including one proposal to revise the state’s education system for students with disabilities that consumed lawmakers’ attention.

Reynolds wanted school districts to be able to choose how to use their special education dollars. For decades, those funds have gone directly to cooperatives known as area education agencies, or AEAs, that provide special education services.

A compromise lets schools choose, starting in 2025, how to spend 10% of their special education funding. But that approach, along with other changes in the final bill, still leaves many disability advocates and AEA staff concerned that the agencies and special education will suffer.

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Lawmakers also approved an increased minimum salary for Iowa teachers. In the upcoming school year, teachers with less than 12 years of experience will earn at least $47,500, up from $33,500. The minimum salary for more experienced teachers rises to $60,000. Both figures will increase again in the following school year.

The law also addressed non-salaried teachers and staff, allocating $14 million to help schools raise supplemental teacher pay.

In the final days of the session, lawmakers passed provisions to restrict programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, at the state’s public universities, joining a wave of Republican-led states weighing in on the initiatives. The bill prohibits staff positions and offices dedicated to creating or promoting DEI policies, programming or training, except as otherwise required by federal regulations.

IMMIGRATION LAW

Iowa Republicans followed Texas’ footsteps by passing a bill making it a state crime for a person to be in Iowa if previously denied admission to or removed from the United States. Reynolds signed it into law on April 10.

In Iowa and across the country , Republican leaders have accused President Joe Biden of neglecting his responsibilities to enforce federal immigration law.

The Iowa law, which takes effect July 1, has elevated anxiety in Iowa’s immigrant communities and has prompted questions among legal experts and law enforcement on how it will be enforced. It mirrors part of a Texas law that is currently blocked in court. The Justice Department has argued that such state laws are a clear violation of federal authority.

PREGNANCY BILLS

A bill passed this year updated an existing program that funds nonprofits known as crisis pregnancy centers, typically nonmedical facilities that counsel clients against having an abortion, charging the state’s health agency with implementation after it had difficulty finding a third-party administrator.

A separate budget bill provides an additional $1 million in funding for the program.

Lawmakers, with Reynolds’ recommendation, also expanded maternity leave from 60 days to 12 months for the state’s lowest-income moms on Medicaid.

Iowa Democrats, who have proposed expanded Medicaid maternity leave in the past, said the bill would remove benefits for certain mothers who did not meet the lower income threshold.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

Iowa joined about two dozen other states by enacting an echo of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a 1993 federal law that said government would not be able to “substantially burden” someone’s constitutional right to freedom of religion.

Republicans argued that religious freedom is under attack, so the state’s code needed to further enshrine those rights, while Democrats said it would allow some people’s religious beliefs to justify discrimination.

Republican lawmakers voted to speed up the state’s 2022 income tax cuts, instituting a 3.8% flat income tax rate beginning next year.

Republicans also took the first steps toward two tax-related constitutional amendments to put before Iowa voters. One would enshrine the state’s use of a single rate for income taxes, and the other would require a two-thirds majority of lawmakers to change the tax code. To put a constitutional amendment on the ballot, Iowa lawmakers have to approve it in two consecutive sessions, so both resolutions would have to pass again in 2025 or 2026 to make the ballot.

WHAT DIDN’T SUCCEED

Lawmakers rejected one bill that would have removed gender identity from the state’s civil right law and another that would have narrowly defined male and female. The latter, requested by Reynolds, would have required a transgender person’s assigned sex at birth to be listed alongside their gender identity on their birth certificate.

House Republicans failed to advance a Senate-approved bill proposed by chemical giant Bayer that would have given the company legal protections against claims it failed to warn that its popular pesticide Roundup causes cancer, if the company is otherwise in compliance with federal regulations. One House Republican, a farmer, said he’ll put his name on it next year to try to see it through.

Iowa lawmakers also did not put forth a ballot initiative declaring there is no constitutional right to abortion in the state — after initially advancing the measure in 2021. Reynolds has said she’ll let the issue move through the courts rather than push for a vote. Iowa’s current law banning most abortions after roughly six weeks , before many women know they are pregnant, was enacted in July but paused by a judge soon after. The state Supreme Court will weigh in on the case in June.

A bill that would have made changes to Iowa’s fetal homicide law was shelved after a Senate Republican joined Democrats in voicing concerns about the potential impact on in vitro fertilization following an Alabama court ruling that frozen embryos can be considered children. Iowa’s law currently outlines penalties for terminating or seriously injuring a “human pregnancy.” The House-approved bill would have changed that language to apply to the death of, or serious injury to, an “unborn person” from fertilization to live birth.