were depraved and barbaric. More recently, religion has become a powerful method of classifying the “enemy” or “other” in national life, in ways that affect primarily non-Christian people of color. Muslims, for example, have become particularly demonized in the US. The vicious acts of a miniscule handful of their co-religionists shaped their image in popular culture long before the events of September 11, 2001. Since that date, narratives around “terrorism” and the “war on terror” continue to associate an entire global religion, Islam, with violent, nihilistic movements. Looking more closely at many incidents, we discover that anti-Muslim bias is manifested racially. When Islam is associated with particular physical characteristics—that is, when it is racialized—South Asian Americans like me find ourselves being “randomly” selected for heightened screening at the airport because we look like we might be Muslim. South Asian American Sikhs, Hindus, and Christians, and even Hispanics have been targets of post-9/11 backlash attacks—suffering injury, and sometimes death, because of their brown skin, beards, clothing, or turbans. Their racial and cultural markers are associated with Islam in the popular mind, even though they are not Muslim.
Critical Conversations
Despite contemporary rhetoric predicting the “decline of White Christian America,”9 the power of Whiteness and Christianity is deeply dyed in the nation’s wool, and omnipresent in American rules and structures. Indeed, those three terms—“White,” “Christian,” and “American”—have been used interchangeably so often that in many contexts, including in the lexicon of non-White, non-Christian immigrant communities, they remain synonyms for one another. When members of White Christian America react defensively against the nation’s growing diversity, it is because they fail to understand the hegemony on which their power is built and to see how normative and privileged their faith and their race still are. They feel they are “losing” and need to fight to preserve their vision of a White Christian America, not realizing how the legal and social deck is still stacked dramatically in their favor. They see existential threats in issues like Sharia law or the “War on Christmas” that are trivial in comparison with the benefits Christians enjoy.
This is not to say that Christian people of faith do not face hostility in certain quarters. There is discrimination against and even hostility toward religion in general from some quarters. Some popular and academic authors have railed against Christianity in particular, and we can find bias against religion more generally in higher education and social justice or progressive circles. Religion is the last topic some of my progressive colleagues in ethnic and Asian American studies want to discuss. While some scholars are comfortable teaching about the sociocultural aspects of religion, they nevertheless keep their distance from matters of faith.10
Unfortunately, the bias against religion in ethnic studies is a longstanding tradition.11 In some cases, it is the product of scholars’ own unease with religion; in others it springs from the perception of religion as mere superstition and Karl Marx’ influential trivialization of religion as the opiate of the masses. Meanwhile, the study of religion and its role in society and individuals’ lives is mostly relegated to departments of religion and seminaries. In those spaces, on the other hand, many of my colleagues are uneasy discussing race and racism. This untenable dichotomy—ethnic studies’ unease with religion, and religious studies’ unease with race—makes integrative works like this one difficult, but all the more necessary.
Many social justice activists are likewise uncomfortable talking about faith. Some have left organized religion because of its role in the oppression of marginalized communities; others are unable to find congruencies between religious participation and political progressivism. People who are ready to talk about homophobia, classism, or racism are ill at ease including religious discrimination in the conversation. The anti-religious perspective of certain scholars and progressives can—sometimes legitimately—come across as bias against Christianity.12
Even if some Christians may have personally faced real obstacles, criticism, or discrimination related to their faith, such experiences do not negate the power of Christian privilege. This book does not deny the existence of anti-Christian bias; rather, it aims to show that White Christian norms nonetheless remain entrenched in our institutions, laws, and civic culture in ways that set up an uneven playing field in everyday public, social, and work life to the disadvantage of many religious minorities. Moreover, none of the strategies presented here to ameliorate this problem aim to diminish Christianity, but rather to ensure equal opportunity for all religious traditions and for those who embrace no religion.
Religious Oppression Today
There are many different types of religious oppression in our society, of which the most well-known are probably antisemitism and the anti-Muslim sentiment sometimes referred to as “Islamophobia.” Atheists, agnostics, practitioners of Native Americans traditions, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and others also frequently face religious oppression in various forms. From the Jew whose synagogue was vandalized to the Sikh man killed in a post-9/11 “backlash” attack, to the Muslim woman who doesn’t get a job because she wears a hijab, religious oppression is present wherever we find privilege: in legal policies and structures, in social designs and cultural practices, and at the level of individual discrimination.13
Long before September 11, 2001, and even more so since then, discussions about terrorism and depictions of terrorists have tended to invoke Islam and Muslim Americans—even though, both in the US and globally, most terrorists are not Muslim.14 Consider the experience of a young Muslim man growing up in Metro Atlanta in the 1980s and 1990s. Salim was a second-generation Indian American Muslim whose religious identity was a source of conflict for him. In addition to disparaging remarks about Muslims from peers, he dealt with anti-Muslim sentiment— disguised as comedy—from teachers. His ninth grade homeroom teacher “always joked” and said to him: “‘You don’t have a bomb in that backpack, [do you]?’ And he would duck and make a big joke in front of all the other kids.… We all kind of laughed and made a big joke out of it but it made me really uncomfortable.”15 For Salim, his teacher’s statements and actions legitimized the association of Islam with terrorism in the eyes of an entire classroom; Salim felt vilified by a popular authority figure. His teacher was magnifying a contemporary American cultural perception, of Muslims as terrorists, and placing his own student in that frame in front of all of his peers. Salim’s experience took place long before 9/11, in the early 1990s, during the time of the First Gulf War. Unfortunately, even today students who are Muslim or perceived as Muslim (such as South Asian Americans of various religious affiliations) confront harassment, discrimination, and assaults in school, college, and beyond.16
The association between terrorism and Islam, and between Islam and Arabs, became the subtext of many other public disputes, like the debate in 2015 and 2016 over the admission of Syrian war refugees to the United States. In the absence of any evidence connecting Syrian refugees with any anti-American terror plot, and in willful ignorance of the 14-step security vetting refugees receive, state governors and presidential candidates nevertheless assumed a connection. The winning candidate in the 2016 presidential contest promised a “Muslim Ban”17 and ultimately saw the executive order he signed in fulfilment of that promise upheld by the US Supreme Court. By contrast, between 2012 and 2018, White Christian men murdered three Muslim college students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, shot up a synagogue in Pittsburgh, a gurdwara in Wisconsin, a church in South Carolina, and a concert in Arizona, and yet the words “terrorist” or “terrorism” were rarely used by the media or the politicians to describe these men or their actions.18 Nor were there many references to the perpetrators’ race or religion. By contrast, when the media identifies an act as “terrorist,” attention is given to the perpetrators’ national and ethnic origins and religion.19
A Social Justice Approach
This book takes a social justice approach to religion in American society. This approach sets out to acknowledge, explore, and value religious diversity; to recognize the unequal treatment of specific religions in our society; and to identify solutions that can increase equity and justice