Christianity has been used to establish and maintain political, social and cultural dominance leads us to recognize the long presence of White Christian supremacy in the US. We can use these historical legacies to analyze contemporary religious oppression in our country and show how society often ignores or trivializes the experiences of religious minorities and atheists. This lens enables us to understand how Protestant Christianity interacts with Whiteness and national identity and the ways religious groups are admitted to or denied access to citizenship, housing, schooling, legal protections, and political representation. It also allows us to see how Christianity has been used to maintain, justify, and reproduce patterns of domination and subordination—even as many Christian individuals and communities have been part of the fight against oppression.
Often, topics related to religion are discussed through the lens of pluralism, which acknowledges religious diversity in the US and how various faiths are part of the national landscape. A social justice approach goes further. It illuminates the systemic inequalities faced by religious minorities and the nonreligious and the underlying White Christian supremacist laws and culture that produced those inequalities. Thus it considers not just diversity, but the structural inequities that generate social hierarchies. White Christians’ access to social power, in the form of privilege and normativity, sets them apart from religious minorities and atheists to whom those privileges are denied. Social justice thinking also takes an intersectional approach, acknowledging that various religious minority communities are racial minorities also, and taking into account dynamics of class, gender, sexual orientation, and other identities that shape individual and collective experiences. Social justice is a process: it engages in analysis of the contradictions in US history, between aspirations to religious pluralism and the recurring and resurging Christian hegemony that often undermines those aspirations. Social justice is also a goal: we approach and examine legal structures and historical events not just to understand them—though that is an important first step—but to identify the ways in which we can create more just structures to ameliorate historic injustice. Acknowledging how and why religious minorities suffer structural disadvantages helps us to find ways to create a society that takes all kinds of diversities into account and affords opportunities for all kinds of people to lead fulfilling lives.
A social justice approach focuses beyond individual experiences to recognize the structural dynamics of both advantage and disadvantage. More succinctly, examining society with a social justice mindset means acknowledging that for every “down,” there must be an “up.” To truly understand dynamics of oppression, we have to see the “up”: the advantaged group or identity. It took decades for the scholarship and popular dialogue on racism to go beyond looking at how Blacks and others are targeted for racial discrimination, and to focus on Whiteness and White privilege—the “built-in” advantages that members of the nation’s historic majority enjoy whether they want them or not. Similarly, in matters of sexism, we have long focused on the challenges women face rather on than the structural advantages men enjoy as a result of history and culture. Along similar lines, to effectively unpack and understand religious bias and discrimination in America, we must understand that the “down”—discrimination against US religious minorities—has a corresponding “up”—the rules of society that have been constructed to benefit Christians.
A social justice approach is also reflective, and looks past easy answers. It asks, for example, why we so rarely recognize the religious facet of oppression against religious minorities who are also people of color. We recognize antisemitism as religious oppression, in part because of its central role in twentieth-century history but also in large part because most American Jews are now considered White; as a result, when they are targeted for discrimination, we see that it is directed at their religious identity. By contrast, headlines about violence against Sikh men, or about the “dotbuster” attacks on New Jersey Hindus in the 1980s, often describe “racial violence.” For so many of the reasons described in this book, race is allowed to eclipse what would otherwise be seen as a religious attack. Recognizing intersectionality, and situating the disadvantages that racial and religious minorities face in the context of the structural advantages Christians possess, will let us delve into deeper truths.
Contemporary American Religious Diversity
The story of American religious diversity is not a new one. The religions with the longest history on this continent are Native American, but Islam, native African beliefs, and other traditions have coexisted with Christianity on these shores for centuries. The nation grew more diverse with waves of immigration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which brought Catholics, Jews, Orthodox Christians, and members of other faiths, including Sikhs and Buddhists.
However, demographic changes over the past half century have made it particularly urgent to understand the impact of White Christian privilege and envision approaches to respond to it. The United States has been experiencing increases in the number and diversity of religious minorities that are unprecedented. Since 1965, when immigration reforms reopened the nation’s doors to immigrants from beyond northern Europe, the country has experienced a rapid flourishing of racial, ethnic, and religious diversity. We have had a larger-than-ever influx of followers of the Baha’i faith, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Islam, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, and more. These religious groups are building communities and houses of worship in places that have never seen anything like them. Contemporary workplaces, classrooms, and the very “public square” of American social and political dialogue are more religiously diverse than they have ever been, and are growing more so.20
How many followers of these faiths are in the US? Answering this question is more difficult than accessing almost any other type of demographic data, such as race, national origin, or gender, because the US Census—the most comprehensive count of American residents—does not collect information on religious self-identification.21 We therefore rely mostly on non-governmental surveys that collect data on religion based on voluntary responses as well as on self-reporting from organized religious congregations. But since Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and Native American religious practices are not necessarily congregational or documented by official listings, it becomes all the more difficult to gather demographic data on the numbers of their adherents. Many of these religions’ beliefs and practices are individual and highly personal; often, worship will be done at home and through individual actions and choices rather than in a group setting. Thus, individuals may or may not affiliate with houses of worship, and the congregational bias of surveys and scholarship likely results in undercounts of these populations.
| TABLE I.1. Current US Religious Affiliation | ||||||
| Group | Pew22 327,167,434 | PRRI23 322,762,018 | Other Sources | |||
| Unaffiliated, who might identify as Secular, Atheists or Agnostics | 26% 85.1 million | 24% 77.5 million | ||||
| Buddhist | .07%24 2.3 million | 1% 2.49 million | ||||
| Christian | 65% 212.7 million | 67%25 216.3 million | ||||
| Hindu | 1% 3.3 million |
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