Religious Equality in America and White Christian Privilege

Khyati Joshi in her new book, “White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America,” documents how in diverse ways whiteness and Christianity is favored in the US. She argues that Americans believe that there is religious equality in the US because of the First Amendment. They think that the constitution and courts have been successful in making the US a land of religious freedom. Dr. Joshi contends that this belief is not true and links whiteness privileges to Christian privileges. In an article in Religious News Service by Simran Jeet Singh, Dr. Joshi explains using three key concepts: Christian privilege, Christian normativity, and Christian hegemony. Christian privilege is associated with the everyday advantages that Christians have in the United States. Christian normativity "refers to how Christian ideas, beliefs, and practices have become so entrenched in American society that they have become the national standard." Christian hegemony is linked with the state or government. It demonstrates the myriad ways in which the American state endorses Christianity. 

In Khyati Joshi’s new book, “White Christian Privilege,” Joshi brings religion into the conversation about privilege, arguing that our perception of whiteness suffers from an “optical illusion”: that religion is one place where there is equality in America.

Because it is enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution, we presume that religious equality is manifest in our society as well. Yet any analysis that neglects white Christianity’s role in creating and upholding whiteness, Joshi argues, fails to capture the full picture. 

Source: Religious News Service

Joshi upends our usual approach to these questions by focusing not on marginalized communities’ experiences, but the other side of the equation: how the dominant group has created, sustained and framed its distinct advantages. In helping us to see “the rules of society that have been constructed to benefit Christians,” Joshi connects the dots of just how this privilege functions.

The relationship between whiteness and Christianity becomes clearer as Joshi follows multiple threads through American history that inextricably intertwined one’s faith and the color of one’s skin. In the 1790s, the U.S. Congress passed a naturalization act that declared one must be a free white man of good moral character to become a citizen. Explicit about race and gender (white, man) but implicit about religion (good moral character), the legislation deftly linked whiteness and morality, itself an indicator of being a Christian in good standing.

Nearly a century later, when African Americans were granted citizenship through the 14th Amendment (1868) and the Naturalization Act of 1870, it seemed on its face a sign of racial progress. But non-Christian communities — East Asians, South Asians and Native Americans — were still denied citizenship, ensuring that who counted as an American had as much to do with religion as it did with race.

Joshi organizes the rules of Christian society using three key concepts. The first is Christian privilege, which pertains to everyday advantages that folks who identify as Christian or grew up as Christian have in the United States. She gives an example from her childhood in the American South in which a Hindu American named Suha is barred from starting on his high school soccer team because he refused to recite the Lord’s Prayer with his coach and teammates prior to their matches.

Suha’s story transported me back to my high school soccer days in Texas. My team, too, would recite the Lord’s Prayer before each game. I would kneel alongside my teammates and bow my head out of respect – it never occurred to me until much later that I could have requested we say a Sikh prayer as well. Christian prayer was the default, and that this seemed normal to all of us.

Joshi’s second concept, Christian normativity, is related: It refers to how Christian ideas, beliefs and practices have become so entrenched in American society that they have become the national standard. Christian — and particularly Protestant — ways of doing things come to be so normal that non-Christian approaches are perceived as deviant, even threatening. It doesn’t take much of a leap from there to understand why maintaining Christian normativity is at odds with achieving religious pluralism and religious equality.

The third bucket is Christian hegemony. Here the state is the power that endorses Christianity, inserting the words “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance and the inscription of “In God We Trust” on our currency. These and other examples, Joshi argues convincingly, point to how deeply Christianity has been established as our official religion.

The first half of the book, which recounts how these constructs have worked their way through American history, is fascinating and illuminating: fascinating because it helps us see the subtle and overt ways in which religion has partnered with race to produce American racism; powerful because Joshi sheds light on an aspect of white supremacy that is so often left under the hood.

In the latter chapters, rather than historicizing and teaching, she shifts slowly into practical matters, which comes as little surprise to those who know her social justice training. It’s also refreshing in an academic text, a genre that more often than not wallows in problematizing and stops short of solutions.

An entire chapter, “Making Meaning and Making Change,” offers helpful advice on how to move forward, as well as a vision for what it would take to establish religious equality and religious pluralism in America.

Two ideas of hers stuck out to me in particular, both of which I am yearning to see realized. One is changing our assumptions. Once we can see clearly past the optical illusion of Christian privilege, we will become conscious of how damaging our assumptions of Christian normativity can be for religious minorities. Seeing its harmful impact can and should move us to challenge and change our assumptions of what is normal and acceptable.

Second is Joshi’s suggestion of changing our paradigms. Living within a structure built on white supremacist and Christo-centric norms makes it difficult for those who are not white and not Christian to establish equal footing. Bending the structure, opening the door for other faiths to exercise privilege of their own, won’t work, as we will ultimately end up with the same results. A meaningful interrogation calls on us to replace it with a new paradigm, one that does not privilege any groups over any others.

These interventions are as powerful as they are compelling: It is clear that without these steps, we have no path to realizing religious equality and pluralism.

4th of July and American Religious Nationalism

Is the US a Christian nation? Does embracing Christian nationalism part of being a Christian in America? Is the 4th of July a Holy Day?

Angela Denker is a Lutheran pastor in her article "Christian nationalism, the border and Fourth of July church in Dallas" critiques the close link of American nationalism and Christianity. She visits a megachurch on the 4th of July and informs how the 4th of July has become a religious holiday as are many other national holidays in America. How America is worshiped almost as an idol in many churches: 

When I got there for Saturday night worship, I found out that Prestonwood had a big Fourth of July celebration planned for Independence Day. Pastor Jack Graham promised at the beginning of Saturday worship that they’d be “celebrating our freedoms as a country ... and singing patriotic songs,” as well as offering a pastor dunk tank, games and refreshments in the Dallas summer heat.

When I walked in, I noticed that the arena-style worship space that seats 7,000 had been covered with red, white and blue American flag bunting. Flags festooned the stage, and most of the screen designs and backgrounds were red, white, and blue.

As Graham concluded his welcome for the evening service, he said, “We’re going to start with the Pledge of Allegiance, the national anthem and honoring our service members.”

I had not said the Pledge of Allegiance since elementary school, and I could not help but think of the Ten Commandments — ostensibly as influential here as the pledge. The First Commandment, as found in the Book of Exodus, warns against worshipping and pledging allegiance to a flag and not to God, but no one around me seemed to mind, so, feeling a compulsion to conform, I put my hand on my heart and mouthed the words.

We then sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” and sat as the songs for each branch of the armed forces played, and veterans and active-duty soldiers were invited to stand when their branch was called, and we applauded.

The idea of American exceptionalism having a biblical justification is not new, but Prestonwood made it fresh. The church had bright and compelling red, white and blue graphics with retro black-and-white photography, a guest preacher who specializes in travel to the Middle East, and even a special song. The video montage and song came next, followed by the guest speaker. 

Source: Family Research Council

Pastor Denker contrasts this deep entanglement of Christianity and the American state with another view where love of Christ and love for America are at war. She writes about her conversation with Dean Inserra, a prominent conservative evangelical pastor. He is a Liberty University graduate and the founder of City Church in Tallahassee, Florida. He is also an advisory member of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Inserra told me about a term from Southern Baptist theology that describes the current moment in American politics and religion. “In this linking of nationalism and Christianity, we are forgetting about the message of Jesus. ... When we do that, we have a gospel distortion.”

A gospel distortion is the idea that another ideal is impeding the truth of the gospel. Inserra said the gospel distortion in the SBC during and before Trump’s presidency has its roots in Christian nationalism.

“We have to be Christian first. If you are American first, Jesus will be at odds with you,” he said. “Patriotism is not a fruit of the Spirit. It’s idolatry on the Fourth of July.”

Inserra pointed to national holidays that receive as much attention in the SBC as Christmas and Easter. “I say there are different high holy days in the Southern Baptist Church. Some churches have Pentecost and Epiphany. We have the Fourth of July, the Sunday closest to Veterans Day, the Sunday closest to Sept. 11. You go to a Southern Baptist Church on the Fourth of July, you’d think you were at a baseball game, eating a hot dog.”

Ira Stoll, a conservative editor and columnist, argued in his essay, The Theology of the Fourth of July, in Time magazine, that 4th of July is a religious holiday and it was the liberal icon President Kennedy who told us that. Ira quotes three different speeches, including his inaugural address, to prove his point. 

For instance, on July 4, 1946, Kennedy was invited to speak at the City of Boston’s Independence Day celebrations. 

Kennedy began by talking not about taxes, or about the British, or about the consent of the governed, but about religion. “The informing spirit of the American character has always been a deep religious sense. Throughout the years, down to the present, a devotion to fundamental religious principles has characterized American though and action,” he said

Ira contends that even if we ignore Kennedy, there is enough evidence from the founding documents and the founding fathers of America about the nature of the state that was imagined in the early years:

Whatever Kennedy’s motives were as a politician for emphasizing this point, on the historical substance he had it absolutely correct. The Declaration of Independence issued from Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, included four separate references to God. In addition to the “endowed by their Creator” line mentioned by JFK in his July 4 speech, there is an opening salute to “the laws of nature’s God,” an appeal to “the Supreme Judge of the World,” and a closing expression of “firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.”

A signer of the declaration, Samuel Adams, writing to a friend on July 9, wished the declaration had been issued earlier: “If it had been done nine months ago we might have been justified in the sight of God.”

George Washington, announcing the Declaration of Independence to the troops in a General Order dated July 9, wrote, “The General hopes and trusts, that every officer and man, will endeavour to live, and act, as becomes a Christian Soldier defending the dearest Rights and Liberties of his country….knowing that now the peace and safety of his Country depends (under God) solely on the success of our arms.”

Ira ends his essay by saying that Americans can believe whatever they like but "the idea on which our nation was founded" was clearly religious.