37 - Religion and Race

Summary

There are no “red,” “white,” or “black” people as such. The specific ways in which we understand these terms have some roots in antiquity, but as full-blown categories they are relatively recent inventions. Once the categories emerged, however, they took on lives of their own, so much so that “race” became deeply inscribed in Western thought, permeating its religious beliefs, fables, and mythologies. Historically, Christianity in England, Europe, and America mythically grounded, and later frequently regrounded and revised, modern notions of race. This essay explores the lengthy history of how religion helped to create and later to deconstruct race through the colonial, antebellum, post–Civil War, and civil rights eras. In addition, the essay suggests how groups who were seen as ethnic rather than racial groupings – especially Jews – or who came late to the history of American religio-racial history – namely, Asians and Asian Americans – encountered ideas and practices of race that were foreign to their own histories. Some of these groups were thought of in racial categories because of their presumed religions, namely, Asians; others, namely Jews, usually were not. Finally, the essay examines how a more contemporary project of pluralism claims to efface this historic confluence of religion and race, even as race still fundamentally informs how religious groupings conceptualize and organize themselves.