As a religious culture (as opposed to a legal polity), Anglo-American Protestantism has been both liberating and hegemonic. Anglo-American Christianity in the early republic was vitally democratic, as myriad groups competed for souls and spawned vital religious movements such as Mormonism. At the same time, Euro-American Christian traditions conjured up a mytho-religious framework that racialized, and thereby subjugated, peoples. Deeply mythological stories such as the “son of Ham” fable (from Genesis 9:18–27), for example, biblically sanctioned black enslavement.Footnote ¹

Thus a central theme of religion and race in American history starts with this intensely paradoxical interplay of religious freedom/equality and religiously sanctioned unfreedom/inequality. In this dialectic, embattled ethno-religious communities deployed the American tradition of religious liberty as well as their own spiritual practices and sacred writings to compel redefinitions of freedom, autonomy, and the rights of citizenship. The discourse of American freedom thus could lead to very different ends than could have been envisioned by the Anglo-Protestants who authored the classic texts on religious freedom. Ethno-religious communal sacred narratives – such as the spirituals, the songs of the Longhouse, or the Virgen de Guadalupe sacralizing a farmworkers’ procession – gave sustenance to these struggles by resisting and counterbalancing the dominant social, theological, and racial hierarchies.

A complex of historical factors (such as the gigantic global enterprise of colonizing the New World and then populating it with Europeans and African slaves) and mythic groundings (such as stories from the Old Testament and diverse indigenous American and African traditions) influenced the construction of modern racial categories. Euro-American Christianity was hardly the sole or even primary force in this process. Yet religious myth, originating from interpretations of biblical stories as well as speculations about God's Providence, played an important role in the formation, revision, and reconstruction of racial categories in the modern world. In short, religion played a significant part in creating race. More specifically, Christianity necessarily was central to the process of racializing peoples––to imposing categories of racial hierarchies upon groups of humanity or other societies.Footnote ²

If Christianity fostered racialization, it also undermined it. Biblical passages were powerful but ambiguous, and arguments about God's Providence in colonization, proselytization, the slave trade, and slavery were contentious. Christian myths and stories were central to the project of creating racial categories in the modern world, but the central text of Christianity, the Bible, was also amenable to more universalist visions, and in that sense could never be a fully reliable ally for theorists of racial hierarchy.Footnote ³

What did it mean for slaves to envision freedom? For many, it involved framing their selves within the spiritual narrative of Exodus.Footnote ⁴ For freedpeople after the Civil War, it involved forming independent religious institutions, which then served the purposes of community and political organizing during Reconstruction and into the twentieth century. White southerners violently resisted African American freedom, culminating in a political battle that whites referred to as “Redemption,” giving a name of deep religious significance to a brutal struggle for power in the former Confederacy. The same battles played out again (to a very different conclusion) in the second Reconstruction of the 1950s and 1960s, again with religious ideas and institutions taking center stage in the greatest drama of twentieth-century American social history.Footnote ⁵

Partly because of its central role in the civil rights struggle, the African American religious experience has received close and extensive coverage in the scholarly literature.Footnote ⁶ Less well understood is the relationship between religion, race, and ideas of freedom among Latinos, Native Americans, and other groups. What did it mean, for example, for newly incorporated Mexican citizens after 1848, or Mexican American farmworkers in the 1960s, to be free citizens? For many, it was about expressing a faith that might be scorned by the dominant church or squelched by a repressive home government. What does freedom mean for Native Americans in the contemporary United States? For a significant number, it entails finally having (or perhaps in other instances still struggling for) the liberty to act out religious practices once driven underground by the heavy hand of the state, or to protect sacred grounds once claimed in the name of Manifest Destiny or the rights of eminent domain.Footnote ⁷

For much of the eighteenth century and, even more so, the nineteenth, race and religion were joined in the project of civilization. Christianizing others involved civilizing them. Sometimes this amounted to brutally stripping colonial subjects, especially Native Americans, of the garments of their own civilizations. This included language, religious belief, and cultural practice. “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” went the motto of the “Friends of the Indian,” a philanthropic group devoted to Indian education in the late nineteenth century. At other times, the joining of Christianization and civilization underwrote idealistic crusades of bringing formerly enslaved peoples into American civilization, as in the abolitionist movement and, later, in the creation of black schools and colleges during Reconstruction. In other instances, the intertwining of Christianity, civilization, and whiteness justified the complete exclusion of peoples from the American republic, notably in legislation such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Progressive Christian writers such as Josiah Strong articulated a strong sense of Christian nativism, warning against the dilution of the kind of Protestantism that had been instrumental in forming American democracy. In short, the connections between religion and race were complicated; idealism and brutality often went hand in hand, as did notions of inclusion together with the instruments of exclusion. Idealism and imperialism often joined in projects both inspiring and ignoble.Footnote ⁸

In the twentieth century, Christian thought helped to undermine the racial system, which it had been instrumental in creating. In the 1950s and 1960s, black civil rights activists in the Congress of Racial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee emerged from black churches and finally broke through the walls of segregation, still guarded vigilantly by conservative white churchmen and opportunistic politicians. The civil rights revolution in American history was, to a considerable degree, a religious revolution, one whose social and spiritual impact inspired numerous other movements around the world.

To some degree, this had always been implicit in biblical texts, which envisioned a Christian community that broke the bonds of male and female, Jew and Gentile. It took considerable intellectual convolution to read the Bible as advocating something other than the universal humanity of mankind, all born of Adam and potentially redeemed through the salvific work of Jesus. And yet theology played a central role in justifying social hierarchies based on race, as well as on other distinctions, including class. In the twentieth century, ideas of cultural pluralism – that percolated through the progressive intellectual world of the early twentieth century – eventually found their way into an American discourse of religious pluralism. This pluralism was never all-inclusive. For groups whose spiritual practices did not constitute a discernible “religion” and thus did not enjoy the benefits of First Amendment protection, religious freedom remained a more distant ideal. Yet for many others, including those who were excluded by the legacy of racist immigration legislation and others who historically had been dishonored, the emergence of religious pluralism as an ideal in public discourse constituted a true revolution.

When challenged, the power of the state does not recognize all “religion” equally; the implicit, de facto Protestantism of the American republic historically has defined public discourse, shaped public ceremonies, and dominated public life in the personage of political officials.Footnote ⁹ Moreover, racial profiling as applied to Latino Catholics, African Pentecostals, or Middle Eastern Muslims affects lives and individual liberties in a way that is simply unthinkable for the dominant Protestant majority. In this way, the nexus between “religion” and “race” has never died. But it undeniably exerts a relatively smaller influence in comparison with the power of that dualism in earlier centuries. Religious pluralism requires an official rhetoric of respect and neutrality. However imperfectly practiced, religious pluralism has opened up spaces for ethnic groups and minority religions that were formerly surveilled and suppressed.

Religion and race remain tied together in the public mind. If religion is no longer racialized in the ways it was in previous centuries, religious congregations tend to be racially separated, a simple reality of how Americans of diverse ethnic backgrounds have ordered their lives. Race still has a color, and a religion, even while the public rhetoric of American religion is ostensibly raceless and colorless. Thus, in a society sometimes said to be moving into a “post-racial” era, ethnic and racial constructions remain a central ordering fact of religious life. Americans remained united by an unusually high association with faith, with religious belief, but remained divided by faith since the institutions reflecting those beliefs still tend to separated by race, culture, and politics. Given the history of race and religion in America, it is hard to see how it could be otherwise.