This interdisciplinary volume charts research trajectories in the study of race and religion in American society and explains how race permeated the American religious experience. Moreover, the text explores the ways in which normative white Christianity functioned interactively with Native American, African American, Asian and Asian American, and Latino/a religion and how all were reconfigured because of these contacts. Jews, the editors argue, though they at times advanced claims on their whiteness, were excluded from the subjugated groups, notwithstanding the persistence of anti-Semitism in the United States. The thirty-four essays are categorized into four thematic sections: terms and theories; religious traditions and popular culture; colonial destructions and creations; and immigration, pluralism, and civil rights.

In the first section, which focuses on terms and theories, race and religion are posited as contingent categories that should not be understood universally, either in time or space. Rather, they are principally modern classifications and descriptions which are largely determined by their historical context. Frequently, these contexts have included systems and structures of hegemony through which subject peoples (with their preexisting ideas of race and religion) encountered white Christianity. In these interactions, subject peoples deployed their beliefs, practices, and rituals to affirm their humanity and resist dehumanization. The essays in this section explore race and religion in specific contexts of region, culture, and group identity.

The second section, on religious traditions and culture, focuses on the interactions between racial identity and religious belief, the organized bodies in which they were practiced, and how they functioned in white-dominated political, economic, and cultural environments. Patrick Q. Mason says that Mormons, for example, who argued that the new divine revelations codified in the Book of Mormon possessed the same scriptural authenticity as the Old and New Testaments, hardly avoided the protocols of whiteness. This is attested to by their justification for their condemnation of blackness and their societal sanction for making African Americans a cursed people. Though the Mormons’ position shifted in the twentieth century with demonstrations of diversity, the church's “whiteness,” says Mason, “remains the racial norm” (168). As much as other well-established white religious bodies across the Protestant and Catholic spectrum, the Mormons, notwithstanding their tensions with other sects, had the same tropes of Caucasian privilege available to them as their religious rivals.

In the section on colonial destructions and creations, the mission of normative white religious practitioners, including their agenda of conquest and violence, is illustrated unambiguously. White hegemony either violently attacked, sidelined, or disrupted non-white religions and their adherents. Resonating in this part of the book is the paradigmatic example of the annihilation of Indian religion and culture by supremacist whites. Jennifer Graber noted that “if brutality against enslaved people and lynching free blacks provided white southerners a way to ritually perform the purified world they desired, violence against native people offered a variation on that theme” (391). Additionally, the editors, in introducing the volume, recounted the vicious and violent invasion of a white assassin into Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in 2015 as the latest demonstration of how the heritage of white racism and religion has merged and resulted in the targeting of nine African American victims in a naked assertion of Caucasian racial superiority. Nonetheless, drawing from centuries-old beliefs, practices, and rituals, victims of violence—be they Native American, black, or from another subject people—have sustained non-white religious sensibilities and poured them into new structures. Communities have then used these structures to resist and critique white religious norms, creating religious resources which they have deployed to preserve themselves as survivors and bulwarks of their communities.

As shown in the section on immigration, pluralism, and civil rights, with the exception of Native Americans, the presence of subject people in the US—including African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latino/a Americans—has been enhanced in the twentieth century. The religions of all of these populations, including Indians, have reckoned with the persistence of their subjugated status and have become more than reservoirs of their particular cultures. Whether in the modern black civil rights movement or in the modern American Indian Movement, these non-white religions have maintained their historic pursuit of liberationist objectives. They have transformed the nation's religious environment and compelled normative white denominational bodies to respond. Carolyn Dupont, for example, writes that the black civil rights movement “dramatically altered the American religious landscape” and pushed both mainline and conservative white religious groups into “reconfigurations” of themselves as they wrestled with rights issues emanating from non-white populations (505–506). Grace Yukich argues that, as immigration greatly impacts American society, it has highlighted intersectionality and transnationalism as analytical strategies for conceptualizing and doing research on American religion.

This encyclopedic text is a provocative reference volume that capaciously surveys the broadening landscape of scholarship on the American religious experience, serving as a primer on the most recent work on race and religion in the United States. The book challenges traditional accounts to integrate its analytical framework and narrative content, arguing for a substantive rethinking of what constitutes the American religious experience by decentering the dominant white narratives that have too often excluded or marginalized non-white faith traditions. The increased diversity of the experiences of Asian Americans, Native Americans, African Americans, Latino/a Americans, and the vast range of immigrant populations require a reassessment of what American religion is and what its multiple components are. In providing scholars with this timely volume, the writing of a new American religious history can now accelerate.