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I wrote this paper last night, and essentially outlined the use of hierarchy in religion and the role of Christianity as a justification to perpetuate racism.

I have awful grammar, but I will admit that I think my ideas and thoughts are valid… So if any of you actually take the time to read this, take my grammar with a  grain of salt.

My lovely midterm paper for Ethnic Studies. :p

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The privileges of those, who are what we would call “white”, amass a profound advantage over those whose skin is not “white”.  This privilege has taken form and spread through communities on the back of societal factors such as gender, class, and immigration status.  Though these aforementioned factors play a significant role in the propagation of white privilege, religion tends to make the strongest and most aggressive impact on keeping this privilege afloat.  Religion has been used as an institution to discriminate, a means of continuing racism, and a means by which to “demonize” the religious “other”.  Religion, along with the construct of white privilege, has been used to justify slavery, prejudice, and racism in general to create disparities between the “good, white, Christian man” and the “evil, dark-skinned, heathen man”.

 The idea of having one group of people raised above another is not a new concept found in religion; whether it is the non-religious below the religious, the woman below the man, or the congregation member below the preacher, Christianity has always created a hierarchical system in which one person is privileged and another is not.  It’s not surprising that this concept of hierarchy in religion was soon transferred out of the church and into daily practice on those of different skin color.  When there is a system where there is always one person above another, those in power will soon start to invent reasons as to why they are allowed to subjugate those not in power: God ordained it.  Their reasoning as to why men are better than women?  God ordained it.  Their reasoning as to why one man is king and the other is not?  God ordained it.  Their reasoning as to why people who are black are meant to be enslaved?  God ordained it.  The hierarchy that existed in religion was extended into the secular realm and created inequalities so great that we have a nation of people still scarred and recovering from the after-effects of it.

How did such a hierarchy of race begin with religion?  A simple starting place would be the association of words with “white” and “black”.  In Euro-centric language (and specifically religious language), we have evil, sin, and wickedness associated with the color black, while purity, innocence, and goodness are associated with the color white.  Sin has a direct connection with religion, while evil and wickedness are connected in a more roundabout way (evil being associated with the Devil and wickedness being associated with Paganism).  By connecting Africans with the color “black” and Europeans to the color “white”, there is automatically a preconceived idea on the core values of these people.  By assigning this language, people who are black are automatically pinned as the “Devil’s Incarnate” based solely on having darker skin.  

This idea of dark-skinned people being sinful was soon ingrained into the European mindset and quite easily carried over into the New World.  The Puritan idea almost always considered the Native Americans to be sinful.  And as a result of that supposed “sin”, the Native Americans perished by disease because it “pleased God to visit these Indians with a great sickness”.  The Pilgrims inherently thought that because of the general sinful nature of these Native Americans they deserved to die, and that after they died it was a “divinely sanctioned opportunity to take the land” from them.  The Puritans used God as a personified being who killed the Native Americans by will of the good Christian folk; that because the Native Americans were non-believers and savages they deserved to die and God did as such to them.  These Native Americans were consistently referred to as “devil-driven” because of their lack of being white and because of their lack of Christianity.  But not only this; they were specifically thought of as “deviant” to the Pilgrim lifestyle.  Kai Erikson in A Different Mirror discusses that deviance is a way of measuring what not to do in society, and the Pilgrims took this to heart with the Native Americans.  By creating the Native American image as deviant, the Pilgrims separated themselves as the pure, religious, civilized, white people while the Indians were savage, heathen, uncivilized people not even deserving of American land.  The English were afraid of becoming like the Native Americans through sin, because Native Americans were “the Devil and everything the Puritans feared – the body, sexuality, laziness, sin, and the loss of self control”.  The Indians were “sinfully squandering America’s resources” according to the Puritans and they thought that the Native Americans deserved punishment.  The use of language by many white people to demonize a whole group of persons based on a lifestyle and skin color plays exactly into the hierarchical system that religion places on people.  When they use language like “devil”, “demon”, “sinful”, etc., it creates these large discrepancies with truth and the fear-mongering that put people of darker skin below those who are white.

            With this construct of “whiteness” and “Christianity” coming hand-in-hand, there was a turn of the colonization of the America’s not as an opportunity to discover a new world, but as a religious endeavor:  “The English settlement was given a religious meaning: “starving” in England, they would migrate to America where they would cultivate the “Lord’s garden”.  The English saw the colonization of the America’s as a way to set forth a series of events of religious exclusion of those who are not Christian.  They had to save the land full of resources from the “savages” that didn’t know their God.  They wanted to teach “Christian Religion to such people who as yet lived in the darkness and miserable ignorance of the true knowledge and worship of God”. To them, it wasn’t just about resources; it was about teaching the racially different people about their religion, forcing them to worship it, and then still discriminating against them, even after the racially different people conform to all of their white, European standards.

            This idea extends far beyond the Native Americans and Puritans though. This is an idea that is consistently used even today against non-white people in America. Throughout history, the “non-Christian” has been the persecuted other: From the Pagan Irish, to the “heathen” Chinese, to the “immoral” Jewish man, or to the “extremist” Muslim, those of a different religion paired along with a different race have been racially discriminated against for thousands of years.  In fact, the word “heathen” has been applied to several different races of color for no apparent reason.  “Heathen” literally means “dwelling on the heath”, which implies people who dealt with untilled land and nature (i.e. Pagans).  This word was soon twisted and contorted into a derogatory term to discriminate the Irish Pagans of the time, and has been and is still being used to put down the religious “others”, even if they aren’t Pagan.  The English, or more generally Europe, had used their white privilege to influence language in their advantage; creating and changing words to fit their definitions so they can easily ostracize those who are not white or Christian.

            The use of religious language was not the only way to create racial disparities between different groups of people when concerning Christianity.  Christianity, more often than not, is used as a scapegoat or a justification of actions that are harmful to those of different races.  Though the United States of America was not founded on Christian values, by the early 1800’s it was a preconceived notion that the United States was a “Christian nation”.  Those who did not fall under this religious category of “Christian” were automatically ostracized, and these non-Christian people were soon paired with certain races, which made them even more vulnerable as a minority. These people of color who were not Christian were enslaved, kept from citizenship, or killed.  And to justify these heinous actions, Christian men would claim it was “God’s divine will”.

            These men who would harm in the name of God were part of the “Christianity of this land”, as put by Frederick Douglass. These men ripped families apart, made people of color work tirelessly without pay or freedom, raped colored women, harmed children, and spilled blood all in the sake of profit in the Lord’s name.  As put by Douglass, “I can see no reason but the most deceitful one, for called the religion of this land Christianity”. These white men in power used their religion to uphold their reputations as slaveholders, use the money made by their slaves to fund the church as an institution, and then pray to that same messiah that preaches equality and unity. They claim that it was a religious duty to read The Bible, and yet prevented their slaves from being able to read it.  Keeping their slaves not only incapable of reading, but specifically keeping them unable to read The Bible, made the slaves continuously “heathens” or “religious others”.  Because these slaves are kept as “religious others”, it only adds to the reasons why white men shouldn’t grant black men the same privileges. It keeps them distant not only in skin color and intelligence, but also on a religious level.  “Christianity of this land” is representative of the cruelty and hypocrisy in the “religion” of the United States, versus the “Christianity of Christ” in which Douglass participates in.  Christianity of that time had lost the religious aspect and kept the subjugating ideologies that are barely present within the actual text (the New Testament).

Christianity is socially correlated with moral character content. And being that people who are African descent came from a country that did not celebrate Christianity were automatically assumed to have immoral character content.  Whether on religious terms or human terms, it is a social construct.  As a construct, the dominant group carries the most weight in what the definition of it shall be.  The dominant group has the power to pick and choose, and above all, the brute force of this resides in religion’s institutionalized nature. (Taking ‘morals’ and placing them in the system structure which would counter African-Americans). In addition, the notions are bolstered by the ‘thick wall of respect’ that surrounds religion. This idea of being non-religious as deviant and immoral soon became correlated with skin color. If a man has dark skin, he must be from Africa, which in turn makes him not Christian; therefore he has poor moral character content. This thought process was soon turned into: He has dark skin, so he must have poor moral character content.

 Though religion seemingly plays no role in these assumptions, a large part of racism and discrimination can be attributed to Christianity. Men, women, and children of color were and are subjugated by this religion because of the necessity of being white in religion to have power.  This privilege of being white in a religious society where the color white is seen as “good and pure”, keeps non-white people below white people in the hierarchy of society, and justifies radical behavior of open racism.  The KKK is one example of many of a religiously based group that overtly discriminates and harbors hatred towards a differing race.  Though The Church is not as open about their discrimination, they were easily one of the largest organizers of hate and intolerance known to history. They would use their white privilege, and hold it above the heads of those who were underprivileged; propagating their power through religion and religious practice, and pushing their own beliefs on those below them in the hierarchy of race that society has created.