Bounds of Their Habitation

by Paul Harvey

  Yet unlike so many other white supremacist crimes in southern history, this time, interracial gatherings mourned the dead. President Barack Obama’s eulogy for Clementa Pinckney alluded to the traumas of that southern past, but also the evidence of God’s grace seen in the transformations of the region. Pinckney had said that “Across the South, we have a deep appreciation for history. We haven’t always had a deep appreciation of each other’s history.” But, Obama added, he also “understood that justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other, that my liberty depends on you being free,” and that “history can’t be a sword to justify injustice or a shield against progress.” Obama’s address expertly wove the theme of “grace,” throughout, punctuated with an impromptu singing of “Amazing Grace.” After the funeral, local politicos pivoted quickly to distance themselves from the Confederate battle flag which flew over the procession of the Reverend Pinckney in Columbia. Televised scenes from the courtroom showed family members of the victims in the Charleston shooting express their grief but also their forgiveness toward the presumed perpetrator. Russell Moore, a denominational official within the conservative-led Southern Baptist Convention, wrote in a post responding to Charleston that “the cross and the Confederate flag cannot coexist without one setting the other on fire.” Governor Haley, flanked by South Carolina’s black Republican Senator Tim Scott, declared that the flag had been an important part of South Carolina’s past, but had no place in its future. Some perceived this as a turning point, at least symbolically, in race, religion, and southern history.

  A few months later, the leading Republican candidate early in the primary season for the 2016 presidential election, the businessman and real estate mogul Donald Trump, announced to enthusiastic crowds his proposal to build a wall between the United States and Mexico and ban the entry of all Muslims into the country until “we know what the hell is going on.” Not to be outdone, his closest rival for the Republican nomination, Ted Cruz, urged systematic surveillance of “Muslim neighborhoods” in the United States and a stringent regime of deportation even for sons and daughters of those who had crossed the border illegally. At one campaign event, an audience member told the crowd, “We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims,” as Trump nodded and said “Right.” “We know our president is one. You know he’s not even an American,” the person concluded, to no contradiction from the crowd or the candidate. Polls and surveys demonstrated that, even at the end of Obama’s presidency, nearly a third of Americans either thought Obama (a Protestant Christian) was a Muslim, or were “not sure”; for Republican primary voters, the figure was over fifty percent.

  As was normal with his campaign, Trump’s suggestions were less policy proposals than symbolic statements articulating the historic prejudices of great numbers of Americans, who feared immigrants generally, and the decline of white American nationalism particularly. Since the tragedy of September 11, 2001, many had perceived the threat of terrorism associated with Islam in general and Muslim immigrants to America in particular. No amount of statistics pointing out that average Americans were more likely to die in a lightning strike than in a terrorist incident, or that right-wing white domestic terrorism had resulted in more deaths since September 11 than all incidents related to terrorism arising from those motivated by violent interpretations of Islam, could persuade those who already had made the connection. And a steady stream of hate crimes directed against those perceived to be Muslims (including Sikhs, who come from an entirely different tradition) and against their institutions (such as hate graffiti sprayed on mosques) resulted in part from the connections.

  THE RACIALIZATION OF MUSLIM AMERICANS

  The contemporary Muslim-American experience of (at once) freedom, surveillance, and suspicion reflects much of the long history of race, religion, and “difference” in American history. The fears expressed here harkened back to nativist movements familiar in American history, most especially to the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s, which tried to ban Catholic immigration and perceived Catholics as a dire threat to the American Republic, just as many Americans perceived Muslims in the 2016 electoral cycle. Perhaps most important, it suggested the ways in which “Muslim” elided categories or both race and religion and stirred up deep-rooted American tropes of the bounds of racial and religious habitation.

  Islam has had a long history in the United States, dating from the large-scale importation of slaves from Islamic regions of West Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Later, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, sizable populations from what later came to be called the Middle East, particularly Lebanese, began to arrive. Since the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, Muslim immigrants have come in large numbers particularly from South Asia (Pakistan), Southeast Asia (particularly Indonesia), and the Middle East and North Africa, coinciding with a dramatic diversification of the immigrant population generally.

  The main factor differentiating contemporary Muslim Americans is their racial diversity. As one careful demographic study from 2011 indicated, of the approximately 2.75 million Muslims residing the United States, “No single racial or ethnic group makes up more than 30% of the total” population. Thirty percent described themselves as “white,” slightly over twenty percent as Asian, six percent as Hispanic, and nineteen percent as “other” or “mixed race.” Part of this statistic derives from the fact of many Muslims from the Middle East describing themselves as white or mixed race, while South Asian Muslims typically signify themselves as “Asian.” More native-born Muslims self-identified as “black” (forty percent did so), while eighteen percent identified as white, ten percent as Asian, and twenty-one percent as “other.” Interestingly, an unusually high concentration (almost sixty percent) of third-generation Muslims (born in the United States or of parents from the United States) self-reported as black.

  This sets the context for the cultural conversation of the role of Islam in America and its status as a “minority” religion, or an “ethnic” religion, or a racialized religion. For the demographic reasons just noted here, it is impossible to see Muslims as a “race,” despite the mistaken propensity of many white Americans to identify “Muslim” with “Arab.” At the same time, the rising hostility toward Islam among a sizable minority of white Christians in the 2010s, and the nativist sentiments held by many, suggest the continued racialization of suspicious religious subjects in contemporary American life.

  Ironically, at the same time, Islam in America faced its own dilemmas of race and religion, most particularly in divisions between African American versus immigrant Arabic or South Asian Muslims. Most American mosques remain essentially monocultural, just as do the majority of American Christian (especially Protestant) congregations. The same differences in language, worship practice, socioeconomic status, neighborhood residentially organized religious institutions, and other factors that kept American Christians apart racially (even when they deliberately strove to break down those barriers) had a parallel effect on American Muslim institutions. This suggests the degree to which racial inequalities in America are deeply rooted structurally and institutionally, such that they are reproduced in schools, churches, and neighborhood organizations, even when participants in those organizations actively fight against them.

  DIVIDED BY FAITH

  Optimists about race and religion frequently point to the important role religion has played historically in movements such as abolitionism and civil rights. And certainly, movements toward racial equality historically have had a strong religious base, as has been discussed previously in this book.

  Yet one primary challenge to the thesis that churches will point the way to racial equality came in the important 2001 work Divided by Faith, authored by the religious sociologists Michael Emerson and Christian Smith. The title captured their thesis. Emerson and Smith showed that contemporary white and black evangelicals believed on the one hand in a racially egalitarian church, but were fundamentally divided on issues of how racial inequalitie
s could best be addressed in society. White evangelicals continued to insist that conversion and “heart change” would be sufficient to address deep-rooted social problems such as racial inequality. Meanwhile black, Latino, and other evangelicals of color perceived structural barriers to racial inequality. They insisted that an activist government was necessary to address the deeply embedded racial inequalities of American society. A simple “heart change” was not sufficient.

  White evangelicals, Emerson and Smith found, held one of three views. The first was that racial problems resulted from the sin of personal prejudice. The second was that a perception of “race problems” resulted from members of minority groups who harped on racial prejudice and blew up random individual incidents into systemic problems. Related, many evangelicals felt that there was no race problem, but only something ginned up by a racial grievance industry that capitalized on racial rhetoric to advance its own agenda. Even evangelicals who recognized the reality of racial inequality, they suggested, interpreted this through an individualistic theology, which made them unable to see structural and institutional discrimination written into the history of American neighborhoods. As they summarized it, “white evangelicals’ cultural tools and racial isolation direct them to see the world individualistically and as a series of discrete incidents. They also direct them to desire a color-blind society.” Black evangelicals tend to see the racial world very differently, through the lens of systemic discrimination enforced less by personal prejudice than by the workings of institutions and by a gulf in generational wealth accumulated disproportionately by whites.

  Since this work, scholars have examined the “Divided by Faith” thesis in a variety of contexts, most particularly within the rise of multiethnic churches in American society. Difficult issues of how churches may address social change in America come in part because of the long evangelical emphasis on “heart change” over social change. On the other hand, religion in America often has been at the forefront of the most dramatic and sweeping movements of equality, from abolitionism in the nineteenth century to the civil rights movement in the twentieth. Thus, churches have shown how they can work effectively “in the world” without sacrificing their spiritual message, precisely by applying their spiritual message to the world. The increasingly pluralization of American society is reflected in the growing multiethnic church movement and the very self-conscious ways churches and ministers have acted as mediators and interpreters of contemporary social conflicts involving race.

  MULTIETHNIC CHURCHES

  Over the last two decades, a growing effort to intentionally foster and establish multiethnic churches has taken hold among a significant minority of American Christians. Sometimes this happens without that much conscious intent, as in the case of suburban megachurches which draw huge crowds from their surrounding areas, and thus attract multiethnic congregations more or less by default. In other cases, religious leaders have consciously fostered multiethnic settings in urban congregations in an attempt to recapture the church’s potential for easing or overcoming human divisions through the power of bodies worshipping together.

  In the wake of controversies over the highly publicized shootings of young black men in Missouri, New York, and elsewhere in 2014, a group of multiethnic church leaders wrote the following, expressing their vision of what the church could accomplish that other institutions in society could not by themselves:

  At its core the scourge of racism presents a spiritual crisis with real life and death repercussions. And while government and educational programs, together with the efforts of countless individuals, groups and agencies, have long-sought to eliminate prejudice and the disparaging consequences of systemic racism still deeply embedded within our society, it is long-past time to recognize that systemic racism cannot be overcome apart from the establishment of local churches which intentionally and joyfully reflect the love of God for all people beyond the distinctions of this world that so often and otherwise divide.

  They noted as well that current statistics demonstrate that over eighty-six percent of churches have less than twenty percent diversity in their congregations, showing how far American churches had to go on this issue. Groups such as the “Mosaix Global Network,” founded by a pair of pastors in 2004 to “catalyze” the growing multiethnic church movement, aimed to move American churches toward a goal of twenty percent congregational diversity in twenty percent of American churches by 2020. They described the importance of their work as follows: “Apart from ethnically and economically diverse relationships, we will not fully encounter the condition of those different than our own . . . we are less likely to get involved in genuine community transformation. Without involvement, nothing changes, and, thus, systemic inequities are perpetuated unintentionally by sleeping giants; namely the evangelical churches of America.”

  However, the degree to which even multiracial churches will move evangelicals to embrace more structural ways of interpreting inequality remains in some question. A recent close study of the issue, focusing on the “racial healing” movement, and especially on “racial reconcilers of color,” found them ambivalent on the question of whether race problems were in fact just sin problems. After well-publicized incidents in Missouri, Chicago, and elsewhere demonstrated persistent problems of systematic targeting of minority communities by local police and government, a football player for the New Orleans Saints (Benjamin Watson, himself an African American) posted the following reflections:

  I’M ENCOURAGED, because ultimately the problem is not a SKIN problem, it is a SIN problem. SIN is the reason we rebel against authority. SIN is the reason we abuse our authority. SIN is the reason we are racist, prejudiced and lie to cover for our own. SIN is the reason we riot, loot and burn. BUT I’M ENCOURAGED because God has provided a solution for sin through . . . Jesus and with it, a transformed heart and mind. One that’s capable of looking past the outward and seeing what’s truly important in every human being. The cure for the Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner tragedies is not education or exposure. It’s the Gospel. So, finally, I’M ENCOURAGED because the Gospel gives mankind hope.

  One extensive study of the “Evangelical Racial Change” movement over the last generation of American evangelical history, based on years of interviews and participant-observation of efforts, quotes a reconciler of color concluding: “A lot of times the reconciliation issue is focused on Anglos making it right, but it’s from both sides, from all sides. It’s not just white/black or white/brown; it’s sometimes black/brown and Asian/Asian, brown against brown and so forth. So it isn’t a matter of skin, it’s a matter of sin. So I get forgiveness of my sin and you get forgiveness for your sin and we forgive each other and we’re forgiven of God, then we can start on a clean slate.” This reinforced the reflections of Watson and others. The study showed that the “racial reconcilers” often saw racism not as a social problem, but as an individual affliction of sin, and that government attempts to address racism at systematic and structural levels would therefore fail. This view resonated not only among white evangelicals but was also characteristic of “reconcilers of color.” The reconcilers of color may be more sensitive to the social causation of racial inequality, but they often tend to turn to individual solutions, including moments of personal reconciliation that evangelicals experience as social miracles. Ultimately, they too see it as a sin problem.

  Even the most politically conscious of these newly emerging multiethnic churches remain ambivalent, at best, about addressing political rather than personal solutions. Evangelicals remain resistant to examining the structural roots that frame racial encounters unequally. Many multiracial churches would have to avoid such discussions because their members would divide up into racially defined voting blocs. At one particularly successful Pentecostal megachurch, Redemption Church in Greenville, South Carolina, one member noted that in a church with the motto “Where the Many Become One,” the church was de facto divided between liberals (nearly all black
) and conservatives (nearly all white), and “it’s like never the twain shall meet.” As a result, political discussions were taboo. Redemption Church thus represents a living symbol of progress toward a multiracial society, even while it stands as a representative of the deep divisions that will continue to define race and religion in America. Members of various religious traditions—evangelicals, Catholics, Muslims, and others—truly believe that of one blood God made all nations, but find it difficult, for deep historical and institutional reasons, to break the bounds of America’s racial habitations.

  * * *

  This book has attempted to balance the terms “religion” and “race” over the long duration of (North) American history. I have aimed to show how they remained always contested and yet ultimately solidified into social formations that fundamentally shaped American religions in terms of ideology, organization, and practice. However constructed “race” may be, it acts as a real force in history, and however much the term “religion” is always being redefined and reformed, it has been a central ordering force in individual lives, in social policies, and in vast social movements. This book has been a highly selective glimpse at just a handful of the stories that could be told. And yet, the half has never been told.

  A Note on Sources

  GENERAL SOURCES AND INTRODUCTION

  This book may be best accompanied by Paul Harvey and Kathryn Gin Lum, eds., The Oxford Handbook to Race and Religion in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2017). For acute theological accounts of race and religion, see J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), and Willie Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), is an essential study of the rise of “whiteness” thought in American history, as is Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Racial Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). On race and Mormonism, see W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).