Abstract
Robin Dale Jacobson and Nandy D. Wadsworth (eds), Faith and Race in American Political Life, Charlottesville, VA, University of Virginia Press, 2012; vi + 320 pp.; ISBN 9780813931951
This collection of essays explores what it means – in a historical and contemporary sense – that ‘religion has often been the primary lens through which Americans understood race and the power hierarchies organized around it’ (5). The approach is that of ‘intersectional scholarship’, a kind of analysis that ‘began at the intersection of race and gender to capture the complex positioning of black women’, but should now, the editors argue, move ‘beyond the analysis of specific intersectional groups ... and into theoretical explorations of how intersectionality works more broadly’ (10–11). A key question is where religious identity – normally considered one of choice, as opposed to a category such as gender or race – fits, for ‘religion in this country can be and generally is regarded as privatized and therefore not the same kind of politically constructed identity’ (13). But the editors insist that ‘the consideration of religion alongside other forces helps us problematize questions of choice and permanence, of where the physical ends and the cultural begins in the realm of identity’ (14). More particularly, ‘because religion enjoyed formal political equality, there are more cracks in the power structure of the dominant religious order ... than there are in the dominant racial order’ (17).
The first section, ‘Foundations’, opens with a strong survey essay by Eric Michael Mazur on ‘Religion, Race, and the Constitutional Order’. From a legal history perspective, he shows how the United States could be a land of a highly racialized ‘religious freedom’ for a good deal of its history, one in which any citizen ‘could (in theory) participate in the federal government as long as he behaved properly: like a good Christian’ (35). He then traces three periods of the ‘transformation of the Court’s relationship to religion’, from ‘Protestant Nationalist’ to ‘Republican Protestant’ to ‘constitutional order’. In particular, the rise of public education as a primary socializing instrument spurred the rise of a constitutional order which ‘enabled the federal government to better incorporate those beyond the Euro-American Protestant dominant culture’ (38). American public education served as an ‘engine of religious and racial dynamism’ by creating a moral order and authority over and above a specific religious tradition. He concludes: ‘The modern state, having disestablished religion and freed itself from its protestant foundations, has a result not only secured its own authority; it has as a by-product also loosed other social institutions (such as race) from their group definition’ – hence the possibility of a Kennedy in 1960 and an Obama in 2008 (50–1).
Mazur’s essay alone is worth the price of admission, but the remainder of the book considers a variety of intriguing case studies in the intersections of religion and race in American history. For example, editor Nancy Wadsworth’s ‘Ambivalent Miracles: The Possibilities and Limits of Evangelical Racial Reconciliation Politics’ offers a partial defense of the well-known tendency of white evangelicals involved in ‘racial reconciliation’ to consider such projects as improving individual relations rather than addressing systemic issues of inequality, a thesis explored in great depth by Emerson and Smith’s Divided by Faith (2001). Wadsworth’s interviews, however, suggest that ‘reconcilers of color’ find these efforts meaningful ‘precisely because they don’t allow whites to remain oblivious to their privilege, or their counterparts of color to stew in distrust’ (268). Thus, rather than simply dismiss these efforts as neoliberal attempts to focus on the individual rather than the structural components of racial inequality, Wadsworth would have us ‘seek to understand the resources they navigate and the communities they reflect’ (268–70). A pair of essays on race and political behavior/voting patterns among white and black evangelicals and on Latinos both refute ‘the popular if incorrect notion that highly religious voters are necessarily conservative’, while also finding (in the latter case) that Latino Protestants are more likely than Latino Catholics to identify as Republicans (140, 165–6). However, the immigration issue trumps even that identification, a finding the authors of the Latino politics essay suggest here and was amply verified by the overwhelming Latino turnout for Obama in 2012. The following essay by Dale Jacobson on the Christian Coalition and the issue of immigration suggests that a declining religious right has turned to shoring up its base (white Protestant evangelicals inclined towards nativist views) in recent years, hence its tone-deafness to the salience of the immigration issue (contributing to the conservative debacle in 2012). Furthering this argument is Sangay Misra’s contribution examining how ‘analysis of the racial targeting of South Asians and their responses in the post-9/11 period suggests that religious identity can also work against a broader panethnic and antiracial mobilization’ (246).
Space prevents a fuller discussion of a variety of other rich essays here. This is a volume that all scholars of religion, race and politics will want to have in their library.