WHITE CHRISTIAN PRIVILEGE: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America, even-handed study of a divisive reality

WHITE CHRISTIAN PRIVILEGE: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America
KHYATI Y. JOSHI
NYU Press
$23.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Exposes the invisible ways in which white Christian privilege disadvantages racial and religious minorities in America

The United States is recognized as the most religiously diverse country in the world, and yet its laws and customs, which many have come to see as normal features of American life, actually keep the Constitutional ideal of “religious freedom for all” from becoming a reality. Christian beliefs, norms, and practices infuse our society; they are embedded in our institutions, creating the structures and expectations that define the idea of “Americanness.” Religious minorities still struggle for recognition and for the opportunity to be treated as fully and equally legitimate members of American society. From the courtroom to the classroom, their scriptures and practices are viewed with suspicion, and bias embedded in centuries of Supreme Court rulings create structural disadvantages that endure today.

In White Christian Privilege, Khyati Y. Joshi traces Christianity’s influence on the American experiment from before the founding of the Republic to the social movements of today. Mapping the way through centuries of slavery, westward expansion, immigration, and citizenship laws, she also reveals the ways Christian privilege in the United States has always been entangled with notions of White supremacy.

Through the voices of Christians and religious minorities, Joshi explores how Christian privilege and White racial norms affect the lives of all Americans, often in subtle ways that society overlooks. By shining a light on the inequalities these privileges create, Joshi points the way forward, urging readers to help remake America as a diverse democracy with a commitment to true religious freedom.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm an atheist of long standing. Religion is evil, makes everything worse, and hides the worst impulses in people behind the idiotic fig leaf of "sin and redemption."

The author's not of my persuasion. She studies and teaches Race and Religion at the Fairleigh Dickinson University School of Education. Her take, then, is not as dogmatic as mine, or as dismissive. The subject she's presenting here is christian identity as a lens through which racism is magnified and spotlit.

This means she's focused on the results of the problem of religious organization of US society, ie the kinder one of enforcing a kind of cultural blindness on the country, to the ugliest of them all, white nationalism. It is simply unquestioned in the US that christian religious holidays will be generally celebrated, wher other religions' holy days are, if acknowledged at all, presented as curious customs observed by Others. That's mildly insulting on a social level, Othering people in their own home country, but has far broader implications when it's the unquestioned basis for legal issues and governmental policy. The 1954 moral panic that added "under god" to the already creepy "Pledge of Allegiance" very plainly meant the christian one when accompanied by the enshrinement of christian privilege in the laws of the land. This is also the reason a book like this exists: christians feel they're under attack because their privilege is, at long last, being challenged. Privilege is, by definition, invisible to the privileged, at least until it is challenged. It is painful to be made aware, however gently, that one has been both insensitive and exclusionary toward others, without ever meaning any harm. The harm is caused; the privilege itself causes it, and one's own benefit from that privilege is part of that harm caused. That concept, studied here, causes some made aware of it to double down on it. White nationalism is very appealing to those whose belief is that their privilege is natural not intentionally designed and enforced. It's often the case that one sense of entitlement leads to the development of the other as they mutually reinforce the existence and primacy of the social norms that are changing.

The book is, I'm aware, going to make those most in need of its message feel very defensive and attacked. I'd've offered a fifth star to my rating had the author taken a self-help kind of approach to initiating or having conversations about the subject...despite that not being the reason for the book's existence, it felt like something that should have organically come to be from the way the book presents the information about the development of the issue. I'm responding mostly to her utter, unsparing honesty in defining US institutions' earliest designs as optical illusions meant to conceal the central role of christian social norms; it felt to me as though this rigor should lead to some proposal for at least some interpersonal solution.

As a work, as an artifact of thought and analysis, this is a very good book. As a complete train of thought, I found its lack of a proposal for a social solution an unexpected letdown. It is a very good explication of how white christians came by their experience of themselves as Masters of the Universe. As such I can heartily recommend it to the curious.