Race and Religion
Race and Religion
RELIGION AND RACE AND MODERNITY
Although both race and religion are enormously difficult to define, almost all human beings in almost all societies recognize, shape themselves, and are shaped by representations, influences, effects of the phenomena and dynamics to which each term generally refers. Bringing these two freighted and problematic terms together in critical analysis may force consideration of certain issues that may otherwise not be addressed at all, or at least not addressed in the manner befitting their complexity. Notwithstanding evidence of phenomena associated with both terms going back to the beginning of social ordering among human beings—for example, language and behaviors—the understandings, usages, and representations most often associated with both race and religion among contemporaries in the English-speaking world were determined by interests at the beginning of the modern era.
RELIGION AND MODERNITY
The modern and contemporary English term religion is taken from Middle English (religioun ) and the Latin of ancient Rome (religio, “piety”; re-ligare, “to tie,” “to bind back”). Although different connotations and uses of the term have developed over the centuries in different cultures and settings, the baseline assumption that has persisted in the English-speaking world has to do with different understandings about the operations, officers, ideologies, rhetorics, and symbolic objects facilitating orientation to—that is, communication with and reverence of—what is understood to be the supernatural, the Other. This supernatural or Other is a social-psychological projection that can be experienced as a form of transcendence or as a special aspect of inward presence.
Those human beings for whom a certain set of the operations, ideologies, rhetorics, and symbolic objects come to mean generally the same things, through whatever means, are thereby bound together into a type of society. This society may be large-scale and international, nationalist, or local and on the fringes of the dominant host society. It may have its beginning as an alternate, oppositional, unpopular, and illicit society, but over a period of time, with growth, complexity of organization, and social power, it may develop into a dominant force such that its boundaries overlap with the boundaries and interests of the dominant society. The binding effect of that large-scale “society” inspired by or reflective of “religion” then comes to be represented in recognizable external forms—in canonical practices, structures, societies, offices, officers, ideologies, and operations. Such forms generally have fairly serious ramifications—social-cultural, political, economic—for the larger host societies; and they are what distinguish “religion” in strict terms from some of the ongoing experiences, practices, and sentiments of single individuals often understood and claimed to be comparable.
What has come to be called “religion,” then, can be considered ways of orienting individuals to certain types of societies. Given this general function, religion has some specific complex purposes and effects—that of binding persons into a new alternate society or order. It simultaneously and to different degrees and in different respects separates such bound persons from all or some other societies that do not recognize and respond to the same forms. It leads to a binding with larger-scale pressure and challenge for the purpose of institutionalizing the new society’s ideologies within or across a larger expanse of society or territory.
RACE AND MODERNITY
The origins of the modern and contemporary English term race are not at all clear. The term has multiple origins and valences from different cultural settings and discursive domains. It comes from Middle and Old English (rase[e] ) and (raes ) and from Old Norse (ras ), meaning “a running,” “rush,” “swift movement,” “attack.” These meanings may have had an Indo-European base (-eras ), carrying the meaning “to flow,” “to move rapidly.” The term has for centuries if not millennia been used most basically to refer to particular types of athletic competition. From this specific usage the term has been widely borrowed and pressed into service to reflect a rather wide range of provocative meanings in domains far from the original. Uses have come to be more figurative in order to reference different types of competition and differentiation.
Included among such figurative uses is the poignant usage whereby different groups of human beings are differentiated, classified, and hierarchialized. That at the onset of modernity the term race came to be accepted by almost everyone—from scientists and learned scholars of many types within and beyond the academy to politicians in their chambers to the haranguers on the streets—as a way to refer to and classify human beings was consequential. That the term came to be used to refer to and classify human beings not on the basis of their activities, accomplishments, or exploits but in terms of external physical features, especially color of skin, was decisive. This change facilitated a type of freezing of categories to the point that, notwithstanding more recent scientific (especially biological) and postmodernist arguments about the problematics, even nonexistence, of “race” (in strict physiological terms) as applied to human beings, many observers and critics would consider the contemporary world to be obsessed with it and many persons—especially “racial” and “ethnic” minorities—radically (over-) determined by it.
RELIGION AND RACE AND MODERNITY
No responsible critical grasp or engagement of “religion” and “race” in our times is possible without attention to the specifically modern-era determination of the concepts and phenomena associated with the terms. The modern-era understandings and uses begin with the European encounters—through the exploits of their commissioned merchants, military seamen, explorers, and missionaries— with other peoples in the lands mistakenly and unfortunately called “new.” Beginning in the fifteenth century these contacts challenged and inspired Europeans to name and conceptualize themselves in relationship to the newly “discovered” peoples and their lands. This naming and conceptualization led to a type of hierarchy of human classification that squared with and justified the eventual domination of many of the newly discovered peoples. Notwithstanding the emergence of modern nation-states and their nationalist ideologies and fierce competition, in this period of “discovery” Europeans began to think of themselves more consistently and collectively as “European” in culture and orientation over against the several newly discovered other worlds and their ways, and they began to think of themselves as “white” over against the others who were “black,” “red,” “yellow,” and “brown.” The recognition of the differences between European and North American “white Christian European” ways (in all their variety) and the ways of the others came to be exploited. This exploitation came to include a conceptualization of power on terms that determined some of the others as inferior, befitting the roles of natural perennial servants and slaves. The “discovery” of other peoples by Europeans made for Europeans the “race”-ing of all peoples compelling and strategic.
In such circumstances “religion” became along with “race” a marker of associations and identities shaped in relationship to modern imperial forces. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, the critical study of the “science” of religion, the history of religions and comparative religions, was invented, and the concept of “world religions” evolved in conjunction with the first convocation of the World Parliament of Religions. These developments reflected the heightened awareness of the complexity of the world, its many different peoples, traditions, varied global developments, challenges, and crises, including the beginning of global wars and their resultant power reformations and arrangements. Religion increasingly came to be seen as one of the reflectors of social-cultural differences, with a presumed hierarchy that established the “world religions”—those religions built around literacy and sacred books—as the superior formations. Within this larger period and set of developments, there could be found alongside the large transnational boundaries and formations—for example, the “Christian” West, the “Islamic” Near East, the “Hinduism” of South Asia; and the “Buddhist” Far East—modern nationalist religious formations—for example, French Catholics, German Lutherans, and Chinese Buddhists.
In relationship to these large-scale global formations, one can further distinguish the religions of the formerly colonized, enslaved, and otherwise dominated, who were through various more or less violent means heavily missionized—for example, African American Baptists and Methodists, East African Anglicans, Korean Presbyterians, Mexican Catholics, Brazilian Pentecostals, Nigerian Muslims, and so forth. As religion was used to integrate persons into and to hold together large social-political formations, it also provided minorities and the subaltern within the large-scale formations media and means by which to register resistance and criticism. The symbols, offices, officers, operations, and ideologies that constituted local traditions, on the one hand, and the “religions” of dominants, on the other, have in certain situations been critically engaged by the subaltern as part of efforts to undermine the social-cultural and political-economic effects of dominance as well as to help restructure identity and reorient themselves to the world.
The historical and ongoing consequences of the imbrication of the two categories are at best mixed. The enslavement and disenfranchisement of black peoples in Europe and in the Americas, the Holocaust and pogroms against Jews in Europe, the violence of apartheid in South Africa, ethnic conflicts and wars among black Africans, hate crimes in the United States and Europe, denominational splits, the Israeli-Palestinian-Arab world conflicts, the genocidal crisis in Darfur—these are just a few examples of religion-inflected conflicts in the modern world. Yet not to be forgotten are the biblically inspired songs and artistry as well as insurrections of the slaves and the religious piety and formations of the soldiers of the civil rights movement, of the modern-day Palestinian movement, and of the Irish Republican Army. These examples suggest that the confusion of “religion” and “race” set forth at the beginning of modernity is likely to obtain with mixed consequences for the futures that can be imagined.
SEE ALSO Black Nationalism; Blackness; Christianity; Culture; Discrimination; Islam, Shia and Sunni; Liberation Theology; Modernism; Modernity; Nation of Islam; Natives; Palestinians; Postmodernism; Protestantism; Race; Race and Economics; Racism; Religion; Segregation; Whiteness
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Chidester, David. 1996. Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Goldschmidt, Henry, and Elizabeth A. McAlister, eds. 2004. Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kidd, Colin. 2006. The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Long, Charles H. 1999. Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. 2nd ed. Aurora, CO: Davies Group Publishers.
Masuzawa, Tomoko. 2005. Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Prentiss, Craig, ed. 2003. Religion and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity. New York: New York University Press.
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Vincent L. Wimbush