The Muslim Ban: The Racialization of Religion and Soteriological Privilege

Abstract

Why do some racial and religious groups appear to be inseparably associated, what are the consequences of these associations, and how might new expressions of Christian theology resist them? This essay first theorizes a knot between the racialization of religion, on the one hand, and, on the other, Christian social hegemony in the US context. I argue that Christian theology has contributed to the network of power relations that racializes some religious groups, and call for a more conscientious approach to religious belonging. Finally, I propose interreligious encounter as a productive opportunity for deepening Christian theological perspectives on embodiment.

On December 7, 2015, then-presidential candidate announced, i n his characteristically bombastic style: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States…” Trump paused as the crowd cheered. He went on, “...until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” The crowd cheered more. “We have no choice,” he continued in a lamenting tone, “we have no choice.”

Trump made good on his promise on January 27, 2017, when as president he issued Executive Order 13769: officially, Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States; unofficially: the Muslim Ban. Its stated purpose is “to protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals admitted to the United States.”¹

Not all Americans met the Muslim Ban with the rousing enthusiasm displayed by Trump’s 2015 audience. Quite to the contrary, the order sparked protests around the United States (US), as well as legal action in the courts that aimed to stop the ban.²

The climate for Muslims in the United States cannot be characterized as warm or receptive. Report by the non-partisan research group, the Pew Charitable Trust, finds that Muslims face ongoing challenges in American society.

Pew religious climate studies (2014, 2017, and 2019) find that Muslims are perceived as having the coolest reception of any religious group. Other Pew surveys confirm that many Americans believe Islam encourages violence. Another Pew study of Muslim experience in the US. finds that they report facing discrimination, and—according to at least one study—such experiences increased in Trump years.

At the same time, the US Muslim population is growing. In 2007, Muslims accounted for just under 1% (0.8%) of the total American population. Statistical models estimate that Muslims constituted just over 1% (1.1%) of the total American population by 2020.³ Pew cites a study on US houses of worship that estimates that the number of mosques has doubled in the last 20 years, now counting approximately 2800.⁴

Islam’s growth in America is perhaps unsurprising given its global status as the fastest growing religious group in the world.⁵ Still, many Americans know little about Islam and even fewer personally know a Muslim.⁶ There is a notable incongruence here: Muslims are growing, both in population and symbolic presence. At the same time Muslims are subject to ongoing, even increasing, negativity and discrimination.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) began fighting the Muslim Ban within hours of Trump signing it, first suing the Trump administration for violating the First Amendment of the US Constitution. The ACLU argued that prohibiting Muslims from entering and settling in the US prevents the free exercise of Islam.

The ACLU’s challenge was temporarily successful, resulting in injunctions and court stays that forced the Trump administration to reissue the ban over the course of the following year and a half.⁷ In a speech lauding the ACLU’s early work against the first Muslim Ban, an ACLU representative stated, “The unconstitutional ban violates American values and has taken a great toll on innocent individuals.”⁸

I’m interested both in the logic of the Muslim Ban, as well as the rhetoric opposing it. My aim in this essay is to consider what both sides of this coin tell us about the perceived relationship between race and religion, and what the relevance is for Christian theology.

The Racialization of Religion: What It Is

The racialization of religion, theorized by social science researcher Khyati Joshi, will inform my exploration. The racialization of religion, Joshi writes, is multifaceted. It has “multiple processes, involves multiple agents, and results in multiple outcomes.”⁹ One version of the racialization of religion is when a religious group is “constructed in the social imagination” as a racial group. Another version is when an ethnic group is identified with a particular religion.¹⁰ In both versions, Joshi explains, religion “becomes a proxy for race.”¹¹

When a religion is racialized, observable features of human bodies become linked to or associated with religion, such that an individual’s “race” creates a presumption of religious identity.¹² The racialization of religion leverages a set of assumptions about race more broadly, namely that phenotypical features tell us something about the biological and moral “essence” of a person.¹³ In other words, outer characteristics (such as the shape of someone’s eyes or the texture of a person’s hair) are linked to—and apparently reveal something about—the inner properties of a person. Those biological characteristics, through a perversion of the transitive property, then, ostensibly tell us about their religion and vice versa.

Philosopher Kwame Appiah characterizes this approach to race, wherein we assign people to racial groups according to phenotypical features, as the “folk theory of race,” the theoretical paradigm that “dominates” the social imagination of Westerners.¹⁴ It includes the idea that races are passed through birth: a person “gets” their race from their biological parents. It also includes assumptions about deep-set qualities and characteristics that belong to—and to a certain extent define—racial groups. In this way, the folk theory of race is an essentializing paradigm.

The racialization of religion builds on and extends this essentializing paradigm of race such that religious identity is attached, along with intrinsic characteristics, to phenotypical features.¹⁵ To be a brown-skinned person with certain facial features is to be Muslim. To be Muslim is to be brown-skinned and have certain facial features. And this racialized religious identity is also value-laden, imbued with suppositions about what it means to occupy this position.

Besides having a spurious scientific basis, a core problem with the folk theory of race is, as Appiah points out, in that it extends the meaning of racial characteristics “far beyond the superficial.”¹⁶ The shape of person’s nose, for example, places them in a certain racial group, and it also affords them a certain moral constitution (or lack thereof). Consider, just as one example, housing segregation in America. Historian Richard Rothstein documents the practices of red-lining, where throughout the twentieth century black people were excluded from public housing projects, subjected to exclusionary zoning, and denied by banks for home loans. Together, governmental and private action prevented African Americans from setting down roots, ensuring the homogenous racial composition of white neighborhoods and ultimately limiting the opportunity for black individuals and families to grow wealth.¹⁷ What were these practices built on? Long-standing problematic assumptions about the moral substance and credibility of black and white people. To have dark-brown skin is to be African American and to be of dubious moral character—incapable of owning a home. To have pale skin is to be white and it is also to be trustworthy—deserving of a safe place. Values and suppositions about racial groups are already written into the categories by the time we inherit and use them, and the very fabric of our social order (e.g., where people live and whether they own homes) feedback those racial meanings in the practices of everyday life.

Let’s return to Trump’s so-called Muslim Ban. EO13769 suspended visa and immigration benefits to persons from seven predominantly Muslim nations (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen). The ACLU contested the Muslim Ban on the grounds that it violated the non-establishment clause of the US Constitution. What the ACLU couldn’t stand for—or at least what they had a legal argument against—was barring Muslims from entry: that the executive order went against the deep-set American value of religious tolerance. But the wider effect of the order was that it had the potential to bar more than Muslims, it had the potential to bar dark-skinned Middle Easterners and North Africans, regardless of religious membership, from entry into the US. If a phenotype-“folk” approach to religion is used, then a person’s appearance becomes proof enough and any protestations otherwise can be dismissed as dissimulation. We can see how, in the logic of the Muslim Ban, religion becomes a proxy for race and race becomes a proxy for inherent—and inherited—morality.

One tragic effect of this kind of conflation was demonstrated repeatedly by acts of violence against Sikhs following September 11, 2001. In a number of examples, American vigilantes took Islam (or rather, a certain interpretation of Islam) to be signaled by a certain way of looking (a brown skin man donning a turban), and persecuted, assaulted, and even killed “Muslims” in the name of American patriotism.¹⁸

Racialization of religion creates odd apologies for violence, such as saying the “wrong” people were targeted for abuse—rather than condemning the violence full-stop. Racialization also disables differentiation within an ethnic group, as in “Why shouldn’t Christian Iraqis be allowed to immigrate?”

The Muslim Ban exemplifies how the process of racialization renders presumed Muslims visibly identifiable on the basis of “permanent” phenotypical features. Muslims, in this way of thinking, are always “other,” and for that reason to be excluded. Just as the associations of racializing religion functions to exclude, it also “serves to include and make superior another group—White Christians.”¹⁹ Here emerges another outcome of the racialization of religion: religious hegemony and specifically Christian hegemony, which Joshi argues is its deepest problem instead.²⁰

The story of Christian predominance in the US is nothing new, as just a few examples illustrate.²¹ American federal holidays and most public-school calendars align primarily with Western Christian liturgical calendars. The Christian Sabbath of Sunday anchors the start of the business week. By tradition, public officials swear the oath of office on a Christian Bible. We can see in these few examples how Christianity formatively shapes, in the language of Joshi, the “norms, rituals, and language” of American culture, as well as its “institutional rules and rewards.”²²

At one level, Christian hegemony is the outcome of America’s sociopolitical history. Christians have historically had a numerical advantage. Historically, they have occupied politically powerful positions, and so have been the decision-makers and power-brokers in American society.²³ But America’s Christian past is not the only mechanism that accounts for Christianity’s dominance in our present. For example, contemporary anti-abortion activists in the US appeal to narrowly construed Christian understandings about the beginning of human life and these strategies move legislation forward. Even when not speaking in the name of Christianity, American lawmakers and leaders enact rules and practices that ensure Christianity as cultural anchor.

Warren Blumenfeld thus frames Christian hegemony as a form of imperialism. In this rendering, Christianity is not just a group that takes up the most space, but also a force that actively expands its reach. In the same vein of thought, Lewis Z. Schlosser explores Christian hegemony in relation to the concept of Christian privilege. He gives some examples, narrated in the first-person voice: “I can be sure that when told about the history of civilization, I am shown people of my religion who made it what it is” and “I do not need to worry about the ramifications of disclosing my religious identity to others.”

Just as many whites don’t think of themselves as having a race, Schlosser explains, nor do Christians think of the US as an oppressive place.²⁴ His linkage reveals how the cultural environment grants Christians advantages of which they also tend to be unaware. Christian hegemony reigns precisely for being informally and quietly instituted and privilege communicates Christianity as socially normative. Its “particular beliefs, values, and perspectives” are established as dominant. At the same time, other (subordinate) religious groups are both constructed according to stereotypes²⁵ and rendered invisible.²⁶ Christianity thus capitalizes on the racialization of religions.

The Racialization of Religion: Why Does It Occur?

I have theorized there is a knot tied between the racialization of religion, on the one hand, and Christian privilege and Christian hegemony, on the other. Now I address a prior question: Why do we form inseparable associations between religions and racial groups in the first place?

The answer to this question, I propose, requires a deeper dive into the folk theory of race and the philosophical conceptualization it relies upon. Philosopher Robert Bernasconi traces “race” to Immanuel Kant and the seventeenth century.²⁷ Race’s broad, stated purpose was to divide and classify the people of the world. Its unstated, and far more powerful purpose, was to legitimize racist practices that were already in place.²⁸ Categorizing people—and treating them better or worse in the social sphere based on their category—was by no means new or unique to the seventeenth century, as Bernasconi readily admits. What was new was that this way of classifying people had a supposedly biological foundation.²⁹

Kant was keenly attentive to the debates and controversies burgeoning among natural historians of his day. Karl Linnaeus and George-Leclerq Buffon developed competing systems for divvying up the natural world. ³⁰ Kant drew on these classificatory contributions, and extended them to the human social realm to divvy up human beings.

To understand his contribution to the theory of race, we need to appreciate the basic premise of his moral philosophy. In broadest terms, Kant the moral philosopher aimed to identify the “fixed, permanent, and enduring structures” on which people could ground their moral actions.³¹ Kant’s signature theory—the categorical imperative—attempts just this: a code for human choice and behavior that is always and everywhere true, an ethical North Star.

Kant the natural systematician was interested in system of classification that likewise relied on a fixed, permanent, and enduring foundation. For Kant, the essence of any human group cannot be based on that which shifts and changes, such as culture and customs, but instead must be based on that which is unchangeable and fixed—a biologically given qualities, such as skin color or facial features. Linnaeus provided inspiration. Where Linnaeus looked to the existence of mammaries to divide mammals from birds, Kant looked to the physical characteristic of skin color—which he saw to be fixed, permanent, and enduring, to divide and classify people into groups.

Just as laying an egg is the external evidence of what most deeply connects a turkey to a pigeon to an ostrich (the essence of being a bird), likewise skin color in Kant’s accounting was the external evidence of deeper connective tissue among people belonging to a particular skin-color group. Those who share the trait of dark skin mutually bear the essence of dark-skinned people. Kant’s racial essentialism is biologically rooted, also ensuring a permanence to the division of races.³²

The so-called Summer of Racial Reckoning (2020) brought about a shift in American conversation on race. Even while not all Americans agree that it’s dehumanizing to essentialize racial groups, or that white privilege is destructive, or that racism is alive and well, the very concepts of racial hierarchies, essentialism, and privilege are now very much “on the table” in ordinary conversation among everyday people. While the popular conversation on race has exposed many of the ways racism has flourished and flowered in the US, I also maintain that scholars—and Christian theologians in particular—have more work to do attending to the root system that extends far and wide under our soil. Until we face the issue of bodies and the identities conferred by bodies, racism’s root system will continue to grow.

There are counterarguments to be made to such a claim. It’s possible to argue that races are purely socially constructed and have nothing—really—to do with bodies. Such a perspective informs the imperative to be “colorblind.” Even if race is socially constructed, there is still a collective unconscious practice of seeing race—bequeathed to us by Kant—that is at work (likely even for those who profess to “not” see it!). Our folk ways of thinking and talking about race, our practices of noticing skin color, Bernasconi notes, are residues of earlier thought-patterns that carry forward certain values.³³ We cannot evacuate ourselves of such a lineage by fiat.

It’s also possible to say that the problem lies not so much with grouping people together according to shared features, as with arranging those groups hierarchically. Kant explicitly arranged racial groups into a hierarchy, in which white skin color was the ideal that expressed a higher rational character.³⁴ Dark skin, he claimed, revealed a limited capacity for rational attainment. On this scale, non-white people were “superior or inferior to the degree that they approximate whiteness.”³⁵

For Kant, race is purposive.³⁶ The fact that there is something that distinguishes white people from black people (namely, skin color) must be meaningful, it must have a broader purpose. If skin color didn’t have a purpose or a meaning, it wouldn’t be there. Our practice of seeing skin color carries with it this easy slippage between quality and purpose and, again, this cannot be excised just by fiat.

To fully appreciate our “folk” ideas about race, we need to turn not only to its roots in Kant but also to Christian theology and colonialism. Willie James Jennings has been on the forefront of exposing the role Christian theology plays in the development of race, and the racializing practices of the West, and his work is generative for this essay.³⁷ The colonial period was pivotal, Jennings argues, for the development of race thinking. It also decisively shifted the course of Christian theology.

In the colonial age, Europeans left their homes to claim and occupy territory.³⁸ They forcefully removed Indigenous people from their land, and captured and sold Africans to support their endeavors in the “new” colonies. Colonial acts of displacement and dehumanization demanded a rationale, a conceptual structure to uphold and legitimate them. Christian theology, Jennings argues, met the demand, and—along the way—set itself on a new course.³⁹

“Europeans,” Jennings writes, “enacted racial agency as a theologically articulated way of understanding their bodies in relation to new spaces and new peoples and their new power over those spaces and peoples.”⁴⁰ Jennings perceives a shift that happens with respect to how Europeans express their self-understanding. Physical features of the human body, rather than physical features of the land, came to be important for how people understand identity.⁴¹ Rather than knowing oneself primarily in relation to a place (in today’s parlance, “I am from Pennsylvania”), Christians in the colonial moment and after thought about their identity in terms of their body (“I am white”).

The human body, rather than land, became the giver of identity. Kant’s system of classification illustrates this perfectly: what was defining of groups of people were embodied features. In this paradigm, the white body—from which the European, Christian way of being sprung, took on special significance, forming a standard for all other bodies. While Kant associates whiteness with higher form of rationality, Jennings notes that, in the colonial Christian accounting of bodies, whiteness went beyond even this, taking on theological significance.⁴² Jennings writes that whiteness came to represent a “true moment of creation.” It was white people, who were also Christian, who had the power to create, to define, and breathe life into the non-white people they enslaved and displaced. The key act for Jennings is conversion. Conversion offered “a new reality for black flesh.”⁴³

Blacks were defined by being the furthest removed from salvation and therefore also the most in need of white evangelizing action.⁴⁴ Skin color thus helped white colonizing Christian to discern the “salvific possibilities” of the people they encounter.⁴⁵ And we can see how Kant’s presumably biological framework both buttresses and “naturalizes” these kind of discernments. Racial being was placed on “a trajectory toward an endless becoming organized around white bodies.”⁴⁶ By converting to Christianity, non-white converts became more like white Christians. They nudged their way up the racial scale in the direction of white, even if their skin remained (and would always remain) dark.

Racialization and Underracialization

While Kant may have been interested in classifying humans by skin color as a matter of intellectual curiosity, Christians in the colonial period classified humans by skin color to give purpose to their very raison d’être in the new world. Even the exploitative and money-making endeavors of mercantilists was overlaid with a veneer of evangelism. Jennings calls blackness the “fundamental tool” of the white conceptual frame: White people “needed” non-white people to convert. As Jennings’ study reveals, religion and race were created together, and aided the work of Christian missionaries.

For this reason, the concept of racialization of religion, as I introduced it at the outset of this chapter, is misleading in its suggestion that there is a moment when “race” and “religion” exist separately from each other. Race and religion are bound together, always mutually implicated. And they are bound together because of Christian theology. The relationship between the racialization of religion and Christianity is not coincidental, but mutually interlocking.

Like the magician who uses his left hand to pull the audience’s attention while his right hand sets to work planting a coin behind an ear, the racialization of religion—the collapsing together of a racial group with a religious one—distracts from another, much less obvious activity: what I will call the underracialization of religion. Where Sikhs and Muslims are overtly racialized, as the Muslim Ban shows, Christians are underracialized.

Speaking about the contemporary US context, Joshi asserts, “Christianity has also been ‘racialized,’ in this case as White, with non-Christian religions and non-believers constructed in opposition to Christianity—to Whiteness.”⁴⁷ Strictly speaking, Joshi is quite right that white (Eastern Euro-American white) tends to create the presumption of Christian identity, or—maybe more accurately—the presumption of a historic or familial Christian identity. Beginning in the colonial period, “white” serves as an archetype for Christian, and in this way Christianity is racialized like other religions.

And yet, at the same time, white people are not seen to be bound to any religious community, least of all Christianity, in the way that dark-skinned people are. Whites are free to explore and shop around religiously, to be “spiritual but not religious,” to convert and sample other religious traditions, to be not Christian. Consider the Muslim Ban example as a point of contrast: in an attempt to have the ban stand up in federal court, Trump changed the language of his original promise (to bar Muslims from entry) to encompass a wider scope (to bar anyone from seven predominately Muslim countries from entering the US). People from those places—with those facial features and that skin tone—were not supposed to be anything but Muslim so by banning people from those countries, Trump’s revised Muslim Ban was not defanged of bigotry but rather taken to a darker conclusion.

What accounts for the ready association between white and Christian, on the one hand, and, on the other, the freedom whites enjoy to move across religious boundaries? In part—I submit—it comes from the notion that religion in its ideal form is something freely chosen and which can be swapped at will (an issue I will return to at the conclusion of this chapter). In part—I submit further—it comes from the history of whiteness as a history of apparent lack. Here it is helpful to draw on “underracialization.” Due to underracialization, Christians have not sufficiently examined their history as white and, as at the same time, whites have not sufficiently considered the role Christianity has played in how “white” is constituted. Both race (white) and religion (Christianity)—I claim—have been underracialized.

Sociologist Ruth Frankenberg’s landmark qualitative study of whiteness explores white as race-less—or underracialized—category.⁴⁸ Her project is useful for thinking through underracialization. Frankenberg observes, from her extensive interviews with white women about their racial identity, a curious pattern in the way they talk about their race, namely, as nonexistent. White people, Frankenberg posits, don’t think of themselves as having a race. Instead, whiteness is framed as a neutral or empty category. Race, ethnicity, and culture are things that other people have. Being race-less themselves, white people take on the role of “the non-defined definers of other people.”⁴⁹

Whiteness is a historical identity formation, meaning that the white women Frankenberg interviewed, just for example, were not “born” seeing themselves as without a race.⁵⁰ Being race-less is not “natural” to whiteness, but is a quality built into it over time and maintained through the continual enactment. Frankenberg’s white women learned to view themselves as they did by adopting foregoing and ambient practices of other white people. While whiteness is not, as philosopher of race Charles Mills notes, “synchronously uniform nor diachronically static” there are features of it that seem to be largely consistent through time and across subgroups.⁵¹ One key feature is that whites occupy the position of what scholar of race George Yancy calls the “master signifier.” White is the “positive term” or “transcendental norm” against which all-that-is-non-white is defined.⁵²

This account of whiteness—as the learned position of undefined definer—coheres with the narrative traced out by Jennings regarding the colonial project of Christian mission. White Christian settlers perceived the color of the Indigenous people they displaced and the African people they enslaved, but not their own. Skin color correlated to a kind of soteriological status. While “white” may not have been translated theologically to mean “saved,” “black” did translate to “heathen” and “in need of salvation.” And this is precisely the point. White Christians do not need to be named as the saving missionaries. They already are. Their soteriological status (saved) is implied by the fact of their work to “save” non-Christians (who are non-white), and marked by their white skin.

George Yancy argues that white people are “implicated in a complex network of racist power relationships” in which they are both “its beneficiaries” and “co-contributors,” even if unwitting as such.⁵³ I take Yancy’s statement a step further, or perhaps in a new direction, toward the role of Christian theology. The network of racist power relationships is rendered even more complex when we tug on the theological thread. I argue that, in the post-colony—literally, in the world that follows from colonialism, white skin carries a presumption of salvation, of having Christian soteriological certainty, which affords those who bear it both a kind of flexibility with regard to religious belonging, identity, and practice and a remit to connect “other” people to certain religious identities. I call this presumption, which underlies whiteness, soteriological privilege.

Soteriological privilege is related to, but distinct from Christian privilege. Christian privilege is structural and social: “it permeates our institutions, influences public discourse, and impacts attitudes toward other religious groups and nonbelievers.”⁵⁴ It places Christians in positions of normativity and comfortability. Soteriological privilege is, in the most plain meaning of the word, metaphysical. It goes beyond the concrete, physical world. Where Christian privilege is an assumption about what goes and who’s who in the social world of reality, soteriological privilege is an assumption about what goes and who’s in in the world beyond this one. Soteriological privilege is the ultimate security, or—better, soteriological privilege is security about one’s ultimate place.

The most important aspect of soteriological privilege is that there is a final significance to being white that doesn’t have to be—and hardly ever is—spoken to be known. Even for whites who are not Christian and for whites who actively reject a narrative of saved-damned or a paradigm of an afterlife, my claim is that soteriological privilege is at work. Because “to be saved” (and therefore in a position of recognizing and naming “others”) is encoded into the structure of whiteness.⁵⁵

To use a technological metaphor: If white skin is the hardware, and white privilege is the software, then soteriological privilege is the code that writes that software. Just as one can’t be white without having white privilege, one can’t be white without having soteriological privilege. (Privilege is something afforded to a person by the surroundings and social interaction, not by one’s voluntary choice.) That soteriological privilege is foundational for whiteness and white privilege is one key dimension of my hypothesis.⁵⁶ It affords us an explanation for exactly why whiteness carries so much power and privilege, and just how deeply that power and privilege run. The concept is useful because it protects against easy resolutions to white privilege, such as the expectation that privilege will diminish over time or with population gains among historically minority racialized groups.

Soteriological Privilege and the Christian Community

My principal interest in developing the idea of soteriological privilege, however, is not to theorize about its significance ad extra, but rather for the work it potentially accomplishes ad intra. That is, I develop this concept primarily to wrestle with values and practices internal to Christian traditions and exercised by Christian communities. Joshi claimed that the racialization of religion is the key to religious hegemony. We must extend Joshi’s claim: the racialization of religion is also the key to white hegemony, a hegemony that can only be dismantled if Christian superiority—as a theological value not just a social practice—is taken into account.

Let me put one example on the table for critical consideration, Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, and the famous handful of lines that Christians cite as evidence of Christianity’s universalism. After taking the Galatians to task for revisiting debates on circumcision, Paul writes,

As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise. (Gal 3:27–29)

Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female. Christ welcomes all. And such social divisions are abolished in Christ. With baptism, Paul seems to be saying, we let go of the bodily identities that previously bound us.⁵⁷

But why read the value of detaching from bodily identity into Paul’s letter? Or, why assume that Paul presents Christians as a group who stand outside of racial belonging?

Scholar of early Christianity Denise Kimber Buell rereads early Christian texts with the explicit assumption that concepts of race and ethnicity are at work in them.⁵⁸ Buell’s work allows us to see how, when Paul wrote Galatians, he relied on ethnic reasoning, and in fact used religious belonging as a domain to produce—rather than escape from—a notion of race.⁵⁹ In other words, racial identity is assumed by Paul. Christians are not transformed to having no race at all, they are transformed instead to a new people (a new racial group) altogether. This is what Paul means when he writes “you are Abraham’s offspring.” Christians are a fleshly people alongside other fleshly peoples.

Soteriological privilege denigrates fleshiness. It encourages a mode of thinking that purports to prioritize “voluntary” identities over “given” ones. By voluntary identities I mean those that are detached from the body, that are arrived at through deliberation or acts of will, for example, by sampling various religious practices from across traditions. Given-identities are those that arise from or are connected to the body. Paul doesn’t bestow Christians today with this mode of thinking in his Letter to the Galatians, but Paul can be read (and has been read!) as saying that which is voluntarily chosen is superior to that which is given. Christians, in this reading, choose their way out of flesh.

We as Christians can—and ought to—challenge our interpretative practices by critically asking about how we arrange the values of voluntary/given. Am I reading a theological source in such a way that prioritizes what is voluntary over what is given? Do I find myself believing that God prefers those aspects of myself that I have “earned” versus aspects of me that I was born with? These questions may seem far afield from the matter I began this essay with—how a de facto Christian population relates to Muslims—but there is a long, linking chain connecting fleshliness to how we view voluntary versus chosen identities to interreligious interaction.

When boiled down, the racialization of religions and simultaneous underracialization of whiteness and Christianity are both about fleshliness, and how different groups are assumed to orient to bodies.⁶⁰ In the inherited paradigm—issuing forth from both Kant and colonial Christianity, “others” (including non-Christian people of faith and people of color) are bound to the flesh of their bodies. The bodies of people of color confer “culture.” The bodies of people of color confer also religious belonging. Whites and Christians, by contrast, are seen to be somehow detached from their fleshliness. White is a non-category. Christians choose their religious identity through an active, voluntary profession of faith.

To reflect deeply on questions about how Christians relate to other religions—including how we approach religious belonging, interreligious interaction, and the question of salvation for non-Christians—must also be to reflect deeply on how we orient to our own fleshliness. Seemingly abstract theological questions on the diversity of religions and the wideness of God’s grace are, in the end, not abstract at all, but rather embedded in how we look at and live through the very flesh of our bodies.