Religion and a Non-White American Future

For far too long the "public religion" if you will in the USA has focused on white conservative Christianity.  Now, with the USA headed towards becoming a minority white nation within a few decades, the "public religion" will be facing increased pressure to cease granting special rights and special deference top the white Christianist who have long sought to impose their religious beliefs on all of American society.  It is a pretty safe bet that these religious extremists who hold little but hatred and bigotry towards non-whites and anyone deemed "other" and that they will not peacefully and willingly give up their special status.  Indeed, it is more than likely that that increased hatred and acrimony will be the hallmarks of the process that ensues as the white Christianist ultimately assume minority status in America. Moreover, we can expect to see anything but "godly behavior" as the Christofascist struggle to hold on to their dwindling power.  A piece in Religion Dispatches looks at the coming conflict as the white Christofacsists slide to minority status.  I for one, have absolutely no sympathy for the white modern day Pharisees as they slide to a minority position that they have long deserved given how they have utterly perverted Christ's Gospel message.  Here are some article highlights:

The U.S. Census Bureau, never one to rush to judgment, has now made it official: fewer than 50% of the babies born in the United States during the year ending in July of last year were white.

That’s right: among the nursery set, certifiably white bundles of joy are now in the minority, and this trend is considered irreversible in view of the higher fertility rates among immigrant groups already living here and a virtual end to the in-migration of whites from abroad.

This observation implies that younger people of color might take counsel among themselves and decide that it’s not such a great idea to subsidize old white people. Myself, I think it’s much more likely that the old white people will use their undue political influence to squeeze more from those whom they were once pleased to refer to as “the minorities” (and other less polite terms).

Seeing the end in sight, conservative white Californians began more than three decades ago to implement a series of voter-enacted restrictions on the raising of any new taxes or fees.

Taken together, these restrictions created the ironclad supermajority requirements that now block the California legislature and all local elected bodies in this state from raising adequate revenue to support the education of kids who (surprise!) don’t look like “us” anymore. The effects of the revenue chokehold are plain to see: K-12 schools in California now rank at or near the bottom on various national scales, and California’s once-vaunted high-quality, low-cost public higher education system has been almost entirely trashed. 

 America’s most visionary spirits (e.g., Walt Whitman in “Democratic Vistas”) always expected the idea of American democracy and the idea of a new and blended population to lift people above any form of tribalism. Alas, this is not that kind of sane culture. Tribalism, especially white tribalism, still runs deep. And as religion has everything to do with this particular form of insanity, religion is where we should look, both to gauge the scope of the problem and to scan for possible pathways to sanity. 

The distinctly American hierarchical system, the comprehensive system of economic and social control that James Lawson tellingly refers to as “plantation capitalism,” has long been thoroughly bonded to a white supremacist ideology. Bad religion functions as the binding agent, sanctifying hierarchy and validating racial subordination. No one, then or now, seems to catch the irony of Christianity—a distinctly un-tribal religion in its origins—becoming a primary vector for raw white tribalism on American soil. 

  

[J]ust consider (if you please) the seamlessness lying within the old expression “white Christian nation.” When world-bestriding figures like Theodore Roosevelt spoke of “the nation” or “the national interest,” he did not need to spell out (although he often did) that he was referring to white Christian people, particularly white Christian men.

More than a century beyond Roosevelt’s day, one does not often hear the words “white Christian nation” uttered out loud any longer. What one does hear, however, amounts to code for the same thing. Thus, R.J. Rushdoony’s still-influential ideas about forging a godly nation—a nation organized according to biblical law—take it pretty much for granted that godly social organization has whites on top. Rushdoony, who lived into the current century, condemned interracial marriage as “unequal yoking.” 

Un-dead David Barton, another hugely influential figure and hero to the religious right, doesn’t really need to say anything at all about retaining white hegemony   .   .   .   But it’s there by implication when Barton assaults church-state separation as a heathenish imposition upon the Founders’ original plan to build the new nation on Christian principles and to keep (white) Christians in charge. 

  To be clear, again: this openly racist view is no longer trumpeted in the public square in the plain light of day.  . .     So, for example, laws and practices known to subjugate and suppress the political voice of millions of African Americans via mass incarceration remain, on their surface, race-neutral.  .  .  .   But does anyone doubt that the threat to white hegemony (both economic and cultural) plays a major role in creating such legislative monuments?

 [T[he implied continuing linkage of “American” to “white Christian” also accounts for a good bit of the obsession with Obama as an outsider: neither a true American (where is that birth certificate?), nor a true Christian.  .   .   .  Here’s a proposition: if breaking the grip of plantation capitalism and its political enablers requires the empowerment of immigrant communities and communities of color, then white liberals who are serious about wanting a significant progressive shift in the way this country is governed must offer maximum strategic support for the organization and mobilization of non-white people and non-white movements.

White skin privilege among educated elites is every bit as persistent as white tribalism among non-elites—and in some ways more destructive.

The power struggle will be ugly.  I expect non-whites to ultimately win.  But along the way it will become painful obvious that the white Christianists are anything but true Christians who  embraces the Gospel message.  Hatred, lies, untruths and vile behavior will likely be their main attributes.  The world will be a far better place when their claim to being the arbitrators of morality is ended.