There are several forms of Christian Dominionism. However, all of them advocate “taking America back for God,” which is to say, from “non-Christians” (however understood), undocumented aliens, “sexual deviants,” “femi-Nazis,” liberal progressives, and the like. To be sure, most individual Dominionists and most Dominionist congregations are not violent. Nevertheless, some are. This is not because these few are ignorant, isolated, or insane, but rather because they reside in a particular kind of social/cultural milieu, one that normatively encourages them to harm others (in the name of their god) and offers them opportunities to do so, and where they are not subject to external restraints that might otherwise deter them from acting out their supremacist proclivities. One implication of this is that in order to avert Dominionist-motivated violence, policymakers must do more than merely criticize Dominionist theology—as important as this may be. Additionally, they must deal with local normative expectations that embolden potential terrorists and provide them easy access to high-powered weaponry. They must also protect vulnerable, marginalized populations from being targeted and step up law-enforcement vigilance and preparedness.
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Christian Dominionism and Violence
James Aho
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African Americans and Religion
Sylvester A. Johnson
Beginning with trans-Atlantic slavery, which forced hundreds of thousands of people into what is presently the United States, religion among African Americans consistently featured a complex of efforts toward innovation, preservation, and agential intervention rooted in efforts toward survival against structures of racial domination. Social factors including slavery, black responses to a range of political conflicts, influences of immigration, and the varieties of genealogies that have constituted religious formations among African Americans contributed to the creation of formal Christian denominations, intentional communities of Orisha, and transnational movements of Islam. Also important are the insurgent challenges that African Americans have proffered as a rejoinder to social oppression. But this progressive tendency has been paralleled by sharply conservative religious formations that check any easy generalization of African American religions as being predisposed toward social justice movements. Also important are social sources of autonomous church formation, the role of Black Nationalism, anticolonial forms of religion, and Yoruba revivalism of the mid-20th century.
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Jefferson, Thomas and Islam
Denise A. Spellberg
Thomas Jefferson (b. 1743–d. 1826), author of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom (1786), governor of Virginia (1779–1781), commissioner and US minister to France (1784–1789), first secretary of state (1790–1793), vice president (1797–1801), and two-term president (1801–1809), is famed in Americans history in each of these capacities. Less well known remains Jefferson’s lifelong interest in Islam and his personal contacts with its practitioners. This aspect of his public life and intellectual thought deserves to be included in standard histories of the United States as a unique window into ideas about religion and race during the nation’s founding era. A complex figure, Jefferson’s views of Islam and Muslims reflect his uniquely expansive views of religious freedom as well as his enduring engagement with issues of race and slavery.
Jefferson’s intellectual curiosity about Islam predates the founding of the United States. His early views of Muslims and their faith would be shaped first by transatlantic British scholarly publications as well as English diplomatic precedents with the Muslim kingdoms of North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Books Jefferson ordered while a colonist in Virginia established the foundation for this bibliophile’s lifelong pursuit of knowledge about Islam and the Middle East. His direct encounters with Muslim officials resulted from Jefferson’s diplomatic and presidential engagement with North African Muslim kingdoms.
As an American intellectual, Jefferson’s views of race and slavery ultimately intersected with his capacious, radical, but minority view that Muslims should theoretically be granted religious freedom and political equality in his new nation—at some future point. He did not invent this position but rather borrowed and extended earlier English precedents for the religious toleration of Muslims, which he applied to legal precedents in his native Virginia at the outset of American independence. However, these theories would be contradicted by his personal practice of the enslavement of Black West Africans. Among those who arrived in bondage in North America from West Africa, a significant minority were persons of Islamic heritage.
The author of the Declaration of Independence knew well that enslaved Blacks toiling in North America would never be defined as “created equal” before the law. Among the West African Muslims swept up in the slave trade from 1619 to 1808, some may have labored unrecognized for their faith on Jefferson’s plantations. Although there is no proof of this, Jefferson learned of the presence of two enslaved West African escapees, both seemingly literate in Arabic, at the end of his second term as president. His response to their predicament reveals innate contradictions at the heart of his views of Muslim religious freedom and future citizenship. Ultimately, Jefferson’s remarkably inclusive precedents for his nation’s ideals of religious pluralism, which included Muslims theoretically, would be vitiated by his competing views of race and slavery.
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The Black Atlantic and the African Diaspora
Walter C. Rucker
The Black Atlantic and the African Diaspora refer to overlapping geographic and historical concepts each representing a complex series of dispersals, connections and reconnections, interactions, engagements and disengagements, and conflicts. As a geographic, spatial, and historical subset of the African Diaspora, the Black Atlantic refers to the sustained contacts and connections among the peoples of Atlantic Africa, Europe, and the Americas beginning with the “Age of Reconnaissance” (1306–1484) and the “Age of Contact” (1482–1621) and extending into the present. One of the first acts in the creation of the Black Atlantic can be located within the story of Mansa Qu, Islamic emperor and explorer from the western Sudanic empire of Mali, who commissioned two oceanic voyages to discover the western extent of the Atlantic between 1307 and 1311. Reconnaissance expeditions of this sort, launched by both Atlantic Africans and later by Iberians in the 14th and 15th centuries, helped create knowledge networks and webs of interconnections that would become critical to the later formation of the Black Atlantic.
At the core of many of these earlier efforts to explore the world around them were the religious pursuits and goals—both Christian and Islamic—on the part of Atlantic Africans and Iberians. Delegations of Christian monks and pilgrims from Ethiopia visited the Italian peninsula, Iberia, and other parts of Europe beginning in 1306 seeking pan-Christian alliances against common Muslim foes. These early delegations fueled later Iberian imaginations about the existence of Prester John—an eastern defender of Christendom believed by the early 15th century to preside over an East African kingdom. In part, the protracted search for the mythical Prester John in Africa by the Portuguese after 1415 set in motion sustained contacts between Iberia and Atlantic Africa highlighted by the creation of Iberian-African settlements along the Atlantic African coast and in the Atlantic Islands, the transfer of enslaved labor to the Americas via the Atlantic Slave Trade, and the beginnings of sugar plantations and slave societies in the Caribbean and Brazil by the mid-16th century. Centuries of sustained contact of this nature spawned a range of cultural formations, the processes of ethnogenesis, and the creation of new transnational identities in the littoral regions and beyond of the four continents that frame the Atlantic Ocean.
Creolization, the unique confluence of Atlantic cultures, served as the foundation for reinvented peoples across the Western Hemisphere who remembered, activated, and re-created “Africa” while attending to New World realities of racial slavery and hierarchy. This process of creolization created a range of ethnocultural permutations, from Atlantic Creoles to a wide array of neo-African ethnic groups in the Americas (e.g., Eboes, Coromantees, Congos, Nâgos, and Lucumís). Within this diverse cultural matrix and the processes of cultural mixing, religious and spiritual worldviews were among the most significant articulations of Black Atlantic and creole cultures. Indeed, there is no other way to decode the intricacies of Cuban Santería, Brazilian Candomblé, Haitian Voudou, New Orleans Hoodoo, Jamaican Myalism, or Obeah without framing them in the context of the cultural negotiations among many Atlantic African peoples made necessary by the suffocating confines of racial slavery and more recent socio-racial hierarchies embedded within Western Hemisphere colonialism, Jim Crow in the United States, and other manifestations of white supremacy
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Race, Sectionalism, and Religion in America
John L. Crow
Sectionalism denotes the division of a country, such as the United States, into sections based on shared cultures, religions, and racial, economic, and political identities. These sections then compete, putting their interests over those of the other sections. In the case of the United States, one of the most significant sectional conflicts was the Civil War, where North and South battled due to conflict over racial, economic, religious, and political differences. However, sectional conflict can be seen as early as British colonialism during which time the colonies competed with each other and with their governments in Europe and later as other sections such as the West developed its own characteristics and interests. Religion and race were frequently at the core of sectional conflicts, in everything from the Revolutionary War, the drafting of the Constitution, the failure of compromise regarding slavery, and the intermittent battles with Native Americans over land and religious practice to the emergence of the West and the great immigration and religious innovation that took place there. In all these cases, sections constructed identities in which race and religion were fundamental and were also significant points of contention. Even today, at the beginning of the 21st century, sectionalism continues with geographic sections still battling for dominance, and cultural sections square off in what is commonly called the culture wars.
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Race, the Law, and Religion in America
Michael Graziano
The history of race, religion, and law in the United States is a story about who gets to be human and the relevance of human difference to political and material power. Each side in this argument marshaled a variety of scientific, theological, and intellectual arguments supporting its position. Consequently, we should not accept a simple binary in which religion either supports or obstructs processes of racialization in American history. Race and religion, rather, are co-constitutive. They have been defined and measured together since Europeans’ arrival in the western hemisphere. A focus on legal history is one way to track these developments.
One of the primary contradictions in the relationship between religion and race in the U.S. legal system has been that, despite the promise of individual religious free exercise enshrined in the Constitution, dominant strands of American culture have long identified certain racial and religious groups as a threat to the security of the nation. The expansion of rights to minority groups has been, and remains, contested in American culture. “Race,” as Americans came to think about it, was encoded in laws, adjudicated in courts, enforced through government action, and conditioned everyday life. Ideas of race were closely related to religious and cultural assumptions about human nature and human origins. Much of the history of the United States, and the western hemisphere of which it is part, is linked to changing ideas about—even the emergence of—a terminology of “race,” “religion,” and related concepts.
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The Idea of Black Religion
Jamil W. Drake
It is impossible to provide a conclusive definition of the idea of black religion; however, certain themes, tropes, and characteristics are typically associated with the “black” in black religion. These ideas are inseparable from the ideas of race in American history. The ideas of the religious differences (e.g., institutions, theologies, practices, or values) attributed to black people are not objective or neutral. Rather, these ideas about the differences of black religion are value-laden and shaped by larger debates about the moral and intellectual capabilities, social status, and/or political struggles of black folk in the United States. In this sense, the idea of black religion is inseparable from the larger discourse about black people and their place in the republic.
Arguably, black religion was not a formal object of inquiry until the late 19th century, yet it often includes statements about the paganism, idolatry, and/or fetishism used to define “religion of Africa” in the colonial period. By the antebellum period, a cadre of voluntary African associations continued the ideas of pagan Africa that posited a redemptive [African] race that simultaneously sought to purify American religion from slavery and to civilize Africa from the ideas of primitivism. Throughout the 20th century, early studies of “black religion” were associated with ideas of social and moral uplift; race heredity; economic stress; transmission of Africanisms; and protest and liberation. In the end, black religion is intrinsic to U.S. intellectual and cultural history.
