The Religion of Whiteness

Angry Sad Afraid Guilty Powerless Exhausted Anxious Judged Encouraged Empowered Hopeful Joyful The first line contains negative emotions, and the second line contains positive emotions. Additionally, respondents could select “indifferent” or “other.” If they selected “other,” we asked them to write their feelings out.

what all religions have in common, he argued, is that they divide the world into the sacred (things set apart as special, worthy of reverence) and the profane (everything else). These are two separate realities.

They exhibited what we referred to as an epistemology of ignorance, an actual concerted effort to not know.

we argue that most white Christians in the United States—our best estimate based on empirical data is two-thirds—are faithfully following what amounts to, in effect, a competing religion, or sect, or creed. This religion—the Religion of Whiteness—distorts people’s Christian commitments and raises race to creedal status over other aspects of histori

Collective effervescence is just a different feeling, a different experience. And it is one that people often crave. It is collective effervescence that keeps people returning to churches; it is collective effervescence that venerated symbols remind people of; it is collective effervescence that gives people reason to believe in the sacred.

what about the group is being worshipped? It is the power, the uplift, the energy, and the transcendence one experiences when engaged in a common activity with other people, something that cannot exist or be created alone.

All of this adds up to what we can call white supremacy, the social system that functions to move symbolic and material resources from people of color to whites.

race is “religionized” and how it is so—must be understood before progress can be made.

Most of those we label as white Christians are also in fact faithful, dedicated practitioners of a Religion of Whiteness (ROW). The ROW is a unified system of beliefs and practices that venerates and sacralizes whiteness while declaring profane all things not associated with whiteness. We refer to adherents of the Religion of Whiteness as ROWers.