The Religion of Whiteness

“opportunity hoarding.”

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.

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.

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.

The unsettling truth is that, for nearly all of American history, the Jesus conjured by most white congregations was not merely indifferent to the status quo of racial inequality; he demanded its defense and preservation as a part of the natural, divinely ordained order of things.15

“Christianity in the United States has been coded as white, which means that any attempt to identify whiteness and white supremacy in it is taken as an attack on the faith.”14

sacred symbols include most centrally representations of a white, blue-eyed Jesus, the merging of the American flag and the cross, and, increasingly, firearms.8 For some clans of the tribe, the Confederate flag is also a sacred symbol.

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

From these three political lies these philosophers developed three religious lies to create a fully fertile land for the ROW: 1.From Hobbes, Christians can be in right relationship with God without being in right relationship with the broken and abused of society. 2.From Locke, the only business of the church is salvation. Anything else is a sidesh