Emerson and Bracey's The Religion of Whiteness
Intriguing Theory, Harder to Find
A few weeks back, Adam Shields — social media friend and early subscriber to this SubStack (#40 of 903) — reached out to ask if I had read Michael Emerson and Glenn Bracey’s new book. Titled The Religion of Whiteness: How Racism Distorts the Christian Faith, it fits nicely into the scholarship in Whitehead and Perry’s Taking America Back for God, Whitehead’s American Idolatry, Robbie Jones’ The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise, and many others. Readers may recognize Michael Emerson as the coauthor of the classic Divided by Faith written with Christian Smith.
At Adam’s suggestion, I got the book and read it pretty quickly. It runs 154 pages not counting the appendices.
The research project the book draw upon began in 2019. It is what’s called a multi-method project that combines interviews, a national survey of nearly 3,000 respondents (oversampled on Christian identity), focus groups, and participant observation. As the title suggests, the book looks at the role of Whiteness as a component of religious identity. In this way, it is distinct from the scholarship on White Christian Nationalism, because some supporters of the Religion of Whiteness (which they abbreviate as ROW) do not support core tenets of Christian Nationalism.
Adherents of ROW are especially challenged by the demographic changes taking place in society in general. This is the argument Robbie Jones made in The End of White Christian America. What many might see as “progress”, the ROW folks see as threat.
To understand the deep values of ROW, the authors return to the classic work of Emile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Studying aboriginal clan culture1, Durkheim attempted to explore how the values of clan organization get made sacred over time. The regular rituals, characterized by “collective effervescence” was a means of reinforcing religious identity while celebrating clan identity. This brought about Durkeim’s classic definition of religion:
A unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things — that is to say, things set apart and forbidden — beliefs and practices which unite into one single community called the Church, all those who adhere to them.
Through these practices and beliefs, the clan celebrates its defining essence. In Emerson and Bracey’s telling, for some Christians, this is whiteness. They argue that being white is the default assumption as taken as sacred (in Durkheim’s terms) and that other entities become profane by comparison.
Such default assumptions keep many White Christians from seeing the incongruity of White Jesus with blue eyes and blond hair.2 It’s why racial inequality is minimized, if seen at all. It’s why structural barriers to minority advancement are not taken seriously, because individual achievement is a key value.3
Not all White Christians are adherents of ROW. In Chapter Six, the authors distinguish between two types of ROWers: the White Veil group and the White Might group. You can think of the first group as those “who don’t see race.” Their support for White identity is assumed yet remains somewhat passive. In contrast the White Might group adheres to White identity but sees it as continually under attack, that they are victims in the broader society.
The authors suggest some rough percentages characterizing these groups. They argue that about two-thirds of White Christians are in one of those two groups, with another third they identify as “Remnants”. Just over 50% would be in the White Veil group, with the balance (17%) as White Might ROWers.
On a variety of measures from their survey, they show Remnants are remarkably similar in attitude with African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, or multiracial Americans. There is a statistical difference between these groups and ROWers.
It is at this point that I began asking questions about what they’ve found and how it aligns with their theoretical framework. As much as I’m intrigued by that framework, the actual data raises more questions.
Here’s an example. The report on a Likert item stating “The U.S. has historically been a Christian nation.” The scale ranges from 1=strongly agree to 5=strongly disagree. For nearly all the non-ROW groups, they average 2=agree. The two ROW groups average 1.5 or halfway between strongly agree and agree. This difference is statistically significant but may not be substantively significant.
The same thing happens with many of the items summarized in Appendix B. There are instances where White Might group differs in larger ways than other groups. To take but one example, they ask a seven point Likert item4 saying that we should “stop trying to fix racial problems”5. The White Might group averaged 3.16 where everyone else was much higher. White Veil and Asian Americans averaged 4.65. Blacks were at 5.01. Mixed race at 5.16 and Remnant at 5.65. But even the most negative of the White Might group wind up barely in the “somewhat agree” category. The White Veil’s 4.65 is between “neutral” and “somewhat disagree”.
So where there are differences between the groups, I wonder if they are great enough to be mobilized into policy positions to quite the extent that the authors suggest. Thsi is perhaps due to the challenge of writing survey question that really tap the ROW dynamic.
To be fair, the book includes lots of interviews with people from different groups. Those are quite telling when it comes to articulating the sacred values of ROW. Understanding how those values and attitudes get operationalized in policy considerations or voting in the upcoming election is harder to tease out.
The Religion of Whiteness is an important addition to our attempts to understand the various ways in which the Christian church in America has been infused with values that aren’t necessarily Christian6 but are co-mingled and buried in our taken-for-granted assumptions about society.
Clan organization plays a key part in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which I highly recommend.
In a related sense, we can understand why Megan Kelley argued that Santa Claus had to be white.
This is where some of the complexities of their argument show up. There are many core values deemed to be sacred: individualism, meritocracy, capitalism, which are intertwined with White values.
This one has strongly 1=agree, 2=agree, 3=somewhat agree, 4=neutral, 5=somewhat disagree, 6=disagree, 7=strongly disagree.
Table 6.2B
See Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory.