Malory Nye Race and Religion: Postcolonial Formations of Power and Whiteness 2019

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/15700682-12341444
Method and Theory in the Study
of Religion 31 (2019) 210-237
brill.com/mtsr
METHOD
THEORY in the
STUDY OF
RELIGION
&
Race and Religion: Postcolonial Formations of
Power and Whiteness
Malory Nye
Theology and Religious Studies, University of Glasgow
malorynye@gmail.com
Abstract
I have two ambitions in this paper. The first is to explore a framework for talking about
the intersections between the categories of race and religion, particularly with ref-
erence to critical race and critical religion approaches. The second is to discuss how
discourses on religion are a particular type of racial formation, or racialization. The
premise for this discussion is the historic, colonial-era development of the contem-
porary categories of race and religion, and related formations such as whiteness. Both
religion and race share a common colonial genealogy, and both critical studies of race
and religion also stress the politically discursive ways in which the terms create social
realities of inequality. Although the intersections between these terms are often dis-
cussed as the ‘racialization of religion’, in this paper I follow Meer (2013) and others by
concluding that the category of religion is in itself a form of racialization.
Keywords
Religion – race – racialization – critical race theory – religionization –
postcolonialism
The central question that I am examining in this paper is this: when we speak
of religion are we in fact talking about race?
Or to put this a little more carefully, what I am trying to explore is the extent
to which discourses on religion and religions (that is, religious practices, reli-
gious differences, classifications, etc.) are a means of expressing discourses on
race and racialization.

211Race and Religion
Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 31 (2019) 210-237
Does the idea of ‘religion’ only make sense if we consider it as a particular
instance of a racial formation (Omi and Winant 1994)? Or, if Patrick Wolfe is
correct to assert that ‘race is colonialism speaking’ (Wolfe 2016, 117), then to
what extent are contemporary discourses on religion also such a product of
empire and colonial power?
Therefore, what I am aiming to explore in this paper is a tentative frame-
work for talking about the intersections of how the two terms race and religion
are used—both separately and together.
1 The Racializing of Religion (and Vice Versa)
When a young Sikh man called Deep Rai was attacked and shot outside his
home near Seattle in Washington on Saturday 4 March 2017,1 the obvious con-
clusion to draw was that this was a mistake, and that he had been targeted on
the assumption he was Muslim. This was not the first such attack. In August
2012, a gunman had entered a Sikh Gurdwara in Oak Creek near Milwaukee,
Wisconsin and shot and killed six people, injuring several more.2 These inci-
dents are not isolated, there have been as many as 300 attacks on Sikhs in the
US since September 2001. In all of these cases, the attackers (who all identified
as white) had directed their Islamophobic hate crimes at people who appar-
ently were not in fact their intended victims. These attacks on Sikhs were in
fact apparently intended as attacks on Muslims.
How can we understand such a significant mistake?3 It certainly was a grim
irony that the violence was directed against Sikhs on the presumption that they
are somehow Muslim. Some would say it is just plain ignorance. (However,
there is no record of any apologies being offered by any of the surviving gun-
men for their mistakes in attacking Sikhs rather than Muslims.)
1 Forareportof thisattack,see‘SikhmanshotinUS,toldto“gobacktoyourcountry”’,AlJazeera
English, 5 March, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/03/sikh-man-shot-170305052756400
.html.
2 See, ‘Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting: six killed in act of “domestic terrorism”’, The
Guardian, 5 August 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/aug/05/wisconsin-sikh
-temple-domestic-terrorism.
3 Such a discourse of ‘mistake’ is a common response to these particular tragedies. See, for
example, ‘Sikhs in America are still coming under attack because people think they’re
Muslims’, The Independent, 29 December 2015, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/
americas/sikhs-in-america-are-still-coming-under-attack-because-people-think-they-re
-muslims-a6789601.html.

212 nye
But there is something else going on. This violence against Sikhs (as pre-
sumed ‘Muslims’) appears to be perpetrated by people with a sense of threat
from Islam and Muslims to their (exclusivist white nationalist) ‘American val-
ues’. And thus the Sikh victims of such attacks have been accordingly identi-
fied as part of this ‘threat’, in terms of external markers such as skin colour and
clothing.To the attackers, the victims are ‘dark skinned’ ‘ragheads’, identified as
being from a different country (even if they were in fact born in the US).
That is, in such acts of terrorism4 the intention has been to target victims
not only for their religious identities (as presumed Muslims). It has also been
very largely racial—based on presumptions of race that appear more accurate
than the presumptions of religion.
MostSikhs(andindeedthevictimsof theseparticularcrimesinWashington
and Wisconsin) share much in common culturally (and ‘racially’) with many
American Muslims. Most Sikhs, and many (but not all) American Muslims
come from South Asia, in particular from the area of Panjab in the north west
(straddling both India and Pakistan). They share a common language, and
much of what we could call culture. And they have the ethnic markers of cloth-
ing and skin colour that are used for designations of race-based differences.
In short, the attacks—and indeed the wider issues of Islamophobia—are
constructed on overlapping understandings of both religious and racial dif-
ferences. In this case, as in much else, the racial and the religious overlap
is very significant. The violence of Islamophobia is not about either race or
religion (Indian/Asian or Muslim). Although the attacks (and many other
Islamophobic attacks by white people on Muslim people) appear to be framed
as solely about religion (Islam), it is more accurate to say that there are issues
of both religion and racialization. Indeed, the apparent lack of care about the
actual religious self-identification of the victims (as Sikh not Muslim) indicates
that the paramount issue is the racialization of those victims, as dark-skinned
Muslims. An Indian/Asian, in this case, is by definition a Muslim (even if they
are not). The victim’s (perceived) religion is defined by their (perceived) race.
One way of talking about this is through the deployment of the phrase ‘ra-
cialization of religion’ (e.g., Bayoumi 2006), suggesting that a person or a group
4 Of course, the term ‘terrorism’ is itself problematic, not least because of the many ways it is
used and understood, and because in recent decades the term has been overtly racialized.
That is, most often the term ‘terrorist’ is used to refer to an act of political violence attributed
to a person or group that identifies as Muslim, and who are racialized as non-white. This
is not to say that the term cannot be used beyond this context, and in recent years there
has been a movement to establish its use to categorise other forms of racialized violence as
similarly terrorism. Thus, the violence directed against Sikhs/Muslims in the US by people
who identify as white and Christian could, in this sense, be talked of as white nationalist
terrorism.

who are identified in religious terms (as Sikhs) have not merely been misla-
belled, as Muslims. Instead, in this framework, both Muslims and Sikhs are
thought of in similarly racialized terms, somewhere within the broad catego-
ries of ‘Muslims’ (as a race) and ‘orientals’ (or perhaps Arabs/Indians).5 When
this happens, a racialized identity is overlaid (or mixed in with) the specifically
religious identity of being Sikh.
Thus, when a person who identifies themselves as a white Christian
American decides to attack a Sikh because he6 considers that person to be
Muslim, he is not making a ‘mistake’. Instead, his classification of that Sikh
(into the racial and religious category of ‘raghead’7) makes sense to the at-
tacker in his own terms, although it is not in line with more nuanced under-
standings. Or to put this another way, although academics may feel they have
clear cut means to distinguish racialized groups from those that are defined
in terms of religion, in popular discourses the two categories are not so easily
distinguished.
Indeed, as Meer (2013) and Garner and Selod (2015, 12) have suggested, the
category of race is often deployed with a religious reference within its range of
meanings. And this also applies the other way around: the category of religion
often (and perhaps always) also has a racializing element. Therefore, rather
than considering race and religion as separate categories, the designation of
religion is often used as a marker of race (i.e., as part of racial formation, or
the process of racialization), and that it is misleading to see the category of
religion as solely based on issues of belief and theology.
One small but significant indication of this is found in another public as-
sociation of religion and race with head covering—that is, in popular (white)
perceptions of the hijab and burqa. These terms refer to a wide range of forms
5 The proliferation of racializing terms here is in itself an indication of the impreciseness of
racial discourses. People who are Sikh in America may be racialized, in varying contexts, as
Indians, Asians, Asian Indians, orientals, or indeed as Arabs—as well, of course, as Muslims.
Sometimes they may even be racialized as Sikhs.
6 It is worth noting here that I am not intending the pronoun ‘he’ in this context to be under-
stood in any inclusive way. The only instances of violent attacks against Sikhs in the US have
been perpetrated by people who identify as men.
7 As an indication of popular usages of the term, in 2017 the Oxford English Dictionary
(3rd edition) has the following definition of ‘raghead’: ‘n. orig. and chiefly U.S. slang (de-
rogatory and offensive): a person who wears a head cloth or turban; a native or inhabitant
of a country where such items are customarily worn, esp. a Middle Eastern person (also in
extended use)’ (OED 2008). It is noteworthy that this definition does not make any specific
indication of the common association of the derogatory term with Islam and Muslims (and
hence to particular religious identities). Further to this, one of the early (1927) quotes used in
the OED to illustrate the term’s usage is to ‘Hindoo labourers’, which again ambiguously refer-
ences an identity which is both religious (Hindu) and/or racialized (Indian). For a discussion
of the historical connections between these terms, see Altman (2017).

214 nye
of clothing associated with Muslim women, and are most usually understood
as clear markers of religious identity and practice. However, in popular debates
both the burqa and hijab are also very often seen as markers of race. As with
Sikhs (who are also prominent due to head covering, particularly Sikh men),
attributing a religious identity to race, or vice versa, is not about a ‘mistaken
identity’ (although it is a misrepresentation of the particular person’s own self
perceptions). Rather, there is no ‘correct’ or truthful racialization, since it is a
cultural and political process by one racialized group with respect to another.
Such racialization is located within relations of power, and the racialization is
a means to disadvantage those who are subject to power (Wolfe 2002, 58). In
such a situation the power of racialization also entails the power to misrepre-
sent and ignore the racialized objects’ own self-identities.
2 Race and Religion in Ideological Terms
Needless to say, both academic and popular discourses on race and religion
require critical analysis, as both are very often used in apparently self-evident
ways. As I will discuss, both have been subject to considerable (often mutu-
ally exclusive) academic scrutiny, and continue to be used in diverse ways by
scholars.
One of my starting points here is an assumption that categories of race and
gender are fundamental to the analysis of culture and society, inasmuch as
both categories (together with other categories, such as sexualities, ability, reli-
gion) are part of the constructions of reality in which people live.
Indeed, the centrality of race and gender to cultural analysis are because
they are central issues within contemporary Western cultures. We cannot un-
derstand the contemporary US and other English language speaking nations
without trying to understand how particular historical constructions (and
assumptions) of race and gender have been (and continue to be) primary cat-
egories of power. Thus, for example, in his seminal discussion of whiteness,
Richard Dyer noted two decades ago that ‘racial imagery is central to the
organisation of the modern world’ (Dyer 1997, 1).
So, to be clear, when I talk of both ‘race’ and ‘religion’, I am taking both of
these as cultural terms—we can call them imagined, or constructed, or ideo-
logical (Smith 1982; McCutcheon 1997; Martin 2013).8 Neither term is intended
8 Needless to say, the term ‘culture’ is also doing a lot of work in this context. AsWilliams (1961)
and many others have discussed, when we talk of culture and cultures, it can refer to various
aspects of human activity. I have tried to summarise a number of these approaches in Nye

to refer to any entities that are ‘sui generis’, that have a reality beyond the ways
in which the terms are put to use.
The way I try to put this is to point out that ‘religion’ is not a thing in itself
(e.g., ‘this is my religion’, ‘that is their religion’, etc.). ‘It’ is not an it. If ‘it’ is any-
thing, religion is something that is done—or perhaps more accurately the term
‘religion’ is a way of talking about things that are done by people (Nye 2000;
Cuthbertson, n.d.).
Race, gender, and religion are all practised ideologies that are embodied
discourses (in Foucaultian terms) or interpellations (according to Althusser).
They operate within fields of power (both top down and base up) and are the
basis of the embodied realities within which people live.
Using Althusser’s terminology, both are seemingly obvious realities that are
so obvious that their existence is taken for granted (Althusser 1971; Ferretter
2006; Martin 2013; Nye 2008, 65-69).We ‘know’ what religion and race are when
we see them. This is what Althusser refers to as the ‘obviousness of obvious-
ness’, and in different terms the anthropologist Clifford Geertz glossed ‘religion
as a cultural system’ as making
powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in [people] by formulating
conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those concep-
tions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations
seem uniquely real.
Geertz 1993, 90
That is, both ‘race’ and ‘religion’ are cultural discourses. The terms talk about
social and cultural realities that exist, and in being such ‘cultural realities’
they are used in many ways to construct social and political relations and
practices.
But neither race nor religion have any basis in any reality beyond the
cultural9 (that is, within specific contexts of language, history, and place), par-
ticularly not in the sense that each of these terms themselves imply. In the
same way that we assume the reality of money (as though ‘money’ is a thing
(2008, 23-56). There are significant areas in which the discourses of culture, ethnicity, race,
and religion overlap and merge together, and so my use of this term here is not without its
own problems. However, these are issues that I will leave to discuss in another paper.
9 There is a lingering debate among scholars of religion regarding whether there is some-
thing ‘real’ about religion after it is has been deconstructed, that may perhaps ‘need’ to be
reconstructed (see, for example, Schilbrack 2013). As I argue elsewhere, the ‘deconstruction’
of religion (i.e., a critical theoretical approach) does not need any reconstruction, it simply
requires further analysis (Nye, n.d.).

216 nye
that exists within itself, even though we ‘know’ that in reality there are no
Gringotts-type vaults underneath banks in which our money is kept in cor-
poreal form),10 we have also come to know that there is no actual basis for the
idea of race beyond the markers and ideas of difference that have been chosen
to determine such racial categories (see, for example, Omi and Winant 1994).
Race is not a biological state, it is a form of personal, social, and political
classification that structures how people think and act (Back and Solomos
2000; Wolfe 2002; Goldberg 2009). It is one of the most primary categories for
organizing and governing differences. Together with gender it is a key way to
think about, organise, and govern people and resources.
It is an imaginary that has a stark and very harsh reality. Thus, race and ra-
cial classifications are actual experiences, in forms such as racial discrimina-
tion, racism, and race-based violence such as genocides, slavery, lynchings,
police shootings, and mass incarceration. These all exist in a very real sense.
In a similar manner, the term religion is also a way of talking about (and
thinking and practicing) human activities, rooted in culture and language. The
category of religion is a particular embodied discourse on what exists with-
in and (sometimes) beyond such culture and language, beyond the human,
but the cultural study of religion explores what humans do with this term re-
ligion. Although we think of the idea of religion as having been formulated
to describe what Christians do (particular Protestant Christians), the idea of
religion as both a range of specific traditions and also as a universal aspect of
human behaviour is a contemporary assumption that comes to us from a very
particular set of historical circumstances.
And, as part of this analysis, we thus also need to recognise that the English
language terms (and discourses) of both race and religion have particular his-
tories that have developed certain meanings to how to think about, organise,
and exert power between social and political groups.
My central question here is not so much whether these terms are connected,
but to what extent—and if we can at all distinguish religion from race?
Largely because of these initial suppositions, both of these terms are very
meaningful to a large number of people—albeit in somewhat different ways.
Both create and contain very significant emotional investments—people tend
to consciously engage with both categories with great passion. Religion (as an
idea) is often either loved or loathed, the idea of religion is often perceived as
10 For a brief discussion of this point, see Nye (2017).

the source of hope and peace or the source of division, war, and death. Race
is everywhere and nowhere (inasmuch as the ideology of colour blindness or
post-racialism has its own cultural power). And the idea of race’s corollary of
racism is a state of mind (or accusation) that very few people wish to claim, but
which is experienced in brutal ways.
However, there are some seemingly obvious starting points for looking for
the differences between what we think of as race and religion. On a superficial
level, most popular definitions of race and religion define them as opposites—
race is seen as being on the outside (about skin colour) whilst religion is inter-
nal (a matter of belief or faith). Race is seen as biological and inherited, and
religion is fundamentally seen as a matter of choice. On a popular discursive
level, (white) people may claim that ‘I don’t see race’, whilst they may say that
they ‘don’t care what someone’s beliefs may be’. A more sophisticated version
of this might be that race points to nativism and the primordial, whilst religion
points to transcendence and otherworldliness.
However, the problem with these abstract opposites is that they are all cer-
tain historical expectations of terms that have long histories of political and
cultural construction. If we analyse both religion and race as particular ideolo-
gies of power, difference, and society (of ‘being human’), the terms share much
more in common than the ideologies that set them apart. And so I argue that
there are many ways religion is a term that we have learnt to use as a surrogate
for race.
A key point for connecting religion as a racial formation is the common ‘an-
cestry’ or genealogy of both concepts. Although ideas of difference based on
what we now call race and religion have been around for a long time, the two
English language terms have emerged out of fairly recent history. And in both
cases,theyaretheproductof theEuropeanpoliticalexpansionthatbeganinthe
late fifteenth/early sixteenth century—eastwards into Asia, south into Africa,
and to the west across the new (to Europe) continent that they called America.
In both cases, the terms race and religion formed meanings around issues of
difference that were part of the process of defining certain groups as other: as
subjects for pacification, subjugation, civilization, and exploitation.
The Portuguese, the Spanish, and then later the French, Dutch, and English
(and then British) all tried to understand through their political expansion—
colonization, settlement, and exploitation—how they were similar to and dif-
ferent from the people who they encountered, and became subjects of their
empires. Ideas of race and religion were both used and developed in this pro-
cess (Nongbri 2013, Mandair 2017, Asad 1993).

218 nye
3 What is Race?
The study of race is not about a general, universal idea or process. The idea of
race, as it is generally understood within western, English speaking contexts
has a very particular history—and of course it is an English language term.
Indeed, as Wolfe (2016) shows, the idea of race has several different histories
even within the English speaking world. Thus, race came to be used quite dif-
ferently against the Indigenous nations of settler Australia than it was used
in north America against both enslaved (and emancipated) Africans and the
Indigenous peoples. In each case, the use of the term ‘race’ creates, endorses,
and purportedly universalizes the particularities of local structures of power
and difference.
That is, discourses of racial difference (e.g., skin culture, a sense of cultural
difference, or of differences of civilization) are a part of the framing and prac-
tice of power relations — involving the exertion of power by one group over
another. This is the basis of Patrick Wolfe’s pithy comment that I quoted above,
that ‘race is colonialism speaking’ (Wolfe 2016, 117). The idea of race is not only
the product of colonial power, it is in itself a significant part of the structure of
empire. As Wolfe quotes Ann Stoler,
In the nineteenth century … race becomes the organizing grammar in
which modernity, the civilizing mission, and the “measure of man” were
framed.
Stoler 1995, 27
Or, as noted by Hannah Arendt:
The fact that racism is the main ideological weapon of imperialistic poli-
tics is so obvious that it seems as though many students prefer to avoid
the beaten track of a truism.
Arendt 1944, 41
As race theorists such as Stuart Hall,11 Paul Gilroy (1993; 1998; 2000), and Omi
and Winant (1994) have explored, European colonial history was the signifi-
cant part of the development of the discourse of racial difference. At the heart
of this was an idea of cultural whiteness, policed by the idea of biological/
genetic purity, and against which were placed all classifications of others (Du
11 See Hall (1980; 1986; 1992); and also Alexander (2009); Dittrich (2012); Solomos (2014); and
Rizvi (2015).

Bois 1920; Morrison 1992; Dyer 1997; Hage 1998; Hesse 2007; Andrews 2016).
Thus white people named themselves as white, and named those they came to
exert power over, as so-called ‘Negroes’, ‘Natives’, ‘orientals’, and so on.
That is, the concept of race was not plucked out of nowhere, or based on a
scientific deduction, to simply describe the world. Rather, we should instead
see the term as an ongoing, historical, and predominantly political means by
which social worlds have been created.
Thus, the assumed difference between white (European, originally British)
Americans and black (African) Americans came about through a particular
historical process, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. This pro-
cess was largely rooted in the violence of the chattel-enslavement economy,
of colonial British America and then in the independent United States (see
Johnson 2018, Kendi 2016).
In short, white Americans learnt to think of themselves as white, and as
socially and biologically different from those who were enslaved (Allen 1994).
Thus, those who defined African Americans in racialized terms of ‘blackness’
(as ‘negroes’, etc.), also racialized themselves as white, and the power dynam-
ics of this classification became the basis of the dominant American ideology
(Johnson 2015; Hesse 2007; Du Bois 1920). Due to the power they exerted (and
continue to exert) this group universalized this ideology,12 drawing in those
who came within their power (through both repressive and ideological state
apparatuses).
Omi and Winant talk about this process in terms of the idea of racial forma-
tion, that is:
the process by which social, economic and political forces determine the
content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in
turn shaped by racial meanings.
Omi and Winant 1994
Thus, the term race is a means of exerting power. One element of this power is
the ways in which its use is often hedged with restrictions, silences, and taboos.
It is the unspoken, the ‘elephant in the room’, and the ultimate insult. No mat-
ter how one behaves, the label ‘racist’ is nearly always rejected (e.g., ‘I am not a
racist’, ‘I don’t have a single racist bone in my body’).13
12 This is a process that Antonio Gramsci described as ‘hegemony’ (see Gramsci 1971; Hall
1986; Lash 2007; Martin 2013).
13 Thus, for example, when a doctor in Denver used a racialized insult on Facebook about
Michelle Obama, she qualified her comment by saying she was ‘not a racist’ (https://

220 nye
Indeed, as Patrick Wolfe points out,
Viewed in the context of its operations, race is a highly active and produc-
tive ideology … In this sense, the term ‘racism’ is somewhat redundant,
since race already is an ‘ism’.
Wolfe 2002, 53
To put this another way, any use of the (highly active ideological) term ‘race’ is,
in itself, an act of racism (‘race-ism’).
In short, ‘race’ and racialization are not about skin colour and genetic clas-
sification. Such bodily attributes are a part of the discursive and ideological
power of the concept and practice of race, of marking and organizing social
differences on ideas of difference that rely on such embodied distinctions. In
practice, though, race is also embodied in social institutions and practices—
the processes of racial formations—that are manifest in physical and social
experiences such as law codes, segregation in housing, education, criminal jus-
tice, and healthcare, and in the experiences of people who are classified to live
within such structures of power.
Thus, I argue that discourses of race—and the implementation of social
divisions and values based on the complexities of such discourses—are a pri-
mary element of English-speaking culture and social organization. This is not
only in north America, but also in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand (the
legacy ‘white’ nations of British colonialism), where discourses of ‘race’ are
fundamental in constructions of politics, social difference, and culture. This
involves not only constructions of difference based on the idea of race, but also
constructions of the national self, based on self-racialized ideas of whiteness.14
In Omi and Winant’s reappraisal of race formation theory in 2012 (thirty
years after they introduced their take on this approach), they concluded as
follow:
Racial formation theory should help us think about race and racism as
continuing encounters between despotic and democratic practices, in
www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/colorado-doctor-michelle-obama
-monkey-face-ape-in-heels-racial-slur-disciplined-michelle-herren-a7450016.html).
Similarly, when Donald Trump was reported as having described African nations as
‘sh*t-hole countries’, he likewise affirmed that he was not a racist (https://www.nytimes
.com/2018/01/14/us/politics/trump-im-not-a-racist.html). It appears that being accused
of being a racist is often considered worse than actual racist speech or behaviour.
14 I will discuss issues of whiteness in more detail below.

which individuals and groups, confronted by state power and entrenched
privilege but not entirely limited by those obstacles, make choices and
locate themselves over and over in the constant racial “reconstruction”
of everyday life.
Omi and Winant 2012, 327
That is, ideas of race are a process—an ongoing process—which have been
created in particular historical and political circumstances related to forma-
tions of empire and globalization. This is, of course, linked to the power of the
state, and so as Sylvester Johnson argues,
race is a state practice of ruling people within a political order that per-
petually places some within and others outside of the political commu-
nity through which the constitution of the state is conceived.
Johnson 2015, 394
As I indicated above, the primacy of race exists alongside a similar primacy of
discourses and constructions of gender. Indeed, the two intersect—construc-
tions of whiteness and racial otherness are rooted in related constructions of
masculinity, with femaleness as its own other. Since Kimberle Crenshaw (1989)
brought forward the term, this has been broadly labelled intersectionality—
race, gender, and religion do not exist only in themselves and should not be
considered in isolation from each other (Hill Collins and Bilge 2016; Lykke 2011;
Bilge 2014; Yuval-Davis 2011; Banton 2011). It is at the intersections between
these categories that lives occur, discrimination and violence happens, and
power and agency are experienced (Bilge 2010; Singh 2015). This is often at a
very contextualized level, where in fact the seemingly ‘stable categories’ of
race, gender, etc., are part of local ‘assemblages’ (Puar 2007, 212; 2012; 2014) that
are each particular to the context and which ‘cannot be cleaved’.
That is, race and racial differences are perceived in gendered and sexual-
ized terms (e.g., white hetero men, black hetero women, etc.). And similarly
gendered differences are themselves located in racial discourses—very often
focusing on white (and cis-male heterosexual) normativity. The person (and
group) is gendered and sexualized according to white discourses of being a
man or woman, and from this are constructed opposites of, for example,
black maleness (as ‘threatening’) or Asian femaleness (as ‘submissive’ and/
or eroticized).
And of course, the issues of power often reside in those who are able to
control the definitions of such ideologies—what Althusser (1971) refers to as

222 nye
the state apparatuses (the harsh violence and threat of violence of the repres-
sive state ideology and the soft but very tangible power of the ideological state
apparatus).
4 Race and the Study of Religion
I have for a long time argued that the field of religious studies is considerably
lagging behind developments in other related disciplines such as cultural stud-
ies (Nye 2000).
In this respect, the field of religious studies was slow to pick up the transfor-
mative ideas from cultural studies that emerged in the 1980s—postcolonial-
ism, race, gender—to an extent that these have only slowly been embedded in
theory and methodology in the last decade or so.
Although thankfully it is now (largely) expected that an analysis of religion
takes account of (or, indeed, should be centred on) a gender-based analysis,
the same cannot be said about the category of race. I can place myself as an
anecdotal example of this. Even though I have been researching and writing
about religion, race, culture, and diversity since the late 1980s, when I came to
write my introduction to religion in 2002 (Nye 2008), I did not think to include
a chapter specifically on race (although I did have a chapter on gender). It was
a publisher’s reviewer’s comment that pointed out (in 2012) that such a chapter
was missing.
So, as Rudy Busto has argued,
scholars of religion cannot afford to ignore the concept of race.
Busto 2015
There is some excellent work in the field on race and religion—mostly about
race and north American religion, such as Blum and Harvey (2012) on ‘The
Colour of Christ’, Paul Reeve (2015) on Mormons, and Johnson (2015) and
Weisenfeld (2017) on African American formations. This particular context is
not surprising, since the USA, in particular, is highly structured around racial-
ized formations (for a very recent comprehensive handbook on race and reli-
gion in America, see Lum and Harvey 2018). So it should be very hard to ignore
race-based issues in any study of American religion (although much scholar-
ship does manage to do just that—ignore race). But issues of race and religion
are not only relevant (indeed essential) to this context, they are also very ap-
plicable for contemporary Europe, and in fact elsewhere.

Thus, writing on religion and race in the USA, Paul Harvey points out that:
both ‘religion’ and ‘race’ are categories invented in the modern world,
for particular purposes. The specific ways in which we understand
these terms have some roots in antiquity and the medieval era. Yet, as
full-blown categories, they are relatively recent creations … Religious
ideas created racial categories and imposed race upon individual human
bodies—what scholars refer to as racialization.
Harvey 2016, 3-4, emphasis in original
Likewise, in his recent exploration of the roots of contemporary concepts of
race and religion within the Enlightenment, Theodore Vial (2016) has made
the succinct point that:
Race and religion are conjoined twins. They are offspring of the modern
world. Because they share a mutual genealogy, the category of religion
is always already a racialized category, even when race is not explicitly
under discussion.
Vial 2016, 1
5 Race and Genealogies of Religion
Alongside this, there is also a more nuanced approach to the study of the cat-
egory of religion. That is, that what is referred to as religion is also a category
subject to formation—in a similar way to the race formation theory of Omi
and Winant. This focuses in particular on the Canadian writer (based at the
University of Alabama), Russell McCutcheon, who has written a number of in-
fluential ‘marmite’ works that look to explore the political labour that is done
with the category of religion—in McCutcheon’s case, particularly within the
academy among scholars of religion.
Drawing on Jonathan Z. Smith’s (1982) and Bruce Lincoln’s (2014) approach-
es, McCutcheon (1997; Arnal and McCutcheon 2012) has set out an agenda that
explores religion as a part of cultural discourse, as a form of classification that
has political consequences.To go back to my earlier point, the term religion for
McCutcheon does not refer to a ‘thing’ in itself, but should be understood as a
way of talking about and classifying the world. Its particular power is that it is
hidden within a concept that puts itself ‘outside’ the world, as something that
goes beyond the human.

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As a result of the Western invention of a form of state that deliberate-
ly dissociates itself from certain aspects of social identity, religion has
come to be a central cultural tool that we—modern, Western heirs to
Reformation, Enlightenment, revolution, and the secular nation-state—
use to describe and make sense of ourselves: our history, commitments,
subjectivities, and identities, and (above all else) our circumscribed
political institutions as distinct from other types of social activity.
Arnal and McCutcheon 2012, 110
Related to this is the quite recent work that has been done in religious studies
on the genealogy of the discourse of ‘religion’ within a similar context to the
genealogy of ‘race’. That is, the term religion is used within western scholarly
circles (and far beyond) to refer in particular to cultural/religious forms that
are in line with western Protestant liberal Christian assumptions (Asad 1993;
Fitzgerald 1990, 2000; Nongbri 2013). Used in this way, religion is seen as refer-
ring in particular to ‘beliefs’, to mainly interior states, so that its ‘core’ is un-
derstood in reference to sacred texts, and an understanding of such religion
largely comes through reasoning (and to a certain extent by observation). All
of these assumptions refer to the academic concept of religion, not necessarily
to what people do when this term is used to say they are ‘being religious’.
And such an approach to religion did not come from nowhere, it is not a
neutral, value-free description of the world. Instead, this approach not only
emerged from within Protestant Christian academic cultures, it was also the
result of a long history of colonial power. That is, the idea of religion—both as
an entity in itself, and as something that can be considered in various forms
(religions, such as Christianity, Islam, etc.) across the globe but which is a
universal aspect of human life—is not only derived from certain particular
Christian discourses.
Religion (i.e., the idea of religion) is also the product of European colonial-
ism (Chidester 1996, 2014; Fitzgerald 2000, 2007; Nongbri 2013; Masuzawa 2005;
Cotter and Robertson 2016). The concept of religion and religions has been
developed as a means for Europeans (and others within the various colonial
spheres) to think about and implement the governance of difference. Thus
Nongbri has argued against the assumption that we can use the term religion
as a meaningful, universal signifier. Instead it should be placed within the his-
torical context of colonialism. Hence,
the idea of religion is not as natural or universal as it is often assumed
to be. Religion has a history. It was born out of a mix of Christian dis-
putes about truth, European colonial exploits, and the formation of

nation-states. Yet the study of religion as an academic discipline has pro-
ceeded largely on the assumption that religion is simply a fact of human
life and always has been.
Nongbri 2013, 154
In particular, as Masuzawa’s (2005) Invention of World Religions details, the
classification of differences of religions (particularly as ‘world religions’)
is the product of nineteenth-century scientific scholarship, which in itself
was part of the structures of colonial power. The idea of different (world)
religions was not—as it claimed to be—a scientific (Linnaeus-type) clas-
sification of the natural world. It was instead a process of formation, largely
dependent on rigorous Orientalist studies, and largely concurrent with the
formation of ideas of race within the context of British imperialism. Thus, for
Masuzawa,
[I]t has become exigent that the discourse on religion(s) be viewed as
an essential component, that is, as a vital operating system within the
colonial discourse on Orientalism … [T]here is from the beginning a sym-
biotic, or perhaps better, congenital relation between Orientalism in the
narrow sense (scholastic subculture) and Orientalism in the more gen-
eral sense (culture as colonialism) …
[T]he problem of Orientalist science is not a matter of would-be pure
knowledge contaminated by ulterior political interests, or science com-
promised by colonialism. Our task, then, is not to cleanse and purify the
science we have inherited—such efforts, in any case, always seem to end
up whitewashing our own situation rather than rectifying the past—but
rather it is a matter of being historical differently.
Masuzawa 2005, 21, emphasis in original
However, this was not a simple matter of Orientalists and other academics
producing new forms of knowledge simply to bolster or justify imperialism.
Although this did happen, we should rather understand how the context of co-
lonialism gave rise to, and then fed off, scholarship on religion (and race). For
example, in his writing on such processes within (what became) South Africa,
and the wider imperial locations of the nineteenth century, David Chidester
argues that,
Imperial comparative religion merged knowledge and power, not in any
simple social physics of cause and effect, as if the study of religion could
cause imperial expansion, but in the ways in which knowledge about

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religion and religions circulated through the networks of empire. As we
have seen, that knowledge could be used to support empire, but it also
accompanied empire in its circulations through colonized peripheries,
such as South Africa, in ways that simultaneously enabled and destabi-
lized the production of knowledge about religion and religions in impe-
rial comparative religion. Alternative knowledge, shaped by local factors,
was also produced. In trying to understand the history of the study of
religion, all of these forces and factors must be taken into consideration
in discerning the ways in which knowledge about religion and religions
was produced, authenticated, and circulated.
Chidester 2014, 212
One part of this was how social evolutionary approaches played such a key part
in the rise of the discipline of religious studies in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, in figures such as Muller, Tylor, and Fraser (see Sharpe
1985). All of these approaches were predicated on a racialized understanding
of the Christian West (the white race) as the pinnacle of human evolution.
And thus, the framework for understanding the universality of what we now
think of as religion was formulated with an explicit reference to race, and in
particular whiteness.
What is interesting to note here is that the scientific racism and social evo-
lutionism that formed the basis for these founders of religious studies were
largely discredited by the mid-twentieth century. With the rise of cultural an-
thropology in the US (led by figures such as Margaret Mead and Franz Boas),
and the wider social and geopolitical horrors of race-based nationalism exem-
plified by Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s, mainstream scholarship began to
learn to feel a discomfort when talking about ‘race’ as an academic term.
Thus, the study of race (particularly as a social and biological assumption)
became excluded from the mainstreams of academic disciplines, and instead
academic discourses shifted to talking of alternative explanations of differ-
ence,usingtermssuchascultureandethnicity(andveryoftenthesenewterms
were largely acceptable synonyms for the term ‘race’). This does not mean
the political processes of racialization also declined, even as the British im-
perial age reluctantly gave way to decolonization and independence, and the
US federal government made grudging adjustments to civil rights and vot-
ing laws, in order to be seen to move away from Jim Crow and racialized
segregation.
Here is it important to note that this shift away from the study of race over-
lapped with the expansion of the study of religion in the mid-twentieth cen-
tury. Thus, the rigorous study of religions that was largely contained within
Orientalist strands of humanities (and which, as Masuzawa noted existed

alongside overt scientific racism in the nineteenth century) became the basis
of the disciplinary formation of the study of religion (Sharpe 1985). That is,
whereas the term race went out of favour for a while (even though racial for-
mation continued to operate), the term (and the idea of) religion became the
basis for a growing academic discipline. Like the terms culture and ethnicity,
religion became in many ways a surrogate for exploring and explaining differ-
ences that were racialized.
Thus, there is a case to be made that during this timeframe (i.e. largely from
the mid nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries), the rise of the idea of reli-
gion as a recognised descriptor of cultural (and other forms of) difference was
one of the means by which the colonial project of racialization was continued.
Or in response to Masuzawa’s question,
On what moral or ideological grounds is the pluralist doctrine, as exem-
plified by the world religions discourse, predicated? What interests and
concerns animate this doctrine and keep it viable?
Masuzawa 2005, 13
One potential answer to this is that it was the ideology of race and racializa-
tion (and the idea of religion as racialization) that led to the emergence of
religion as a description and explanation of difference, and hence an academic
discipline.
To summarise this, perhaps, we could say that contemporary popular ideas
of religion largely work as particular forms of discourse on what otherwise may
be thought of as race and racialization. Much of this has emerged from not
only colonial and postcolonial attempts to frame (and justify) the politics of
difference within the empire, but also alongside this (and feeding into such
popular discourses) the scholarship of religion by early writers during the era
in which the discipline of religious studies was being formed.
Thus, what we think of as religion is itself a way of thinking (or an ideol-
ogy) that very much formed around the political need to categorize differences
during the colonial era. This was not a neutral project. It was part of the racial
project of imperialism, and then later during the (contemporary) postcolonial
era of globalization.
6 Whiteness, Religion, and Modernity
The study of the processes by which European colonial powers have developed
and used the terms race and religion is also the study of what has come to be
termed ‘whiteness’.

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As I have outlined, racialization was (and is) a way of constructing colonial
differences (in discourse and in practice). These political processes of racial-
ization, that constructed others as ‘races’, were also a means by which the colo-
nisers (Europeans) constructed and empowered a racial ideology of whiteness
for themselves.
Thus, whiteness is the product of Europeans’ own racialization of them-
selves, which is largely done without comment or acknowledgement. As WEB
Du Bois noted, such whiteness is based on a particular, culture and politics
bound ‘theory of human culture and its aims’ which ‘has worked itself through
warp and woof of our daily thought with a thoroughness that few realize’ (Du
Bois 1920). Richard Dyer (1997) has pointed out that this whiteness is usually
invisible and unnamed, and is assumed as the default form of humanity. Thus
a person is only given an adjective if they are non-white (e.g., a black person,
or Asian person, etc.), without such an adjective the person is, by default, as-
sumed to be white.
This is the power of racialization: to racialize others (those considered non-
whites) is to name and to define. For the racializer to racialize the self, there
is no need to do anything other than assume the default, the natural, and that
being white is ‘just’ being what should be. In trying to understand this, Kehinde
Andrews (2016) has labelled this the ‘psychosis of whiteness’, an attempt ‘to
deal with the dissonance between … “white mythologies” and the reality that
Western capitalism is built on and maintained by racial exploitation’ (Andrews
2016, 439).
The racialization of such identities as ‘white’ relies to a large extent on
the specifically religious identity of Christianity (CSRAC 2009). Although this
whiteness is not always articulated in such religious terms, and may in con-
temporary contexts be a formation that is built around a secular as much as
a religious identity, the creation of a racialized group who identified as white
occurred very much within the context of Christian (and particularly
Protestant) discourses (Driscoll 2016, Baker 2011).
That is, the category and practice of whiteness is both racial and religious. It
should not be seen merely as a racial identity that is religionized. For example,
markers of Christianity are often taken as markers of whiteness (such as God,
the Bible, the ‘family’, particular sexual ethics, and politics). And of course
this is not only historic, it is also the means by which contemporary white
Americans are interpellated into white American-ness and (white) American
nationalism. This is achieved with reference to others, particularly non-whites
such as Muslims.
Thus Barnor Hesse (2007), who was alluded to by Andrews above, framed
the idea of historic, colonial ‘white mythologies’ in these terms,

Whiteness, Christian, the West, Europeanness comprise a series of racial
tropes intimately connected with organicist and universalist metaphors
so frequently assumed in various canonical accounts of modernity.
Hesse 2007, 643-44
White racialized identity cannot be separated from the perception of the
Christian cultural self of Europe. In the nineteenth century, a central part of
white European (particularly British) identity was Protestant Christianity.
Based on this, the perception of the civilizing mission of empire was formed
on the ‘obligation’ of Christianity (i.e., white Christian colonizers) to impart its
salvation to the world, onto non-white non-Christians as a ‘civilizing mission’
(Fischer-Tiné and Mann 2004).
If, then, we return to the questions that Masuzawa (2005) asks about the
emergence of the forms of classificatory knowledge that talked of ‘other reli-
gions’ (i.e., world religions, or religions of the world), this process can be un-
derstood as the interplay between such whiteness and Christianity, between
race and religion. That is, the discourse of world religions came into being as a
means of trying to classify and control non-white alternatives (and ‘deviants’)
to (white) Christianity.
This process was linked to the discourses of colonialism that were based
on a political system in which those who were categorized as non-Christian
were subject to the power and control of white British Christianity. At the
same time, this political system was also based on a pervasive ideology which
assumed whiteness and thus Christianity were the reason for this power, that
colonization was purportedly a means to bring religious civilization to those
non-whites/non-Christians. It was the interplay between such power and
ideology, and the rationalization of the particularities of understanding and
governing such systems across large populations and areas, through which
systems of knowledge were constructed. As I noted above, this took the form
in the nineteenth century of both scientific racism and systematic studies of
world religions.
7 Religionizing as Racial Formation
In trying to bring this all together, it is worthwhile exploring how we have
come to discuss the central issue of the example that I used at the beginning
of the paper. That is, the ways in which what is seen as a specifically reli-
gious identity can be racialized. The example I used was of Sikhs misidenti-
fied as Muslims rather than Sikhs, but much of this discussion has focused in

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particular on how to understand the racialization of Muslims, in the USA and
in Britain.
So, for example, when Moustafa Bayoumi (2006) discusses the way in which
American Muslims have historically been defined as a racial rather than a
religious group, he uses the work of Fredrickson (2002) to draw a distinction
between the two categories. Thus, he says,
In a religious conflict, it is not who you are but what you believe that is
important. Under a racist regime, there is no escape from who you are (or
are perceived to be by the power elite).
Bayoumi 2006, 275
This, of course, relies on a rather simplistic assumption that race and religion
can be so easily distinguished. Of course, the category of religion relies on
a lot more than ‘what you believe’, and that indeed a religious identity is no
more easy to ‘escape from’ than one based on racialization (see, for example,
Meer and Modood 2009). Thus, when talking about both anti-semitism and
Islamophobia as forms of racism, Nasar Meer points out that there is often ‘dis-
cursive opposition to placing antisemitism and Islamophobia within the same
tier as each other, and in the same register as race’ (Meer 2013, 386).
Whether it is a Jewish or Sikh man attacked for wearing a kippah or turban,
or a Muslim women for a headscarf, the category of religion is similarly ‘who
you are (or are perceived to be …)’. But the distinction between this being cat-
egorized as race or religion breaks down for a more important reason, as sug-
gested by the above discussion of these categories.That is, religion and race are
not separate in this respect.
I have mentioned above a further point made by Meer (2013), that the cat-
egory of race is broad and so the process of racialization may often be based
on identities (or perceived identities) that could otherwise be labelled as reli-
gious. His historical conclusion is that ‘the category of race was co-constituted
with religion’, and the formation of race is implicated ‘in the racializiation of
religious subjects (Meer 2013, 389).
A recent formulation of this by Judith Weisenfeld (2017) has emphasized
the idea of ‘religio-racial’ identities and movements, framing in particular
early twentieth century groups such as the Moorish Science Temple, Ethiopian
Hebrews, and Father Divine’s Peace Movement Mission. In these cases, the
boundaries between specifically religious categorization overlap so much with
racialized categories that in these particular cases (at least) the categories need
to be combined.

However, I would push this further to suggest that there is no simple place
where ‘race’ ends and ‘religion’ begins. If we were to draw a Venn diagram of
this, the circle for religion would be contained completely within the circle for
race. The only question to resolve would be the extent to which religion is a
large or small subset of race. However, such a diagram in itself is not helpful,
since it merely maps in very abstract terms the complexity of the discourses
that frame the concepts and practices of race and religion in the contemporary
English speaking world.
Sylvester Johnson sums this up very effectively as follows,
It is with … analytical urgency that scholars must be able to conceive of
race without the somatic body, of religion without the creed. We must
understand in the most rigorous fashion how race performs its work as
colonial governance through the structures of democratic empire. And
we must begin to appreciate religion as, at times, a racialized formation,
one located squarely at the center of bio-politics. Only then can we per-
ceive the entanglement of religion, race, and colonialism.
Johnson 2015, 400
I do, however, question whether it is necessary for him to use that particular
small phase, ‘at times’.
8 Conclusion
I started this paper with two substantial ambitions. One was to explore a pos-
sible framework for the intersections between how we talk about religion
and race. And the other (even more ambitious) was to pose the question of
whether when we talk about religion are we in fact talking about race. The
task of fulfilling these ambitions seems even more daunting now than when
I began.
One thing that should be clear from this discussion, though, is that I am not
alone in exploring such intersections, and that there are many strands through
which contemporary critical approaches to race and religion can relate the
terms to a common history in colonialism as well as contemporary discursive
practices of power.
Race and racism matter in the contemporary world. As noted above, Richard
Dyer has said that ‘racial imagery is central to the organisation of the modern
world’ (Dyer 1997, 1).The categorization of race, and the power of whiteness

232 nye
form the reality in which we live , and so thinking about and classifying race
permeate and structure all aspects of discourse in English-speaking societies.
In the English language it is not possible to think beyond or without race. The
same is true with gender, and also with sexualities.
And so, in comparison, is religion a similarly primary concept? Or does the
significance of the category of religion become meaningful largely through this
understanding of race (rather than ‘in its own right’, whatever that may be)?
There is no simple answer to this query, and of course in the end ‘religion’ is
not ‘really’ either separate or subsumed within ‘race’ because both categories
are culturally imagined realities that depend on how they are thought and
practised.
But the act of making a categorization as religion, what could be called
religionization (cf. Cuthbertson, n.d.), is remarkable in its taken-for-granted-
ness—as evoked in discussions of defining that often rely on the assumption
that we are ‘not sure what it is but know it when we see it’. This suggests an
invisibility which is similar to whiteness, and like whiteness it is a default as-
sumption, largely built on discourses of white Christian liberal Protestantism.
That is, the term religion serves power interests that rely primarily on racial
constructs.
Thus, in the end it is not really a matter of determining whether religion is
(or is not) different from race, but rather how the categories are distinguished
as different, as though the distinction matters. This can be distinguished in
terms of creed and skin, belief and attributes, or traditions and geographies.
The differences themselves are not the causes of the distinction, they are the
means by which the distinctions are policed and enforced. Racialization does
particular political work, and so does ‘religionization’, by attributing difference
or similarity on the basis of the category of religion.
And so, we can find the idea of religion being very obviously used in many
types of popular and academic discourse as a racial formation. That is, reli-
gion is a racialized category, whether the term is used in predominantly white
discourses to distinguish racialized others (i.e., ‘non-whites’), or otherwise to
affirm the power of a self-racialized category of Christian (or inclusive secular)
whiteness. As with race, in this respect the term religion is very often a form of
colonialism speaking (and acting).
Acknowledgements
This paper was first presented to the Theology and Religious Studies seminar
in the School of Critical Studies of the University of Glasgow. I would like to

acknowledge and thank staff and students of the subject area for their useful
comments and feedback. A subsequent drafting of this paper was included
on my blog, Religion Bites, under the title ‘The analysis of race in the study of
religion’(https://medium.com/religion-bites/the-analysis-of-race-in-the-study
-of-religion-c9288a5da01d). I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of
MTSR for their careful readings of a draft of this paper, and their insightful
feedback.
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