Race, Religion, and the Secular

Catalog description

The history of race is intertwined with religion. From the Spanish Inquisition to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, to the European construction of a secular “humanism” in the Enlightenment, the relationship between Christianity and Whiteness has entailed dehumanizing consequences for non-Christian, racialized Others. This class will explore the relationship between religion, nationalism, secularism, and racism by drawing on theological, historical, sociological, theoretical and literary texts. This class will outline a genealogy of both racialization and secularization to understand how “whiteness” is bound up with the history of Christianity and secular power in liberal democracies, as well as how racial logics rely upon and redeploy the language of religion in purportedly secular sites of social systemic discriminations. Topics will include racialization and religio-racial formation; Anti-Blackness, Anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia; nationalism and populism; citizenship, civic religion, and public morality.