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Chapter 5: Religious Oppression
- Rutgers University Press
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5 Religious Oppression Religious discrimination in the United States of America is not a post-9/11 phenomenon. Indeed, it is not even a twentieth-century phenomenon, nor has it been limited to non-Christian faiths. The United States has a history of religious intolerance from its beginnings. Native Americans, Catholics, Quakers, Mennonites, and Eastern Orthodox Christians faced religious persecution in seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. Antisemitism, in its turn, took root on American shores from xenophobic seeds brought from Europe, and in some forms continues to have a place in American culture. Today, the followers of Sikhism, Islam, Hinduism, and other non-Western faith traditions encounter prejudice and discrimination because of their religion.1 Although the racialization of religion exacerbates the discrimination faced by Indian American adherents of these religions, it alone does not explain the discrimination . Nor does the excuse that the faiths are Eastern; Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, is an Abrahamic faith with adherents of all ethnicities—yet Muslims in America face perhaps the most pervasive religious discrimination of the day. Religious affiliation, like race, has been the basis for exclusion and discrimination throughout American history. The real story of religion, oppression, and privilege in America is as long as American history itself and has touched the experiences of each successive wave of immigrants to arrive on these shores (as well as the experiences of those who were here before the first European trod the land). A detailed discussion of the history is unnecessary here; a brief review shows important parallels between the significance of racial difference and that of religious difference. In the colonial era, Virginia, the Carolinas, Maryland, and Georgia all required taxpayers to contribute money to the Church of England . The Puritan religious establishment restricted dissenters’ civil rights, including their right to vote. Laws were enacted to compel church attendance, 118 VVVVVVVVVVV impose religious oaths as an obligation for public office, and punish “blasphemy ” harshly. The cultural power of Puritanism resulted in suppression and persecution of people with differing religious beliefs (see Ahlstrom 1972; Gaustad and Schmidt 2002). Massachusetts expelled religious dissenters, banishing or executing defiant Quakers and Catholics.2 And even as tolerance among the various Protestant denominations grew during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Catholics, Jews, and other religious minorities remained subject to officially sanctioned discrimination (Moore 1986; M. F. Jacobson 1998). Legal structures were put into place to ensure the continued dominance of Protestant Christianity.3 In addition to such state-sanctioned discrimination, provisions of the federal Civilization Act of 1819 provided U.S. government funds to subsidize Protestant missionary educators (Spring 2003). The surge of immigration in the middle to late 1800s led Protestants to worry that Catholicism would undermine the Protestant Puritanism on which the nation had constructed its moral and political identity (Prewitt 2004). The National Origins Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, effectively functioned to prevent non-Protestants from immigrating to the United States. With the support of nativist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the American Protective Association as well as individuals, including Protestant professionals and clergy, the act restricted immigration rights almost exclusively to northwestern Europeans in order to “protect our values . . . [as] a Western Christian civilization” (Feagin 1997, 35).4 In doing so, it closed off large swaths of geography where the world’s Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, animists, and others resided. Was excluding non-Christians an aim of the act? Was it something the act’s advocates saw as even a salutary advantage of their plan? We cannot say for sure. The politicians who led the charge to enact the act denied that they were out to exclude Jews—but then, they also denied that they were racists. Religious oppression did not disappear in the decades that followed the 1965 Immigration Act’s passage, and the reader is left to consider whether and to what extent the beliefs that animated Congress in 1924 continue to exist today. The discrimination that one faces for being Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh is another way religion is by second-generation Indian Americans. In many respects, this chapter continues the discussion of lived religion begun in chapter 3 by discussing in detail religious discrimination and, more broadly, religious oppression . Nearly half of the research participants described at least one experience they perceived as religious discrimination. These experiences took many forms and had substantial effects on the ethnic identity development of these secondgeneration Indian Americans. In...