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  • Race, White Supremacy, and the Making of American CatholicismIntroduction
  • Matthew J. Cressler1, Guest Editor

This forum began as a roundtable at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). Thanks to the support of Amy Koehlinger and Michael Pasquier, then co-chairs of the AAR’s Roman Catholic Studies Group, we gathered around a contention and a question. Contention: race, racism, and white supremacy are marginal in the stories scholars have told about American Catholicism. They have been treated as pet projects best addressed by specialists. Question: what might Catholic Studies look like – our research, our teaching, our writing – if scholars considered race, racism, and white supremacy as constitutive categories for the study of Catholicism in the United States?

This question did not appear out of thin air, of course. Our essays continue conversations initiated by another roundtable-turned-forum. Two years ago, “The Future of Catholic Studies” charted new directions for our subfield, aspiring “to unearth those unique contributions Catholic Studies might bring to important scholarly discussions of gender, race, and imperialism.”2 We take up their call in both substance and style, aiming to be “direct, pointed, provocative, and brief.”3 And we are grateful to the editors of American Catholic Studies for encouraging us to sustain this conversation in print. [End Page 1]

More pointedly, this question arose in a particular time and place. Scholars are products of their past and present, no more or less than the subjects they study. We write in a time and place when one must insist that black lives matter in the face of a society that insists otherwise. We write in a time and place when human beings are demonized as “aliens,” deemed “illegal,” and deported. To borrow a phrase from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we write feeling “the fierce urgency of now.”

Race, Racism, and White Supremacy

Before we move on, I must say precisely what I mean by these terms. In common usage, “race” names a natural fact and “racism” a moral ill. When we check a box on a form or describe someone on the street, we identify “races.” I am white. She is black. Racism, in this formulation, is race-based bigotry. “White supremacy” is bigotry taken to its furthest extreme (think Confederate flags and the KKK).

When I invoke these words in the North American context I mean something different. Scholars have long since demonstrated that race has no scientific basis. The idea that human beings could (and should) be organized according to skin color is a relatively recent one. The modern concept of “race” was codified amidst colonialism as Europeans and their descendants enslaved Africans, exterminated native peoples, and redistributed resources from nonwhite to white peoples. Race and racism thus are mutually constitutive terms. The former justifies the latter. Slavery could be (and was) construed as a moral necessity if the British were enslaving an inferior race, not diverse peoples with thriving cultures. White supremacy thus is a consequence of colonialism. It incentivizes being white – in law and politics, in religion and economics, in the academy and popular culture – and enforces the idea that nonwhite lives matter less, sometimes through spectacular violence but often in much more quotidian ways.4 [End Page 2]

What is the “American” in American Catholicism?

Numerous histories of “American Catholics” and “American Catholicism” have been published over the past forty years.5 But what makes Catholics “American” in the first place? The prevailing answer, it seems, is that Catholics became American to the extent that they entered the “mainstream.” Historians and sociologists have been telling this story since the 1970s.6 Catholics were once a despised immigrant population. Convents and churches were burned. The Ku Klux Klan’s brand of anti-Catholicism ran rampant. Protestants took Catholics to be inimical to their American Dream. But this changed following the Second World War. Educational achievement, economic advancement, and social mobility combined to make Catholics virtually indistinguishable from other Americans. So, what did Catholics become when they “became American”? Charles R. Morris succinctly summarizes the story when he says “American Catholics have long since made it in America . . . [insofar as] they are middle-class...

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