Symbiotic Supremacies: Racial and Religious

The grounding thesis of this essay is that claims of supremacy feed off each other and that religious supremacies are particularly nutritious for racial and national claims of superiority. After describing the nature and contents of religious claims of supremacy and how they naturally lead to the subordination if not replacement of others, the author then takes up concrete cases of how Christian supremacy has led to and sustained White supremacy in the United States, and how convictions of Buddhist supremacy have inspired Burmese supremacy in Myanmar and Sinhalese supremacy in Sri Lanka. The conclusion is self-evident: to combat racial supremacy, religious leaders and practitioners are called to overcome religious supremacy. But that calls for another "axial shift" in the history of religions.