Research

Good White Christians: How Immigrant Religion Made Racial Privilege in America – book manuscript in progress

I am currently working on a book that describes how religion shaped racial status and cultural privilege in the U.S. – not just the other way around. Through looking at five different immigrant groups in the 19th and 20th century, I outline how “white religion” as we know it today is not simply an afterthought of racial binaries, but a fundamentally spiritual construct. White religion, I argue, was never simply Anglo-Saxon, nor always American-born. Instead, it was – and is – marked by world-bettering activism and the well-meaning sentiment that ethnicity is a hindrance to being a “good Christian” in the U.S.