My dissertation investigates how religion shaped the interplay between “whiteness,” race and power that continues to weigh on conversations about identity, justice, and spirituality in America today. Engaging these conversations through the lens of immigrant religious groups between 1885 and 1914, I ask how it happened that certain newcomers with pale skin employed religion as the crucial missing link to becoming fully “white” Americans.

Based on German, Swedish and Norwegian sources from seminaries, congregations, and mission agencies, my project follows these immigrants through Chicago’s Anglo-Protestant activist scene – its social-gospelers, revivalists, and home missionaries. I argue that these immigrants harnessed the social capital and cultural power of white Protestantism through adopting a posture of religious activism and missionary zeal toward “ less white” ethnics, as well as a view of ethnic boundaries as a hindrance to proper religion.

As a result, they lost what could be a considerable gift for churches interested in solidarity with the racially marginalized of the 21st-century: the instinct of ethnoreligious minorities that declined to exploit the advantages of their skin pigmentation, but chose a spirituality that left them on sidelines of dominant culture. Today, the churches that descended from these immigrants – – Mennonites, Scandinavian evangelicals, German liberals, for example – have begun to investigate contemporary racial binaries in order to probe the power, privilege, guilt, and brokenness that come with being a white Protestant. However, they usually remain uninterested in how the social function of their religion has formed – and is forming – them into culturally white communities. Beside the historical import of defining “white religion” through immigrant - not Anglo-Saxon - eyes, my project therefore also provides a historically religious outline of racial spaces in America that have endured, and lessons on how to change those space