Love in a Weighted World: On Christian Hegemony and White Supremacy

“… context where White supremacy has created institutionalized forms of disparity, Christians must enact anti-racist theologies toward racial justice. ”

Team Members/Contributors

Jeannine Hill Fletcher Fordham University Contact Me

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Recent work has indicted the Christian theological tradition as constituted by Whiteness and blind to internal currents of racism. Even in theologies of religious pluralism, where White Christians have theologized about their racialized others, race is rarely mentioned. Yet, this Christian theological project has created the conditions for racialized dispossession. In North America, Christian theologies of religious superiority dispossessed native peoples from the land, enslaved Africans, and excluded racialized-religious immigrants -- oppressions premised on the theological superiority of Christianity and directed toward racialized religious Others. Christian theologies of religious otherness also fueled the racialization of the Jews in modern Europe, laying the foundation for the Holocaust. These examples invite us to consider the continued function of religion in the construction of race, with attention to contemporary dynamics.

The intersection of religion and race at the heart of this study sustains a constructive theology of religious pluralism that takes race into account. Recognizing how religion and race have created the conditions of dispossession and the injustice of White privilege (what Mark L. Taylor describes as a ‘weighted world’), this constructive theology returns to the central claims of the Christian tradition to pursue a theology of love in a weighted world.

Image Title Year Type Contributor(s) Other Info
  Warrants for Reconstruction: Christian Hegemony, White Supremacy 2016 Journal Article Jeannine Hill Fletcher
Volume 51, Number 1, Winter 2016 pp. 54-79