In today's episode of Interactions, we hear from Joseph Winters of Duke University and his Canopy Forum article “Imperial Pieties: Religion, the Sanctification of Whiteness, and the Duplicity of the Sacred”. In his essay, Winters analyzes the slogan “make America great again” against the now infamous photograph of Trump holding a Bible on church steps forcefully cleared of protesters.
Both, Winters argues, belong to a religious performance of whiteness. These gestures form a project of what he terms white re-sanctification, a response intimately tied to the recent movement for black lives that endeavors to honor black life and death.
In this view, the photo on the church steps was not an aberration but rather the manifestation of an ongoing problematic involving race, empire, and the sacred, one that only becomes apparent if considered in terms of whiteness as religion.
“To elaborate on the qualities and features of whiteness,” Winter writes, “I maintain that we think of it as a religion with a repertoire of beliefs, pieties, rituals, and sacred figures.”
Read the original article on Canopy Forum.
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