America’s postwar Judeo-Christian identity excluded Black Americans and Muslims

Evidence

As notions of religious pluralism normalized, the systemic discrimination against Blacks and other racial minorities became glaring. Legalized racial segregation and immigration restrictions targeted non-Whites, many of whom were also non-Christian. Seeking to merge the religious pluralism movement with the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr. invoked the language of Christian brotherhood and national unity to push for racial equality. His appeal in 1963 to the National Conference on Religion and Race prompted the inclusion of race in its conception of the brotherhood of man under God. … With the increased participation of religious organizations in the Civil Rights Movement, racial differences between Blacks and Whites eclipsed divisions between Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and Jews. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 464 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Arab Muslims had a more difficult time acquiring citizenship, Gualteiri argues. However, by the mid-1940s Arab Muslims were also incorporated into legal definitions of whiteness on the grounds that they were part of the Semitic race. The Immigration and Naturalization Services department argued that since the Semitic races had contributed to Western civilization, Arab Muslims could be granted citizenship. Thus, while Arab Americans were legally discriminated against in a process that we might understand as racism, it was a shifting and unstable form of racialization that did not target them specifically but was part of a system of oppression directed at all “new immigrants.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 230 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The Judeo-Christian category is a mid-twentieth-century construct that erases Islam from the West — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 229; Billy Graham fused Christian identity with American patriotism as early as the 1950s — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 237; The Judeo-Christian concept emerged around WWII partly to expel Islam from the West — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 229 (+20 more)

Broader Connections

• Racial divisions historically eclipsed interdenominational religious divisions in American life #complicates (0.75) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 464
• Arab Muslims won US citizenship via the Semitic-race argument in the mid-1940s #complicates (0.72) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 230
• State loyalty pressure has rendered public Islam indistinguishable from Judeo-Christian civic discourse #complicates (0.72)