Religious expansion to Judeo-Christian framing was a precondition for immigrant Whiteness

Evidence

The transition from race to ethnicity in identity formation prompts the question of how European immigrants’ non-Protestant religions ceased to race them as socially non-White and instead became a peripheral cultural aspect of their ethnic identity. Why didn’t coercive assimilation require religious conversion from Judaism, Catholicism, and Mormonism to Protestantism? One explanation is the social reconstruction of America’s religious identity from a Protestant to a Judeo-Christian nation. This shift in national identity that now encompassed Catholics, Jews, and Mormons was a key to opening the door to Whiteness for tens of millions of Americans. Exploring this history informs whether a shift to an Abrahamic identity is the prerequisite for some Muslims to attain first-class citizenship status. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 420

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: whether Muslims must similarly be folded into a broader ‘Abrahamic’ American identity to achieve first-class citizenship — testing the historical parallel in reverse.
• QUESTION: Follow the thread: did any predecessor argue the Judeo-Christian shift was strategically manufactured rather than organic? The NCCJ evidence in later paragraphs suggests deliberate engineering.
• XREF: connects to: Syrian immigrants won citizenship by proving their whiteness through Christian faith; Christianity was the factor that let Armenian immigrants pass as white. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 162