Surveillance agencies define legitimate religion as politically quiescent

Evidence

The FBI characterized this change in the following way: “The society is said to have conducted itself as a religious organization until approximately nine months ago when several persons connected with it exhibited pro-Japanese sympathies.” 42 This framing suggests that for the FBI, religion, at least among black people, must be politically quiescent in order to be religion. Once a group began to articulate a position that ran counter to the dominant politics of the Bureau, it stopped being religion proper. 43 The articulation of pro-Japanese sentiments was evidence of sedition, and as the dream of a Japanese invasion spread among thousands of African Americans in the early 1940s, the government arrested the African American leaders suspected of stoking such feelings. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 394

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s larger anatomy-of-intolerance project: this is the state’s definitional power deciding what counts as religion, echoing how the fearful subject defines the Other. — connects to: The FBI designated orthodoxy by political loyalty rather than theology — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 235