Within the broad interdisciplinary domain of religious studies, explicit attention to whiteness remains limited. Not only does this situation reinforce an analytic division between race and religion, it also works to obscure the racial dimensions of dominant Western forms of religion, particularly Protestant Christianity in the United States, as well as the religious dimensions of white supremacy. Tracing the contours of a body of scholarship on whiteness and religion that has been scattered across a number of fields and disciplinary boundaries, this article explores the role that the racial category of whiteness has played in US religious life and what is gained analytically by exploring the co-imbrication of whiteness and religion. Given persisting racial inequality and white extremism, we argue that whiteness itself needs to be theorized and discussed within the study of religion in ways that do not shy away from explicit discussions of power and racism.
