Session Submission Summary

Policing Religions: Secularism, Race, and Governance

Fri, November 10, 8:00 to 9:45am, Hyatt Regency Chicago, San Francisco, Ballroom Level West Tower

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

Even as religious freedom is guaranteed in the United States, the policing of many religious groups has been a common feature of secular governance. State agents have understood these groups to practice “bad” or even “dangerous” forms of religion. Categories like “superstitious,” “heathen,” and “fanatical” mark these groups as different from legitimated forms of religion, often based on white Protestant Christian norms. Those classified according to negative categories receive heightened levels of policing because of their religious identities, which often have intersected with racial and gender identities. Post-9/11 efforts to surveil and intervene in Muslim communities at home and abroad are representative of this long history, which goes back to at least the nineteenth century. This panel dives into this longer history.

These papers explore American secularism and religious freedom through analyses of policing practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We suggest that the policing of “bad” religion, often articulated in racialized terms, has been an integral part of secular governance and, thus, the institution of religious freedom. The three papers explore, respectively, the US occupation of the Philippines, the annexation of Hawai’i, and vice suppression campaigns in New York City. Read together, these papers highlight how policing deviant religions and races—at various levels, from national military to local societies with power to arrest—is integral to the history of American secularism as the state constructs and regulates religio-racial identities, and as groups creatively appropriate, contest, and dissent from these labels.

This panel aims to make at least two primary contributions. First, we examine religion, an understudied topic in American studies in recent decades, but rather than focusing on religious organizations or people, per se, we center our discussion on state power. This connects religious history, too often (self-)sequestered, with broader concerns in American studies and history. Second, we advance a specific argument about secularism, namely that it ought to explain how secular states enact their secularity by defining and regulating—and in so doing constructing—religions. Many scholars analyze the intellectual genealogies of secularism and church-state relations, as well as the rise and fall of religious belief and the place of religion in public life, but these account often lack attention to secularism as a built, lived, and contested institution or process. By turning attention to policing, then, we capture how secularism is a processual mode of governance aiming to regulate bodies, communities, and beliefs. Violence, or the threat of violence, is a key feature of the management of bad or dangerous groups and practices. Situating this type of policing at the core of American secularism and religious freedom helps us not only to understand the discursive politics of “religion” in US empire, in dynamic intersection with other classificatory schema, but to trace the material effects of this politics.

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