White Theology and White Power IV

The argument of this series depends on chronology. If modern whiteness is projected backward onto every Christian hierarchy in European history, the analysis becomes morally forceful but historically weak. Medieval Christians did not possess the nineteenth-century racial classifications that later organized Atlantic slavery and colonial rule. They did, however, inherit and develop ways of ranking religious communities, distinguishing orthodox from heretical belief, and treating Christian political order as normatively superior to the worlds beyond it. Those earlier hierarchies were not white supremacy in an unfinished form. They were a different system of ordering whose concepts, institutions, and habits could later be adapted to racial projects.[1]

I use the term Christian supremacy here in a deliberately limited sense. It describes a political and theological order in which Christianity is treated not simply as true, but as entitled to a privileged relation to law, territory, public authority, and full membership in society. That definition does not imply that all Christians sought coercion or that every medieval Christian polity treated non-Christians identically. Jewish communities, Muslims, dissident Christians, and converts experienced different legal arrangements across different centuries and regions. The point is that religious difference could carry consequences well beyond private belief because political membership and Christian belonging had become closely connected.[2]

The distinction is visible in medieval anti-Judaism. Christian theology could recognize Jews as a people whose scriptures remained indispensable to Christianity while simultaneously describing Judaism as superseded, spiritually incomplete, or stubbornly resistant to Christian truth. Popes and rulers sometimes protected Jewish communities, and theologians did not speak with one voice. Yet protection itself often assumed a hierarchical relationship in which a Christian majority determined the conditions under which a religious minority would live. Periods of relative coexistence therefore existed beside restrictions, forced........

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