This talk explores the history and contemporary relationship between religion and white supremacy in the United States, showing the ways that religious theologies and practices are mobilized to both resist and reinforce racial inequality. It also shows how gendered norms undergird this relationship.

Sophie Bjork-James

Sophie Bjork-James has over ten years of experience researching both the US based Religious Right and the white nationalist movements. She is the author of The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family (2021) and the co-editor of Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism (2020). Her work has appeared in American Anthropologist, Oxford Bibliographies, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and Transforming Anthropology. Her work has been featured on the NBC Nightly News, NPR’s All Things Considered, BBC Radio 4’s Today, and in the New York Times. She has published op-eds in the LA Times, Religion Dispatches, and the Conversation.

More from the lecturer

• Dr. Bjork-James, “The Biggest Threats to American Democracy? White Nationalists and Politicians Who Embrace Them,” Los Angeles Times, 2020.
• Dr. Bjork-James, “Nearly Two Centuries Ago, a QAnon-Like Conspiracy Theory Propelled Candidates to Congress,” Politics Means Politics Magazine, 2020.
• Interview with Dr. Bjork-James, “The Rise of White Supremacist Groups in the United States,” NewsPoint360, 2020.
• Podcast with Dr. Bjork-James, “The Similarities Between White Nationalists and Christian Nationalists,” Straight White American Jesus, 2020.
• Dr. Bjork-James, “Anti-Semitism is at the Center of White Nationalist Ideology,” Newswise, 2018.

More on the topic

• Michael Luo, American Christianity’s White-Supremacy Problem, The New Yorker, 2020.