¹ See Faisal Devji, “From Xinjiang to Germany: How Did Islamophobia Become a Global Phenomenon?” The Guardian, March 27, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/27/xinjiang-germany-islamophobia-global-phenomenon.

² See, for example, Wildman, Stephanie M., Privilege Revealed: How Invisible Preference Undermines America (New York: New York University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Gallagher, Charles A., “Color-Blind Privilege: The Social and Political Functions of Erasing the Color Line in Post Race America,” Race, Gender & Class 10, no. 4 (2003): 22–37Google Scholar; and Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018)Google Scholar.

³ USCCB Pastoral Letter Against Racism, “Open Wide Our Hearts,” 2018, https://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/racism/upload/open-wide-our-hearts.pdf.

⁴ Pope Paul VI, Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate), October 28, 1965, §3, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html. Nostra Aetate §3 severely underplays the Western, Christian position of power over societies of Muslims since the era of European colonization and the Euromerican slave trade, which included Muslims, by merely stating that “not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems.” This is an example of the church absolving itself from its past sins without sincerely working for reconciliation and restoration, a theological tactic this article directly challenges as insufficient.

⁵ Pope Paul VI, Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate) §2.

⁶ Beck, Ulrich, “The Truth of Others: A Cosmopolitan Approach,” Common Knowledge 10, no. 3 (2004): 433CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In this article Beck uses Bartolomé de Las Casas as an example of Christian universalism. Although Las Casas advocated on behalf of the rights of Amerindians and sought to end the Spanish colonial encomienda system brutally oppressing them, he does so by demonstrating that they were remarkably similar to the Spanish Christians: “They were friendly and modest, respected interpersonal norms, family values, and their own traditions, and were thus better prepared than many other nations on earth to embrace God's word” (ibid.). Beck suggests that Las Casas rejected hierarchical differentiation, and this may be true. However, this sort of universalism becomes ripe for the emergence of hierarchy. “Universalism, then, sponsors more than one way of handling the otherness of others. For Las Casas, a Christian universalist, it is not otherness but sameness that defines the relationship between the other and ourselves. In any form of universalism, all forms of human life are located within a single order of civilization, with the result that cultural differences are either transcended or excluded. In this sense, the project is hegemonic: the other's voice is permitted entry only as the voice of sameness, as a confirmation of oneself, contemplation of oneself, dialogue with oneself” (ibid.).

⁷ Drawing from Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, Jeannine Hill Fletcher writes that “the function of a retroductive warrant is to anticipate the material outcomes of our theological thinking. In constructing a contemporary Christian theology, Christians must ask what are the possible outcomes of particular ways of thinking and must be guided practically by the negative outcomes (as well as the positive) that might be anticipated.” See Fletcher, Jeannine Hill, Christianity, Racism, and Religious Diversity in America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2017), 44Google Scholar. See also Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler, “Systematic Theology: Task and Methods,” in Systematic Theology: Roman Catholic Perspectives, 2nd ed., ed. Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler and Galvin, John (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2011), 58–59Google Scholar; and also Bateman, Terrence, Reconstructing Theology: The Contribution of Francis Schüssler Fiorenza (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Hill Fletcher, Christianity, Racism, and Religious Diversity in America, 44.

⁹ Kate McCarthy, “(Inter)Religious Studies: Making a Home in the Secular Academy,” in Interreligious-Interfaith Studies: Defining a New Field, ed. Eboo Patel, Jennifer Howe Peace, and Noah J. Silverman (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2018), 12.

¹⁰ See Tracy, David, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981)Google Scholar.

¹¹ This is how the field of interreligious studies has often been defined. See, for example, Hedges, Paul, “Interreligious Studies,” in Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions, ed. Runehov, Anne and Oviedo, Luis (New York: SpringerReference, 2013)Google Scholar, as well as Patel et al., eds., Interreligious-Interfaith Studies, xii.

¹² Gottschalk, Peter and Greenberg, Gabriel, Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 5Google Scholar.

¹³ Allen, Christopher, Islamophobia (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 190Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Allen, Islamophobia, emphasis mine.

¹⁵ Allen, Islamophobia, emphasis mine.

¹⁶ Popular conceptions of the Enlightenment contend that liberal and democratic systems were made possible because of the creation of the private (religious) sphere as separate from the public (secular) sphere. However, critical studies in religion suggest that a particular Enlightenment version of Christianity was in fact normalized within the public sphere and rendered hegemonic over nonconforming ideas and identities, including religions and races. See Martin, Craig, Masking Hegemony: A Genealogy of Liberalism, Religion, and the Private Sphere (Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2010)Google Scholar, and McCutcheon, Russell T., Religion and the Domestication of Dissent, Or, How to Live in a Less than Perfect Nation (Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2005)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Teel, Karen, “Whiteness in Catholic Theological Method,” in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 87, no. 2 (June 2019): 427CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ See Joshi, Khyati, White Christian Privilege (New York: New York University Press, 2020)Google Scholar.

¹⁹ “The racialization of religion is a process in which particular religions are associated with certain physical appearances and human differences come to be treated as absolute, fundamental, and heritable, like race.” Joshi, White Christian Privilege, 46.

²⁰ Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Catholic Teaching on the Shoah: Implementing the Holy See's We Remember (2001), https://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/ecumenical-and-interreligious/jewish/upload/Catholic-Teaching-on-the-Shoah-Implementing-the-Holy-See-s-We-Remember-2001.pdf, 9.

²¹ Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Catholic Teaching on the Shoah, 10.

²² See Jennings, Willie James, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Carter, J. Kameron, Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jeannine Hill Fletcher, The Sin of White Supremacy; Teel, Karen, “White Supremacy and Christian Theology,” in Enfleshing Theology: Embodiment, Discipleship, and Politics in the Work of M. Shawn Copeland, ed. Saracino, Michele (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2018), 199–214Google Scholar. Other works include Douglas, Kelly Brown, What's Faith Got to Do with It?: Black Bodies/Christian Souls (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005)Google Scholar, and Perkinson, James W., White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. From outside the discipline of Christian or specifically Catholic theology, the work of Gil Anidjar is outstanding (and, from a Catholic perspective, damning and challenging). See Anidjar, Gil, Blood: A Critique of Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anidjar, Gil, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Anidjar, Gil, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

²³ See, in particular, Jennings's The Christian Imagination, Carter's Race, and chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Hill Fletcher's The Sin of White Supremacy.

²⁴ See Randall C. Zachman, “Identity, Theology and the Jews: The Uses of Jewish Exile in the Creation of Christian Identity,” in Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Interreligious Hermeneutics: Ways of Seeing the Religious Other, ed. Emma O'Donnell Polyakov, (Boston, MA: Brill 2018), chap. 3, 51–67.

²⁵ This is how Martin Luther referred to the Jews in his On the Jews and Their Lies, published in 1543. See William R. Russell, ed., Martin Luther's Basic Theological Writings (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2005). 497–503.

²⁶ See the entries for “Canon (Church) Law and Jews” and “Church and Jews” in Norman Roth, Medieval Jewish Civilization: An Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2003); see also Oberman, Heiko Augustinus, The Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Age of Renaissance and Reformation (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

²⁷ Those who criticize the strictures and alleged arbitrariness or unreasonableness of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh, which is the discipline that interprets the sharīʿa, or Islamic law) often unwittingly reproduce the same antisemitic arguments against Jewish law. A great example of this is a recently published (January 14, 2021) opinion piece by Zubair Simonson in “A Former Muslim Discovers the Goodness of Bacon,” National Catholic Register, https://www.ncregister.com/blog/goodness-of-bacon.

²⁸ See, for example, Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 96–97.

²⁹ Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 272.

³⁰ Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 97. Jennings proposes this supersessionism as a sort of malformed supersessionism. He argues that the incarnation of Jesus Christ as Jewish flesh transforms the relationship between Jew and Gentile (and consequently all other “kinship networks”): “This transformation of the space from two to one implies the transformation of peoples from two to one. This does not happen simply in the removing of the boundary but in the reconfiguration of living space itself around a new center. If there is a moment at the heart of Christianity in which something is superseded it may be found precisely here. It is not the usurpation of the people of God, Israel replaced by the church, but of one form of Torah drawn inside another, one form of divine word drawn inside another form—that is, the word made flesh. If Torah was inseparably connected to the living of life in the promised land, then Torah's transformation into the living word of God in Jesus continues its central purpose” (273). For an excellent analysis of Jennings’ argument, see Sameer Yadav, “Willie Jennings on the Supersessionist Pathology of Race: A Differential Diagnosis,” in T&T Clark Handbook of Analytic Theology, ed. James M. Arcadi and James T. Turner (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2021).

³¹ For instance, in the mind of the well-known architect of Christian anti-Judaism, Isidore of Seville, by circa 600, both paganism and heresies “had been dealt their death blows,” Tolan, John V., Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 16Google Scholar.

³² Tolan, Saracens, 147.

³³ Although Christians felt challenged by Islam and argued against it before the medieval period and well outside the Latinate context (such as in eighth- and ninth-century Syria in the writings of John of Damascus and Theodore Abū Qurrah), this section remains focused on the later medieval and Latinate context. This article does not address the Eastern Christian context as it lies outside the genealogy of Islamophobia as an aspect or tool of Western, Christian supremacy; for this topic, see Griffith, Sidney, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

³⁴ See Tolan, Saracens, chap. 1, esp. 18ff.

³⁵ There are exceptions, such as Nicholas of Cusa's (d. 1464) De Pace Fidei (“On the Peace of Faith”), which came close to granting theological merit to other religious traditions, particularly the Islamic. Another exception is Ramon Llull's (d. circa 1315) Libre del gentil e dels tres savis (“Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men”), which exhibits ambiguity regarding the place of Islam within the Christian dispensation: “Llull's zeal for the conversion of all Muslims to Christianity, taken along with his frequent expression of admiration for Muslims and for the value of Islamic thinking, has aptly been called ‘a curious mix of fanaticism and tolerance,’” Gregory Stone, “Ramon Llull and Islam,” in A Companion to Ramon Llull and Lullism, ed. Amy M. Austin, Mark D. Johnston, and Alexander Ibarz (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 120, citing Tolan, Saracens, 258. See also Annemarie C. Mayer, “Llull and Inter-Faith Dialogue,” in A Companion to Ramon Llull and Lullism, 146–75. Finally, William of Tripoli (d. circa 1273) composed two lesser known works, De Notitia de Machometo (“Information regarding Muhammad”) and De statu Sarracenorum (“On the Realm of the Saracens”), both of which compare Islam with Christianity in an unusually positive way (see O'Meara, Thomas F., “The Theology and Times of William of Tripoli, OP: A Different View of Islam,” Theological Studies 69, no. 1 [March 2008]: 80–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar); O'Meara cites De statu Sarracenorum demonstrating as much (“The Saracens are neighbors [vicini] of the Christian faith and are near [propinqui] to them on the way of salvation” [98]). Discussing the nuances of these exceptions remains outside the purview of this article; suffice it to say that a tentative conclusion is that these minority opinions failed to gain traction in a Christian imaginary so dominated by supersessionist and supremacist theology and in a Christian world on the eve of becoming an imperial power.

³⁶ Muslims were also referred to biblically as Ishmaelites or Hagarenes (which still implied an ethnicity distinct from Jews and of course from the various peoples of present-day Europe), or in a way antithetical to Muslim self-conception, that is, as Muhammadans (which once again implied an Arabic provenance). See Tolan, Saracens, xv.

³⁷ The spread of Islam through the Arabic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, followed by the imminent threat of Ottoman forces against European Christian communities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, would suggest that the Islamic traditions were likewise shaped by a supremacist theology. However, Qur’anic, early, classical, and postclassical Islamic theologies of the religious other (be they People of the Book—ahl al-kitāb—or otherwise) are better categorized as subordinationist than supersessionist. The details and nuances of these differences are well outside the purview of this article; comparing Christian and Islamic theologies of the religious other in terms of supersessionism and subordinationism and how they shaped Christian imperialism/colonialism and Islamic expansion in different ways is a scholarly desideratum. It is only in modernity that groups of self-described Islamic forces seek supremacy over certain regions and their populations, such as the case with the Taliban in Afghanistan, the stateless network of al-Qaeda, and the self-ascribed proto-state of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. But even in these cases, it is not global supremacy that is so much sought as regional autonomy (taken by force and with many atrocities, to be sure); this autonomy is, in their views, threatened by Western supremacy in the region. Of course, I am in no way excusing the violent actions of these forces, but only suggesting that it may not be sourced in Islamic supremacist theology, and that, even if supremacist theology exists in Islam, it never morphed into a secular worldview in the same way that Christian supremacy morphed into Western supremacy.

³⁸ In addition to Tolan's Saracens, see his Faces of Muhammad: Western Perceptions of the Prophet of Islam from the Middle Ages to Today (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), as well as Southern, R. W., Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kritzeck, James, Peter the Venerable and Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Banks, David R. and Frassetto, Michael, Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perceptions of the Other (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, book I, chapter 6, article 4. This text was considered a missionary handbook until recent scholarship disproved that assumption; see Mark Jordan, “The Protreptic Structure of the ‘Summa Contra Gentiles,’” The Thomist 50 (1986): 173–209.

⁴⁰ Isidore of Seville's Against the Jews is infamous for this characterization. As Tolan summarizes, for Isidore, “Christians are rational, as befits men; Jews congregate like irrational sheep” (Tolan, Saracens, 15).

⁴¹ Innocent III, Quia Maior, 1213, in Crusade and Christendom: Annotated Documents in Translation from Innocent III to the Fall of Acre, 1187–1291, ed. Jessalynn Bird, Edward Peters, and James M. Powell (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 107–12, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fh9x5.19.

⁴² See Innocent III, Pium Et Sanctum, 1213, in Jessalynn Bird, Edward Peters, and James M. Powell, eds., Crusade and Christendom: Annotated Documents in Translation from Innocent III to the Fall of Acre, 1187–1291, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fh9x5.20.

⁴³ Bird, Jessalyn, Peters, Edward, and Powell, James M., eds., Crusade and Christendom: Annotated Documents in Translation from Innocent III to the Fall of Acre, 1187–1291 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 114CrossRefGoogle Scholar, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fh9x5.21.

⁴⁴ Bird, Peters, and Powell, Crusade and Christendom, 114.

⁴⁵ See Tolan, Faces of Muhammad.

⁴⁶ In addition to the more recent scholarship by Tolan (Saracens and Faces of Muhammad), Norman Daniel's Islam and the West (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009) and Southern's Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages offer an even broader scope of images.

⁴⁷ Tolan, Saracens, 275.

⁴⁸ See Dupuis, Jacques and Burrows, William R., Jacques Dupuis Faces the Inquisition: Two Essays by Jacques Dupuis on Dominus Iesus and the Roman Investigation of His Work (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012)Google Scholar, particularly 46ff regarding Christology and 56ff regarding ecclesiology.

⁴⁹ Daniel J. Vitkus, “Early Modern Orientalism: Representations of Islam in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe,” in Banks and Frassetto, Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, 208.

⁵⁰ Vitkus, “Early Modern Orientalism,” 214.

⁵¹ Vitkus, “Early Modern Orientalism,” 214–15.

⁵² Vitkus, “Early Modern Orientalism,” 209, 215–16.

⁵³ Vitkus, “Early Modern Orientalism,” 217.

⁵⁴ Vitkus, “Early Modern Orientalism,” 216. For aspects of this twenty-first-century trope, see Mamdani, Mahmood, “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 766–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁵ “[The] creation of the distorted image of Islam was largely a response to the cultural superiority of the Muslims, especially those of al-Andalus,” Watt, W. Montgomery, Muslim-Christian Encounters: Perceptions and Misperceptions (London: Routledge, 1991), 88Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ “While the Christians of Spain, Portugal, England, and other nations were establishing their first permanent colonies in the New World, they faced the threat at home of being colonized by the Ottoman Empire. Thus, the power relations that were in effect in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the opposite of those that operated later under Western colonial expansion and rule. Many of the images of Islam that were produced by European culture in the early modern period are imaginary resolutions of real anxieties about Islamic wealth and might. The Christian West's inferiority complex, which originated in the trauma of the early Caliphate's conquests, was renewed and reinforced by the emergence of a new Islamic power, the Ottoman Turks, who achieved in 1453 what the Ummayad armies had failed to accomplish in 669 and 674—the capture of Constantinople” (Vitkus, “Early Modern Orientalism,” 210).

⁵⁷ Mikhail, Alan, God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Liveright, 2020), 396Google Scholar: “Filtering their experiences in the Americas through the lens of their wars with Muslims, Europeans in the New World engaged in a new version of their very old Crusades, a new kind of Catholic jihad. Long after the many Matamoros—Moor-slayers—who sailed to the Americas aboard Columbus's ships were dead themselves, Islam would continue to forge the histories of both Europe and the New World and the relationship between the two” (386). Elsewhere, Mikhail concludes: “Indeed, the idea that Islam is a deep existential threat to the Americas is one of the oldest cultural tropes in the New World. Its history is as long as the history of European colonialism and disease. It must, therefore, be a part of any understanding of the history of the Americas. After 1492, European colonialism, as we have seen, folded the Americas into the long history of European-Islamic relations. Seeing American history in this way allows us to give a more holistic accounting of the American past. The history of the United States does not begin with Plymouth Rock and Thanksgiving. The first European foothold in what would become the continental United States was not Jamestown, but a Spanish Catholic outpost in Florida. The origins of the American people must obviously include the history of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and the Americas, West Africans, and the Jewish and Catholic subjects of mainland European polities. This history must also include Muslims, both African slaves and Selim's Ottomans, for Islam was the mold that cast the history of European racial and ethnic thinking in the Americas, as well as the history of warfare in the Western Hemisphere” (396).

⁵⁸ Edward Said, “Orientalism,” in The Edward Said Reader, eds. M. Bayoumi and A. Rubin (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 73.

⁵⁹ Daniels, Islam and the West, 326.

⁶⁰ Lean, Nathan C., Esposito, John L., and Shaheen, Jack G., The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Hatred of Muslims (London: Pluto Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Said, Edward W., Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient-Reprinted with a New Afterword (London: Penguin, 1995), 27–28Google Scholar.

⁶² James Renton and Ben Gidley, “Introduction: The Shared Story of Europe's Ideas of the Muslim and the Jew—A Diachronic Framework,” in Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe: A Shared Story?, ed. Renton and Gidley, (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 9 (emphasis added), citing Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient-Reprinted with a New Afterword (London: Penguin, 1995), 286.

⁶³ See, for example, Renton and Gidley, “Introduction,” in Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe. The sharpest critique of Christianity and its role in shaping the modern world along oppositional racial-religious lines is the work of Gil Anidjar (cited previously).

⁶⁴ Talal Asad makes the case for neither continuity nor simple break between the religious and the secular in Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); esp. 24–25. Anidjar's most recent critique of “the rhetoric of novelty” or of discontinuity with respect to the relationship of Christianity to modernity, particularly to secular violence, suggests that this relationship can be thought of “in terms that are neither filial (a direct descendent) nor arcane (Christianity in disguise)” and that Christianity is “at once the history of its transformations and the endurance of its efforts to change the world benevolently and violently,” Gil Anidjar, “II The Violence of Violence: Response to Talal Asad's ‘Reflections on Violence, Law, and Humanitarianism,’” in Critical Inquiry 41, no. 2 (January 1, 2015): 441–42.

⁶⁵ Typologically, justice-oriented, liberation theology tracks with Dorothee Sölle's radical theology and Justo Gonzalez's Type C theology, while the colonial, imperialist theology is a product of what Sölle terms orthodox/conservative theology and Gonzalez Type A theology. See Dorothee Sölle, Thinking about God: An Introduction to Theology (Philadelphia: SCM Press, 1990), chap. 2, and Justo L. González, Christian Thought Revisited: Three Types of Theology (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1989).

⁶⁶ Beck, “The Truth of Others,” 433, citing Las Casas.

⁶⁷ Beck, “The Truth of Others,” 433.

⁶⁸ Beck, “The Truth of Others,” 435.

⁶⁹ Sometimes they are potentially the same as they outgrow their childhood and enter the “age of reason,” more often than not with the violent discipline of their caretakers (colonizers). See Bessis, Sophie, Western Supremacy: Triumph of an Idea? (New York: Zed Books, 2003), 17Google Scholar. Bessis is in general agreement with Beck in arguing that Las Casas effectively provides the first version of “the white man's burden.” She quotes Las Casas: “When such savage peoples are found in the world, they are like uncultivated land, which readily produces weeds and brambles, but which has in it so much natural virtue that, if it is worked and taken care of, it yields edible, healthy and useful fruits” (ibid.). In this case, Las Casas offers a humanist vision, but one that still maintains the religio-cultural (and racial) hierarchy that keeps Christianity, Europe, and whiteness at the summit.

⁷⁰ Diana Hayes, “Reflections on Slavery,” in Change in Official Catholic Moral Teaching, Readings in Moral Theology 13, ed. Charles E. Curran (New York: Paulist Press, 2003), 67.

⁷¹ See Newcomb, Steven T., Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2008)Google Scholar.

⁷² “[King Louis XIV] and the other kings in Europe had been raised since childhood to pursue glory on the battlefield, yet they bore none of the costs involved—not even the risk of losing their thrones after a defeat. Leaders elsewhere faced radically different incentives, which kept many of them militarily weak. In China, for example, emperors were encouraged to keep taxes low and to attend to people's livelihoods rather than to pursue the sort of military glory that obsessed European kings,” Philip T. Hoffman, “How Europe Conquered the World: The Spoils of a Single-Minded Focus on War,” Foreign Affairs, October 7, 2015, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/2015-10-07/how-europe-conquered-world.

⁷³ As usual, there are always exceptions to the norm, but the general point is that the dominant discourses of Orientalist scholarship persistently represented the Muslim and Islam in this harmfully reductive way.

⁷⁴ “So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression. I do not think it is an accident, therefore, that recent talk of U.S. military intervention in the Arabian Gulf (which began at least five years ago, well before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) has been preceded by a long period of Islam's rational presentation through the cool medium of television and through ‘objective’ Orientalist study: in many ways our actual situation today bears a chilling resemblance to the nineteenth-century British and French examples previously cited,” Edward Said, “Islam through the Eyes of the West,” in The Nation, April 26, 1980, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/islam-through-western-eyes/.

⁷⁵ Ethan Katz begins to map this process in his “An Imperial Entanglement: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and Colonialism,” in The American Historical Review 123, no. 4 (2018): 1190–1209. This article is phenomenal in both summarizing and furthering the academic discussion on the entanglement of antisemitism with Islamophobia as a Western discourse of “othering” and constitutive of the European age of colonialism. However, similar to Bessis, Katz begins the story with the Enlightenment, while I begin with the early roots of Christian theological supersessionism, supremacy, and anti-Islamic theology. See also Dobkowski, Michael, “Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism,” in CrossCurrents 65, no. 3 (2015): 321–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Renton and Gidley, “Introduction,” in Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe.

⁷⁶ Bessis, Western Supremacy. 6.

⁷⁷ Later, Bessis adds that “the West's inexhaustible capacity to disassociate what it says from what it does has long made its modernity both unintelligible and illegitimate for those it designates as others, even if it is true that they have benefited from it by default” (Bessis, Western Supremacy). Indeed, the same could be said for much of Christian theology and its collusion with supremacy, subjugation, and colonization. Bessis dates the birth of the West and thus of the Western supremacy she discusses in her book at around 1492; she dates the birth of the myths of Western supremacy at the Renaissance (Bessis, Western Supremacy, 12–15). However, I am seeking to locate the roots of supremacy further back and more deeply embedded in supersessionist theology (similar to Willie James Jennings, J. Kameron Carter, Jeannine Hill Fletcher, and Gil Anidjar).

⁷⁸ See GhaneaBassiri, Kambiz, A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Though, at least until the 1950s, it was Protestantism specifically and not Christianity generally.

⁷⁹ See Ignatiev, Noel, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar; Brodkin, Karen, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and McGreevy, John T., Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁰ For a case study of this exclusion, see Corbett, Rosemary R., Making Moderate Islam: Sufism, Service, and the “Ground Zero Mosque” Controversy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017)Google Scholar. See also Williams, Rhys H., “Civil Religion and the Cultural Politics of National Identity in Obama's America,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 52, no. 2 (2013): 239–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a study that aims explicitly to connect racism with Islamophobia, see David Tyrer, The Politics of Islamophobia: Race, Power and Fantasy (London: Pluto Press, 2013). Most recently, Khyati Joshi's White Christian Privilege forcefully and rightfully makes this case.

⁸¹ See the following news program produced by CGTN, which is funded in part or wholly by the Chinese Communist Party, “China Exposes the Truth about Xinjiang, but the West Ignores. Why?,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRy1AKUzb2o.

⁸² See Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, and McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom. Of course, discriminatory policies remain against the predominantly Catholic migrants from Latin America even to this day.

⁸³ See Rivera, Mayra, Poetics of the Flesh (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

⁸⁴ Thompson, John B., Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1984), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁵ Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 1966), 41Google Scholar.

⁸⁶ Christian Krokus rightfully argues “the high probability that Louis Massignon's work on Islam in the decades prior to the Second Vatican Council was the key influence on the conciliar statements regarding Muslims” (Christian Krokus, “Louis Massignon's Influence on the Teaching of Vatican II on Muslims and Islam,” in Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 23, no. 3 [July 2012]: 342). Krokus does a fantastic job of summarizing previous scholarship on the likely influence of Massignon on Vatican II, and so I refer the reader to his article. In addition, chapter 4 (“The Council and the Muslims”) of Gavin D'Costa's Vatican II: Catholic Doctrines on Jews and Muslims (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) provides a helpful overview of the council's teachings regarding Islam and Muslims. In my view, D'Costa is too generous in his interpretation of the documents. In the end, these documents fail to undo the centuries of harm that remain the legacy of modern-day Islamophobia.

⁸⁷ Hill Fletcher, The Sin of White Supremacy, 19.

⁸⁸ Hill Fletcher, The Sin of White Supremacy.

⁸⁹ “Commission for the Religious Relations with the Jews: The Gifts and the Calling of God are Irrevocable’ (Rom 11:29), A Reflection on the Theological Questions Pertaining to Catholic-Jewish Relations on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of ‘Nostra Aetate’ (No 4.),” paragraph 27, http://www.christianunity.va/content/unitacristiani/en/commissione-per-i-rapporti-religiosi-con-l-ebraismo/commissione-per-i-rapporti-religiosi-con-l-ebraismo-crre/documenti-della-commissione/en.html.

⁹⁰ The literature on post-Shoah and post–Vatican II Catholic theology of Judaism is too vast to engage in this article.

⁹¹ The most famous one is Pope Benedict XVI's comments about Islam at the University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006. Ralph M. Coury cogently and rightfully connects the pope emeritus's comments to Orientalism and Islamophobia in his “A Syllabus of Errors: Pope Benedict XVI on Islam at Regensburg,” Race & Class 50, no. 3 (2009): 30–61. Another example is Cardinal Raymond Burke's comments at the Rome Life Forum on May 17, 2019, when he averred that “to be opposed to … large-scale Muslim immigration is … a responsible exercise of one's patriotism,” opining without evidence that Muslim immigrants are mere “opportunists” and falsely claiming that “Islam … believes itself to be destined to rule the world.” See Jules Gomes, “Opposing Muslim Immigration is a ‘Responsible Exercise’ of Patriotism, Says Cardinal Burke,” Virtue Online, May 21, 2019, https://virtueonline.org/opposing-muslim-immigration-responsible-exercise-patriotism-says-cardinal-burke. See also Robert Duncan, “Cardinal Burke: Limiting Muslim Immigration is Patriotic,” American Magazine, May 21, 2019, https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2019/05/21/cardinal-burke-limiting-muslim-immigration-patriotic. Arguably, Cardinal Burke is representative of many Christians who equate their Christian faith with white, Western, or Euro-North American racial or nationalistic imaginaries, adhering to a form of Christian ethnonationalism. For an argument considering the religion-race-national identity nexus within American civil religion, and how it expresses a religio-racial tribal identity that ascribes a particular character and purpose to the American people, see Williams, “Civil Religion and the Cultural Politics of National Identity in Obama's America.” For a popular article regarding the rise of this form of nationalism, see David Albertson, “Whose Nation? Which Communities? The Fault Lines of the New Christian Nationalism,” America Magazine, September 19, 2019, www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2019/09/19/whose-nation-which-communities-fault-lines-new-christian-nationalism. For recent polling on this issue, see Joanna Piacenza, “Roughly Half the Electorate Views Christian Nationalism as a Threat,” Morning Consult, April 2, 2019, www.morningconsult.com/2019/04/02/roughly-half-the-electorate-views-christian-nationalism-as-a-threat/.

⁹² D'Costa, Vatican II: Catholic Doctrines on Jews and Muslims, 210.

⁹³ See “A Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together,” published in Abu Dhabi, on February 4, 2019, by Pope Francis and The Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/travels/2019/outside/documents/papa-francesco_20190204_documento-fratellanza-umana.html. A portion of this document is then cited in Fratelli Tutti, 285.

⁹⁴ Krokus, “Louis Massignon's Influence on the Teaching of Vatican II on Muslims and Islam,” 336.

⁹⁵ Teel, “Whiteness in Catholic Theological Method.”

⁹⁶ Teel, “Whiteness in Catholic Theological Method,” 427–28. “From there, perhaps we can begin to conspire with like-minded people to provoke moments in which white supremacy no longer reigns supreme, in which justice and mercy can gain the upper hand, however fleetingly” (428).

⁹⁷ One is tempted to use “Western supremacy” here instead of “economic supremacy.” As evidenced by the violent maltreatment of Uighur Muslims by the Chinese Communist Party, however, it is Muslims that are caught in the middle of an economic war of domination between Euro-North American nations and the Chinese Communist Party, with even Muslim-majority nations such as Saudi Arabia gladly colluding with the oppression of Muslims who do not adhere to their Wahhabi-Salafi interpretation of Islam. For a succinct overview of the internment camps in China, see “China's Secret Internment Camps,” Vox, https://www.vox.com/videos/2019/5/7/18535634/chinas-uighur-muslim-internment-camps-reeducation.

⁹⁸ See Joshi, White Christian Privilege.

⁹⁹ Kim, Grace Ji-Sun and Shaw, Susan M., Intersectional Theology: An Introductory Guide (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2018), 107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰⁰ M. Shawn Copeland understands not only religion, but also race, gender, sexuality, class, dis/ability, immigration status, and more as “marks” on the body. This is a feature of her theological anthropology: “For bodies are marked—made individual, particular, different, and vivid—through race, sex and gender, sexuality, and culture. The protean ambiguity of these marks transgresses physical and biological categories, destabilizes gender identities, and disrupts ethical and relational patterns (who is my brother, who is my sister?). These marks delight as much as they unnerve. They impose limitation: some insinuate exclusion, others inclusion, for the body denotes a ‘boundary’ that matters,” Copeland, M. Shawn, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 56Google Scholar.

¹⁰¹ Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom.

¹⁰² Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Wisdom Ways: Introducing Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005), 118. Kyriarchy includes sexism, racism, speciesism, homophobia, classism, economic injustice, colonialism, militarism, ethnocentrism, anthropocentrism, and nationalism.

¹⁰³ Catechism of the Catholic Church §1423, https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM.

¹⁰⁴ Catechism of the Catholic Church §1459.

¹⁰⁵ Catechism of the Catholic Church §1451.

¹⁰⁶ Catechism of the Catholic Church §1455.

¹⁰⁷ Catechism of the Catholic Church §1459.

¹⁰⁸ Catechism of the Catholic Church §1459.

¹⁰⁹ Marian Liebmann, Restorative Justice: How It Works (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2007), 25, citing Restorative Justice Consortium, 2006.

¹¹⁰ Liebmann, Restorative Justice, 26.

¹¹¹ Athanasius, De Incarnatione 7, in Athanasius, Contra Gentes and De Incarnatione, ed. and trans. Robert W. Thomson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 151.

¹¹² Athanasius, 167, translation modified.

¹¹³ Athanasius, 165.

¹¹⁴ Liebmann, Restorative Justice, 26.

¹¹⁵ Liebmann, Restorative Justice, 26.

¹¹⁶ D'Costa, Vatican II: Catholic Doctrines on Jews and Muslims, 210.

¹¹⁷ Liebmann, Restorative Justice, 27.

¹¹⁸ See chapter 2 of Moreland, Anna Bonta, Muhammad Reconsidered: A Christian Perspective on Islamic Prophecy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹⁹ Among those analyzed by Moreland are Dei Verbum (Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation), Lumen Gentium (Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), Nostra Aetate (Vatican II, Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions), “Dialogue and Proclamation” (published twenty-five years after Nostra Aetate by the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue), and Dominus Iesus (Declaration on the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church, published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2000).

¹²⁰ Moreland analyzes Vatican documents on revelation and religious pluralism and then turns to Thomas Aquinas concerning postbiblical prophecy to construct a Catholic theology of revelation that could embrace Muhammad as a prophet, at least in an analogical sense (here she employs Aquinas’ “third way” of understanding language, between univocity and equivocity).

¹²¹ Moreland, Muhammad Reconsidered, 21–22. For this critique of Moreland's otherwise impressive book, see Axel Marc Oaks Takacs, “Muhammad Reconsidered: A Christian Perspective on Islamic Prophecy,” Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations (2020), doi: 10.1080/09596410.2020.1802862.

¹²² Clooney, Francis, Comparative Theology: Deep Learning Across Religious Borders (Chichester, England: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹²³ The bracketed portion, “Divine,” draws from the Islamic commentarial traditions.