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Over the past decade or so, leaders of Afro-Brazilian religious communities (particularly Candomblé) have been using a new phrase to describe the discrimination and violence that they endure. That term is “religious racism.” As I explore in a recently published article in The Review of Faith and International Affairs (RFIA), this concept offers an interesting new framework to think about the intersection of racism and religious discrimination.

In recent years, violence against Afro-Brazilian religious communities has escalated dramatically. Studies document hundreds, if not thousands, of acts of discrimination against these faiths in the 21^st century. These include violent assaults on places of worship like arson and stoning as well as physical threats and harm to devotees.  The primary perpetrators of these attacks are Evangelical Christians who regard Afro-Brazilian religions as their spiritual enemy and an evil that needs to be eradicated.

Since the late 20^th century, scholars and activists have sought greater state recognition of and response to the crimes against Afro-Brazilian religious communities. At first, they described these attacks as “religious intolerance” as a way to push back against Evangelical Christians, who claim that they are engaged in a holy war. By using “religious intolerance,” scholars and advocates sought to underscore that this supposed “holy war” was one-sided and that Afro-Brazilian religions were the victims of acts of discrimination, not the participants in an ongoing conflict.

By the 2010s, as assaults on Afro-Brazilian religions escalated, scholars and practitioners had begun to argue against using the phrase “religious intolerance,” noting that conventional understandings of it center on “lone wolf” perpetrators who engage in “one-off” attacks stemming from their “intolerance.” Additionally, support for the phrase “religious intolerance” waned as devotees clamored for a solution that resulted in more than “tolerance” (the natural opposition of and presumed remedy to “intolerance”); they demanded equality and respect.

Although it is unclear who first coined this phrase, “religious racism” has emerged as a common replacement for “religious intolerance.” Not only does this phrase highlight the systemic and serious nature of the problem, it also underscores that racism is at the root of discrimination and violence against devotees of Afro-Brazilian religions. Rachel Cantave succinctly explains: “The ‘racism’ of religious racism refers to the fact that enslaved Africans brought traditional African religions to Brazil, and their spiritual practices have since been exoticized and demonized for their non-Christian and non European worldviews and their Afro-Indigenous elements.”  According to Baba Wanderson Flor do Nascimento, “religious racism” also emphasizes that Afro-Brazilian religions are more than just “religions,” they are “conserved values of social organization, ancestral knowledge, ways of caring for life, health, other people, economic processes that were inherited from the African continent… they are ways of life that contain a spirituality in their interior.”[i]

As I argue in my article, while the concept of “religious racism” has emerged as a phrase designed to describe discrimination and violence against Afro-Brazilian religious communities, it reflects a pattern of racially motivated “intolerance” that targets other African diaspora religions, such as Cuban Santería (Lucumí) and Palo Mayombe, Haitian Vodou, and Rastafari. For instance, especially following the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Protestant Christians have harassed, assaulted, and denied critical disaster aid to devotees of Vodou (more commonly known by the derogatory term “voodoo”). These attacks are fueled by stereotypes of Vodou that emerged in the 19^th and early 20^th century when racist theories posited that Black people were incapable of self-governance and Western intervention was necessary to prevent the independent Black nation of Haiti from relapsing into “African barbarism.”

In my RFIA article, I argue that “religious racism” could also be a useful phrase to describe recent State discrimination against Obeah (a term applied to a broad range of African-derived spiritual practices in the Anglophone Caribbean). Obeah was first criminalized in Jamaica in 1760, after enslaved Africans utilized spiritual practices to protect and aid them in a major rebellion. Sweeping laws against Obeah were ultimately passed in virtually every British colony in the Caribbean. Like the first statute in Jamaica, the earliest of these laws sought to protect the institution of slavery from African spiritual practices that represented alternate forms of power and authority. Later laws and amendments characterized Obeah as a form of fraud and vagrancy and criminalized it purportedly to protect a “superstitious” public.

Recent scholarship has highlighted that these laws are a troubling anomaly, as statutes criminalizing Obeah remain in effect in much of the Caribbean in the 21^st century, long after other countries in the Anglophone Atlantic recognized that governments should not have the power to declare that religious beliefs are false or fraudulent. Not only do colonial laws against Obeah remain in place in many nations, a recent series of court cases in Canada have limited the rights of Obeah practitioners there. Speaking of these cases, which allowed police officers and informants to pose as Obeah practitioners to obtain confessions from suspects in criminal cases, anthropologist J. Brent Crosson argues that Canadian courts interpreted “religion” in a way that did not recognize African diaspora worldviews and was limited to a “Euro-Christian concept of sin and salvation.”

In my opinion, it is important to think about the concept of religious racism, and to recognize the pattern of discrimination and violence against African diaspora religions that this term was coined to describe. These faiths are often overlooked in the discussion of limitations on religious liberties and the protection of human rights. Finally, it is important to note that recent scholarly literature on religious racism is part of a larger body of research that increasingly shows how 21^st century religious discrimination—particularly against Muslims and Sikhs—is fueled by racism and/or can be understood as a form of racism.

[i] Conservaram valores de organização social, saberes ancestrais, modos de cuidar da vida, da saúde, das outras pessoas, dos processos econômicos que foram herdados do coninente africano… são modos de vida que contém em seu interior uma espiritualidade.