The Religion of White Rage: White Workers, Religious Fervor, and the Myth of Black Racial Progress - Paperback

by Stephen C. Finley (Editor), Biko Mandela Gray (Editor), Lori Latrice Martin (Editor)

This book sheds light on the phenomenon of white rage, and maps out the uneasy relationship between white anxiety, religious fervour, American identity and perceived black racial progress. Contributors to the volume examine the sociological construct of the "white labourer", whose concerns and beliefs can be understood as religious in foundation, and uncover that white religious fervor correlates to notions of perceived white loss and perceived black progress. In discussions ranging from the Constitution to the Charlottesville riots to the evangelical community's uncritical support for Trump, the authors of this collection argue that it is not economics but religion and race that stand as the primary motivating factors for the rise of white rage and white supremacist sentiment in the United States.

Back Jacket

Critically analyses the historical, cultural and political dimensions of white religious rage in America, past and present This book sheds light on the phenomenon of white rage, and maps out the uneasy relationship between white anxiety, religious fervour, American identity and perceived black racial progress. Contributors to the volume examine the sociological construct of the "white labourer", whose concerns and beliefs can be understood as religious in foundation, and uncover that white religious fervor correlates to notions of perceived white loss and perceived black progress. In discussions ranging from the Constitution to the Charlottesville riots to the evangelical community's uncritical support for Trump, the authors of this collection argue that it is not economics but religion and race that stand as the primary motivating factors for the rise of white rage and white supremacist sentiment in the United States. Stephen C. Finley is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Louisiana State University. Biko Mandela Gray is Assistant Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. Lori Latrice Martin is Professor of Sociology and Professor of African and African American Studies at Louisiana State University. Cover image: (c) Shutterstock.com Cover design: [EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN 978-1-4744-7370-5 Barcode

Author Biography

Stephen C. Finley is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African & African American Studies and Director of the African & African American Studies Program at Louisiana State University. He is co-editor of authored Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: "There Is a Mystery"... (with Margarita Guillory and Hugh Page Jr, Brill, 2014) and author of the monograph, In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam.

Biko Mandela Gray is Assistant Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. He is the author of Black Life Matter: Blackness, Religion, and the Subject (Duke University Press, 2023). He is co-editor of The Religion of White Rage: White Workers, Religious Fervor, and the Myth of Black Racial Progress (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

Lori Latrice Martin is Professor in the Department of Sociology and African and African American Studies at Louisiana State University. Dr. Martin is the author of numerous scholarly works. Martin's most recent publications include South Baton Rouge, Black Asset Poverty and the Enduring Racial Divide, Color Struck and Big Box Schools: Race, Education, and the Danger of the Wal-Martization of American Public Schools.