ABSTRACT
What does it mean to “believe” in an idol? How are idols produced? The first glimpses of white religion are made possible by looking to one of its most cherished idols, whiteness, exposing it by situating it as a god-idol, a centering idea produced and reinforced through various rituals which function to secure (for its adherents) a sense of personal and collective certainty and stability. As this god-idol, whiteness emerges as a particular racialized expression of a fundamental inability to accept human limitation and uncertainty. Making use of hermeneutical and functional analyses, White Lies begins here offering a way to interpret, to make sense of, the role and effects of whiteness in contemporary U.S. society. Although often overlooked over and against time spent on these topics by scholars of American religion, many of these racialized social activities and beliefs in the U.S. are “religious” in that they ritualistically structure and are structured by a demand for certainty and stability seemingly procured through identity formation and process. Taken as such, religion then amounts to the field through which social order is sought, created, and reinforced through maintenance of these god-idols –
centering, ultimately empty concepts employed to address demands for personal and collective certainty and security, often through attempts to ritualistically create it in the material world – thus transmuting ideas into social reality. Whiteness is one of the “white lies,” one of the “hollow” idols to borrow
Nietzsche’s phrase, rooted ultimately in physical death, and born in the practice of lynching. This chapter sketches whiteness in heuristic, hermeneutic form, looking first to the intense ideological work done by the practice of lynching, moving to discussions of the functional life, death, and ultimately the twilight whiteness finds itself in today. Whiteness does not materially exist, save for its conceptual expression as this racialized inability to accept limit. Conversely, neither does blackness “exist” other than as an awareness of the impossibility of ever completely accepting human limitation and uncertainty. This does not stop these empty identity markers from operating within the social environment as some of the “most believed in” of idols, whereby an imaginary idea, a lie, can bring about a kind of truth – a ground of being, an ultimate concern – as severe and enduring as the history of racialized oppression in the U.S. As gestured towards in the Introduction, god-idols, like whiteness, are most
adequately analyzable and understood through the notion of “twilight” – the doubtful clarity3 exposed through their de/construction. Twilight as an analytical notion suggests that these god-idols are simultaneously functionally effective and, yet, seemingly break down in their effectiveness given shifts in historical circumstance, ideological commitment, and a host of other arbitrary as well as not-soarbitrary features and trends of social life. Where white religion is concerned, this exploration of whiteness is as much made possible by the shift towards twilight as the findings from such a perspective may suggest that a god-idol born from a kind of fundamental twilight now finds itself on uncertain ground.
