Religion, Race, and Popular Culture

This chapter discusses the intersection of race, religion, and popular culture. Race is posited here not as synonymous with people of color, but rather as an analytic category that examines the social construction and very real reality of racialization: the process of becoming and identifying whiteness, blackness, and so on. Two broad approaches to the study of race, religion, and popular culture are examined: Popular Culture in Religion, and Religion as or in Popular Culture. The chapter then offers a brief overview of how these two approaches have both broadened standard narratives of American religious history as well as illuminated scholarly understandings of how religio-racial identities are constructed, perpetuated, challenged, and queered through the use of popular culture forms such as print, phonograph, radio, televangelism, celebrity, and hip-hop.