Whiteness Makes Atheism Easier Than Antiracism
White people’s lived experience in a society rooted in their supremacy means they often aren’t asking the questions that poke at the fabric of their comfort and privilege. They’ve been taught to believe that the good news can exist in the clouds, abstract and ethereal, untouched by the dirt and grit of real struggle. But for people of color, faith has always had to be something concrete, grounded in the raw reality of survival—a God who shows up when the systems fail. Whiteness allows for a faith that can float, disconnected and theoretical, but for the rest of us, faith has always had skin in the game.
When those white-centered, abstract theological frameworks start to crumble, it might feel like the world is falling apart. But in truth, it’s just the end of a particular kind of privilege. Those of us on the underside of religion and democracy have long had to conjure identity and make meaning in spaces that weren’t built for us. We ask the hard questions because we’ve always had to.
And that’s why, when whiteness unravels, many choose to abandon faith entirely. It’s easier to walk away than to sit at the feet of people of color and learn what it really means to hold faith in your bones. Or worse, some become progressives without realizing that the issue wasn’t just bad theology—it was the whiteness baked into it.
Whiteness Hurts White People Too
White epistemologies lean hard into the empirical and the objective, missing the deep well of human experience that can’t be boxed into neat categories or measured on a chart. This limited view ignores the resilience and wisdom that come from a more holistic understanding of life—one that intertwines spirituality with the land, with stories, with the generations who’ve lived and died on that land.
To move beyond these shallow frameworks, white folks need to return to the roots—to ethnography and the stories that ground communities in something real. Ethnography, the study of cultures and people, offers a doorway into understanding how different communities live out their spirituality. By immersing themselves in the spiritual practices of others, white people can begin to dismantle the myth of their supremacy and recognize the depth of wisdom and resilience that lives outside their narrow scope.
What it Is and What it Ain’t
The thing is, whiteness isn’t an ethnic identity. It’s a construct built on the erasure and commodification of others—Black nonbeing, Native subhumanity, the reduction of land to property. Those who remain tied to whiteness will never be able to guide themselves or others toward a sense of true grounding, because they’re cut off from the very things that make spirituality real—land, place, and story. Even the rise of spiritual atheists, who speak of ritual and interconnectedness, can’t escape the trap of whiteness because it’s built on a foundation of dispossession.
Spirituality cannot be separated from land, place, story, or heritage. These elements are foundational to how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. Land grounds us in the physical space where our lives unfold, connecting us to the natural rhythms and cycles of life. Place offers belonging, anchoring us in a specific context that shapes our identities and perspectives. Stories carry the wisdom of our ancestors, passing down hard-earned truths and insights into the human experience. Heritage links us to the traditions and practices that define our cultural identity, tethering us to a larger community and history.
Ethnographic tradition taps into deeper wells of wisdom, resilience, and inspiration. Spirituality rooted in land, place, story, and heritage cultivates a sense of interconnectedness and responsibility. It reminds us that we are part of a larger whole and that our actions ripple out far beyond our individual lives. Place-based spirituality fosters genuine care for ourselves, our communities, and the world around us.
The impulse to create secular spiritual communities that are detached from ethnographic tradition cannot provide the shared values, identities, beliefs, or moral ideals that people are seeking—because these communities are still extensions of whiteness. This reflects the broader pattern of white frameworks categorizing and compartmentalizing human experience, stripping spirituality from its deeper cultural and contextual roots. In non-Western cultures, spirituality is woven into the fabric of community, heritage, and place. It doesn’t need a secular or structured framework to generate shared meaning—it already exists in the lived, breathed traditions of the people.
This impulse to build secular spiritual structures in predominantly white spaces arises from the void left by the decline of traditional religious institutions. But instead of addressing the deeper causes of that decline—like epistemologies rooted in binary shame or a diseased imagination—these attempts often recreate the very same problems they seek to escape. They recreate the structure of religion without uprooting the toxic leaven of whiteness that has always been embedded in these systems. In the end, this approach just perpetuates the same exclusionary issues by imposing a sanitized, institutionalized version of spirituality instead of fostering genuine, culturally-rooted understanding and integration.
How Did We Get Here?
The Age of Reason, also known as the Enlightenment, was a period in the 17th and 18th centuries marked by a profound shift in the way people approached knowledge, science, and religion. Thinkers of this era emphasized reason, logic, and empirical evidence over tradition and religious dogma, seeking to liberate humanity from the perceived limitations of faith. While this intellectual movement fostered advancements in science, philosophy, and human rights, it also carried with it the seeds of white supremacy, as European intellectuals positioned themselves as the ultimate arbiters of knowledge and progress, further entrenching hierarchies that privileged whiteness.
The failure to acknowledge this history reflects the same arrogance that shaped the Great Chain of Being, where the sacred was supplanted by the secular, and white men were placed at the top of the hierarchy.
In the process of claiming dominance, white men didn’t just move God out of the way—they replaced Him with themselves. But here’s the deeper truth: white supremacy is embedded in both the construction of God and in the rejection of God for the sake of reason. In both cases, whiteness remains at the center, and it’s the leaven that taints everything it touches.
When white men created a God in their own image—authoritative, punitive, distant—they laid the groundwork for a theology that justified domination, exploitation, and the subjugation of others. This unlimited, invulnerable God became a tool of empire, a divine seal of approval for colonization, enslavement, and the spread of white supremacy. It wasn’t about faith. It was about power.
Whether they called it God or called it Reason, the outcome was the same: the white male mind became the ultimate authority, the final say on what is truth, what is real, and who gets to define both. The shift didn’t remove white supremacy; it just rebranded it.
Faith in a punitive, authoritarian God was replaced by faith in human reason, and both carried the same underlying assumptions about whose intellect and whose humanity should be prioritized. White supremacy leavens both systems, holding up the idea that whiteness knows best, whiteness is the standard, and anything outside of whiteness is less-than.
Meanwhile, in non-white spaces, the sacred was never supplanted by the secular. Communities of color—who have long existed under the weight of empire and violence—didn’t have the luxury of abstraction. The need God to be real. They need God to work. They nurtured spirituality that was rooted in survival, in interconnectedness, in the land and stories that sustained them. God, or the sacred, was not something to be manipulated for power, but rather a source of life, resilience, and justice.
The arrogance of white supremacy is in the refusal to acknowledge these histories and ways of knowing. Whether it's faith or reason at the center of the story, whiteness remains the unspoken assumption, shaping the world in its image. The real work, then, isn’t just deconstructing faith or embracing secularism—it’s about uprooting the whiteness that undergirds them both.
Where Do We Go From Here?
For white people seeking to dismantle these structures and reconnect with something real, the journey begins by reclaiming the stories and traditions that have been lost or forgotten. An ancestral journey can help untangle the threads of identity, moving beyond whiteness and toward a deeper, more rooted understanding of self. Here are some tips to guide that journey:
Research and Rediscover Ancestry: Explore your family’s history, cultural roots, and traditions to reconnect with your heritage and uncover the identities that predate the forces of whiteness.
Engage in Ethnography and Pre-Christian Practices: Study ancestral cultures and spiritual traditions, particularly indigenous European practices tied to land and nature, for a more authentic spiritual connection.
Listen with Humility and Heal: Center the voices of marginalized communities, and engage in personal rituals of healing, acknowledging both your roots and the harm caused by whiteness while committing to dismantling it.
By embarking on this journey, you can begin to untangle your identity from the destructive forces of whiteness, and cultivate a spirituality that is deeply connected to land, place, story, and heritage. In doing so, you not only reclaim your own sense of self, but also contribute to the collective work of dismantling white supremacy.