The reincarnation of the Asian Buddhist peril: White Christian nationalism and contestations of mindfulness in K-12 public schools

Abstract

This article explores legal contestations to school based mindfulness programs in the context of an increasingly overt White Christian nationalist agenda in the United States. By illuminating the force and logic of White Christian nationalism in education, I demonstrate that though Christian organizations’ legal opposition to mindfulness is framed around defending First Amendment Establishment Clause protections in schools, their ultimate objective is to safeguard Christian hegemony and structurally reinforce a racial-religious belief of the US as a White Christian nation. Interrogating the discursive invocation of Buddhism as a “danger” helps to reveal this intention, and its exclusionary function. In this light, I trace how the claims of Buddhist treachery recall and reaffirm 19th century White Christian nationalist imaginations of Asian immigrants as embodying dangerously foreign religions and inassimilable behaviors in order to facilitate their legal exclusion from the nation. Understanding this historical context sheds light on the ways these Christian legal contentions of mindfulness attempt to maintain a historical racial-religious subjugation of Asians as a “Yellow Peril” and inculcate anti-Asian phobias of national invasion. Thus, I also argue that the current legal disputes over mindfulness are not new assertions of White Christian nationalism. Rather, they illuminate the ongoing legacy of White Christian nationalism, and represent attempts to maintain the structure’s hegemonic positioning in the 21st century. In highlighting these arguments, this article demonstrates that we cannot understand the debate around mindfulness in schools (and secular mindfulness programs themselves) without understanding the White Christian nationalist history of Asian racial-religious exclusion in the US.