Comments on: Protestant Stereotypes

By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Thu, 15 May 2008 06:16:06 +0000

I’m just wondering if you couldn’t be more subtle, like, say, Aihwa Ong in _Flexible Citizenship_. There Ong observes that wealthy Overseas Chinese pose a special problem for their neighbors, including Chinese Americans who came in earlier waves of Chinese immigration. The immigrant is supposed to arrive poor, work insanely hard in unsavory conditions, and gradually claw their way up to middle or upper-class status. Immigrants who arrive with heaps of cash, buy houses in Beverly Hills, and immediately start throwing their weight around in local cultural and political circles are a whole new kind of perceived threat. I suspect that much the same is true of successful Indian or Korean entrepreneurs.

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By: Rex

Rex — Wed, 14 May 2008 20:14:24 +0000

Well anxiety that minority Others are going to displace you is a pretty standard thing to happen to majorities — particularly in the US. Consider fears of migrant workers from Mexico or stereotypes of Korean convenience store owners: both groups with histories of Christianity.

We’d need real data to parse it out in detail, of course. But I imagine that there are two things going on here: first, a fear that some minority groups will ‘out-suffer’ anglo-protestants (by working harder, which speaks to protestant anxiety about not suffering enough) and then also general (and historically quite deep) suspicion of market mechanisms, their ability to produce wealth without work, magically, and some people’s seeming special access to them (it could be Jews, but protestant elites can also be suspects of this more populist, agrarian impulse).

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By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Wed, 14 May 2008 06:22:43 +0000

I wonder if Rex couldn’t press his case a bit harder and observe that in the cases of Jews, Chinese, Japanese, and Indians the common thread is fear of people who appear to have gone to far in embracing what were once seen as Anglo-Saxon virtues. This isn’t the WASP looking down on people of color; this is the WASP afraid that he is losing his once dominant position. So the stereotypical attributes are quite different from those that look north to south and depict those in the south as more emotional (less rational), more touchy-feely (insufficiently individualized).

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By: Carlos Mondragon

Carlos Mondragon — Tue, 13 May 2008 22:54:55 +0000

“But when considered together we can see that they say more about the people making the statements than the people described in them.”

Indeed. And from my touchy-feely Latino perch, may I suggest a really great couple of reads that touch upon some of the ancestral origins of anglo-protestant stereotypes of Hispanic American peoples? I’m thinking of James McDermott’s “England and the Spanish Armada”, which does a superb job of demonstrating the way in which the Medieval Anglo-Spanish (anti-French) alliance was gradually disassembled by a peculiar form of proto-national Elizabethan chauvinism and xenophobia that gave way to the Black Legend.

The second book is also historical, with an anthropological twist, and turns on its head the argument that Iberian Catholic missionaries were Medieval-style colonizers gripped by an evangelistic and exorcising religious mania that gave rise to an irrational and unjust social type, by contrast with Elizabethan Puritans, who were more “modern” spiritual gardeners. The book is “Puritan Conquistadors”, by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra.

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