This morning, I thought about how religion uses patrilineal or matrilineal descent as a means of indicating whether one has been born into the religion of his or her most immediate ancestor(s), and how, in the case of Judaism and Islam, such stipulations have been contorted by both adherents, non-adherents and detractors from a simple Abrahamic membership inheritance issue into an ethnoracial issue in those societies which observe an Abrahamic religion on a majority basis.

For instance, in Judaism, one’s status as a Jew by religion is either gained through conversion or through being born to a Jewish mother; a similar regime exists in Islam, except that inheritance is patrilineal. 

But while the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches of Europe focused upon stamping out both religions by expelling or executing many and forcefully compelling others to convert to their brands of Christianity, the Enlightenment brought to the fore such concepts as race, ethnicity and nationhood. Thus, the adherents and adherent-descended non-adherents of Judaism and Islam were increasingly perceived as ethnic groups, with different cultural traits, and were eventually classified as "Ethnic Jews" and "Ethnic Muslims" (especially in such areas where Islam was a significant faith system of the population, such as Bosnia and the Balkans). Religion (both spiritual and civil) became increasingly tied to the ethnoracial nationality of people even as movements toward the disestablishment of state-recognized churches sped up, resulting in the ossification of identity to the point of almost no return.

Of course, this led to more pogroms, more massacres, more genocides, but this tendency also influenced the creation of Zionism, Pakistani nationalism and Malay Muslim nationalism, as all three nationalisms were born out of an internalization of the "inheritance of sectarian identity = ethnoracial feature" meme: Zionism (Jewish nationalism) envisioned a state where those Jews and ethnic Jews who were alienated by the meme (and the chaos that was caused in Europe) were welcome to enjoy a government allegiance that guaranteed a permanent majority of people who enjoyed such similar cultural traits which had allowed the formulators of nationalist ideologies in other countries in Europe to mark them with ethnoracial perceptions and projections. The Pakistan movement arose from those political leaders in colonial India who happened to be descended from Muslim individuals and families and were educated toward accepting the same meme that led them to perceive their existence in a majority-Hindu India as a precarious existence that should be "revolutionized" by carving out a separate state for those Indians who were in similar straits as themselves. Malay Muslim nationalism internalized the meme to the point that adherents to such an ideology felt a need to permanently tie Islam into the ethnoracial descriptor of Malay Malaysian so as to set the relevant population apart from the ethnoracial descriptors of other large minorities in Malaysia, such as Indian-Malaysians and Chinese-Malaysians, and to reserve the descriptor "Malay" only for Muslim Malays in Malaysia.

This internalization of the "sect = race" meme, I think, can be easily compared to the one-drop rule in United States culture, in which being partly of African ancestry qualifies one as African-American (and, in earlier times, led to one being treated with various indignities based upon that racial descriptor, no matter how much that person could "pass for white"). Looking at the "sect = race" meme, it is even more ridiculous than the one-drop rule (which was based on physical features rather than one’s ancestor’s religion), but it probably has had more serious downward effects on intercultural and interreligious relations than many of the other erroneous imports from European culture.

I think that this was most illustrated in the 2008 presidential election period, when Barack Obama was described by his most vociferous opponents in the election as a Muslim based upon his father’s religious identity, or as a Marxist socialist based upon his earlier associations with those who happened to bear an affinity for socialism as an ideology. Now, not only does "Sect = race", but also "political ideology = race".

I honestly don’t think that we live in a post-racial society if, in 2010, we are surprised by, or highly interested in whether or not, Iran’s Ahmadinejad is "part"-Jewish, or if Obama is "part"-Muslim. I don’t think we can even claim that "racism is in the past" if we continue to accept the "’one-drop’ of a sect = race" meme.

(This doesn’t negate any of the resulting nationalisms, such as Zionism and Pakistanism, but it does blame both the European Enlightenment for the meme and Christianity for having created such a supremacist drive against the European presence of non-Christian/non-Abrahamic/non-theist belief systems in the first place. It is the fault of both groups/events, and it devalues many of the accomplishments of peoples who were involved with both institutions.)