Religion in the Closet: Heterosecularisms and Police-Practitioners of African Diaspora Religions

Drawing on ethnography with police officers in the United States, this article explores the policing of Africana, Afro-Latinx, and diaspora religions. This article demonstrates how state secularism is involved in the simultaneous gendering and racializing of African diaspora religions as criminal and deviant. It illuminates the white-Christian Protestantism underlying the police state’s secularism. By exploring how police officers who secretly practice African diaspora religions see themselves as being “in the closet” to their departments, it demonstrates how white-Christianity and heteronormativity are implicit to American secularist policing, what I term here heterosecularism.