it offers a historically informed road map of how Christian privilege developed and has influenced the American experiment from colonial times to the present. Drawing on interviews and personal narratives, it illuminates the impact of White Christian privilege in our workplaces, classrooms, and broader society, and offers strategies to expose and overcome its dynamics.
The book takes a hard look at three specific, related, and mutually supporting phenomena in the US: Christian privilege, Christian normativity, and Christian hegemony. Christian privilege is experienced at the individual level, in the everyday; it is manifest in unearned advantages that Christians receive and in the corresponding disadvantages religious minorities, atheists, and agnostics must deal with on an everyday basis. Many people think about bias and discrimination as dynamics that happen between two people. It can be easy to recognize a religious slur like “kike” or “dothead” as bias. We are conditioned to see bias most easily at the individual and interpersonal level, which makes it easy to think that if we all were to treat people with respect and kindness, bias would stop being a problem.
But there’s far more to it than individual cruelty. At the level of our society and culture, Christian privilege is structural. It has afforded the Christian majority the historic and contemporary power to shape social norms. This Christian normativity makes Christian values intrinsic to our national identity, conveys the status of truth and rightness on Christian culture, and makes Christian language and metaphors and their underlying theology the national standard. Christian normativity imbues Christianity with a unique power, situating it as ordinary and expected. As a result, atheists and religious minorities who embrace different practices, belief systems, and world views are disadvantaged relative to their Christian peers.1 Very real everyday consequences result from a situation in which the Christian way of doing something comes to be understood as the normal way of living.
Consciously or unconsciously, we may perceive practices outside the Christian norm as exotic or illegitimate. “God,” for example, is most often depicted in nonreligious settings, in line with Christian imaginings, as an old White man with a flowing beard. We might also see Christian figures like Jesus and the Virgin Mary representing the divine. Yet it is exceedingly unlikely that in a setting that is not explicitly Hindu, for example, we will encounter a representation of “God” as the Hindu God Krishna, with his blue skin, or as the four-armed Saraswati, Goddess of knowledge, wisdom and learning, or as other Hindu Gods with their colorful clothing and multiarmed bodies. Christianity’s images of God are perceived as “normal” images of God because of Christianity’s cultural sway. The God images of other faiths may be regarded as idols—“weird” or cultic in comparison.
It is impossible to overestimate the ways Christian normativity influences the dialogue that goes on in America’s public square—from the traditional news media to the 24-hour churn of online social media. In fact, it is so pervasive, and often so subtle, that we often may not notice it. While Christianity makes frequent appearances in the media, it appears even more often in the subtext—the impressions implicit in the words and images selected. Consider, for example, the images and associations that come into your mind when you read the word “terrorism.” At a meta level, the institutions and legal standards established in the United States over the past 400 years reflect the accretion of Christian privilege and Christian normativity into an infrastructure of Christian hegemony. Hegemony refers to a society’s unacknowledged and/or unconscious adherence to a dominant worldview. Hegemonic ideologies are perpetuated through the cultural norms, policies, and practices which set those ideologies up as “business as usual.” Christian hegemony thus refers to the predominance and endorsement at the national level of Christian observances, beliefs, scriptures, and manners of worship.2 Christianity is embedded in our national laws, mores, and expectations as “regimes of truth,” and endures there with legal and social power that has spanned the length, breadth, and entire history of the country.3
Christian Privilege and White Supremacy
Any discussion of religion in the US that does not explore its intersections with race and racism is incomplete. This book takes an intersectional approach, not only grappling with Christian privilege as a single phenomenon, but also attending to the way it interacts with other structures of social, economic, and legal privilege. The advantages Christians receive are not experienced in isolation; every Christian, and every religious minority, also holds other social identities. Asian, Black, Hispanic, and Middle-Eastern Christians thus experience Christianity in America differently from the way White Christians do. Their various origins and histories in the US have given these groups different experiences. While they share many of the advantages of being Christian in America, those advantages may be harder to recognize or acknowledge, especially because of the racial discrimination and violence some groups have also faced. In this respect, their Christianity is often “othered,” just as racial minorities as such are “othered.” They may be targets of violence, a problem that Black churches, for example, have faced throughout history and continue to face. In some cases, it can be difficult for individuals to distinguish religious identity from cultural identity. The identities of Filipino Catholics, Black Protestants, and others, for example, interweave religion and culture in ways that make them virtually impossible to separate. This intimate connection between an advantaged identity (Christian) and a disadvantaged identity (racial minority) can make it difficult for Christians of color to recognize and acknowledge the advantages they do possess.
White Christian supremacy in America is the product of a centuries-long project in which notions of White racial superiority and Christian religious superiority have augmented and magnified each other. White Christian supremacy is an ideology that developed before the European “Age of Discovery” and European colonization of Africa, Arabia, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. Born from theologies that positioned White Christians at the top of a global social and economic order, White Christian supremacy looked to the Bible for rationales that supported the subjugation and genocide of Indigenous peoples, Black slavery, and a view of Asians as threatening, exotic, and heathen.4
These principles coalesced in a series of fifteenth-century Papal Bulls (edicts) that permitted the Portuguese monarchy to seize West Africa by deeming any land not inhabited by Christians as available to be “discovered,” claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers, and permitting the enslavement of Muslims, pagans, and other “unbelievers.” This “Doctrine of Discovery” became the basis of all European claims in the Americas as well as the foundation for the United States’ western expansion.5 Christianity thus permeated colonial enterprises around the world, both before and after the colonization of North America. In all of these projects, non-Christians were denied the rights to land, sovereignty, and self-determination enjoyed by Christians.
In what would become the United States, White Christian supremacy was developed, rationalized, and spread by theologians, philosophers, and scientists. At the time of the nation’s founding, most of its major universities were affiliated with the church, from Puritan Harvard and Calvinist Yale to Anglican Columbia, Presbyterian Princeton, and Baptist Brown. “Scholarship” in these institutions of higher learning helped to create and perpetuate White Christian supremacy. By reproducing and amplifying scientific theories of racial hierarchy and religious destiny, these institutions promoted theologies that rationalized land theft from native non-Christians and enslavement of Black non-Christians.6 Far from an anomaly in the theological discipline, Whiteness has been a dominant theological outlook by which non-White, non-Christian persons have been assessed along a hierarchy of humanity. The conquest of the US was a colonial endeavor that combined taking land with spreading the gospel of Christ. In the words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Our nation was born in genocide.… Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade.”7
Over the centuries, Christianity has justified race-based segregation of Whites and Blacks within the same Protestant denominations, be they Baptists or Methodists or Pentecostals. In the present day, Christian normativity perpetuates the societal exclusion of Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and
