11/17/2021 – What Is White Christian Privilege?

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The Indian American scholar Khyati Joshi at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey grew up in the Atlanta area where I taught for seven years. Also, many years ago, in the Chicago area where I grew up, I worked for a company owned by an Indian businessman and I had a lot of Indian coworkers, so I have a pretty good idea where she’s coming from with this. Her book is called White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America. As I started reading the book, I quickly realized I could probably do an entire video episode just on the 19-page introduction alone. When I was finished with the book I had twice as many notes as I could possibly use, so, we’re going to have to leave out a myriad of details and just try to get a big-picture view of the main themes. For anyone who’s listening to this, especially in the United States, you need to find a way to get a copy of this book or check it out from your library and read the whole thing. It’s that good.

Okay, the introduction sets up the book and there are already some big whoppers in there. The great thing about Joshi in this book is she doesn’t hold back and shouldn’t hold back because she’s writing about things that have been going on for centuries. Just on the first page alone: Christianity dominates by setting the tone and establishing the rules and assumptions about who belongs or does not belong, about what is acceptable and not acceptable in public discourse. The book explains how the effects of this privilege are acted out in our society and it demonstrates that Christian privilege in the United States has always been entangled with notions of White supremacy. C’mon now. Let’s goooo…

The three themes defined in the introduction are referenced throughout the entire work. First, Christian privilege is the unearned advantages that Christians receive, and the corresponding disadvantages religious minorities, atheists, and agnostics must deal with on an everyday basis. Second, Christian normativity means Christian values are taken as intrinsic to national identity making Christian language and metaphors and their underlying theology the national standard. Third, Christian hegemony is the unacknowledged and/or unconscious adherence to this dominant worldview. This is an intersectional approach showing how Christian privilege interacts with other structures of social, economic, and legal privilege. The problem is when members of White Christian America react defensively against the nation’s growing demographic changes in religious and racial diversity, it is because they fail to understand the hegemony on which their power is built and to see how normative and privileged their faith and their race still are. A social justice approach manifests the systemic inequalities faced by religious minorities and the nonreligious, and the underlying White Christian supremacist laws and culture that produced those inequalities. And that’s just the introduction.

After the introduction there are six chapters, so let’s see what we can learn from them. The first chapter on “Christianity and the American National Identity” gets into some highly relevant historical and political background information such as even though there was not a federally sanctioned church, there were official state churches. Eight of the original thirteen colonies had them. Like, who knew? Get this, my favorite sentence she wrote in this chapter starts out, “To be clear, the optical illusion here…” I see what you did Prof. Joshi, you mistress of irony. “To be clear, the optical illusion here is…” hehehe…wait, why are things suddenly getting a little blurry here…I, uh…hold up! The sentence reads, “To be clear, the optical illusion here is the idea that the Constitution demands a separation between church and state, and that such a separation actually exists as a result.” Believing that the reality of religious freedom matches our Constitutional aspirations obscures the Christian privilege and religious oppression encountered by religious minorities. Even the Supreme Court defined “free exercise” narrowly, in a way that restricted practices that violated political and cultural norms, without limiting religious belief. So, let me get this straight, it didn’t matter what you believed religiously as long as you didn’t do anything about it? What? A portion of White Christian America view the move toward social equity as discrimination against them. You know, it’s interesting that nothing feels so imbalanced as a level playing field, when for as long as you can remember the field has been tilted in your favor. A huge swath of White Christian America perceives the presence of religious diversity as a threat to its existence. This thinking construes “others” as unwelcome in American public space because they dilute and pollute what is genuinely American: Whiteness and Christianity.

The second chapter on “Christianity and the Construction of White Supremacy” gets into the European colonial aspects of the issue going all the way back to 15th century Spain tracing it all the way through to the founding of the United States. This colonial and orientalist mindset believed that Christians were superior to Muslims, Jews, and followers of indigenous religions native to Africa and the Americas, and that Europeans were superior to all others. Whiteness and Christianity coexisted. It wasn’t enough to be Christian, and this can be seen by the numerous Black churches that were bombed during the civil rights movement killing many, even including children.

The third chapter tackles the immigration and citizenship questions and how they relate to White Christian supremacy. It’s rooted in nativism, which is a combination of xenophobia, the express hatred or fear of others, and ethnocentrism, the preference for one’s own group. “We the people of the United States…,” says the U.S. Constitution. Joshi writes that the evolution of American laws on citizenship illustrates the strong relationship of Whiteness and Christianity in national identity and legal interpretations of who “we” are and who “we” aren’t. While citizenship had been restricted to free white men since 1790, in 1952 the racial restriction was lifted, making members of all races and religions eligible for citizenship. More than half a century later after this federal legislation, however, we began to see new public debates over who should be a citizen. The question of birthright citizenship is now being debated again. Remember President Obama and the birther movement? Since his opposition felt they could not attack his race directly, another indirect method had to be implemented, namely, manufacture questions about his right to citizenship. Historically, White + Christian = eligible for citizenship. Just look at what happened during World War II when Japanese Americans were rounded up and put in internment camps while Italians and Germans had far more modest restrictions, basically only being excluded from military areas. Like what was that all about?

Then chapter four gets into “Everyday Christian Privilege” where she explains that the concept of privilege has both external (or structural) dimensions and internal (or attitudinal) dimensions. The external/structural dimension of privilege refers to the construction of what is normal and not normal, what is acceptable and unacceptable, as decided by society to determine mainstream behavior. Centuries of Christian control over legal and cultural standards have successfully resulted in dominant social realities and social visions being accepted as common sense, or “normal.” But what’s “normal?” [film clip from Star Trek Generations, 1994 – Soran: Have you ever considered a prosthesis that would make you look a little more, how can I say, more normal? La Forge: What’s normal? Soran: What’s normal? Well, that’s a good question. Normal is what everyone else is and you are not.] Oh, so that’s what “normal” is. Y’all like Star Trek? When religious minority groups want access to the same things that Christians have often had, these occurrences get framed as the religious minority group asking for “special treatment” and Christians often accommodate up to the point of Christian discomfort, but as soon as Christians feel like they are giving something up, resentment sets in, a line is drawn, and the power of the norm is invoked. There is a long list of examples provided here and they all strongly support the case. These are prayer, construing one’s religion as beliefs vs. myths, civic matters, patriotism, language, rituals, religious attire, dietary restrictions, and lifestyle issues such as wearing a hijab or how the calendar is framed around Christian holidays creating structural privileges at work and school.

We’re not quite done yet. Chapter five, “Voices of Christian Privilege,” has a lot of real-world examples from both sides. The first is Christian privilege and Christians addressing denial and avoidance, superiority and entitlement, and the recognition (or lack thereof) of Christian privilege. The second is religious minorities and Christian privilege addressing denial, avoidance, and internalized inferiority; the recognition of Christian privilege by members of religious minorities; and asking what does a social justice approach to Christian privilege sound like? Christians may be dismissive or defensive when someone points out the presence of Christian privilege or normativity. But stop, pause, and acknowledge that your ability even to see a problem may be limited because you have not experienced disadvantage due to your religious identity. Calling it “politically correct” devalues the question and the questioner – the person experiencing the disadvantage. Sometimes, it is hard to believe privilege exists or to acknowledge it when you benefit from it. Privilege does mean that there are some struggles you’ll never have to deal with. The personal impact and sometimes practical consequences of Christian privilege are very real in the lives of religious minorities, even when they are invisible to those who benefit from the privilege.

Finally, the last chapter, “Making Meaning and Making Change,” is more proactive on how to address these challenges. What does a liberated world look like? Envisioning a world where the religious diversity in our country is not just valued but where all have genuine equal opportunity is difficult, precisely because it is so hard to step entirely out of the nation’s history and legacies of injustice. One must embrace critical consciousness. To be critically conscious is to recognize systems of inequality and to take action against those systems. Joshi suggests the three components to this are the head (or knowledge), the heart (emotional component/affective response), and the hand (action). One must get “proximate,” meaning engage personally and directly. It’s not just letting someone have a seat at the table but giving them a real voice. Recognizing and understanding real, lived religion. She posits that we need to change five things: (1) change the language; (2) change the questions; (3) change the focus; (4) change the foundational assumptions; (5) change the paradigm. Asking, “Why would anyone give up privilege and social power?” is the wrong question. It starts from the assumption that this country belonged to Christians or to Whites, in the first place. It’s not about redistributing privilege but replacing the very notion of privilege with a fulfillment of the ideals of equality so that opportunity, dignity, and safety are equally available to all.

This book is entirely focused on the United States context, and I wonder how this book would be different if written about another county such as India, Malaysia, Mexico, and so on. Obviously, the examples and some of the content would be different, but I’m guessing a lot of the principles would be quite similar. What do you think about all of this? When people learn about privilege what are the emotional responses? What is the proper way to channel this? Is Joshi really on to something here? Leave a comment below. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, support the channel in the link below, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.