Christian Privilege: A 3-part reflection

A thorn in the flesh¹

Reflecting its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, the Roman Catholic university at which I teach requires students to answer diversity and inclusion questions as part of course evaluations every semester. In general, students in my ethics classes affirm my commitment to equity and value our engagement with various perspectives in course material and class discussions. Yet, last year, two students commented that I was too religious. I was surprised and immediately wondered about the authors. Was it the student who publicly disclosed, early in the semester, that he was an atheist? Could it be the student who discussed a project extension with me because he was fasting for Ramadan? Perhaps it was the student who shared, in a journal entry, that she was no longer a practicing Catholic? Or was it someone else?

After a while, I shifted to wondering why. What caused them to say this? Though trained as a Christian ethicist, I primarily teach an introductory ethics course which surveys the Western ethical tradition. While I am required to assign a portion of Augustine’s City of God and engage with Catholic Social Thought, most of the course content is sourced from moral philosophy. How was I too religious? I couldn’t figure it out.

As time passed, I focused less on the source of the bother – the comments themselves – and more on my reaction. The feelings these comments had stirred up in me – denial and avoidance – felt familiar. I realized that I had these responses before as I became aware of and wrestled with different forms of privilege over the years. And so, I started to investigate religious privilege.

Doing my homework²

After a brief search, I discovered White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America by Khyati Y. Joshi. In White Christian Privilege, Joshi paints a vivid picture of pervasive Christian privilege within the U.S. Like other forms of social privilege, Christian privilege offers unearned advantages to its members and corresponding disadvantages to all other (non-) religious groups. For instance, Joshi describes how Suhas, a Hindu, “was denied the chance to ‘start’ on his public school’s soccer team because he refused to join the coach and his teammates in Christian prayer.”³ Suhas’s coach considered the Lord’s Prayer integral to building team spirit; when Suhas chose not to participate in the Christian practice because of his religious identity, he was penalized. Many more compelling examples of Christian privilege are highlighted throughout the book. 

Importantly, Joshi situates Christian privilege in the context of Christian hegemony and Christian normativity in the U.S. She notes that Christian privilege is “a product of institutional oppression and legacies of social power.”⁴ It is the fruit of both Christian hegemony, or dominance of Christian ways of seeing and acting in U.S. culture, and Christian normativity, the “assumption by Christians that their own belief system is universal, or ought to be rendered universal without question or critique.”⁵ Thus, though Christian privilege most clearly manifests at the individual level, Joshi reminds us to be careful not to forget its structural nature. 

A couple examples from my own institution may be helpful here. For one, our academic calendar includes an Easter Recess, which grants students a break from academic responsibilities from Holy Thursday to Easter Monday. While every student enjoys the long weekend, this schedule enables Christians to easily travel home to celebrate Easter with their families, free from academic obligations.⁶ In contrast, every year, Muslim students who want to celebrate Eid al-Fitr with their families have to make individual requests to each one of their instructors to excuse their absence and set aside time during the holiday to complete missed school work. In addition, my university offers an extracurricular mentorship program which pairs students with faculty members and involves catered meals during which participants discuss a text and reflect on the relationship between faith and learning. While meant to be inclusive to all faiths and traditions, program events are opened and closed with Christian prayer and selected readings are largely Christian in nature. These examples highlight the structural dimension of Christian privilege, which makes Christian beliefs and practices normative for the entire community. 

Pursuing critical consciousness⁷

I realize, as I write this, that Christian privilege may not have been what those two students were naming. In the end, though, it doesn’t really matter. Once recognized, I have an obligation to contend with the reality of Christian privilege. While I am still processing Joshi’s work, I see two places where I might start.

First, I need to examine how I might be manifesting Christian privilege in my classroom and how I might do things differently. For instance, am I assuming shared familiarity with Christian stories when I teach? Am I making Christian concepts normative points of reference for course material? While my professional context is complicated as, at a Roman Catholic institution, Christian culture is interwoven with university culture, performing such acts may reinscribe Christian normativity and harm non-religious students or students from other faith traditions. Moreover, how might I lessen the burden of students who are religious minorities? Could I shift from generic syllabus language which provides accommodation for religious holidays to proactively identifying various religious holidays in the syllabus and rethinking the course schedule considering those events? Joshi identifies these and other actions as possible first steps. 

Second, I need to think more critically about how I might contend with Christian privilege in my scholarship. As someone whose work attends to issues of privilege, particularly in the political sphere, I have unfortunately neglected to examine religious privilege. If I am serious about investigating injustice in U.S. society and the resources Christianity might offer, I need to analyze how “White racial superiority and Christian religious superiority have augmented and magnified each other.”⁸ This is a challenging task and one that will require significantly more reading, reflection, and conversation. Yet, even if my way forward is currently hazy, the commission to do something new remains clear.

References:

Joshi, Khyati Y. White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America. New York: New York University Press, 2020.

Notes:

1. It is worth noting the Christian origin of the phrase “thorn in the flesh,” found in 2 Corinthians 12:7. 

2. Joshi urges the adoption of a social justice approach to contend with the ongoing legacy of White Christian Supremacy in the U.S. For members of the majority, a key step is doing one’s homework on Christian privilege and its impact on minority communities (Joshi, 210). 

3. Joshi, 126.

4. Joshi, 128.

5. Joshi, 22.

6. Yet, religious traditions are internally diverse as well. Since Orthodox Christianity uses a different liturgical calendar than Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, students observing Orthodox Easter often require special religious accommodation to celebrate the holiday despite the scheduled Easter Recess. This occurrence does not undermine the reality of Christian privilege in the U.S. but rather highlights the intersectional nature of privilege.

7. Joshi’s social justice approach centers on critical consciousness, or the capacity “to recognize systems of inequality and to take action against these systems,” a concept advanced by Paulo Freire and bell hooks in their respective work (Joshi, 205).

8. Joshi, 5.