Читать книгу White Christian Privilege - Khyati Y. Joshi - Страница 13

Members of White Protestant denominations tend to enjoy Christian privilege at its most expansive, while Christian communities of color may enjoy it in different and more constrained ways. Racism has inhibited the social power of African American, Native American, Asian American, and Latinx churches.

In addition to understanding how identities like race, gender, and sexual orientation affect experiences of Christian privilege, it is important to recognize that there are numerous Christian denominations and that a hierarchy or continuum of Christian privilege has been manifest among them. In colonial America and the early United States, for example, discrimination against Christians whose theology was at odds with Protestantism, including Anabaptist Christians (such as the Amish and Mennonites), Mormons (adherents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints), Quakers, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and believers in Christian Science, placed those Christians in a relatively disadvantaged position vis-à-vis the mainstream Protestant majority. Indeed, the question of whether these groups were “Christian” was—and to some degree remains—contested. For other Christian groups, particularly Catholics but also adherents of the many eastern Orthodox traditions, it was their immigration in large numbers and the resulting sense of insecurity among White American Protestants that led to religious discrimination and positioned these non-Protestants as lower in the social hierarchy.