Читать книгу White Christian Privilege - Khyati Y. Joshi - Страница 9

Despite contemporary rhetoric predicting the “decline of White Christian America,”⁹ the power of Whiteness and Christianity is deeply dyed in the nation’s wool, and omnipresent in American rules and structures. Indeed, those three terms—“White,” “Christian,” and “American”—have been used interchangeably so often that in many contexts, including in the lexicon of non-White, non-Christian immigrant communities, they remain synonyms for one another. When members of White Christian America react defensively against the nation’s growing 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. They feel they are “losing” and need to fight to preserve their vision of a White Christian America, not realizing how the legal and social deck is still stacked dramatically in their favor. They see existential threats in issues like Sharia law or the “War on Christmas” that are trivial in comparison with the benefits Christians enjoy.

This is not to say that Christian people of faith do not face hostility in certain quarters. There is discrimination against and even hostility toward religion in general from some quarters. Some popular and academic authors have railed against Christianity in particular, and we can find bias against religion more generally in higher education and social justice or progressive circles. Religion is the last topic some of my progressive colleagues in ethnic and Asian American studies want to discuss. While some scholars are comfortable teaching about the sociocultural aspects of religion, they nevertheless keep their distance from matters of faith.¹⁰

Unfortunately, the bias against religion in ethnic studies is a longstanding tradition.¹¹ In some cases, it is the product of scholars’ own unease with religion; in others it springs from the perception of religion as mere superstition and Karl Marx’ influential trivialization of religion as the opiate of the masses. Meanwhile, the study of religion and its role in society and individuals’ lives is mostly relegated to departments of religion and seminaries. In those spaces, on the other hand, many of my colleagues are uneasy discussing race and racism. This untenable dichotomy—ethnic studies’ unease with religion, and religious studies’ unease with race—makes integrative works like this one difficult, but all the more necessary.

Many social justice activists are likewise uncomfortable talking about faith. Some have left organized religion because of its role in the oppression of marginalized communities; others are unable to find congruencies between religious participation and political progressivism. People who are ready to talk about homophobia, classism, or racism are ill at ease including religious discrimination in the conversation. The anti-religious perspective of certain scholars and progressives can—sometimes legitimately—come across as bias against Christianity.¹²

Even if some Christians may have personally faced real obstacles, criticism, or discrimination related to their faith, such experiences do not negate the power of Christian privilege. This book does not deny the existence of anti-Christian bias; rather, it aims to show that White Christian norms nonetheless remain entrenched in our institutions, laws, and civic culture in ways that set up an uneven playing field in everyday public, social, and work life to the disadvantage of many religious minorities. Moreover, none of the strategies presented here to ameliorate this problem aim to diminish Christianity, but rather to ensure equal opportunity for all religious traditions and for those who embrace no religion.