the everyday impact of christian hegemony
There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.
—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE (1831)1
Introduction
Historically, there is no shortage of evidence of Christian power and influence. Though Christianity often portrays itself as benign, as a force for good in the world, the actual story is much more complex than that. What is at stake here is not just the impact of Christianity but also the role of Christianity as a determinant of institutions, culture, and behavior through its centralizing and hierarchical authority structures, its alignment with political elites, and its militant values.
For the last seventeen centuries ruling elites have used Christian institutions and values to control, exploit, and violate people in many regions throughout the world. Claiming Christianity to be the only true source of spiritual salvation, Christian leaders used their religion to sanction and to justify participation in genocide, colonialism, slavery, cultural appropriation, and other forms of violence and exploitation. Today, in the twenty-first century, can we really speak about Christianity as a dominant force in our lives?
Buried even deeper than the political, military, and economic policies and actions of Christian institutions and individuals there seems to be a dominant Christian worldview which has shaped western culture so profoundly that it is difficult to delineate fully. The dominant form of western Christianity calls for a transcendence of the material world. It gives suffering and death a particular meaning and proclaims that salvation and eternal life are possible, contingent, and exclusively available to some and not to others based on God’s judgment. A single person, Jesus, suffered and died to redeem humankind and make this possible. This western Christian story of transcendence, salvation, the purpose of suffering, and the possibility of redemption, as well as a number of related concepts and beliefs, have provided some of the core framework for western languages, art, music, literature, philosophy, architecture, politics, and ritual.
Within this framework there have been a thousand years of crusades against evil, terrorism, and Islam, including US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Within this framework multinational corporate capitalism, colonialism, slavery, and various forms of genocide have ravaged the world, leading us to the brink of ecological destruction. Within this framework women, men and women of color, people who are queer, people who have disabilities, immigrants, and everyone who is not Christian—all those labeled “Other” by dominant Christianity—have been and remain marginalized, exploited, and vulnerable to violence.
What Is Christian Hegemony?
I define Christian hegemony as the everyday, pervasive, and systematic set of Christian values and beliefs, individuals, and institutions that dominate all aspects of our society through the social, political, economic, and cultural power they wield. Nothing is unaffected by Christian hegemony including our personal beliefs and values, our relationships to other people and to the natural environment, and our economic, political, education, health care, criminal/legal, housing, and other social systems.
Christian hegemony as a system of domination is complex, shifting, and operates through the agency of individuals, families, church communities, denominations, parachurch organizations, civil institutions, and through decisions made by members of the ruling class and power elite.
Christian hegemony benefits all Christians, all those raised Christian, and those passing as Christian. However, the concentration of power, wealth, and privilege under Christian hegemony accumulates to the ruling class and the predominantly white male Christian power elite that serve its interests.
At one level Christian hegemony operates through the internalization of dominant western Christian beliefs and values by individuals. Concepts such as original sin, manifest destiny, there is only one truth and Christianity holds it, and man (sic) was given dominion over the earth influence the behavior and voting patterns of tens of millions of people in the US.
The power that individual preachers, ministers, and priests have on people’s lives is another level of influence. This influence often condones US expansionism abroad, missionary activity towards those who are not Christian, and exclusion and marginalization for groups or behaviors deemed sinful or dangerous by Christians.
Particular churches and some Christian denominations wield very significant political and economic power in our country. For example, the Mormon and Catholic churches and many individual religious leaders and particular churches raised millions of dollars, organized public campaigns, and mobilized constituents to vote for Proposition 8 on the California ballot—a ballot measure that would have made gay marriage illegal.2
There is a vast network of parachurch organizations, general tax-supported non-profits such as hospitals, broadcasting networks, publishing houses, lobbying groups, and organizations like Focus on the Family, Prison Fellowship, The Family, World Mission, and thousands of others which wield influence in particular spheres of US society and throughout the world. As just one example, the Child Evangelism Fellowship runs Good News Clubs in public schools across the country teaching hundreds of thousands of children to find Jesus and to proselytize to other children.3
Another level of Christian dominance is within the power elite, the network of 7,000 to 10,000 predominantly white Christian men who control the largest and most powerful social, political, economic, and cultural institutions in the country. The Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch, and Bill Gates are examples of power elite members who wield this kind of power.
And finally there is the level that provides the foundation for all the others—the long and deep legacy of Christian ideas, values, practices, policies, icons, and texts that have been produced within dominant western Christianity over the centuries. That legacy continues to shape our language, culture, and beliefs, and to frame public and foreign policy decisions.
These levels of Christian dominance have substantial personal, interpersonal, institutional, and structural effects in our society. The personal impact shows up in beliefs about heaven and hell, the apocalypse, sin and salvation, and the way that many Christians internalize feelings of superiority, entitlement, judgment, and narrow-mindedness while those who are not Christian may internalize feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and low self-worth.
The interpersonal effects include the specific acts of discrimination, harassment, and violence directed at those who are not Christian or Christian of the wrong sort, e.g., Muslims or lesbians and gays.
The institutional effects show up in the ways that the policies, practices, and procedures of the health care, educational, and criminal/legal systems favor Christians and Christian values and treat those who are not Christian as abnormal, dangerous, and outside society’s circle of caring. The interweaving and cumulative impact of Christian dominance in our institutions create an overall structure that is dense, pervasive, and devastating to our society.
The pervasive nature of Christian dominance can be seen in the way that, regardless of our awareness, certain words, symbols, and practices have resonances that influence our thinking and behavior. Words such as “crusade,” “inquisition,” or even “Christian” symbols like the cross, concepts like evil or hell, practices like public prayer, the torture of prisoners, or the public shaming of women—these and so many more can be triggered and manipulated by ruling elites because of our history of Christian dominance.
Frequently, discussions of Christian power or Christian values focus on the Christian right or other extreme versions of Christianity that are both visible and explicitly Christian. Evangelicals and fundamentalists constitute a powerful force. However, focusing on Christian Evangelicals and fundamentalists without reference to mainstream Christian dominance is similar to talking about the KKK and neo-Nazi groups without talking about institutional racism and white power. Defining the extremists and extreme versions of Christianity as aberrations leaves unexamined the institutions, policies, and practices of mainstream forms of Christianity and gives dominant Christianity itself a deceptively benign status.
Although it may seem confusing, in this discussion we are not talking about Christianity but about western Christian dominance. Christians and Christian institutions have done many beneficial things over the centuries. For example, some Christians and Christian institutions have fed the hungry, set up housing programs, provided medical care, and fought for social justice.
Nor are we talking about individual Christian beliefs and spiritual practices. If you are Christian you might feel a need to defend your religion or religious practice. You might want to say that “that” Christianity is not “my” Christianity. Just as I, as a man who respects women, work to end male violence, and challenge male dominance, might be tempted to say that I have rejected patriarchy and now stand against it. But I still benefit from male privilege, I still (often unwittingly) collude with the exploitation of women (Who made my clothes? Who made my computer?), and I still have to continually challenge internalized forms of male entitlement and superiority in myself. As social justice educator Mamta Motwani Accapadi wrote, “Christians cannot willingly dissolve and disown their Christian privilege because of their individual relationship with their Christian identity.”4
A hegemonic system provides a worldview—an intellectual framework, a language, and a set of values—that is promoted as common sense, as just the way things are, as unchallengeable. Many of the everyday manifestations of Christian hegemony are often mistaken as non-Christian or secular. See the checklist at the end of the article for many examples of how it plays out in our lives.
Original Christians
The original Christians were West Asian and North African Jews, predominantly Arab. Jesus, Mary, the Apostles, and all of the early leaders in the church were Jewish Arabs of varying ethnic and cultural identities, and with diverse but certainly not white skin tones.
Since then, dominant western Christianity has produced another kind of “original” Christian—one who is white, male, European, and contrasted with and juxtaposed with Others such as Jews, pagans, Muslims, white Christian women, heretics, homosexuals, heathens, and people who were lepers, people with disabilities, and those with other physical “conditions.” Women, people of color, and many others could become Christians of a sort but they were inferior imitations of the “real” thing because they were contaminated by their difference from the white, male, physically and morally perfect images of God, Adam, Jesus, the Apostles, and a long line of church leaders continuing into the current day. A person from any of these groups was considered more likely to revert to non-Christian ways, more likely to tempt good, i.e., white Christian men and women, away from virtue, and more likely to subvert Christian community norms and thus be a danger to community health and safety in their very being. On the other hand, as a group and taking into account differences in class, this system accords straight, white, male Christians power, prestige, political and economic representation, respect, protection, and credibility.
Key Concepts
There are six key concepts that have come to dominate Christian institutions and shape western culture. Christianity is based on a binary framework with a belief in a cosmic battle between good and evil. It embraces love within a theology of hierarchy, dominance, and obedience. It has a core belief that people are innately sinful individuals who need to be saved and they have available to them one truth, one way to God. There is a linear, temporal focus—God set things going in the beginning, gave us guidelines and a timeline in the Bible, revealed his plan in the natural world, and history is the unfolding of that plan. These powerful concepts frame our foreign and domestic policy—how we think about the world.
Foreign and Domestic Policy
The belief that “you’re either with us or against us”5 is the foundation of a Christian-based foreign policy. Early Christians offered pagans and Jews a choice: “convert or die.”6 Centuries later, Crusaders offered Jews and Muslims the same choice. Later still, indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere were told to convert and give up their land or be killed. Today US crusaders for freedom and “free” markets offer similar conditions to countries like Vietnam, Cuba, Iraq, or Afghanistan.
Manifest destiny is the belief that God has a plan for the world moving forward in time towards the final judgment and that the Christian-inspired United States has a special role in the unfolding of that plan. Along with a crusader mentality, belief in the manifest destiny of the US keeps the public supporting the invasion of other countries and a vast network of missionary organizations involving tens of thousands of individuals and billions of dollars of support for proselytizing around the world as well as in our local communities.
Examples of Christian dominance in the public policy arena are everywhere and include:
• Good News Clubs, athletic prayer programs, and other proselytizing efforts in our public schools
• The lack of reproductive rights for women, such as limits on access to contraception alternatives, severe limitations on access to safe abortion options
• Government funding for purity-based programs, such as abstinence-only sex education, zero tolerance, and prohibition campaigns instead of for the proven effectiveness of safer sex, needle-sharing, and other harm-reduction programs
• An economic system based on the invisible hand (whose hand?) of the market
• A criminal/legal morality system that rewards the wealthy (considered to be virtuous) and punishes those who are poor, are sexually active, or use substances deemed to be illegal (considered to be sinful)
• Lack of civil, worker, and human rights in Christian institutions and organizations
• Large-scale Christian Zionist support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine
• Intervention by groups such as The Family in the internal affairs of other countries
• Widespread ecological destruction based on the belief that God gave humans dominion over the earth
• Lack of full civil and human rights for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and people who are transgender
• Widespread support and use of corporal punishment by parents and school personnel
Christian Allies
An ally is someone who uses their privilege and their resources to stand with those under attack and to dismantle systems of oppression. There have always been Christian dissidents—those individuals and groups who rejected dominant interpretations of the meaning of Christianity or the political, economic, and social role of the church.
There is also a long and honorable social justice tradition in Christianity, derived from the Jewish prophetic tradition in the Bible, which has challenged injustice in its many manifestations. This resistance has continued in the role of black churches, the development of the social gospel, and the liberation theology movement. There are many Christians today working for peace and justice.
In contemporary times, some Christian churches have challenged US wars of aggression, supported majority world liberation struggles, worked for economic, racial, and gender justice, fought for civil and human rights, and worked diligently to challenge Christian hegemony within Christian organizations. They have also created alternative feminist-, black-, Native American–, Latino-, gay-, and social justice–focused churches and organizations. Christian dissidents and liberation theologians7 continue to try to reclaim Christianity.
What’s a Christian Ally to Do?
If you are Christian or were raised Christian, there are many concrete things you can do to counter Christian hegemony.
• Learn the history of Christianity and its impact on other peoples.
• Learn the history of the denomination that you belong to and/or grew up in.
• Understand and acknowledge the benefits you gain from being Christian in the United States.
• Use your privilege to support the struggles of non-Christian peoples throughout the world for land, autonomy, independence, reparations, and justice.
• Notice the operation of Christian hegemony in your everyday life.
• Learn how to raise these issues with other Christians.
• Challenge organizational and institutional policies that perpetuate Christian hegemony.
• Challenge public exhibitions of Christianity.
• Respect other peoples’ sacred places, rituals, sacred objects, and culture—don’t appropriate them in any way.
• Support the First Amendment separation of church and state and work for religious pluralism.
• Challenge missionary programs.
• Challenge attempts to justify US imperialism by appeals to the special, superior, or righteous role that the US should play as a Christian, civilized, democratic, free-market, or human rights–based society.
• Examine the ways that you may have internalized feelings of superiority or negative judgment of others, especially those from marginalized or non-Christian groups based on Christian teachings.
• Examine the ways that you may have internalized judgments about yourself based on Christian teachings.
• Examine the ways that you may have cut yourself off from your body, from natural expressions of your sexuality or spirituality, from connections to the natural world, or from particular groups, ethnicities, behaviors, or cultures because of Christian teachings.
• Avoid excusing hurtful behavior or policies because of the good intent of their perpetrators.
• Look for the complexity in situations and people and avoid reducing things to an artificial either/or dynamic.
• Don’t assume that other people you meet are Christian—or should be.
No living Christian created the system of Christian hegemony that we live within. In that sense none is guilty. But Christians are responsible for their response to it, for the way that they show up as allies in the struggle to build a just society.
All of us, Christian or not, working to create a world without hate, terror, exploitation, and violence must identify the internalization of Christian ideology in our thinking and eliminate its negative consequences from our behavior. In addition, we must learn effective techniques for educating people about Christian hegemony and for organizing to challenge its power.
Finally, we must free ourselves from the restraints it has imposed on our imaginations so that we can establish relationships with ourselves, other people, and all living things built on values of mutuality, cooperation, sustainability, and interdependence with all life.
Living in a Christian-Dominant Culture Checklist8
Please check the following that apply to you:
1. You have ever attended church regularly.
2. You ever attended Sunday school as a child, or attended church periodically, e.g., during Christian holidays.
3. You ever attended a Christian-based recreational organization as a young person, such as the YMCA or YWCA, or church-based summer camp, or participated in a program of a nonreligious youth organization that was based in Christian beliefs, such as the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts.
4. You were ever told or instructed by a Christian or by a Christian authority figure, such as a minister, priest, teacher, parent, public official, or counselor, that things that you do with your body, sex with others, or sex by yourself was sinful or unclean.
5. You were ever told by a Christian or Christian authority figure that sexual acts other than intercourse between a man and a woman, or sexual orientations other than heterosexual, are sinful or unclean.
6. You were ever told or instructed by a Christian or Christian authority figure that women are unclean, that women are the source of temptation, or that they are the source of sin or evil.
7. You have ever heard heaven and good described as light or white and hell and evil described as dark or black.
8. You have ever been told something you did was sinful or evil, or that you were sinful or evil.
9. You have ever noticed that a Christian theological either/or framework of good/evil, black/white, sinner/saved is used by you, people around you, or is prominent in mainstream culture.
10. You have ever been approached by family members, friends, or strangers trying to convince you to become Christian or a Christian of a particular kind.
11. You have ever been rejected in any way by family or community members because you were not Christian or were not Christian enough.
12. You have ever found that, in your community, the church is a major center of social life that influences those around you and is difficult to avoid.
13. You have ever taken Christian holidays such as Christmas or Easter off, whether you practice them as Christian holidays or not, or have taken Sunday off or think of it, in any way, as a day of rest.
14. You have ever been given a school vacation or paid holiday related to Christmas or Easter when school vacations or paid holidays for non-Christian religious celebrations, such as Ramadan or the Jewish High Holidays, were not observed.
15. The public institutions you use, such as offices, buildings, banks, parking meters, the post office, libraries, and stores, are open on Fridays and Saturdays but closed on Sundays.
16. When you write the date, the calendar of time you use calculates the year from the birth of Jesus and is divided into two segments, one before his birth and one after it.
17. You have ever seen a public institution in your community, such as a school, hospital, or city hall, decorated with Christian symbols, e.g., Christmas trees, wreathes, Jesus, nativity scenes, or crosses.
18. If you wanted to, you could easily find Christian music, TV shows, movies, and places of worship.
19. You can easily access Christmas- or Easter-related music, stories, greeting cards, films, and TV shows at the appropriate times of the year.
20. You have ever received public services—medical care, family planning, food, shelter, or substance-abuse treatment—from a Christian-based organization or public services that were marked by Christian beliefs and practices, e.g., Alcoholics Anonymous or other 12-step programs, pro-life family planning, hospitals, etc.
21. You daily use currency that includes Christian words or symbols, such as the phrase “in God we trust” (the “god” in this phrase does not refer to Allah, Ogun, Shiva, the goddess, or the great spirit).
22. You have ever received an educational, job training, job, housing, or other opportunity where Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, or other non-Christians were screened out or discriminated against.
23. You have ever been told that a war or invasion, historical or current, was justified because those who were attacked were heathens, infidels, unbelievers, pagans, terrorists, evil, sinners, or fundamentalists of a non-Christian religion.
24. Your foreparents or ancestors were ever subject to invasion, forced conversion, or the use of missionaries as part of a colonization process either in the US or in another part of the world.
25. In your community or metropolitan area, there have been hate crimes against Jews, Muslims, gays, people who are transgender, women, or others based on the perpetrator’s Christian beliefs.
26. You have ever attended public nonreligious functions, such as civic or governmental meetings, which were convened with Christian blessings, references, or prayers.
27. You have ever been asked or commanded to sing or recite, in public, material which had Christian references, such as the Pledge of Allegiance, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” or “America, the Beautiful.”
28. You have ever heard the US referred to as a Christian or God-fearing country.
29. As a young person you were ever read or told to read Christian-themed stories that were not identified as such, for example, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Last of the Mohicans, Little House on the Prairie, Doctor Doolittle, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Babar, Indian in the Cupboard, or the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales.
30. You or young people you know have ever played video games in which white people colonized, attacked, killed, or “converted” darker-skinned people, games in which women were physically brutalized or sexually assaulted, or games where there were “implicit stereotypes of colonial domination.”9
31. You have ever viewed Christian-themed movies that were not identified as such, for example, Star Wars; The Matrix; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; Tarzan.
32. You have ever thought of yourself as non-Christian or not religious, but when you think about it have had a Christian upbringing or have been influenced by Christian rituals and values.
33. You have any feelings of discomfort, reluctance, fear, or defensiveness in talking about the major impact Christianity has had on you and on our society.
notes
1. Alexis de Tocqueville, “Democracy in America,” trans. Henry Reeve (London: Saunders and Otley, 1835), chapter 17. Quoted in Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), 6.
2. ProtectMarriage, the official proponent of Proposition 8, estimates that about half the donations it received came from Mormon sources, and that LDS church members made up somewhere between 80% and 90% of the volunteers for early door-to-door canvassing. Jesse McKinley and Kirk Johnson, “Mormons Tipped Scale in Ban on Gay Marriage,” New York Times, November 14, 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/us/politics/15marriage.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1&hp&oref=slogin.
3. Katherine Stewart, The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children (New York: PublicAffairs, 2012), 45.
4. Mamta Motwani Accapadi, “Christmas in a Cultural Center,” in Warren Blumenfeld et al., Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2008), 26.
5. This is a phrase that George W. Bush used just days after the 9/11 attacks.
6. Conversion did not mean acceptance or safety but was simply less life-threatening.
7. Such as Cornel West, Matthew Fox, Rita Nakashima Brock, Mary Radford Reuther, James Cone, Howard Thurmond, Tricia West, Karen Armstrong, Catherine Keller, and thousands of others, as well as the multitude of majority world cohorts.
8. © 2004. Adapted from Allan Creighton by Paul Kivel with input by Luz Guerra, Nell Myhand, Hugh Vasquez, and Shirley Yee.
9. The phrase is from Ziauddin Sardar, Postmodernism and the Other: The New Imperialism of Western Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 116.
a “Living in the Shadow of the Cross: Understanding and Resisting the Power and Privilege of Christian Hegemony,” by Paul Kivel. www.christianhegemony.org, 2005. Used by permission of the author.