Abstract
The chapter serves as a case study focusing on the impact of a pervasive Christian culture and climate at a large Midwestern state-supported land-grant university. The chapter is founded on the conceptual organizers of McIntosh’s concept of dominant group “privilege,” Gramsci’s notion of “hegemony,” Foucault’s “regimes of truth,” de Tocqueville’s “tyranny of the majority,” Pharr’s “elements of oppression,” and Watt’s “Privileged Identity Exploration” (PIE) model. Specifically, in this context, the author defines Christian hegemony as “the overarching system of advantages bestowed on Christians. It is the institutionalization of a Christian norm or standard, which establishes and perpetuates the notion that all people are or should be Christian thereby privileging Christians and Christianity, and excluding the needs, concerns, ethnic, and religious cultural practices and life experiences of people who are not Christian. Often overt, though at times subtle, Christian hegemony is oppression by intent and design, but also by neglect, omission, erasure, and distortion.”
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Blumenfeld, W.J. (2019). Challenging Christian Hegemony and Christian Privilege in Academia. In: Papa, R. (eds) Handbook on Promoting Social Justice in Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74078-2_113-1
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