Traversing Boundaries: Dialogues on Christian Privilege, Religious Oppression, and Religious Pluralism among Believers and Non-Believers

A dialogic modelfor the discussion ofissues related to Christian privilege and religious oppression ofminority religious groups and non-believers in the UnitedStates is presented Thegoal ofthe dialogue circles is to create and maintaina true multicultural community on the university campus. One of our responsibilities as members of a teacher education faculty is to teach the required multicultural course. Within the discussions in our classrooms we have witnessed various levels of resistance to the concept of "privilege". Part of that resistance is manifested around issues related to Christian privilege. Religious scholar Diana Eck (2001) summarizes the multicultural "dilemma " created by Christian privilege: The new American dilemma is real religious pluralism, and it poses challenges to America's Christian churches that are as difficult and divisive as those of race. Today, the invocation of a Christian America takes on a new set of tensions as our population of Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist neighbors grows. The ideal of a Christian America stands in contradiction to the spirit, if not the letter, of America's foundational principle of religious freedom (p. 46). Based on Peggy McIntosh's (1988) pioneering investigations of White and male privilege, we can, by analogy, understand Christian privilege as constituting a seemingly invisible, unearned, and largely unacknowledged array of benefits afforded to Christians. This system of benefits confers dominance on Christians while subordinating members of other faiths as well as non believers. These systemic inequities are pervasive throughout society. They are encoded into the individual's consciousness and woven into the very fabric o