Chapter 8: Unburning The Cross—Lifting The Veil on Christian Privilege and White Supermacy in The United States and Abroad: Building Multicultural Understanding of Religion, Spirituality, Faith, and Secularity in Educational and Workplace Settings ¹

Though public education and work spaces are officially secular, subtle religious and quasi-religious messages permeate these environments throughout the year. Generally, these messages come with Christian overtones. In much the same vein as Peggy McIntosh’s work on male privilege and white privilege (1988), the goal of this chapter is to identify strategies for creating an inclusive educational and/or work environment that supports and values the identities of Christian and non-Christian students and employees, while addressing the overt and subtle forms of discrimination that primarily affect non-Christians. This chapter introduces and discusses the concept of Christian privilege as a form of white supremacy in the United States and abroad. It will undertake a case study examination of the University of Maryland’s Office of Human Relations Programs’ (OHRP) efforts to confront Christian privilege and build religiously, spiritually, faith-based, and secularly inclusive community within OHRP and across campus, paying special attention to the process through which these efforts were undertaken to ensure that both the confrontation of, and resolution to, Christian privilege honored the complexities of multiple social identities, especially those embedded in a juxtaposition of Christian privilege with race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic oppression. And, it will examine the secularization of Christianity and the impact of this on the perpetuation of Christian privilege and white supremacy, both nationally and internationally, in Post 9/11 and Fahrenheit 9/11 political climates.