The Religious Food Court and Christian Privilege

There is a food court somewhere in the middle of America that has become, without anyone quite planning it, a perfect metaphor for the most contentious arguments in our national life. Walk past the entrance and the place you’ll notice first — the one with the longest lines, the warmest bread smell drifting into the corridor… Read More

Shade, Roots, and Leaves That Don’t Look Like Yours

Find the right tree on a hot August afternoon and you will understand something about civilization that no lecture can teach. The shade beneath a great oak is not an accident. It is the accumulated result of decades — sometimes centuries — of growth, of roots driving deep into the earth, of branches spreading wide because the seed and soil and years all conspired together in exactly the right way. You did not plant this tree. You arrived beneath it already grown. You are cool where others are not. You are sheltered where others burn. … Read More

Truly Christian Behavior: Values, America, and the Critique of Christian Privilege

Christianity, at its core, is a faith system built on the twin commandments to love God with all one’s heart and to love one’s neighbor as oneself — a framework that has demonstrably shaped the most consequential nation in human history. The United States of America did not emerge from a vacuum. Its founding documents, its institutions, its culture of ordered liberty, and its eventual self-correction on historic moral failures all draw meaningfully from a Christian theological inheritance. To acknowledge this is not to claim the nation has been perfectly Christian — it has not — but rather to observe that its greatest achievements reflect Christian ideals applied faithfully, and its greatest failures reflect those same ideals abandoned or distorted. …Read More

Muslim Privilege: Applying the Logic of “Christian Privilege” to Majority-Muslim Countries

In American academic and social justice discourse, “Christian Privilege” has become a widely deployed concept describing the unearned advantages that Christians receive by virtue of being the religious majority in the United States. Scholars and advocates have catalogued dozens of examples — from federally recognized holidays to unexamined assumptions in courtrooms, workplaces, and media. The core argument is straightforward: when the dominant religion of a country’s culture and government shapes its laws and institutions, members of minority faiths are disadvantaged. This report accepts that logic at face value and turns it 180 degrees. …Read More