Understanding Christian privilege: Managing the tensions of spiritual plurality

T Seifert - About Campus, 2007 - journals.sagepub.com
About Campus, 2007journals.sagepub.com
Education, Elizabeth Tisdell details the intersections between students' gendered, racial,
ethnic, and spiritual identities and asserts that students' spirituality as a dimension of their
learning warrants greater attention. Peter Laurence, director of the Education as
Transformation Project, explains in a 1999 About Campus article how spiritual development
supports the twenty-firstcentury goals of higher education. He notes,“Students are in the
process of discovering what it means to be in community as they also develop their own …
Education, Elizabeth Tisdell details the intersections between students’ gendered, racial, ethnic, and spiritual identities and asserts that students’ spirituality as a dimension of their learning warrants greater attention. Peter Laurence, director of the Education as Transformation Project, explains in a 1999 About Campus article how spiritual development supports the twenty-firstcentury goals of higher education. He notes,“Students are in the process of discovering what it means to be in community as they also develop their own worldviews. Students who develop a sense of [religious] pluralism during this critical time of their development can later play a key role in the building of a more stable and inclusive civil society”(p. 13). If contemporary education is to include holistic learning and development of citizen leaders, students must not be treated as disembodied intellects but as whole people whose minds “cannot be disconnected from feeling and spirit, from heart and soul,” according to Parker Palmer in his article “Evoking the Spirit in Public Education”(p. 10). This combination of feeling spirit, and mind—a foundation of the student affairs profession—is often framed as dimensions of holistic student learning. Research on learning indicates that what and how students feel affects not only how they view themselves and how they interact with others but what they know and believe to be true. Spiritual development, which bridges the affective and cognitive, contributes to the three capacities that embody learning and liberal education, which Martha Nussbaum details in Cultivating Humanity. These capacities include “critical examination of oneself and one’s traditions, understanding the ways in which common needs and aims are differently realized in different circumstances, and the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself”(pp. 9–11). As a facet of learning and a means to accomplish the larger goals of higher education, spiritual development is important for students of all faiths. One obstacle that can get in the way of this development is Christian privilege—the conscious and subconscious advantages often afforded the Christian faith in America’s colleges and universities. In this article, I suggest that Christian privilege must be acknowledged and dismantled before environments truly conducive to spiritual development for all can be created. Christian privilege—as well as other kinds of privilege—hinders the development of all students. It may forestall or foreclose Christian students’ critical examination of themselves and their own traditions while simultaneously stifling non-Christian students’ expression of their spiritual identity. Helping students recognize the existence of Christian privilege and how it impinges on learning is an important first step in managing both the subtle and apparent tensions that exist on a spiritually plural campus and in openly exploring the ethical and existential questions important to life in the twenty-first century. With that recognition, the higher education community can begin to create spaces for dialogue in which non-Christian and Christian students alike feel free to openly share and learn with others. My intent in writing this article is to help start a community dialogue about how to manage spiritually plural campus environments, beginning with a definition of Christian privilege and examples of student experiences. I conclude with recommendations for applying specific principles in order to create communities of dialogue on individual campuses.
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