The following is a transcript, lightly edited for clarity, of my October 1, 2018 Praxis interview with author and educator Paul Kivel. You can also listen to the interview in the player below. Resources referenced and more at Paul’s website.
Paul Kivel (PK): I’m Paul Kivel, I’m a social justice educator, activist and writer and I’ve been working around the issues of violence prevention and social justice in terms of economic inequality, race, gender, class, sexual orientation, ability, etc. for many decades at this point and I’m always glad to be in the conversation to explore the issues of power and privilege and violence and exploitation and how to build community and create the society we really want to live in.
Taylor Weech (TW): Great, and that work obviously has been going on for years, you’ve published some books on anti-racism that I know of and most recently on this topic were going to cover today, Christian hegemony. So can you get into a bit of what your definition of Christian hegemony or Christian dominance is and how that other work led you to work on that?
PK: Ok, well after many years of working on issues of racism and sexism and economic inequality, I began to see that underneath these different systems of oppression were a combination of powerful institutions and individuals and a world view— a set of dominant concepts— which over the centuries have coalesced into something that shapes the way we think, the way we behave, our public policy and foreign policy and that the foundation of a lot of that was really dominant Christianity. And so I put Christian hegemony in the middle of a piece of butcher paper and other systems of oppression around it and started drawing lines and making connections and seeing how without understanding the central role that Christian dominance plays in our society that we’re really inadequately understanding racism and sexism.
And also our strategies for changing the world are seriously sabotaged and undermined without an adequate understanding of the way the roots of Christian dominance hold it together. So I define Christian hegemony as the everyday, pervasive, and systematic set of Christian values and beliefs; individuals and institutions that dominate all aspects of our society through the social, political and economic power that they wield; and it’s a system of oppression. It’s complex, it’s flexible, and it operates on multiple levels. So let me lay out some of those levels. One level is the internalization of key Christian concepts what we might call dominant Christian worldview by individuals in our society. Another level is the power that individual preachers, ministers, and priests have on people’s lives and in our communities. A third level is the significant political and economic power that specific churches and Christian denominations wield. We see this in the area of public policy around reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, things like that in particular. Another level that Christian dominance operates on is the vast network of parachurch organizations— these are broadly Christian, but not tied to a single denomination which are general tax supported nonprofits such as hospitals, broadcasting networks, publishing houses, lobbying groups, organizations like Focus on the Family, Prison Fellowship, World Mission, The Family, on and on.
There’s literally tens of thousands of these parachurch organizations. The other two levels I want to mention: one is the power elite, the network of maybe 10 to 15 thousand of the most powerful, primarily white Christian men who run the major institutions, the social, political, cultural and economic institutions of our country and the influence they wield, the control they have over our daily lives. The final level, and this is really the cultural level, is the long and deep legacy of Christian ideas, values, practices, policies, icons and texts that have been reproduced over the centuries and continue to shape our everyday behavior and also frame our public and foreign policy decisions. That’s where we should start.
TW: So right up front, you’re not talking about the existence of Christianity as a power system inherently, you’re talking about all of the institutional and other forms of power that it monopolizes in our culture. Is that a correct distillation?
PK: Well some of those are explicitly Christian and some of them are not if I’m understanding you correctly. We have to look at both the ones that are explicitly Christian and also those that are not but that are reproducing the dominant concepts, the political institutions, and informing the way things are. I’m not talking about individual Christians because individual Christians are diverse and have lots of different ways of relating to dominant Christianity and I’m not talking about Christianity per se because there’s a lot of alternative Christianities that have been in juxtaposition to and even in opposition to dominant Christianity—so we can talk about liberation theology, and black churches, and feminist theologies and various contemporary and historical alternative forms of Christianity.
TW: Yeah, so complex, but you did a good job summarizing all of it in a short time. I want to go back to that butcher paper, which is really the foundation of so much social justice work, which is a big butcher paper or legal pad. You put Christian hegemony in the center and started drawing out those arrows. For me, I think the most obvious and it’s because of my situation as a woman in our society, is sexism. I think that’s the one that springs up primarily but I’d like to explore a specific one just to get into this idea. What did your race, the racism line, look like when you pulled it off of that Christian hegemony center?
PK: Well, let’s start with the gender one first, because of course there’s patriarchies in lots of societies and lots of religions, but what’s unique in our society is the way that Christianity has shaped patriarchy into particular forms. So starting with the creation story and the concept of original sin and the blaming of women for as a source of evil in the world, all the way through the 250 years or so of witch burnings and public trials and torture of women, there’s various ways that Christianity has shaped and formed sexism or patriarchy or male supremacy— whatever words we use— in our society today. And similarly with race, racism really came out of the attempts in Spain in the 15th century to create a pure Christian society that excluded Muslims and Jews and became a legal system. That eventually determined that if anyone with even one drop of non-Christian blood could not be a citizen of the Spanish society and was vulnerable to either being expelled or killed and, you know, this was the origins of contemporary racism as its been shaped in Western societies.
TW: …and then that’s operated in a through-line to the present day?
PK: Right, well clearly we have during much of our society here in the U.S., we’ve had a one-drop rule in terms of legal segregation and exploitation, but just this sense that white Christians constituted a pure, normal, centralized version of humanity and everybody who is labeled non-white, non-Christian, is outside the community boundaries and is dangerous, is polluting, is evil in some way.
TW: …and so to what extent do you think in the U.S. specifically, is this idea of Christian dominance built into the foundations and to what extent has it, how has it evolved, in a structural sense in our institutions?
PK: Its’ definitely built into the foundations, it’s built in a number of ways. One is that the colonizing countries in Europe, Portugal, Spain, France, Britain, Holland, etc. were following the mandates of the church— the Roman Catholic church— that claimed divine control over the world and said that Christians had the permission and obligation to go out and convert everyone in the world wherever they were to Christianity and in doing that they could enslave them, they could take their property, they could take over their land, virtually unlimited freedom to go to any place that wasn’t already claimed by Christians. This was called the doctrine of discovery it was issued in papal bulls in the 15th century and all these countries followed that mandate, they used that to guide them in their actions in other countries— in Africa, North and South America, etc. so that is part of the legal foundation of the U.S. and it’s still cited in court cases as precedent in terms of indigenous and U.S. government relationships. Similarly the exploitation and domination of people of color particularly African Americans has always been based on this longstanding concept that non-Christians were heathens, infidels, that they were dangerous, that they were a source of evil and they were not fully human. And so it’s still very much built into our laws and our public policy around the way that people of color are marginalized, excluded and still dehumanized in our cultural media.
TW: And so all of this has continued despite the fact— and correct me if I’m wrong, you probably have data on this and I’m just pulling it out of the back corner of my brain— but I know over the past century and specifically the last 4 or 5 decades, American society has become more secular on an individual level— is that correct? That individuals identify less as religious in general and yet this influence is still pervasive?
PK: Right, at this point 25-30% of the population identifies as non-Christian, as other in some category.
TW: …and is that having an impact on this overall pattern of dominance?
PK: Not particularly. I mean, if we look at the Supreme Court, if we look at political parties, if we look at who’s leading our corporations, our cultural institutions, think tanks, universities, we still have primarily white Christian males in power and with the accumulation of the most wealth. And if we look in our cultural media, the icons and stories and images of dominant Christianity are still primarily what we see and that guides people’s beliefs and behavior, so it’s not about numbers per se, although the numbers are significant. It’s about power and wealth and control.
TW: And while that’s— while were talking about the U.S., to back up, to where you were talking before about the doctrine of discovery, maybe we can also address how these ideas have affected U.S. foreign policy and kind of… U.S. imperial moves? This kind of idea that was popularized in the Bush Administration, but I think it predates that and continues beyond it— of the U.S. as being engaged in a kind of holy war or, you know, a conquest that’s been sanctioned by God.
PK: It’s actually, it’s pervasive within European countries as well as the U.S. and in South Africa and New Zealand, Australia— very Christian countries, this concept that anywhere in the world is kind of our domain and if it’s not Christian yet, it should be. And we are blessed by God, we call that manifest destiny or American exceptionalism— that we can go anywhere to save people, to help people, that we are the good guys, that everybody else is inferior and needs our help. So a lot of our interference, our exploitation and military invasions of other countries is based on this concept that truth and democracy and free markets and Christianity and bringing all of God’s goodies to those who don’t yet have them. Of course in the Cold War this was really explicit, because communism was seen as a form of atheism and the evil enemy of the U.S., which was God’s chosen country, but that goes all the way back to the pilgrims and the idea of the city on the hill and people here (being the white people here) being the role models for the rest of the world.
TW: Yeah and I mean the Cold War is when we get “under God” inserted into the pledge of allegiance, right?
PK: Yeah and “In God We Trust” on our currency. And just not the Cold War exclusively, but like you mentioned, Bush really actually used the word “crusade” after 9/11 to talk about [our mission] and the Crusades were started a thousand years ago but for that entire thousand years pretty much Muslims were the enemy outside, the threat against Christianity and Christendom.
TW: And I believe Bush was— less in public addresses and more in information that came out from inside the administration— but he was known to quote Revelations and talk about end-times prophecy in reference to our excursions and imperial wars in the Middle East. So how does that kind of the end-times theology play into Christian hegemony in general? We’ve talked about the savior complex and some of those other things, but how does that specific… flavor of Christianity I suppose influence the rest of these systems?
PK: I think the apocalyptic aspect of dominant Christianity has always been very strong. Even today about half of the U.S. population thinks that the end-times will come within their lifetime, that’s a tremendous amount of people in this country who believe concretely in that apocalyptic vision. It comes out of the sense that Revelations in particular in the New Testament, but also from the cosmic battle between good and evil, between God and the devil, the dualism of dominant Christianity in the sense that there is a cosmic battle going on and people have to be on one side or the other. It’s very simple minded. Bush said “you’re either with us or against us” and that’s something presidents have said for the last couple hundred years, and its a common framework, “which side are you on”, “are you with us or against us”. And if you’re against us, it doesn’t mean that you have a different opinion, or different interests, but that you’re actually representing the interests of evil and the devil in the world and therefore it’s not about negotiations or compromise, it’s about annihilation and destruction. Because you don’t compromise, you don’t even talk to evil, you just have to kill it and eliminate it.
So it definitely influences our propensity to go to war, to attack other countries, and people’s sense of it also has undermined our environmental justice work. So many people in this country don’t actually care about what happens to the environment because the world’s going to end anyway and therefore we shouldn’t be paying that much attention to whats going on with the environment. And coupled with the dominant Christian concept that humans were given dominion over the earth by God— the two concepts together mean that there’s kind of very little effort or attention on controlling the devastation that’s happening to the natural world.
TW: I chose to interview [you] this week because tomorrow Spokane will be visited by Vice President Mike Pence, perhaps we can get into him specifically a little bit and what he represents, his wing of the current administration, how it fits into these ideas. But that idea about the environment is one of the key things that jumps out at me because my main background is in environmental work and that idea that we can’t mess it up too much because we’re supposed to be in control, humans are supposed to be on top of this imaginary pyramid with everything else on earth below us…
PK: Right and one of the things that leads to is people being unable to comprehend what it is like to live interdependently with the natural world in mutual and balanced relationships, so even the environmental work that some Christians do is changing “dominion” to “stewardship”, but still with humans in control and on top and not with a real sense of interdependence and balance and mutuality. I would say we really need to understand the core of how that hinders our ability to have really radical solutions to environmental crises we face.
TW: …and tied up into all of that and into what you were talking about before is the idea of predestination either with specific individuals or also just destiny in terms of God’s plan, how does that work? What does that thread look like, wherever you’d like to follow it?
PK: Predestination is usually applied to individuals, a sense that our lives are predestined and in that sense dominant Christianity says we have a choice to make: to follow God or to follow our evil impulses and move to the side of the devil, but the larger picture that there’s a linear temporal framework for the world. God created the world, there was an intercession when Jesus was alive and then killed, and there’s an endpoint, final judgement, you know, an apocalypse, whatever. Different Christians believe different scenarios around that but in the dominant Christian worldview this is all laid out by God and, you know, we’re moving along on this linear timeline towards the final times.
TW: …and that’s a very —considered a Western concept— and I think that the more I hear you talk about this and the more I read about on this topic, the more I realize the conflation between Western thought and Christianity.
PK: Right. I mean, Western thought developed around Christian domination in our society and the idea of progress was first talked about by Christians in the 12th and 13th centuries and that’s—all our concepts of progress and the future and development and things that we think about come from this linear timeframe that we really have to question. Many societies have linear timeframes, but they tend to be more cyclical, based on the annual cycle or longer term cycles of time. And then for many indigenous people in the world, time is less important than place and what happens in that place and what the history and the natural world of that place is like. So there’s lots of other ways to conceive of the world in terms of time and place and Christianity presents us with a certain kind of time-space framework and it dominates and eliminates our ability to think about things more complexly and to be more tied into the natural world.
TW: …and I guess— unless you protest to this i would like to move on to just the example of Mike Pence— I think kind of epitomizing the moment that we’re at with this concept. He’s the technically the second most powerful person in the country and by some estimations the world, can you talk a little bit about him and what wing of Christian domination he represents?
PK: I can talk a little bit about Mike Pence. I don’t know a lot of details about who he is or where he comes from, but he is part of a fundamentalist strain of Christianity which is called dominionism. It’s about creating the U.S. in the image of a Christian society. It’s tied into…the “seven mountains” of society, the major institutions that’s important for Christians to control those 7 dominant institutions, the government, the education system, things like that. And so it’s an explicit agenda not just for Christians to be in power, but for the entire society to be reshaped in the image of a perfect Christian society. And in that society, most of us don’t have a place because we are considered to be other— whether we’re female or queer or trans or Jewish or Muslim or recent immigrants or people of color or indigenous or people with disabilities— all of us are considered not part of that pure Christian society based upon values of purity and goodness. That writes us out of the story basically and so they see themselves waging war or crusades in the name of Christianity against evil and they don’t really care about the casualties of that and most of us would be casualties if they are able to do what they want to do. There’s a lot of variations on that and Pence is just part of certain strands of that, but it’s highly dangerous because it’s associated with tremendous amounts of influence and wealth and power and is kind of relentless in these people’s attempts to undermine our democratic institutions and the kinds of core values that so many of us hold dear.
TW: It’s really stark to think about the ideals (whether they’ve been realized properly or not) of the U.S. around pluralism and around democracy and representation for everyone, are so counter to this idea that it’s interesting to think about the fact that people in power who speak to those ideals and give them lip service are also, from the other side of their mouth, talking about being a Christian nation, etc.
PK: Right and Christians, really powerful Christians, in this sense have the ability to speak to many millions of Christians in our society who are evangelicals, or fundamentalists or Catholics or Protestants of whatever sort in a language that is coded with Biblical references and phrases and terms that have developed to speak to them in a way that is not literally apparent or clear to the rest of us because we don’t have those frameworks and vocabulary. so Bush and Pence and so many others don’t sound as radically Christian in that sense as they might because so much of what they say is coded in dominant Christian language. And that’s important. The other thing thats important is that this is— so many people are working to get Trump out of office and impeached and lessen the damage that he could do, but its not just Mike Pence, but others in the administration and outside who have these kinds of radical Christian agendas are going to continually… we need to really understand the longer term struggle to limit their ability to unravel our society and to prevent us from actually creating the inclusive, democratic, and sustainable society that we want to live in.
TW: Yeah and I just recall, I mean Mike Pence is pretty open about it in some ways, he’s quoted as saying “I’m a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order” so I mean he’s pretty up front with it. But how do you think, we can start to get into solution territory here, how do you suggest based on your work that we begin to address this deep seated quasi-invisible force?
PK: I think one way we begin to address it is to realize it’s not just about the far right or conservative Christians or particular parts of dominant Christianity, but we live in a deeply hegemonic Christian society in which we’ve all been socialized into certain concepts and values whether we are Christian or not, whether we’ve rejected Christianity or not. A lot of the core concepts of dualism, and cosmic battle between good and evil, and individualism, and domination over nature, and on and on, sin and salvation, all that kind of stuff shows up in many ways in our thinking and behavior and our institutions. We have to understand the problem of Christian hegemony as one that’s much more deeply rooted than its most radical manifestations. Without understanding that and the history and the force which holds that together and without understanding the actual concrete forms of political power and wealth and control that denominations and churches and individuals have accumulated, we’re not able to seriously address what we’re up against.
I think that in my book and on my website, there’s lots of resources about what Christians can do, what resistance looks like, how those of us who are not Christian have resisted over the centuries. There’s a section on the website—stories of resistance—how different people and organizations are fighting Christian dominance today whether it’s public policy that supports Christian institutions and infringes on our civil liberties around reproductive rights or LGBTQ rights or impacts our foreign policy that there’s lots of ways that people are resisting. But we need to understand how the system works, the depth of it, what holds it together and then basically we have to decolonize our minds as we get together with other people to fix particular issues to struggle around with an understanding of —whether its environmental or reproductive rights or criminal legal system issues or foreign policy issues— that unless we have a lens which helps us understand how Christian dominance is shaped by those issues, our solutions and strategies won’t be adequate to fight back.
TW: Having read the book, even just doing the exercises, the thought exercises of examining your own life and the influence that Christianity and Christian dominance has had in ways you might not initially identify has been really helpful. You have facilitated a lot of these conversations through the research process and in sharing this work—what are some of the common barriers that people come up against when they begin to look at this issue and how do you help them learn through those challenges and barriers?
PK: Well the common resistance is from Christians. Most people who are not Christian have a pretty clear understanding, they may not have the vocabulary and framework I’m presenting, but they have a pretty clear understanding of the dominance of Christianity and the negative aspects of that in their lives. So talking about Christianity in particular, then there’s a lot of Christians who actually have ambivalent relationships with dominant Christianity because they’re queer or trans or women or people with disabilities or people of color, etc. that even though they’re Christian, they’re not fully accepted and represented and empowered within Christian institutions. So there’s resistance there. One of the things I come up with a lot is people say “that’s not my Christianity”, “I don’t believe that”, “that’s not my Jesus”, and that’s fine, but that’s a way of saying “this isn’t my problem, I’m not responsible.” It’s like white people who say “I’m not a racist” or “I’m not a member of the Klan” and again, that’s fine, but we all as white people have a responsibility to address racial injustice in our society because we’re benefiting at the expense and exploitation of other people.
Now Christians also get benefits in our society from being Christian or passing as Christian and one of those is acceptance and opportunities that people who are not Christian are locked out of. So this part of the resistance is realizing…whatever your relationship to dominant Christianity, that we all have a responsibility to be working to end it because it impacts all of us and destroys the structures of our society. The second kind of resistance I get is people immediately saying “what about Islam? isn’t it worse?”. There’s such a long history of Islamophobia in our country that people immediately assume that even though Christianity may not be perfect, Islam is far worse and more dangerous and therefore it’s ok because we have to fight the evil enemy out there. And first of all, that’s usually just based off stereotypes and misinformation about Islam and second, we’re here in the U.S. in a Christian dominated society and this is what were up against. So you know, it’s a distraction from that to start looking at the complexities of Islam and the many, many different cultures and countries in which it exists— in China, and India, and Indonesia, and Kenya, the Middle East and all over the world. And we need to not focus our attention on Islam, but what we’re up against here which is Christian dominance.
TW: …and how have you—I was going to say shepherded— (laughter) how have you guided people through that?
PK: It depends a lot on what the situation is and what the time limit is and what people’s motivations are. And I think it’s important we have these conversations 1 on 1 wth people, and in 1 on 1 conversations, we can have a better sense of who they are and where they’re coming from and what their resistance is to look at this. Workshops and trainings and talks— it’s more of a group process and you build some exercises that help people move collectively through an understanding of what I mean and what this system of Christian hegemony looks like. And then for people who work in churches or with religious congregations or explicitly Christian groups, then there’s some different exercises to look at —how does Christian dominance show up in Christian institutions even though people might be committed to alternative values than those dominant ones? The roles that institutions can play in challenging that dominant Christianity. It depends a lot on who and what and where and how— the how comes out of the others.
TW: …and just in these last few minutes I’m wondering if you have a favorite…example of resistance? A favorite from your stories of resistance?
PK: I don’t know that I have a favorite one. I think there’s a lot of resistance that’s really important, the resistance of indigenous people around the country at Standing Rock and so many other places and throughout the world, protecting sacred sites, protecting sovereignty, resisting the exploitation of natural resources, the natural environment— it’s very inspiring frontline work. The atheist community, particularly some of the atheist organizations have been strong defenders of religious freedom and separation of church and state— [they] are constantly bringing lawsuits and challenging the imposition of Christian culture and norms and ceremonies and prayers into our daily lives and there’s lots of that around the country. For a lot of us, resistance just looks like survival. For indigenous people, for Jews, for others— we weren’t meant to survive. Ultimately within dominant Christianity, the goal was to move us out of the way and get rid of us. It can take a lot of different forms. We need to learn to recognize and see those forms. Then, of course, the resistance of women for instance today, fighting for end of sexual assault, domestic violence, reproductive freedom, comparable wages, full inclusion, these are also forms of resistance to Christian dominance in our society and a dominant Christian agenda which would continue to marginalize women. And so these we also have to understand as forms of resistance that are even more powerful when we understand their relationship to dominant Christianity.
TW: Yeah those are all good examples and again there’s a whole section on your website. And just in closing, what are some other —aside from your website—some other resources you would recommend?
PK: I would, rather than accessing resources, there’s lots on the site and book, I would say start conversations about this topic. Get involved with— if you’re Christian, with progressive Christian groups that are social justice based and bring this framework in to that work. If you’re outside of Christian institutions, to also get together with others and look at the ways Christian dominance plays out in the organizations you’re in, the institutions, the community, in the culture, there’s lots of resources for personal growth and education, but we also need to be connecting with others and lifting up and joining the struggle to challenge the Christian dominance of our society and institutions.
TW: Well thank you so much for talking with me today!
PK: Thank you—it’s good to be with you and part of the conversation.