Rhetoric Race and Religion
Emergent Christianity is a broad term, and progressive an even broader one, so I don’t speak about all people from all movements that use these words to define themselves. I want to make that clear before I move on, because I appreciate and benefit from much progressive Christian thought, and emergent Christianity helped me escape fundamentalism. But in many progressive Christian circles, I feel silenced, as a woman. Several people of color and queer people have told me that they feel the same way. This is why I talk about it.
It starts out with this idea that because a privileged man is educated, and because he is okay with women speaking in the church, isn’t part of the KKK, and doesn’t believe in ex-gay therapy he must an ally to all oppressed groups. The church/conference he attends or the blog that he writes on that has similar values must be a safe haven for all of these oppressed groups, too. When oppressed groups groups bring up the fact that they do not feel comfortable in Privileged Dude’s favorite spaces, or when they bring up the fact that they are underrepresented in these spaces, Privileged Dude refuses to see oppression as part of the problem.
This is the part where Privileged Dude brings up his academic training and feigns blindness to race/sex/orientation/etc. He’s just concerned about “rigorous thinking!” You just don’t understand the Marxist sociopolitical ideology that informs his critique of theories that hegemonic paradigms invisiblize certain subjectivities! Oh, but you’re not educated enough to understand. Don’t worry. . . Privileged Dude will put it in simpler terms for you.
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