This week marks our final recording from the 2016 Minnesota Renaissance Festival. We sit down in the beautiful trailer studios with our good friend Tony Miller to take another look at Christian Privilege in America. Tim spends a fair amount of time discussing the false equivalence between Tim Tebow and Colin Kaepernick. We also talk about the ark park, televangelism, and a lot of other subtle ways that Christians in America are not being persecuted even a little bit. Tony then gets to ask us five very thoughtful questions. You can totally answer them yourself in the comments!
I agree that it doesn’t look like we in the US are on track to eliminate Christian Privilege in our lifetimes. It is on the otherhand remarkable to note that many European countries, and I think some in other parts of the world, when from majority-religious to majority-secular in a rather short time, less than a century I think, such as Scandinavia, Estonia, etc.
However, it’s first of all it’s not clear that Christian privilege doesn’t still exist in those countries, at least as compared with other religions, as we saw with France recently, though perhaps Christianity doesn’t enjoy as much of a privilege over atheism or other types of secularism there as it does in the US.
Second, as many parts of Europe became more secular, some of the more vocal advocates in the US came to take pride in defining this country as *not* participating in that trend, that we were the ones keeping the torch alive for Christianity in the West, as opposed, of course at first to the Communist world, but also especially after the end of the Cold War as opposed to Western (and Northern) Europe as well.
So we will have to overcome that national pride at what some of us might consider a lack of progress to get there.