The George Washington University’s Multicultural Student Services Center is hosting a seminar teaching the perils of “Christian privilege.” The event description promises that, upon completing the session, attendees will be able to list three examples of Christian privilege as well as ways to ally with non-Christian persons. The outlandish event demonstrates a flawed understanding of Christianity on campuses and around world.
For those attending or leading the Christian privilege session, here’s what it’s really like to be a Christian on campus.
Like most colleges in the U.S., GWU is home to a vibrant party culture. Activities that contradict Christian values like binge drinking, casual sexual encounters, and recreational drug use are promoted at social events. If you don’t partake, you’re either excluded from social functions or left to stand awkwardly in the corner while your friends blackout from drinking too much.
University academics are no friendlier to Christian beliefs. Science departments go out of their way to demean Christian beliefs of Creationism without considering evidence presented by Christian scholars. Social science classes attack Christianity as a hateful religion that attacks the gay community, the trans community, and a woman’s right to have an abortion. Of course, by “attack,” they mean “have a different viewpoint.”
Secular student organizations feed into the anti-Christian culture on campus, especially at GWU. During Holy Week, a student run newspaper shared a satirical article comparing Jesus to a lesbian stereotype. Christian students who spoke out against the article, myself included, were called homophobic. Other student organizations, concerned about conflicting with the March For Our Lives, rescheduled events so that they fell on Palm Sunday. Partisan protesting was given preference over an important Christian religious holiday.
I’m not complaining or trying to gain sympathy for Christians on college campuses. No one chooses to follow God because it’s easy. We choose to follow him so that our Earthly life reflects his image and so that we may join him in eternal life.
The Multicultural Student Services Center’s Christian Privilege Session demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of Christianity. One of the learning objectives for the session, clearly targeted at Christians, states that following the session, participants will be able to list at least three ways to be an ally with a non-Christian person. Christians are already allies with non-Christians. The church engages in countless community service activities locally, nationally, and internationally. We do so with the purpose of helping others, Christian and non-Christian, and spreading the good news that Jesus died so that we may live. If the Multicultural Student Services Center expects Christians to stop trying to share the word, they are asking us to stop being Christians.
The Multicultural Student Services Center also twists the definition of privilege to fit their narrative. Typically, liberal diversity activists have presented privilege as the benefits someone receives due to a part of their identity they cannot change (male or white privilege). However, religion is a choice. Unlike your skin color, you can change, mask, or hide your religion. No person (or institution) who looks at me knows I am Christian and gives me benefits they would refuse to a non-Christian. This session undermines the definition of privilege that liberals have been promoting for years.
George Washington University prides itself on preparing students for a global community, yet this event ignores Christian persecution around the world. The Christians forced to worship in secrecy or face slaughter for their beliefs in Pakistan, Afghanistan, North Korea, and many more countries are not privileged. The Christian privilege seminar description does not even hint toward discussions of global Christian persecution. Somehow, I doubt it will be a topic of discussion.
If you’re interested in learning about what it’s like to be a Christian on a college campuses, skip the Christian Privilege event and attend a Christian student organization meeting or a student church service. Ask questions and form your own opinion. You’ll learn much more from real religious leaders than from a diversity professional claiming to be qualified to instruct Christians on how to walk with Christ.
