Exploring Intersectional Understandings of Christian Hegemony and White Supremacy with Pre-Service Social Studies Teachers

• In Event: Critical Hope and Collective (Re)Imaginings: Intersectional Approaches to Decentering Whiteness in an Initial Licensure Program

Abstract

Purpose/theoretical framework
Christian hegemony encompasses the privileges that Christians experience and the institutionalization of Christianity as a norm in society (Blumenfeld, 2006; Gramsci, 1973). In schools, hegemonic Christian values work with white supremacy to justify the oppression of minoritized youth. This study explores how discussing whiteness and Christianity in a social studies teacher education program led to deepened conversations about power, privilege, oppression and identity. The research questions that guide this study are:
How does teaching a lesson about the relationship between white supremacy and Christian hegemony early in the semester impact a pre-service social studies teacher (PSSST) cohort?
How do PSSST make sense of power, privilege, and oppression in relation to white supremacy and Christian hegemony?
This study is grounded in a theory of Christian hegemony (TCH) that puts Christian dominance in conversation with white supremacy (Aronson et al., 2021). Religious identity intersects with racial and ethnic identities in a variety of ways that lead to the oppression of people with minoritized religious identities. For example, the Bible has been used to justify American slavery.

Methods
This study utilized narrative inquiry, in which the researcher is an active participant in the study, to gather data (Clandinin & Connelly, 2004) The author of this study is white and Jewish. The study was conducted in a secondary PSST classroom at a large, midwestern research university. Participants included 17 preservice teachers, one of whom identified as non-white and one of whom was Jewish. Data was collected through reflective journaling, recorded conversations with students, and document analysis of student work, course materials and syllabi. Grounded theory was employed to explore emerging themes in the data (Corbin & Strauss, 2008).

Results
Preliminary results suggest that exposing PSSST to conversations about whiteness and Christianity led to a deepened understanding of power, privilege, and oppression. After the initial lesson, PSSST continued to refer back to conversations about whiteness and Christianity. The day after our first lesson one student said, “I’m struggling with how to reckon with the bad things Christian people have done, knowing that I’m not a Christian like that. I think I have a lot of work to do.” This shows that the student recognized the connection between their identity and broader systemic oppression, and also was struggling with making sense of it still. A few weeks later, we discussed herofication and villainization of historical figures one student said, “Would the hero/ villain dichotomy be an example of Christian conceptions of good and evil?” PSSST expressed their desire to continue grappling with the connection between Christian hegemony and white supremacy.

Scholarly Significance of the Study
Christian nationalism is on the rise within public schools, as evidenced by Oklahoma’s recent mandate to teach the Bible and Ten Commandments (Burke et al., 2023). PSSST largely feel unprepared to address these topics, however it's clear that interventions exposing them to the connection between whiteness and Christianity are helpful. Teacher educators must take the rise in Christian nationalism seriously and change their programs accordingly.

Author

• Emma Eckstein Nicosia, University of Minnesota