Debunking Christian Privilege

I've just been made this community's third moderator. elf and I have been discussing privately some of the wording in the original post and will be editing it later this week when we're less busy at work. It probably was not the best idea to start this community so early in the week. I do appreciate the vigorous discussion (and personally apologise for being stupid about forgetting how many very different countries are in the Commonwealth, because that really was idiotic) but it's clear that we need to discuss things among ourselves before posting another draft. As mods, elf, pj and I will not all have the same opinions (we're co-mods, not clones) but we will be working together to achieve some kind of consensus. We are in agreement that the original post needs to be reworked. We are not yet in agreement as to how, so please give us time.

This community is not intended just for people in the USA to talk about specifically USian problems. If it seems that we are ignoring the problems of non-Christians in other countries where Christian privilege is entrenched, please let us know. However, we all live in the USA and may not be as well informed on those areas as we are about problems in the USA. I am totally willing to have my USian privilege checked but I cannot make it go away except by studying on it and/or fucking up and learning from that. We will be welcoming posts from non-Christians in other Christian countries. (Also, they're Pagan and I'm Jewish; we are certainly interested in Muslim, Hindu, Afro-diasporic, Native and other voices that aren't ours. I know I don't know as much about those perspectives as I should.)

However, this is a community meant specifically to address issues of Christian privilege. The people who run this community know what it's like to be non-Christian in a Christian society. We do not know what it's like not to be Muslim in Saudi Arabia, not to be Jewish in Israel, or not to be Hindu in India. The history of those countries is different from the history of 'Christendom' and we'd rather not make conjectures that might be insulting or erasing; we'd also rather not get derailed by those discussions. This is also not a community for discussing the oppression of Christians in foreign countries; that is off topic and can end up in the land of derailing. We will rewrite the draft of the community rules so that it does not erase those people, but will probably not spend lots of time discussing them.

Finally, we will fuck up sometimes. I wish that were preventable, but even though we don't have Christian privilege, we have other kinds. I try to take correction well, I can't speak for anyone else, but I promise that I will tell co-mods if I think they're wrong although I reserve the right to do it in private if I think that would be more effective.

Thanks for reading. I don't have a mod hat icon yet, so you get art instead.