How Unearned Privileges (Or Lack Thereof) Can Impact How Spiritual Beliefs Feel To Seekers

An Examination of Unearned Privilege As A Way To Make Us More Compassionate To All Parts & All People

My BIPOC sister and others like her have done a good job schooling me about how common spiritual beliefs that might feel inspiring, motivational, compassionate and helpful to people on the high end of the unearned privilege scale might feel insulting, hurtful, judgmental, and demeaning to people who lack certain privileges. For example, take the prosperity gospel or the law of attraction/ “manifesting.” Some people honestly believe that a measure of how pious or spiritually powerful they are is how much wealth they’re accumulating, how many of these deepest desires are coming to fruition, how well they’ve been able to “call in the one” or otherwise co-create a life of abundance.

The problem is that such a world view may have a gaping hole in its understanding of unearned privilege, the inequities of unearned privilege, and how much easier it might be to “manifest abundance” if you’re white, cis, hetero, able-bodied and stereotypical Barbie or Ken beautiful. As Rachel Cargyle said, “Maybe you manifested it. Maybe it’s white privilege.”

To give another example, I kind of liked the idea that my soul chose my traumas to help me grow spiritually. It helped me see a silver lining when something awful was happening, like maybe I’m crushed, devastated, disappointed, sad, angry, and terrified, but at least my soul is growing!

But when I ran that one by my queer BIPOC girlfriends, she was like “My soul would never in a million years put me in a biracial female lesbian body in the US in this time in human history. My soul would grow much faster if I wasn’t continuously oppressed.” Fair enough.

And I love the idea of pronoia, that the universe is, at its core, benevolent, a friendly universe that has my back. It’s comforting to believe that. But run that one by people who have been stuck in the lowest Hindu caste systems for generations of oppression, and it’s going to be a hard sell.

We’ll unpack more of the spiritual belief systems that can be oppressive, mean, and insulting in the next installment of Love Bigger: An Exploration Of Spirituality Without Spiritual Bypassing, which you can access with a paid subscription. But for now, let’s just take a moment to reflect on our own privileges or lack thereof.