Christian privilege
The concept of hegemony describes the ways in which a dominant group, in this case mainly U.S. Protestant Christians, disseminate their "dominant" social constructions as common sense, normative, or even universal, even though most of the world's inhabitants are not Christian. Christian hegemony also accepts Christianity as part of the natural order, even at times by those who are marginalized, disempowered, or rendered invisible by it. Thus, Christian hegemony helps to maintain the marginality of other religions and beliefs. According to Beaman, "the binary opposition of sameness/difference is reflected in Protestant/minority religion in which mainstream Protestantism is representative of the 'normal'".
Essex School of discourse analysis
Founding figures of this approach are Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, two post-Marxist political theorists, who, disillusioned with economic reductionism, tried, since the 1970s, to reinterpret Gramsci’s theory of hegemony to highlight the role of meaning and of processes of interpellation and identification in the creation of political identities and in the articulation and sedimentation of political discourses and hegemonic orders. The paradigmatic formulation of this innovative orientation and of its various conceptual innovations can be found in Laclau’s and Mouffe’s "Hegemony and Socialist Strategy", first published in 1985, as well as in many subsequent contributions of the two thinkers.