About Those New, Western Values—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

 

I continue to be very pessimistic about the public square, expecting an increasing opposition to and persecution of Christians throughout the world.  This is based on reading stories daily about how Christians are opposed, sued, discriminated against, deplatformed, and ridiculed.  This does not mean for me a disengagement with the world but a recalculation of what that engagement involves.  The prophets found themselves in the important role in ancient Israel of telling the governmental and social powers of their day that they did not know God.  As the West today becomes increasingly anti-Christian, not simply post-Christian, in its values and practices, and as it redefines virtues in anti-Christian ways, the Church’s engagement with the public square ought to be less and less a matter of finding common cause with others in the pursuit of justice but needs rather to be a matter of showing the world that it is not the Kingdom of God.  An anti-Christian vision of the world defines social justice in a way that is opposed to divine justice.

One significant way to describe the moral changes in public discourse about justice is in terms of social values.  Not that long ago, Western values were defined in terms of human rights, based on the notion that all humans were equal.  Freedom and equality became the primary values for the West.  The American version of this argument involved a Deist understanding: the Creator made humans from the same cloth, so to speak, and He endowed them with inalienable rights in the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, as Thomas Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence.  The French had their secular understanding of this, but it, too, highlighted similar values: equality, liberty, and fraternity.  Over the history of secular Western modernity hung the vestige of a Judeo-Christian worldview involving freedom and equality for all because there is one God, Creator of all.  With this loosely Christian version of justice, Christians could usually agree—it was their ethic, after all, that stood at the root of Deist and secularist versions of the public square’s ethic.  Thus, Christians could frequently engage the public square in common cause with non-Christians.  Or they could, at least, dialogue and argue with them.

In the 21st century, however, these values have been shuffled to the storage closet and three new values have been erected in the public square: diversity, equity, and inclusion.  Not a few in the West have been duped by the reshuffling of values, thinking that there is continuity between what was and what is now proclaimed as truths self-evident.  The three new values are all predicated on the essential differences of humanity, not their essential sameness.  Instead of universal commonality or unity we now have diversity.  Instead of equality we now have equity.  Instead of God’s work of inclusion, His mission—Christians would say His offer of salvation through Jesus’ sacrificial death for the sins of the world—we have strictly human efforts at inclusion, particularly of things God calls sin.  The shift in values in the public square has left many Christians speechless.  Thinking that diversity, equity, and inclusion sound like worthy values, ones Christians might affirm, they have been confused at the resultant changes in Western society.

I recall one well-meaning Christian jumping on the Black Lives Matter bandwagon only a short while ago, thinking that this racist organization was all about racial justice.  I know a seminary administration and board that has made diversity its mantra, even down to replacing white male authors on its syllabi for anything else—as though truth wears the faces of the authors writing about it and academic excellence is found in readers’ responses rather than critical arguments.  I know of ministers who crafted confused sermons about diversity, equity, or inclusion, not realizing that they were shifting the congregation’s eyes from the cross to street activism, from the Church’s mission to the public square’s version of justice.  The confusion comes because activist efforts in the face of perceived or actual injustices are easily endorsed without realizing that they are defined and pursued in entirely non-Christian ways.  Justice in the Kingdom of God is not a mere quantitative improvement of justice in the public square; it is a qualitatively different understanding of justice.

Some ‘evangelical’ seminaries have contributed to the confusion.  Even before the value shift to diversity instead of the universal Gospel, some mission departments changed their names to ‘intercultural studies.’  This involved reconceiving the method and purpose of mission studies.  Instead of being about understanding the Gospel, the focus was now on understanding the audiences.  Instead of missions understood through Biblical and theological interpretation, it was now a project of the social sciences—anthropology, culture, and sociology.  Instead of involving evangelism to the lost, it was now about dialogue and understanding.  Instead of understanding the Gospel as all about the world streaming to the cross to make their garments white in the blood of the Lamb, the public square’s value of diversity ruled the agenda.  In an Evangelical seminary, beyond the mission department changes, this might not be so blatantly presented as the study of other religions.  It might also be presented as a communal journey toward social diversity.  The result is to focus on ourselves, not the cross of Jesus Christ.  The achievement of diversity is never clearly defined, since an ultimate definition would have to recognize that each person is unique.  Instead, some vague notion of diversity of groups is in view, and this inevitably means a valuing of some groups over others.  Has the faculty reached its goal of diversification when it has hired a black, Hispanic, or Asian professor, or does that black professor have to be Afro-American and not Nigerian?  Is a Nigerian enough diversity, or does the seminary also need a Kenyan?  What about a Polynesian?  Would a Chinese from Singapore be as acceptable as one from the Philippines?  And so the game of diversification is played.  It is played by forgetting the Church, theology, and ministerial calling and focusing on incidental distinctions and accidential characteristics as though they are critical, permanent, and essential.  Instead of focusing, as we have heard so often, on the content of a person’s character, we are told to focus on the colour of his or her skin.  We are told to focus not on releasing people to the ministry to which God has called them but on racial, gender, and cultural identities.  The concern for adherence to the truth is sidelined in the pursuit of some menagerie of multicultural community.  We are considered stronger with our differences, and woe be it that someone changes culturally and no longer provides that difference he or she initially contributed.  The Gospel is seated in the shadows so that the spotlight might fall on the dappled differences we represent from our diverse groups. To be sure, diversity in Christian community will occur as we focus on the worldwide mission of the Church and affirm the gifts God has given each of us irrespective of our marginal identities.  This is, however, a result of one faith, one Gospel, one Lord, one Spirit, and One God and Father of all.  Results are different from purposes.  When we make our own diversity the purpose, we shift everything to being about us.  When diversity is pursued as the goal, community replaces ecclesiology, diversity replaces mission, and human differences replace our one Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

The public square has also replaced equality with equity.  Equality emphasizes opportunity, equity emphasizes outcomes.  A notion of essential ‘equalness’ is replaced by a notion that social justice is required to created ‘equalness.’  Scripture advocates concern for more than equal opportunity.  God’s view of justice in Scripture recognizes human depravity and a world groaning under sin and its results such that more than opportunity is called for to achieve justice.  Thus, the public square’s ‘equity’ has caught the eye of many Christians, and they have tried to catch up to the higher view of justice as equity in the public square than what they have found in their Christian circles.  Yet the public square’s version of equity is not the Scripture’s version of equity.  Scripture encourages social efforts in particular directions to help groups like the widows, orphans, and aliens so that they might have equal opportunity, not so that everyone in society might have equal outcomes.  Grain is to be left on the edges of the field for those without fields of their own, not collected and handed out to everyone equally.  Needs are to be met, not property redistributed.  The former version of justice gives the help needed so that people can achieve their goals through hard work; the latter version of justice puts the government in control of production and distribution of goods.  Equity in this sense at best penalizes those who work hard and at worst removes the very possibility of private property, hard work, and self-achievement.  Instead of helping the needy, it makes the needy the preferential social group.  Perhaps worst of all, it puts the determination of social justice into the hands of a political elite, a vanguard of the people, whose judgements are seldom just.

Finally, the public square has replaced God’s missional vision with its version of inclusion.  This is a theological versus secular distinction at its root.  God’s mission in the world is soteriological and ecclesial.  The human predicament is that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  God’s solution is the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ on the cross for our sins and for the sins of the whole world.  All are in need of salvation, and only God can provide that salvation.  People can do nothing to save themselves.  All that they can do is accept or reject the salvation that God has provided.  Salvation is by grace through faith—God’s gracious gift in Christ’s sacrificial death. Our response of faith is believing that Christ has died for us and receiving that gift of salvation.  The public square’s value of inclusion rejects all this.  It rejects that humans are in need of God or of God’s salvation.  If there is ‘sin’, it is not sin against God’s just decrees but society’s own determinations of injustice.  Thus, ‘inclusion’ is humanistically and not theologically defined, and those awkwardly trying to merge this public version of inclusion with Christianity regularly find themselves opposed to the teaching of Scripture, particularly around sexual ethics.  These progressive Christians call evil good and good evil (Isaiah 5.20), for their notion of inclusion involves tolerance and welcoming of people without the need for repentance of sin and obedience to God.  They not only tolerate evil but call unjust those who affirm what Scripture says is sinful.  ‘Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them’ (Romans 3.32).  It is enough for them to be inclusive, and, like the Corinthian church of old, they congratulate themselves for their toleration of things that even pagan society finds excessive (cf. 1 Corinthians 5.1).  Indeed, society is not to be called pagan, and the Church is urged instead to be as inclusive as society is towards sin.  This version of inclusiveness runs right through the Christian counselling world and the degrees seminaries offer in therapeutic counselling, for, in order to hold onto their cherished licenses in the public square, these Christian counsellors are required not to identify anything as sinful and not to call for repentance, conversion, and transformation in their practices.

Thus, engagement with the public square is not a matter of joining arm in arm with the social justice warriors of diversity, equity, and inclusion in some sort of mindless blurring of the distinction between Church and society.  The Church’s first role in society is to lift high the cross of Christ for all to see.  Wherever the centrality of Christ diminishes in our pursuit of justice, we are making compromises with the world.  These are subtle, duping many a Christian, church, seminary, Christian organization, and denomination.  Kingdom justice is not diversity but unity in Christ, not equity as elitist control of production and distribution but as care for the needy, and not inclusion without repentance for sin and baptism into Christ.  Only in showing the world that it is not the Church will the Church be the light that shows the world the way to God.  And only then may it find the righteousness of God.