A Different Understanding of Diversity
Most of the low-church Protestants I know, in Methodism or not, ignore the great Creeds. They rarely recite even the Apostles’ Creed, let alone the Nicene Creed. But on those rare occasions when they do confess their faith according to the Creed, many of them have this annoying tic of saying “universal” instead of “catholic.” The Apostles’ Creed says, “I believe in the holy catholic Church.” The Nicene Creed says, “the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.” But some people are allergic to the word “catholic.”
Why? I mean, sure, catholic is a rare word, not used in most people’s vocabularies. But apostolic is just about as rare. And if we cease using technical terms because people misunderstand them, we’re going to have to edit out all kinds of things. Religion is full of, well, religious terms. We don’t refrain from saying them, we teach people what they mean. But then, you see, many people think “catholic” just means Roman Catholic, and they are allergic to Catholicism (note the capital letter). Which means that substituting “universal” for “catholic” is a shibboleth, a tribal signifier. Encouraging the identification of catholicity with Catholicism is thus a celebration of ignorance and one of the last few acceptable bigotries nice people can indulge themselves in.
Let’s set the record straight. “Catholic” means more than “universal.” If you ask most Christians what the Creeds are talking about, they will tell you that it means all Christians everywhere are members of the Church of Jesus Christ – and not only all the believers on earth, but also those who have died in the faith and are with Christ in heaven. And they’re right about that. But there are two different concepts in that idea. One is unity. There is only one Church, however many ways we split ourselves up into denominations. The idea that if we were really following Christ as we are supposed to, we wouldn’t have multiple denominations, is an idea all of us need to wrestle with, and different people have different answers to that. But “all believers in Christ are numbered among the believers in Christ” is a tautology. If that’s what you mean by universal, fine. But that’s covered in the Nicene Creed under “one.” The other three Marks of the Church are “holy,” “catholic,” and “apostolic.”
Catholic is made up of two Greek words. Kata is a preposition meaning, among other things, “according to.” Holos means “the whole” of something. “According to the whole” implies something about the diversity-in-unity of the members of the set being considered. If I have a catholic taste in music, for instance, that doesn’t mean that I really dig Gregorian chant or hymns to the Virgin Mary (though I might), but that I like a wide variety of musical genres: classical, jazz, rock and roll, folk, blues, showtunes, the marches of John Phillips Sousa, yada yada yada. I may like some kinds of music more than others, but I appreciate all of them. I don’t draw artificial distinctions between them, declaring some of them “real music” and others not.
In theological terms, the Church is catholic because all different kinds of people throughout the world and throughout the ages have authentically received and confessed Christ. They didn’t stop being who they were, they didn’t abandon their language or culture in order to follow Christ. You can follow Christ in any language or culture. There is in Christ neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, bond nor free. All are one without loss of their identity. A Christian in Africa doesn’t have to become an American in order to be a Christian.
This assumes that one can be authentically Christian in any culture. And it assumes that the truth of Christ, which belongs to no one language or culture, can be authentically expressed in any language to people of any culture. Not only that, but the barriers between them are broken down and real reconciliation between people who have historically seen the world in very different terms is possible. Forgiveness is possible, both to give and to accept. Enemies can become friends.
Catholicity thus doesn’t mean “sameness,” though we could debate how far one can go in doctrine or practices before crossing the boundary of the Church and becoming something no longer Christian. Catholicity is about unity-in-diversity, about the parts and the whole. And this is something that is extremely important in the debates that dominate our society today.
For there is another kind of “diversity” that is preached among the progressives that denies what we Christians believe. In Critical Theory Sociology/Critical Race Theory/intersectionality/woke, the holy trinity invoked is “diversity” along with “equity” and “inclusion.” But the progs’ view of diversity is very different from the catholicity I’ve been talking about.
In progressive thought, society is made up of groups, not individuals, and all these groups are in bitter competition for all the resources of society. The resources of society include not only economic and political goods but definitions and symbols, so there is no one “Truth” that all can refer to, only “your truth” and “my truth.” For that matter, a “truth” that belongs to one group is only a mask for the advantage-seeking of that group. So, some would say that the cross of Jesus is alien to Asian thought; therefore Asians don’t need the sacrifice of Jesus, and should not be required to confess it even if they are leaders of the church. Any insistence on calling God “Father” (the term used in the Bible and by Jesus himself) is an alien thought to women, and therefore only another means by which all men oppress all women. And so on.
The competition never ends, either; there is no possibility of actual reconciliation between people with different identities/loyalties. Since all resources are finite in the progressive view, any gain for one group is necessarily a loss for the others, so no group can ever have “enough.” Nor is there anything moral about forgoing our group’s gain in order to share with other groups. There can never be real friendship between people with different backgrounds (no matter how much some talk about being an “ally”), since any interaction between groups involves somebody being the oppressor and the other party being a victim. They talk a lot about “unity,” but unity for them only means doing it my way. And they talk endlessly about “diversity,” which means more status, more advantage, more resources for my group. It is a cruel and angry kind of religion-as-politics which divides more than it unites and can only punish but never reconcile.
The diversity ideology is, in fact, a heresy. It is a poor and mean-spirited imitation of catholicity. Which is why it is so important to reclaim this word – and not merely the word, but the concept. We must affirm the catholicity of the Church to the world. And we must adjust our view of Christianity to a wider lens. We must see all people as potential followers of Jesus, and we must accept the other followers of Jesus as genuine.
Beyond religion, we must affirm catholicity, even of a secular kind, to our whole society. We need to have a concept of the nation as a whole, in which all the different people in their different groups can find themselves and advance themselves, without declaring a war of all against all. We must realize that the resources of the society are only finite at any particular time, but are not finite over time – that wealth can be increased, that justice can truly be for everybody, and that the pursuit of happiness does not require some people to be made unhappy.
We need to reclaim catholicity as an idea, teach it to our congregations, explore the practice of it in both religious and secular contexts. And we can start by dumping that faction-word “universal” and confess our faith in the holy catholic Church.
Why? I mean, sure, catholic is a rare word, not used in most people’s vocabularies. But apostolic is just about as rare. And if we cease using technical terms because people misunderstand them, we’re going to have to edit out all kinds of things. Religion is full of, well, religious terms. We don’t refrain from saying them, we teach people what they mean. But then, you see, many people think “catholic” just means Roman Catholic, and they are allergic to Catholicism (note the capital letter). Which means that substituting “universal” for “catholic” is a shibboleth, a tribal signifier. Encouraging the identification of catholicity with Catholicism is thus a celebration of ignorance and one of the last few acceptable bigotries nice people can indulge themselves in.
Let’s set the record straight. “Catholic” means more than “universal.” If you ask most Christians what the Creeds are talking about, they will tell you that it means all Christians everywhere are members of the Church of Jesus Christ – and not only all the believers on earth, but also those who have died in the faith and are with Christ in heaven. And they’re right about that. But there are two different concepts in that idea. One is unity. There is only one Church, however many ways we split ourselves up into denominations. The idea that if we were really following Christ as we are supposed to, we wouldn’t have multiple denominations, is an idea all of us need to wrestle with, and different people have different answers to that. But “all believers in Christ are numbered among the believers in Christ” is a tautology. If that’s what you mean by universal, fine. But that’s covered in the Nicene Creed under “one.” The other three Marks of the Church are “holy,” “catholic,” and “apostolic.”
Catholic is made up of two Greek words. Kata is a preposition meaning, among other things, “according to.” Holos means “the whole” of something. “According to the whole” implies something about the diversity-in-unity of the members of the set being considered. If I have a catholic taste in music, for instance, that doesn’t mean that I really dig Gregorian chant or hymns to the Virgin Mary (though I might), but that I like a wide variety of musical genres: classical, jazz, rock and roll, folk, blues, showtunes, the marches of John Phillips Sousa, yada yada yada. I may like some kinds of music more than others, but I appreciate all of them. I don’t draw artificial distinctions between them, declaring some of them “real music” and others not.
In theological terms, the Church is catholic because all different kinds of people throughout the world and throughout the ages have authentically received and confessed Christ. They didn’t stop being who they were, they didn’t abandon their language or culture in order to follow Christ. You can follow Christ in any language or culture. There is in Christ neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, bond nor free. All are one without loss of their identity. A Christian in Africa doesn’t have to become an American in order to be a Christian.
This assumes that one can be authentically Christian in any culture. And it assumes that the truth of Christ, which belongs to no one language or culture, can be authentically expressed in any language to people of any culture. Not only that, but the barriers between them are broken down and real reconciliation between people who have historically seen the world in very different terms is possible. Forgiveness is possible, both to give and to accept. Enemies can become friends.
Catholicity thus doesn’t mean “sameness,” though we could debate how far one can go in doctrine or practices before crossing the boundary of the Church and becoming something no longer Christian. Catholicity is about unity-in-diversity, about the parts and the whole. And this is something that is extremely important in the debates that dominate our society today.
For there is another kind of “diversity” that is preached among the progressives that denies what we Christians believe. In Critical Theory Sociology/Critical Race Theory/intersectionality/woke, the holy trinity invoked is “diversity” along with “equity” and “inclusion.” But the progs’ view of diversity is very different from the catholicity I’ve been talking about.
In progressive thought, society is made up of groups, not individuals, and all these groups are in bitter competition for all the resources of society. The resources of society include not only economic and political goods but definitions and symbols, so there is no one “Truth” that all can refer to, only “your truth” and “my truth.” For that matter, a “truth” that belongs to one group is only a mask for the advantage-seeking of that group. So, some would say that the cross of Jesus is alien to Asian thought; therefore Asians don’t need the sacrifice of Jesus, and should not be required to confess it even if they are leaders of the church. Any insistence on calling God “Father” (the term used in the Bible and by Jesus himself) is an alien thought to women, and therefore only another means by which all men oppress all women. And so on.
The competition never ends, either; there is no possibility of actual reconciliation between people with different identities/loyalties. Since all resources are finite in the progressive view, any gain for one group is necessarily a loss for the others, so no group can ever have “enough.” Nor is there anything moral about forgoing our group’s gain in order to share with other groups. There can never be real friendship between people with different backgrounds (no matter how much some talk about being an “ally”), since any interaction between groups involves somebody being the oppressor and the other party being a victim. They talk a lot about “unity,” but unity for them only means doing it my way. And they talk endlessly about “diversity,” which means more status, more advantage, more resources for my group. It is a cruel and angry kind of religion-as-politics which divides more than it unites and can only punish but never reconcile.
The diversity ideology is, in fact, a heresy. It is a poor and mean-spirited imitation of catholicity. Which is why it is so important to reclaim this word – and not merely the word, but the concept. We must affirm the catholicity of the Church to the world. And we must adjust our view of Christianity to a wider lens. We must see all people as potential followers of Jesus, and we must accept the other followers of Jesus as genuine.
Beyond religion, we must affirm catholicity, even of a secular kind, to our whole society. We need to have a concept of the nation as a whole, in which all the different people in their different groups can find themselves and advance themselves, without declaring a war of all against all. We must realize that the resources of the society are only finite at any particular time, but are not finite over time – that wealth can be increased, that justice can truly be for everybody, and that the pursuit of happiness does not require some people to be made unhappy.
We need to reclaim catholicity as an idea, teach it to our congregations, explore the practice of it in both religious and secular contexts. And we can start by dumping that faction-word “universal” and confess our faith in the holy catholic Church.