Have you noticed the growing pressure for sameness in our civic and religious cultures lately, the idea that uniformity, or perhaps conformity, is necessary for a holy and Godly nation? I have, and I’m very concerned, because I think it’s dangerously false. Not only is it not biblical, it also makes us weaker. I’m going to explore this topic from both religious and political perspectives.
Let’s start with two definitions:
According to Mirriam-Webster Dictionary, unity is “the quality or state of not being multiple; oneness“, or “a totality of related parts; an entity that is a complex or systematic whole“.
Uniformity is “the quality or state of having always the same form, manner, or degree; not varying or variable; consistent in product or opinion.”
These words are similar but the definitions are very different. On the one hand is sameness; on the other hand is togetherness despite complexity.
A particularly strong theme from Jesus and later from the apostles was the unity of the body of Christ.
Although Jesus frequently told His followers that He came to divide people, that His very existence would result in deep division, He was nonetheless focused on moving people into the Kingdom and having His followers “be one” as He said in the Gospel of John chapter 17, specifically John 17:6-24. In this great prayer for His disciples, Jesus four times refers to them becoming one, not just with God but with each other. Aside from these verses, numerous other references to unity of the Body of Christ can be found in 1 Corinthians 1:10-13, Philippians 2:2, Romans 12:3-18, Romans 14:1-23, Ephesians 2:11-22, Ephesians 4:1-32, and Galatians 3:26-28.
Even in the Hebrew Bible this theme was visible, at least within the people of God, the nation of Israel, such as Psalm 133:1, Ezekiel 37:15-28, and 2 Chronicles 30:12.
What’s interesting, however, is that none of these references refer to uniformity: just to unity. In fact, many of them refer to setting aside differences, looking past unique presentations of an incarnate God in God’s people, or unique giftings, such as Ephesians 4, even unique doctrines or understandings of the Law (such as Romans 14:1-23).
In fact, it’s worth quoting Eph 4:11-13:
And He gave some as apostles, some as prophets, some as evangelists, some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ; until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.
This is pretty clear: the distinctions are given explicitly to bring about unity! It’s impossible to have uniformity with the distinctions.
But look at the American church, and you see a ton of disagreement about doctrine, about how to live in the world, about how to deal with those who think differently than us about doctrine and about how to treat people, especially the marginalized and oppressed. It seems like most Christians want everyone to be exactly the same, and if you don’t agree almost completely with their church’s doctrines, you’re not really saved.
So that’s the religious angle. What about the political? I think it’s important to consider both, since lately the evangelical community is pushing really hard to bring the two together.
From the American perspective, I can’t help but remember our national motto: “E pluribus unum” – “Out of many, one.” That’s been part of our nation’s heritage since it was put on the first national seal in 1776. But in recent months, there’s been a determined drive, particularly on the conservative front, to force a move towards uniformity, especially in calling America a “Christian nation” – with a very particular brand of Christianity supported by the government, despite the First Amendment. And beyond the religious angle in civics, there’s also a deepening divide between the parties with an almost violent unwillingness to compromise, as if the only acceptable solution is for everyone to agree to a particular point of view. There’s no room in our political discourse for working together with anyone who disagrees with us. Anyone perceived as compromising or crossing the aisle is vilified by their own party. So there’s this drive towards political uniformity that is actually tearing us apart.
But which are we really after – uniformity, or the more difficult unity?
I think it’s obvious that right now, both in the American church and the American political system, unity is probably the least evident characteristic of all, and there’s really not much uniformity either. We’re a nation of 300 million very diverse people with thousands of different identities and characteristics and beliefs and ideas and dogmas.
However, there is an unspoken insistence upon uniformity in most circles, especially the fundamentalist conservative ones, which are often founded on the assumption that there is only one True way of being in the world. But what I am discovering lately is that much of the goodness in the world comes from people specializing in the thing that they are good at, and doing it with excellence and dignity and diligence, even if that is even somewhat unconnected to other people doing different things.
I’m really driving at this point: rather than everyone being the same, I say that moving our human condition forward requires lots of small and seemingly unconnected roles. It’s okay for different people to have different roles in the process. Some build. Some deconstruct. Some create. Some renovate. Some teach. Some study. Some lead. Some follow.
But when it all comes together, good things happen.
More to the point, good things happen precisely because it all comes together.
In light of this, I think that part of the systemic failing we see all around us is the expectation that we all must have the same role and the same experience and even the same opinions or beliefs, in order to come together.
In this framework, the question “who am I?” becomes deeply relevant.
In a system of uniformity, the answer is “the same as everyone else.” We have to mold ourselves to what others are, or what they expect at least. We hear a message that for the system to work – be it religious or civic – we need to conform to a single ideal, a single standard.
In a system of unity, however, the answer is “who God made me to be” – whatever that happens to be. Rather than trying to fit ourselves into somebody else’s box or definition of good or bad, right or wrong, we become free to pursue who we truly are. It allows us to pour ourselves into the way we truly are made, instead of trying to satisfy someone else’s expectations.
This lines up neatly with the verse from Proverbs 22:6, which in the NRSVUE says “Train children in the right way, and when old, they will not stray.” I’ve heard it said – and I believe – that a better way to conceptualize this verse is “if you train up a child in the way that they are built, they’ll never leave that way.” In other words, figure out who they are, and strengthen that very thing in them, instead of trying to reshape them into OUR vision of what they should be. Recognize their nature, and strengthen it.
And I think that applies to spiritual formation of adults, just as much as young children. And it applies to secular training as well: figure out what makes a person tick, where their passion is, what makes them thrive, and then strengthen that, and you’ll create a powerhouse that’s capable of doing that very thing with excellence for a lifetime.
The challenge, however, is that this requires us to release our expectations of what everybody else needs to be doing. We are not free to demand of somebody that their methodologies or nature or skills must suit our own goals or our ideas of how to achieve those goals.
But that’s tough to swallow for many people – especially many parents – who have a vision of how their family or their children or their world should look, and their corresponding desire to force others into their own mold as the only right way to shape that human or society.
From a spiritual perspective, though, there is no capacity here for human direction and orchestration of the whole of society. We simply cannot create the order and structure that WE want. That can only be done, from my spiritual sense, by the Holy Spirit. Perhaps an inspired human can offer leadership, and others will feel inspired to participate, but those things ought to be organic, not forced.
When I think about my spiritual inheritance, there was a very strong idea that unity meant uniformity. That view would say that there is one God, and the Bible perfectly presents exactly what God is and what God wants, and therefore there is only one true way of being. But the longer I exist in this pluralist world, and far more importantly, in this pluralist faith called Christianity with its many thousands of denominations and subcultures, the more I realize that there is no such thing as complete uniformity. In fact, probably there CAN be no such thing. More to the point, there probably SHOULD not be any such thing. Forcing everyone into a single mold will break almost all of them.
If that is true, the only way to achieve unity is in diversity – not uniformity.
But how can this work?
Unity or oneness cannot be cobbled together by making everybody the same. So the whole idea of squashing every human into the same Christian doctrine is simply a non-starter. Doctrine, like it or not, proves to be always contextual, despite purist attempts to insist that it is entirely transcendent. When you dispassionately survey global Christianity, and when you survey the real history of Christian theological thinking down through two millennia, there’s been a very wide range of doctrine that usually tracks with the needs of a given community in a given context. So it just cannot be collapsed into one lump of “perfect” thinking about God and Jesus and the Kingdom; the felt need to find that one perfect theology turns out to be driven largely by a fear of getting it wrong and going to hell as a result. Well, there are plenty of theologians who reject that dogma, and are thus quite willing to allow theological diversity and still call it Christianity.
And what I see happening politically right now in America is much the same as I see happening in Christianity. There is a devoted and determined attempt to fit every American into the same mold, the same dogmatic view of what it means to be “American,” so that we can be one nation under God. The assumption seems to be that if we are not the same, we cannot be one. But just as with religious doctrine, political unity is not founded upon uniformity. We will never all be identical, and in fact, nor should we be. The fifty states that comprise the United States of America cannot even agree on a great many things. Communities within those states have sometimes vastly different ideas about life and civility and morality, that suit their particular contexts and needs and experiences. And of course this is even more true when you look across the world stage, and realize that people of the various nations have very different ideas about what it means to be human and to be civil.
So America, as a player on a global stage, with people from all different cultures in this melting pot which used to be celebrated, will never be composed of people who all think and act and believe the same.
If all of this is true, and if that diversity is as inherently human a trait as I suspect, we might as well abandon any pretense at unification via uniformity.
So what do we do with this?
If diversity is foundational to a healthy unity, this requires a determined pushback against those who are pursuing nationalism vi a uniformity. As an example, the recent Republican platform push to eliminate immigrants from our shores is a thinly veiled attempt to create uniformity. Not only does it inherently seek an evil ethnic cleansing, it also seeks an ideological cleansing, from any who come from nations that don’t already share our political or religious values.
And much the same way, the push to eliminate queer and trans people is another attempt to create a kind of ethnic cleansing.
As an aside, I grew up with the idea of America as a melting pot; my earliest years were experienced in the context of the American Bicentennial, where we were celebrating 200 years of an America formed from many people from many different places and cultures who gathered on these shores and formed a new and strong nation. But here’s the thing about a melting pot: instead of celebrating diversity, it sort of implies an alloy or an amalgamation, where everything stirs together into a single thing. However, this analogy for America is flawed in this way: you cannot add immigrant diversity to a melting pot without changing its composition – there will never be a single unchanging right thing, if we are a melting pot.
So actually a better analogy might be that the US is a salad bowl: lots of interesting and diverse things mixed together, each retaining their unique nature, being far more interesting than a bowl of uniform grey goo.
Anyway, back to unity and uniformity:
This recent push for uniformity all seems to go back to a fundamentalist, or maybe reconstructionist, reading of the Torah and its purity codes, which were strongly based in eliminating impurity and blemish from the people and from their sacrifices, so that God’s presence would not flee the polluted land. The laws that were recorded in those scriptures are quite explicit about avoiding contamination. Even things as simple as not mixing types of fiber together when creating fabric, or not using different fabrics in one garment, are a form of this removal of impurity.
In that sense, it is certainly biblical to try and eliminate otherness from amongst a culture – at least the Jewish culture. But is that truly what God wanted for all of humanity?
If all you are doing is proof texting, starting from a dogma and finding verses to support the dogma, that would certainly be arguable. But looking at the larger context, considering Peter’s vision of the sheet coming down out of heaven, and God telling him to rise, kill, and eat the unclean animals that he saw, it seems to me that God’s specific instruction to “not call unclean what God had made clean” was a marked change in the guidance that was given. You can’t take as a mandate the Torah law and cling to something that God very explicitly overturned in the New Testament.
Just how far does this change go, however? Does it only apply to admitting the Gentiles into the church? That would certainly be the argument of most conservative Christians. But I am of the personal opinion that this vision of Peter’s marked a complete change in the spirit realm, going far beyond unclean foods or unclean people.
Actually, “unclean people” is exactly the change that we are considering here. It was no longer just about whether non-Jews could participate in the kingdom, because we also have to recognize Paul’s statements that neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, were distinctives that could be used to segregate full participation in the kingdom. I think from a pattern perspective, that change goes even further than those three categories. It speaks to a freedom that was unprecedented in that cultural thinking.
I find it interesting that nothing in the early church’s discussion of bringing Gentiles into the kingdom required complete uniformity with the Jewish cultures that were already present in the kingdom. As a matter of fact, recall that there were Jewish believers that insisted on the Gentiles adopting Jewish practices such as circumcision, and Paul strongly pushed back on that topic. In fact, he so completely rejected the idea that he explicitly directed them to stay in whatever state they were when they entered the Kingdom. So the discussion about circumcision was a direct repudiation of the idea that practices and beliefs all had to be perfectly aligned within the people of God – despite strong religious convictions on both sides. Certainly there was an expectation that those involved would honor the Lord and Christ, but in the Book of Acts we see an explosion of respect for other people’s ways of worshiping that had never been conceived under the Hebrew scriptures. And the teaching in Romans was about how to lovingly and graciously live out unity despite different worship practices.
So let’s wrap this up.
In this discussion, I’ve been bouncing back and forth between ideas of religious unity, and civic unity – dogmatic purity and the purity of social ideas and practices. While I’ve largely been addressing politics and religion separately, I actually think they’re very tightly tied together, because in their intersection we get to the topic of religious nationalism – which, when you study it, is the foundation of fascism: the idea that a master race and a pure religion and pure culture are the foundation of national greatness. It’s been attempted in numerous nations around the world, and every time it’s led to oppression of marginalized groups, both ethnic and religious, and every time it’s ended up with a strongman holding oppressive power that results in vastly less freedom for everyone – even those who are initially part of the favored class. So it’s something that strikes me as deeply dangerous, not just the wrong thing to do.
As a result, when I put all of this together, I find it important to reject the nationalistic impulses to suppress differences and enforce uniformity as a precursor for national stability. The promise of the Statue of Liberty and the plaque inscribed on its base was an open invitation that immigration would be welcomed, and this certainly came with a willingness to accept what those people brought with them. And that isn’t just culture; it’s also faith practices and doctrines.
For these reasons, I want to see two things:
First, religious pluralism should be accepted as normative, and in fact welcomed, by those who can view their religious views with humility and curiosity. That allows us to hear the gentle whispers of the Holy Spirit even in ways that might seem counter to our existing dogmas, and lead us to a truth we would otherwise be missing.
And second, political pluralism s0hould be similarly welcomed, so that we can benefit from all the amazing diversity of people and the wealth of knowledge that different people bring to a common civic table. And like the religious pluralism, this requires us to be humble. It might even require some of us to be willing to lose our deeply-valued privileged position at the top of the pyramid of power and control. But I think in considering that “loss,” we can reach back to our Christian faith and realize that Jesus challenged us to lay down our lives and our comfort for the benefit of those around us – especially those we see as marginalized and underprivileged.
So let’s be deliberate to rethink our relationship with unity, and stop trying to achieve it by demanding uniformity instead.
Thanks for spending some time with me today. We’ll talk again soon. Be blessed!
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