The Creator Delights in Diversity
The Creator loves and delights in exuberant diversity.
If you have any doubts, open your window, and gaze out at the city streets or even a meadow, and you will run into more diversity than your mind can ever contain. You will see endless variety in blades of grass, in leaves, in the shapes and curves of tree branches. If you can spot only human faces, there too you will only see diversity, each face utterly singular, even those of so-called identical twins.
Seven billion of us, each a singular and unique creation, each precious, each priceless, each and every one cherished and loved into being by Love itself. God loves difference.
Honoring and celebrating diversity, then, is not some contemporary fad of political correctness or multiculturalism.
It is fundamentally a theological matter grounded in the doctrine of creation. To call God “Creator” is to affirm that diversity is never a mistake but a positive good. If we desire to be faithful to God’s creative love, we will strive to expand our capacities for appreciating and delighting in difference.
Tragically, some among us who are themselves creations of the Divine fashion an arbitrary circle between us and them, between inside and out. That act of imagining an “us” that has nothing to do with and is threatened by an alien “them” — that act is the conceptual and rhetorical violence that precedes and prepares the ground for every act of actual violence. The natural range and extension of the heart’s capacity to love has to be compromised first.
You have to be tutored to hate; hate is unnatural for creatures made in the image of divine love.
Here, we run up against an important and subtle matter: we must affirm that difference is a blessing, but the construction of an alien and threatening otherness, a curse. How do we mark the difference between the former and the latter? How do we avoid the temptation to erase difference in order not to fall prey to otherizing?
Here’s the key: in the latter case, some mark of difference is deployed to dehumanize. Some phenotypical feature — skin color or some cultural marker like language or food preference — are valanced negatively, and those who bear these markers are regarded as falling short of full humanness. These others are either figured as bestial or as carriers of a disease.
Such dehumanizing strategies were deployed with instinctive ease by our former President when he spoke of Covid-19 as “the China virus” or as “kung flu.” He knew what he was doing when he demonized and dehumanized Asian Americans.
If the other is not quite human but is a virus or an infection — a well-known Nazi strategy for dehumanizing Jews — then we commit no atrocity when we seek to exclude or eliminate the other. On the contrary, violence is commendable, even virtuous, when it is mobilized to eliminate threats to those who count as truly and fully human. In the U.S., we speak here naturally of those who are accorded the status of whiteness.
We who are subjected to hatred and dehumanization face a great and horrible danger that we may come to doubt our worth, our own preciousness. My dear siblings, I pray that not a one of us will surrender to this temptation.
You, I, each and every one of us, is an embodiment of the Beloved’s creative passion for diversity.
As St. Irenaeus famously stated, “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.” And the only way to be fully alive is to live into our precious and unrepeatable singularity. Only a world in which we are safe to be just exactly who we are created and called to be is a world worthy of God’s love. Hence, our first and most basic calling in times such as these is to be nothing other than just our own unique precious selves, in our distinctive and priceless embodiment.
Let us labor and love to build a world in which each of us can be fully alive in and through our very distinctiveness. The Church knows the name for such a world, namely, “The Beloved Community.” The glory of God in this time calls us to build just such a community.
Dr. John Thatamanil
John J. Thatamanil is Associate Professor of Theology and World Religions at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. He is the author of Circling the Elephant: A Comparative Theology of Religious Diversity (2020) and The Immanent Divine: God, Creation, and the Human Predicament; An East-West Conversation. His areas of research include theologies of religious diversity, comparative theology, and philosophical theology. He is an Anglican but much else besides. Specifically, he studies Advaita Vedanta and Tibetan Buddhist traditions both academically and spiritually. He is committed to seeking interreligious wisdom through multiple religious participation, the work of taking up the practices of and learning from the insights of other religious traditions. He is also a Past President of the North American Paul Tillich Society and the first Chair of the American Academy of Religion's, Theological Education Committee.
John was born in India and migrated to the U.S. as a child when he was just shy of 9. He traces his love for Indian religious traditions to his desire to learn more about what it means to be Indian as an Indian kid growing up in the U.S.
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