Way back when I was in high school, a new student group started on campus, “Diversity Club.” I was invited to the inaugural meeting. I remember sitting in a circle of chairs in the cafeteria and listening to someone talk about how this club would help us recognize and respect students from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds.

I never went to the club again, probably because I was busy and, frankly, it was rather boring, but I still think about that half hour in the lunch room occasionally. This was the early 2000s, and I now recognize the club’s existence as a tiny mustard seed of what would come over the next two decades. “Diversity matters” was a whisper.

By the end of the Obama administration in 2017, that whisper had turned into a yell. DIVERSITY MATTERS! Everyone, everywhere, was obsessed with diversity: diversity week, diversity scholarships, diverse members, diverse leaders. Diversity had grown from its humble beginnings in the cafeteria and was in our politics, our schools, and even our churches.

By this time, I had graduated from college, had married, had children, and had lived in four different states. I had been exposed to many types of diversity. I experienced ethnic diversity by moving from the Pacific Northwest to the Southwest. I experienced social class diversity - teaching at a Title 1 public high school in Texas and then a private Christian school in Washington State. I even experienced religious diversity as a Christian attending graduate school at a large secular institution. Eventually, I found myself as a Reformed Protestant professor working at a Pentecostal university. Diversity was kind of fun.

Until it wasn’t.

Soon diversity became attached to other words… equity… inclusion… reconciliation, and justice. None of these words was troublesome at face value. I didn’t mind diversity. As a believer, I think God cares greatly about reconciliation and justice.

But I began to get the feeling that these words didn’t mean what I thought they did.

As we celebrated “inclusion,” I began to see partition everywhere I looked… the Black Student Union, Asian Pacific Islander Week, LGBTQ club, the Hispanic Evangelical Alliance. Everyone was fractured into special interest groups and clubs, usually based on nationality or skin color. We had even invented new words such as “Latinx” (and now “ze/zir”).

It came to a head for me the day after the 2016 election. Trump had won and everyone — conservatives and liberals alike — was shocked. I worked at a different university at the time, and as I pulled onto campus, I discovered one of my students sobbing in the parking lot. She was terrified of how Trump’s “racism” might affect her family. Just an hour later, another student lingered after class, waiting to ask me if Trump would deport all the Dreamers, as she was an undocumented student.

I started to wonder, “Is all this diversity resulting in inclusion and peace? Or are we just fostering fear and breeding animosity?”

It only ramped up from that point on. Diversity proliferated into division. Both words come from the Latin root “div,” which means to divide. Maybe this was the end goal of the diversity club at my high school. We had moved from student clubs to segregated college dorms from peaceful protests to race riots in the streets of Minneapolis.

Diversity’s tentacles were creeping their way into the church. In the fall of 2020, I was leading a women’s small group for my church. One of our long-term participants decided she needed to take a break from our Bible study to participate in a local “Be the Bridge” group. This program teaches Christians how to pursue racial reconciliation. The method? White members remain silent and “listen” while members of color are encouraged to share their grievances, even if they sometimes resort to yelling or cussing.

The church group I led at the time happened to be ethnically diverse, but we found friendship and unity in studying the Bible together, with no yelling required.

Over the past few years, I’ve grown in this conviction: diversity doesn’t matter. At least not in the way we think it does. It brings division, which is by design. Diversity singles people out and fractures groups. It causes us to obsess over our differences, fixate on grievances and outcomes, and harbor resentment.

Diversity isn’t valuable. What’s valuable is when diversity is overcome with unity.

When diverse people come together for a common goal, a shared purpose, or a greater good, it’s beautiful. But the unity is the fruitful part.

This is why the Bible tells us to shed our “diversity” labels. The apostle Paul tells us in Galatians that it doesn’t matter if you are Greek or Jew, slave or free, male or female. These are ethnic, socioeconomic, and gender categories. And none of them matter if we are one in Jesus Christ.

Jesus offers us so much more than diversity. He offers us unity. He is the firstborn among many brothers because he brings different people — young and old, rich and poor, brown and white — into his family. We are alike only in our sin, yet he makes us brothers and sisters by the unifying grace of his blood shed for us.

This is why the most faithful churches often grow in both size and diversity naturally. When the Word of God is preached truthfully, people will be inclined to show up and listen, and they will often represent a range of ages, incomes, and melanin counts. These pastors aren’t trying to fulfill quotas; they are trying to rightly deliver Biblical instruction. It turns out the gospel attracts more people than the best strategic diversity plan.

Everyone wants a label, a name, a special spot in a distinct group. This is one of the ways God has set eternity in the hearts of men. But the world grasps for labels based on physical features and ancestry because it doesn’t know the unfading value of being called a child of God.

Only when we surrender our diversity and self-interested labels in pursuit of unity will we find real joy, lasting relationships, and sincere love for others.

Diversity is a cheap placeholder for the unity offered to us by Jesus Christ.

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