When I first came to Regent University,
I taught a course on Community Psychology. I remember preparing a lecture on
diversity issues and I was speaking to a staff member about it. He is from a
racial minority group. He shared with me that there was no need to teach on
diversity or to cover multicultural aspects if we are Christians. He proceeded
to share that the story of the Tower of Babel indicates that such diversity is
a result of human pride, and the current efforts to promote diversity or
multiculturalism were of little to no value in light of a Christian’s primary
identity in Christ, which he viewed trumping these other diversity domains.
I recently co-conducted a diversity workshop for
another Christian psychology program, and I was asked to reflect on a theology
of diversity. As I began to look into it, I was surprised at how little had
been written from an evangelical Christian perspective. Most of what had been
written dealt with race or ethnicity but not other areas of diversity, such as
age or disability, let alone the more controversial topics of sexual
orientation or gender identity.
