In part one of this two-part series (June 13, 2024), I described the essential features of identity politics. Identity politics divides people into oppressors and the oppressed and further subdivides the oppressed into a hierarchy of oppression. One’s place in this hierarchy determines all personal relationships, communal bonds, and social policies. This vision of society is characterized by division, hostility, and shame. Communal bonds among the oppressed are forged by a sense of victimhood and hostility toward the oppressor classes. The oppressors are allowed into the community only if they confess their privilege and guilt, engage in rituals of shame, and pay reparations in some form. In this way, the oppressed become everything they hated in their oppressors. Just like their oppressors, they seek power, wealth, privilege, and honor but use a different set of virtues to rationalize their quest: justice, diversity, respect, inclusion, truth, and equity. And like their oppressors, they display the vices of greed, envy, resentment, pride, and jealousy.

The People of God

The New Testament frankly acknowledges the existence of social divisions and hierarchies, of class and ethnic consciousness. It understands the human tendency to seek power, wealth and honor, and it is well aware of the rationalizations used to justify it. It sees the widespread injustice, violence, and oppression that plagues the world. It knows of the prevalence of greed, envy, resentment, pride, and jealousy. But the New Testament neither excuses these evils as do defenders of the status quo nor attempts to reverse the order of oppression and privilege as do theorists of identity politics. The Christian vision of community is dramatically different from either order, as we can see from 1 Peter 2:9-10:

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Peter declares that those who believe in Jesus Christ have been given a new identity superseding all others. God has united people from every tribe, tongue, and class into a people, a nation. The divine power that unites them is much greater than the worldly forces that had divided them, for their unity is grounded in God’s eternal nature, will, and power. The “identities” that identity politics makes primary—race, class, sex, gender, and all others—God subordinates to the greater harmonizing force of the Holy Spirit. God orders natural and cultural diversity into a rich harmony of love, beauty, and fellowship.

Consider the identity markers these people share. They are each and all chosen by God, each and all are ordained priests, each and all are holy to God, each and all are called by God, each and all have the task of praising God, each and all have been saved from darkness and blessed with light, and each and all have been given mercy. Notice especially the words bolded in the quote from 1 Peter. Peter uses three Greek words that may sound familiar because they have been incorporated into the English language: genos, ethnos, laos. They are often translated race (or generation), nation, people. It would be foolish to attempt to distinguish them. That is not Peter’s point. He uses three different words to emphasize one point: just like the ancient people of God, he says to his readers, you have a bond of kinship, calling, and purpose that takes priority over all other bonds. You are not a people because of your similar economic interests, not a nation because of your common ethnic origins, or your language, native customs, etc., but because of your divine calling and your common faith.

The Line of Division

In an essay posted May 03, 2024, I wrote about the origins of such training programs as Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity (SEED), which is used in hundreds of American colleges and universities to inculcate identity politics. In the 1980s, Erica Sherover-Marcuse developed workshops designed to promote a new intersectional consciousness among educators and other shapers of culture. The most well-known exercise in these workshops is the “privilege walk.” Participants divide into groups based on where they stand in the hierarchy of privilege and oppression. The privileged, then, must acknowledge and apologize for their racism, sexism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression. Imagine a room filled with students, school teachers, or college professors. The facilitator asks the white males to move to one side of the room. White females stand next to them. The process continues in order of least to most oppressed. Those considered oppressed are invited to share stories of abuse, shame, and marginalization. Tears abound. The privileged, however, are not allowed to defend themselves from accusation or relate their stories of oppression; instead, they must confess their undeserved privilege and engage in penitential rituals. No reconciliation here. No love. No forgiveness. No foundational unity. Only resentment, envy, shame, and hypocrisy.

The Circle of Unity

Imagine a different room. Men and women and children from different ethnic groups, languages, cultures, economic classes and educational levels gather to worship the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. They surround the Eucharistic Table to participate in the body of Christ in grateful memory of their costly redemption. United in the one baptism and full of the one Spirit, they sing praises to their Creator and Savior. They form a circle of love by joining hands. They look across, to the right, and to the left and see only dear brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers. Each has a claim on all and all have a claim on each. The love of God compels them to love each other, to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. There are no oppressors and no oppressed…no shame, no envy, and no contempt.

Lines have beginnings and ends, tops and bottoms. Circles do not. The most prominent feature of a circle is the center, the principle of its unity. A line has a middle but no center, therefore no unity. As we can see from 1 Peter 2:9-10, God is the center that makes a circle of a line and a people of a crowd.