If you spent any time on X (formerly Twitter) the last week, you probably saw the clip from Allie Beth Stuckey’s podcast — you know, the one where she questions the value of ethnic diversity.
“Yes, the kingdom of God is multicultural,” Stuckey begins in a recent episode of “Relatable.” But “hot take,” she continues, “we do not see the importance of ethnic diversity within nations or local churches anywhere in Scripture. Nowhere.”
She goes on to assert that calls for diversity are aimed only at white churches. “No one’s going up to the Hispanic church or the Korean church on the, you know, street corner in Plano saying like, ‘Why don’t you have more people of Norwegian descent inside your doors?’ But if there’s a predominantly white church in a predominantly white area, you get people walking in and saying, you know, ‘Why don’t you have more Black people here?’ And so the call for diversity is not even sincere.”
Allie Beth Stuckey
There’s a lot going on with Allie Beth Stuckey here. It’s clearly not a good-faith argument, so I’m not interested in spending time rebutting it point-by-point. But one piece of her comment gave me pause: The Bible doesn’t speak to the importance of ethnic diversity in local churches?
It stopped me not because I think it’s an oft-repeated talking point for white nationalist Christians (it is), but because … well, it’s true in a way. The Bible actually doesn’t talk about the importance of ethnic diversity in local churches a whole lot.
But that’s not the theological gut-punch Stuckey thinks it is, and I’ll tell you why.
Why doesn’t the Bible say more about ethnic diversity?
I don’t want to give Stuckey too much credit. Someone as well-versed in the Bible as her will know immediately the eschatological vision of the promise to Abraham and its reimagining in the prophets assumes all peoples will be drawn to the God of Israel. If that has indeed happened in Jesus Christ, well, it’s hard to avoid the implications for our churches here and now.
And of course, more than one of Paul’s letters were written in large part to force the issue of Jew and Gentile integration in urban churches. Galatians, possibly the earliest letter we have from Paul, challenged the prejudices of some Jewish church leaders for making social distinctions between Jew and non-Jew. Similarly, Ephesians portrays Christ as the one who “desegregates” the new world by bringing Jew and Gentile into one covenant and, remarkably, giving Gentiles equal status as “citizens” and “members” of the household:
For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. … So then you (Gentiles) are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.”
It’s important to remember that “Gentile” is a catch-all term. Gentiles were not a homogenous group with a singular culture or language; they were everybody in the world who wasn’t of Jewish ethnicity. So when Paul enjoins Jews to welcome Gentiles into the covenant community of the Messiah, he’s telling Jesus-worshipping Jews the people of the world are given the same seat at the table as them — and not just some “spiritual” table in heaven or at the end of time. No, the table in your fellowship hall.
“In Paul’s mind, the resurrection of Jesus and the giving of the Spirit made any ethnic concerns a moot point.”
In Paul’s mind, the resurrection of Jesus and the giving of the Spirit made any ethnic concerns a moot point. The Gentiles already were present in the world of the New Testament and in its churches. The Roman Empire was a highly mobile, urbanized world, with cities serving as hubs for migrants moving across the Mediterranean basin for work, trade, family and survival. In this world, early Christian communities inevitably included people of different ethnic, linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
So what do we do with all these people from different places gathered in the early urban churches?
For many, the temptation is to overplay the assimilating force of Romanization; to assume when Rome came to town, people traded local language, tradition and custom for a one-size-fits-all Roman identity. But that’s simply not the case. Historians helpfully tell us “ethnicity” is an inherently unstable but persistent category in the New Testament’s imperial context. Civic identity, which was imperial, never completely subsumed local identity, which was “ethnic.”
These two aspects of a person’s identity may have been in tension at times, but Roman occupation did not cancel out one’s familial or cultural heritage. We know based on the Bible this was the case for Jews in Roman Palestine and abroad, but recent historical scholarship reveals this was true for many ethnicities and cultures across the Roman Empire. Historian Brent Shaw writes:
Everywhere we look, from the Gaulish noblemen in the west to persons like Saul/Paul in the eastern provinces of the empire, we witness the same inside schism that ran along the internal fault line between local society and central state. The different strands in personal identities ran from the top to the bottom of the social orders of the empire, confirming in reality the ideological claim that the Roman Empire was an empire of cities and peoples. Frequently, we must suspect, it was so within each person.
If we let go of our assumptions that the people named in the New Testament were all just some variation of “Roman” or “Jew” and start taking mobility and local variety seriously, the churches of the New Testament burst off the page with multi-cultural brilliance. First-century Christians weren’t merely “Romans.” Being “Roman” was in some important respects like being “American,” in that many people who emigrate into the U.S. and obtain citizenship do not cease being German or Italian or Malawi or Japanese by taking the civic identity of “American.”
“Ethnic diversity wasn’t a goal because it was a given in the churches of the New Testament.”
To return to the question: Why doesn’t the Bible talk more about ethnic diversity in the church? Basically, ethnic diversity wasn’t a goal because it was a given in the churches of the New Testament. The churches’ fault lines did not run along ethnic difference or skin color.
There were important threats to the church’s mission related to a lack of diversity. And naming those threats can be instructive for seeing similar dangers in our own context.
The challenge of diversity in the New Testament
When the gospel came to the cities of Rome, it brought together people from various tribes, cultures and languages. But it also brought together people of different classes and gender within the social hierarchy. The early churches attracted household masters, fathers, highborn women, high-ranking local officials, wealthy aristocrats, artisans and the like. The churches also welcomed enslaved persons, sexual minorities (like eunuchs), people with disabilities, widows, children and others who lived lives of precarity. The temptation always was to fall into the roles and hierarchies the outside world touted as “natural.”
But the gospel pressed all these different people not only into shared religious rituals but into new relations of belonging, relations that directly challenged the structures separating and appraising these various groups in society. When Paul wrote in Galatians 3:28 that in Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, he was not identifying mere social categories but rather relationships of power and status.
Those power differentials — between Greek and Jew, slave and free, men and women — are relativized and ultimately overridden by a new, shared social identity: heirs alongside Christ.
For that shared social identity to be enjoyed by all, it required would-be elites to divest themselves of their social or religious power to become sharers in Christ’s kingdom. But by doing so, they gained a new family.
“Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age — houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions — and in the age to come eternal life,” Jesus said in Mark 10:29-30.
Following the Gospel of Mark’s lead, we can think of this “new family” as a new network of solidarity and social security. By that, I mean churches became sites of community-building by rejecting greed, privilege and domination and by sharing all things, just like siblings are all provided everything they need with equity by loving parents. (That’s not to say it’s easy. So much of the New Testament is spent trying to convince first-century Christians to embrace this new community and to resist the forces that threaten to tear it down.)
Even still, to borrow from Malcom Foley, the goal of the New Testament church was not merely to “tweak our world,” but to “imagine a new one, free of exploitive and violent power.”
Diversity, for New Testament churches, became a byproduct of a people of equality — people gathered from across the socio-economic and cultural spectrum who realigned their lives to eat together, to meet one another’s material needs, to give dignity and mutual respect to one another, and above all to think of the church’s people as their people.
As Foley describes in his book The Anti-Greed Gospel, Christ’s church, modeling the incarnation, strives for equality, because “equality banishes exploitation”:
Exploitation convinces me that I ought to have more than you, and its attendant principalities contrive reasons and narratives that justify that to me. As a follower of Christ, I must respond with a resolute commitment to love you as I love myself and to seek that your needs are met as much as mine. In other words, we need to acquire a deep discomfort with inequality. We must never accept it as natural. This means that when we look out at our cities and towns, often segregated racially and economically, we must not say: “That’s just the way things are. They can’t be changed.” Instead, we have to say: “We made it this way. We can make it something else.”
Taken this way, American Christians ought to value racial diversity in our churches not merely because it more accurately reflects the universal church or is a picture of what heaven will be like. That’s an important theological truth, but it’s not enough by itself to build an equitable community.
“Racial representation is not the end goal.”
Racial representation is not the end goal. Instead, we should think holistically about what “new networks of solidarity” look like in our context. Just as slavery, war, gender, citizenship status, age and wealth were the sites of status and subjugation in the New Testament world, so too the creation of race continues to be an instrument for power and exploitation in our own American context.
The reality is wealth and poverty, hunger, health care, infant mortality, education and a host of other social outcomes are racialized in the U.S. As Foley says, “particular groups have been singled out for exploitation and domination.” In such a world, Christian networks of solidarity will necessarily see people with different racial and ethnic backgrounds standing and living together to resist that domination.
Regardless of what Allie Beth Stuckey thinks, we don’t have the option of saying, “The Bible doesn’t talk about racial diversity, so it’s a made-up problem.”
If the Bible teaches on wealth and poverty, greed and generosity, violence and peace, sickness and wholeness, widows and orphans, then in the United States the Bible does talk about race.
If the Bible presents Jesus’ reign as good news for the poor and dispossessed, for those on the underside of the empire, then in the United States the Bible does talk about race.
Since social disparities touch communities of color uniquely due to America’s racial history and politics, attention to how race and power operate in our own church contexts is a piece of working toward the unity of the church. By broadening our theological imaginations, we can see racial, ethnic and cultural diversity to be an expression of the church’s witness that the traditional ways of doing social, political and economic dominance have been abolished by the Christ who shares all he has with his brothers and sisters.
Jacob Randolph
Jacob Randolph serves as assistant professor of the history of Christianity at Saint Paul School of Theology in Oklahoma City. He is a Ph.D. graduate of Baylor University.