I SPEAK ON about 25 college campuses a year, which affords me a front row seat for current trends in identity politics. One of the things I’ve noticed is that when people say they are engaged in “diversity work,” what they often mean is that they are busy mobilizing their preferred identity groups toward their approved politics. The main role they see for those on the other side is to be defeated.
But the real challenge of living in a diverse democracy is not dealing with the differences you like, it’s working with the differences you don’t like.
In his excellent new book, Confident Pluralism, John Inazu, a professor at Washington University Law School and board member of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, takes a long look at how to do this, with special attention to religious differences.
Disagreements with regard to religious matters are some of the most challenging ones around. That’s because religion is about ultimate concerns. Not only do faith traditions deal with issues—creation, salvation, morality, human purpose—that are inherently ultimate in nature, they imbue matters that may otherwise be viewed as mundane with a sense of ultimacy. That’s not just a random group of people over there, that’s the church, or the umma. That’s not just any old piece of land, that’s the place where the Second Temple once stood, or where Lord Rama was born.
Inazu opens his book with a sobering quote from the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “It is impossible to live at peace with those we regard as damned.”
He is reminding us right off the bat that the stakes could not be higher.
Thankfully, Inazu is more optimistic than Rousseau. His prescription for living with the differences we don’t like is both to be proud of our particularities (the confidence part of the title) and to recognize that building a common life together takes a great deal of energy and attention (the pluralism part). In other words, we do not have to give up essential things about who we are or how we believe in order to live well with people who believe and behave differently. But we cannot take such living well together for granted. Healthy, diverse societies do not magically appear; people work enormously hard, generation after generation, to build them.
Inazu’s book is divided into two sections, constitutional commitments and civic practices. The constitutional-commitments section reminded me just how influential the courts are in this country, and just how lucky we are to inherit (and be able to improve upon) a constitutional tradition that took at least certain dimensions of diversity seriously.
The stories in the civic-practices section had the added bonus of containing immediately applicable lessons. I loved especially the stories about friendships between people who disagreed profoundly on some fundamental matters but chose to bracket these differences and find common ground. For instance, Kevin Palau, a conservative Christian evangelist, and Sam Adams, the first openly gay mayor of Portland, Ore., chose to put aside their disagreements on human sexuality and focus instead on civic engagement in their shared city. Had such a friendship not been formed, thousands of people in the Portland area would have gone without needed food, housing, and counseling.
Confident Pluralism is a reminder that—whatever our preferred groups and approved politics might be—bracketing disagreements and building friendships across divides is the essence of “diversity work” in our fractious republic.
Eboo Patel (@EbooPatel), founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, writes about social justice from his perspective as a Muslim American of Indian heritage.
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