Is Diversity Good?

If you had asked the question in this article’s title a few years ago, people would probably have looked at you funny. Of course, diversity is good. What are you, some sort of racist? Today, you might get the same reaction, but for different reasons. Why do you care about diversity, are you woke or something? I think this remains a deeply important question for us to ask, and unpacking an answer to this question can help us more wisely navigate the rocky terrain of our political moment, dominated as it is by the logic of equal-and-opposite reaction.

Diversity as a Relative Good

We could begin by looking at what sort of diversity we’re talking about. Do we mean the general concept of variety, which, as the adage goes, is the spice of life? Do we mean cultural diversity? Something else? I think this starts us down a helpful path, because it highlights the difficulty of speaking in abstraction. We sometimes talk about diversity as if it was a thing, as if there were some substance out there we call “diversity.” Of course, this isn’t true. Diversity isn’t a thing, it’s a description of things.

This changes how we should approach the question. Things can be desired in themselves. This fitness as an object of desire is how classical philosophy defined goodness. It adds another layer to God’s declaration that all things He made are “good.” Not everything that exists is equally desirable, but there is a goodness, a proper desirability, to everything. However, if diversity isn’t a thing but a description of things, then the question of goodness becomes a question about whether that state is good for those things.

So what? Many of you got to this point ahead of me. Asking whether diversity is good may always have meant asking whether diversity is good for whatever we’re really talking about. The reason I worked around to this point the long way is that it highlights that diversity is what we call a relative good, rather than something good in itself. We can reject one pole of our social dialectic from the outset by recognizing that diversity is not desirable for its own sake but rather for the sake of the good of the thing we’re talking about. Applied to society, this means that approaches that treat diversity as good in itself will be prone to go haywire because they lack an anchoring reference to the good of society. We could add more diversity to society by making more space for psychopaths and cannibals, but nobody really thinks that would be a good idea.

At the same time, this doesn’t mean that we reject the notion of diversity as irrelevant or even undesirable. We can see this simple truth again by turning to society, which depends on diversity for its existence. Our very reproduction is dependent on the difference between men and women. Obviously, some degree of difference is good for us.

Evaluating a Relative Good

So how should we think about diversity? To start, even though many of us default to splitting the difference when there are disagreements, that approach will be unsatisfying to everyone. While it gives some direction to say we should have some diversity, but not too much, we’re still lacking a standard to judge too little or too much. To judge the good of diversity, we have to talk about the good of the things that are diverse. Keeping with both the examples I’ve used so far and the applications most of us care about, this means that talking about the good of diversity means we have to talk about the good of society.

Shifting gears to focus on society helps ground our consideration in a number of ways. We can start by recognizing that diversity is the foundational state of affairs. Individuals within families are different from one another. Families are different from other families, and the ethnic and cultural groups that grow from these families are different as well. The real question is often how one society can emerge from the many differences that make it up.

Starting from square one, then, society needs something to unify it in order to actually be any one specific society. This makes sense philosophically, too: unity is an essential characteristic of all things that exist in a way that diversity is not. It is an unqualified good of my body that it all be my body. Yet the varied functions of the parts of my body are only good in relation to the part they play in the whole. In short, society has diversity and it needs unity. That means that the relative good of diversity will relate to its need for unity.

Here is where I think the Neo-Calvinist traditions offer two really helpful concepts that help us escape from placing unity and diversity in a dualistic tension with one another. The first helpful insight is what I’ve called Reformed Organicism. I describe this in more detail in a forthcoming book,[1] but the basic idea is that society is a sort of living thing, and this invites comparisons to other living organisms, like our bodies. We see a version of this in the Apostle Paul’s numerous appeals to the church as the body of Christ. In each case, the diversity of the parts uniquely contributes to the whole. “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’”[2] This schema emphasizes that diversity, despite being a relative good, remains essential to the proper health of the body. This means that we should be careful in easily concluding that our left or right hands are things we can so easily cut off without negative consequences. Even where removal seems necessary, we should recognize and try to otherwise account for the good that’s being lost alongside the diseased limb.

This connects directly with the second insight from Neo-Calvinism, which is that the human pursuit of unity typically collapses into the enforcement of uniformity. We’re all fans of unity if it means that everyone has to agree with us, but we chafe under pressure to conform to others’ expectations. Human efforts produce unity over uniformity for two reasons. First, uniformity might be what we sinfully desire. It’s no secret that humans at times willfully crush God-honoring differences. The second reason is less malicious, however, and that’s the simple fact that the law works externally. Only God reaches the heart, and when a heart of unity is what’s needed, human power is constrained to outward appearances. This means that even well-intentioned efforts to produce unity can generate crushing uniformity if we’re not careful.

Neo-Calvinist Abraham Kuyper captures both of these insights beautifully in his description of the nature of God-given unity:

“Humanity fashions for itself an iron fence made up of identical stiles. That is its unity. But if you wish to see the unity of God, go out into a wild forest, observe there the crooked trunks, the twisted branches, the mingling colors, the endless variety of shades, and note how it is precisely in the whimsical interplay of colors and lines that unity is revealed in its finest expression.”[2]

Promoting Diversity

With these thoughts on unity in place, we can return to the question of diversity. Why is our political moment so fractured over initiatives to promote diversity when diversity is a given? While it makes a certain sense to talk about it as “promotion,” I think it’s more illuminating to think about these efforts as work to either reintroduce natural diversity or to preserve it from the threat of eradication. I think we have to consider the question of diversity in these two settings in different ways.

When it comes to efforts to reintroduce diversity, the assumption is that long-standing prejudices have chased natural diversity out of various parts of society. For instance, there might be more women represented in STEM fields absent decades of social pressure and discrimination that kept them out. Further, the difficulty of breaking into the field might mean that women and other historically-disfavored groups need help breaking back in.

Our two insights about unity can help us navigate the challenges of these efforts. First, if we think of this like an organ transplant, we recognize the need for immune suppression efforts, and we also recognize the very real possibility of rejection. However, I suspect the apt metaphor more often looks like trying to reintroduce a species lost from an ecosystem. Sometimes that goes well, but there are many cases where confident, heavy-handed interventions by humans have had serious unintentional side effects. A major reason why this might happen in society is because so many of these efforts make confused assumptions of uniformity. To pick back up our example of women in STEM, we think we know what health looks like, namely equality. Therefore, we think more serious intervention is justified to achieve it. However, this assumption is predicated on the idea that there are no meaningful differences in male and female preferences–that we are all uniform. Policies that promote diversity at one level while fundamentally rejecting it at another will naturally go off the rails as surely as any house divided against itself.

Efforts to preserve diversity are a different matter. The assumptions in this area are that existing diversity is good, and the prejudices and pressures of broader society threaten to choke it out. While there are exceptions to be made—particularly when they cause harm or conflict with shared civic values—I think adopting a default posture that is more sympathetic to preserving existing diversity makes a lot of sense. The Dutch immigrant subculture in my area makes a significant effort every year to preserve its heritage through a tulip festival, and I see no reason why the local population shouldn’t make similar space for, say, Hispanic or Ukrainian immigrant groups to celebrate their heritage.

In sum, when we hear people today talk about efforts to promote diversity, we need to discern what their aims and assumptions are. Diversity for diversity’s sake is incoherent. We need to interrogate what good is actually being promoted and what assumptions ground that assessment. Further, we need to interrogate our own assumptions about the relative value of the diversity being promoted. Where we are trying to create diversity, we should be cautious about trying to shape society into our ideal, especially if our ideal assumes the statistical insignificance of our genders or cultures. Where we are weighing the value of preserving existing diversity, we should be careful not to discount the value of different groups with a cultural “survival of the fittest” mentality or assuming that their diversity harms society while ours is good.

Ultimately, the question of diversity calls for careful discernment, and it is inevitable that we will disagree in these evaluations. However, if we can take our cue from the pluriformity of God’s creation, we can find hope for our efforts. Even where we get it wrong, God shapes Creation so that the riotous diversity of our world, whether in complimentary or contrasting tones, cannot fail to highlight His glory.

Footnotes:

[1] Donald Roth, Unity in Diversity: How Critically Recovering our Sense of the Nation as a Body Can Offer Us New Paths Forward in an Age of Division (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2026). The way we understand our situation shapes the way we approach our problems. This book argues that recovering a neglected way of understanding society will help us find better paths forward. It offers a way for Christians to engage in society to the glory of God, whether we're in political power or not.

[2] 1 Cor. 12:21

[3] From Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader. James Bratt, ed. (Eerdmans, 1998), 36.