In the spirit of my dear friend Gloria’s “Call to Prayer” published on this page last week, I would like to offer an invitation of my own. I would like to invite the readers of this Wespeak to reflect on the importance of diversity, both moral and cultural, to our university and our modern society. My intent here is not to criticize Christianity or the institution of religion, as that would require a book length work and more time than this senior can spare.
My intent is to ask whether an invitation to prayer “in the name of Jesus Christ” would, in fact, heal the divisions amongst the student body. Such an invitation implies that this campus, with its population that consists of adherents of many faiths and no faith, should sacrifice its diversity as a means to avoid unpleasant debates. Diversity is difficult. It is challenging. It is also one of the overriding, observable realities of our world, and it strikes me as deeply problematic to assume that our internal divisions would be repaired if we were to be unanimously subsumed into the dominant religion. I would ask that we find another way to reconcile our differences, a method based on empathy and appreciation of difference. For as long as we continue to believe that the world’s problems must be solved through conformity and assimilation, we will continue to be drawn into conflict by our attempts to convince unwilling others to share our emotions and to assume our attitudes.
The problem here is not the invitation to prayer (many campus groups advertise their activities) but the implied assumption that our joining together in prayer will somehow solve our problems, and that the mass conversion of our campus to a homogeneous ideology is either possible or desirable. To say that a prayer meeting is open to “everyone” is disingenuous—it assumes that we would be willing to pray in the name of anything, and extols the unifying potential of faith without seeming to even realize its potential to cause division. I, for one, would not sacrifice meaningful diversity of thought in return for a more ethnically diverse friend group. After all, a group of people that thinks as one cannot be truly diverse no matter how many races it consists of.
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