This Fourth of July, stop talking about diversity

OPINION:

Over the past thirty years, I’ve had just shy of 20 different college students live in my home with my wife, my kids, and me. These students became part of our family while they attended college. The majority of these young men and women were from different cultures, and some were even from other countries. My wife and I will take a back seat to few when it comes to actually doing something about integration rather than just sitting around and talking pompously about it.

But, here’s the thing — for these some three decades, color and race have rarely been discussed under our roof. In my house, unity, not diversity, has been our concern. We are family, pure and simple. We see character, not color, age, nationality, or social status. 

We celebrate what we have in common and don’t worry about how we differ. 

We focus on the Savior and not ourselves. 

We hold each other accountable to righteousness, and we don’t belabor or bemoan our rights. 

In the “Piper family,” we are much more interested in what is good than what we think we deserve. Our identity is in Christ, not our individual grievances. Everyone in our clan is a human being, nothing more and nothing less. There are no subdivisions. My home is a “uni-versity,” not a “di-versity.” It is a place where everyone is expected to learn, grow, act like an adult, and not pout and fuss and behave like a child. My home is not a daycare. Our priority is to know and honor God, not stand around and talk about how we are offended or how our feelings have been hurt. 

This Fourth of July, as we celebrate our nation’s birth, forget what the proponents of diversity are telling you. They say they’re striving to bring unity to all people, but their goal is to create further division. 

They say they champion what brings us together, while all they do is highlight the very things that drive us apart. Playing on race, they create greater separation between people of different colors. Calling for bipartisanship, they castigate and cast out those who hold different beliefs and values. 

While claiming that they accept all people as they are, they reject those who do not conform.

These diversity-hucksters call for all of us to come together while finding pleasure in driving us further and further apart with each passing day. 

Their diversity is insular and adolescent. It cares more about individual rights than personal righteousness. It is self-centered. At its core, it is truncated, myopic, shallow, and stagnant. It enables perpetual childishness rather than demanding that we stop our self-absorbed navel-gazing, grow up and start acting like adults. It fixates on color and laughs at character. It is pretentious and proud. It focuses on division more than unity, segregation more than integration, reparations more than repentance, and a divided state more than a United States. 

Adolescents talk about their differences. They segregate. They divide. They haven’t yet learned the ancient lesson that the self is always self-defeating, that if all you care about in life is your rights and your identity, then you may get what you want in the end, but you may not like it. 

Today’s diversity is totalitarian and despotic. It forces compliance and demands that you bow to the state. It ignores the fact that when your God is diversity, the freedom that comes from self-discipline and personal restraint will not be tolerated by those who preach self-worship.  

The historic vision for America is the opposite of all this. Our republic’s ideal is one of unity rather than division. Our history is one of a people of differing views who came together, unified, and with common purpose who fought for human dignity and freedom. What our founders held in common was of far greater value than any of their differences. They understood the paradox that the more a government focuses on what the individual is owed, the more all individuals will be owned by that government. They knew that strength is found in uniting with one another and that the bond we share as “one nation under God” is the very thing that makes us “indivisible” and that brings “liberty and justice for all.” 

These foundational principles of freedom are clearly under attack by the contemporary political class and demagogues of diversity, who know very well that the way to more power is through more division. 

As you celebrate America’s birthday, ask yourself this: Why divide when the strength of numbers offers greater odds of success? Why be satisfied with a diverse nation when you can have one nation and one people coming together under one common cause?

• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Daycare: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery) and, most recently, “Grow Up: Life Isn’t Safe, But It’s Good” (Regnery, 2021).