My son and I have a tradition. Every Saturday we go to the local doughnut shop for breakfast, where he gets half a dozen doughnut holes and a long john, and I get one blueberry cake and a glazed donut.

It’s a popular place, so walking in on this particular Saturday, it was no surprise to see a line. But what was surprising was the demographic mix. The shop owners, a husband-and-wife team, are from Southeast Asia—one from Vietnam and the other from the Philippines. Customers in front of us included a father-and-son pair dressed in camo gear, rugged leather boots, and baseball caps with mesh netting in the back. A Black woman perused the glass case deciding what doughy sweet treat she wanted. A woman wearing a hijab and a dark-coloured abaya stood happily next to her husband. Then there was my son and me, both Black. Languages swirled around us as each spoke in their preferred tongue, only to switch to English once they reached the counter.

This is an increasingly normal scene in America, not limited to global cities like New York or Los Angeles. Gateways like Ellis Island and varied immigrant tenements once layered on the Lower East Side have long since dispersed to neighbourhoods in small and mid-size cities and the American suburbs. While the suburbs have long been pictured primarily as communities of white people, the latest census data show more people of colour calling these areas home.

In 1990 less than 40 percent of Black people lived in the suburbs, but in 2020, over half (54 percent) do. For Latino and Asian Americans, the numbers are even higher—more than 60 percent live in the suburbs. While major cities are still the most racially diverse places to live, the suburbs have shifted. In 1990, just 20 percent of suburbanites identified as a persons of colour. In 2020, that number has increased to 45 percent.

As for my family, we live in a town of 9,149 people on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi delta. Traditionally made up of Black people and white people, our small town holds glimpses of this more heterogeneous nation. And as we do, it’s got me thinking: a modern reformation in church and society requires a robust and textured exploration of what it means for all people—and so many different kinds of people—to be made in the image of God.

Dense Diversity

We are living in the most pluralistic and diverse society in world history. Never before have so many different people come into contact with each other on such a consistent basis and with such ease.

The population has grown from about 158 million to more than 330 million since the 1950s. In the mid-twentieth century, white people constituted almost 90 percent of the US population. Today white people are just over 60 percent of the population, mostly due to declining birth rates and strong immigration, especially from people of Latin descent.

I have always thought it natural that Christians be among the first to welcome this increasing interaction between different people groups. After all, the arc of the biblical story points toward its glory, as John of Patmos describes in a vision: “After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands” (Revelation 7:9).

But somehow this has not been our story, not recently, not in the United States. A 2021 survey from the Public Religion Research Institute showed that among religious people, white evangelical Protestants tend to view increasing diversity as a threat. “White evangelical Protestants (78%) are the most likely to agree with the idea that America is in danger of losing its culture and identity, followed by 64% of white Catholics, 59% of white mainline (non-evangelical) Protestants, 58% of other Christians, and 52% of Black Protestants.”

The survey measured “culture and identity” by asking respondents questions such as whether they thought the United States had historically been a force for good, whether being a “true” American included speaking English, and if racial, ethnic, religious diversity makes the country better. Settling on a common definition of “culture and identity” is notoriously troublesome, but such questions help determine how different people define themselves as American and whether they think others fit that description.

Others have felt so threatened by the growing number of racial and ethnic minorities in the United States that they have subscribed to a belief called the “Great Replacement Theory,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center defines as a “racist conspiracy narrative [that] falsely asserts there is an active, ongoing and covert effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries.” When a man walked into a Buffalo grocery store in May 2022 and killed eight Black people, he rationalized his deadly hate by appealing to the Great Replacement Theory. The theory animated the neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville in 2017. And over the years, attacks on Jewish Americans, Sikhs, and others have been linked to this narrative of fear.

Why is it that the church, which the final book of its most holy text indicates will be composed of people from every tribe, tongue, and nation, is often so unprepared to welcome demographic and cultural diversity?

Followers of Christ should be known for our hospitality. Instead, we have become known for how threatened we feel. Instead of extending the right hand of fellowship, we thrust out the stiff arm of rejection.

It is time to re-disciple the church, especially in the United States, about what it means to live as Christians amid massive diversity in all its forms. It is time to re-examine the doctrine of the image of God.

In God’s Image and Likeness

I’ve written three books now, and I am working on my fourth. I have written hundreds of articles and blog posts. With every piece of writing, the introduction is key. It orients the trajectory of the entire piece and introduces the most important elements of what you’re trying to communicate.

It is striking that in the very first chapter of the very first book of the Bible, God declares the dignity of all humanity. “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:26–27).

The Bible’s first chapter introduces the concept of what Christians have come to call the imago Dei, the doctrine of the image of God. It is the foundation for what Christians believe about human beings and ought to dictate every aspect of Christian thought and action—political, social, aesthetic, moral. At the most basic level, it should govern how we treat each other, especially across lines of difference.

Being made in the image and likeness of God means that human beings hold certain similarities with God. To borrow the words of author D.A. Horton, it means “that we all bear, in a limited way, characteristics of God’s image: qualities such as morality, personality, rationality and spirituality that make us distinct from the rest of God’s creation.” We can reason and think. We have emotions and compassion. We can make moral choices. We have stewardship over the earth. Some of God’s attributes, such as his omniscience and omnipotence, do not extend to human beings, but God has crowned human beings with glory and honour (Psalm 8:5).

God’s fingerprints rest on every single person without restriction. They have not touched merely some human beings; they have touched all human beings. His is a holy image that imprints itself on Black and white people, men and women, rich and poor, incarcerated and free, queer and straight, documented and undocumented, nondisabled and disabled, powerful and oppressed. We are equal in value to one another in our shared likeness to God. It is a value at once incalculable, inviolable, with implications for every stage and aspect of life, both individual and corporate.

Human beings do not simply have the image of God; we are created in the image of God, thoroughly and holistically. As theologian Herman Bavinck writes in his Reformed Dogmatics, “This image extends to the whole person. . . . While all creatures display vestiges of God, only a human being is the image of God and is such totally, in soul and body, in all his faculties and powers, in all conditions and relations.” No part of ourselves is separate from our image-bearing.

Martin Luther King Jr. called this a sense of “somebodiness.” In October 1967, King offered an inspiring message to a group of junior high school students in Philadelphia.

“What is your life’s blueprint?” he asked them. King explained that any person’s road map for their life should begin with a sense of their intrinsic and sacred value.

“I want to suggest some of the things that should begin your life’s blueprint. Number one in your life’s blueprint, should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your worth and your own somebodiness. Don’t allow anybody to make you feel that you’re nobody. Always feel that you count. Always feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has ultimate significance.”

What King called “somebodiness” the Bible calls being made in the image of God. It is the conviction that each person possesses divine possibility and infinite value. If we carried that notion in all our interactions with people, how might it change our approach to diversity and plurality?

In Western thought and anthropology, theological explanations of what it means to be made in God’s image and likeness have tended to focus on how this teaching applies to one person at a time. Yet each people group—with our different languages, culinary culture, art forms, traditions, and histories—bears the image of God. We are valued in God’s sight not solely as single persons, but as part of distinct groups that each reflect God’s brilliance differently and together form a composite image of an endlessly inventive Creator. The image of God teaches us to honour one another as individuals, yes, but also as members of broader communities.

In an increasingly diverse world, where the sheer variety of differences can overwhelm us, the doctrine of the image of God teaches us to approach one another with respect and humility. A curiosity that dignifies is key: We could learn about misión integral from Latin American Christians, an understanding of missiology that embraces both evangelism and social responsibility. We could learn about peacemaking between ethnic and political groups from Palestinian and Rwandan Christians. We could learn about truth and reconciliation from South African Christians. Each historical and cultural experience has a charism to offer as God’s logic work itself out in the particularities of earthly groans. The church is most beautiful when its prismatic reality is most visible.

A Modern-Day Reformation with the Image of God at the Centre

But how do we better delight in this prism? The church is in need of a modern-day reformation to clear the cobwebs, a reformation emanating from a recovery of the imago Dei as central.

What would such a reformation look like? First, it would entail renewed scholarship that explores what it means to be made in God’s likeness in relation to contemporary issues. There should be no domain left untouched: questions of gender identity, transhumanism and artificial intelligence, end-of-life care, wealth and financial systems, labour exploitation, how we treat our food and agriculture, racial and ethnic conflicts, modern immigration and refugee dynamics, climate change and other issues of pressing concern cry out for the light of this doctrine. While the principle of bearing God’s image is eternal, the specific applications of that principle must shift and adapt in new contexts and time periods.

Excavating the image-of-God teaching for the modern day would also emphasize the ethical. The image of God is not simply an entry for a systematic-theology textbook. It is not just a teaching for audiences of churchgoers to give a nod of assent. Our ways and means must match our ends. Orthodoxy rings hollow without orthopraxy.​

Being made in God’s likeness is an integrative reality, a holistic teaching that attends to all dimensions of the human experience. There is no artificial separation between the spiritual and the material. Liberation is not limited to one’s soul in eternity but includes one’s body here on earth. To honour the image of God in self and others entails both personal piety and public justice. It means honouring truth and loving neighbour. It means cherishing the intellectual, physical, and spiritual being of all humankind.

Too often, Western theology has emphasized the verbal explication of a doctrine to the neglect of its behavioral aspects. How did so many white Christians see race-based chattel slavery as no violation of the image of God? How did pious churchgoing Scripture-quoters interpret the bondage of Africans as a positive good? How is it that what Frederick Douglass called “slaveholder religion” is now re-gaining momentum in what historians call Christian nationalism?

It is telling that Black theology arose as an explicit attempt to reweave belief together with ethical practice, to restore integrity to the Jesus way. J. Deotis Roberts, a Black theologian, wrote, “Because of Black suffering we have always seen the need to wed faith to ethics. . . . Our circumstances have led us to the conclusion that Christian faith and social action go together.” It is no accident that time and again the oppressed people groups in a society see how one treats the “least of these” as the true measure of one’s religious convictions.

A new reformation will have new leaders. A selective hearing of the imago Dei has disempowered and marginalized precisely those who have so much to give. Women will have a more prominent role. The poor will have a voice. Black Christians and other people of colour will feature as significant leaders. Those in historical positions of dominance will experience both the humility and the delight of being a student, a guest, and an ally.

The new reformation probably will not focus on the United States. It may not even be Western. If we truly value the contributions and potential of all image bearers, then we should look to the majority world, most of which is made up of very poor black and brown people, for revival. The majority world can teach us that Western individualism is not the only way to think theologically. God’s church around the globe can teach us about a more communal application of biblical principles and what that looks like amid poverty and marginalization.

The new reformation will require us to rethink for how we deploy resources. A deeper understanding of the image of God would lead us to realize the system of white supremacy was developed to undergird and justify the profit motive. In the antebellum era, plantation owners wanted to maximize their profits and minimize their losses. The most efficient way to do this was to refuse to pay their labourers. Politicians, pastors, business owners, theologians, and others devised a rationale to justify forcing people of African descent to labour for life without pay. In various periods the subjugation of Black people was attributed to the “Curse of Ham,” biological inferiority, or cultural deficiencies. Similar justifications arose to sanction the theft of Native American land, excluding people of colour from certain jobs, and barring other people groups from voting rights. Explanations for the superiority of one group over another are almost always in service of greed and materialism.

In the workplace, respecting image bearers means valuing people not simply for their productivity but for their humanity. We ought not overwork those who labour in our organizations. Plenty of time for rest and other obligations outside of work acknowledges that people are not just labourers but fully orbed human beings. Pay equity between staff of different races and ethnicities should be an expected workplace feature.

On matters of racial justice, white people will choose to follow pastors, theologians, authors, practitioners, activists, and others who have experienced racial and ethnic marginalization. Those whose voices have been ignored or muted would have the opportunity to not only share their perspectives but also influence the direction of organizations. Literally, the last would be first.

Our lives would be integrated in more authentic ways. Right now, a diverse congregational gathering on Sunday morning is often seen as the greatest demonstration of racial integration. While such gatherings are good, might there be other, more authentic ways to demonstrate racial solidarity? Those who value the image of God would see diversity as a disposition and direction more than an event on a certain day of the week. Honouring each other as image bearers would influence our decisions on where to live, where to send children to school, and where to worship. We would see these decisions as part of what puts us in a position to meaningfully engage with people of different races and ethnicities.

Christians can begin to apply fresh understandings of the doctrine of the image of God in our own organizations and communities first. We have no standing to ask others to respect the dignity of all people unless we hold ourselves to the same standard.

Humility and Honour

In an increasingly diverse world, we need to understand the foundational biblical teaching of the image of God so that diversity does not devolve into division.

Ultimately, the failure to honour the image of God in others is about fear and pride—fear of the other and inordinate pride in oneself. Fear is tight. It closes you off. It withdraws and guards. Its sharp edges harm anyone who gets close. But there is no fear in love. Love is open. It is curious rather than critical. It embraces rather than excludes.

Pride puffs up. It crowds others out and takes up more space than it deserves. Humility is well-proportioned. It neither shrinks nor balloons. It holds just the right amount of room for each person. Humility makes space.

To honour the image of God in each other, we need to practice love that embraces and humility that makes space. This allows everyone to present themselves in their fullness. As brothers and sisters in Christ, we should not have to puff up or minimize any aspect of our identities. We should be able to show up just as we are, trusting each other for support and accountability just as Christ modelled for us.

Our world traffics in abuse, pain, violence, and rejection. It should not be so among people of the Way. Our minds, bodies, and souls are already so bruised and scarred. Our world needs healing. To offer this balm, we need a profound appreciation of each other’s fragile yet priceless humanity. When we honour the image of God in one another, we honour the God whose image we bear.