This challenge pops up pretty much every day, pretty much everywhere. And nominally Christian colleges are no exception.

At Central College in Iowa, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship is under fire for dismissing a gay leadership-team member named Brad Clark who wouldn’t accept the group’s position that sex outside marriage is wrong. Though the college is affiliated with the Reformed Church in America, soon cries of “discrimination” were in the air, and members of the Student Senate tried to yank InterVarsity’s official recognition. In the end, InterVarsity won in the Senate, but now a college “diversity committee” is drafting new policies for student groups. (The college itself bars discrimination based on “sexual orientation.”)

Now on campus, discrimination and diversity are loaded words. No one wants to be caught on the wrong side of any controversy defined in such terms (you never see anyone embrace the labels pro-discrimination or anti-diversity). But these terms carry some very dubious assumptions that need to be challenged — especially by Christians, if we want to avoid being swept up by the values of the world.

Discrimination is commonly used to invoke Jim Crow-style bigotry of the separate-drinking-fountains-for-blacks variety. Yet that’s not the chief meaning of the word; its most basic meaning is simply to make distinctions — whether between persons, things, ideas or behavior. Some reasons for making distinctions are unfair: If you presume a man is lazy or untrustworthy based solely on his race, you’re denying him the right to be judged as an individual, and indulging a mindset that will smear a lot of other innocent people in the process. Other reasons, however, may be perfectly valid. If a man has a history of stealing, you’re justified in keeping a close eye on him when he’s around money, and you’d do well to think twice about putting him in charge of counting the church offering. (Christians are obliged to forgive, not to wear blinders.)

What we’re seeing today is a rhetorical sleight-of-hand that’s meant to make us associate all discrimination with irrational prejudice. That’s a bum rap, especially when applied to groups like InterVarsity. Race is a biological and cultural distinction, but it’s a moral irrelevancy; God doesn’t consider some people better or worse than others on the basis of skin pigmentation. Ideas and behavior, on the other hand, can have great moral significance, for good or for ill — and that’s what InterVarsity’s saying when it distinguishes homosexual conduct (and for that matter, unmarried heterosexual conduct) from marital sex.

This sense of the word “discrimination” has been lost and really deserves to be reclaimed. But till then, perhaps a better word is the synonym the Bible often uses: discernment.

Diversity — sometimes called multiculturalism — is used to suggest a broad-minded regard for people from a wide range of cultures. That’s a great thing if it means nothing more than the truth that there are lots of beautiful and worthwhile things in lots of different cultures. But as Dr. James Dobson points out, the words “are a kind of Trojan Horse in which to smuggle the concept of moral relativism into the heartland of western culture. They are code words for the proposition that there is no such thing as right and wrong. . . . Somehow the existence of many different standards proves that there is no standard.” So the bottom line is, everyone can do whatever he wants — what the biblical book of Judges repeatedly (and disapprovingly) calls “right in his own eyes.”

Well, not quite, because there’s a corollary to the notion of diversity, and it amounts to a particularly virulent type of exclusiveness. “Diversity” has no room for Christianity, because Christianity insists that right and wrong really exist. In short, Christianity breaks the lone rule of postmodernism: that there are no rules and no one may claim otherwise. Other religions and belief systems also break that rule, of course. But advocates of “diversity” are happy to celebrate (say) Islam, simply because it’s a stick with which they can beat Christianity — or at least to reduce Christianity to the status of one among many religions, none more valid than any other. They might feel differently if they lived in an Islamic country. But they don’t, and they recognize Christianity as the main enemy they must defeat in order to achieve cultural dominance in the country they do live in.

That’s why InterVarsity’s not in good hands when it comes under the rule of a campus “diversity” committee. At best such a body might let InterVarsity continue — but only with the understanding that “diversity” (i.e., moral relativism) is the ruling standard on campus. Alternately, the committee will simply order InterVarsity to give up the principles which form its reason for existence — that, or be banished to the land of groups which (unlike the local homosexual activist group) fall beyond the pale of campus respectability. Scratch the surface of “diversity” and you’ll find it can turn pretty intolerant pretty quickly.

But if “diversity” is hypocritical, that’s not its greatest flaw.

Christians can respect and value the products of many cultures, including non-Christian ones; they’ve done so for centuries, even incorporating the art and philosophy of pagan cultures like Greece and Rome.* Still, Christians can never make diversity their highest standard. They believe that absolute truth about God and man exists, and they measure ideas and cultures against that truth.

This, too, is what InterVarsity did. They believe the truth is that God made man and woman for sexual relations within marriage. They can’t abandon or subordinate that judgement, in the name of diversity. They’ve sworn an oath to the far higher name of God.

* Arguably, incorporating Greek and Roman philosophy into Christian theology hasn’t always been wise; the issue was a matter of debate in the Reformation. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with drawing on the culture of non-Christian peoples — so long as it’s subject to a Christian worldview.