Three words, seemingly quite different, mean the same in the current social context: Ethnicity, tribe, community. All three words mean an identity separate from the larger group. When a politician says he/she wants to represent his “community,” he is making clear that his community stands separate from the whole. The word, “race,” is often used as a substitute for ethnicity or tribe, but because race is a superficial identifier rather than one of essence, it is a poor descriptor. A man or woman can be of African or Asian descent and be absolutely in the mainstream of Western Civ. And one can be a descendant of European settlers and be firmly fixed in the hip-hop community.

I wander off in the weeds here just to make the point that the more an ethnic or community group sees itself under siege or threat from the outside, the more violent it becomes. When we look at the world around us we see groups who are unusually violent. Take the Palestinians and their constant attacking of the Jewish Israelis as one example. From the outside it doesn’t make a lot of sense to attack someone who is certain to cause massive destruction in return. But Palestinians see themselves as a threatened community abandoned by those they thought their allies and they strike out.

The example closer to home is the death and destruction among those who see themselves members of the “black community.” Black men are not born more violent or murderous than any other sinner in the human race. Yet men who see themselves as members of an oppressed community, men who only comprise 7% of the US population are responsible for 50% of the murders here. Again, it is not because they are intrinsically evil. It’s not because Black men are more violent, more homicidal, than men of Asian or European origins. They are not closer to some primitive evolutionary ancestors than other men. We are all children of the same Adam. No, the violence we see in those who identify as members of a persecuted community here is the same as that of the Palestinians and the the Serbs and the Irish (during the Troubles).

If you don’t identify as a member of a minority community, you, like me, may scratch your head when members of those communities engage in riotous mayhem when a criminal fires upon the police and is killed in return as they did in Minneapolis. Well, when you don’t see yourself as one of “them”, as in a member of the larger community, then any police action is seen as an assault on your community. Then, as with Hamas’ rocket attacks on Israel, the community strikes out in self-destructive violence against its “oppressors”, and because of its heightened state of alert against aggression from the dominant community, more violence is committed against one another. Minor slights result in gunfire and bodies pile in the morgue.

Is there a solution? I don’t think so in any secular sense. The only thing that has worked outside the United States is separation. Ireland broke off from the United Kingdom and many Scots want to follow suit. Yugoslavia broke up into the separate ethnic territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. Czechoslovakia became Czechia and Slovakia. Ukraine broke off from Russia, and Pakistan from India, and then Bangladesh from Pakistan. Tribes demand tribal territory. People with separate ethnic identities don’t seem to be able to live together in peace. We’ve been trying it here in the US for some time, but the voices demanding we get into our separate ethnic enclaves and divide the spoils are increasing. E pluibus unum may not long endure. Currently the dominant power structures are doing the Marie Antoinette thing and trying to placate the demands of minor ethnic groups, but eventually the mob will not be placated and will be dragging them off to the guillotine.

The only lasting solution is a new identity. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. As Jesus put it: we must be born from above into a new community – a new ethnos. That is what God is doing through the gospel. I’m not saying “church” or “religion.” Church and religion can be just as tribal as “Country” or “R&B”, “Rock & Roll or Rap.” But true faith in God through Jesus Christ is a total transformation. All superficial identifiers of skin tone, hair texture, language, or ancestry fade into insignificance and all we see is Jesus and his brothers – and mine.