Embracing differences: Dignity in Faith and Spirituality

Professor Anna Rowlands is the St Hilda Chair of Catholic Social Thought and Practice at the University of Durham, UK. She is currently working for the Catholic Church on secondment to the Dicastery for Integral Human Development and the Synod Office. She is the author of Towards a Politics of Communion: Catholic Social Teaching in Dark Times (Bloomsbury, 2021).

"I don't need people who are different from me." This false idea claims that we can be self-sufficient as individuals, neighbourhoods, nations. That we don’t need others, especially ‘outsiders’. Pope Francis describes this as a kind of narcissism in his social encyclicals and letters.

We have our own national versions of ‘otherness’ in our class, racial, ethnic, religious and citizen status narratives. We separate the ‘other’ and create another category of human, in some sense less worthy than us. But self-sufficiency is a myth. We need to build societies that meet everyone’s basic human needs and enable dignity to flourish.

We are more than homo economicus and the Catholic tradition identifies universal drivers. A crucial part of human dignity, supported by Catholic social teaching, is being seen as a contributing person, who offers skills, talents and abilities. There are certain features of human behaviour, certain temptations and fault lines: the human condition. And the philosophical question is, how do we navigate the human condition in a responsible way that promotes dignity?

I founded The Centre for Catholic Social Thought and Practice to connect academics and practitioners interested in how the core principles of Catholic social teaching – based on human dignity, solidarity and the common good – can transform society. We connect academic perspectives on these principles and ideas with those with lived experience.

Our aim is to find ways to regenerate society towards a dignified, solidaristic future. It is a privilege to enable people to articulate their natural sense of what makes for a dignified life, to be able to draw out their own deep, visceral knowledge and wisdom. It requires listening to each other and relearning the connections that previous generations had wired into their DNA. And this transcends religion.

None of us has a singular identity. When we try to make things more homogenous, we single out a particular element of human identity and hold it in such a fixed way that it becomes a force of isolation, fracture and separation. In reality, we’re a complex mix, constantly negotiating and renegotiating our identities throughout our lives. Hearing people reflect on their own plurality is key to understanding how we build complex communities. By distilling learnings from global contexts we can recognise that we are plural beings.

My sense of the complexity of identities, of not having a settled sense of nationality, is rooted in my own family history. My grandparents came to the UK from rural Ireland in search of construction and factory work. We haven’t had a settled family community for at least two generations. I now live in a completely different place from my parents and siblings. What – and where – do I call home?

A week working in a Cambridge, UK, immigration detention centre twenty years ago further disproved my assumptions about humanity and citizenship. I heard the stories of refugees who had walked through deserts, stowed away on ships, travelled in the back of lorries and negotiated their way across continents. I’ve since worked with migrant communities experiencing forced displacement - refugees. I’ve listened to migration journeys, of attempts to settle and renegotiate lives in a new context.

I've worked on big scale projects that look at the role of religion in motivating either hospitality or hostility towards migrants. Religion sits on both sides of that fence – it can be something that motivates hostility and opposition: you're not one of us, you're not like us. But it can also motivate deep hospitality. The Abrahamic faiths, and many others, have this strong sense of the duty to the stranger, to the person needing support. It is there in all the sacred texts and traditions of the world’s major religions.

I was involved in a huge project in the Middle East talking to people displaced from Syria into Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan. We found that UN agencies and national governments were not the biggest providers of support for refugees. The most powerful support comes from two places: refugees assisting other refugees, and local communities in the poorest city neighbourhoods. The most economically marginalised of one community welcome the most politically marginalised of another. They manage to work out how to live side by side.

Humanitarian policymakers often struggle to understand religion, faith and spirituality. They see it as irrelevant or as a source of division, difficulty and conflict. But religion provides spiritual and psychological resilience for minority and migrant communities as they settle and renegotiate their lives in a new context. We can find hope in small scale projects where people from different groups learn how to do things side by side and create shared worlds in very ordinary ways.

My religious belief is that all human beings are rational, capable of self-reflection and capable of giving of themselves in relationships of love and justice to others. I believe that all human beings have an equal status because they are the product of a common creator. God gifts affection and love equally and ensures that the goods of the Earth are destined to meet the needs of all people. As the Pope says, we are a universal fraternity and all humans are our siblings.

Regardless of beliefs, to thrive in societies where human dignity can flourish, we need to confront plurality, difference and newness. That comes from the outsider, the newcomer, the person left on the peripheries of a community. We need their wisdom and their deep knowledge about what it means to be human. We need the spaces to think reflectively, to make connections, to recognise and share them together in the space that political philosopher Hannah Arendt calls inter-est - the public space, and this is the space that needs to be rebuilt. This comes from working together to find ways to regenerate society towards a more truly common, more dignified and more genuinely solidaristic kind of future.