ABSTRACT
The Church, I argued in Chapter 7, is committed to a doctrine of human equality on account of its universal gospel, a gospel which privileges all people without distinction. Universal claims in ethics have been disparaged by postmodernists, in the name of the collapse of grand narratives, and postcolonialists, in the name of resisting Western cultural imperialism. Examples of the oppression of minorities, or the devaluation of cultures, in the name of specious universals are easy to find and the objections therefore have cogency. They are similarly disparaged, however, by every variety of religious fundamentalism, which all have their own hotline to God and therefore their own unique account of the categorical imperative. Implicitly they are also denied by the latest attempt to divide humankind up and argue for paths of 'separate development' in the by now notorious thesis of the North American political analyst and foreign affairs advisor, Samuel Huntington, about the 'clash of civilizations'.
