When Openness Meets Asymmetry

What institutions lose when goodwill is not returned

In Algeria, the Pope stood in a place where Christianity cannot be freely proclaimed and spoke of “communion” between Christians and Muslims under the mantle of Mary. It was a striking image—generous, expansive, carefully chosen. It was also at odds with the conditions under which Christianity actually exists there. Christian proselytizing is restricted, and conversion can carry legal and social consequences. The terms of coexistence are not mutual. Yet the language offered was one of unity, shared aspiration, and spiritual closeness. The question is not whether peace is good. It is whether the language of peace can substitute for the language of truth without cost. When it does, something quieter disappears: the ability to name what is.

What the Pope expressed in Algeria is not an isolated gesture. It reflects a broader institutional posture, one that prizes openness while losing clarity about its limits. Where reciprocity does not exist, refusing to name that asymmetry does not produce unity. It obscures it.

This tension is not unique to the Catholic Church. It appears wherever institutions adopt openness as a posture while losing sight of what that posture is meant to protect. I recognized that pattern years ago, when I became a Unitarian Universalist. I was drawn to the faith’s stated commitments: a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, and the right of conscience. What made the tradition compelling was not the absence of structure, but the presence of principles that allowed inquiry without collapsing into relativism.

Over time, those principles shifted—not through rejection, but through refinement. The language softened. Emphasis moved toward shared values such as equity, transformation, and pluralism, all gathered under the broad and difficult-to-contest banner of love. Taken together, those changes marked a turn away from principles that protected inquiry and toward a framework that prioritized alignment. The revision of Article II formalized that turn, replacing the Seven Principles with a model centered less on how individuals come to truth than on how communities commit to shared positions.

That distinction matters. When an institution deprioritizes the mechanisms that make disagreement possible—conscience, inquiry, process—it does not become more open. It becomes more cohesive, but on narrower terms. The accompanying resolution affirming gender identity ideology made that dynamic explicit. It did not simply state a position. It established expectations around that position, collapsed contested distinctions, and framed dissent as harm. At that point, the language of welcome remained, but its function had changed. Inclusion no longer described openness to difference. It described an expectation of agreement.

This is how institutional drift occurs. Not through overt takeover, but through substitution. The vocabulary of openness remains while the boundaries that once gave it meaning recede. In their absence, the institution does not become neutral. It becomes vulnerable to the most assertive framework within it—the one most willing to define terms, set expectations, and enforce them. What emerges is not pluralism, but consolidation without acknowledgment.

The pattern is familiar. The setting is different.

Its consequences are easiest to see not in abstract doctrine, but in the areas where boundaries matter most. Questions of sex and vulnerability do not tolerate ambiguity well. When institutions lose the ability to name distinctions clearly, those distinctions do not disappear. They are redistributed, often at the expense of those with the least power to absorb the cost.

In recent years, debates around women’s spaces and the medicalization of gender-distressed children have exposed this tension with unusual clarity. The language of inclusion has often been used to dissolve sex-based boundaries that once functioned as safeguards. At the same time, dissent from that shift is frequently reframed as harm, placing the burden not on those redefining the boundary, but on those trying to maintain it. Where clarity gives way to consensus, and consensus to enforcement, the line between protection and participation becomes harder to see and easier to move.

Seen in this light, the Pope’s language in Algeria is not simply aspirational. It reflects the same assumption: that openness, once offered, will be met in kind, and that shared language can bridge asymmetrical realities. Where reciprocity does not exist, a posture built on assuming it becomes less a bridge than a misreading of the conditions. Yet those conditions remain. In Nigeria, Christians have been killed in significant numbers in recent years. The causes are complex, involving insurgent groups such as Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province, as well as regional conflict and weak state control. But complexity does not erase the religious dimension where it is present, nor the need to name it plainly.

The problem arises when institutional language operates at a level of abstraction that no longer corresponds to lived conditions. Appeals to unity are not wrong, but they become insufficient when they obscure asymmetry rather than address it. An institution that cannot distinguish between mutual coexistence and constrained tolerance risks confusing the two, and in doing so, loses the trust of those who experience that difference directly.

None of this means openness is misplaced, or that institutions should retreat into rigidity. Openness remains necessary for any institution that intends to engage a plural world. But openness is not self-defining. It depends on boundaries that clarify what is being opened, to whom, and on what terms. Without those boundaries, openness ceases to function as an invitation and becomes a void—one others will inevitably move to fill.

The challenge, then, is not to abandon openness but to recover its structure. That requires a willingness to state, without evasion, what an institution believes, what it does not believe, and what it is prepared to defend even under pressure to harmonize. It requires distinguishing between coexistence and equivalence, between dialogue and dissolution. These are not semantic niceties. They are the conditions under which an institution retains its identity while remaining capable of engaging others.

It is still possible to pursue unity without relinquishing clarity, just as it is possible to welcome others without surrendering definition. But that balance does not sustain itself. It must be maintained deliberately and expressed plainly. When it is not, the language of unity expands while the substance beneath it contracts. What remains is an institution that speaks in increasingly universal terms while becoming less able to account for the particular realities it claims to address.

At that point, openness has not strengthened the institution. It has thinned it. And where that thinning occurs, the consequences do not fall evenly. They settle where boundaries once offered protection—and they are not borne by those who set the terms.