Believing is either hospitable or it is not believing. Hospitality is structurally part of believing. Hosting others in oneself is the very essence of believing in God, not a more or less necessary ethical consequence. If one does not host others in oneself, one does not believe.

The Hebrew God, the God that the Hebrew Bible presents to us in the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis, is a universal God who cares for all the peoples of the earth and guides them to perform the task he has assigned to them on earth and in the universe he has created. All human beings are equally co-existent on God's earth.

Believing in God means, therefore, knowing that we are connaturally consanguineous with every human being from the ‘neighbour’, the husband, the friend, down to every other human being anywhere on earth. I do not exist without him, and he without me.

The message is reversed

But there is another form of belief and that is faith in the citizen God. Every city, every people has its own God and religion. To believe in God is then to believe in a God who protects my city, against the city of others, which in turn is protected by Gods who are our enemies.

The opposition of religions stems from replacing the universal God of the Hebrew Bible with a citizen God, who excludes. God protects me and threatens others. This belief in the citizen God creates the identity (we are Christians, Italians, the others are Africans, Muslims), the identity that is opposed to other identities based on other beliefs. Belief becomes structurally enmity. Religion thus manifests itself as a form of defence against the threat of others.

Many, many times, Christians have turned the universal God of the Bible into an identity-citizen God who is hostile to others.

But, if God is the one who guides every single human being, every single human group, every people, believing in God implies an existential attitude whereby I instinctively, necessarily identify with others. They are me, and I am them. To be human is par excellence, structurally, to identify and to mingle, to blend into each other. One finds oneself by mutating into the other.

Try to read the gospels carefully and you will see that the most intimate attitude that defines Jesus is to be driven to identify himself with the concrete interlocutor in front of him, to understand the situation he finds himself in and to propose, in that situation, an alternative of life that saves him from the danger that threatens him. Faith necessarily leads to the desire not only to identify with others, but also to the need to contribute to the improvement and salvation of those who are - with us - a ‘con-human’ on earth.

See. Dio cittadino – Città di Dio