Is Multiculturalism a Failure? Should it be?

    

When I was a child, my parents took me to the New York World Fair, way back in ’64, where there was an enchanting exhibit called “It’s a Small World”, a celebration of the variety of peoples and cultures of the world. But multiculturalism was more of a theory that a reality way back then, with the United States largely separated from the rest of the world, and primarily white and mainline Christian, albeit with a small but significant African-American population, much of which was segregated from the white majority.

     The United States, and the world for that matter, are far different today. The States have become far more diverse in every sense: ethnically, racially, religiously, culturally, and so on. Where once the United States was often thought of as a “melting pot”, we now more and more resemble a “salad bowl”. And no longer are the religious options here limited to Christian, Jewish, and none-of-the-above; now in addition to those we also have vibrant and visible Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan, Muslim, and Mormon communities of faith, plus a variety of others as well.

            A rise in multiculturalism has been happening in Europe as well, with large flows of immigrants, including Muslim immigrants, coming in from eastern Europe and Africa.

            While there are many who celebrate the rise of multiculturalism, there has been, particularly recently, vocal and even violent opposition. A week ago a Norwegian citizen, identified by police as a right-wing fundamentalist Christian obsessed with what he saw as the threat of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration, exploded a bomb in central Oslo, then went on a killing rampage at a youth camp on a nearby island. He simultaneously released on the internet at 1500-page “manifesto” detailing what he saw as the dangers of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration and the need to abandon dialogue and take up armed resistance.

            It would be dangerous to believe that this man’s horrific deeds are simply the work of a mad man, divorced from a wider cultural and religious context. In recent years leaders from across Europe have trumpeted the alleged failure of multiculturalism, particularly with respect to Islam and Muslim immigrants. Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, said in October 2010 that attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany had "utterly failed", stating: "The concept that we are now living side by side and are happy about it does not work”, and that "we feel attached to the Christian concept of mankind, that is what defines us. Anyone who doesn't accept that is in the wrong place here."  The United Kingdom’s Prime Minister David Cameron has echoed her remarks, as has Australia’s ex-Prime Minister John Howard.

            And we in this country are no strangers to anti-multiculturalism sentiment, particularly with respect to religious bigotry. Herman Cain, a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, told a reporter a few months ago that he would not be comfortable with a Muslim in his cabinet; he expanded upon that thought in a subsequent television interview saying that his discomfort was due to the intention of some Muslims, and I quote here, “to kill us.” Moving from this absurd generalization to advocating a blatant violation of the Constitution of the United States, he supported opposition to the construction of a mosque in Tennessee on the grounds that “Islam is both a religion and a set of laws, Shariah laws”, which he claims is different from “traditional religions where it’s just about religious purposes.”  Never mind that Judaism and Christianity, to name just two other world religions, are also structured around religious laws, beginning with those same 10 Commandments that conservative Christians keep wanting to have posted in classrooms and court houses.

            The Chancellor of Germany claims that the Christian concept of mankind, as she puts it, requires that those who don’t share the same heritage, culture, and religion of traditional Germans don’t belong in their country. A self-proclaimed Christian in Norway believes that multiculturalism and immigration by Muslims are such dangers to Norway and such abominations that they justify mass murder. An American presidential candidate, an associate minister in his Baptist church in Atlanta, openly advocates bigotry against Muslims. So well might the world ask, so might we ask, what does our Christian faith have to say about the challenge of multiculturalism?  What does Christianity have to say to us about how we ought to approach the religiously other?

            We could, of course, start with Scripture, which brings us back to Paul in Athens. For Paul, there is no note of religious superiority, no claim that God has favored any one set of the world’s peoples, privileged them or set them above all others. Listen again to what he says:

“The God who made the world and everything in it . . . made all the nations to inhabit the whole earth; and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him – though indeed he is not far from each of us.” (Acts 17:24-28).

The effect, theologian and preacher Brian McLaren says, is to shatter the traditional us-them mind-set:

“People of every language, culture, and religion are given a place in God’s world, and no nation is given permission to crush, annihilate, dominate or assimilate others. In so doing, Paul unifies everyone in a singular “us” – people created by God, people who have a God-given right to life and land, people who are being invited to seek God right where they are, people to whom God is already near, people who are already living and moving and having their being in God, people who are already God’s children.” (A New Kind of Christianity, p.211)

            Paul is not saying anything new here, nothing that does not follow the trajectory of Scripture beginning with Abraham and running through the prophets and right through to Jesus.  Abraham was called by God to be a blessing to all the nations of the earth.  The prophets spoke of how while God loved the Hebrews, God’s love extended to the other nations as well – I think here of Amos, through whom God said, “Are you not like the Ethiopians to me, O people of Israel? Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Captor and the Arameans from Kir?” (Amos 9:7). Jesus made explicit that his message was not just for the house of Israel, but for the world, reaching out to a Samaritan woman, a Roman centurion, the Greek friends of Andrew and Philip. The early church, beginning with Peter and his message that God shows no partiality, continued that trajectory affirming that we all have a place in God’s world.

            The backlash against multiculturalism is driven, of course, by fear. By anxiety that immigrants will take our jobs, by worries that the increased presence of those unlike us will threaten the ways we have always done things, by concerns that “they” might lay claim to that larger portion of the pie which we by historic accident and luck of place of birth have enjoyed.

But it should not, and must not, be fueled or justified by claims that the Christian faith supports such bigotry. Angela Merkel has it completely wrong – the “Christian concept of mankind”, as she puts it, speaks of love of neighbor, not his exclusion and eviction. Herman Cain has it completely wrong – Jesus has no room for discrimination against those whose groping for God, as Paul put it, is done in the name of Islam. And the Norwegian domestic terrorist has it completely wrong – nothing in Christianity endorses the cold-blooded mass murder of innocent men, women and children, and certainly not in pursuit of keeping a country pure from immigration by those of another faith.

            This, instead, is what our Christian faith calls us to do:

To love, not hate, our neighbor – to feed, tend, and care for God’s children, recalling the risen Christ’s command to Peter: “feed my sheep.”

To repent of our tendency to divide the world into us versus them, to think of insider versus outsider, but instead to see that we are all our God’s children, and all have a place not in our world, but in God’s world.

And finally,  to trust so securely in our faith and in Jesus’ abiding love for us that we can both humbly offer that faith to the world as a gift, and at the same time receive as a gift from others their experiences of the one God who holds us all in the palms of his hands.