If you missed the
goings-on in the streets of San Jose last week outside a rally for presidential
candidate Donald Trump,
you might have been the only one. Protesters waved Mexican flags and were
caught on camera burning Trump hats, egging, punching and kicking Trump
supporters and calling them “racists” and “fascists”. One police officer was
assaulted. Video clips on YouTube show victims almost uniformly white and attackers
almost uniformly Hispanic.
A minor skirmish,
really, but we’re only in June. It’s a long way to November, and there’s no
guarantee the election of a new president — no matter who he or she may be —
will do anything to substantially ease racial tensions.
For better or worse,
America is now a quasi-democratic republic comprised of a number of ethnic groups
with increasingly divergent interests. (My adjectival “quasi-” has more to do with concerns about the reliability and security of electronic voting than about the validity of U.S. democracy in principle.) The thing is, absent a sustained economic boom or the imposition
of order by a strong central government, multicultural states and empires have poor
long-term track records for cohesion. Iraq is a fine example: brutal
dictatorship kept Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish cultures in line for more than
two decades. Remove Saddam and the results speak for themselves.
While many complain
about Trump’s “divisive rhetoric”, it seems to me that Trump is merely a
symptom of the current American malaise and not the root cause of anything. It
is American multiculturalism that most severely threatens its cohesion. Historically at least (as
someone has well put it), Diversity + Proximity = War.
And yet multiculturalism
is assumed uncritically by many members of Western societies to be an
unmitigated good. (Such assumptions are less common in China, Russia, North
Vietnam and many, many other countries around the world.) To some in the
Christian community multiculturalism is even thought to be (in some bizarre,
extended sense) the will of God.
The word multiculturalism
is used by different people to mean different things, and the various usages
are often conflated.
Natural Multiculturalism
First, the word gets
used to describe the obvious historical fact that for various naturally occurring
reasons — personal, political, religious, economic — some people leave ethnically homogeneous surroundings to live elsewhere
for an indefinite period of time, creating a certain level of ethnic
diversity in the host society.
Multiculturalism in this
sense is a natural thing, and is probably as old as mankind. In such host
countries there is usually a dominant culture to which a certain amount of legal,
linguistic and practical conformity is required (“When in Rome …” as the
saying goes), along with a number of less influential but still identifiable cultural
flavours. When Abraham brought Hebrew culture and the worship of Jehovah to
Canaan, it was at first nothing more than a cultural flavour. When Moses
brought Hebrew culture back to Canaan after several hundred years in Egypt, it
was a very different story indeed!
So far as this natural phenomenon is concerned, Israelite law reminded
its citizens to love the sojourner and treat him as an equal. But the word sojourner means “resident alien” and hints at not only an ultimate allegiance outside the nation in which one is a stranger, but
also the temporary nature of one’s visit.
Enforced Multiculturalism
Second, the word multiculturalism
may be used to describe the intentional government imposition of greater cultural diversity on a (relatively) homogeneous nation. This is a very
different thing. Such policies are not the least bit natural, and one has to
wonder at both the motives and wisdom of regimes that introduce and perpetuate them. U.S. Democrats have worked this angle effectively to swell their voting base by tens of millions since the passage of Teddy Kennedy’s Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and the powers
that be in Germany, Sweden and much of the EU have more recently imposed on an even more artificial shift in ethnic demographics on their citizens. Whether the results are ultimately
satisfying to voters in the affected countries remains to be seen.
Present indications are not good.
Christian “Multiculturalism”
Third, a sort of
multiculturalism is often said to exist within
the Christian church, in which there is “neither Jew nor Greek … for
you are all one in Christ Jesus”. Likewise, in Revelation we read of a great multitude “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” standing before the throne of the Lamb. That’s both the end game and the
current spiritual reality, but we need to recognize that in this present age of
grace, the extent to which the Church succeeds or fails in taking a spiritual truth
and making it a practical reality hinges on its willingness to abandon cultural
loyalties, customs and quirks within the Body of Christ rather than embrace and
preserve them.
Government-Imposed Cultural Diversity
With that said, there
is nothing specifically Christian about government-imposed cultural diversity,
and no valid biblical reason for a Christian to promote a policy of enforced
multiculturalism over a more nationalistic approach. There is certainly no good
reason for Christians to be calling one another racists and fascists over our
preferences.
Yet the spiritual oneness
of the Body of Christ continues to be confused with some sort of more general fraternal
obligation to the unsaved of other races:
- Christena Cleveland stops only a hair short of calling white Christians in America racist for largely failing to line up alongside #BlackLivesMatter and “follow Jesus’ footsteps by standing in cross-cultural solidarity with black people” over the Michael Brown shooting and the racial issues it raised. But a desire to reach fellow Americans of all ethnic backgrounds for Christ should not be confused with an obligation to take a firm political stand on an issue where any evidence of racism or wrongdoing by the police is very iffy indeed.
- Richard Shin of the Glory Church of Jesus Christ says, “Being a part of the global village, we are required to live in harmony with all of the people whom God created”. But our Christian obligation to live at peace with all men has nothing to do with being part of some falsely conceptualized “global village”. It has to do with being members of Something (or Someone) Else entirely. Further, to live at peace with all men is not the same as inviting all men to move in next door. That’s a question of prudence, not theology.
- David Gushee and a multiracial group of Christian ministers and scholars have released a statement “confessing resistance to Donald Trump as a Christian obligation” on the basis that he is “targeting other races, women, cultures, ethnicities, nations, creeds, and a whole global religion [whatever that last bit means]”. That’s a shame. Our “Christian obligations” have nothing to do with races, cultures, ethnicities, nations, creeds or other religions, either in attacking them or defending them. We are obligated to God’s creation, and to our fellow believers, not to such abstractions.
All One In Christ Jesus
It needs to be remembered that it is ONLY in
Christ that Jew and Gentile truly become one. It is certainly not true in
the world around us, no matter how many wish it were so.
The “brotherhood of man” makes a great
sixties platitude but real brotherhood requires common spiritual parentage. Cain and Abel were brothers genetically but not spiritually, and look how that ended.
Enforced, politicized multiculturalism is nothing
more than a failed attempt to mimic the spiritual unity of the Body of Christ in the
world at large without the power of the indwelling Spirit of God, the love of
the Father and the direction of the Head of the Church. It is Christianity
without its main ingredient: Christ. It is Tower of Babel 2.0 — an exercise
in human ingenuity and empire building that cannot possibly succeed in the
long-term.
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