International Journal of Public Theology 8 (2014) 335–343 brill.com/ijpt
Engaging Multiculturalism as Public Theologians J. Jayakiran Sebastian
Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, USA*
[email protected]
Abstract This article explores notions of multiculturalism, and how the term is to be understood practically within theological education, mission and ministry. By taking the author’s Indian heritage as a context, the article traces social and political usage of multiculturalism as an ideology and questions how multiculturalism should effectively be employed by public theologians, within theological seminary programmes in a western context.
Keywords theological education – multiculturalism – heritage – public theology – ministry
Introduction The constant challenge a postcolonial critic faces is how to maintain marginal status. How to be on the edge. How to remain an outsider. There is danger awaiting those who are located in the academies. Universities are increasingly becoming collaborators with corporate capitalism rather than being its critics. Our knowledge production is being managed to suit the demands of the market . . . The university wants to know the economic impacts of our outputs, but knowledge is more than economic
The original version of this article was presented at the session on ‘Addressing Global Issues as Public Theologians’, American Academy of Religion meeting, Atlanta, USA, 2010. I thank the chair of the panel, Katie Day for her encouragement and perseverance, as well as my fellow panellists and the audience for their feedback. In addition I thank the anonymous referees of the IJPT for very constructive comments.
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benefits. It is about raising awkward questions, upsetting received ideas, and challenging power.1 Having taught for two decades from the mid 1980s at the United Theological College in Bangalore, India, where the community comprised of students, staff, and faculty drawn from a multiplicity of denominations from the four confessional families: Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant and Pentecostal; having been in a college that pioneered interfaith dialogue and interreligious learning and praxis; having participated in the movement that led the way in placing the issues of the marginalized in Indian society, especially issues emerging from the Dalit and Tribal communities, which together constitute the majority of members in the Indian churches, I find myself now at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia (LTSP), whose population, too, is ecumenically and culturally diverse. Faculty, staff and students are, among others, members of the Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopal, Presbyterian, United Church of Christ, Church of God in Christ, and Baptist churches; they include Latinos, Asians, Caucasians and African-Americans. At various levels we are engaged in attempts to explore the task of rethinking and re-visioning theological education, as we continue to grapple with questions of cultural and denominational diversity in our midst.
Understanding Multiculturalism in Asian and Euro-American Contexts
It is from this culturally and ecumenically diverse educational context that I seek to offer some interconnections and insights, as someone coming from the Asian context and now working in the North American academic setting. An important aspect of my Asian heritage has been captured by the cultural critic Kuan-Hsing Chen, who writes: Useful ways of understanding our own societies have lain dormant, mainly because our points of reference have been the United States or Europe, where civil society as it is defined in those locations is well established, but also because we are constantly being pushed by our nationalist elites to follow and catch up with the West by reproducing those Euro-American forms of civil society . . . If the points of reference remain 1 R. S. Sugirtharajah, Exploring Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: History, Method, Practice (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 185.
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within the old colonial framework, the process of translation will never be undertaken, and we will be blind to forces operating outside civil society and the state. However, once the dialogue is shifted and local and regional referents become the focus, unnoticed translation problems are necessarily brought to the fore and have to be confronted.2 The challenge of recognizing different cultural societies through a largely Euro-American lens, is being taken seriously at various levels, not least through the promise and potential of subaltern historiography and postcolonial studies, and because of this, various subsumed dimensions of realities that were easily overlooked because of overarching and homogenizing ways of looking at things have emerged and demand sustained and serious attention, most importantly in the areas of Dalit and Tribal studies. Given this demand and holding as I do the responsibilities of both teaching courses and heading an initiative at the LTSP, namely, being Director of the Multicultural Mission Resource Center, leads me to an ongoing engagement with the term ‘multiculturalism’, a term that by no means is self-explanatory. Amartya Sen notes that ‘[d]emand for multiculturalism is strong in the contemporary world. It is much evoked in the making of social, cultural, and political policies particularly in Western Europe and America’.3 Even while this demand for multiculturalism is the case, there are many voices being raised against the blandness and limitations of the concept. Kwame Anthony Appiah talks about multiculturalism as ‘another shape shifter, which so often designates the disease it purports to cure’.4 Another important analysis places multiculturalism as a concept amidst the societal changes that were brought about in the United States following the Civil Rights Movement; it goes on soberly to state: Although shocked by blacks’ calls for “power,” many white ethnic groups responded to the allure of identity politics by calling for public recognition of their distinctive cultural heritage. The result, in the standard narrative, was American multiculturalism, reflected in today’s motley celebrations of diversity, multicultural sensitivity training, and American history textbooks featuring favorable depictions of the achievements of Americans from different shores . . . Multicultural recognition is 2 Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 243–44. 3 Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (London: Allen Lane, 2006), p. 149. 4 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), p. xiii.
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important; yet it cannot replace efforts to address the continuing reality of racial inequality.5 As public theologians we need to address the complex set of questions of changing demographics as they relate to the mission and ministries of the church. These changing demographics have consequences for the way in which theological training is structured and re-visioned; for the development of courses and curricula; for the way in which congregations respond in terms of revitalizing their outreach, especially to minority communities; and for the way in which denominations work together ecumenically to foster openness and hospitality in the midst of growing cultural and religious intolerance and hostility. The issue of how the term ‘multiculturalism’ can be used to acknowledge the fact of cultural, racial or ethnic diversity in our society, and to recognize that cultural diversity is a valued gift that enriches community life and relationships, should be addressed. A multicultural approach in theologizing and theological education must, therefore, address issues of relationships between different cultural communities, norms governing their respective claims and practices, and the historical memories that cultures represent; it must then draw those gifts and memories into theological discourse and ministerial praxis. In a broad sense, multiculturalism is about the place of diverse cultures within the framework of our community and, in a narrower sense, a search for the realization of the meaning of ‘catholicity’ in the church as an institution and in the context of theological and ministerial formation.
Recognizing the Challenges of a Multicultural Society
Amartya Sen argues that there are ‘two basically distinct approaches to multiculturalism, one of which concentrates on the promotion of diversity as a value in itself; the other approach focuses on the freedom of reasoning and decision-making and celebrates cultural diversity to the extent that it is as freely chosen by the persons involved’.6 In the Indian context, one is faced with the ongoing struggle to understand what being a nation that is by definition a secular democratic republic means, where, at the same time, the reality for
5 Elizabeth Anderson, The Imperative of Integration (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 1–2. 6 Sen, Identity and Violence, p. 150.
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many Indian Christians remains the charge, which often escalates into violence, that Christianity is of ‘alien origin’ and, as Sakar notes: More specifically, of having been a constituent of Western-colonial projects of cultural conquest. The charge persists, despite the fact that the origins of Christianity in one part of India (Kerala and Tamilnadu) go back to the early centuries of the Common Era, preceding, incidentally, the conversion of England to Christianity and indeed the formation of most living forms of Hindu tradition.7 What we need to take into consideration and nuance, in a context where multiculturalism is used loosely and often superficially, is how this reality within the Indian context of an emerging and vibrant nation, seeking to take its place as one of the global economic superpowers, facing at the same time the reality of growing poverty and a widening gap between those who have benefited from globalization and those who are victims of the new world order, struggling with interreligious prejudices and intra-religious narrow mindedness, can help us in our efforts to understand how diversity brings with it its own challenges, which cannot be brushed aside with a quick celebration before returning to routine indifference. In questioning the sense in which multiculturalism is a somewhat superficial term that does not address underlying social inequalities, Susan Moller Okin’s comment, in concluding her reply to a group of committed, serious, scholars who responded to her piece ‘Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?’, contributes to the ongoing discussion. Okin writes: ‘What we need to strive toward is a form of multiculturalism that gives the issues of gender and other intragroup inequalities their due—that is to say, a multiculturalism that effectively treats all persons as each other’s moral equals’.8 Okin’s comment raises the question of whether such a form of multiculturalism relativizes varying forms of inequality, placing those who have been victimized and brutalized on the same moral plane as those who did the victimization and brutalization. In India, where it is only recently that millennia-old institutionalized patterns of discrimination on the basis of birth and gender have been belatedly addressed 7 Sumit Sarkar, ‘Christian Conversion, Hindutva, and Secularism’, in Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, eds, The Crisis of Secularism in India (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 356–67 at p. 360. 8 Susan Moller Okin, ‘Reply’, in Susan Moller Okin with Respondents, Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 115–31 at p. 131.
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in the public realm, and those denied the possibility of agency are gaining the voice that has been silenced or ignored, such an attitude, relativizing social inequality, risks jumping too quickly towards a speedy levelling of difference. The sobering words of Rey Chow are important here: As discussions of ‘multiculturalism,’ ‘interdisciplinarity,’ ‘the third world intellectual,’ and other companion issues develop in the American academy and society today, and as rhetorical claims to political change and difference are being put forth, many deep-rooted, politically reactionary forces return to haunt us. Essentialist notions of culture and history; conservative notions of territorial and linguistic propriety, and the ‘otherness’ ensuing from them; unattested claims of oppression and victimization that are used merely to guilt-trip and to control; sexist and racist reaffirmations of sexual and racial diversities that are made merely in the name of righteousness—all these forces create new ‘solidarities’ whose ideological premises remain unquestioned. These new solidarities are often informed by a strategic attitude which repeats what they seek to overthrow. The weight of old ideologies being reinforced over and over again is immense.9
Locating Multiculturalism within Theological Education
In keeping this warning about the repetition of old ideologies in mind and recognizing that terms that are easily tossed to and fro, including multiculturalism, need to be interrogated, so that it is clear that multiculturalism is not used simplistically just in terms of making diversity visible, as I continue to bring my experiences in India to bear on my work at LTSP, my focus as a theological educator is to equip persons for mission and ministry in a 9 Rey Chow, ‘From Writing Diaspora: Introduction: Leading Questions’, in Paul Bowman, ed., The Rey Chow Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 30–47 at p. 43 (original italics). The 2011 killings in Norway offer a chilling reminder that under the surface of what passes for a stable, prosperous, welcoming, multiculturally-oriented society, there are those like Anders Behring Breivik, who, through the violent murder of innocents, signalled his belief that multiculturalism would spell the end of society as he knew it. We have to wonder whether this act, as a recent editorial in the Economic and Political Weekly put it, a symptom of ‘the mainstreaming of prejudice in the West’? (Editorial, ‘Lessons from Utoeya: The Norwegian Killings Illustrate the Mainstreaming of Prejudice in the West’, Economic and Political Weekly, 46:31 (30 July 2011), 8).
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multicultural congregational context within United States. Among the many concerns worth exploring the first is the integration of a multicultural perspective in all theological disciplines, not as something tangential to the larger whole, but as a vital and integral component in a seminary education. Also worth exploring are: the fostering of praxis-oriented theological education amidst the messiness of everyday life, as it relates to diverse cultural populations; the reinforcement of the seminary’s conviction that public theology demands individuals and communities be committed to a life of sensitive faithfulness amidst the instabilities and uncertainties generated by the articulation of identity claims in a multicultural context, where historical, cultural and economic privilege is increasingly coming under scrutiny; the ability to discern the impact these issues have on relationships, recognizing that multicultural realities generate opportunities to re-think relationships in a context where there is a jostling for space in the public sphere among groups with a variety of histories, legacies and expectations. Finally, the possibility of rethinking patterns of ministry and pastoral leadership appropriate to the unique challenges and demands of racial and ethnic specific communities in an ecumenical setting should be explored.10 These concerns to consider within mission and ministry education indicate the importance of why a multicultural approach to theological education is not only necessary but also vital in the present context. Such an approach ensures that churches, congregations and denominations do not stagnate and lapse into a business-as-usual mode of being or rely exclusively on a ‘Euro-centric’ model of mission and ministry. Further, a multicultural approach recognizes the promise that multiculturalism can offer an untapped richness, which has the potential to enliven the life of the church at all levels. However, one reality that we must not lose sight of is that of the variety and range of historical ‘situatedness’ of various groups of people within the rapidly-changing landscape of contemporary life within the United States. In the Indian context, the fact that the country as a whole gained independence in 1947, meant that various groups of people who, although pushing their own agendas and concerns, gained a national identity and were now in a position to work through and struggle for their narrower identitarian claims within the public stage of the nation-state. 10
I ask the question: can public theology in a multicultural and multi-religious context assume that there is a ‘public’ out there, when for many members of the real or imagined public, religion may not mean anything in particular?, and comment on these concerns in J. Jayakiran Sebastian, ‘Overcoming Ignorance and Arrogance: Public Theology in a Multicultural Context’, in V. J. John, ed., Many Ways of Pluralism: Essays in Honour of Kalarikkal Poulose Aleaz (Delhi: ISPCK, 2010), pp. 320–29.
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In the United States, what we have to make clear when talking about multiculturalism is that this should not and cannot be some kind of overarching ideology that subsumes the long and complex histories of various groups within the struggle not just to birth the nation but also to keep the ‘united’ reality of the federal experiment alive. The role of those whose enslaved status, blood and sweat are an indispensable part of what the nation is cannot be relativized in the name of political correctness and a so-called level playing field. As public theologians, drawing upon insights from various corners of the world, and also from our own neighbourhoods, we need to strategize how we can work together with pastors, church leaders and practitioners functioning in challenging areas of interfaith and interreligious cooperation, and with faculty and departmental colleagues concerned about contentious issues and themes in contemporary understandings of missiology and related disciplines, to identify and analyse trends regarding changing expectations and challenges facing seminaries and congregations in the local contexts (in view, among other things, of rapidly changing demographics; the reality of immigration; the local face of global Christianity; and the need and necessity of cross-cultural and interreligious engagement and intervention in issues of public importance). Those of us who are teaching in North America must consider how to use insights on interreligious cooperation from outside of the United States to develop a new curriculum or revamp existing courses, taking the reality of multiculturalism, denominational instability and religious plurality seriously. There is a need to develop such courses at various academic levels, with aims and objectives, outlines, bibliographies and resources clearly indicated, in the broad areas of biblical studies, history of Christianity, systematic theology and pastoral life and praxis. Further, the course development process needs to interact with and integrate insights emerging from a range of disciplines, including the fields of cultural studies, sociology, immigration studies and missiology, and the needs to draw them together and make them a part of our ongoing discussions and plans. Such work developing theological courses will have multiple impacts, on the pedagogy of theological education; on policy and decision-making in the churches; in the form of publications that can feed into the ongoing discussions on multiculturalism; and in bringing about an enhanced awareness at the congregational level as to what the integration and nurturing of a multicultural way of thinking and praxis offers in communities where people live, work and worship.
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Conclusion In terms of my work at LTSP, such thinking offers an intentional way to deepen an already ongoing conversation among my colleagues and throughout the institution, including in classroom pedagogy and the self-understanding of who we are as an institution. This conversation is especially important as we, at the seminary, work to foster public leaders in keeping with our mission of seeking ‘to educate and form public leaders who are committed to developing and nurturing individual believers and communities of faith for engagement in the world’.11 The LTSP has a thirty-five year history of being enriched and transformed by its association with the African-American community, through the Urban Theological Institute; this initiative has immensely enriched who we are as a seminary, and transformed us as a learning, teaching and worshipping community. The ongoing implications of this transformation, in a context where immigration and growth of other communities and groups make dynamic multiculturalism less of a choice and more of an inevitable reality, serious and sustained conversations needs to be facilitated, attracting more participants and feeding into a broader discussion across the disciplines and the ‘publics’, as we seek to contribute in various ways to ecumenical cooperation and interreligious engagement. At the same time, it is hoped that our interrogation of the concept and reality of multiculturalism, will, most importantly, give voice to those who for too long have not had their voices heard and have been compartmentalized and marginalized.
11
Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, ‘Mission and Values: A Seminary for a Church in Mission’, LTSP.edu (April 2010), < http://ltsp.edu/missionvalues> [accessed 26 May 2014].
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