Right at the start of my research for Theos on multiculturalism I remember watching a TV debate on the topic. The panel covered all the usual bases – British identity, immigration, religious and political extremism – and yet managed to float above many of the challenges of real life. This detachment was captured perfectly by George Galloway’s insistence that we should ‘forget about blending people and just build the most beautiful mosaic society we can’. How exactly this is supposed to translate into the lives of the people I live and work with in East London is elusive to say the least.
Six months later, having just finished writing the report, I heard the very sad news that the wife of one of the people I’d come across through my research had had a stroke. This man was part of a father and sons group in East London who had used a small Near Neighbour’s grant to organise monthly trips with activities like camping and archery. The group brought together families from eastern European, Asian and white British origins. This very diverse group had rallied around the family in the most incredible and practical way – from cooking meals to offering lifts to and from the hospital. In fact the wives of the dads were even getting together – Hindus, Catholics and Muslims – to pray for this woman and her family.
The contrast with the detached and polarised debates, conducted in increasingly esoteric language (superdiversity, interculturalism, etc) and driven by ‘experts’, could not have been more stark. In 20 years, if we are to look back at a time when we got better at living together in a plural and diverse society, that ‘getting better’ wouldn’t consist in more expert opinion and fine-tuned buzzwords. It will have been part of a process of building genuine local relationships between people of different faiths and ethnicities. How could we help people do this?
My research set out to investigate how projects are already bringing diverse groups together and forming what American scholar Danielle Allen has called ‘political friendships’. In particular I looked at the Government-funded Near Neighbours programme which enables different faith groups to undertake social actions projects together, and the civil society campaigning of community organising as practiced by Citizens UK. The research draws two important conclusions.
The first is that working together is essential. ‘Dialogue’ is important, but if there is no tangible common action then it will be hard to create any sense of shared destiny or shared agency. This encourages people to focus on specific, local experiences which they share – of poor housing, low wages, or whatever. Near Neighbours is a good example of how governments can help create space for political friendship to flourish, even if they can’t magic them into existence. Small grants are distributed with the sole criteria that projects bring people together from different faiths or ethnicities. This allows people to engage in the ways that make sense to them, with nobody telling them what they should be doing or how.
Second, if people are going to get beyond surface level co-operation, they need to be free to share their deepest motivations. Citizens UK has been quick to recognise this, giving its participants chances to share ‘testimony’ in public meetings. This often involves very personal stories, where themes that aren’t always permitted in the public like family and faith are particularly in evidence. People are allowed to ‘be who they really are’, in a way that is often not permitted in other public forums. One result is that campaigners can trust each other to stick together when challenges arise because they know that people are acting out of their experience, not some theoretical commitment to a campaign. People know exactly what their collective efforts represent to each person involved.
Encouraging political friendships by building people’s skills in working together and sharing core motivations involves making some difficult choices. One area of challenge is in who is considered acceptable to work with. People from different religions need to decide not to refuse to cooperate with people who believe differently or not at all. Others may have to follow a similar process with cherished political beliefs. There is something of an irony in ‘progressive’ circles that whilst outwardly championing diversity and difference, many people are often restrictive about which groups they will co-operate with. For example there is a conversation which comes around with wearying regularity about whether political parties should be working with faith groups that they might agree with on social justice but disagree profoundly with on issues of equality and personal morality.
The experience of Citizens UK and Near Neighbours suggests that we need to change the way we judge potential partners from using a ‘progressive test’ of their beliefs to a ‘relational test’ of whether they can co-operate with people from different backgrounds. They have found that this more open form of working can create unlikely alliances which are transformational for all involved, and that such experiences are actually much more likely to soften fringe views than simply giving people the political cold shoulder.
The second challenge of the report is to those who might feel nervous about the idea of exploring core motivations, particularly when this means allowing people to express strong religious ideas in the public square. Isn’t that inherently divisive? Again the experience of Near Neighbours and community organising suggests that this fear is ungrounded, finding instead that people are usually quite good at negotiating fundamental differences themselves without needing boundaries for what are and aren’t acceptable ‘public’ reasons.
At its heart this report has a very simple message. David Cameron famously suggested that state multiculturalism has failed. If we are to reclaim a more practical multiculturalism, it won’t be won by new theories, buzzwords or more debates on the meaning of ‘Britishness’ but by encouraging real relationships at a grass roots level between people of every background and belief. I wouldn’t say that Near Neighbours or community organisers have ‘cracked it’, but they have understood key ways in which diversity can be handled on the ground. If these lessons can be taken up across civil society then, like the dads of East London, we might just find ourselves surprised by the way in which communities can be both diverse yet united communities of which we can all truly be proud.
David Barclay is the Faith in Public Life Officer at the Contextual Theology Centre, and a former President of the Oxford University Student Union. To read Making Multiculturalism Work, click here.
Image by Pug50 from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence.
