Reading ‘Superdiversity: Migration and Social Complexity’ in the Church of England.# 188. 04/02/2024.
Out of many, One People
Welcome, to a follow up to thoughts about Steven Vertovec’s ground-breaking book with suggestions to how it should change the thinking and practice, primarily in the Church of England, but also hoping that it will resonate with Christians of other backgrounds
Reading ‘Superdiversity: Migration and Social Complexity’ in the Church of England.
What follows are some of the outworking of Vertovec’s concept of Superdiversity should have on the church.
Try very hard not to use ‘UKME/GMH’.
It is difficult. I always use the simple phrase ‘ethnic minorities’ though I agree it can be clumsy but as a plural term it recognises the breadth and remarkable inner diversity within the term. The acronym squanders all the important insights and warnings that superdiversity alerts us to. I recognise that an acronym that may imply that white English people are problematic has usefulness. Superdiversity, as Vertovec recognises, is not an alternative explanation of the injustices of racism, personal or institutional. We still need alertness to, and repentance for, all expressions of it. But the default use of UKME/GMH constantly obscures crucial distinctions that need to be made if we are to address our current situation with the necessary degree of precision and appropriateness.
2. Quotas do not promote racial justice.
Seeking to implement quotas for particular occupations or opportunities fails to promote racial justice. Firstly, it requires wilful blindness to the substantial differences between the concerns, emphases, practices and behavioural patterns of different groups, such that equal outcomes can only be achieved by unfairly privileging some groups and disadvantaging others. Secondly, as Vertovec emphasises, the ethnic patchwork of Britain is so complex and fragmented, that isolating those blocs that deserve to receive quotas can only be done at the cost of gross over-simplification. Yet this is what, for example, the ‘From Lament to Action’ did repeatedly, particularly using the figure of 15% (estimated as the proportion of England’s overall UKME/GMH population at the time). But Britain’s minority ethnic population is markedly diverse across so many criteria (and notably as regards religious and Christian allegiancies) that expecting ethnic minorities as an agglomerated mass to show fairly identical patterns to the (also diverse) white population is sheer intellectual clumsiness.
As shown by Thomas Sowell in ‘Preferential Policies’ quotas do not benefit the mass of disadvantaged minority populations, but only a small advantaged cadre within them that is able to reap the benefits, which is why that little group defends them so protectively. Meanwhile the majority within that minority continue to be sidelined.
Lying behind the requirement of quotas is hubris: ‘a kind of premise that social difference is something that can be ‘managed’, usually from the top down (i.e., that is arranged by a state agency or public organisation)’ (p 5). Rather, the superdiversity that Vertovec has identified is an unmanageable and ever-changing melee, now clearly evident in our society and increasingly in the English churches. It is folly to think we can or should expect proportionately equal outcomes.
3. Recognise the great importance of the ‘1980s divide’ in migrants coming to Britain.
Pre-1980s migrants came largely for employment, most often unskilled or low paid, from a specific number of Commonwealth countries: the Caribbean, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Mostly, they played cricket. From the 1980s onwards immigrants came from very many more countries, often outside the Commonwealth. Mostly, they played football. They came for many more reasons – as refugees, for professional advancement, as students, fleeing instability, war or civil war, as asylum seekers.
This is very significant for the Church of England. Virtually all our minority ethnic senior leaders come from the ‘post 1980s’ cohort, and from a very wide variety of ‘untypical’ areas, notably South India (as opposed to North), Belgium/Congo, Iran, Zimbabwe. Most startlingly they were Christians before they came. To my knowledge Bishop Arun Arora is unique in having come to faith in this country, as well as one of very few from the earlier main sources of migration.
The other side of the picture is that the Church has still had distressingly little impact on the pre-1980s cohort of migrants. Those from South Asia, of course, mainly had other world faith backgrounds, but around 10% were Christian. Whilst a considerable number of worshippers are of Caribbean backgrounds, especially elderly and female, we have produced very few senior leaders, especially men.
Therefore, if the Church gives serious attention to superdiversity it will mean radically shifting its focus from simply increasing the number of minority ethnic leaders (as we have seen at present mostly from ‘untypical’ but usually middle-class and well-educated backgrounds) and instead seeking to develop strategies to evangelise and disciple those from the predominantly working-class ‘pre 1980s’ Caribbean and South Asian communities. Our failure to make fine-grained, intelligent distinctions within the minority ethnic populations means we still fail to address this major issue, and have unrealistic expectations on the potential of minority ethnic leaders who are from significantly different backgrounds.
4. Work at ‘inner’ diversity.
Vertovec quotes from Tariq Ramadan’s book ‘On Superdiversity’ on ‘the opportunity and responsibility for individuals to consider their own ‘inner’ diversity (p 61). He goes on to quote Ramadan: ‘thus the super-diversity of our time requires an intimate way of dealing with our own beliefs, convictions, and ‘the other’ - no diversity outside without a sense of diversity inside’ (‘On Superdiversity’ p 19). To this end, he also quotes Bhikhu Parekh: ‘Identities do not exist passively: their interaction pluralizes each of them, and discourages their essentialization and reification’ (p 206).
Surely such interaction is meat and drink for Christians! Paul’s stress on the church as a body where the many parts make their distinctive contributions was written to a church riven with many divisions, including, most likely, ethnic ones (see blog # 20, 11/03/2021 on ‘Barriers to Inclusivity in 1 Corinthians’). Members of intercultural churches are learning to draw on the spiritual gifts, pastoral practices and theological understanding that can come from very different cultures. Archbishop Justin Welby’s invitation to Dr Selina Stone to write his 2024 Lent book, ‘Tarry Awhile’, drawing on the spirituality of African-Caribbean Pentecostal churches was an important initiative.
This illuminates an important possibility for Christian witness in contemporary society, where, as is often now noted, ‘people sort themselves into closed, like-minded, categorically homogenous social networks both online and offline’. We see how such fragmentation leads to ‘democratic dysfunction and social injustice’, so that ‘the continued dominance of essentialist meanings around social categories poses a range of negative consequences to society across all scales’ (p 207). It is a crucial challenge for churches of all ethnic backgrounds to push back against these ‘negative consequences’, to rise above being ‘homogenous social networks’, and instead work to reflect in their common life and witness ‘the wisdom of God in its rich variety’ (Ephesians 3:10). We need to be confident in the good that churches contribute to our society, and the Kingdom of God, when congregations are marked by far-reaching ethnic diversity along with loving mutuality and respect.
5. Recognise ‘Hybridisation’.
Vertovec noted the rapid and increasingly diversifying growth of ‘Mixed’ categories in Census returns. However this is not just in terms of mixed parenting – in my observation, at an above average extent in our churches; I think of a young man whose father was from Kenya of mixed Indian and Chinese parents and whose mother had Jamaican and British parents. His step-father was Turkish. Rather, amongst young people the ‘hybridisation’ also includes close friendships across standard ethnic groupings, creating new cultural shapes. Vertovec refers to ‘the ways that linguistic categories are being dynamically transgressed and transformed’. (Sociolinguistics plays a significant role in his book). He quotes one study observing ‘The stability that characterised the established notions of language can no longer be maintained in the light of the intense forms of mixing and blending occurring in superdiverse communication environments’ (p 178). This mixing and blending of established notions extends far beyond language, leading to a cultural category sometimes referred to as ‘urban’. (Vertovec speaks of ‘metrolingualism’). It has been a staple of creativity in popular music in various forms for a century. Fusion as well as diversity is common along high street restaurants. Borrowing of styles is common in clothing.
Thus among young people, between the ‘established’ ethnic minorities and the whites (who can still often be alarmingly exclusive) there is a continuum along which lies a rapidly emerging group who don’t fit any of the established categories. It would be interesting to know how far the growing number of minority ethnic ordinands, especially younger ones, fit more appropriately in the ‘hybridised’ or ‘urban’ categories rather than the established, long-standing ethnic ones.
6. How can we respond to ‘ecclesial superdiversity’?
The fifteen or so houses at our end of the street include a Roman Catholic Ugandan family, a Barbadian neighbour taken by her children to the fairly exclusive Church of Christ, a Brazilian family who have the most public Christmas and Easter displays and who are Presbyterian but the daughter attends a Pentecostal group meeting in the local Costa coffee, and a Romanian who was miraculously healed of cancer through a Pentecostal church but now is being trained for leadership in an African led ‘Jesus Only’ church. These are just the people I know – a door-to-door investigation could produce even more complexity.
This situation is alluded to by Vertovec when he writes: ‘religious beliefs and practices are known to abound beyond the confines of established categories of religion’ (p 168). The nature of the Christian diversity sketched above parallels the history and shape of ethnicity diversity in general. Some of it is within the familiar, ‘large blocs’ ecumenical paradigm (Protestant/Roman Catholic), some of it within the extended paradigm created by the proliferation of both Pentecostal denominations as well as independent churches, but the diversity here described in microcosm goes much deeper and is marked by such complexity that in effect it creates a new paradigm, created not just by the multiplication of independent groups, but also frequent transfers of allegiance, and of people being simultaneously involved in two or more churches. So Vertovec wtites: ‘With regard to religious categories on both individual and collective levels, there are many unclearly undefined religious affiliations, fuzzily bordered groups, and multiply affiliated people. Specialists observe that “religious diversity itself is changing in all these regards, becoming more complex and relating in complex intersectionality with other categories of diversity”’ (p 176). In a chapter on ‘New churches in Newham’ (in ‘The Desecularisation of the City: London Churches to the Present’, edited by David Goodhew and Anthony-Paul Cooper) Colin Marchant discovered ‘More than 350 new churches have arisen in the London borough of Newham between 1975 and 2015’ (p 105). So he speaks of ‘the near death of ecumenicity. New forms of communication and collaboration, like Transform Newham, have emerged, but more are needed’ (p 119).
For Christians who are committed to some visible and relational expression of Jesus’s prayer ‘I in them and you in me, that they become completely one, so that the world may believe that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me’ (John 17:23) there is a daunting question of how we transcend the increasing complexification caused by cultural differences as indicated by varying levels of expressiveness, patterns in the exercise of authority, sense of mutual accountability, and approaches to scripture, set alongside peoples’ experiences of exploitation, misuse of power, exclusion and racism? And for Anglicans, with some sense of our accountability that comes from being the national church, how can we use our position to facilitate greater unity across this multi-level complexity? (As I understand the cover of Vertovec’s book, it is an illustration of several irregularly shaped jigsaws laid on top of each other).
The Covid lockdown was possibly a missed opportunity for a central Christian voice (the Archbishop?) to speak for, with and to the mass of Christian people in the country. Major central evangelistic initiatives, such as once led by Billy Graham are of declining traction. Finding central foci that draw together the extraordinary superdiversity that characterises Christianity in England calls for earnest prayer, wide-ranging imagination and creative initiatives. In line with a Superdiverse context, such initiatives will be primarily bottom up. Colin Marchant refers to one such, and there are varying, quite often small and limited groups building inter-church and inter-ethnic networks across the country. There is also a growing coming together of leaders of such networks. Perhaps a major contribution of the Church of England can be to train and motivate its parish clergy to be catalysts for such initiatives, and help network and share experiences and lessons learned. The Christian configuration in our cities is now so complex and superdiverse that the prospect of developing any sense of Christian oneness across the whole range of expressions seems hopelessly naive. But then at the heart of Christian prayer is the belief that reality can be changed.