Governments worldwide increasingly struggle to manage religious diversity. University of Bristol Sociologist and Boniuk Institute Senior Scholar Awardee Tariq Modood offers multiculturalism as a tool states should consider employing to effectively govern religious pluralism in their population.
Modood describes multiculturalism as a civic idea concerned with the right to a group identity, be it religious, ethnic, racial, etc. and the assurance that all groups--both majority and minority subgroups--are afforded the rights and privileges of equal citizenship. Properly understood, multiculturalism serves as a guide, determining what one receives as a member of the citizenry and what one owes to other members, and can help to combat polarization. However, when multiculturalism is misunderstood, it can significantly contribute to the high levels of polarization that we see in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries around the world.
Multiculturalism, however, Modood offers, has the capacity to ease polarization in the following three main ways:
- Protecting and promoting core policies accommodating universal civic recognition.
- Understanding identity anxieties; multiculturalism is built on appreciating the reasons minorities experience such anxieties, and this appreciation can be extended to majority identities.
- Bridge-building to diversity skeptics by persuading them--with reason and evidence and not accusations or dismissals--that national coherence need not suffer as the result of diversity, and that minorities can be recognized and accommodated in ways that 1) build up the nation, 2) rally the diverse citizenry behind the national idea, and 3) respect the majority's place in the national story.
"If, as I believe," says Modood, "multiculturalism is about giving minorities what majorities have or seek to have--namely their own national or cultural identities folded into their citizenship--I also have come to appreciate that majorities have become identity-anxious, and that multiculturalists should be sensitive to this.
Multiculturalism cannot be just a matter of the majority recognizing minorities, but must also be about all subgroups of citizens mutually recognizing one another and affirming the equal right of all to belong fully to the body of citizens."