Let’s Move! — Studying Global Christianity in Superdiverse Societies
Malmö can be seen as a test-case for changes that take place in many cities across Europe. The population of Malmö will soon reach 500,000. Statistics show that, of today’s population, about 50 percent do and about 50 percent don’t have a migration background. Among the under-15-year-olds, the ratio is 65 to 35 percent. When they will have grown up, the distinction between a majority who didn’t migrate and a minority who did migrate will stop making sense. Malmö as a whole will have a migration background.
Sociologist Maurice Crul suggests that cities like Malmö are shifting from diversity (where one can distinguish between minority and majority) to superdiversity (where one cannot distinguish between minority and majority). He argues that this shift has consequences for the concept of integration. The assumption today is that integration is the process through which a minority integrates into a majority. But as the statistics show, there will be no such process in Malmö. Integration will be a task for people with and without a migration background. Both will have to integrate into a society that will look radically different and radically diverse.
Crul’s argument connects to scholarship on the postmigrant society. Naika Foroutan, a social and political scientist who teaches in Berlin, suggests that migration is the new normal. Her concept of the postmigrant society stresses that the binary between people with and without a migration background becomes blurred. In Die postmigrantische Gesellschaft: Ein Versprechen der pluralen Demokratie, she argues that the postmigrant society poses the question of how we can get beyond the social dividing line of migration if we want to live together in societies that are becoming more and more plural.
Taking up the professorship of Global Christianities at Lund, I am wondering what students need to know to navigate superdiverse public squares like Malmö. In the postmigrant society, what could they learn about religion, what should they learn about religion, and how might I help their learning?
Movement in the Past
Whatever one can say about the shift from diversity to superdiversity that Malmö signals, one statement makes immediate sense: “Det började röra sig!” This statement (including the exclamation mark) comes from the scholar who introduced the study of Global Christianity to Lund: Gustaf Lindeberg. In Ett sekel I missionens tjänst: Lunds Missionssällskap 1845–1945, Lindeberg described missiology during its heyday. One has to read between the lines to notice how his statement summed up how different local and global currents came together in a constellation that enabled the creation of the Lund Mission Society. One can feel Lindeberg’s excitement.
Lindeberg’s Malmö was neither diverse nor superdiverse. During his life, the Kockums shipyard developed into one of the largest shipyards in the world. Malmö was booming. It was a city on a map of the world which revolved around a Christian center. Malmö was in this center. Accordingly, Lindeberg assumed that mission is the movement of Christianity from the middle to the margins: inside Sweden, missionizing indigenous populations here; outside Sweden, missionizing indigenous populations there. But Lindeberg’s story isn’t a success story. The new institute for missiology that the Lund Mission Society was meant to fund had not formed by the time he retired. Lindeberg was never appointed professor. After his retirement, the worst that a theologian from Lund could imagine happened: theologians from Uppsala came to teach Global Christianity here!
It took until the 1990s for the Lund Mission Society to endow a professorship at Lund. Aasulv Lande was the first professor. Lande was not convinced by Lindeberg. Suggesting that Lindeberg’s missiology functioned as a defense of colonialism, Lande shifted from a colonial to a postcolonial perspective. Seen from a colonial perspective, mission starts inside Europe. Europe is the center of Christianity. Hence, the history of mission is understood as the movement of Christianity from European to non-European territories. Seen from a postcolonial perspective, however, mission starts neither inside Europe nor outside Europe. Europe is not seen as the center of Christianity. On the contrary, Christianity is seen as polycentric. Hence, the history of mission is understood as the movement of Christianity from European to non-European and from non-European to European territories. Through this movement, Christians and non-Christians encounter each other, changing what Christianity means in the process.
Lande’s successors – David Kerr and Mika Vähäkangas – suggested that the name “missiology” is so ingrained in colonialism that it ought to be changed to Global Christianity or even Global Christianities. They continued the decolonialization of theology by concentrating on comparative theology and contextual theology respectively. I would like to follow suit.
Movement in the Present
The Malmö I know differs from Lindeberg’s or Lande’s. Malmö is one of the most unequal cities in Europe today. Areas with overlapping ethnic, economic, and often also educational segregation have increased since the 1990s. Coupled with the need to adapt to climate change, Malmö’s shift from diversity to superdiversity stirs up controversies. The city makes headlines, often through racist discourse and religious discrimination that target migrants and Muslims. The European Islamophobia Report for Sweden is a chilling read.
According to Crul, cities such as Malmö are at the tipping point of the shift from diversity to superdiversity. In The New Minority: People Without a Migration Background in the Superdiverse City, co-authored with Frans Lelie, Crul argues that it’s not enough for people to live and let live. Encounters need to be enabled. To return to Foroutan’s postmigrant question: How we can get beyond the social dividing line of migration, if we want to live together in societies that are becoming more and more plural?
This question, I would suggest, is a starting point for the study of Global Christianity. Global Christianity has always been interested in encounters between different people. With the shift from diversity to superdiversity, the competences required to navigate such encounters turn from a specialist skill (in the Malmö of the past, a competence only for students of Global Christianity) to a survival skill (in the Malmö of the potential future, a competence not only for students of Global Christianity). At the moment, we are somewhere in-between. A theology that is interested in exploring and enabling encounters must be a public theology. Its task is to interpret the theologies that shape and are shaped by encounters between different people in the public square. As scholars of Global Christianity, we need to analyze practices of living together critically and to assess practices of living constructively to enable creative action. This task is not as simple as it sounds.
The Potential of Movement
To my mind, scholars of Global Christianity have the problem and the pleasure of disturbing the disciplinary and denominational order that governs the study of religion in the university – not only at Lund. This means that we are inclined to annoy our colleagues by insisting that different religious and different non-religious ways of life have contaminated each other throughout history. There is neither “Christianity” without “other religions” nor “other religions” without “Christianity”. There is only contamination. The question of what it means to be a Christian cannot be answered once and for all. I would argue that the answers have changed in the past and that the answers have to change in the present for the sake of our superdiverse future.
Apophaticism is crucial here. Apophaticism is the ancient idea that God is greater than anything we can say: deus semper maior. Hence, theology is more about un-saying than about saying “God”. This shifts our analytic approach. God is not the guarantor of social dividing lines, as if God was a tribal god who would pit Christians against Muslims or migrants. On the contrary, God calls us to go beyond social dividing lines. God comes into view as moving. This has consequences for the study of Global Christianity. Our question mustn’t presume purity, as in: “Why do people come together across differences?” Our question must presume plurality, as in: “Why do people not come together across differences?” This way of approaching the question of how we want to live together in societies that are becoming more and more plural has theological potential. If students of Global Christianity learn this about religion in the postmigrant public square, they can explore and enable encounters between different people, thus helping to make the superdiverse society a better place for all.
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Ulrich Schmiedel, professor at CTR/Lund University since spring 2024, has taught at Edinburgh University and led the academic research within the Church of Sweden En värld av grannar program/the A World of Neighbours network.
