The New Wine Press vol 25 no 10 June 2017 | Page 8

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Building Bridges of Understanding & Respect
by Maureen Lahiff, Alameda, California Companion
I have lived and thrived in urban, coastal California
since 1986—in Los Angeles and now in Oakland.
California is no longer a majority white state. I ex-
perience this as vibrant and positive, not something
that makes me fearful and anxious. For this, I owe
many thanks for the training and experiences I’ve had
around building multi-cultural church communi-
ties. At a congressional town hall meeting on Martin
Luther King weekend in January, one of the speakers
pointed out that we were what the present and future
look like: neighbors and community with a rainbow of
faces and accents. At that gathering a few days before
the inauguration, I felt hope in a group that had shared
values and goals.
In the past year, I’ve been thinking a lot about the
corporate stance on immigration that we adopted last
June at our assembly. I think it’s a really well balanced
statement, including a call to assisting people who
would rather remain in their home countries if they
could live and work in safety, and a call to address
the need for laborers in agriculture. Since then, so
many even more pressing issues have come to the fore
with the election campaign and the beginning of the
new administration in January. I do not think it is an
exaggeration to call these current challenges emer-
gencies. Suspicion, fear, and concomitant hatred have
6 • The New Wine Press • June 2017
dominated what passes for public discourse. People
don’t seem able to listen to each other, perhaps because
so many feel there’s little hope of being understood
or appreciated.
I have been looking for a perspective to help make
sense of what I deem as hysterical, irrational fears and
over-reactions. One lens that has helped me make
sense of what’s going on is cultural anxiety. In times of
rapid change, cultural anxiety is a fear that one’s cul-
ture is being changed in ways not under one’s control
and that one’s values and way of life are threatened.
Cultural anxiety is not new in the history of the
world and the U.S. I see it reflected in the Easter
Season readings from the Acts of the Apostles as the
early church struggled to incorporate Gentile con-
verts. Fortunately for us, the majority decided not to
impose most of the fabric of daily life on non-Jewish
Christians. It helped, I think, that the culture in
urban centers and ports of the Roman Empire was
multi-cultural.
Today, almost 15% of the U.S. population was born
in other countries. In 1960 and 1970, it was around 5%,
so this is a fairly rapid change. Of course, new arrivals