Introduction
Singapore – a small island nation in Southeast Asia – is affectionately known to its residents as the “little red dot.” The term was first used in a derogatory manner by an Indonesian politician who, feeling slighted by Singapore’s political leaders, denigrated the country’s influence by referring to it as only a “red dot” on the map. Singaporeans later made the term a badge of pride at what the nation could achieve despite its small size.
On the other side of the world, the term mestizaje – deriving from mestizo/a – also started out as a derogatory one, referring to biological mixtures between the Spanish and Portuguese colonizers and the indigenous peoples of Latin America. The term has since been imbued with multiple meanings and been claimed by some in Latin America and Latinas/os in the United States as a source of pride and unity. U.S. Latina/o Catholic theologians have also explored mestizaje as a theological category.
This paper explores how U.S. Latina/o theological discourses on mestizaje may contribute to a theology from the “little red dot” of Singapore, which is also a site of biological and cultural intermixtures. The paper will (i) explore the multiracial and multireligious context of Singapore; (ii) delve into how mestizaje has been used as a theological category; and (iii) draw out some lessons from theological discussions on mestizaje that can guide the development of Catholic theology and ethics in Singapore.
The Context: Race, Religion & Multiculturalism in Postcolonial Singapore
Singapore, despite its small size, is an ethnically and religiously diverse country. In fact, the Pew Research Center’s Religious Diversity Index ranks Singapore as the most religiously diverse country in the world.[1] Singapore’s postcolonial nation-building efforts, therefore, have required a careful balancing of the needs of diverse ethnic and religious groups. This has been achieved by the adoption of a multicultural national narrative and policies, which seek to allow various groups to contribute and benefit equally from national development, while retaining their own cultural and religious practices.
Multiculturalism in a Multiracial Society
The emergence and development of multiculturalism in Singapore must be seen against its historical background. Before the era of British colonization, there is evidence of some intermixing between the small indigenous Malay population and Chinese and Indian traders.[2] The British East India Company through its representative Stamford Raffles founded a settlement in 1819 and opened the doors to immigration of laborers from the surrounding region, mostly Chinese and Indian. The British administration applied a “divide and rule” policy to manage relations between the various ethnic communities. By 1871, influenced by Social Darwinism and associated racial theories in Europe and the United States (U.S.), it introduced a system of “racializing” communities, segregating them into categories separated by origin, language, and other characteristics.[3] Ironically, this practice was continued in postcolonial Malaysia and Singapore.[4] The present paper follows the use of the term “race” where it reflects such usage in the national narrative.
In the 1950s and 1960s, as the British prepared to leave the territories of Malaya and Singapore, local political parties worked towards a merger of the two territories, whose destinies were seen as closely linked. The difficulty was in the difference in racial composition: while Malays were the largest racial group in Malaya, at 49.8% of the population in 1957,[5] in Singapore the Chinese population was dominant, at about 70%.[6] After much work, the Federation of Malaysia merging the two territories was established in 1963, but this proved to be disastrous because of the racial tensions that ensued. While the politicians from Singapore insisted on multicultural policies, the Malayan politicians demanded special rights, including political leadership, for Malays as bumiputera (“sons of the soil”).[7] Singapore separated from Malaysia in 1965, though racial hostility and politics continued to play out in inflammatory rhetoric and suspicions for several years afterwards. Independent Singapore’s policies for managing racial and religious diversity cannot be considered apart from this crucible of historical experience, in which racial identities and tensions played a dominant role. Multiculturalism became a focus of nation-building and an integral part of the national narrative.[8] While it is largely accepted by the population as necessary and effective, national policies have had some homogenizing tendencies that have obscured the distinctiveness and diversity of ethnocultural traditions.
Firstly, the state’s multicultural policies[9] are based on a framework that classifies ethnic communities as “Chinese,” “Malay,” “Indian,” and “Others” (“CMIO”).[10] This framework has affected Singaporeans’ understanding of their cultural identities.[11] However, this negatively impacted cultural diversity as the CMIO categories conflated ethnocultural groups that previously considered themselves distinct, hailing as they did from different regions and with different languages and traditions. When a bilingual education policy was introduced, all students were required to learn English and their “mother tongue.” For the “Chinese” this meant Mandarin and for the “Malays,” the Malay language, which meant that many families did not pass down to their children their other ancestral languages and dialects.[12] The state, however, considered the adoption of common languages a unifying force that would bind the diverse population together.[13]
The state’s developmental choices also had homogenizing tendencies. In what one writer describes as a “peculiar post-colonial affliction.”[14] Unlike other postcolonial states, the Singapore state did not turn to its people’s ancient cultural traditions, nor was there a transformation of ethno-religious traditions into nationalist discourses. Instead, it “grounded the imagination of the nation in the calling of modernity to achieve progress and prosperity through rapid industrialization and participation in the capitalist world economy,” cultivating an “ethos of economic asceticism, pragmatism, and diligence.”[15] This required, among other things, the sacrifice of certain cultural aspirations. The English language became the main language used in schools, government, and businesses, which drove a wedge between those within ethnic groups who were proficient in English and those who were not. Vernacular schools, which had been the medium for passing on of language, culture, and the political aspirations of one’s ethnic group, were phased out, and in recent years a greater percentage of families across all ethnic groups have spoken English in their households.[16]
The issue of Malay indigeneity and sovereignty claims has – after separation from Malaysia – given way to an ethic of multiculturalism, though Malays have been given certain constitutional rights arising from their indigenous status.[17] While the Malay community has, like other Singaporeans, benefited from national development, it has been seen as lagging behind other ethnic groups, including the Indian minority, in areas such as educational and socio-economic achievements. This has been a cause of concern for government leaders and the Malay community, and commentators have postulated various reasons for this, ranging from cultural values to systemic inadequacies.[18]
Religious Diversity, Liberal Catholicism, and the “Maintenance of Religious Harmony”
Race is very much tied to religion in Singapore as the vast majority of the Malay population is Muslim,[19] while the Indian community is linked with Hinduism and Sikhism, and the Chinese community with Confucianism, Buddhism, or Taoism.[20] In 2020, 18.9% of the Singapore resident population were Christian, the majority of these being Chinese, though there is also a significant Indian minority. [21] Research has shown that among Chinese converts to Christianity, Christianity is associated with modernity, and Chinese traditional religions with backwardness.[22]
The Singapore state itself is secular, but there is a great deal of state intervention to promote religious harmony and ensure that religion stays out of the political domain. The Catholic Church in Singapore has had its own experience of running afoul of the state. From the 1950s, Catholic university students became active in examining social issues in accordance with the social teaching of the Church, and began organizing groups of students to pray, act, and reach out to workers. Various social initiatives were taken by the Catholic community to minister to local and foreign workers. Catholic students became involved in campaigning for workers’ rights and other social causes.[23]
Catholic social activism, however, came to a head in May 1987, when the Singapore government arrested sixteen church workers and social activists, calling them “new, hybrid pro-communist types [augmenting] traditional Communist Party of Malaya tactics with new techniques and method.” Besides those arrested, the Young Christian Workers, the University of Singapore and Singapore Polytechnic Catholic Students’ Societies, the Geylang Catholic Centre (for workers), the Archdiocesan Justice and Peace Commission, and four liberal priests were also implicated in what became known as the “Marxist Conspiracy.” To the dismay of some Catholics, the then-Archbishop, after a meeting with the Prime Minister, took action to avoid further conflict with the government by stopping the sale of an implicated newsletter, suspending the four liberal priests from preaching, closing the Geylang Catholic Centre, and tightening controls over church administration.[24]
Daniel Goh has argued that the state’s real concern over this incident was that “the socio-political capacity of liberal Christianity threatened the state’s monopoly on setting the public agenda for the day-to-day running of the country.”[25] The detained activists’ theological views also connected local worker experiences to the larger issues of working-class experiences in developing Asia. This contradicted the state’s pragmatic discourse on the need for obedience, diligence, and frugality to survive in a hostile economic world.[26] Not long after the arrests, the government passed the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act.[27] The need for this law was purportedly because when a religion “crosses the line and goes into what they call social action,” this opens up “a Pandora’s box in Singapore,” leading other religions to enter the political fray and disturb the harmony of multi-religious Singapore.[28] In other words, according to the State, religion should remain in the private sphere.
Mestizaje as a Theological Paradigm
Having considered the multiracial and multireligious context of postcolonial Singapore, we will now explore critical aspects of the theological discourse of mestizaje that may contribute to the development of a Singaporean theology.
During the 1970s, Mexican American theologians first used the notion of mestizaje to articulate the faith of the Mexican American people.[29] Over the years this has been taken up by other communities of U.S. Latina/o theologians who found mestizaje a useful category for constructing collective identity against the backdrop of the dominant political, cultural, and religious U.S. context.[30]
Mestizaje has been associated with multiple meanings, four of which are described by Néstor Medina in his article “(De)ciphering Mestizaje.”[31] Firstly, it refers to the biological intermixture that took place between indigenous peoples and the Spanish and Portuguese during the latter’s invasion and colonization of the Americas. Secondly, it points to the historical condition of cultural intermixtures, wherein indigenous, African, and European cultural sources gave rise to rich and diverse Latina/o cultures, and which has been on the one hand valued and on the other given rise to socio-political and economic discrimination. Thirdly, mestizaje conveys how identities are fluid, dynamic, contested, and irreducible to facile or clearly defined notions. Fourthly, mestizaje also refers to processes of code-switching, in which several cultures and traditions are “seamlessly” used together, such as in certain linguistic practices (e.g. speaking in Spanglish).
Theological Reinterpretation of History
Adopting mestizaje as a theological category, launched U.S. Latina/o theologians into “a slow and painful process of (re)claiming their historical past as the province of God’s creative work.”[32] Reclaiming history unmasks the violence of conquest and rape from which the historical mestizos/as first emerged, the experience of slavery of the African peoples, and the later U.S. history of expansionism and interventionism. On the other hand, this critical re-reading also reveals how historical violence and destruction had unexpected results in the creation of the mestizo/a people. This, as the U.S. Latina/o theologians came to see, was a divine act of creation.[33]
The theologians’ discovery of divine providence in their people’s bloody experience of mestizaje suggested to them that the biblical text cannot be read apart from questions of power.[34] The objective of reading the biblical text to elucidate questions of power is to acknowledge divine activity amid the messiness of human actions and history, without romanticizing it. Justo González, for example, suggests that all biblical interpretations are tainted by unacknowledged social, economic, and political interests, which have often obscured the good news. The biblical text is in fact profoundly political, dealing directly with matters of power and powerlessness, and there is no universal, ahistorical reading of the text. He therefore suggests that the biblical text must be read in light of the history and experiences of the members of the faith community, for it is their history and experiences that shape the questions they bring to it.[35]
Culture as Critical Site of Theology
As theological discourse, mestizaje challenges dominant theological approaches by insisting on the centrality of culture in people’s faith experiences, where the cultural is understood broadly as “the inescapable fabric of how people view the world, understand reality, confront misery, and experience and process both pain and happiness,” and as “that open-ended, fluid, and linked series of codes and segments of codes by which people make sense of life, interact with each other and the world, and approach the divine.”[36] U.S. Latina/o theologians affirm that neither the gospel nor expressions of faith can be understood or articulated outside of culture. Accordingly, culture is the very place where people encounter the divine at work – and thus also the locus of theology. This rejects dominant notions of theology as a meta-discourse above culture.[37] It also necessitates a new understanding of divine revelation: for if God’s self-disclosure is mediated through culture, then the cultural material of a group limits such revelation. As such, no cultural group has a complete view of God, and all theological notions therefore are incomplete, although one can have a fuller understanding by engaging in dialogue with other cultural groups as equals.[38]
For the U.S. Latina/o people, cultural mestizaje took place specifically in the historical clash of indigenous, African, and Spanish peoples and the subsequent mixture of their cultural elements. Adoption of mestizaje as theological category allows celebration of traditions and sources of knowledge from these cultures and cultural intermixtures – including dreams, stories or even gossip, and their own non-Christian religious traditions[39] – that might yet be absent from dominant approaches to theology associated with enlightenment rationality and exclusivist theological claims.
In the Borderlands: Identities in Tension
One scholar who draws out the impact of mestizaje on formulating and articulating questions of identity is Gloria Anzaldúa. She plays with the metaphor of borderlands / la frontera, which firstly refers to the geographical Mexico-United States border which remains an “open wound” and symbol of the historic exploitation of and discrimination against Chicano/a communities. Secondly, the borderlands describe the spaces erected by dominant groups to exclude the other: a “series of psychological, sexual, and spiritual sites, present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle, and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.”[40] In her own experience of borderlands as a Chicana Catholic with indigenous ancestry, she rejects notions that make indigenous women traitors of the people, the Catholic heterosexual script imposed on her, notions of women as sexual objects closer to evil, and the U.S. dominant Anglo-European culture that disallows her Chicana experience and identity.[41] Chicanas in this way resist “cultural tyranny” in the form of inflexible hegemonic frames of interpreting reality that exclude those whose identities do not fit the socially-constructed frames. She calls for a paradigm shift to resist the dominant culture’s reduction of reality to dualistic frames that do not permit the recognition of multiple identities in people. Here she reclaims a second metaphor from the legendary Aztec symbol of Coatlicue, the ancient serpent creator goddess who holds opposite elements in fine tension without excluding any. The goddess represents a mental space in which “ambiguity and contradiction reign, and where reality and identity are irreducible to fixed categories, conceptual frames, or rigid terms. Any attempt at defining her reality and true identity means going outside prescribed norms and frames; it is to ‘kick a hole’ out of old boundaries.”[42] Like Coatlicue, living in the borderlands, the new mestiza “learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode – nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing is rejected, nothing abandoned.”[43]
Anzaldúa’s proposal has been criticized as tending towards intellectual abstraction and without historical grounding. In particular, her synthesis of different facets of identity occurs at the level of consciousness while saying nothing of its historical expressions in everyday activities, practices, customs, etc., which would relate it to the larger cultural whole.[44] Her disconnection from the historical use of the category mestizaje also runs the risk that historical baggage – such as how the rhetoric of inclusion has led to exclusion of certain voices in Latin American or Latina/o communities – is not engaged with.[45]
Problems with the Use of Mestizaje
This latter criticism has also been levelled against other theological articulations of mestizaje by U.S. Latina/o theologians. Medina explains that they have tended to draw from idealized constructions of mestizaje from Latin America without engaging the socio-political context of the region, assuming that mestizaje would lead to the inclusion of other cultural groups when that does not reflect historical reality.[46] As mestizaje became characteristic of U.S. Latina/o communities, the “unmixed” or “differently mixed” indigenous and African voices became obscured. Scholars such as Ada María Isasi-Díaz have realized this, using the term mestizaje-mulatez to include the intermixture of European and African people in the Caribbean.[47] Hanna Kang has also pointed out how Asian Latino voices need to be included in mestizaje discourse.[48] Regarding gender, scholars have also not yet satisfactorily responded to women’s challenges to hegemony, homogenization, racism, and sexism in the way mestizaje has been conceived and articulated.[49] Therefore, Medina argues that there is a need for Latina/os to interrogate how oppression and discrimination take place within their own communities as they have applied inherited racialized and patriarchal hierarchies. He emphasises the importance of dialogue or mutual conversation with the religious and ethnocultural universes of indigenous peoples, African Latinas/os and other voices that have been obscured by mestizaje and, following this, once again engaging in painstaking historical revising.[50]
Medina also proposes that mestizaje be understood in the plural sense (as plural mestizajes) – a “multiplication of syntheses and fusions and the creation of multiple new identities that spill out of rigid, airtight categories” – as opposed to one global mestizaje, and that they be qualified in light of the historical contexts from which they emerge.[51] This, he says, challenges theologians to a wider understanding of divine revelation, which takes place in multiple ways among different cultural and (even non-Christian) religious groups.[52] In a similar challenge to a hegemonic image of mestizaje determined by biological ancestry and visual conception – which leaves out marginalized social groups like Asian Latinos – Kang argues for a conceptual category of mestizaje that is “intentionally messy, ever-changing, and open-ended.”[53]
Contributions of Mestizaje to a Singaporean Theology & Ethics
As we have seen, the discourse of mestizaje arose from a particular set of historical contexts and cannot be considered uncritically apart from it. Despite this, I propose that both the category of mestizaje – and criticisms of it – offer fruitful ways of thinking about a Singaporean theology.
The preliminary question on which it has something to say is on whether there should, in fact, be a theology from Singapore.[54] I would hazard a guess that most present-day Singaporean Catholics, in line with dominant theological assumptions that the gospel is distinct from culture and seeing the adoption of imported Western Christianity as part of their progress towards “modernity,” have never entertained the thought that their “little red dot” might have something to offer to broader theological discourse. If, though, as the U.S. Latina/o theologians postulate, the people themselves in their everyday living and the ways they make sense of the world are the site in which the divine works and thus the source of theology, then the residents of the “little red dot” indeed have a distinct cultural window into divine revelation. How are they then to make sense of this revelation in their midst? I suggest that theological discourses on mestizaje point to two fruitful avenues for exploration: firstly, reclaiming Singapore’s history as the site of ongoing divine creation; and secondly, reclaiming culture – and in particular cultural intermixtures – as a locus of theology. Both explorations will lead to new theological understandings and deeper expressions of faith, which, in Singapore’s multi-ethnic and multi-religious context, I propose would take the form of creative, constructive, and collective engagement towards a more inclusive society.
(Re)claiming History as Site of God’s Ongoing Creation
Reclaiming Singapore’s history as the site of ongoing divine creation requires first questioning inherited uncritical attitudes about colonization and official versions of history that narrate the founding of the Singaporean state, ex nihilo as it were, by the British. Samantha Fong argues that the fact that we know and think so little about Temasek (Singapore’s pre-colonial civilization) as its residents knew it “testifies to a colonial erasure that was perhaps less bloody, but no less decisive than that which notoriously took place in the Americas.”[55] She asks:
What stories of creation did the Orang Laut have? How did the Johor Sultanate imagine the body politic? Questions like these are problematic because they use the disciplinary language of modern scholarship, and set Western models up as normative paradigms for comparison. Nonetheless, they are a useful first step toward rethinking Singapore’s successes not as ex nihilo creations of modernity, but the result of a costly series of political and cosmological conquests—first by the British… and then by the “native” elites of Singapore, who rejected Western rule, but continued the modern mission of salvation through the pursuit of secular gods like Progress, Security, and National Development. These new gods have demanded no fewer sacrifices… [and those] of us who have benefited from the success of modern Singapore must thus reckon with ourselves as beneficiaries of an imperfect and imperializing form of creatio ex nihilo.[56]
The first group sacrificed to the new colonial regime of course was the indigenous peoples of the land (bumiputera), who through their leaders first conceded de facto and later de jure sovereignty over the land through treaties providing pecuniary benefits. Some have raised questions, though, about the pressures placed upon them by British agents.[57] The historical record shows that the British were keen to push the indigenous population to the fringes of the new settlements – which were being populated by immigrants in numbers that far outstripped that of the original inhabitants – both for more effective land use and because of violent disputes occurring between them and the immigrant settlers.[58] The rights of Malays as bumiputera was a key issue in dispute between Singapore and Malaysia in the foundational years. Arguably, many Malays have now – perhaps realizing the fruitlessness of this endeavour – turned their focus away from asserting their historical rights to the country in favour of calling for equitable treatment and more opportunities in the country’s multicultural and meritocratic environment.[59] It remains a reality though that they have not done as well as other ethnic communities, according to social and economic indicators.[60] What does this mean to those of us who are Catholics today, settlers in a land once sacred to the Malay peoples? What responsibilities might we have, of cultural exchange or in promoting their communal aspirations? Perhaps we are now far enough away in time from the trauma of inter-racial violence associated with the nation’s birth that these issues can be re-explored by a new generation of Singaporeans in dialogue with each other.
Furthermore, how are we to come to terms with other voices and aspirations that have been silenced in the name of progress, among which were the left-wing parties and trade unions shut down in Operation Coldstore, the Chinese cultural aspirations embodied in Nanyang University, or the Catholic social consciousness embodied in our own silenced activists?
The U.S. Latina/o theologians reclaimed their history of violent colonial conquest by seeing what emerged – mestizaje – as part of ongoing divine creation. The Singapore story, on the other hand, has been too quick to see divine intervention in creating the modern nation state, uncritically accepting – and even celebrating – the colonizing event and subsequent drive for progress without acknowledging the historical erasures and marginalization of social groups that facilitated both. The use of mestizaje as a tool for reinterpreting history, then, might suggest ways in which we might more critically reclaim our history in a fuller and deeper way: firstly, by identifying the biological intermixtures and cultural clashes and amalgamations that took place as various ethnic and religious groups came together during the period of colonization, and then in efforts to forge a shared nation; and secondly by examining the power dynamics that undergirded these historical movements, paying attention to how some voices were privileged while others were suppressed or lost. In so doing, we might come to a new understanding of how the divine has been present in both the glory and messiness of our human actions, and how it might be calling us towards a more inclusive society while making reparations for historical injustices and imbalances.
(Re)claiming Culture as Site of Theology
Mestizaje as theological discourse also points us towards reclaiming the centrality of culture – and in particular, cultural intermixing – in our faith and theology. The CMIO framework that has guided national policy and come to shape our self-understandings has obscured our biological and cultural intermixtures. For example, intermarriages between ethnic groups have been taken place since before the colonizing event – though the British policy of “divide and rule” had a constraining effect on these during the colonial period – and picked up pace afterwards. The CMIO framework rendered this invisible, first by subsuming the category of “Eurasian” – in use since colonial times to describe biological intermixture between Europeans and Asians – under the “Others” category in CMIO,[61] and then by requiring children from mixed marriages to follow one parent’s race. In more recent times, hyphenated identities have been recognized, such that children of mixed marriages might be registered as Chinese-Indian, for example, or Indian-Chinese, with the first marker being the group with which they are identified for the purpose of national policies (e.g. an Indian-Chinese would be considered Indian and not Chinese under public housing quotas).[62] Even the revised framework, however, still remains a blunt tool in describing an increasingly complex reality, especially in light of immigration trends in recent years which have seen an influx of new residents from different parts of the world.
Apart from the biological, cultural intermixtures have also been a shared Singaporean experience. This is evident in how long-time Singaporean Indians or Chinese, for example, consider themselves culturally distinct from more recent immigrants from India or China, given their socialization over generations by cultural processes in Singapore. The discourse of mestizaje gives us a greater appreciation of how our cultural boundaries are porous, fluid, and always in flux.
Anzaldúa’s work in recognizing multi-sectional identities is particularly of interest as we seek new language that recognizes our cultural intermixtures. Public discourse has not allowed space for exploration of the multiple influences there have been on our cultural identities, and her interpretation of mestizaje in particular might open our imaginations to the way in which we might conceive of our plural ethnic, cultural, religious, gender, and other identities that exist together in mutual tension. Medina’s advice to the Latina/o community to “drink from their own wells” in recovering lost traditions and epistemologies (or cultural universes) might also be helpful for Singaporeans if we are to value the totality of our cultural inheritances. A constant spectre in our cultural imaginary – as sometimes caricatured in local media productions and narratives – is the English-educated Singaporean native who, having attended the best universities in the West, is nonetheless rootless and tragically comedic for having lost touch with her ancestral languages and cultures.[63] Medina’s challenge, however, goes further than simply recovering language and cultural traditions, to include non-Christian religious traditions as well. This is particularly relevant in the Singaporean context where, in the worldviews of many of our ancestors, religion and culture were not considered distinct. However, this would certainly be a stretch for Singaporean Catholics who have inherited exclusivist understandings of the Christian tradition and require Coatlicue-like powers for those who do take up the challenge of inter- and intra-religious dialogue.
Another important cultural influence for Singaporean Catholics to acknowledge and interrogate is that of socio-economic class – an issue that has been amplified in public discourse since 2017 with the publication of a book titled This is What Inequality Looks Like by a local sociologist.[64] It could well be that nowadays the issue of class has come to be more divisive in Singaporean society than race, and it behoves Catholic Singaporeans who hail from the upper- and middle-classes of society to consider how this aspect of their cultural conditioning and identities has affected their theological understandings.
Resistance as Creative and Constructive (Rather than Oppositional) Engagement
How might what emerges from efforts in reclaiming our histories and cultures be expressed in our concrete theological and faith practices? Anzaldúa’s work, as has been pointed out, suggests a synthesis that remains at the level of consciousness and does not necessarily guide us here. Other theologians writing on mestizaje have emphasized the importance of popular religion as the cultural expression of a people’s faith.
On the level of theology, our re-reading of history, appreciation of our cultural intermixtures, and awareness of the power plays that have determined our current course should suggest to us new questions to ask of scripture and new appropriations of our faith tradition that facilitate our quest for a more inclusive society. More attention, for example, might be paid to Catholic social teaching, gone out of vogue since the incident of the “Marxist conspiracy”. More efforts might also be paid to the areas of comparative theology, the theology of religions, and interreligious dialogue. I suggest that interreligious dialogue needs to happen with respect to the cultural and religious traditions of those ethnic groups represented within the church, in an effort to develop a theology that resonates more with our own cultural instincts; but furthermore also with those outside of the church, particularly Islam, the traditional religion of the Malay indigenous population in Singapore, with whom, given our history, we have a special responsibility to dialogue, and by whom we have also been influenced over the years in the fluid and dynamic processes of cultural intermixture.
I suggest that in the Singapore context, the Catholic Church itself provides a fruitful space for intercultural encounters. Among the ethnic groups represented in the church in significant numbers are Chinese, Indians, and Filipinos, each of which is associated with a certain social status, class, and cultural stereotypes. Coming together as members of the same worshipping community, though, is an opportunity to encounter each other in a different way. Practices of inculturation (understood as inter-culturation, as Asian theologian Peter Phan suggests) serve not only as culturally relevant expressions of a people’s faith, but can also aid the different ethnic groups to appreciate one another’s cultures at a deeper level. [65] For example, the popular religious practice of “Simbang Gabi” – a Christmas novena that is an integral part of Filipino Catholic practice – has in recent years been celebrated in some Singaporean churches, and Chinese New Year, a significant cultural celebration in the Chinese community, is also commemorated by a special mass. Our appropriation of cultural intermixtures, as described in the previous sub-section, might contribute to deeper inculturation of faith expressions, and these could also be more intentionally used as spaces for intercultural encounter between ethnic groups in the Catholic community. At the same time, power differentials between cultural groups in the church should be acknowledged. Personal intercultural encounters within the church context, entered with the spirit of mutual curiosity, might help facilitate re-interpretations of these relationships of power.
Practices of reclaiming history and culture also impact a community’s interactions in the public sphere. Since the “Marxist conspiracy”, the Catholic church has been wary of encroaching into spaces that the state considers “out of bounds” for religious groups, such that Catholic faith practice in Singapore has largely been seen as a private matter. Surprisingly, Pentecostalism, which has been on the rise in recent years, has increasingly engaged in the social arena in Singapore; for example, “prayer walking” around the city and praying over government offices.[66] The difference, it seems, is that its efforts cultivate among its adherents a sense of responsibility for and loyalty to Singapore that is in line with the state’s own ideology of progress and shared responsibility, without openly opposing state policy. Catholics might take a leaf out of their fellow Christians’ playbook in finding creative and constructive ways to contribute to public discourse while respecting the nation’s multi-ethnic and multi-religious context and the prerogative of the state. To risk a broad generalization, the Asian traditions to which we in Singapore are heirs privilege the values of harmony and consensus over that of opposition and resistance in political and social life. This is not to say that resisting abuses of power and injustice is not important, but that there is also an appreciation of the role of moral leadership on the part of the state, and so how resistance is carried out must reflect that to be effective. As the East Asia Christian Conference declared in 1964:
Much Christian thinking, particularly in the West, has emphasized the necessity to limit state power. But in Asian countries we must stress the positive functions of government in the re-ordering of economic life and the duty of Christians and other citizens to accept the authority of the state and a great measure of state-imposed discipline as a means to social progress.[67]
The kinds of oppositional practices associated with liberation theology from the Americas are unlikely to be effective or culturally resonant in the Singaporean context. Furthermore, there is also a deep appreciation among Singaporeans for harmony between diverse ethnic and religious groups, such that limits on public expression and discourse are understood as necessary. Therefore, Catholics in Singapore seeking to work towards a more inclusive society as an expression of their reclaiming of history and cultural intermixtures must resist unjust or oppressive practices in ways that are creative and constructive, through mutual dialogue and collective solutions that respect Singapore’s multi-ethnic and multi-religious context.
Conclusion
In summary, mestizaje as a theological category offers fruitful pointers for a development of a Singaporean Catholic theology and faith practice. This would involve reclaiming history with both its successes and its dark side, as well as the phenomenon of biological and cultural intermixtures, as part of ongoing divine creation. Ethical practices arising from this reclaiming might involve interreligious and intercultural dialogue, both within the church and without, and particularly with the indigenous Malay-Muslim community. Finally, the faith community’s aspirations for a more inclusive society may be effectively expressed in creative and constructive engagement in the public sphere.