The crucial question becomes: Do the people in the encounter feel secure enough to learn from it rather than to react with anxiety and fear? Right now, we are asking millions of Americans to accept high immigration while they are already living with maximum insecurity. Their wages are declining, their families and communities are fragmenting, their churches are shrinking, government services are being cut, their values and national identity feel unstable.

Of course they are going to react with suspicion if suddenly on top of all this they begin to feel like strangers in their own place.

The lesson is that to create thick pluralistic society, you first have to help people embed in a secure base. That includes economic and health care security, but it also involves cultural and spiritual security. It involves offering people opportunities to embed in their local culture, to practice their particular faith, to live by local values that may seem alien to you and me.

Only people who are securely rooted in their own particularity are confident enough to enjoy the encounter with difference.

This is the paradox of pluralism: In order to get people to integrate with others you have to help them weave close communities with their own kind. Cosmopolitans never get this.

A person who is firmly rooted can go out and enjoy the adventure of pluralism. This is the second phase of thick pluralism. The person with the pluralist mind-set acknowledges that God’s truth is radically dispersed. It is not contained in one tradition and community. The good life is only understood through a holistic journey across traditions.

The pluralist doesn’t see society as a competition for scarce resources, but as a joint voyage of discovery in search of life’s biggest answers. Pluralism offers us the chance, and the civic duty, to be a daring social explorer, venturing across subcultures, sometimes having the exciting experience of being the only one of you in the room, harvesting the wisdom embedded in other people’s lifeways. A key pluralist trait is curiosity, the opposite of anxiety.