2020 California Citizens Redistricting Commission
In 2020 I was selected as one of fourteen California Citizens Redistricting Commissioners. I’m happy to report that despite COVID, unprecedented Census delays, and a holiday-unfriendly final deadline of December 27, we completed our maps and passed them with a unanimous vote. In this coming decade, we hope these new Assembly, state Senate, Board of Equalization, and Congressional election districts serve the Golden State well.
One of the commissioner selection criteria was an appreciation of diversity. I believe my theological education helped me cultivate that appreciation. I’m probably the one and only person in the world with degrees from both Dallas Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union. I’ve long circulated in both Evangelical and Mainline circles, appreciate worship in both liturgical and free settings, and see the world through both majority- and minority-culture eyes. Along the way I’ve come to see the enormous value of viewing one’s own beliefs and practices in perspective with those of others. Appreciating a diversity of views and traditions both strengthens my own convictions and helps keep me humble about how big the world is.
The value of a place like New College Berkeley is in the conversations and learning it cultivates, helping Christians explore and deepen their own beliefs, while also expanding their perspectives beyond their own traditions. It seeks to be a place to deepen both convictions and humility—both too often in short supply in our relativistic, individualistic, bombastic age.
As the Commission took public input from Californians, one often-voiced assertion particularly struck me: “We have absolutely nothing in common with them!” (usually spoken by residents of one city or town who did not want to be in a district with this or that other city or town). Of course election districts should properly group people with particular shared interests, which can then be well served by their elected representatives. Indeed, by law we were required to try our best to draw lines that respected such communities of interest. On the other hand, part of me winced to hear such divisions highlighted and reinforced.
Again and again, I thought of 19th-century French political observer Alexis de Tocqueville’s admiration of the exemplary American capacity for “self-interest rightly understood.” By this he meant a habit of keeping the common good always somewhere in mind and habitually making small self-sacrifices on its behalf. Today that virtue too seems in painfully short supply.
Here again NCB provides a tonic, helping believers learn and care about fellow Christians and the wider world. While rightly focusing on the particular approach to worship, formation, evangelism, and service in each of our local churches and traditions, we do well to grow in our appreciation and care for the wider church. We can seek to be good stewards of not only our own particular faith tradition but of Christian faith writ large, around the world and throughout history.
Early in my Commission tenure I shared with a friend about feeling the “impostor syndrome”—how could I really cut it as a commissioner, having exactly zero experience in public office and a lifetime of being largely a-political. This friend helpfully reminded me that the whole point of citizen redistricting is to avoid the usual decennial messes created by the professionals and political experts. The fourteen of us had to pull each other up a dizzying learning curve and avail ourselves of all manner of training, briefings, and readings. (I became one of our Voting Rights Act specialists). Even now we certainly would not claim to be thorough experts at redistricting. But like a jury, there is a particular power in deliberation and shared judgment. We put what we learned to good use and successfully drew the maps.
NCB’s specialty is theological training for laypeople, deepening and strengthening their faith journeys, ministry gifts, and vocational callings. I still warmly remember NCB classes and workshops I myself took decades ago, and how they expanded my world. At that time I had absolutely no idea my journey would come to include a tenure of public service. (Indeed, back then, California was still redistricting via political brawls and naked partisanship. Sacramento’s political nadir of the 2000’s helped lead to independent citizen redistricting starting with the 2010 cycle.) May NCB continue to help equip believers for the good works God has prepared for them to do, no matter how unexpected they may be.
The Rev. Russell Yee, PhD, is a NCB Advisor and faculty member, who lives in Oakland.