To some extent, multiculturalism is inevitable. Even within White Christian Europe, cultures have always differed—nation to nation, tribe to tribe, even family to family. Whenever people live together, there will always be some degree of cultural diversity. The only way to achieve a true monoculture would be to reduce the population to one.
Cultural variation, then, exists by degree. When we speak of Western culture, we refer to those many micro-cultures that coexist harmoniously within the larger framework of a shared Western tradition. But that is not what multiculturalism means today. Modern multiculturalism no longer concerns itself with diversity within Western bounds; it celebrates instead the introduction of cultures outside those bounds, cultures not shaped or refined by Christianity or Christian moral order.
In that sense, multiculturalism today is less about culture and more about religious and moral relativism: the belief that there is no ultimate truth, no objective or unchanging moral law to which we, as individuals or as a society, must conform. No reasonable person could expect such a foundation to produce harmony. Quite the opposite. If one man deems moral what another calls immoral, conflict is inevitable, especially among those who have not embraced relativism.
And yet, this relativism is rarely demanded of all. It is imposed almost exclusively upon the Westerner, upon the Christian. Muslims, Hindus, and Jews are never asked to surrender their convictions or pretend allegiance to a false neutrality. Instead, we celebrate their distinctiveness and make exceptions for their beliefs and customs. Only the Christian West is expected to forget its own.
True unity is never achieved through relativism but through truth. A civilisation rooted in Christianity once provided that truth: a transcendent moral order binding diverse peoples into a coherent whole. Multiculturalism, severed from that foundation, can offer only the illusion of harmony, because without a common truth, there can be no common good.
If cultural diversity within a shared moral framework is natural and even enriching, multiculturalism as it is now conceived undermines that very framework. A society cannot long endure when it denies the moral foundations that once gave coherence to its many parts. The irony is that in seeking to include every culture, we erode the only culture capable of sustaining such inclusion—a civilisation built upon the moral order of Christianity.
