Multiculturalism, Nation, and Church

Why Christians Should Care about the Cultural Surrender of Britain

The ideology of multiculturalism continues to plague nations like Britain. If it does not resist the madness, Britain will no longer be Britain. Should Christians not care about that?

I don’t live on the south coast of England anymore, so—even at an imaginative level—the relentless thousands of fighting-age Muslim men arriving on the shores of Britain on boats each week does not appear to affect my life, my family, or my nation.

I do see it up-close in cities in the Midlands and the north, of course, where multiculturalism has simply been an open drawbridge for cultural Islamism, and where whole areas of such cities look like a completely different place to the Britain most of us grew up knowing.

For most of Britain’s population—even myself—it is remarkably easy to block it all out and pretend it’s not really happening. But it is happening. And it shows no signs of stopping happening anytime soon. Why do we pretend it’s not happening?

It’s hard to watch when you feel you can do nothing about it. You see Britain paying billions to give away islands which a previous generation paid billions to keep. You see Britain’s politicians being led into all sorts of terrible economic “deals” that will inevitably weaken its longer term identity and sovereignty. And then there are those endless reports and pictures of boat after boat after boat after boat of arriving on the coasts.

The Surrender of Britain

It seems manifestly obvious that if Britain does not get serious about stopping the boats, Britain will cease to be Britain. This may seem like dramatic hyperbole but it’s simply logical. The illogical thing would be to allow what’s currently happening to continue and then to expect anything different than the abolition of Britain as Britain.

Rupert Lowe, currently the only MP in the House of Commons who seems willing to speak up for Christian Britain and to directly oppose Islamism in Britain, recently said:

“I look at these pictures and videos of the boats coming in - almost exclusively young men, as we know - and just think, how the HELL can anyone see that and think they're actual desperate asylum seekers? Are they that deluded? Are they that mad on woke that they believe it? Or is it one big practical joke? Because it certainly feels that way. Nobody in their right mind can think that, surely?! If you tell yourself a lie, over and over and over, I guess maybe you start to believe it…I just cannot get my head around it. They are men. Young men. Fighting-age men. Almost all of them.”

It really is increasingly ridiculous how frequently we tend to reinforce the lie about immigration in Britain.

The boatloads of Muslims arriving in their thousands are coming into strong communal networks across numerous cities. These are communities within communities which are largely off-grid from British societal norms and practices.

They have a strong and envisioned cultural and religious identity, helped by the fact that many of them still actually believe their beliefs. Those who are influenced by western norms are part of large extended family networks that will reinforce and reapply those beliefs to them over time.

Meanwhile, the British population are communally fractured, apathetic to the Christianity that once grounded them, and have replaced their active devotion to Christ with a combination of self-obsession and statism.

They have long stopped believing in large families, with most having 1-2 children at most, and aborting thousands of babies per month at just the same time as we actively enable tens of thousands of the aforementioned men to arrive on boats every month. What did we expect to happen if this continues?

They gave themselves up to ideological delusion via the doctrine of "multiculturalism". Downstream from the cacophony of postcolonial guilt, this doctrine is preached by the State and upheld by its media cardinals to ensure that British people feel perpetually guilty and confused about their national identity, stifling any fledgling resistance to the cultural and ideological invasion that threatens their national identity.

Other options are available. Stopping the boats is just the start. But it would at least show we have not self-surrendered. Whatever happens, Britain must get serious about wanting to remain Britain.

But should any of this matter to Christians? After all, is not our citizenship in heaven rather than Great Britain? It depends whether you believe Christian nations are a good idea, and/or whether you believe that their erosion by the hands of secularism paving the way for Islamism is a “good” thing to be celebrated rather than something to be resisted.

Isn’t the Church Pro-Multiculturalism?

Earlier this year, the great church movement leader, Terry Virgo, tweeted:

“Harmony through diversity is so much richer than predictable conformity. So true in colour, in music, in teamwork, in creation, in God’s glorious church.”

This is true indeed. We do not want cultural uniformity. But it would be an error to apply this to multiculturalism. The thing is, you only get musical harmony when people play their own part well, rather than seeking to play every other part simultaneously, which results in cacophony.

This is the crucial difference between the genuine diversity of the Church and the enforced “diversity” of multiculturalism, the secular ideology which really only gained traction due to misplaced postcolonial guilt.

Ironically, multiculturalism insists (in the name of “diversity”) that we should all think the same way, the trick being that this usually only applies to native westerners, who are told that their culture must perpetually “give way” to other cultures in their midst. More often than not, this ends up eroding the Christian foundations of that culture.

Many Christians still hear the term “multiculturalism” in the media today and think: “But that's what Jesus does, bringing people together from different backgrounds, loving and welcoming people, not grasping after our own things, but giving them away generously…” However, they seldom realise that what most people mean when they talk of multiculturalism is an ideological feature of the post-Christian secular West.

It is not representative of the genuine diversity of God's kingdom. Like Marxism—to which it is related—it is actively hostile to Christianity. It utterly fails to produce the harmonic utopia it promises and instead actively erodes many of the cultural foundations which expressed themselves in particular ways throughout history.

Unlike multicultural ideology, God's kingdom does not entirely eradicate the meaning of our cultural or ethnic or familial particularities. Rather, it illuminates them to God's greater glory. Christ really does unite different peoples. All who repent and believe in Him will be saved, whoever they were, whoever they are (Gal. 3:10). Christ frees us from the hostilities different nations and peoples have always held against one another based on their differences.

But in Christ, we are supernaturally empowered to love and pray and sing in unison with and/or despite our differences, bearing with one another in love, so that we can truly identify in Christ who are not like us. We can and should look to our own “household” first, as Christ Himself did (Matt. 15:24; Rom. 1:16), as all Christians are called to do (Mark 7:11; 1Tim. 3:4-5). But there must also be a genuine identification, however inconvenient, with “our brotherhood throughout the world” (1Pet. 5:9) too, across the many diverse nations of this earth.

This is easier said than done, but it must be done. The problem with many western Christian approaches to this issue today is that they neglect their household, their nation, for such globalist identification which, whilst seeming pious, can often be a strange self-atonement for the fake ancestral guilt imputed to them by postcolonial multiculturalism. This is why they perpetually laud the cultures of other nations, willing them to “multicularalise” their own nations, even where it leads to the active de-Christianisation of their own nations and cultures.

God’s Plan for the Nations

God has great plans for the nations. If a culture or nation becomes too ashamed to be itself it will cease to be. This may not always be a bad thing. Some cultures and nations ought to cease. Some become lost as God’s judgement for their refusal to heed or obey Him. But the loss of nations and cultures can also rob others of the God-given blessings it might have brought to the harmony of God's creation. It would bring such blessings by playing its own part in God’s great choir—however large or small the part—rather than passively withdrawing and surrendering their talents in fear or shame.

Christ's Church transcends national, cultural, and ethnic boundaries as God's “new nation” (1Pet. 2:9). But God is not indifferent to the particular character of nations and cultures within his great new nation, and He appears to have no desire to squash everyone into a homogenous mode of cultural expression, even as all are called to submit to His ways above our own.

“Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you judge the peoples with equity and guide the nations upon earth.” (Psalm 67:4)

That is the true glory of the City of God, where the many become one without losing their distinctive character as “nations”, enlightened not by a blanket ideology imposed upon them by the world but by the supernatural light of Christ Himself.

“By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it...They will bring into it the glory and the honour of the nations.” (Rev. 21:24-26)

---

Some will be aware that I spent some time in India several weeks ago. Many of these reflections about the Christianisation of culture and the relationship of Christian Britain to other nations applies there too, and in a very unique way. I have much to share about that trip and hope to find time to do so over the summer, if time allows. So stay tuned for some “adventures in India” articles mirroring my recent “adventures in Iraq”.