Stephen Wolfe dismantles Multiculturalism at the New Christendom Press Conference
10 June 2024
By Dr. Adi Schlebusch
Over the past weekend New Christendom Press hosted their annual conference in Ogden, Utah. The theme of this year’s conference, “Building Christian Boroughs in the spirit of King Alfred,” also resonates with Pactum's mission and vision and the speaker line-up for the conference this year was, as you can imagine, quite impressive. Speakers included pastor Eric Conn who has promoted one of our books on the King's Hall Podcast as well as Dr. Stephen Wolfe who authored the foreword of one of our first publications. While most Christian conferences tend to be a waste of time, this is one conference I most certainly would have loved to attend if I had been able.
Wolfe’s lecture on multiculturalism was especially striking. He starts off by exposing the blatant inconsistency of the multiculturalist ideology in terms of allowing and even promoting ethnic self-consciousness for every group apart from white people. Wolfe shows how this creates a mechanism where white people become their own group’s “out-group” while the entire world becomes their “in-group.” Through this mechanism, Wolfe explains, a radical demographic revolution is accomplished: multiculturalism and diversity essentially means less white people.
Throughout his talk Wolfe expressly advocates ethno-nationalism and race realism in a way that I have not seen from him before. He embraces the categories of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant and European descendent as ones which he identifies with and which define and delineate the original, genuine, “unhyphenated” American identity. Wolfe affirms that there is an ethnic basis to American identity, and unashamedly identifies the American people as a white Protestant people with a shared culture, religion, ancestry and lineage. He goes on to reject the ideas of propositional and civic nationhood altogether, remarking that “the people matter more than the place.”
Wolfe makes an important distinction by highlighting the difference between multiculturalism and ethnopluralism, with the latter representing a traditional political arrangement which has, in many cases, proven to be wholesome and beneficial many societies. Ethnopluralism, unlike multiculturalism with its destructive twentieth-century idea of the “melting pot,” recognizes the reality of host cultures or dominant cultures, as well as the cultural and geographic boundaries between ethnicities even within the context of a shared political space. Furthermore, any sensible and non-destructive immigration and assimilation policy must be developed within a framework where the dominant Anglo-Saxon ethnicity of the American people is acknowledged and respected.
Wolfe also rejects white people’s embrace of multiculturalism as a form of ethnomasochism, which he aptly defines as “the perverse thrill in experiencing cultural suicide.” This phenomenon is something Wolfe attributes to the suicidal admixture of collective guilt for the perceived “oppression” of the others and universalist egalitarianism. Inherent to this embrace of multiculturalism is a pathetic attempt on the part of white people to find in “the other” the required self-affirmation to even legitimize their own humanity—a mechanism by which white Westerners become completely dependent upon non-whites in the very way we ought to depend upon God.
He continues to argue that American identity cannot be understood apart from the historical founding of the country on North American soil by Anglo-Protestant settlers who self-consciously viewed themselves not only as British Protestants with a shared religion and ancestry, but also as legitimate heirs of the Anglo-Saxon common law tradition. America is an Anglo-Protestant country.
Wolfe brilliantly concludes his lecture by amplifying the perpetual significance of nations and national distinctions in God’s Kingdom by quoting from Revelation 7:9, which shows that the multitude of God’s people does not consist of mere abstracted individuals, but of distinct nations each with their own unique identity.
Wolfe's full lecture can be watched here.