Why Multiculturalism always Fails
20 June 2025
By Dr Adi Schlebusch
Understanding the fundamental problem with multiculturalism requires understanding what culture is. The Calvinist philosopher Henry van Til famously defined culture as "religion externalized," which in itself is not a bad definition but which I would argue does open the door to misunderstandings. In the discourse about culture there are two fundamental pitfalls that both need to be avoided - spiritualism and materialism. Conceptualizing culture as constructed through beliefs, convictions, or even worldview alone suggests a gnostic anthropology through which man is abstracted from the physical, concrete reality of our existence. This is the basic tenet of liberalism and this was central to the flaws of the Enlightenment. It is for this very reason that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century counter-enlightenment philosophers polemicized so heavily against abstract theories of human rights or the idea of the social contract as the basis of society.
What the liberal philosophers of the Enlightenment, especially the eighteenth-century French philosophers sought to do was to rebuild a new society based on ideals. It fundamentally sought to de-root man from the so-called "chains" imposed upon him by created realities. In doing so, they often appealed to nature or man's supposed state of nature which, according to them, had been corrupted by customs and habits imposed by tradition. It is for this reason that I believe the contemporary Neo-Thomist accusation against Theonomists that we are fundamentally liberal in our anthropology as a result of our skepticism about natural law, holds no water. The fact of the matter is that appeals to nature as justification for egalitarianism and a universal human fraternity was actually quite common during the Enlightenment, particularly in France. This is not to say that natural law theory is liberal in and of itself, but it has certainly historically been much more of a tool employed by liberals than Scripture has, for example.
Whereas the spiritualist or gnostic understanding of culture had been fundamental to liberalism, it was the reverse side of the coin, namely materialism that shaped the Marxist view of culture. Classical Marxism reduced culture to an expression of economics, with man effectively being reduced to a machine with no spirit. In this view culture loses all connection to religion first and foremost, but also to family, tribe, or nation, and becomes tied to class more than anything else. Many normies in major international cities today are essentially Marxist in their social life, as they tend to find their identity in their relationship to other members of the corporate world around them rather than in the church, family, place, or nation.
It is precisely because neither materialism, nor spiritualism, when put into practice can create genuine culture, that we have the phenomenon of multiculturalism in the first place. When either anthropological distortion of man as purely material or man as purely spiritual is posited as real, culture gets destroyed, because ultimately culture is an expression of the very intersection of the spiritual and the material. The reality of the world is that family is the basis of the social order and culture begins in the context of a familial expression of inner convictions and even instincts. Culture is always interpersonal in that it can never be individually expressed, and from a very young age that interpersonal context is, at heart, familial. When families come together the tribe and the nation organically becomes the "bedding" for the expression and cultivation of these beliefs, customs, and ideals. This is also why God deals with nations covenantally.
Culture organically develops where there is both a common faith and a common ancestry, and good, God-glorifying culture develops wherever the former is biblical Christianity. But Christianity itself is religion, not culture. A Christian culture necessarily implies a bio-geographic bed or soil required for it to live and grow. Whenever the room and role of this bed or soil is denied, and the ethno-territorial social order willed by God (Deuteronomy 32:8, Acts 17:26) is denied, that this distortion manifests in the phenomenon that we call multiculturalism.
Once we understand how and why multiculturalism is a violation of the divinely-ordained ethno-territorial social order, we understand why it results in chaos as we see today in Los Angeles, London, and South Africa. All over the world where a society fails to acknowledge and account for divinely-ordained distinctions, and mankind, through egalitarian projects, try to establish its own sovereignty by trying to remake the world in his image, the result is inevitably anarchy and conflict. Uncontrolled immigration, religious pluralism in the public domain, and a globalist international order is fundamentally bad not only for the specific nations whose identities are suppressed thereby, but for humanity as a whole. If we truly desire peace and prosperity, we would recognize the unique place and role given to each race and nation in God's created order. For there is a place on earth for all of mankind, but only in terms of all of its diversity, that is, mankind as created reality rather than mankind as an abstract idea.
Viewing humanity as an abstraction necessarily entails emphasizing unity at the cost of diversity does not accord with God’s will, for it denies the very instinctive loyalties, natural affections, and associations which make human society possible in the first place. Theological heresies such as the Federal Vision, for example, advocates a type of “covenant objectivity” according to which all those holding church membership are considered part of God’s family, regardless whether they are regenerate or even elect or not. This effectuates a type of ecclesiocentrism in which all spheres of life, including the social and civil realms, are to be modeled after the church, as exemplified in this recent pro-immigration and pro-multiculturalism X-post by Peter Leithart. Yet this monistic impulse is radically at odds with God’s will.
Ultimately, the glorification of God through obedience to the infallible revelation of his will in the Bible, and the flourishing of mankind as created species are two things which necessarily go hand-in-hand. For because God is absolutely sovereign, they can, in the God-given reality in which we exist, never be at odds.