by Raymond Ibrahim, The Stream
The ugly truth about “multiculturalism’
Are all cultures equal? That is, after all, the taken-for-granted premise behind the now deeply rooted and unquestioned notion of multiculturalism, which itself has singlehandedly led to countless cultures being infused into the West.
This claim comes out often and casually. For example, while apologizing to “indigenous peoples” and denouncing Christians — without the all-important historical context — Pope Francis once declared, “Never again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected by the idea that one culture is superior to others…”
This widely held position is very dangerous — particularly because it leads to relativism and the abnegation of Truth.
Culture Rests on Religion
For most Western people today, the word culture conjures at best superficial differences—“exotic” dress or food. In reality, however, cultures are nothing less than entire and distinct worldviews with their own unique sets of rights and wrongs, often rooted in a religion or philosophy.
Indeed, for some thinkers, such as essayist T.S. Eliot, “culture and religion” are inextricably linked, just “different aspects of the same thing”:
Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living…. [N]o culture can appear or develop except in relation to a religion… We can see a religion as the whole way of life of a people, from birth to the grave, from morning to night and even in sleep, and that way of life is also its culture. [From Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 1943, p.100-101; emphasis in original.]
Similarly, for Anglo-French historian Hilaire Belloc,
Cultures spring from religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude toward the universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it — we see that most clearly in the breakdown of Christendom today.
In short, cultures bring much more than, say, the convenience of having Thai cuisine down the street.
Which leads to another important fact: All values traditionally prized by the modern West — religious freedom, tolerance, humanism, the equality of males and females — did not develop in a vacuum but rather are inextricably rooted to Christian principles which, over the course of some two thousand years, have had a profound influence on Western epistemology, society and, of course, culture.