The mixing of vastly different cultures without regard to any common, higher allegiance and without any acknowledgment of man’s sinful nature is a recipe for disaster

Fatal Attraction: 

The Church and Multiculturalism

by William Kilpatrick

As any number of observers have pointed out, multiculturalism is the Trojan Horse by which militant Islam entered the West. The spread of the more extreme manifestations of Islam only became possible when the West capitulated to the doctrine that assimilation to Western values was no longer desirable and criticism of Islamic practices no longer permissible.

A comprehensive new study in the UK shows one of the consequences of embracing the otherness of the “other” without qualification. Easy Meat: Multiculturalism, Islam, and Child Sex Slavery reveals that for more than two decades Muslim gangs in England and Wales have been grooming and sexually exploiting British children on a large scale. According to one estimate, at least 10,000 girls, most of them between the ages of 11 and 16, are kept as virtual sex slaves by the gangs at any one time. The study is unusual for explicitly and emphatically blaming the doctrine of multiculturalism for enabling the growth and spread of the crime wave:

Because the predators were Muslims, the agencies responsible for child-protection have almost entirely failed in their job to protect vulnerable children. From a fear of being called ‘racist’, police forces across the country have buried the evidence … Political correctness would be used to make sure that people did not speak about this phenomenon, enabling the perpetrators free rein to sexually abuse school girls for decades.

In view of the actual and potential destructive effects of non-assimilation, it’s more than a little disconcerting that the Catholic Church seems to have unofficially adopted much of the multicultural agenda—particularly in respect to immigration. American and European bishops have, on the whole, taken a very welcoming stance toward immigration, and, in general, they have put the emphasis on the duty to welcome the stranger, rather than on any duty the stranger may have to assimilate. Moreover, two popes have singled out Muslims for particular attention. In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis said that “Christians should embrace with affection and respect Muslim immigrants.” Francis also called on Muslim countries to respect and uphold the rights of Christians, hoping that his goodwill toward Muslims in Europe will be reciprocated by leaders of Islamic nations toward persecuted Christian minorities. Furthermore, Pope Benedict, who initially opposed Turkey’s inclusion in the European Union on the grounds that Turkish culture was incompatible with Europe’s Christian culture, eventually reversed his position and became a supporter of Turkey’s entry into the EU—perhaps to avoidreprisals against Turkish Christians. (Indeed, every time Benedict called on Muslims to respect reason or behave in a civilized manner toward their Christian neighbors, protests soon followed.)

But, as Geert Wilders, a member of the Dutch Parliament has pointed out, while Turkey can be a “good neighbor” to Europe, it would not be wise to make it “a member of the family.”

If the 72.5 million Turks join the EU, Turkey will be the second most populous EU state after Germany and will probably be the most populous by 2020. Turkey will then have the most seats in the European Parliament and will profoundly influence the EU’s agenda from within, including through the new flood of Turkish immigration that EU membership will make possible. (Marked for Death, p. 173)

It would be nice to think that Turkish immigrants would assimilate, but there are a couple of reasons to think that they won’t—one being that they have not on the whole done so, and the other being that European and Turkish elites don’t believe in assimilation. As Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Erdogan told a crowd of twenty thousand Turkish immigrants in Cologne in 2008, “assimilation is a crime against humanity.”

There are a number of good reasons why the Church ought to rethink the multicultural program. The primary reason is that multiculturalism is a form of relativism. It’s based on the belief that all cultures and religions are of equal value and, for that matter, that all values are of equal value. If that’s so, then societies shouldn’t endorse one set of values over another.

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