“We are shocked by these attacks. Violence in whatever name of God, can never be excused. At the same time, we must be careful to not treat a particular ethnicity or religion differently. Among the victims are all persuasions present, Muslim, Jew, Christian or Atheist." --Belgium-Luxembourg Conference
"Firm and unconditional is our condemnation of all acts of terror, violence and oppression. May weapons, hate and violence cease! No religion is responsible for terrorism. People are responsible for violence and terrorism. We are all brothers and sisters, children of one same Father.” --Inter-European Division
"Our hearts and prayers go out to the people of Brussels who have sustained terrible explosions causing death and destruction. One of those blasts was very near our Seventh-day Adventist headquarters for that region. . . . Today, during our General Conference committees, we will earnestly pray for the country of Belgium, our church members and the families affected by this terrible tragedy." –General Conference
Our official responses to the Brussels bombing indicate more than just a fear of Muslim violence. They sound exactly like the “politically correct” pabulum that regularly issues from every Western government, big corporation, or large organization that seeks cultural respectability.
What is multiculturalism?
We are all familiar with these bromides: all religions are equally valid paths to God, all cultures are of equal value, no one should ever discriminate. This is the ideology of multiculturalism. Its true adherents believe that if only we would all suspend judgment and discrimination, stop “clinging to God and guns,” put aside regional, national, religious, cultural and civilizational loyalties, and blend into one formless, shapeless mass, the world will be a paradise.
Multiculturalism is a secular utopian ideology, like communism, only it isn’t Leninism but Lennonism, as in John Lennon:
Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one
It is no coincidence that “Imagine” was played in the streets of Paris and spontaneously sung in the streets of Brussels after their respective Muslim terror attacks; “Imagine” is the anthem of multiculturalism, and multiculturalism—not Christianity or Christendom or Western Civilization—is our answer to a resurgent Islam. It is a losing response. When one side has a religion, with the promise of a sensual heaven that can only be secured through martyrdom while fighting jihad, and the other side by its own admission has “nothing to kill or die for,” only the prerogative of hedonism in the here and now—“living for today”—then the final outcome of such a contest is not in question.
Multiculturalism is promoted as virtue itself, as the absence of discrimination, bigotry and hatred. But there is a grubby economic imperative underlying multiculturalism: the post-sexual revolution West is not having enough children to replace the current population, much less to produce the level of economic growth demanded by the plutocrats who fund (and thereby control) all political parties. The West is dependent upon mass immigration to sustain growth. Multiculturalism makes a virtue of necessity by wrapping mass immigration in a high-minded ideology, providing cover for the plutocrats’ policy preferences.
If all cultures are equally compatible with our Western liberal civilization—which values representative democracy, laws made by elected legislatures, religious freedom, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press—then massive non-Western immigration into the West poses no problem. But if all cultures are not equally compatible with our values, if multiculturalism’s basic assumption is wrong, then the West has a serious problem.
It is already uncouth (in America) and criminal (in Europe) to question multiculturalism
The plutocrat promoters of multiculturalism are not disposed to hazard anyone disputing their assumptions. They have worked tirelessly to place any meaningful discussion of multiculturalism’s tenets beyond the pale of acceptable political discourse. There can be no discussion of the remorseless war on sex roles that is at the root of the West’s demographic suicide. All Western political parties hustle to outbid each other in their devotion to feminism and contempt for traditional sex role distinctions. The war on the created sexual order now also includes an assault on the idea that gender corresponds to one’s birth sex; even this insanity is being put beyond the boundaries of political discussion by the conceit that choosing one’s gender, rather than being assigned it by one’s birth anatomy, is a basic civil right.
Likewise, there can be no serious questioning of the mass immigration that the birth dearth has necessitated. Mass immigration is supposed to be off the table, beyond the pale of legitimate political discussion. If you oppose mass immigration, or even want to discuss it in a public setting, all the bien pensants revile you as a racist and a bigot. To the multiculturalist, the only reason anyone could possibly oppose his utopian ideology is ignorance and bigotry. (This partially explains the conflict between the Republican Party establishment, which is committed to multiculturalism, and the party’s leading primary vote-getter, who is successfully exploiting the fact that many American voters are not sold on multiculturalism.)
In Europe, which does not have a First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, those who express serious reservations about Islam and the regime of mass Muslim immigration are often criminally prosecuted for “hate speech” or some other “crime” that amounts to disapproved thinking. Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who opposes Muslim immigration to an already heavily Islamized Netherlands, is now enduring his second trial for hate speech, but he is merely the best known of many Europeans to be prosecuted for having doubts about Muslim immigration.
For almost a week, the German government and German media outlets colluded to cover up the fact that Muslim immigrants (who are, strangely, 72% male and mostly of military age) committed a mass sexual assault on hundreds of German women in Cologne on New Years’ Eve. The more obvious it becomes that Islam is not compatible with Western values, the more zealously Western elites try to crush those who point out the obvious. Last week, the German government arrested, booked, and searched the houses and personal effects of nine people whose only offense was to express officially-disapproved views toward Muslims. Multi-culturalism shares with Nazism and communism, the two older and more famous secular utopian ideologies, the view that dissenting opinion must be ruthlessly suppressed.
It is multiculturalism that demands that all respectable institutions—including churches—pretend that Islam is just Methodism with funny headwear.
Multiculturalism is based on a lie
If there is a connection between Islam and terrorism, then multiculturalism is obviously fraudulent. And because our elites are committed to multiculturalism, we are regularly confronted, as I noted here, with their continued insistence that Islamic terrorism is not Islamic—the type of denial of obvious reality that is typical of the utopian ideologue.
In fact, Islam does promote terrorism—and also jihad, Islamic supremacism, death or dhimmitude for non-Muslims, honor killings, female genital mutilation, polygamy, misogyny, Jew hatred, sexual abuse of minors (and all “infidel” women), slavery (including sexual slavery), and self-segregation of Muslims inside Western nations (creating no-go emirates where the nominal government’s writ does not run). Islam is itself a totalitarian religio-political ideology that does not tolerate opposing points of view, but ruthlessly suppresses and destroys them. Islam is a not merely what Westerners think of as a “religion” but is also a jurisprudential project that seeks to impose sharia law; it does not concede the legitimacy of “man-made” law—law written and passed by elected legislatures and signed by elected governors. The notion that Islam is compatible with liberal Western democracy is so contrary to reality as to be essentially insane.
I will go further: Christian culture is superior to all other cultures. Yes, I said it, because it is true. If we have a biblical world view, we must believe this to be true, because we must believe that the light of the gospel, when it enters a society and eventually preponderates, pervades all aspects of a society and changes it for the better. For world travelers, observation will be sufficient to demonstrate this truth.
I am not finished smashing the idols of multiculturalism: Protestant Christian culture is superior to Roman Catholic culture. If you do not believe this, tour Latin American, or at least read Chapter 15 of “The Great Controversy,” in which Ellen White describes the conditions in late 18th Century France that led an atheistic, anti-clerical Revolution. When a priest-ridden people are prevented from accessing and internalizing God’s word, the resulting culture exhibits extremes of wealth and poverty, with a small elite allied with the Roman Church sustaining itself in power through corruption, venality and violence over a great mass of degraded peasants who, by reason of ignorance and superstition, are unfit to govern themselves. Such societies are inherently unstable, and tend to oscillate between clergy-backed “right wing” authoritarian dictators, and anti-clerical, more-or-less atheistic “left wing” totalitarian regimes. (Recently, some Roman Catholic priests steeped in “liberation theology” have backed the Leftist totalitarian regimes instead of the Rightist authoritarian regimes.)
The French Revolution is the template for many subsequent convulsions of priest-ridden societies: the Russian Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Castro Revolution in Cuba, the Chavistas in Venezuela, and on and on ad infinitum.
By contrast, Protestant Christian cultures have generally been more successful in maintaining a healthy middle class and stable institutions of self-government through representative democracy.
I know it shocks you to read the foregoing paragraphs—such politically incorrect truths! It shocks me to write them. But that shock is an indication of how deeply we have all imbibed multiculturalism. It has wormed its way into American life and thinking, far more than did those other utopian ideologies—communism and National Socialism. We all have participated in a conspiracy to pretend that lies are truth, because our elites believe that such fictions are the only way forward, the only way past the demographic cul-de-sac in which the post-Sexual Revolution West finds itself.
Multiculturalism and religion
One would think that no church, much less the Adventist Church, would sublimate the truth to the demands of a secular utopian ideology. Utopianism is, after all, a heresy. In the biblical worldview, human society is irretrievably broken by the Fall of mankind, and hence there can be no perfect society until God does away with sin and sinners, and makes a sinless world. No amount of governmental force and violence can perfect any human society; the millions upon millions of dead victims of 20th Century secular utopian ideologies are more than sufficient proof of that. As Christians with a biblical worldview, we should be immune to the siren song of utopian ideology—any utopian ideology, but even more so an ideology like Lennonism, which posits “no heaven,” “no religion,” “above us only sky,” and “living [only] for today.”
I do not think the SDA Church is intentionally subscribing to an anti-Christian secular utopian ideology. But there is a sort of “institution-speak,” a language to which all large institutions, including churches, feel that they must conform, even though the ideological underpinnings of that language are anti-Christian and anti-biblical.
Multiculturalism and Mysticism
As I think about it, there is a spiritual phenomenon that dove-tails perfectly with the secular ideology of multiculturalism: mysticism. The mystic has personal supernatural experiences that she believes are from God, but are actually from the adversary. The mystic enjoys her supernatural experiences much more than the written word of God, and comes to value the former more highly than the latter. This allows the adversary to gradually and almost imperceptibly insinuate false doctrine into the mystic’s mind. Ellen White warned against mysticism:
“We need not the mysticism that is in [The Living Temple]. Those who entertain these sophistries will soon find themselves in a position where the enemy can talk with them, and lead them away from God.” Review & Herald, Oct. 22, 1903.
Typically, the false doctrines of mysticism include one or more of the following four:
- monism = all is one, all reality is a unified whole, with no sharp demarcations between Creator, creation and creature;
- pantheism = everything is God, the tree, the flower, the bird the cat, the human—all are God;
- panentheism = God is inside of everything and everyone; and
- universalism = everyone will ultimately share in eternal life.
These ideas lead to a blurring of religious distinctions that need to be maintained. Mystics chafe at dualistic, black/white, right/wrong, either/or thinking, and instead emphasize oneness and universalism. This leads inevitably to false ecumenism, aided by the fact that there is a mystical tradition within every religion on earth—another reason why mysticism is the perfect spiritual handmaiden of multiculturalism. (Sufism is the mystical tradition within Islam, in case you were wondering.) Mysticism is at the heart of the “emerging church movement” which is currently pouring into Adventism through the agency of the “One Project.”
Let us be truthful about Islam
We need to consciously strive against multicultural “institution-speak,” and the blurring of necessary religious demarcations. We must clearly represent our beliefs:
Christ is the way, the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through Jesus Christ. (John 14:6)
Muslims are lost eternally without Christ. (1 John 5:12; John 3:36)
Muslims must put away the sword, because whoever lives by the sword dies by it, and dies eternally. (Mat. 26:52; 5:39; Rom. 12:19; 1 Thes. 5:15; 1 Peter 3:9)
The Quran was not divinely inspired; rather, God allowed Satan to inspire Muhammad and loose Islam upon apostate Christianity, to punish it. (Rev. 9)
There are positive aspects to Islam, such as its firm rejection of any form of idolatry or polytheism, but these pale to insignificance next to its errors and falsehoods, and its violence, cruelty, and barbarism.
One thing that Adventists should emphasize is that wherever there is a church-state combination, there is persecution and religious violence. The medieval Roman Catholic Church became the beast power and the anti-Christ because it controlled the kings of Europe; it was a church-state combination.
By the same token, Muhammad was both a (purported) prophet or religious leader AND a warlord or political chief. The caliphate (the caliph is the successor to Muhammad) that ISIS and other Muslim groups want to establish would, following the model of their founder, also be a mosque-state combination. In Islam, mosque and state are bound together much more tightly than the Roman Catholic Church was ever tied to the civil governments of medieval Europe. Church and state were always separate entities in theory, even during the height of the middle ages when the church made the state enforce its edicts. But the Muslim nation (“ummah”) is one religio-political entity; there is no “mosque and state,” there is only one nation, the Muslim ummah. That is why the penalty for leaving Islam is death: it is not just apostasy or leaving a religion, it is treason against one’s nation. It is Islam’s character as a religious nation-state that explains the extreme violence of its most faithful adherents.
The Adventist Church should take the opportunity presented by savage acts of Islamic terror to point out that a religious-political combination is a terrible thing. The occasion of Islamic terrorism is the perfect “teachable moment” to explain basic principles of religious liberty.