Jason Goroncy on ‘How Christianity both creates and can resolve the problem of monoculturalism’

What if the goal isn’t getting everyone to fit into one culture, but learning how to live together across our differences? This article from Jason Goroncy explores why he believes monoculturalism conflicts with the Christian vision of unity.

Opinion article by Reverend Associate Professor Jason Goroncy

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has, for the third time in three decades, made monoculturalism speakable again in Australian public life – not simply as nostalgia for a vanished homogeneity, but as policy: a demand that immigration, citizenship, and public culture be organised around the protection of a single inherited ‘Australian way of life’ against what is imagined as the solvent of multiculturalism. The problem runs deeper than politics, however: it is religious at its root. The monoculturalism on offer here does not merely resemble a Christian politics of belonging; it draws on deeply ‘Christian’ assumptions about peoplehood, order, and purity that Australian churches have long helped to authorise, bless, and normalise. That is why the charge of ‘heresy’ sticks: not because every preference for cultural cohesion is, by itself, a doctrinal error, but because monoculturalism becomes heretical when Christian communities present it as a “Christian” account of belonging.

Before proceeding, a distinction that the debate consistently muddies. Not every culturally homogeneous society is one committed to monoculturalism. There is a difference between a society that happens to be relatively unified in language, custom, and inherited practice – as a result of geography, history, or long settlement – and a society that pursues cultural uniformity as a political ideology, deploying the instruments of the state to produce, enforce, and protect that uniformity against perceived dilution. The former is a contingent social fact; the latter is a political programme. Iceland’s linguistic coherence is not a heresy. Japan’s relative cultural cohesion is not a heresy. The first nations of this continent, who maintained rich and distinct cultural traditions across millennia, are not heretics for having done so.

What is under examination here is monoculturalism as ideology – the deliberate project of making a single inherited culture the condition of political belonging, typically by excluding, assimilating, or suppressing those who do not conform to it. This is the programme Hanson’s One Nation has repeatedly advanced. This is the programme that has structured Australian immigration policy from 1901 to the present. And this is what the church’s own confession, rightly read, names as false doctrine.

Three further qualifications follow. The first is that heresy only means anything if it can fail to apply – if there is a way of holding a high view of national belonging, of place and people and the loyalties that bind them, which does not fall under the judgement. I do not think that those whose work I discuss in what follows (such as Yoram Hazony, Roger Scruton, Brian Barry, or David Goodhart) are heretics. It would be intellectual bad faith to call them that: none of them is making a claim about the body of Christ, and a category cannot be violated by people who were never working within it. What can be shown – and is the actual labour of this essay – is that the strongest versions of their case depend, often without quite noticing it, on assumptions about peoplehood that the biblical material some of them invoke does not in fact underwrite, and that where monoculturalism is given theological warrant, as it demonstrably has been throughout Australian history, it meets, almost to the letter, the definition of false doctrine that Barmen and Belhar developed for exactly this kind of error. The heresy attaches to the warrant, and to the Christian communities and rhetoric that supply it, not to secular political philosophy as such.

The second qualification is more easily forgotten once the argument is underway: this is not a brief for multiculturalism as a settled good. Liberal multiculturalism has its own characteristic blindness – Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Slavoj Žižek, from quite different directions, all properly expose it – and a community that simply traded one orthodoxy, national cohesion, for another, the celebration of diversity as such, would not have escaped the problem so much as relocated it. What is at stake is not which side of a contemporary political argument the gospel underwrites, but a peculiar third thing: a unity constituted by difference rather than achieved despite it, which neither monoculturalism nor most multiculturalism, on its own terms, has the resources to imagine.

Third, and most uncomfortably: the churches most implicated in the heresy being named are not out there somewhere, unidentifiable and other. They are the ones that built this country’s schools, staffed its colonial bureaucracies, blessed its immigration policies, and that now, on the whole, are silent.

Classically, heresy – hairesis, a choosing, a faction, a path taken apart from the rest – named a deviation from the rule of faith specific and grave enough to require the judgement of the gathered Christian community: Arius on the Son’s relation to the Father, Pelagius on the freedom and bondage of the will, Eutyches on how two natures cohere in the one Christ. It was never a synonym for ‘a view I happen to find distasteful’. So if the word is to do real work here, it has to answer two questions: what, exactly, is the doctrine being mishandled, and on whose authority is the verdict rendered? The doctrine, I will try to show, is ecclesiological (concerned with the nature, shape, and membership of the church) and eschatological (concerned with creation’s promised end, or what the tradition calls the ‘last things’).

The authority is the Second Testament’s own account of how Jew and Gentile came to share one body without either becoming the other. It is read alongside those moments in which the Protestant confessional tradition – the practice of issuing formal, church-wide declarations of doctrine in response to specific historical crises – has judged a cultural-political doctrine serious enough to require formal confession rather than ordinary disagreement: at Barmen in 1934 (a statement by the German Confessing Church against National Socialism’s claim on Christian faith), at Belhar in 1986 (a South African Reformed confession against apartheid’s theological justifications), and at Accra in 2004 (a global Reformed statement against the theological pretensions of neoliberal economic empire). And alongside these confessions stands a further, sharper claim, one I, with John Flett, have tried to substantiate at length elsewhere, that the church has a long and largely unexamined habit of producing what it calls ‘orthodoxy’ by eliminating difference and calling the result unity. It is that established habit of the church – not political homogeneity as such – that I am naming as heretical. That habit is heretical in its very pattern, prior to and independent of whatever propositional content happens to be at stake on any given occasion; and a politics built on the same habit – unity purchased by absorbing or erasing difference – reproduces the heresy in a different key, with different and often gentler-seeming stakes, whether or not anyone involved would recognise, or would want to recognise, the theological grammar being borrowed.

Before the church can name this error in itself, however, it must reckon with the strongest secular and theological cases for the politics it has long endorsed. … Keep reading

Jason was also published on ABC Religion and Ethics. Read it here. 

Jason Goroncy

Jason Goroncy (PhD, St Andrews) is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Whitley College, the University of Divinity. His current research broadly engages questions in public theology, theology and the arts, death, and trauma.