I.

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.

II.

Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) is the most theologically serious defence of monoculturalism of which I am aware. Hazony, an Israeli-American philosopher and political theorist, grounds the case for national self-determination explicitly in the Hebrew Bible. He reads ancient Israel as the first sustained political alternative to imperial universalism: against Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon, and their dream to ‘bring the four quarters of the world to obedience’ – an obedience that ‘made salvation from war, disease, and starvation possible’ – Israel’s prophets articulate a politics of bounded, self-governing nationhood, kings drawn ‘from among your brothers’, borders Israel is commanded to respect even in its neighbours’ territory. A nation, on this account, is ‘a number of tribes with a common language or religion, and a past history of acting as a body for the common defense and other large-scale enterprises’.

Crucially, this is not for Hazony a biological category: ‘foreign-born individuals’ can join Israel’s ranks if – and only if – they are willing ‘to accept Israel’s God, laws, and understanding of history’. Without embracing these central aspects of Israelite tradition, they will not become a part of the Israelite nation. Ruth’s words to Naomi supply his proof text: ‘your people is my people and your God is my God’. Christendom’s sin, on Hazony’s reading, is not nationalism but its opposite: the Western church’s adoption of imperial universalism, the dream of a single political-religious order embracing all nations, read as a betrayal of the Hebrew Bible’s own political vision.

Hazony’s is a truly strong argument, and cannot be simply dismissed. Empire has its own idolatries; the prophetic tradition does resist universal political absorption; a great deal of liberal cosmopolitan rhetoric does proceed as if national attachment were itself a moral failure requiring correction, a charge that British journalist David Goodhart presses with rather more sociological precision. In his book The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (2017), Goodhart distinguishes between mobile, university-credentialed ‘Anywheres’ and rooted, place-attached ‘Somewheres’. This names something real: elite multiculturalism has often been a luxury good, available to those whose social capital travels, purchased at the expense of communities whose only capital was a shared place and a shared story.

Likewise, the British philosopher Roger Scruton champions a case for what he calls oikophilia – love of home, of the oikos that makes shared sacrifice and democratic accountability thinkable in the first place. Scruton’s argument in his little book The Need for Nations (2004) has much to commend it: a polity that asks nothing of its members beyond procedural agreement will struggle to generate the trust that redistribution and mutual obligation require. Importantly and persuasively, he also, therein and elsewhere, distinguishes between ‘national loyalty’ and ‘nationalism’. He outlines his position with characteristic clarity in a public lecture delivered in Hungary in 2004:

[W]e must distinguish national loyalty, which is the sine qua non of consensual government in the modern world, from nationalism, which is a belligerent ideology that looks for a source of government higher than the routines of settlement and neighbourhood. Nationalism is an ideological attempt to supplant customary and neighbourly loyalties with something more like a religious loyalty – a loyalty based on doctrine and commitment. Ordinary national loyalty, by contrast, is the by-product of settlement. It comes about because people have ways of resolving their disputes, ways of getting together, ways of cooperating, ways of celebrating and worshipping that seal the bond between them without ever making that bond explicit as a doctrine.

From a different angle entirely, Brian Barry’s critique, in Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism (2000), that group-differentiated rights can entrench class disadvantage and abandon internal minorities, women within patriarchal minority cultures and children of fundamentalist sects, to the tender mercies of ‘their own community’ stands as a warning any defence of cultural difference has to absorb rather than wave away as bad faith dressed up as tolerance.

The political logic underlying the arguments of Hazony, Scruton, Goodhart, and Barry finds its most rigorous and most uncomfortable theoretical articulation in Carl Schmitt’s Der Begriff des Politischen (1932). Schmitt’s foundational claim is that the defining criterion of the political is the friend–enemy distinction: The political enemy need not be ‘morally evil, aesthetically ugly or economically damaging’, but he [sic] is, nevertheless, ‘the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible’. A politics that refuses to name its enemy, in Schmitt’s account, has not transcended the political but only displaced and disguised it – and the displacement is characteristically liberal.

Schmitt extends this critique in Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950), arguing that stable political and legal order requires a world of bounded, sovereign territorial units, each with its own spatial nomos (the founding act of land-appropriation and ordering that makes law and governance thinkable), and that the universalist project of replacing this plurality with a single global legal framework (e.g., the League of Nations) does not abolish political enmity but escalates it: the enemy of a universal order is, by definition, an enemy of humanity itself, against whom no legal limit on violence applies. In his Positionen und Begriffe, im Kampf mit Weimar – Genf – Versailles 1923–1939 (1940), Schmitt sharpens this into a diagnosis of liberal internationalism as such: when a particular power claims to represent humanity, it can prosecute unlimited expansion while genuinely denying it is acting imperially – its universalism functioning as its most effective instrument of domination.

Hanson’s monoculturalism reproduces the Schmittian political logic in its most transparent register: it names the stranger directly and refuses the diplomatic idiom of multicultural accommodation. Liberal multiculturalism, in Schmitt’s analysis, does not abolish this logic but relocates it – which is, as I shall show below, precisely what Bhabha’s concept of mimicry and Žižek’s diagnosis of the depoliticisation of culture are, from quite different positions, independently demonstrating.

The theological argument advanced in what follows does not, however, share Schmitt’s political realism: if the friend–enemy distinction is the criterion of the political, then the gospel’s claim – that the enmity constituting the wall between Jew and Gentile has been broken down in the flesh of Christ – is, among other things, a political claim. It does not naïvely deny that enemies exist; rather, it refuses to treat the category ‘enemy’ as either necessary or permanent. Schmitt joined the National Socialist Party in 1933 and provided legal justification for the regime’s consolidation of power; this context is not incidental to the framework – it is, in a precise sense, the framework’s destination.

Returning to Hazony’s work – which, unlike Barry’s, is making a claim about the exemplarity of Israel as a political form – it seems to me that his own text undoes his theological claim. In a footnote on minority nations within national states, Hazony cites approvingly Aviel Roshwald’s observation that ‘pluralistic values … are much easier to embrace in the absence of diversity’, which is an admission, not a rebuttal, that the felt naturalness of national cohesion is frequently a function of prior exclusion rather than evidence against the charge. More tellingly still, Hazony documents, without apparent discomfort, the actual machinery by which ‘majority nation or tribe’ cohesion gets produced: American public schooling established in the 1830s explicitly to maintain ‘a public culture based on Protestantism and American nationalism’, the legislative destruction of German-speaking schools in Wisconsin in 1889, and federal insistence that Louisiana’s courts operate in English despite its French civil-law inheritance.

Hazony’s own framework requires a ‘majority nation’ whose customs become the state’s customs, with ‘protection and accommodation of minority nations and tribes’ offered downward as a concession that ‘obviously places limits on the collective self-determination of the majority nation or tribe in every state’, never as a relationship between equals. This is not a flaw at the margins of Hazony’s argument; it is the argument, conceding the postcolonial critique before that critique has even been raised: the cultural cohesion Hazony, Scruton, and Goodhart commend is reliably won by the elimination, suppression, or patient absorption of cultures that do not get to be the majority, and that this can feel, from inside the majority position, like organic unity rather than achievement-by-exclusion is precisely what Bhabha and Spivak, as we shall see, call ideology doing its quietest work.

The theological problem in Hazony’s argument runs deep. His exegesis treats ancient Israel’s covenantal particularity – one people, elected for one historical vocation, bound by one Torah – as a generic template for nationhood as such, exportable to any ‘number of tribes with a common language or religion’. This is precisely the move the Second Testament refuses to let stand, even for Israel. The Jerusalem Council’s decision not to require circumcision and Torah observance of Gentile converts (Acts 15) is not a footnote to early church history; it is the founding constitutional decision that the people of God would no longer be coextensive with one ethnos and its inherited culture.

Whatever Israel’s election meant, the apostolic church concluded it did not mean exporting Israelite cultural-religious uniformity as the price of belonging – the opposite lesson from the one Hazony draws when he treats Israel as proof that durable peoplehood requires shared culture all the way down. Ruth herself, his proof text for voluntary cultural assimilation, sits inside a canon that elsewhere uses her story, alongside Jonah’s, precisely to needle Ezra–Nehemiah’s anxious nationalist purity politics, the demand that returned exiles divorce their foreign wives to protect the people’s cultural-religious integrity (Ezra 9–10). Hazony quotes the Ruth who says ‘your people shall be my people’; he does not reckon with the canon’s evident discomfort about what happens when that hospitality curdles into a boundary-policing nationalism of precisely the kind his own theory requires.

III.

Against this pattern – cultural unity produced through exclusion but experienced as organic – the liberal multicultural tradition has mounted its most sustained challenge. Against monoculturalist accounts, Will Kymlicka, Charles Taylor, Bhikhu Parekh, and Tariq Modood, among others, have built the dominant liberal case for accommodating cultural difference within a shared polity.

Kymlicka’s Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (1995) distinguishes self-government rights (for national minorities, including indigenous peoples ‘whose homeland has been incorporated into the boundaries of a larger state, through conquest, colonization, or federation’), polyethnic rights (for immigrant communities), and special representation rights, arguing that genuine liberal equality sometimes requires group-differentiated treatment rather than a single undifferentiated citizenship, because cultural membership is itself a precondition for the kind of meaningful choice liberalism claims to protect.

Charles Taylor’s 1994 essay on ‘The Politics of Recognition’ presses further into the phenomenology of the claim: identity is dialogically formed – we come to know who we are through relationships with others, not prior to them – and misrecognition is not a discourtesy but a real harm; a polity offering only ‘difference-blind’ formal equality can inflict exactly the damage it believes itself too principled to inflict.

Bhikhu Parekh’s Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (2000) insists that no culture, including the liberal culture doing the accommodating, is self-sufficient or beyond critique – multiculturalism, properly understood, is a standing intercultural dialogue about ‘operative public values’, not a relativist truce in which cultures are sealed off from one another. These ‘operative public values’ are ‘operative’ because they are ‘not abstract ideals but are generally observed and constitute a lived social and moral reality’; ‘values’ because ‘society cherishes, endeavours to live by, and judges its members’ behaviour in terms of them; and ‘public’ in that they are embodied in a society’s ‘constitutional, legal and civic institutions and practices and regulate the public conduct of its citizens’. Together, these values ‘constitute the primary moral structure of … public life’.

Tariq Modood extends this into the contested terrain of religion, arguing, in Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea (2007/13), that genuine multicultural citizenship in a country like Britain – or Australia – requires public accommodation of religious as well as ethnic difference, against a secularism that quietly privileges Christian-cultural assumptions while calling itself neutral.

It was Lesslie Newbigin, returning to Britain in 1974 after decades as a missionary bishop in South India, who saw most clearly what was unstable in that last move. Newbigin had spent a working life inside a society that did not pretend its public reason was culture-free; he came home to one that did and found the pretence considerably less plausible than the open religious plurality he had left behind. The Enlightenment’s claim to a neutral, tradition-free public rationality is not, he argued in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989), a vantage point above the traditions it adjudicates between but one more tradition among others, with its own ‘plausibility structure’ (the background network of assumptions that determines, for any given community, what counts as evidence and what counts as superstition – language he borrows from the sociologist Peter Berger). A polity that builds its sense of fairness on the fiction of having escaped tradition altogether will always mistake its own particularity for the absence of particularity: a more comfortable way of being parochial, not a way of ceasing to be so.

This is Modood’s point given a longer theological genealogy: the secularism that calls itself ‘neutral’ is simply a settlement that has stopped noticing its own history. But Newbigin will not let the argument settle into relativism either. He held that there is a ‘gospel’, a piece of public truth and not merely private conviction, and that its proper apologetic is not argument from a neutral height but the visible, communal life of a people gathered out of, and remaining answerable across, every other gathering. A faith community that cannot show, in its own life together, the reconciliation it preaches about the nations has not yet earned the right to be heard on the question being asked here.

That the question is not merely academic, and that taking it seriously costs something, was demonstrated with some force in February 2008, when Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, delivered a lecture on ‘Civil and Religious Law in England’ at the Royal Courts of Justice. Williams proposed what he called ‘interactive pluralism’: a careful, heavily qualified argument that English law might, in limited and consensual domains such as family arbitration, make room for the ‘supplementary jurisdiction’ of religious communities of practice, sharia councils among them, without dissolving the single legal sovereignty beneath which all citizens remain equally answerable.

The lecture’s argument was considerably more modest than what followed; it was received almost instantly as a proposal to replace English law with sharia, and the ensuing controversy led several members of the Church’s General Synod to publicly call for his resignation and, for many, weakened his public authority. What is instructive is not whether his specific proposal was right – the legal questions are genuinely hard – but the structure of the panic, which assumed, as if it required no defence, that a single, undifferentiated legal-cultural order was simply what national coherence meant, such that any plural accommodation, however bounded, could only be read as betrayal.

This is a substantial achievement on liberal multiculturalism’s part, and it answers Hazony, Scruton, and Barry on their strongest ground: cultural accommodation need not dissolve liberal equality or evacuate shared civic life, and the demand for assimilation frequently smuggles in exactly the cultural particularism – a majority’s customs dressed as neutral citizenship – that liberalism claims to have transcended.

But the liberal settlement has its own blindness, and it is here that Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Slavoj Žižek do some important work. Bhabha’s account of hybridity and the ‘Third Space’ observes that liberal multiculturalism still tends to imagine discrete, bounded cultures meeting at a negotiating table – Anglo-Australian culture here, Vietnamese-Australian culture there, the state adjudicating accommodation between them – when actual cultural life is already hybrid, mutually constituted, and irreducible to the tidy boxes the recognition framework needs to function administratively. His concept of colonial ‘mimicry’, the demand that the colonised subject be ‘almost the same, but not quite’, names a dynamic that survives the transition from formal empire to multicultural citizenship: difference is welcomed exactly to the degree it performs as a charming variation on a still-dominant norm, and regarded with suspicion the moment it asserts itself as a genuinely rival account of the good.

Spivak’s question ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ presses harder still: even the most generous liberal framework for representing minority voices risks having those voices spoken for, translated into terms the dominant culture’s institutions can process and reward, so that what gets celebrated as inclusion is often a sanitised performance of difference – difference on the majority’s terms that does not actually threaten anything.

Žižek’s diagnosis is blunter still: liberal multicultural tolerance functions as the ideal ideology of globalised capital because it relocates the political question – who has power, who owns what, who is exploited – into the comfortably depoliticised register of cultural respect, allowing a society to celebrate its diversity of cuisines and festivals while leaving economic structure entirely unexamined; as he later put it, liberal multiculturalism can ‘mask an old barbarism with a human face’. None of this is an argument for monoculturalism; it is an argument that multiculturalism without economic critique can become exactly the kind of depoliticised tolerance Barry worried about from a different angle – comfortable for elites, of little use to working-class communities, migrant and native-born alike. It converges, interestingly, with the Accra Confession’s later diagnosis of ‘empire’ as an order that survives by depoliticising itself, presenting global capital’s arrangements as natural rather than chosen (about which more below).

IV.

Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006) offers a genuine alternative to the binary impasse that marks the Australian debate. It attempts to answer the monoculturalist that cultural contamination is not corruption, and to answer the liberal critic that recognition need not freeze cultures in place.

Against both, Appiah argues for ‘universal concern and respect for legitimate difference’ held together – the cosmopolitan does not need everyone to agree, only to remain in honest conversation across disagreement – and, crucially, that cultural purity was always a myth: cultures have always been ‘contaminated’, mutually borrowing, changing, absorbing. Culture is porous. There is no pristine ‘Australian culture’ to be protected from multicultural dilution, any more than there is a pristine Vietnamese–Australian or Lebanese–Australian culture sealed off from its surroundings; everyone, on Appiah’s account, is already a partial cosmopolitan, already shaped by contact.

This is closer to the theological resolution being defended here than anything in either the monoculturalist or liberal multiculturalist camp, because it refuses the assumption – shared, oddly, by Hazony and by some forms of identity-politics multiculturalism – that cultures are bounded wholes whose integrity must be either protected or accommodated as units. But Appiah’s cosmopolitanism remains underdetermined in a way that matters. It supplies an ethic of conversation across difference without an account of why difference is, in fact, good rather than merely tolerable, and without an eschatology – a sense of where the conversation is going and what it is for.

It is a humane and intellectually serious holding pattern, and what follows tries to supply what cosmopolitanism gestures toward but cannot, on its own resources, ground: not just that cultural contamination happens, but that it is willed – that the difference of the nations is not an unfortunate fact to be managed through respectful dialogue but a glory to be gathered.

What cosmopolitanism lacks is not goodwill but eschatological depth – a sense of where the conversation across difference is going and what it is for. Religious traditions have attempted to supply exactly this, though not without producing their own characteristic distortion.

V.

I, with John Flett, have argued elsewhere that the church’s foundational mode of producing ‘orthodoxy’ was heresiology – the practice of defining what counts as faithful belief by systematically naming and condemning deviations from it: the construction of unity through hostile definition and exclusion, in which Athanasius retroactively attached Arius’s name to anyone who dissented, regardless of their actual position; in which the same conciliar movement that fixed Christological language also severed Christian communities along linguistic and cultural lines – Chalcedon’s settlement was received by Syrian and Egyptian Christians not primarily as theology but, citing Paulos Mar Gregorios, as ‘the revolt of Asia–Africa against a domineering Graeco–Roman civilisation’; and in which the Western church’s later self-understanding as the normative, ‘acultural’ centre of Christianity required treating everyone else’s cultural embodiment of the faith as derivative, suspect, or merely ‘non-theological’. The Pacific theologian Upolu Vaai names the underlying move ‘oneification’: the imposition of a single story as the only story, achieved by ‘the control of truth’ rather than its discovery. It is, he writes, ‘lazy energy. … It dismisses multiple stories and makes one story the only story. It strives to make visible the face of the one by making invisible the face of the many’.

It is worth pausing on how little of this is peculiar to a postcolonial reading of the fourth century, since the same conclusion has been reached from quite a different scholarly direction. Rowan Williams’s Arius: Heresy and Tradition – still, decades on, the most consequential English-language reassessment of the controversy – argues that the line between Nicene orthodoxy and Arian heresy was not simply there, waiting to be discovered, but substantially made. Arius himself, on Williams’s reading, was a more careful, more exegetically serious theologian than the tradition that defeated him allowed him to remain; ‘Arianism’ as a unified system of error is, to a significant degree, Athanasius’s achievement rather than Arius’s – a polemical genealogy assembled after the fact to gather a genuinely diverse set of positions (Eusebian, Asterian, later Homoian, and Eunomian: theologians who did not agree with one another nearly as much as the label suggests) under one hostile name, the better to be refuted as one thing.

The analogy is not drawn to relativise the work of the council at Nicaea (325 CE), nor to suggest the church got nothing right at Constantinople (381 CE); that is neither Williams’s argument nor mine. It is drawn because it is the same fundamental move: unity manufactured by flattening difference into a single, nameable deviation, the flattening then forgotten, so that what remains in memory is only the unity, never the cost of its making. This is the pattern monoculturalism reproduces, fourteen centuries later and in an entirely different idiom.

Schmitt’s concept of political theology – his argument that ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development … but also because of their systematic structure’ – illuminates what is otherwise puzzling about the persistence of this pattern: the vocabulary of providence, election, purity, and sacred boundary does not disappear from Australian immigration discourse as the country secularises; it migrates from pulpit to parliament, retaining its structural logic while quietly shedding its explicitly religious register. The pattern Schmitt identifies in the secularisation of sovereignty is precisely what the genealogy traced in the following paragraphs demonstrates in practice.

Prime Minister John Howard’s 2007 description of his government’s approach to Australian Muslim communities – the best thing the country could do was ‘absorb them into the mainstream’ – is structurally identical to Athanasius folding every dissenter into ‘Arius’, or to Chalcedon’s formula arriving in Syria and Egypt as the price of inclusion in the one church. In each case, what presents itself as the achievement of unity is the elimination of the conditions under which difference could survive as difference.

That this is a pattern rather than an aberration in the Australian case is something I have traced at length elsewhere, and the genealogy is worth setting out again in summary, because what is striking is its continuity across supposedly opposed governments and across the very period in which Australia officially adopted multiculturalism as policy. The account begins with the explicitly evangelical conviction of James Stephen, Colonial Office Undersecretary from 1836–47, that Australia must be ‘kept as a white man’s country’ lest the introduction of Indian labourers ‘debase by their intermixture the noble European race’ – a position Stephen, a self-described moderate evangelical, held not despite his Christian convictions but, on his own account, because of them, convinced that providence intended ‘our Race, language, Law, and Religion’ to be diffused unmixed across the continent.

The Immigration Restriction Act 1901 (Cth) was the new federal parliament’s first legislative act, Edmund Barton telling the House of Representatives there was ‘no racial equality … no prospect … of its ever being effaced’. Arthur Calwell’s postwar immigration scheme instructed officers to ‘hand-pick … ideal types’ – blond, blue-eyed displaced persons – Prime Minister Ben Chifley’s own reasoning being that intermarriage with anyone else would see new arrivals forget their origins too quickly.

The pattern persisted through the very decade multiculturalism became official policy: Albert Grassby’s 1973 vision of ‘permanent ethnic pluralism’ coexisted with – and, Jean Martin’s contemporaneous sociology suggested, was achieved despite rather than because of – a government still operating in what she called ‘denial’ about the cultural pluralism already ‘quietly consolidating’ beneath official assimilationist assumptions.

The 2001 ‘Tampa affair’ and the September 11 attacks that followed weeks later in the US supplied the pretext for reversing the grammar again: Howard’s ‘we will decide who comes to this country’, and his government’s 2003 Multicultural Australia: United in Diversity policy substituting ‘integration’, ‘Australian values’, and ‘national unity’ for ‘multiculturalism’, under the rubric of meeting post-9/11 ‘threats to Australia and our way of life’. Hanson’s One Nation does not invent this pattern; it is the latest, cruder, more electorally opportunistic iteration of a current that has run continuously beneath the official policy language since the colony’s ‘Christian’ founding – which is precisely why the theological question cannot be deferred to sociology or electoral strategy alone.

Willie James Jennings has supplied a compelling account of why this pattern attaches itself so readily to Christian mission and Christian colony alike, rather than being an embarrassing accident that befell an otherwise innocent gospel. Jennings’s argument, in The Christian Imagination (2010), is that the modern racial imagination is itself a theological artefact, the consequence of a specific and traceable loss: the loss, in the encounter between European Christianity and the peoples it colonised, of a doctrine of creation capable of holding land, peoples, and particularity together in the way Israel’s own scriptures had held them, replaced by a colonial Christian universalism that nonetheless quietly – and not so quietly – installed European identity – and whiteness – as the unmarked centre against which every other people’s belonging to land and to God would now be measured and, where necessary, corrected.

Where Hazony errs by exporting Israel’s particularity as a generic template, colonial Christianity errs by the opposite and complementary error: erasing that particularity altogether while quietly retaining its structure of election for itself. Stephen’s providence, Barton’s racial confidence, Calwell’s careful breeding of new Australians, Howard’s ‘we will decide’, and Hanson’s ‘one cultural umbrella’ are not failures of Christian universalism so much as its logical extension, once a doctrine of creation that could have done otherwise had already been lost.

This is the point at which the claim moves from historical analogy to strict heresy in the Barmen and Belhar sense, and the documented genealogy is what that move is tested against, not an abstract possibility. Barmen’s first thesis rejects ‘the false doctrine, as though there were areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ’. This was aimed at the German Christians’ claim that German Volkstum (ethnic nationhood) constituted a legitimate second source of revelation alongside Christ, a domain of national-cultural life governed by blood and belonging rather than gospel. A confessing church facing a monoculturalist politics that claims the nation’s inherited cultural-religious character as a legitimate, even sacred, boundary of belonging – a claim demonstrably made, with explicit theological warrant, by Stephen, by the architects of the Immigration Restriction Act, by Calwell and Chifley, and in softer grammar by Howard and Tony Abbott – stands under exactly this rejection.

Belhar, drafted in 1986 against apartheid’s theological defence of ‘separate development’, states the matter even more precisely: ‘we reject any doctrine which absolutizes either natural diversity or the sinful separation of people’ in such a way as to obstruct the church’s visible unity (art. 3). Note the careful symmetry of that clause, easily missed: Belhar condemns both the absolutising of natural diversity and enforced uniformity. It is not a brief for an undifferentiated multiculturalism that treats cultural difference as itself sacred and unchangeable; it is a brief against absolutising either pole.

Monoculturalism absolutises cultural sameness as the condition of unity; an uncritical identity-politics multiculturalism can absolutise cultural difference as inviolable; both Belhar and the Second Testament refuse both moves in favour of a unity that neither erases nor freezes difference.

VI.

The confessional tradition did not generate these criteria arbitrarily; it drew them from the same texts that have supplied monoculturalism’s most persistent theological warrant – and that subvert it at every point. Ephesians 2.14–16 states that ‘in his flesh [Christ] has made both [Jew and Gentile] into one and has broken down the dividing wall’ and ‘hostility’ between them ‘that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace’. Saint Paul’s ‘one new humanity’ is not the erasure of Jewish and Gentile particularity into an undifferentiated third thing; it is the reconciliation of two parties who remain identifiably two within a peace that no longer requires either to dominate or absorb the other – what Williams’s writing on recognition calls being changed by an otherness one does not control and cannot finally absorb into one’s own categories, the opposite of the mimicry Bhabha describes, in which the other is welcomed only as a variant of the same.

The wall that falls in Ephesians is the wall of hostility, the demand that one party’s law become the precondition of fellowship – precisely the demand Hazony’s account of conversion to Israel still requires, and precisely the demand Howard’s ‘absorb them into the mainstream’ still makes. What is abolished is the wall; it is not Jewishness or Gentile-ness, which is why the Second Testament can still meaningfully speak of ‘Jew’ and ‘Greek’ as distinct identities held together rather than dissolved – Galatians 3.28’s ‘neither Jew nor Greek’ is a statement about standing before God in Christ, not an erasure of ethnic particularity; Paul remains a Jew, Timothy is circumcised, the Jerusalem church keeps Torah.

Acts 2 supplies the structural counter-image to Babel that the church’s later heresiological habit obscured. At Babel, human unity is achieved by linguistic uniformity. That uniformity is judged – scattered by God precisely because a single tongue in service of a single tower was not the unity God intended for creation (Gen 11). At Pentecost, the Spirit does not reverse Babel by restoring one language; it multiplies hearing, so that Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and the rest ‘hear, each of us, in our own native language’ (Acts 2.8). The miracle is not assimilation to a single Pentecostal Esperanto; it is the Spirit making space for every particular tongue to receive the gospel as its own. Lamin Sanneh’s account of Christian translatability gives this sharp missiological expression: unlike pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism’s attachment to Latin, or Islam’s relation to Arabic, Christianity from Pentecost onward relinquishes any fixed sacred source-language, becoming infinitely translatable, a faith with ‘a proliferation of centres, languages and cultures’ rather than one normative tongue from which all others were regarded as derivations, or worse. This cuts against the easy assumption, common to critics of mission and defenders of monoculturalism alike, that the spread of Christianity simply is cultural imperialism: vernacular scripture translation has, again and again, strengthened rather than dissolved local languages and identities.

Kwame Bediako takes the insight further, asking not whether African Christianity is a faithful copy of a Western original, but whether the very idea of an original – one normative culture from which all others are derivations – survives contact with a gospel that has no native language of its own. And Andrew Walls names the implication directly: cultural diversity was built into the Christian community in its first century, sealed by the apostolic decision not to require circumcision and Torah of Gentile believers. The demand for a single normative national culture as the precondition of belonging is not merely politically contestable; it inverts Christianity’s own founding logic, in which catholicity is achieved through multiplication of particularity rather than its suppression.

That apostolic decision is the closest thing the Second Testament offers to a recorded debate between something like monoculturalism and something like the position being defended here. Acts 15 records a genuine dispute: certain believers of ‘the sect of the Pharisees’ insisted that Gentile converts ‘be circumcised and ordered to keep the law of Moses’ (Acts 15.5) – must take on the cultural-religious markers (circumcision, dietary law, calendar) of the people among whom the gospel originated, exactly as Hazony’s account of conversion to ancient Israel requires of Ruth and the ‘mixed multitude’ that left Egypt with the Hebrew slaves. The Jerusalem Council rejects this, not by declaring Jewish practice worthless – James continues to observe Torah, and Paul circumcises Timothy shortly afterwards (Acts 16.3) – but by refusing to make any single culture’s embodiment of faithfulness the precondition of belonging to the one body.

Colossians 3.11 states the resulting principle as starkly as the Second Testament ever states anything: ‘there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, enslaved and free, but Christ is all and in all’. The ‘barbarian’ and ‘Scythian’ named there are not incidental examples; they are, in the literature of the period, the paradigm cases of those considered beyond the pale of civilised culture altogether – the same category, mutatis mutandis, that Australian immigration rhetoric reinvented for ‘coolies’, ‘Asiatics’, and, most painfully, the Aboriginal peoples whose sovereignty the nation’s founding myth of terra nullius required it to deny. A text that places ‘barbarian, Scythian’ inside the ‘all’ that Christ is and is in cannot consistently underwrite a politics that treats the cultural outsider as a threat to be managed rather than a member already included. This argument takes on particular force when one remembers that Christ is himself neither a Christian nor a member of the Christian community. He was also – and remains, if the Christian community’s claim vis-à-vis his resurrection is believed – a political outsider within every community that would later claim him.

Revelation 21 supplies an eschatological horizon to this argument. Here we read of the ‘holy city’, whose ‘gates will never be shut’ and into whose life ‘the kings of the earth will bring their glory’, a city in which all the peoples of the earth ‘will bring … the glory and the honour of the nations’ (Rev 21.24–26). The nations remain nations in the new creation: their ethne, their particularity, is not abolished but is precisely what gets carried, as glory, through gates that never close. The new Jerusalem is not a monocultural destination achieved by every nation surrendering its particularity to become identical; it is a city whose gates stand permanently open to receive the ongoing procession of cultural difference as gift.

But this reading of Revelation 21 must be held in tension with the history of its distortion. Yii-Jan Lin, in Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration (2024), has demonstrated, in forensic and unsettling detail, how exactly this text has served as the scriptural charter for some of the most brutal exercises in exclusion in the history of the modern West. Lin traces how Ronald Reagan drew explicitly on Revelation 21’s imagery in his famous 1989 farewell address, describing a ‘shining city upon a hill’ with walls and doors and ‘the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here’.

The New Jerusalem rhetoric seems welcoming, but Lin shows that it embeds a structural duality from which it never escapes: on one side stand those with the birthright of belonging (already inside the city), and on the other, those ‘from all the lost places … hurtling through the darkness’, whose admission depends entirely on what they bring and how they perform. The gates of the shining city are, in Lin’s pointed phrase, ‘welcomingly open but are essentially mechanisms of exclusion’, always qualified by Revelation’s own warning that ‘nothing unclean will enter it’ (Rev 21.27) – a verse that has done extraordinary service in the history of exclusionary immigration discourse. This is Schmitt’s ‘political theology’ working at the level of scripture interpretation: the secularisation of theological concepts does not render them politically inert – it renders them politically invisible, which is more dangerous. The New Jerusalem has not ceased to be a theological concept in Reagan’s usage; it has become one that no longer knows itself as such.

From this same text, Lin shows, the America-as-New-Jerusalem myth ‘has been used to incite hate and fear against any number of unwanted peoples, whether the Antichrist-serving Irish, the locust horde of Chinese, the criminal Mexican, or the infidel Muslim’; in the logic of white nativist discourse, ‘those within the United States’ are ‘righteous, chosen, pure, and rich’, while ‘the unwanted immigrants, to be kept outside, are criminal, bestial, diseased, and filthy. A strong border has become the symbol of America’s power and might’.

The same scriptural logic was active at the foundation of the Australian colony, and remains active in its immigration politics today, even when the explicitly religious register has faded. Lin’s analysis of the Trump administration’s border wall is instructive here: she notes that the wall’s measurements – endlessly repeated, fundamentally inconsistent, practically ridiculous – were never intended to be practical. ‘The measurements were and are symbolic, just as they are for the New Jerusalem’. The Australian version of this symbolism is equally transparent: ‘we will decide who comes to this country’ is not primarily an immigration policy. It is a theological claim about chosenness, purity, and the integrity of the city’s walls – whether or not those who make it have ever read the book of Revelation.

A theology that takes Revelation 21 seriously, without the exclusionary overlay Lin documents, cannot regard cultural homogeneity as either a justifiable present vocation or creation’s promised end. Difference is not what the eschaton overcomes; it is what the eschaton receives and honours.

VII.

What the biblical texts establish in principle, the confessional tradition has been called to enforce in judgement – and Australian churches have consistently declined the call. Where Australian Christian institutions have historically supplied explicit theological warrant for cultural-racial exclusion – and this is not occasional but structural, present ‘from the beginning’ of the colony’s administration – and where contemporary appeals to ‘Australian values’, ‘integration’, and cultural cohesion continue to function, whether or not their advocates intend it, as the latest iteration of that pattern, those communities that have staked their identity on the promises of Ephesians 2 and Revelation 21 face a genuine confessional question, not merely a policy disagreement to be adjudicated by competing social-scientific evidence about social trust and cohesion.

The test Barmen and Belhar establish is not severity of consequence but theological substance: does the teaching require treating some other ground – Volk, race, ‘the Australian way of life’ – as co-determinative with Christ for who belongs and on what terms? Where Christian communities or Christian-inflected public rhetoric answer yes, even implicitly, even through the soft language of ‘cohesion’ and ‘shared values’ rather than the harder language of race, the confessional tradition gives the church no room to treat the matter as adiaphora – things indifferent, on which reasonable Christians may disagree and move on. There is no moving on from a wall that should have fallen.

VIII.

Granting everything Scruton names with oikophilia, everything Bhabha and Spivak expose in the limits of liberal accommodation, and everything Barry insists about group-rights frameworks, the claim remains specific: monoculturalism as ideology – the deliberate project of producing or enforcing cultural sameness as the condition of political and, where Christians embrace it, ecclesial unity – reproduces the heresiological pattern by which the church has very often mistaken the elimination of difference (whether cultural or theological) for the achievement of unity.

This pattern stands condemned by the church’s own founding experiences and texts: by a Pentecost that multiplies tongues rather than imposing one, by a Jerusalem Council that refused to make Gentiles culturally Jewish as the price of belonging, by the announcement that in the flesh of one executed by the state, all walls of hostility have been broken down without erasing the parties the wall once divided, and by the promise of a vision of a holy city that keeps its gates open forever, precisely so that the glory and honour of every nation – undiminished, unassimilated, qua difference – can still be walking in.

The Barmen Declaration was written because German churches had handed the name of Jesus Christ to a nationalism that was building toward genocide, and a group of pastors had run out of words other than nein. The Belhar Confession was written by communities separated by apartheid legislation, which was being championed in places like Moore College, Sydney, in the 1960s by D. Broughton Knox and Donald Robinson, who defended theological justifications of apartheid and publicly supported pro-apartheid church leaders, and enforced from pulpits as ‘the will of God’. Those who penned that Confession did so because they could no longer remain silent inside a church that had made their exclusion into doctrine. They were those who rejected the heresy that, in the words of the Afrikaner theologian, F. J. M. Potgieter, ‘it is quite clear that no one can ever be a proponent of integration on the basis of the scriptures’. Both confessions were acts of desperation, made necessary by communities that had chosen something – Volk, race, the comfortable solidarity of the culturally similar – over the gospel that calls them into new being.

Churches in Australia face a cognate reckoning, one they have overwhelmingly avoided for over two centuries. The theological warrant for monoculturalism in this country was not invented by One Nation; it was supplied from the beginning by evangelical administrators who believed Providence wanted race and religion to travel together unmixed across this continent; by denominations that blessed the Immigration Restriction Act as the expression of Christian civilisation; by chaplains and clergy who said nothing as First Peoples were stripped from Country and kin in the name of Christian improvement; and by a political rhetoric of ‘Australian values’ and ‘cultural integration’ that continues, oftentimes in gentler syntax, to make the same demand: absorb or be excluded. Lin’s analysis of what Revelation’s imagery has made possible in American immigration history applies, with only minor changes of cast and locale, to the country built on the myth of terra nullius and the theology of providential whiteness.

Lin closes her study with a call not for better apocalyptic theology but for memory – specifically, for the memory that ‘every law, policy, wall, documentation, and office of the U.S. government did not always exist but are the constructions of human judgments and principles that are neither eternal nor essential’. The same is true of Australia. The Immigration Restriction Act did not always exist. The White Australia Policy did not always exist. ‘Australian values’ as a code for cultural assimilation did not always exist. They were made, by human hands, in many cases by Christian hands, and what human hands have made, human hands – and communities committed to doing life otherwise – can unmake.

But the act of unmaking requires first the act of naming. If the churches that claim to live under the promise of Ephesians 2 cannot find the corporate will to say, clearly and publicly, that this history is not a regrettable accident but a theological catastrophe – not merely failed policy but false doctrine – then they have made a choice. They have not chosen neutrality; there is no neutral position when the wall is being built. They have chosen the wall. They have become the community that, in Williams’s language, welcomes only its own reflection.

Monoculturalism is heresy. Not a policy mistake. Not a cultural preference. Not a legitimate option within the range of positions a faithful community may hold. Heresy: a specific, nameable deviation from the rule of faith, the gospel of a Christ who has broken down the dividing wall and whose city receives the glory of every nation through gates that are never shut. This verdict is not a conversation starter. It is the conclusion the evidence demands – the conclusion that the tradition learned to name at Barmen, at Belhar, at Accra, and that this country’s churches have yet to name with anything like the courage those confessions required.