One Culture, One People, One Place

On the naturalness of cultural particularity, the failure of multiculturalism, and the specific threat it poses to Ave Maria

There is a distinction, largely suppressed in contemporary public discourse, between the fact of human diversity and the ideology of multiculturalism.

The first is simply true: human beings, across the whole span of history and geography, have organized their common lives in radically different ways, producing civilizations of remarkable variety, each expressing a particular understanding of the world, and, more broadly—reality.

The diversity of the human race is an incontestable fact that the Catholic tradition, with its understanding of the universal Church expressing itself through particular peoples and cultures, has always regarded with a kind of reverent wonder.

But the second — multiculturalism as an ideology and social order — is entirely different.

Multiculturalism is not a description of human diversity but a prescription for how that diversity should be managed within a single political and social space.

In both purpose and effect, multiculturalism holds that the ideal community must be composed of multiple distinct cultural traditions existing side by side in a condition of enforced equality, that no single culture should be privileged within the common life of a community, and that the deliberate cultivation of cultural coherence within a particular place constitutes a form of exclusion requiring correction.

This ideology is the target of the present essay. Multiculturalism is a Marxist construct that has had a devastating impact on Western society.

And in the specific case of Ave Maria, it poses an existential threat to the town’s Catholic culture and identity.

Therefore, any attempt to make Ave Maria a “multicultural community” must be resisted in all its forms.

What Culture Actually Is

To evaluate multiculturalism as a social prescription, one must begin with an accurate account of what culture is and how it works — because the ideology rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of both.

Christopher Dawson, whose life’s work constitutes the most sustained and rigorous analysis of the relationship between religion and culture in the English language, argued that culture is not a collection of customs, foods, artistic styles, and holidays that a group of people happen to share and can shed or don at will. It is the incarnation of a religion — the visible, institutional, spatial, and temporal expression of a people’s deepest convictions about what is real and what is sacred.

Culture in Dawson’s sense is not produced by a committee or chosen from a menu. It grows from the cultus, the shared act of worship, which orients an entire community toward a common ultimate reference point and generates, from that orientation, the whole visible fabric of its common life: its architecture, its calendar, its education, its laws, its art, its understanding of the family, its attitude toward death.

Strip the cultus from a culture and what remains is not a culture at all but a set of inherited aesthetic preferences floating free of the conviction that produced them, available for consumption by anyone and therefore belonging to no one.

Aristotle understood the same truth in different terms. The polis is not a residential arrangement. It is a partnership in the pursuit of the good life, which means it presupposes a shared understanding of what the good life is.

That shared understanding is not generated by bringing together people with different and incompatible understandings of the good and asking them to respect each other’s differences. It is generated by a people formed in common, through the same institutions, the same stories, the same practices of worship and civic life, into a shared moral and spiritual universe.

The city, Aristotle insists, is prior to the individual in the order of formation — we become who we are through the particular community that shapes us — which means that a city without a coherent formative culture is not a city in any serious sense. It is a population sharing a geographic space.

Thomas Aquinas, developing Aristotle’s political philosophy within the Christian tradition, adds the crucial theological dimension. The common good is not the aggregate of individual goods. It is the specific good of a specific community — a good that can only be achieved by this particular group of people, formed in this particular way, pursuing this particular understanding of human excellence within this particular set of institutions.

The common good of a Catholic town is not the same as the common good of a secular city or a religiously plural suburb. It is something specific, achieved through specific means, and it cannot survive the dissolution of the specific community that is its subject.

Every genuine civilization requires a forma mentis — a unifying spiritual form that gives the community its coherence, its hierarchy, and its capacity for directed action toward the highest things.

Multiculturalism is the deliberate destruction of form — the reduction of the particular and the qualitatively distinct to the formless mass of interchangeable cultural units, none more authoritative than any other, all equally available for consumption by the anonymous market of individual preference.

The ideology of cultural equivalence does not produce genuine pluralism. It produces the dissolution of all genuine cultures into a single homogenized non-culture defined by its lowest common denominator — the culture of the shopping mall and the entertainment platform, which belongs to everyone in general and to no one in particular.

The Sociology of Cultural Coherence

Human beings require genuine membership in coherent communities — not merely residence in the same geographic space as other human beings, but the kind of deep mutual belonging that requires shared values, shared practices, shared institutions, and a shared orientation toward the future.

This kind of membership is not compatible with radical cultural plurality within the same community space, because membership requires a common substance — something held in common that is more than mere legal co-habitation.

In The Quest for Community, Robert Nisbet observed that the erosion of coherent intermediate communities — the neighborhood, the parish, the guild, the village — was the primary cause of the twentieth century’s susceptibility to totalitarianism. When genuine communities collapse, the need for belonging does not disappear; it migrates into political mass movements that provide the emotional satisfactions of membership without its genuine substance.

Multiculturism accelerates this collapse by treating a healthy, flourishing culture as a problem to be eradicated rather than a good to be protected. If it does not replace those communities with a “culture” of its own, it simply dissolves them in the name of an abstract principle that produces, in practice, the atomized mass of isolated individuals that Nisbet identified as modernity’s most dangerous product.

Human beings flourish within particular, human-scaled, culturally coherent communities. Wilhelm Röpke argued that the healthy society requires what he called a Zwischenschicht — a middle layer of genuine community life between the individual and the state, composed of the small, rooted, particular associations that give life its texture and its meaning.

Multiculturalism is corrosive to exactly this layer. It treats the particular cultural content of these associations as exclusionary and therefore illegitimate, pressuring them toward a cultural neutrality that empties them of the specific substance that made them worth belonging to. A neighborhood association that has been successfully pressured to treat all cultural expressions as equally valid and equally welcome has not become more inclusive. It has become less of a community.

Wendell Berry makes the same argument from the perspective of place and membership. A culture is not portable. It is grown in a specific soil, over generations, through the accumulated practices and loyalties and mutual obligations of people who have committed themselves to a particular piece of ground. Berry’s concept of membership — the deep, place-specific, multigenerational belonging that he distinguishes from mere association — is impossible in a condition of radical cultural plurality, because membership requires a common inheritance to be a member of.

When every new arrival brings a different inheritance and the community is ideologically committed to treating all inheritances as equally authoritative, there is no longer any specific inheritance to belong to. There is only diversity itself, which is not a culture but the absence of one.

Moreover, multiculturalism is not a neutral policy of cultural “coexistence.” It is an instrument of cultural destabilization, deployed with particular ferocity against a dominant culture of whatever society it enters — not because that culture is demonstrably more oppressive than any other, but because its vibrancy and health are an affront to the abstract universal equality they have made their creed.

The intellectual lineage of this project runs from the Frankfurt School’s systematic critique of Western bourgeois culture as inherently authoritarian — Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Marcuse’s concept of repressive tolerance — through the postcolonial academy’s equation of cultural particularity with structural oppression, to the diversity-equity-inclusion bureaucracies that have institutionalized these assumptions in every major American institution.

The logic, at every stage, is the same: the dominant culture (Western Civilization) is by definition oppressive, its coherence is evidence of its exclusionary power rather than of its genuine vitality, and the appropriate response is not reform but dissolution — the replacement of the particular and the inherited with the universal and the managed.

Applied to a Catholic community, this ideology is especially aggressive, because Catholic culture carries the additional offense, in the ideological framework, of being both Western and explicitly ordered toward a transcendent truth that the ideology regards as the deepest form of oppression: the claim that some things are actually true, that some ways of living are genuinely better than others, and that a community has the right to organize its common life around those convictions.

The Historical Record

The multicultural ideology, wherever it has been implemented as explicit social policy, has produced not the harmonious plurality it promises but the fragmentation, mutual suspicion, and parallel-community isolation that its critics predicted. This is not a partisan observation. It has been made, with varying degrees of candor, by serious social scientists and commentators across the political spectrum.

The political scientist Robert Putnam, whose research on social capital is among the most cited in contemporary sociology and who is himself a committed liberal, published findings in 2007 showing that ethnic and cultural diversity at the neighborhood level was associated with lower levels of social trust — not merely lower trust between different groups, but lower trust within groups as well.

Residents of diverse neighborhoods were less likely to trust their neighbors, less likely to participate in civic associations, less likely to vote, and more likely to report social isolation.

Putnam, to his credit, published these findings despite their conflict with his own political preferences, and noted that the short-term costs of diversity for social cohesion were measurable and significant.

The mechanism he identified is simple: shared culture is the medium through which social trust is generated, and where that shared medium is absent, trust has nothing to grow in.

The Structural Problem with Multiculturalism

The defining criterion of the political is the distinction between friend and stranger, in the structural sense of the other whose values, commitments, and way of life are so different from one’s own that their ascendancy would constitute the negation of what one’s own community is.

This distinction is not produced by hostility or by the desire for conflict. It is produced by the simple fact of genuine cultural difference.

Where two communities hold fundamentally different and incompatible understandings of the good, the sacred, and the proper ordering of common life, their coexistence within the same political space requires one of them to become dominant or both to be dissolved into something neither of them chose.

A community that has lost the capacity to recognize such distinctions has committed itself ideologically to the position that no such forces exist, that all cultural expressions are equivalent, and that the assertion of particularity is itself the problem rather than its dissolution.

Applied to Ave Maria, the multicultural ideology that has infected Barron Collier’s marketing materials and the Ave Maria Master Association’s “community programs” does not merely threaten the town’s Catholic character from outside. It threatens it from within, by persuading the community through propaganda that Catholic residents have no right or basis to oppose forces that would dissolve the town’s Catholic identity.

A community that has absorbed the multicultural ideology cannot say: this development decision undermines our Catholic culture and must be resisted. It can only say: all development decisions are equally valid expressions of equally valid preferences, and the insistence that any particular development decision serves our culture better than another is itself a form of exclusion.

Moreover, genuine democracy presupposes homogeneity. This is a claim that sounds paradoxical to modern ears trained to associate democracy with diversity. But democratic self-governance — the capacity of a people to make binding decisions about their common life — requires that there be a demos, a people, with sufficient shared identity and shared values to constitute a genuine collective subject.

A community with no shared cultural substance has no demos in this sense. It has only a population of individuals with competing preferences, whose conflicts must be managed by administrative and legal mechanisms rather than resolved through genuine civic deliberation. The cultural coherence of the community is not an obstacle to its democratic life. It is the precondition of it.

Ave Maria’s residents cannot govern themselves in any meaningful sense if the community they are governing has no coherent character to govern in accordance with. The struggle to maintain the town’s Catholic identity is not, at this level of analysis, a merely cultural preference. It is the struggle to maintain the conditions under which genuine self-governance — the kind the AMSCD board-conversion mechanism is designed to eventually enable — is possible at all.

A town with a coherent Catholic culture and a resident majority on its governing board can actually govern itself toward the vision its members share. A town that has been demographically and culturally dissolved into a generic suburb has nothing to govern toward, and the board composition becomes irrelevant because there is no longer a genuine community whose will it could express.

No one should be surprised by the powerlessness residents have felt by Barron Collier’s unilateral profit-focused decisions. Case in point: a recent county board meeting in which every resident who spoke opposed Ave Maria’s expansion and four commissioners approved it regardless. That was the operation of the political in its pure form: the interests of the entity with the power to define the terms of the decision — Barron Collier, whose framing governed the proceeding from before it began — prevailing over the expressed preferences of the community whose life the decision would most directly affect.

The residents’ failure at that proceeding was not primarily a failure of argument or of turnout. It was a failure of political coherence — the failure of a community that has not yet fully understood itself as a community with specific interests that are genuinely in tension with the interests of the entity that controls its land.

The recovery of that self-understanding — the recognition that Ave Maria has a specific Catholic character worth defending as a political matter, that the forces working against it are not merely misguided but genuinely opposed to what the community is, and that the appropriate response is organized, coherent, politically serious resistance rather than the polite expression of preferences at a public hearing — is necessary for Ave Maria’s authentic community if it is to survive.

The Specific Threat to Ave Maria

Ave Maria is not a city. Nor is it a nation-state attempting to manage a diverse citizenry. It is an intentional community — a town deliberately founded around a specific Catholic cultural vision, built at considerable expense and effort as a place where that vision could be fully expressed in the fabric of daily life.

It is, in the precise sense, a local community of shared practice and shared belief, constructed as a deliberate alternative to the cultural dissolution of the surrounding society.

The multicultural ideology threatens this community in two distinct and compounding ways.

The first threat is demographic. When a significant portion of the residential population of a community does not share its founding cultural commitments, the community’s capacity to reproduce and transmit its culture is progressively diminished.

Culture is not transmitted through official documents or marketing materials. It is transmitted through the daily fabric of shared life — through the conversations on the front porch, the customs observed in the neighborhood, the expectations governing public behavior, the informal social pressure that sustains cultural norms in the absence of legal enforcement.

This transmission requires a critical mass. Below a certain threshold of cultural coherence, the community loses the capacity to form its members in its own image, and the ambient culture of the surrounding society — which is to say, the culture of the shopping platform and the entertainment stream — fills the vacuum.

The developer decisions that are reshaping Ave Maria’s residential fabric are actively reducing that critical mass. The accommodation of bulk investor purchases, the absence of owner-occupancy requirements, the approval of development profiles oriented toward commuters and renters rather than Catholic families — all of these introduce into the community’s demographic fabric a growing proportion of residents who have no particular connection to its founding culture and no particular interest in its perpetuation.

This is not a matter of personal hostility toward those residents. It is a matter of cultural sociology: communities require a coherent and committed membership to sustain their character, and the deliberate dilution of that membership through development policy is the functional equivalent of a decision to abandon the founding vision.

The second threat is ideological. The multicultural ideology, when it reaches a community, does not merely describe the demographic diversity that exists. It prescribes that no cultural tradition should be privileged within the community’s common life, and that the assertion of cultural particularity constitutes a form of exclusion requiring correction.

Applied to Ave Maria, this ideology would hold that the community’s Catholic character — its orientation toward the Church, its formation of public space around the liturgical calendar, its expectation that the face of the town express the faith of the people who built it — is not a legitimate feature of the community’s common life but a form of imposition on residents who do not share that faith.

This ideological pressure does not arrive through dramatic confrontation. It arrives through the accumulated effect of a thousand small accommodations: the developer’s decision to market the town to the broadest possible demographic rather than specifically to conservative faith-based families; the tenants who arrive without any connection to the town’s culture; the governance decisions that treat the town’s Catholic character as a marketing asset rather than a sacred trust; the public events that drift, over time, from the rhythms of the liturgical calendar toward the rhythms of generic American entertainment.

Each of these accommodations is individually defensible. Together they constitute the progressive secularization of a community built precisely to resist secularization.

The Right to Cultural Self-Determination

The argument against multiculturalism as an ideology applied to Ave Maria is, in the end, an argument for the right of a specific people to maintain the specific form of their common life against the pressures — demographic, commercial, ideological — that would dissolve it.

This right is not exotic or controversial in any context other than the contemporary Western one. Every culture in the world, in every era other than the present one, has assumed it as self-evident. A Hasidic community assumes it. The Amish assume it. The Benedictine monastery certainly assumes it.

The assumption that a community has the right — and indeed the obligation — to perpetuate its own cultural form, to form its members in its own image, to resist the forces that would dissolve its particularity into the generic, is not a reactionary position. It is the normal condition of every human community that has ever successfully transmitted its inheritance across generations.

Catholic social teaching grounds this right in the principle of subsidiarity and in St. John Paul II’s sustained defense of the rights of peoples to their own cultures. A people — meaning a community formed by shared history, shared faith, shared practice, and shared commitment to a particular place — has a right to the cultural conditions of its own flourishing.

The dismantling of those conditions, whether by an ideological commitment to managed diversity or by the developer decisions that implement that commitment at the level of the built environment, is a form of injustice against the community’s members, who were promised a specific kind of place and are receiving something generic in its stead.

The residents of Ave Maria did not come here to participate in an experiment in managed diversity. They came because someone offered them a Catholic town — a place where the culture of the community, expressed in its architecture, its institutions, its public life, and the shared commitments of its members, would support and deepen rather than undermine and erode the faith they brought with them. They are entitled to demand that this offer be honored. They are entitled to resist, by every lawful and charitable means, the forces that are working to transform what was built as a Catholic community into something indistinguishable from the culturally neutral suburbs that surround it on every side.

Genuine culture is always particular. It is always the culture of a specific people, formed by a specific faith, expressed in a specific place. The insistence that Ave Maria remain a specifically Catholic community, oriented without apology toward the Catholic vision of the human person and the common good, is not an act of hostility toward anyone. It is the simple, ancient, entirely defensible claim of a people to be themselves, in their own home, on their own terms.

That claim is worth making. And fighting for.