Victory through guilt.(Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy )(Book Review)

Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy By Paul Edward Gottfried University of Missouri Press, 158 pages, $24.95

Multiculturalism has emerged from politically correct academe to shape every major Western institution, from schools and churches to government and corporations. Why is this movement triumphing virtually unresisted?

In his learned and challenging new book, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, Elizabethtown College professor Paul Gottfried advances a controversial but plausible explanation. In After Liberalism, Gottfried examined liberalism's transformation into a movement based on egalitarian social democracy, a movement that relied on a "managerial state" for social engineering. Contemporary liberalism now takes social engineering even further through a "therapeutic" state "increasingly preoccupied with modifying social behavior." And guilt-ridden liberal Christianity predisposes Westerners to submit to multiculturalist abuse. How did multiculturalism triumph? "A transformation of the self-image of the majority population would have to had take place in order for the therapeutic state to have reached its present strength," believes Gottfried. Among the causes of the change, he argues, is "an altered religious consciousness that has affected the Protestant majorities" in the English-speaking world.

Protestantism, he observes, has a long history of public rites of penance and confession of guilt, a stress on sinful dispositions, flaunting of guilt as proof of "virtuous intention," and a separation of the saved from the damned. All of these are readily adaptable to political correctness. Indeed, "absent a Protestant culture of social guilt and of individuals ashamed of their collective past, the therapeutic state could not have taken the hold it has." Moreover, he notes, religious education among American Christians has collapsed. Ill-informed, uninterested in the Bible or theology, and holding traditional Christian beliefs lightly, they easily accept multiculturalist dogmas in familiar Christian guise, as in the case of the many mainstream Christians who endorse gay rights.

Gottfried is on to something. The devotees of multiculturalism, simultaneously guilt-ridden and self-righteous, eerily resemble the holier-than-thou Protestant moral crusaders of yore. Christians can so idealize self-sacrifice, altruism, and a submissiveness to outrages that their behavior often resembles masochism. This has taught Westerners to be sensitive to ...