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These are interesting questions, which we need to break down step by step.
You write:
“Seems like you might be saying that multiculturalism (and its evil twin, universalism) was the inevitable result of the non-assimilation happening in all Western countries.”
I would put it a little differently. I would say the non-assimilation was itself the inevitable result, not of some moral/spiritual failure on our part such as the rejection of the God of the Bible, but of the mass immigration that brought millions of unassimilable people here. I am saying, even if we had started out with the strongest intentions of assimilating the people whom we were bringing in, we couldn’t have done it given the sheer numbers of the newcomers and their racial/cultural differences from the majority American population.
Your idea is that without the moral/spiritual failure, we could have assimilated them all. My idea is that, without the moral/spiritual failure, WE WOULDN’T HAVE ADMITTED THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE. A Euro-American civilization that believed in itself would not have admitted millions of Mestizos and Moslems and all the rest. We only let them in because we had already redefined our society in pure, democratic terms of individual rights. From that point of view, there are no cultures, there are only individuals, and all individuals are basically the same, and therefore there is no reason to discriminate against people from any culture.
This leads to the next question, which I’ll address below: why did we redefine our society in pure, democratic terms of individual rights, thus defining our culture out of existence?
You write:
“And could that situation be the result of the lower birth rate and the replacement of the God of the Bible with the god of Man, Money, and Power?”
While lower fertility wasn’t a factor in 1964-65 when the Immigration Reform Act was passed, the replacement of the God of the Bible with the god of Man, Money, and Power was well under way by that time. Also, Vatican II had embraced the Cult of Man in December 1963. The apotheosis of secular man (by both the religious and the secular wings of our culture) ran in tandem with the ideological movement that resulted in cultures being defined out of existence and replaced by global individualism. What is the common element between these two movements? It is that the God of the Bible on one hand, and our historic culture on the other, are both larger realities that transcend and form the individual; furthermore, as I argue in my article, “How Liberal Christianity Promotes Open Borders and One-Worldism,” these larger realities are not at war with each other but are closely related, since particular cultures and nations are part of God’s plan for humanity. But modern liberalism allows nothing larger than the individual, his desires, and his rights. It lauds human desire, claims that all human desires are equal, and makes discrimination against any desire or any type of person the greatest crime. Once our society had reached that point, it had no choice but to open its borders to the world. The failure to assimilate the immigrants who then began coming was not some separate failure, but a further consequence of the same catastrophic de-culturation that had led us to open the borders in the first place.
So, I am agreeing with you that the replacement of the God of the Bible with the god of Man, Money, and Power is part of the cause of our current situation. But I make two qualifications to that: (1) the loss of God is only one part of the cause, not the whole of it, since another part is the rejection of cultural particularity and ethnic peoplehood as legitimate values; and (2) the causative role played by the loss of God goes back further in time than in your theory. The loss of God and the loss of cultural particularity did not first manifest themselves in our failure to assimilate the immigrants, they manifested themselves in our decision to admit the unassimilable immigrants.
Now I’ll take it one step further back. I would say that the loss of transcendent God and the loss of cultural particularity, while they operate side by side as causative factors in the current situation, are not coeval in their origin. The loss of God came first. It was the left-liberal rejection of transcendence and God,—or, alternatively, the right-liberal narrowing of transcendence and God to the individual and his rights—that led to the rejection of cultural particularity. On the left-liberal side, if there is no transcendent truth, then all desires are equal; if all desires are equal, all cultures are equal and our own culture has no particular value. Alternatively, on the right-liberal side, if there is no transcendent truth except the transcendent individual rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, then any larger cultural wholes are ultimately illegitimate because the only legitimate community is the global community consisting of all equal, rights-bearing individuals. Either way, on the basis of the belief that all humans are the same (however that sameness may be defined), we admitted a mass immigration from the whole human race. But because all humans are NOT the same, this mass immigration resulted in the radical attack on our culture by multiculturalism.
Once again, the main difference between your theory and mine is that you see the spiritual “fall” happening much more recently in the process than I do. In your view, we were ok until after we had admitted the immigrants. At that point, our rejection of the God of the Bible, and our loss of true standards resulting from that, made it impossible for us to assimilate the immigrants.
In my view, the rejection of the God of the Bible occurred further back in the causative chain. It led us to reject the value and legitimacy of our own historical culture and peoplehood, and the legitimacy of discrimination based on that culture and peoplehood. That in turn caused us to open our borders to the world, which led to the importation of unassimilable peoples and cultures and the undermining of our own culture.
Prior to that point, our culture was still substantively intact; we had given up the principled basis of our culture, but our culture still actually existed in the form of inherited shared habit and common sense. In other words, it still existed in the form of unprincipled exceptions to liberal principle. But once we imported the mass immigration, our culture began to be substantively destroyed, as well as ideologically denied. The unprincipled exceptions to liberal principle, such as a vestigial sense of an authoritative national culture, could not maintain themselves once they came under direct attack from multiculturalism.