Will it be violence on the streets or Christian revival in hearts?

England has been in uproar over the murder of Henry Nowak. What has most outraged people is that when police arrived on the scene, they arrested, handcuffed, and manhandled the dying Nowak because the murderer, Vickrum Digwa, accused him of racism. When Nowak told them that he had been stabbed, one officer replied, “I don’t think you have, mate.”

Additionally, as a Sikh, Digwa was allowed to carry a dagger in public, despite the United Kingdom’s otherwise incredibly strict weapons laws. This religious exemption exists even as the government arrests Christians for praying silently while standing still in public. It adds up to a perfect example of how, though officially all Brits are equal, some are more equal than others—specifically, those who are the least British.

The murder of Nowak follows years of revelations that tens of thousands of British girls, mostly working class and white, were horrifically abused, raped, and even murdered by gangs of Pakistani men while the government looked the other way in the name of “community relations.” The government, and the British establishment generally, sees these crimes as a PR problem. They denounce as divisive the pointing out of the obvious truth that British justice is two-tiered, and decry bringing up the rape gangs as a “dogwhistle.”

The British government, regardless of which party was in power, spent decades importing the peoples of their old empire. This meant importing a lot of cultural and religious evils and conflicts. And so they are now afraid that, say, the Muslims will riot, or that the Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs will start killing each other in earnest. Above all, they are terrified that the indigenous white, (nominally) Christian populace will finally have had enough.

Which is to say, they are worried that Enoch Powell’s 1968 Rivers of Blood speech had a point. Powell warned that mass migration into Britain would have dire consequences. Though public opinion was with him, Powell was widely denounced as a racist by the British elite, and his own party leaders kicked him to the curb. The British upper class still hates him, especially the left, which on the 50th anniversary of the speech gloated that he was wrong.

They may be less smug today. Powell was a quintessentially British figure—an odd duck who was also a scholar, soldier, and poet as well as a politician. He knew far more about foreign languages and cultures than today’s mindless multiculturalists. And he understood that different peoples, cultures, and religions rarely coexist harmoniously for long, and that history is in large part a catalogue of plunder, rape, slavery, oppression, and genocide.

That’s human nature. Peace between groups usually meant an empire that imposed its order upon the peoples and cultures it conquered; coexistence came at the point of a sword and was enforced by the executioner. Harsh though this was, it was nonetheless often welcome compared to the alternatives of chaos and conflict. Such is the way of the kingdoms of this world.

But there is a kingdom that is not of this world, and it offers a vision of people of every tribe and tongue and nation together in peace and love. Our longing for this will one day be fulfilled in the kingdom of Christ. And though this eschatological fulfillment is still to come, it is also here among us. Yes, it is imperfectly and fitfully realized in this life, but the kingdom of Christ is present through the church. Governments still have their duties of restraining and punishing evil in this world, but Christ provides for a peace built on something better than the sword and the gallows.

But these sources of order are disdained by those in the West who are most passionate about multiculturalism. And so they try to build without a foundation. They believe that they can outdo the church, establishing a brotherhood of man without God the Father, and without the Son by whom we are reconciled both to God and to each other. They are eager to pretend that all creeds and cultures are equally valid, except for their own Western, Christian heritage, which they renounce even as they invite all others into their homelands.

But throwing people of different cultures and creeds together in some reckless modern experiment does not naturally produce peace, and so the cracks in the multicultural mosaic are getting worse. Maintaining order will require either repression or Christian revival. The real problem is not what we see on city streets, but what we know is in the human heart.