Hindu Nationalists in Odisha, an eastern Indian state, want Christians out.

The fresh calls were made during a book launch in memory of local Hindu Nationalist leader Lakshmananda Saraswati, who was assassinated in 2008.

Although Communists (Maoists) admitted to killing Saraswati and four followers, his slaying was initially blamed on Christians.

As a result, Hindus hunted them down, slaughtered them and looted churches.

This is despite local authorities allegedly knowing that Maoists were responsible.

Instead of de-escalating the destruction, the government apparently buried this fact, thereby encouraging the persecution of Christians to continue.

An October 5, 2008 piece from The Hindu reported that Maoists “left two letters at the scene claiming responsibility for the killing.”

A spokesperson for the Communist Party of India then claimed the government “suppressed those letters to help rioters continue with their attacks on the [Christian] minority community.”

He added that Maoists killed the Hindu monk and political leader because he was “forcing tribals and Dalit Christians in Kandhamal to convert to Hinduism.”

Discussing the book launch, John Dayal, a New Delhi-based human rights advocate and author, claims “speakers at the commemoration called for the elimination of Christians from the Kandhamal district.”

Hinting at ethnic cleansing, he alleged that hardline Hindu Nationalists “view Kandhamal as a testing ground for a model that could be extended across the country.”

During the event, Dayal said they openly “called for a ‘church-free’ Odisha and for curbing the activity of people they termed “vidharmis” (infidels).

This “refers to Christian and Muslim citizens, implying their faith is foreign to India’s soil.” For instance, the belief that “to be Indian is to be Hindu.”

Some senior members of the Modi government were in attendance, he recalled, adding that the story of the slain Hindu political leader would be embedded in the school curriculum.

“The Government Medical College and Hospital in Phulbani would also be renamed after Saraswati.”

Commenting on the 2008 persecution of Christians, Dayal described the slaughter as “one of the worst outbreaks of anti-Christian violence in Independent India.

“The violence,” he recounted, “killed at least 39 Christians, though Christian families said they counted more than 100 dead.”

This includes “more than 40 women sexually assaulted, a Catholic nun and a young Hindu woman who was employed by a Christian NGO.”

Additionally, “395 churches were [reportedly] razed or torched, between 5,600 and 6,500 houses plundered or burnt down, over 600 villages ransacked and some 75,000 people left homeless.”

“Many Christian families were burnt alive,” Dayal said, “and thousands were forced to convert to Hinduism under threat of violence.

“Some Hindu families were also assaulted on suspicion of being friends with Christians, and supporters of the Indian National Congress or Congress party,” Modi’s opposition.

He then argued that the investigation and trial of those allegedly involved in the assassination were sketchy, saying, “Prosecutions crawled through the courts for over a decade and produced a conviction rate that lawyers still call a scandal.”

The calls for kicking Christians out of India hit International Christian Concern’s radar hard.

ICC said the book launch was just a guise that “marks a chilling escalation in the fusion of state authority and radical ideological movements.”

The presence of chief government officials, they asserted, “signals that the ‘church-free’ mandate is no longer a peripheral demand.”

Their anti-Christian activism, ICC remarked, is unconstitutional.

“By explicitly demanding a “ban on the activities of heretics,” the movement presents a direct challenge to Article 25 of the Indian Constitution, which guarantees the freedom to profess, practice, and propagate religion.”

What’s deeply concerning about this, ICC said, is that it’s “not merely a rhetorical flourish.”

It is “a calculated effort to dismantle the operational freedom of Christian institutions by framing their existence as an existential threat to the state.”

Foreign Minister Penny Wong will reportedly use the annual Gyngell Lecture at the Lowy Institute in Sydney to warn that “monoculturalism” poses a threat to Australia’s national security, which is ironic, given that the argument would inadvertently expose the monocultural assumption underpinning multiculturalism itself.

If the government has to warn Australians against thinking in “monocultural” terms, then it’s necessarily asserting that there’s a particular way Australians ought to think about culture, identity, and Australian society. It is to claim there must be some common cultural framework that every Australian is expected to accept.

So, whether one is militantly in favour of multiculturalism or militantly opposed to it, both positions ultimately require some degree of cultural uniformity. The disagreement is only over what that monoculture should consist of, and where its boundaries should be drawn.

Wong’s position inadvertently exposes the weakness in the idea that multiculturalism simply means allowing a genuine diversity of cultures, beliefs, and opinions to coexist.

Clearly, it doesn’t.

At some point, multiculturalism requires a shared doctrine that must be defended, and potentially enforced for the sake of “national security.” As such, multiculturalism can tolerate diversity of cultures and opinion only so long as there is agreement on multiculturalism itself.

Once people are free to reject the doctrine of multiculturalism, the ideological consensus that holds the system together will begin to unravel. In that sense, multiculturalism ultimately depends on a degree of monocultural agreement about the legitimacy of multiculturalism.

But if multiculturalism is compulsory, how is it meaningfully different from the monoculture it condemns?

The supposed champion of diversity therefore finds herself defending a monoculture of her own without even knowing it.

The question is not whether Australia will have a monoculture. The question is which monoculture will be imposed on the nation, what it will hold together, and how much diversity of thought it will tolerate before deeming those thoughts a “threat to national security.”

For decades now, “identity politics” has been one of the central targets of conservative critique. Conservatives have warned against a political approach that elevates group identity, such as race, sex, religion, or “sexual identity,” over and above individual character, shared citizenship, and equal treatment under the law.

Many of the criticisms were well founded. Identity politics can replace personal responsibility with one’s inherited status, fragment national unity into competing factions, and justify unequal treatment in the name of “fairness.” Rather than encouraging merit, civic responsibility, and unity, it can work to entrench division, incentivise grievance, and undermine the principle of equality under the law.

But there was a fatal flaw in the conservative response, and we are paying for it today. Conservatives recognised the potential danger of identity politics, but then convinced themselves that the only solution was to abandon their own identity. There can be no “identity politics” if there are no identities to favour.

At its heart, identity politics exploits that universal human instinct of tribalism. Human beings naturally organise themselves into groups, or tribes—families, societies, peoples, nations, religious communities, and cultures—and they develop loyalties to those particular groups. That instinct is not inherently good or evil. It depends entirely upon where those loyalties are directed and to what end they serve.

For years, “identity politics” has been deployed against the straight, White, Christian, and conservative populations across the Western world—favouring anyone and everyone that doesn’t fall into one or more of those “oppressor” categories. Conservatives were correct to recognise the danger of a system that increasingly defined people according to their group identity and distributed social favour accordingly. Especially when they favoured groups that largely excluded the rightful heirs.

But instead of challenging the premise that identity should determine political treatment, conservatives often accepted it and then simply disarmed themselves. They were told to combat identity politics by rejecting their own collective identity, suppressing their own group loyalties, dissolving their sense of shared heritage, and trusting that individual merit and colour-blind virtues would ultimately prevail.

Meanwhile, virtually every other group was free to organise around its own interests.

And that was the fundamental mistake.

Conservatives abandoned the language of identity while their opponents became increasingly proficient in it. Conservatives were encouraged to see themselves as isolated individuals first and foremost, and members of a people, culture, or civilisation only reluctantly, while others were, and still are, encouraged to organise collectively, articulate their collective interests, cultivate solidarity, and demand political recognition.

You see, conservatives didn’t change the rules of the game. They just gave up playing.

Their opposition to identity politics made them hostile to their own identities. Taken to its logical extreme, their approach became a profoundly anti-national and even globalist posture, without knowing it. This is because identity is unavoidable. Every community, every society distinguishes between insiders and outsiders. Every nation has a common people, a history, a culture, a territory, and a conception of who belongs. Every community, family, organisation, and institution has relationships of loyalty and obligation. Every collective is defined by who is in, and who is out.

The alternative is not a world without identity. It is a world in which meaningful identities are progressively dissolved, individuals are reduced to atomised citizens of an increasingly borderless order, and traditional loyalties are treated as divisive and disorderly.

That’s why the conservative strategy of simply condemning all forms of identity politics has been so crippling. It imposed a standard upon the conservatives that no other faction was prepared to adopt. Conservatives were expected to avoid their own in-group loyalties, refuse collective interests, and condemn any assertion of their own identity, even as competing groups mobilised on those very grounds.

While Conservatives were preoccupied with denouncing every expression of identity politics, others were organising around their identities, defining friend and enemy, building solidarity, and advancing their collective interests.

The problem here is not that people organise around identity. The problem is that Conservatives believed they could be the only group that refused to do so and still somehow succeed.

In truth, they cannot change the way others play the game. But they can refuse to remain uniquely disarmed.

That doesn’t require racial supremacy, hatred, or contempt for outsiders. These are all dishonest terms used to dissuade the “Straight, White, Christian” from engaging in the same collective thinking as everybody else. Nor does it require abandoning the principle of individual dignity or equal justice under the law. It means recognising that people have legitimate obligations to their own families, communities, nations, cultures, and children—and that a civilisation has the right to preserve the inheritance it received and pass it on to the next generation.

For Christians, that obligation must be governed by biblical principles rather than racial animus. We’re not called to despise the foreign, but neither are we commanded to despise our own neighbour, abandon our inheritance, or neglect our responsibility towards our children.

Recognising our shared identity and acting to preserve what has been entrusted to us is not inherently supremacist. Despite what our opponents say, it is not hatred or bigotry. It is responsibility and love.

Diagnosing the threat of “identity politics” simply wasn’t enough. By abandoning their own identity while others strengthened theirs, Conservatives did not abolish tribalism—they simply ensured that they would be the tribe least willing to defend itself.

So, the choice that is before us is not between identity politics and no identity politics. That choice doesn’t exist. It’ll never exist.

The choice is between recognising identity responsibly or surrendering the field to those who recognise it without restraint.

We can’t change the way others play the game.

But we can stop pretending that refusing to play is a winning strategy.