U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered an address at the Munich Security Conference on February 13.

His remarks sparked much conversation, most notably an observation by Elon Musk on X: “For a country to survive, there has to be a common culture.”

Musk spoke in defense of Rubio’s warning that “both America and Europe” face “civilizational erasure.”

Eventually, Word on Fire’s Bishop Robert Barron weighed in, agreeing that we “need to find our sources in the great culture that unites us.” But they all left out some important things.

I am not referring to the uncomplicated way Rubio reflected on how Columbus “brought Christianity to the Americas” or how Europeans “sent ships out into uncharted seas” without mentioning the harsh legacies of colonialism. That would be another essay.

Rather, I mean that Rubio failed to mention some relevant events in European history and culture.

The cost of enforced unity

From 1550 to 1700, historians estimate that between 10 million and 15 million Europeans died during the wars that followed the era of the Reformation. Twenty percent of the Holy Roman Empire’s population lost their lives to the Thirty Years’ War. More than 200,000 deaths resulted from the English Civil War.

Catholic-on-Protestant mob violence that began in France on August 24, 1572, stretched on for months, eventually killing more than 10,000. Hearing news of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Pope Gregory XIII offered a Te Deum Mass of thanksgiving.

All of this happened because, after the Reformation fragmented Western Christianity into Western Christianities, Europeans continued to insist that they needed one common religion and one common culture. They were more than willing to insist with violence that there needed to be a common culture.

Something remarkable happened

After so much bloodshed, something remarkable happened. The modern era began.

The modern era’s most fundamental claim was that, as John Locke said, people “must be left to their own Consciences” by the state.

Differences of religion need to be tolerated, and as a result, many other differences would be tolerated. The purpose of the state was redefined. Now, the state’s most urgent duty has become protecting our rights to be different.

Locke’s influence was vast and remains an important legacy of the West. I love Mozart and Beethoven, whom Rubio named in his remarks. But Locke and others, such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who developed these ideas, seem more important for us to understand today.

They defined Western culture in a way Rubio and too many others seem unwilling to understand.

Plurality is the culture

With Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae, even the Roman Catholic Church agreed that, “In all his activity a man is bound to follow his conscience,” and, “It follows that he is not to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his conscience.”

This is because Western culture’s most important contribution has been to insist that we do not all need to be the same.

The “common culture” of the West insists we can be multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious. Plurality is the culture we share in common.

It’s not easy. We haven’t always done it well. But it simply denies Western history and culture by insisting that being Western means we must be just one thing.

• Steve Millies is the director of The Bernardin Center at CTU. A political theorist who trained at The Catholic University of America, he taught political science for 15 years at the University of South Carolina Aiken before coming to Catholic Theological Union (Chicago, IL) where he teaches courses in history and Catholic social ethics.