Joseph Loconte's Blog, page 3

A Founding Father’s Stirring Condemnation of Slavery

‘So much hath been said upon the subject of Slave-keeping, that an apology may be required for this paper,” wrote a Philadelphia physician two years before the start of the American Revolution. “The only one I shall offer is, that the evil still continues.”

What followed was one of the most devastating intellectual assaults on slavery ever published in the American colonies. The pamphlet titled “Address to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies upon Slavekeeping” struck a nerve: All 1,200 copies quickly sold out. Its author, Benjamin Rush, would soon join the revolutionary cause and sign the Declaration of Independence.

Like no other American Founder, Rush embodied the intellectual and moral alliance between liberal democracy and Protestant Christianity: He read John Locke alongside his Bible.

Appealing to conscience and common sense, Rush demolished the rationalizations for slavery then in vogue, beginning with the assumption that Africans were a naturally inferior race to white Europeans. He cited evidence of their “ingenuity” and “humanity” as proof that “they are equal to the Europeans.” He praised their virtue as impressive “as ever adorned a Roman or a Christian character.”

Next came the dubious claim that slavery was an approved practice in the Scriptures. “Christ commands us to look upon all mankind, even our enemies, as our neighbors and brethren,” Rush argued, “and ‘in all things, to do unto them whatever we would wish they should do unto us.’” Like the religious reformers of the previous century, Rush insisted that the Golden Rule — what he called “the law of equity” — should be applied to political life, regardless of race or creed.

Arguments for the economic necessity of slavery were taken to the woodshed. Economic prosperity did not depend upon the enslavement of other human beings. Quite the opposite: “Liberty and property form the basis of abundance, and good agriculture,” he wrote. “I never observed it to flourish where those rights of mankind were not firmly established.” Such was the divine will of “the great Author of our Nature, who has created man free.”

Although Rush’s name did not appear on the pamphlet, published in 1773, his writing revealed his scientific training. He soon began to acknowledge his authorship privately among his friends.

For a young physician still trying to establish himself in the Philadelphia social scene, it was a brazen act of defiance. A quarter of all the households in Philadelphia had slaves, and some of these slave-owners — including Benjamin Franklin and John Dickenson — were significant people in Rush’s professional life. “He became something of a celebrity in the abolitionist world,” writes biographer Stephen Fried, “and something of a pariah in the doctoring world.”

It didn’t matter. Rush called for an end to the slave trade and the gradual abolition of slavery in the colonies. Young slaves should be “educated in the principles of virtue and religion — let them be taught to read and write — and afterwards instructed in some business, whereby they may be able to maintain themselves,” he wrote. “Let laws be made to limit the time of their servitude, and to entitle them to all the privileges of free-born British subjects.”

The point must not be missed: Nearly a century before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, a leader of the American Revolution — an abolitionist — gave voice to the most radical vision of human equality on the world stage.

Rush became a protégé of Franklin, a confidant of John Adams, an editor of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and George Washington’s surgeon general in the Continental Army. The slavery question would be put aside in the struggle for independence. But Rush’s prominence in the anti-slavery movement — he supported the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and helped raise funds for the independent black churches in Philadelphia — was not without effect.

Importantly, the Bible was Rush’s battering ram in the abolitionist cause. He was especially concerned with the social and psychological impact of the slave trade: The entire thrust of the moral code of Jesus of Nazareth, he argued, was at odds with the degrading effects of slavery.

“Every prohibition of covetousness — intemperance — pride — uncleanness — theft — and murder, which he delivered — every lesson of meekness, humility, forbearance, charity, self-denial, and brotherly-love which he taught, are levelled against this evil,” Rush wrote. “For slavery, while it includes all the former vices, necessarily excludes the practice of all the latter virtues, both from the master and the slave.”

Addressing the clergy directly, Rush delivered a jeremiad against ministers who provided religious rationales for their slave-owning congregants. Do not invoke the religion of Jesus, he warned, to “sanctify their crimes” against humanity. “In vain will you command your flocks to offer up the incense of faith and charity, while they continue to mingle the sweat and blood of Negro slaves with their sacrifices.”

In all of this, Rush’s legacy offers a rebuke to the progressive Left as well as the new Right. Modern liberalism, which treats religion as the enemy of human freedom, has effectively excised Christianity from America’s founding. The Left views the American story as a racist project from beginning to end. The new Right, however, regards the Founders’ emphasis on individual rights and freedom as the serpent in the garden, the wellspring of radical individualism and moral relativism.

It is a safe bet that Rush knew the Bible better than today’s cultural elites. He became the founder of the Sunday school movement in America and a leader of the American Bible Society. Rush’s letter “The Bible as a School Book,” addressed to a reverend in Boston, clearly reveals that Rush wanted the nation’s children to be immersed in the Scriptures as they learned to read. Even if the Bible said nothing about achieving eternal life with God, he wrote, it should be read in the schools because it contains “the greatest portion of that kind of knowledge which is calculated to produce private and public temporal happiness.”

As nearly all the Founders agreed, the Bible was America’s freedom book. Yet if liberty and equality were the birthright of every human soul, then slavery must be the enemy of the American Revolution. This, the doctor reasoned, was the moral logic of the 1776 project.

“The plant of liberty is of so tender a nature, that it cannot thrive long in the neighborhood of slavery,” he warned. “Remember the eyes of all Europe are fixed upon you, to preserve an asylum for freedom in this country, after the last pillars of it are fallen in every other quarter of the globe.”

—

Joseph Loconte, PhD, is a Presidential Scholar in Residence at New College of Florida and the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. He is the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.

National Review: A Founding Father’s Stirring Condemnation of Slavery

This article was originally posted at National Review.

‘So much hath been said upon the subject of Slave-keeping, that an apology may be required for this paper,” wrote a Philadelphia physician two years before the start of the American Revolution. “The only one I shall offer is, that the evil still continues.”

What followed was one of the most devastating intellectual assaults on slavery ever published in the American colonies. The pamphlet titled “Address to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies upon Slavekeeping” struck a nerve: All 1,200 copies quickly sold out. Its author, Benjamin Rush, would soon join the revolutionary cause and sign the Declaration of Independence.

Like no other American Founder, Rush embodied the intellectual and moral alliance between liberal democracy and Protestant Christianity: He read John Locke alongside his Bible.

Appealing to conscience and common sense, Rush demolished the rationalizations for slavery then in vogue, beginning with the assumption that Africans were a naturally inferior race to white Europeans. He cited evidence of their “ingenuity” and “humanity” as proof that “they are equal to the Europeans.” He praised their virtue as impressive “as ever adorned a Roman or a Christian character.”

Next came the dubious claim that slavery was an approved practice in the Scriptures. “Christ commands us to look upon all mankind, even our enemies, as our neighbors and brethren,” Rush argued, “and ‘in all things, to do unto them whatever we would wish they should do unto us.’” Like the religious reformers of the previous century, Rush insisted that the Golden Rule — what he called “the law of equity” — should be applied to political life, regardless of race or creed.

Arguments for the economic necessity of slavery were taken to the woodshed. Economic prosperity did not depend upon the enslavement of other human beings. Quite the opposite: “Liberty and property form the basis of abundance, and good agriculture,” he wrote. “I never observed it to flourish where those rights of mankind were not firmly established.” Such was the divine will of “the great Author of our Nature, who has created man free.”

Although Rush’s name did not appear on the pamphlet, published in 1773, his writing revealed his scientific training. He soon began to acknowledge his authorship privately among his friends.

For a young physician still trying to establish himself in the Philadelphia social scene, it was a brazen act of defiance. A quarter of all the households in Philadelphia had slaves, and some of these slave-owners — including Benjamin Franklin and John Dickenson — were significant people in Rush’s professional life. “He became something of a celebrity in the abolitionist world,” writes biographer Stephen Fried, “and something of a pariah in the doctoring world.”

It didn’t matter. Rush called for an end to the slave trade and the gradual abolition of slavery in the colonies. Young slaves should be “educated in the principles of virtue and religion — let them be taught to read and write — and afterwards instructed in some business, whereby they may be able to maintain themselves,” he wrote. “Let laws be made to limit the time of their servitude, and to entitle them to all the privileges of free-born British subjects.”

The point must not be missed: Nearly a century before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, a leader of the American Revolution — an abolitionist — gave voice to the most radical vision of human equality on the world stage.

Rush became a protégé of Franklin, a confidant of John Adams, an editor of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and George Washington’s surgeon general in the Continental Army. The slavery question would be put aside in the struggle for independence. But Rush’s prominence in the anti-slavery movement — he supported the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and helped raise funds for the independent black churches in Philadelphia — was not without effect.

Importantly, the Bible was Rush’s battering ram in the abolitionist cause. He was especially concerned with the social and psychological impact of the slave trade: The entire thrust of the moral code of Jesus of Nazareth, he argued, was at odds with the degrading effects of slavery.

“Every prohibition of covetousness — intemperance — pride — uncleanness — theft — and murder, which he delivered — every lesson of meekness, humility, forbearance, charity, self-denial, and brotherly-love which he taught, are levelled against this evil,” Rush wrote. “For slavery, while it includes all the former vices, necessarily excludes the practice of all the latter virtues, both from the master and the slave.”

Addressing the clergy directly, Rush delivered a jeremiad against ministers who provided religious rationales for their slave-owning congregants. Do not invoke the religion of Jesus, he warned, to “sanctify their crimes” against humanity. “In vain will you command your flocks to offer up the incense of faith and charity, while they continue to mingle the sweat and blood of Negro slaves with their sacrifices.”

In all of this, Rush’s legacy offers a rebuke to the progressive Left as well as the new Right. Modern liberalism, which treats religion as the enemy of human freedom, has effectively excised Christianity from America’s founding. The Left views the American story as a racist project from beginning to end. The new Right, however, regards the Founders’ emphasis on individual rights and freedom as the serpent in the garden, the wellspring of radical individualism and moral relativism.

It is a safe bet that Rush knew the Bible better than today’s cultural elites. He became the founder of the Sunday school movement in America and a leader of the American Bible Society. Rush’s letter “The Bible as a School Book,” addressed to a reverend in Boston, clearly reveals that Rush wanted the nation’s children to be immersed in the Scriptures as they learned to read. Even if the Bible said nothing about achieving eternal life with God, he wrote, it should be read in the schools because it contains “the greatest portion of that kind of knowledge which is calculated to produce private and public temporal happiness.”

As nearly all the Founders agreed, the Bible was America’s freedom book. Yet if liberty and equality were the birthright of every human soul, then slavery must be the enemy of the American Revolution. This, the doctor reasoned, was the moral logic of the 1776 project.

“The plant of liberty is of so tender a nature, that it cannot thrive long in the neighborhood of slavery,” he warned. “Remember the eyes of all Europe are fixed upon you, to preserve an asylum for freedom in this country, after the last pillars of it are fallen in every other quarter of the globe.”

—

Joseph Loconte, PhD, is a Presidential Scholar in Residence at New College of Florida and the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. He is the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.

The American Spectator: A Frail President in a Hostile World

This article was originally posted at The American Spectator.

Before Biden There Was FDR

Joe Biden is not the first ailing American president to seek another term of office, despite being manifestly unfit for the job. But the last time it happened — with the re-election of Franklin Roosevelt for an unprecedented fourth term — the result was disastrous for the cause of democracy and human rights in the world.

Those in close contact with FDR during the 1944 presidential campaign knew that he was in a state of mental and physical decline. Senator Harry Truman, his newly picked running mate, was stunned by what he saw, “I had no idea he was in such a feeble condition,” he told an aide. On his way to Crimea for the Yalta Conference in February 1945 — the crucial wartime meeting between Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin — Roosevelt was, in the words of one physician, “a very sick man.”

Throughout much of the eight-day conference, the president physically projected weakness and capitulation. The end result of his performance was the forcible absorption of central and eastern Europe into the Soviet Union.

The conventional wisdom, touted for decades by Roosevelt’s sycophantic admirers, is that the Soviet army already occupied these European states by the time of the Yalta conference; there was nothing the president could do to alter Moscow’s intention to create “friendly states” along the border of the Soviet Union. “If he failed at Yalta, it wasn’t because of his physical or mental capacity,” insists author and New York Times editor Joseph Lelyveld. “Had he been at the peak of vigor, the results would have been much the same.”

Yet the transcripts of the Yalta conference and the memoirs of key participants expose this narrative as fairy dust. In fact, Roosevelt’s mental decline accentuated his naïve, progressive instincts and played into the hands of Stalin, the ruthless realist hellbent on dominating Europe.

It is true, of course, that the Red Army, in thwarting the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, occupied most of eastern Europe and was not about to leave. But the decisive issue at Yalta — the hinge upon which Soviet designs depended — was Poland. The American president possessed the power to intervene on behalf of its democratic future. Instead, FDR used Poland as a bargaining chip for his Wilsonian dream of a rejuvenated League of Nations.

Churchill went to Yalta with a supreme objective: to preserve Poland’s political independence. It was the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, in 1939, that ignited the Second World War and created an existential crisis for Great Britain. “Everyone here knows the result it was to us, unprepared as we were, and that it nearly cost us our life as a nation,” Churchill said. “Never could I be content with any solution that would not leave Poland as a free and independent state.”

In stark contrast with Churchill, FDR seemed indifferent to the sacrifice and valor of the 150,000 Polish ex-patriates who fought with the Allied forces at Monte Cassino, at the Battle of Britain, and in other theaters against the Nazis. His interventions on behalf of Poland were sophomoric, vacuous, and ineffective. Against the calculating and duplicitous Stalin, he adopted a posture of perpetual retreat.

The Polish democratic resistance, with its leadership in London, was dead set against the communist puppets installed in Warsaw during the fog of war. The American and British negotiating teams wanted the Soviets to agree to a new Provisional Government in Poland — reorganized “on a broader democratic basis” — to offset the Warsaw communists. After that, democratic elections would be held.

But the Soviets balked, and Roosevelt backed down. “The United States will never lend its support in any way to any provisional government in Poland which would be inimical to your interests,” he assured Stalin.

It was an absurd and astonishing thing to promise: The Soviet Union had made it clear that any democratic government on its border was “inimical” to its interests. Stalin confirmed this when, in September 1939, the Soviet army invaded Poland from the east as the Nazis invaded from the west. He confirmed it again when he proceeded to brutally dismember Polish society, ordering the deportation and execution of tens of thousands of ordinary citizens.

If elections were to be held without a more broadly democratic government in place, Roosevelt and Churchill insisted upon the presence of election observers. Churchill took the lead: “The U. S., Britain, and Russia should be observers to see that they are carried out impartially. These are no idle requests.”

Yet the prime minister lacked the one thing he desperately needed: the clear and unconditional support of the American president. It never arrived. Eager for a Polish settlement to secure domestic support for his dream of a United Nations, FDR instructed his aides to delete the “offending” provision for election observers. Soviet membership in the United Nations, Roosevelt believed, would moderate Stalin’s illiberal instincts.

British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, at Churchill’s side at Yalta, summarized FDR’s frame of mind thus: “He was deluding himself.” Hugh Lunghi, a translator and member of the British delegation at Yalta, was astonished by FDR’s naivete. “Those of us who worked and lived in Moscow knew that there was not a chance in hell that Stalin would allow free elections in those countries when he didn’t allow them in the Soviet Union.”

In February 1945, the American president was commander in chief of the most powerful military in the world and was within months of possessing an atomic weapon. At the beaches of Normandy, U.S. and Allied forces had staged the largest and most successful amphibious invasion in the history of warfare, ensuring the defeat of Nazi Germany. The United States boasted unrivaled industrial might and was the engine of the global economy. Yet with all of these resources in hand, Roosevelt would not even insist upon election observers in a European state that had been brutalized by both the Nazis and the Russians.

Was the President’s Health Determinative?

Did Roosevelt’s fragile condition contribute to his posture of appeasement? Of course it did.

In Malta, on his way to Yalta, Churchill’s physician, Lord Moran, interacted with Roosevelt and recorded in his diary: “The president appears to be a very sick man. He has all the symptoms of hardening of the arteries of the brain, in an advanced stage … I give him only a few months to live.” (Roosevelt died two months later). When he arrived at Yalta, recalled Lunghi, “the President, waxen cheeked, looked ghastly.” His condition deteriorated throughout the conference. Those present believed Roosevelt probably heard only half of what was said during the meetings.

In his memoirs of the Second World War, Churchill complained that Roosevelt took “a distant view” of the Polish question. “It seemed to me, throughout the sessions of that conference, that the President had a distant view on many other problems as well,” recalled A.H. Birse, Churchill’s chief interpreter at Yalta. His aides, Birse added, “appeared to be putting the words into his mouth for him to say.” Indeed, based on the notes of his physician, Howard Breunn, it seems likely that Roosevelt suffered a pulsus alternans (when every second heartbeat is weaker than the preceding one) during one of the debates over Poland.

Thus, a frail American president embodied political impotence at a moment of geo-political crisis. By not demanding a free and fair democratic election in Poland, Roosevelt telegraphed a clear message to Stalin: The United States would not object if Poland’s sovereignty and independence were destroyed, nor that of Eastern Europe’s. The message was received in the Kremlin, loud and clear.

Nevertheless, with a compliant press corps, Roosevelt later declared to Congress that the Yalta conference had been a smashing success, especially with regards to Poland. There were difficulties, he admitted, “but at the end, on every point, unanimous agreement was reached. And more important even than the agreement of words, I may say we achieved a unity of thought and a way of getting along together.”

It was a deception based upon a delusion underwritten by political ambition and personal vanity.

What difference might a democratic Poland have made, caught in the communist grip of the Soviet bloc? That question was answered in 1989, when the Polish democratic resistance movement, known as Solidarity, compelled the regime to allow free and fair elections. Solidarity candidates won in a landslide. The downfall of communism in Poland led directly to the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

The democratic revolutions of 1989 might have occurred much earlier had a stronger American leader been present at Yalta. Joseph Stalin displayed a ruthlessness, a disregard for moral norms, and a lust for domination that has few historical rivals. The sick and feeble Roosevelt was no match for “the man of steel.”

If history is any guide, America’s enemies are taking stock of the fragile president who melted into incoherence during his first debate with Donald Trump — and they are praying that he stays in the race and wins in November.

—

Joseph Loconte, PhD, is a Presidential Scholar in Residence at New College of Florida and the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. He is the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.

National Review: A Christian Prophet’s Unheeded Warning to the Academy

This article was originally posted at National Review.

The intellectual and moral chaos that is ravaging American higher education — typified by the campus protests and outbursts of antisemitism — is serving as a wake-up call to religious conservatives. In fact, the wake-up call was first delivered more than 40 years ago by a leading Christian public intellectual.

“No civilization can endure with its mind being as confused and disordered as ours is today,” declared Charles Malik, the first Lebanese ambassador to the United States and an architect of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to a gathering of Evangelical leaders in September 1980. “At the heart of the crisis in Western civilization lies the state of the mind and the spirit in the universities.”

Speaking at the dedication ceremony for the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, Malik described a “total divorce” in the secular academy between the life of the mind and the truths of biblical religion. The elite academic institutions in the United States and Europe, he said, were awash in materialism, atheism, nihilism, and the will to power. As a result, “all the preaching in the world, and all the loving care of even the best parents . . . will amount to little, if not to nothing” if the universities remain indifferent or hostile to faith. “The enormity of what is happening is beyond words.”

A scholar, educator, and diplomat, Malik understood the intellectual currents of 20th century. He went to Germany in the late 1930s to study philosophy with Martin Heidegger, but the political climate forced him to change plans and complete his Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard. Returning to Lebanon, he established the Department of Philosophy at the University of Beirut. He was soon tapped by the Lebanese president to represent his country at the founding conference of the United Nations in 1945. His political career — including a stint as president of the U.N. Security Council — deepened his awareness of the ideological forces enveloping the academy.

The decline of the humanities, Malik observed, was at the center of the problem. The humanities —the disciplines of philosophy, politics, history, literature, the arts, and theology — explore the most important questions about the meaning and purpose of our mortal lives. As the humanities go, he said, so goes the university. “It is there,” he said, “that the foundations of character and mind and outlook and conviction and attitude and spirit are laid.”

Malik issued a summons to the Christian community: Christians of all denominations should produce, within a decade, an exhaustive study of what was occurring in the field of humanities in the great universities of Europe and America. Malik challenged his Evangelical audience to assemble the finest minds — including scientists, philosophers, poets, and preachers — to explore how the humanities could be renewed by the reintroduction of ancient wisdom and “right reason.” The task was never taken up by the Christian leadership of any denomination.

Next came a warning. Malik embraced the Evangelical emphasis on Scripture, salvation by grace, and heartfelt faith. “I speak to you as a Christian,” he said. “Jesus Christ is my Lord and God and Savior and Song day and night.” Yet he rejected a form of piety that neglected the life of the mind. “I must be frank with you,” he confessed. “The greatest danger besetting American Evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism.”

It was a sobering thing to announce at Wheaton College, then considered the Harvard of the Evangelical academy. Nevertheless, anti-intellectualism was “an absolutely self-defeating attitude” that led to one result: the abdication of the arenas of cultural influence to the adversaries of biblical religion. “For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ himself, as well as for their own sakes, Evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence.”

Malik could hardly have anticipated that this problem would be aggravated by political activism. In 1979, a year before his address, the “Christian Right” had burst upon the American political landscape with the creation of the Moral Majority. Since then, Evangelicals have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in national political campaigns but barely a fraction of that amount supporting Christian scholars or building new academic centers to counter the reigning orthodoxies. With the recent closure of The King’s College, for example — where I taught Western civilization for a decade — there is not a single Christian institution of higher learning in New York City.

With remarkable prescience, Malik warned that the outcome of this crisis concerned Jews as much as Christians. Ideologies that cannot abide the claims of revealed religion undermine the foundations of Western civilization. “If the highest Christian values be overturned,” he said, “so will the highest Jewish values.” Militant secularism and antisemitism march in lockstep: It is thus unsurprising that Jews no longer feel safe on many of America’s elite campuses.

There is a profound sense of urgency to Malik’s message, flowing from a life devoted to working for a more just and humane social order, built on Christian ideals. Malik was burdened by the reality that the most prestigious universities in the world, captured by bankrupt philosophies, could not address the deepest ills afflicting the soul of the West: hedonism, cynicism, breakdown of the family, corruption of character, and “the dearth of grace and beauty.”

He implored his fellow believers to step into the breach. “If Christians do not care for the intellectual health of their own children and for the fate of their own civilization, a health and a fate so inextricably bound up with the state of the mind and spirit in the universities, who is going to care?”

The cognitive and spiritual turmoil of the academy suggests that Malik’s challenge remains unanswered.

—

Joseph Loconte, PhD, is a Presidential Scholar in Residence at New College of Florida and the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. He is the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.

National Affairs: Locke, Virtue, and a Liberal Education

This article was originally posted at National Affairs.

Following the Boston Massacre in March 1770, the Massachusetts lawyer and patriot Josiah Quincy, Jr., joined John Adams in defending the British soldiers involved. The sentries had fired into an unruly crowd of civilians, killing three and wounding eight. If convicted, they would hang. In his argument for the defense, Quincy cited three main sources: the Bible, English common law, and the English philosopher whose theories on government would fuel the American Revolution.

The writings of this philosopher, Quincy argued, represented “the wisdom and policy of ages,” coming from a man “who [had] done as much for learning, liberty, and mankind, as any of the Sons of Adam; I mean the sagacious Mr. Locke.” After quoting from John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, Quincy concluded his tribute thus: “We cite this author to show the world, that the greatest friends to their country, to universal liberty, and the immutable rights of all men, have held tenets, and advanced maxims favourable to the prisoners at the bar.”

The jury found the British soldiers not guilty. At a key moment in America’s struggle for independence, against an enraged mob of public opinion, the principle of impartial justice was reaffirmed.

For Quincy, and for other colonial Americans, Locke was more than a political philosopher: He was a man renowned for his “humanity,” writes Claire Rydell Arcenas in America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life. He was “a companion in thought and an exemplar.” And unlike any other 17th-century author, Locke was for many Americans “an immediate, daily authority” over the conduct of their public and civic lives.

For a growing cohort of conservatives in our own time, however, Locke’s influence on the American founding explains the wretched condition of our national culture. The decline of religion, the breakdown of the family, the idolization of the free market, the soul-destroying materialism, expressive individualism, and widespread moral rot: All of these ills are laid at Locke’s doorstep, tied to his conceptions of equality, freedom, and natural rights.

According to critics like philosopher Yoram Hazony, Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen, and First Things editor R. R. Reno, the chief aim of Lockean liberalism is to liberate individuals “from the constraints imposed by the natural world.” The last half-century of scholarship on Locke has convincingly refuted this portrait. Yet there is a much deeper problem than intellectual laziness among Locke’s conservative critics: Not unlike the progressive left, they fail to grasp how the preservation of republican government depends on the inculcation of republican virtues.

LOCKE’S INFLUENCE

In reality, Locke regarded the cultivation of republican virtue as the central task of the educator. Character formation — rooted in the classical Christian tradition — is the subject of Some Thoughts Concerning Education, the collection of letters Locke wrote to his close friend Edward Clarke. According to the late Cambridge historian Peter Laslett, Locke’s practical and innovative approach ranks as “one of the most influential” in the history of education. It is largely forgotten today that Locke not only made the definitive case for government by consent; he also promoted, with genuine insight into human nature, an educational philosophy that would produce the kinds of citizens fit for self-government.

Locke composed his correspondence with Clarke during his political exile in the 1680s, when the question of representative government was the subject of intense international debate. Political absolutism was on the rise in Great Britain (under Charles II and James II) and France (under Louis XIV). Meanwhile, religious despotism, practiced by the Protestants in the Church of England and the Catholics in France, threatened Europe’s social fabric. Implicated in a failed plot to assassinate the English monarch, Locke fled to the Netherlands, where he reflected on several major themes: the nature of human understanding, the necessity of religious freedom, and the role of education in creating a more liberal society. Locke’s educational advice reflects the turmoil of his age:

By what fate vice has so thriven amongst us these few years past, and by what hands it has been nursed up into so uncontrolled a dominion, I shall leave to others to inquire. I wish that those who complain of the great decay of Christian piety and virtue everywhere, and of learning and acquired improvements in the gentry of this generation, would consider how to retrieve them in the next. This I am sure, that, if the foundation of it be not laid in the education and principling of the youth, all other endeavours will be in vain.

This is precisely what Locke set out to explain in his letters: how to transmit traditional piety and moral character to the next generation. “[N]othing that may form children’s minds is to be overlooked and neglected,” he declared, and “whatsoever introduces habits, and settles customs in them, deserves the care and attention of their governors.”

Locke touched a nerve. Probably no thinker had a greater impact on the educational philosophy of the Anglo-American world in the century after his death. In Sermons on the Religious Education of Children, for example, Congregationalist minister Philip Doddridge cited Locke alongside King Solomon. Historian Samuel Pickering, Jr., observed that Locke’s writings on education “were practically biblical” in their importance to the emerging middle class. “By the 1730s,” he pointed out, “Locke’s educational ideas had been absorbed into the thought of the century.”

What ideas animate Locke’s educational handbook? More than any of his other works, Some Thoughts Concerning Education demolishes the crude caricature of Locke as a secular hedonist made vogue by political philosopher Leo Strauss in the 1950s and parroted more recently by numerous voices on the new right.

Instead of Locke the economic materialist, we find a man admonishing parents to curb their child’s desire for material goods at every turn. Instead of Locke the Enlightenment utopian, we meet a student of the Bible with a sober view of the doctrine of the Fall. Instead of Locke the radical individualist, we see a patriot trying to nourish a culture of responsible citizenship. And instead of Locke the moral agnostic, we encounter a religious believer who defined true virtue as “the knowledge of a man’s duty, and the satisfaction it is to obey his Maker, in following the dictates of that light God has given him, with the hopes of acceptation and reward.” In short, we find in Locke’s philosophy of education a deep and abiding concern for virtue.

EDUCATING FUTURE LEADERS

It may seem odd that a middle-aged bachelor would offer child-rearing advice. Locke himself confessed, “I am too sensible of my want of experience in this affair.” But Edward Clarke, married with two young children, sought him out. Locke had served as a tutor to young students at Oxford; was given charge over the grandson of his political mentor, Lord Shaftesbury; and had gained a reputation for engaging the minds of children on serious topics. “It is quite clear,” writes biographer Roger Woolhouse, “that he was a keen and reflective observer of the young.”

There is a sense of urgency in Locke’s correspondence, a conviction that what a child learns during his earliest years creates “habits woven into the very principles of his nature.” The willful neglect of this truism probably accounts for most of the social problems ravaging America and the West today.

Locke’s advice was intended for the sons of English gentlemen, who were expected to set an example of civility and integrity in their public and private lives, so the stakes were high. Elsewhere in his writings, he explained that a gentleman should devote special attention to “moral and political knowledge” on those studies “which treat of virtue and vices, of civil society and the arts of government, and will take in also law and history.” English gentlemen were expected to engage in public affairs, and Locke hoped to influence the quality of their leadership.

Nevertheless, Locke did not aim his counsel exclusively at one particular class; the moral code he recommended befitted “a gentleman or a lover of truth.” Neither did Locke believe that gender made a significant difference in education. Writing to Mrs. Clarke in January 1684, he said that nothing in his previous letter about the education of her son required alteration with respect to her daughter; he saw “no difference of sex in your mind relating…to truth, virtue and obedience.” The exchange affords a glimpse of what I call Locke’s “democratic conscience” — his belief in the universal human capacity to apprehend moral and spiritual truths. This conviction anchored the views of human equality and independence that he expressed in his political writings.

CURBING THE APPETITES

Locke’s modern critics allege that he viewed man in purely economic terms — that behind his enthusiasm for private property lurked a craven materialism, a blank check for instant gratification. The decidedly anti-materialist message of Some Thoughts plainly undermines that claim.

An overriding theme of Locke’s letters is that children must learn to restrain their desires — not just for frivolous or sensual things, but even for innocent pleasures. If a child asks to be given certain clothes or other “trifles” that he doesn’t need, for example, the mere asking should ensure that he does not get them. “The best for children is, that they should not place any pleasure in such things at all, nor regulate their delight by their fancies, but be indifferent to all that nature has made so.” Locke acknowledged that “tender parents” may find this approach too severe. Nevertheless, he insisted it is necessary if children are to grow into respectable adulthood:

By this means they will be brought to learn the art of stifling their desires, as soon as they rise up in them, when they are easiest to be subdued. For giving vent, gives life and strength to our appetites; and he that has the confidence to turn his wishes into demands, will be but a little way from thinking he ought to obtain them….The constant loss of what they craved or carved to themselves should teach them modesty, submission, and a power to forbear.

The same Spartan attitude, he believed, should be applied to children’s physical training. Parents should not shield their children from all physical discomforts, because hunger, thirst, lack of sleep, and weariness from work “are what all men feel.” These inconveniences can serve a good purpose: They are signposts on the road to character. “The pains that come from the necessities of nature,” he argued, “are monitors to us to beware of greater mischiefs….But yet, the more children can be inured to hardships of this kind, by a wise care to make them stronger in body and mind, the better it will be for them.”

So much for Locke as the Epicurean playboy.

THE LOVE OF LEARNING

Although parents and tutors must take pains to curb the desire to have, they should never quash the desire to know. “Curiosity,” Locke advised, “should be as carefully cherished in children, as other appetites [are] suppressed.” He rejected “the ordinary method of education,” which involved “the charging of children’s memories, upon all occasions, with rules and precepts,” all quickly forgotten. In The Educational Writings of John Locke, John William Adamson explains that in Locke’s view, attempts to compel students to learn would fail. Another form of motivation was necessary.

Locke wanted children’s education to be engaging and enjoyable, both intellectually and emotionally. “None of the things they are to learn should ever be made a burden to them or imposed on them as a task,” he contended. “Whatever is so proposed presently becomes irksome.” Locke also rejected the “rough discipline of the rod,” instead recommending that parents direct their child’s interests, likes, energy, and creativity graciously.

How might parents and educators captivate children in this way? Locke saw a strong connection between the love of learning and the love of freedom that engages children in their play. In this he echoed Montaigne, who observed that “children’s games are not games; we ought to regard them as their most serious occupations.” Locke encouraged any recreation that does not endanger the child’s health, deeming such play “as necessary as labor or food.” Recreation, he believed, will help create deep bonds between children and their educators, who will be free to talk with their charges “about what most delights them.” The impact on children will be transformative:

[T]hey may perceive that they are beloved and cherished and that those under whose tuition they are, are not enemies to their satisfaction. Such a management will make them in love with the hand that directs them, and the virtue they are directed to.

To achieve all this, Locke acknowledged, requires “patience and skill, gentleness and attention.” This is one reason Locke rejected state education and urged parents to teach their children at home, with the help of carefully chosen tutors. The moral formation of their children during this crucial season of their lives was the most important task of both mothers and fathers; it could not be left to chance. With this in mind, Locke urged fathers to make their sons their friends “as fast as their age, discretion, and good behaviour could allow it.”

So much for Locke as the enemy of the traditional family.

PROPERTY AND THE WILL TO POWER

Many interpreters of Locke have assumed (wrongly) that his conception of the “state of nature” was lifted from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. For Hobbes, the state of nature acknowledges no fundamental moral law, leaving human beings at each other’s throats, desperate for an all-powerful Sovereign to preserve their individual lives. But in Locke’s state of nature, there exists a known and enforceable moral law, which obliges everyone not only to preserve his own life, but also the life of his neighbor:

Children should from the beginning be bred up in an abhorrence of killing or tormenting any living creature, and be taught not to spoil or destroy any thing….And truly, if the preservation of all mankind, as much as in him lies, were every one’s persuasion, as indeed it is every one’s duty, and the true principle to regulate our religion, politics, and morality by, the world would be much quieter, and better natured than it is.

Unlike Hobbes, Locke sought to “instill sentiments of humanity” at the earliest possible age. This is essential, he wrote, because human nature inclines us in the opposite direction: “I told you before that children love liberty….I now tell you they love something more; and that is dominion: and this is the first original of most vicious habits, that are ordinary and natural.” Locke’s anthropology here deserves attention: For him, the lust to dominate is “ordinary and natural” for all human beings. Scholars debate Locke’s religious beliefs about the effects of the Fall, but the glib association of Locke’s views with those of the Enlightenment philosophes — who assumed mankind’s essential goodness — cannot be credibly maintained.

Locke argued that the “love of power and dominion shows itself very early” among the young, “almost as they are born.” This impulse appears in a child’s desire to possess things — whatever he wants and whenever he wants it. “[T]hey would have property and possession, pleasing themselves with the power which that seems to give, and the right they thereby have to dispose of them as they please.” Locke identified this disposition as the source of “almost all the injustice and contention that so disturb human life.” It is to be rooted out, he wrote, at almost any cost.

Is this the same Locke famous for his defense of private property? To be sure, the concept of private property is indispensable to Locke’s triad of natural rights: As the fruit of human labor, the possession of property is an inalienable right and deserves the same vigorous protections as life and liberty. Indeed, in 17th-century Europe, with its political and religious authoritarianism, the seizure of property was the favored technique to produce compliant citizens. It needed special protection.

Nevertheless, the acquisition of property, absent a strong moral culture, endangers a child’s soul. “As to the having and possessing of things,” Locke observed, “teach them to part with what they have, easily and freely to their friends.” Parents and tutors must determinedly combat avarice in children and replace it with generosity:

Covetousness, and the desire of having in our possession and under our dominion more than we have need of, being the root of all evil, should be early and carefully weeded out, and the contrary quality of a readiness to impart to others, implanted….Make this a contest among children, who shall out-do one another this way; and by this means, by a constant practice, children having made it easy to themselves to part with what they have, good nature may be settled in them into a habit, and they may take pleasure, and pique themselves in being kind, liberal, and civil, to others.

Locke’s treatment of private property, like so much else in his political writings, has been seized upon by partisans and stripped from its larger context. Libertarians embrace him for writing that “the preservation of property” is “the chief end” of political society. The new right (along with the progressive left and socialists) excoriate Locke for his supposed idolization of property. But when Locke called the protection of “property” the chief aim of government, he was referring collectively to his triad of natural rights. For Locke, rights to life, liberty, and property belong to individuals, who in turn belong to their Creator. As Locke explained in the Second Treatise, every person is “the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker…sent into the world by His order and about His business; they are His property.” As such, man’s natural rights cannot be taken away without violating God’s moral law.

Intelligent critiques have been made of the destructive effects of modern capitalism on personal and social relations. But talk of Locke as the architect of the clawing consumerism of our age offers no useful contribution to that debate.

GOD, MORALITY, AND THE REPUBLIC

The author of Some Thoughts made the theme of our social obligations to one another — ethical and spiritual — the subtext for the entire work. When Locke urged parents to teach their children fortitude — ”the guard and support of the other virtues” — it was to enable them to perform their duties to family and nation. This is the reason, Locke explained, why he delayed discussion of academic subjects until the end of his correspondence: It is the “least part” of a child’s education.

This might appear as a paradox coming from a man of letters, a bibliophile with some 4,000 titles in his collection. Indeed, Locke’s intellectual curiosity seemed boundless. Among his possessions were works of philosophy, history, politics, science, medicine, law, theology, geography, and travel. His books were written in numerous languages and spanned the course of Western civilization. His library exceeded that of Isaac Newton in both size and range. Nevertheless, he believed that mastering subjects was of marginal utility if other things were lacking. “Reading, and writing, and learning, I allow to be necessary,” Locke noted, “but yet not the chief business.”

The chief business, in Locke’s estimation, is to develop men and women of strong character, cultivating the traits necessary for responsible citizenship in the commonwealth. “For I think it every man’s indispensable duty, to do all the service he can to his country; and I see not what difference he puts between himself and his cattle, who lives without that thought.” Contrary to the claims of the national conservatives, Locke was no enemy of patriotism.

Perhaps most importantly, for Locke, as for the American founders, producing such citizens depended on religious belief:

As the foundation of this, there ought very early to be imprinted on his mind a true notion of God, as of the independent supreme Being, Author, and Maker, of all things, from whom we receive all our good, who loves us, and gives us all things; and, consequent to this, instil into him a love and reverence of this supreme Being.

Living in an era of sectarian violence, Locke cautioned against probing too deeply into the mysteries of faith. Too many people, he observed, fail to grasp their own limitations in this regard and “run themselves into superstition or atheism.” This call to intellectual modesty appears elsewhere in Locke’s writings. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which Locke completed during his letter-writing period to Clarke, he argued that “the busy mind of man [ought] to be more cautious in meddling with things exceeding its comprehension.” The wise seeker of truth, he wrote, knows when “to sit down in a quiet ignorance of those things which, upon examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our capacities.”

The best way to encourage piety in youth, according to Locke, is to set an example for them to follow:

And I am apt to think the keeping children constantly morning and evening to acts of devotion to God, as to their Maker, Preserver, and Benefactor, in some plain and short form of prayer, suitable to their age and capacity, will be of much more use to them in religion, knowledge, and virtue, than to distract their thoughts with curious inquiries into his inscrutable essence and being.

Locke cared deeply for the spiritual condition of young people, believing, as he wrote in A Letter Concerning Toleration, that man’s “highest obligation” is to seek God’s favor, since “there is nothing in this world that is of any consideration in comparison with eternity.” This is a major theme in all of Locke’s writings defending religious liberty: the right — indeed, the obligation — to freely seek and embrace the path to salvation and find peace with God. Genuine faith, Locke insisted, must be the result of individual choice, “the inner persuasion of the mind,” uncoerced by church or state. “No way whatsoever that I shall walk in against the dictates of my conscience,” he asserted, “will ever bring me to the mansions of the blessed.”

One of Locke’s stated objectives in Some Thoughts is to educate children in such a way that they will embrace the truths of Christianity. Toward this end, he cautioned against feeding children too much of the Bible before their minds are ready. Such “promiscuous reading” of the Scriptures, he wrote, would create “an odd jumble of thoughts” that would only confuse them. Instead, he suggested they be introduced to the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, many of the stories of the Bible, and the teachings of Jesus, which should be “so often read, till they are thoroughly fixed in his memory.” The aim, Locke explained, is for the teachings of the Bible to “be inculcated as the standing and sacred rules of his life and actions.”

So much for Locke as the godless Hobbesian.

TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL

An honest commitment to moral and spiritual truth, wherever it could be found, was perhaps the most distinguishing mark of Locke’s own intellectual journey. He prized truth-seeking and truth-telling as among the highest of virtues: Parents could give no better gifts to their children than these.

“We are not to entrench upon truth in any conversation,” Locke admonished, “but least of all with children; since, if we play false with them, we not only deceive their expectation, and hinder their knowledge, but corrupt their innocence, and teach them the worst of vices.” Society, he argued, bears a special obligation to children by virtue of their vulnerability and the consequences of failing them. “They are travellers newly arrived in a strange country, of which they know nothing: we should therefore make conscience not to mislead them.”

It is hard to imagine a more damning indictment of our own age. Our children must function in a society awash in lies, falsehoods, distortions, and omissions — all trumpeted by educators, the media, the entertainment industry, the political class, and even the medical and scientific communities. Propaganda, not truth, is the coin of the realm.

This decay of our moral culture comes as a repudiation, not a fulfillment, of Locke’s philosophy — and especially his educational theory. In light of Locke’s clearly articulated thoughts concerning education, it seems obvious that ideology — rather than an informed view of the origins of liberal democracy — lurks behind much of the contemptuous treatment of Locke and the liberal tradition he helped establish.

Which Lockean ideals, we must ask, have so corroded family, community, church, and nation? R. R. Reno offers a strident verdict: “Locke’s ideal society is…a free association of individuals, unbound by duties that transcend their choices.” In Regime Change, Patrick Deneen portrays Locke as an apostle of soulless free-market materialism. Locke’s ultimate hope, he writes, was that the yearning for material comforts “would eclipse spiritual, cultural, or transcendent aspirations.” With Locke’s help, duties to family would be seen “as a burden upon personal autonomy” and constraints on personal liberties “were to be largely eviscerated.” Yoram Hazony, author of The Virtue of Nationalism, singles out Locke for delivering a “closed system” of secular-rationalist principles antithetical to traditional beliefs and institutions. “[T]here is nothing in the liberal system that requires you, or even encourages you, to also adopt a commitment to God, the Bible, family, or nation,” he writes. Instead, the application of Lockean principles — in every instance — has guaranteed “the dissolution of these fundamental traditional institutions.” Like other members of the new right, Hazony condemns Lockean liberalism as fundamentally at odds with “the Anglo-American conservative tradition.”

It is reasonable to wonder, with all due respect, whether these critics have read any of Locke’s works. This brand of “conservatism,” disconnected from historical realities, is a creature of recent invention. On March 7, 1766, for example, when Lord Chancellor Charles Pratt addressed the House of Lords to oppose Britain’s attempt to tax the American colonists without their consent, he turned to Locke for support: “His principles are drawn from the heart of our constitution, which he thoroughly understood, and will last as long as that shall last.”

It is time to admit an obvious possibility: that the leaders of the American Revolution, along with their principled defenders in Great Britain, understood better than disillusioned 21st-century academics what Locke’s writings meant for the cause of human freedom.

Talk of Locke as the serpent in the garden — the thinker who unleashed the sins of materialism, expressive individualism, and militant secularism into the world — is bound up with mistaken schemes to reverse the decay. The advocates of national conservatism, Catholic integralism, and common-good constitutionalism have at least two things in common: They misrepresent and therefore reject the core tenets of Lockean liberalism, and, consequently, they are enamored with state power as the guarantor of a virtuous society.

Their short memories need refreshing. Locke’s earliest writings on politics and religion — from around the time of the Restoration in 1660 — reveal him as a staunch defender of the monarchy and the national church. But as the Restoration project quickly degenerated into autocracy and religious repression, Locke reversed himself, emerging as the most powerful voice in the 17th century for the principles that would form the bedrock of America’s experiment in ordered liberty: natural equality, individual rights, religious freedom, the separation of church and state, government by consent, and the right to resist tyrannical government.

It seems likely that Locke elevated the role of education because he watched with horror as political and religious authoritarians — hell-bent on implementing their vision of “the good society” — ran roughshod over the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. Locke offered a better path to a more just, humane, and unified society, not only by the application of his political principles, but through the careful moral and religious formation of the next generation. “The well educating of their children is so much the duty and concern of parents, and the welfare and prosperity of the nation so much depends on it,” he contended, “that I would have everyone lay it seriously to heart.”

Our collective failure to give children an education in virtue lies at the root of the nation’s moral crisis. John Locke and the architects of the liberal political tradition did not create the pathologies that afflict us — rather, they provided a remedy. We would do well to make use of it.

—

Joseph Loconte, PhD, is a Presidential Scholar in Residence at New College of Florida and the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. He is the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.

National Review: When the United Nations Actually Stood for Something Good

This article was originally posted at National Review.

In a rare moment of concord, members of the United Nations General Assembly rose to honor an American political leader for her role in crafting the world’s first international bill of rights. Seventy-five years ago, on December 10, 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt, former first lady, got a standing ovation for guiding to passage the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Though not legally binding, the UDHR would become a transformational document and the conceptual North Star for the modern human-rights movement.

At the moment of its passage, however, one of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — the Soviet Union, along with its communist client states — was engaged in a ruthless campaign to destroy the most basic rights and freedoms of half the population of Europe.

In June 1948, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had ordered a blockade of West Berlin, in an effort to drive the democratic Allies out of Germany and tighten its totalitarian grip over the continent. Harry Truman, who became president after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, responded with the Berlin Airlift: American and British planes, loaded with food, fuel, and clothing, began landing every few minutes — 24 hours a day, seven days a week — to keep the West Berliners alive and free. The Cold War was in full swing.

It was the Second World War and the Holocaust, of course, that put the issue of human rights at the center of efforts to remake the international order. It would have been inconceivable not to address the question of human rights, given the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, the full extent of which became known in 1945–46 during the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals.

The conscience of mankind was quickened by these revelations — just long enough to reflect on what it means to be human, and the natural obligations we have to one another as members of the same human family.

The leadership in the Kremlin, however, was indifferent to matters of conscience, having dispensed with God and the concept of moral truth from the days of the 1917 Marxist revolution. The Soviet Union’s most recent act of aggression apparently prompted a “come to Jesus” moment for Mrs. Roosevelt and much of the democratic West: the end of illusions about the nature of atheistic communism. She finally grasped that the Soviets meant something quite different by the terms “freedom” and “democracy” as understood in the United States.

Speaking at the Sorbonne in Paris in September 1948, Mrs. Roosevelt admitted that Moscow’s failure to respect human rights had become a major obstacle to world peace. “We must not be deluded by the efforts of the forces of reaction to prostitute the great words of our free tradition and thereby to confuse the struggle,” she said. “We know the patterns of totalitarianism: the single political party, the control of schools, press, radio, the arts, the sciences, and the church to support autocratic authority.”

Mrs. Roosevelt’s moral awakening was late in coming. As the American representative on the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, she carried the immense prestige of her husband’s reputation. She also shared the weaknesses of his political outlook: a naïveté about radical evil that is now deeply rooted in the progressive Left (and, it seems, in the theocratic pretensions of the new Right).

Franklin Roosevelt set a new template of delusionary politics for the political Left. Once the Soviet Union became an ally of the United States in the war against Hitler’s Germany, Roosevelt transformed Stalin — one of the most vicious, paranoid, and murderous dictators of the 20th century — into “Uncle Joe.” Uncle Joe Stalin, FDR told the American people, was a courageous statesman and political visionary who really wanted the same egalitarian society sought by Western leaders.

Like her husband, Eleanor Roosevelt believed that the Russians nurtured democratic impulses — they just needed a little encouragement. During the debates over the core principles of the Universal Declaration, the Soviets — with their materialist outlook on human existence — insisted that social and economic “rights” be included alongside basic political and civil rights. As co-author of the New Deal, Mrs. Roosevelt was sympathetic to the Russian appeal and willing to accommodate them to win their approval for the document.

The result: The Universal Declaration includes not only civil and political rights (articles 1–21), but also economic and social rights (articles 22–29). The “right” to a paid vacation sits on the same moral plane as the right not to be tortured. Human rights — the natural and unalienable rights articulated by John Locke and the American Founders — became hopelessly confused with social aspirations. This represented a radical break from virtually all previous human-rights documents. (In the end, the Soviets balked, abstaining from the U.N. vote on the UDHR.)

Nevertheless, perhaps the most important achievement of the Universal Declaration was its defense of individual conscience in matters of faith. Article 18 affirms the right to “freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.” The article also explicitly promotes the public influence of religion: “This right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

Here is the crown jewel of the entire document, a thoroughly American understanding of the centrality of religious liberty to democratic societies. It is freedom of conscience that anchors freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, and the right to protest the government. Since the passage of the UDHR, even secular-minded human-rights groups have been obliged to criticize governments for persecuting religious minorities or treating religious believers as a de facto threat to the state. The U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief has usually attracted the most fair-minded diplomats in the U.N. system.

It was not an American, however, who delivered the most effective defense of religious freedom during the debates over the UDHR. Rather, it was the Lebanese ambassador to the United States, Charles Malik, an Arab Christian and great admirer of America. “People’s minds and consciences are the most sacred and inviolable things about them,” he argued, “not their belonging to this or that class, this or that nation, or this or that religion.”

As the chief author of Article 18, Malik had to fight off its critics — not only the Soviet delegates, but also those from the Arab states and socialist governments like that of India. The Indian delegate, Hansa Mehta, rejected Malik’s effort to establish a philosophical and spiritual basis for human dignity. “We should not enter into this maze of ideology,” she said. Malik fired back: “Well, unfortunately, whatever you say, Madam, one must have ideological presuppositions and, no matter how much you fight shy of them, they are there and you either hide them or you are brave enough to bring them out into the open.”

Malik offered a model of Christian statesmanship at a crisis moment in the West, when the biblical foundations of our democratic ideals faced a totalitarian threat. His brand of leadership is still needed, because new threats to human freedom are on the move.

In the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, its authors decried the fact that “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” Yet U.N. members parade their contempt for its principles with impunity. Authoritarian states like Russia — despite its brutal and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine — maintain their status as permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. Earlier this year, Communist China earned a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council — despite its genocidal campaign against the Uyghurs and its abrogation of basic democratic freedoms in Hong Kong.

“Unless man’s proper nature, unless his mind and spirit are brought out, set apart, protected, and promoted,” Malik warned, “the struggle for human rights is a sham and a mockery.” There is no hope of reversing the international sham of protecting human rights until a new generation of statesmen takes up Malik’s challenge.

—

Joseph Loconte, PhD, is a Presidential Scholar in Residence at New College of Florida and the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. He is the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.

Wall Street Journal: ‘The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien’ Review: Notes From Middle-earth

This article was originally posted at Wall Street Journal.

On Sept. 15, 1939, two weeks after Nazi Germany invaded Poland, triggering World War II, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to his publisher to explain why he didn’t expect to make much progress on his new story about hobbits. “I am liable to be summoned to a job undertaken last Spring at any moment, and have no idea what time, if any, outside it I shall have.” The story in question was his epic masterpiece, “The Lord of the Rings.” The job in question was that of codebreaker for the British Foreign Office.

The letter is among more than 150 previously unpublished letters contained in an expanded edition of Tolkien’s correspondence, dating from 1914, when he was a soldier in World War I, to August 1973, four days before his death. There are some revealing gems in the new edition of “The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien”—the first appeared in 1981—though Tolkien enthusiasts may be disappointed by what remains under lock and key.

The present collection, drawing on material originally assembled by Humphrey Carpenter (d. 2005) with the assistance of Tolkien’s youngest son, Christopher (d. 2020), illuminates Tolkien’s family and professional life, his friendships and his grueling effort to complete his saga about Middle-earth. No authorized biography has appeared since Carpenter’s “J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography” (1977), and the letters are the closest thing we have to an autobiography, as Chris Smith, an editor at HarperCollins, rightly says in his introductory note.

Unfortunately, the revised volume offers very little about Tolkien’s wartime service—he fought at the Battle of the Somme in 1916—or his struggles in the years immediately after the war. Tolkien once said that his love for fantasy was “quickened to full life by war.” But how? As in the earlier volume, his letters from 1914 to 1918 are almost completely omitted, on the grounds of being “highly personal in character.”

We learn more about Tolkien’s conservative politics, especially during the Cold War. In a letter to his son Michael, dated Nov. 6, 1956, Tolkien notes the popular “hysteria” over Britain’s role in the Suez crisis. The Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser had seized the Suez Canal, causing Israel—joined by Britain and France—to send troops into Egypt to reclaim it. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had just invaded Hungary to crush the democratic revolution led by Imre Nagy. “Half Oxford is in a kind of screaming frenzy—about Suez not Hungary!”

Tolkien proceeds to chide the Oxford professors and undergraduates noisily protesting government policy, the “pacifists” destroying private property, and the fellow dons screaming “fascist” at colleagues who disagreed with them. “What a rot and stink is left by liberalism devoid of religion!” He also worries that encroaching socialist policies will reduce him to poverty. “As it is socialist legislation is robbing me of probably ¾ of the fruits of my labors, and my ‘royalties’ are merely waiting in the bank until the Tax Collectors walk in and bag them. Do you wonder that anyone who can gets out of this island?”

There are more apologetic letters to Tolkien’s publisher, explaining his delay in providing final drafts, maps and appendices to his epic novel. “I am sorry that I have cracked at the critical moment,” he writes to Rayner Unwin in November 1953, “but this year has been too much for me!” A year later: “I have been trying hard; but I have been grievously harried.” And, again, in May 1955: “To prevent a collapse I am just secretly disappearing without a word to anyone.” Tolkien once admitted that had it not been for the great encouragement of his Oxford friend, C.S. Lewis, “I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion.”

Of special interest is Tolkien’s extensive summary of the story’s plot, included for the first time in a lengthy 1951 letter intended to persuade another publisher to release the book together with “The Silmarillion” (the attempt failed). The catastrophic years of World War II, when Tolkien wrote most of the story, had brought its key themes into focus. In his outline of the first volume, “The Fellowship of the Ring,” for example, Tolkien writes that “rumors of troubles in the great world outside reach the Hobbits, especially the rise again of the Enemy.” For “The Two Towers,” he draws attention to the wizard Saruman, “who has turned himself to evil and seeks for domination.” In his summary of “The Return of the King,” the final volume, we read of Sam Gamgee and “his supreme plain dogged common-sensible heroism in aid of his master.”

All of these ideas were deeply meaningful to Tolkien: the contagion of war, the persistence of radical evil and the courage required to meet it. All are found in the classical, biblical and medieval literature that inspired his imaginative world. They also defined everyday life for the British people during the nightmare years of 1939-45.

In a 1954 letter to Katharine Farrer, a detective-story writer, Tolkien thanks her for her review of “The Fellowship,” which had just been published. He was grateful that Farrer had emphasized the “morality” of the story. “It was not ‘planned,’ of course, but arose naturally in the attempt to treat the matter seriously; but it is now the foundation.” The “kernel” of the work, he adds, is found in the final volume of the book, in Frodo’s words to Sam when the Ring of Power has been destroyed. After bearing the terrible burden of carrying the Ring, Frodo finds himself changed, unable to resume his life in the Shire: “I have been too deeply hurt. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.”

Tolkien thus reveals the moral bedrock of his literary outlook: the necessity of heroic sacrifice in the face of impossible odds, to rescue the innocent from great evil. Here is a vision of redemption with roots in an ancient story. “It brought tears to my eyes to write it, and still moves me, and I cannot help believing that it is a supreme moment of its kind.”

—

Joseph Loconte, PhD, is a Presidential Scholar in Residence at New College of Florida and the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. He is the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.

National Review: For Wisdom about the Jews and Civilization, Consult Albert Einstein

This article was originally posted at National Review.

In September 1933, when the world’s most famous scientist, a Jew, was forced to renounce his German citizenship and flee for his life, he knew he would find safe harbor in the democracies of the West. With help from friends in Great Britain, Albert Einstein arrived in England and settled into a country hut in the coastal town of Cromer.

After it was reported that the Nazis had put a hefty price on Einstein’s head, Commander Oliver Lampson, a benefactor, placed an armed guard at the property. Einstein quipped: “I really had no idea my head was worth all that.” Before leaving for the United States, where his arrival was eagerly awaited, Einstein confessed to a reporter: “I could not believe that it was possible that such spontaneous affection could be extended to one who is a wanderer on the face of the earth.”

Such affection for a Jew — regardless of his credentials or circumstances — no longer seems possible in the West. Israel’s war against Hamas, following the terrorist group’s genocidal assault on Israeli civilians, has unleashed an ancient hatred. Historian Paul Johnson once called it “a disease of the mind.” The sickness of antisemitism that has expressed itself in the streets, universities, and capitals — from London to Paris to New York — is another symptom of the crisis of the West. Near the heart of this catastrophe is a staggering ignorance of our history: of the ideals and institutions that built our civilization and made possible achievements in human freedom, equality, and justice unrivaled in the human story.

Einstein knew all about them. On October 3, 1933, just before he left for his permanent home in America, he delivered a speech to an international audience at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Entitled “Science and Civilization,” it was his first public appearance since Hitler’s rise to power. Scotland Yard had received a warning earlier in the day: “Be on your guard — there’s a plot to assassinate Einstein tonight.” Other critics of Hitler’s regime — and Einstein was unsparing — had recently been murdered by the Nazis. Nevertheless, as the New York Times reported, “he spoke as unconcernedly as if lecturing in a classroom.”

It was quite a lecture — an unabashed tribute to Western civilization that, in today’s climate, would probably be shouted down at nearly every Ivy League university in America. “Today,” he warned, “the questions which concern us are: How can we save mankind and its spiritual acquisitions of which we are the heirs? How can we save Europe from a new disaster?” Einstein’s answer was to recommit ourselves to defending the achievements of our civilization: in politics, science, philosophy, literature, medicine, and the arts.

“We are concerned not merely with the technical problem of securing and maintaining peace, but also with the important task of education and enlightenment,” he said. “If we want to resist the powers which threaten to suppress the intellectual and individual freedom, we must keep clearly before us what is at stake and what we owe to that freedom which our ancestors have won for us after hard struggles.” Without this freedom, Einstein explained, there would have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Pasteur. Without these thinkers, without the scientific and technological advances pioneered in the West, “most people would live a dull life of slavery.” Despotism would be the norm.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity, published in 1915, revolutionized the world of physics and made him an international celebrity. But his Jewish identity, and his criticism of the Nazis, made him an object of scorn in the German press. His scientific works were publicly burned in Berlin. Nazi propaganda showed a photograph of Einstein with a caption in capital letters: “Not yet hanged.” The assassination of one of his associates in Czechoslovakia, the German-Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing, convinced him to leave the continent.

Although sympathetic to the Zionist cause, Einstein had lived through the industrial slaughterhouse of the First World War, seeing firsthand the consequences of militant nationalism. He initially resisted the idea of a Jewish state. He also regarded the Arab peoples living in Palestine as “kinfolk” and worried that a Jewish state on Arab land would create hostilities. But the deepening antisemitism in Germany and Europe helped to change his mind.

When he was asked to explain what he found most compelling about his Jewish heritage, Einstein extolled the “pursuit of knowledge for its own sake,” as well as “a strong critical spirit” that prevents “blind obeisance to any mortal authority.” He also revealed his understanding of the gift of the Jews to Western civilization. It involved, in his words, “the democratic ideal of social justice” and “tolerance among all men.” Einstein argued that the Jewish concept of a moral law, rooted in the belief in a purposeful Creator, had powerfully influenced Christianity and Islam and “had a benign influence upon the social structure of a great part of mankind.”

These historical insights are no longer part of the educational outlook of the West. Instead, the contribution of Judaism to the cause of justice and freedom is virtually unknown in the academy. Likewise, courses in Western civilization have all but vanished from the nation’s leading colleges and universities. Interest in studying the humanities — the disciplines that reveal the stunning achievements of the West — has hit an all-time low. Meanwhile, there has never been a moment in the modern period when self-loathing, directed at our own democratic and religious traditions, has been so violent and widespread.

These problems are not unrelated. If we want to understand the nature of this fearsome outbreak of antisemitism today, the war-torn streets of Gaza are not the place to begin. In 1933, when the Nazi Party took over Germany, a Jewish refugee fled to the West and explained what the unfolding crisis meant for his generation. Albert Einstein implored his audience to “care for what is eternal and highest among our possessions.”

The fate of the Jews and the fate of the West were inextricably linked. They have become so again.

—

Joseph Loconte, PhD, is a Presidential Scholar in Residence at New College of Florida and the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. He is the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.

Law & Liberty: A New Beachhead for Western Civilization

This article was originally posted at Law & Liberty.

This fall I joined the faculty at New College of Florida, where educators are engaged in a radical experiment: to transmit the story of Western civilization—its achievements as well as its failings—as an essential requirement of citizenship. That this proposition is considered radical speaks to the moral rot in our national life.

New College, the state’s honors college, has received international attention because of the role of Governor Ron DeSantis in appointing conservatives to its board of trustees. Earlier this year, the board voted to close the school’s office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and eliminate courses in gender studies, the first public college in the nation to do so.

The partisan nature of the debate over the intended reforms at New College obscures a profoundly important question: Is liberal democracy—and the civilization from which it emerged—worth defending? Ironically, many conservatives are as desperately confused about the answer to this question as is the progressive Left. 

The historical narrative of the Left is that Western civilization is a conceit. It has produced a toxic mix of imperialism, militarism, and racism. Our democratic ideals and institutions, we are told, are tools of the oppressor against the oppressed. The United States, as the lead nation in the West, is largely a force for evil in the world.

The storyline of the new Right, however, can be equally damning of our liberal, democratic tradition. A growing cohort has become disillusioned with the American Founding. For them, the United States was conceived in a state of sin—not primarily the sin of slavery, but rather the devilish Enlightenment ideas about human freedom, equality, and natural rights. The inevitable result was a society awash in materialism and radical individualism.

Both of these ideological tribes share the same vice: the blinkered outlook of the cynic. Largely ignorant of our civilizational history, they cling to distorted notions of our past and thus plot utopian visions for our future—either militantly secular or semi-theocratic. But a liberal arts education, firmly grounded in the humanities, offers a better path.

It begins with the knowledge that Western civilization is the centuries-long interaction of Greek and Roman culture, adopted and transformed by the Jewish and Christian traditions, and then transformed again by the scientific, democratic, and intellectual revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe and the United States. Over the course of the twentieth century, through two world wars and a Cold War, our civilization—indeed, all of human civilization—barely survived the prospect of extinction.

This should give us pause. What we call the Western tradition is a story of exploitation, slavery, inquisitions, and war—as well as a story of exploration, freedom, enlightenment, and redemption. Our civilization is something far less than heaven on earth, yet far better than most of the historical alternatives.

Why devote attention to the West? What about Asia, Africa, and the civilization of Islam? They all have influenced Western civilization.

Consider some of the features of modern life that we take for granted: universal education; access to quality health care; clean, running water in abundance; the application of science to harness resources that enrich our lives in countless ways; economic systems that make creative and meaningful work possible; and political societies based on the concepts of government by consent, freedom of speech, assembly, and the freedom to worship God, or no God, according to individual conscience.

All of these accomplishments, though embraced in many parts of the world, were pioneered by inventors and thinkers in the West. These are the fruits of one civilization, in particular, our own.

In his book Civilization: The West and the Rest, British historian Niall Ferguson observes that the dominance of Western culture during the last 500 years is a stunning historical development that demands an explanation. “It is the story at the very heart of modern history,” Ferguson writes. “It is perhaps the most challenging riddle historians have to solve.”

The task of the educator in relation to his student, Locke wrote, is “not so much to teach him all that is knowable, as to raise in him a love and esteem of knowledge and to put him in the right way of knowing, and improving himself, when he has a mind to it.”

In a healthy academic environment, young minds will be encouraged to grapple with this riddle. Rather than arguing over the merits of programs to support diversity, equity, and inclusion, a wiser approach would be to grasp how and why the West has placed such a supreme value on pluralism, fairness, and equal justice under the law. Like no other civilization in history, the West has attempted—haltingly, to be sure—to apply the Golden Rule to its political culture.

This was one of the signal contributions of English philosopher John Locke, considered the father of political liberalism. More compellingly than any other thinker, Locke anchored his arguments for freedom and equality in a biblical view of the human person: man as “God’s workmanship,” as he put it in his Second Treatise of Government (1689). Equally important, he understood that these ideas must be transmitted to the next generation. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Locke insisted that “the welfare and prosperity of the nation” depended on the proper education of young people.

At New College, this education will involve a robust commitment to a liberal arts curriculum rooted in the humanities: the disciplines of literature, politics, philosophy, history, and the arts, as they have developed in the Western tradition. Americans are in the throes of a national argument over what kind of education is essential for our modern democracy. There is less debate, however, over the appalling deficit of decency and civility in our political and civic lives. The precipitous decline of the liberal arts in education is surely part of the reason.

Locke’s contemporaries, too, complained bitterly about the degraded levels of both civic virtue and personal piety. The task of the educator in relation to his student, Locke wrote, is “not so much to teach him all that is knowable, as to raise in him a love and esteem of knowledge and to put him in the right way of knowing, and improving himself, when he has a mind to it.” To cultivate a love for knowledge, not only for its own sake, but for the improvement of our souls: This has been the defining contribution of the classical liberal tradition in the West, a deep source of its cultural health and vigor.

It can become so again—if we have a mind to do it.

—

Joseph Loconte is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Grove City College and Senior Fellow at the Institute on Religion and Democracy. He’s also the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.

National Review: The Decline of the King’s College Reflects Western Civilizational Decay

This article was originally posted at National Review.

Earlier this month the King’s College in New York City announced it was canceling classes for the fall semester, laying off most of its faculty and staff, and struggling to recover its recently revoked academic accreditation. The fate of Manhattan’s most prominent Christian Evangelical college — a school rooted in the political and literary canon of Western civilization — is uncertain.

Nevertheless, the decline of the King’s College is bound up not only with the ills of higher education, but also with the deeper cultural crisis affecting America and the West.

Having served as a professor of history at King’s for more than a decade, I am aware of the college’s challenges and self-inflicted wounds. But if the college fails, its failure cannot be blamed exclusively on the impact of Covid-19, rising crime rates, declining enrollment, or tangle-footed leadership. Something much deeper, and more debilitating, is at work: a collective indifference about the remarkable inheritance of our Judeo-Christian civilization and our moral obligation to preserve it for each generation.

On the political and cultural Left, this indifference often amounts to contempt. Western civilization, we are told, is a conceit. Our traditional beliefs and institutions are merely a social construction: tools of the oppressor against the oppressed. The United States, as the lead country in the West, is the embodiment of all its failings. Thus, courses on Western civilization have virtually disappeared in higher education, and the history of the United States is retold as a tale of unremitting racism and exploitation.

It is not only the radical Left, however, that ignores our inheritance in the ideals and institutions of the West. Today there are voices on the political and religious Right that seem unaware of this legacy and its impact on the American political order. National conservatives, among others, portray the liberal tradition — from John Locke to James Madison — as morally toxic. In doing so, they fail to grasp how Christian ideas about freedom, forgiveness, charity, equality, and justice were able to permeate our culture — and how easily these ideas become corrupted or discarded.

Ironically, both the progressive Left and the new Right fail to comprehend the crucial educational task of transmission. As the American Founders put it in the Northwest Ordinance (1787): “Religion, morality and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

This helps to explain the plight of the King’s College. Its students tend to be risk-takers, and the setting of New York City separates the wheat from the chaff pretty quickly. Since its move to Manhattan in 1999, the college has sent its graduates into the fields of law, journalism, finance, business, education, and the arts. Many have gone to top-tier graduate and professional schools, such as Harvard, Yale, New York University, Columbia, Northwestern, and the University of Chicago. They are some of the most entrepreneurial, mission-oriented young people you will meet. And their sense of vocation, refined in the crucible of New York City, is nurtured in an academic environment where the cultivation of the mind — alongside the cultivation of Christian character — is taken seriously.

Thus the question, Where are the conservative and Christian foundations and philanthropists who understand the critical role of education in cultural renewal? Where are they investing their treasures? More and more of it is going into political campaigns: The idolization of politics now cuts across partisan lines.

In the 2020 presidential election, for example, conservative and Republican donors gave the Trump campaign a staggering $1.96 billion — and to what effect? Just 1 percent of that amount — nearly $20 million — would reopen and reinvigorate the King’s College overnight. Ten percent, roughly $200 million, could create a flagship Christian research institution with state-of-the-art facilities in New York City. It would establish a beachhead of intellectual and spiritual sanity in one of the most strategic cultural centers in the world.

Often it requires the perspective of those deprived of the achievements of our liberal democratic tradition to appreciate its unrivaled importance to human flourishing. Yeonmi Park, who escaped from North Korea at the age of 13, describes her bizarre experience after arriving in the United States and moving to New York City. In an essay for the Free Press, she explains that she wanted to free herself of the mental outlook of the typical North Korean — the habit of not being able to think for herself. But she found that the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and her education at Columbia were of no help to her.

Why? Because of the drumbeat of self-loathing that she encountered in the liberal media and in her circle of progressive friends. She identified the Western canon as her lifeline:

It wasn’t the education I received at Columbia, or following the American press, that helped me. I was reading old books. . . . I started to believe, as I still do now, that the only way to think for yourself is to ignore the mainstream media, and largely forget the daily news cycle, and connect instead with the great minds of the past, who know all of our problems better than we do ourselves. There is a reason why the great books of Western civilization are all banned in dictatorships.

Park is talking about the humanities: the disciplines of history, literature, politics, philosophy, economics, the arts, and religion. These subjects once formed the lifeblood of our greatest academic institutions. They were the safe harbor where the most important questions could be asked and debated: questions about justice and virtue, about politics and the good society, and about the meaning and purpose of our mortal lives. It is through the study of the humanities that the collective wisdom of the West in grappling with those questions is transmitted.

This has been the mission of the King’s College, in a city that seems increasingly cut off from the spiritual inheritance of our Judeo-Christian civilization. The school has been sustained financially by a relatively small group of generous donors. Its struggles reflect the fact that too many conservatives are as detached from the value of its educational purpose as is the woke Left. With a handful of wonderful exceptions, we cannot depend on the current leadership in the conservative Christian community to appreciate the depth of the problem.

More than 40 years ago, Charles Malik, the Lebanese diplomat and an Arab Christian, saw it clearly. He issued a challenge to Evangelicals during a speech at the dedication of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. “If Christians do not care for the intellectual health of their own children and for the fate of their own civilization,” he asked, “a health and fate so inextricably bound up with the state of the mind and the spirit in the universities, who is going to care?”

To care about the Christian university is to care about our young people — which requires a supreme commitment to caring about the future. Historically, this was the motive force behind the transformation of the Greco-Roman world by the teachings of Jesus and his disciples. Tom Holland, a classical historian and the author of Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, has acknowledged his own surprise at “what it was that made Christianity so subversive and disruptive” of the ethical norms and assumptions of classical culture. “So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization,” he writes, “that it has come to be hidden from view.”

There are in the West today powerful forces dedicated to keeping Christianity’s impact hidden in the shadows. But the Christian academy, like no other institution, can chase away the shadows with Light: the light of young minds illuminated by Truths that have built and sustained our civilization over the centuries.

A civilization that does not care very much about these things gets exactly what it deserves.

—

Joseph Loconte is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Grove City College and Senior Fellow at the Institute on Religion and Democracy. He’s also the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.