Category Archives: Christian morality

The Abolition of Creation and the Gender Revolution (Part One)

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Why This Series?

Recently a group of ministers from one of the most secular regions of the United States asked me to present a series of lectures on the challenges contemporary secular culture poses to the church, specifically the popular hostility toward the moral vision of life taught in the New Testament and treasured by the church for 2000 years. Some of them had read my 14-part critical review (September and October 2021) of Karen Keen, Scripture, Ethics, and the Possibility of Same-Sex Relationships* and wanted me to follow up with a more comprehensive treatment. I proposed to address the topic under four headings:

The Abolition of Creation

The Abolition of the Biblical Text

Reclaiming Creation

Reclaiming the Biblical Text

In the next few posts, I want to develop these topics in preparation for my presentations. Perhaps readers can help me refine my thought.

The Darkening of Creation

From July 22 to August 6, 2021, I wrote a five-part review of Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to the Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2020). Trueman explains the origin and agenda of his book in this way:

“The origins of this book lie in my curiosity about how and why a particular statement has come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful: “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” (p. 19).

Like Truman, I am curious about how this change occurred. What factors led people to abandon the moral significance of the order of nature? How could so fundamental a distinction as the biological difference between male and female be completely disengaged from human identity?** Truman began his study with Jean Jacques Rousseau and traced the sexual revolution from the 18th to the 21st century. I will interact with some of the same thinkers as Truman did, but instead of beginning with Rousseau I will begin with Galileo and the scientific revolution. Truman did not describe extensively the premodern understanding of nature and natural law. But I think it is important to explain how Plato, Aristotle, and later Christian philosophers understood and experienced nature. Only then, I think, can we understand what forces led to the abolition of creation as a source of moral guidance and spiritual inspiration. This essay will be devoted to describing the view of nature’s moral order that modern thinkers dismantled and replaced with subjective human feelings.

The Way Things Were

Before 1500, people saw nature as a unity containing different kinds of things, living and nonliving, plants and animals of different shapes and colors. Each individual thing is an organic whole, a unity, an identity. And this inner unity—a mystery in itself—reveals itself in its outer manifestations: that is in the total impact of its color, shape, smell, texture, taste, sounds, and for animals, also in their behaviors. This way of experiencing nature is a matter of common sense, which everybody possesses. Such philosophers as Plato and Aristotle, however, asked theoretical questions about our common-sense experience: what is the inner basis of the distinct identities of things? What accounts for their unified, spontaneous, and purposeful activity?

In common sense we perceive unreflectively the unity of the being and activity of living things, but stop at that unexamined perception. Practical necessity demands no more. Plato and Aristotle—each in his own way—designated the inner principle of identity “form.” And they named the power for unified, spontaneous, purposeful action “soul.” Designating the inner principle of identity as “form” assures us that this principle is intelligible or mind-like; for that is the only way to make sense of the perceptible differences among things. Matter alone cannot account for the order and qualities that differentiate one kind of thing from another.

Even though forms are too complex for us to grasp in one act of understanding in the way we can grasp a simple mathematical idea, they must be intelligible, if only to the divine mind. Likewise, the inner power for unified, spontaneous, purposeful action (soul) must be nonmaterial. Note here that the doctrine of forms and souls postulates a likeness between our inner world of mind, will, and life and the inner world of things in nature. To anticipate future posts, the scientific revolution shattered this likeness and drove a wedge between the human reality and nature.

Admittedly, giving the names “form” and “soul” and “nature” and “substance” to the inner principles of things adds nothing to our common-sense understanding of things. For what information does it add to the appearances of things to postulate a hidden cause of those appearances? But it does articulate our confidence that our ordinary perceptions of the distinct identities of things are perceptions of something real in itself, that is, the invisible reality in things that shows itself through the appearances. The appearances of things are revelations of the inner reality of things. They are not deceptive.

The Christian thinkers Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas took up the concepts pioneered by Plato and Aristotle and incorporated them into the Christian doctrine of creation. The creation as a whole and all creatures within it embody ideas and purposes that find their archetypes in the mind of God. Augustine and Aquinas used such concepts as ideas, forms, souls, and natures to designate and explain our common-sense perception of the inner unity and reality of things and of their inner power for spontaneous, purposeful action. Like the forms and souls of Plato and Aristotle, their Christian adaptations add nothing to our perceptions of the appearances of things. Nevertheless, they assert our confidence that through the appearances our minds make contact with the intelligible inner reality of things.

There is more, however, because the Christian doctrine of creation also assures us that in knowing the forms of things through the appearances, our minds also contact the mind and will of God. Thereby, our ordinary common-sense experience of nature is drawn into the religious and moral sphere. The glory of God and the nature of the good is at least partially revealed in the appearances of creatures.

Observations and Anticipations

1. Hence, we can see clearly why people living before scientific revolution of the seventeenth century would find the statement “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” (Truman, p. 19) not only false but incomprehensible. Laughable even. For if a human being appears to the senses as male, we can be certain that his inner reality (or form) is male. Forms do not deceive us by appearing in bodies as something they are not in themselves.

2. The traditional Christian doctrine of creation adds another dimension. Because the forms that give each creature its identity find their archetypes in God’s mind and embody God’s good will, they demand our respect. They are revelations of God’s wisdom and goodness. It would have struck a person living 400 years ago as impious, ungrateful, and irrational to reject one’s sex.

3. Before the modern era, common sense, the doctrine of forms, and the Christian doctrine of creation together provided a strong foundation for the conviction that a moral law is woven into the fabric of creation. Some activities are good and some are bad. Some are right and some are wrong. And these moral distinctions can be discerned by reason and common sense. For Augustine and Thomas Aquinas or any of their contemporaries, it would have seemed as irrational as it is wrong for a human being to live as an animal or a male to live as a female or a female to live as a male.

Next Time: We will see how the architects of the scientific revolution—Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, et al.—destroyed confidence in the reality of forms and souls and replaced them with atoms, space, and machines. The appearances no longer reveal the reality of things. Creation is emptied of spiritual reality, meaning, purpose, moral law, and beauty, all of which are transferred to the inner subjective world of the human mind.

*Subsequently published in revised form as Ron Highfield, The Choice: Should the Church Affirm LGBTQ+ Identities and Ways of Living (Keledei Publications, 2024).

**If you want to think about the true nature of the biological distinction between the sexes, I recommend reading Tomas Bogardus, The Nature of the Sexes: Why Biology Matters (Routledge, 2026). Bogardus is a philosopher colleague of mine. I will say more about this book in a later post.

Without God, Without Soul, Without Heart

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The Postmodern University

In the previous essay we examined Julia Schleck’s defense* of the postmodern university. Though she admits that the postmodern university no longer believes in knowledge, truth, and virtue in the traditional senses of these terms, she nevertheless argues that society ought to grant professors academic freedom and tenure and generous financial support even though they engage in activities that seem destructive, useless or perverse to most people. My somewhat tongue in cheek paraphrase of her argument goes like this:

Trust us with your children and your money. Give us unfettered freedom, good pay, and lifetime employment. But don’t expect us to answer to you or explain why your investments are sound.

With Scheck’s argument in mind, I want to contrast the idea of a Christian college with her description of the postmodern university. As I observed in my former essay,

A university that no longer believes in knowledge, truth, or virtue no longer believes in itself. As far as I can tell, its driving purpose is maintenance of a system that provides faculty unfettered freedom, good pay, and lifetime employment in exchange for expressing their private opinions in esoteric vocabularies.

By rejecting all presupposed knowledge, truth, and virtue, the postmodern university loses its purpose, forfeits its prospects for progress, and gives up any measure by which we could judge its outcomes. To the casual observer, the postmodern university’s rejection of all “dogmas,” presuppositions, and time-honored truths, and its openness to strange and unpopular ideas may seem the epitome of enlightenment and a fine formula for uncovering new truth. But in this “the casual observer” is completely mistaken. For as described by Schleck, the postmodern university is not about discovering true and useful ideas. It’s about winning a struggle for power and money. The postmodern university replaces knowledge, truth, and virtue with ideology, power, and pretense.

The Christian College

A Christian college worthy of its name believes in knowledge, truth, and virtue; therefore, it believes in itself. Hence it can devote itself energetically to achieving its purpose. Its knowledge is faith, its truth is God and God’s creation, and its virtue is the way of Jesus Christ.

Faith Knowledge

The founding principle of the Christian college is faith, the apostolic faith preached and preserved for us in the New Testament. Far from viciously restricting our search for understanding and truth, faith points us toward truth and away from idols and ideologies. It protects us from evil, immoral, and superstitious paths. The knowledge of faith serves as a foundation on which to build our understanding of God, the world, and ourselves. Faith provides a language within which every discipline and every professor in the college can communicate with every other. Faith, sincerely held by every member of the college community, unifies the Christian college in a way the postmodern university can never achieve.

Transcendent Truth

Because it believes in God the Creator of heaven and earth, the Christian college believes in an objective reality. For God is unchanging and eternal and is the Creator of all else. Truth is the conceptual form of reality and knowledge is the form of a mind in which dwells truth. In faith, the Christian college believes it possesses knowledge of God centrally and principally in Jesus Christ who is the living truth of God manifest in the world. And with respect to this knowledge, its purpose is twofold: (1) to pass this knowledge to the next generation unchanged and (2) to seek deeper understanding of the truth in all its dimensions. Every discipline and every professor is united in this purpose. All seek to know God and God’s works in truth.

True Virtue

A Christian college worthy of its name looks to Jesus Christ as the model for its conduct. There are not two systems of virtue, one for the church and one for the Christian college. Jesus Christ is the Lord of both. The way of Jesus is obedience to the Father; his is the way of humility, faith, love, hope, peace, and patience. The Christian college affirms the teaching of Jesus and his chosen apostles as the normative guide for our relationships to others and the use of our bodies. We are not allowed to do as we please with regard to money, power, sex, and honor. We must bring our words and deeds under the sanctifying and strengthening power of the Spirit. For the postmodern university “virtue” is a mere strategy for attaining power, a Darwinian struggle for money, control, and honor. It should not be so in a Christian college.

Freedom Versus Freedom

At first glance, the postmodern university seems to offer more freedom than does the Christian college. Professors have the freedom to reject Christian faith and traditional morality and to affirm atheism, immoralism, and perversity. They can blaspheme the holy, praise the profane, and parade the ugly without sanction. And they can teach their students to do the same. Christian colleges do not allow professors these freedoms, and true Christians do not want them. On the other hand, postmodern universities do not allow believing faculty to affirm Christian faith and interpret the world under the guidance of the Christian faith. And postmodern universities have their own dogmas, sacred cows, and lists of virtues and vices. They will not tolerate the blasphemies of sexism, homophobia, and transphobia; you may not speak against their sacraments: fornication, adultery, and abortion.

The Christian college holds a different view of freedom. There is no freedom in the power to do evil, only blindness and slavery to lust and pride. True freedom is God-given power to know the truth and do the good. Since Christian colleges believe in knowledge, truth, and virtue, they encourage believing faculty to teach and research under the guidance of their Christian faith. Students can learn from faculty who are so guided. Instructed by faith, Christian faculty can pursue the truth of God and creation with confidence, energy, and hope. And this is the freedom I cherish!

*Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism, University of Nebraska Press, 2022).

A Time for Orthodoxy? (Part Two)

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Today I want to apply the line of thought I began in “A Time for Orthodoxy” (August 17, 2024) to a situation shared by many of my readers to one degree or another. Much of my life’s energy has been devoted to two institutions, the church and the Christian college. I grew up in a conservative wing of what American church historians call the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement [from now on I will abbreviate it as S-CM]. This religious movement began in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Its main aim was to remedy the tendency among Protestant denominations to engage in interminable disputes and divisions over ever more subtle doctrinal points. The early leaders of the movement hypothesized that these disputes were generated by adherence to theological opinions that go beyond the plain meaning of the New Testament texts and get lost in logical labyrinths. Partisans enforced their doctrinal opinions with creeds, confessions of faith, and catechisms and other documents to which they demanded adherence by clergy and laity. These confessions served as the standards of orthodoxy for their party.

The Anti-Creed Stance and Commonsense Philosophy

The leaders in the S-CM combined two strategies already present within Protestantism in their efforts to bring peace to the warring Protestant parties: (1) emphasis on Scripture as the sole authority for Christian doctrine and life and (2) the distinction between essential and indifferent matters. If we follow strictly the words of Scripture, reject all mere human theological constructions (ecclesiastical creeds, confessions of faith, etc.), and require adherence only to a small number of “essential” teachings that are clearly taught in Scripture, all right-thinking believers will agree and unite in the great work of evangelism and service.

This strategy made sense to the first generation of S-CM leaders for two reasons. First, the Bible was viewed by the great majority of nineteenth-century Americans as the final court of appeal in religious disputes. Even denominational creeds and confessions of faith were in theory to be judged by Scripture. Second, along with most Americans the S-CM leaders adhered to commonsense (or Baconian) philosophy, which made a radical distinction between facts and theories in natural science. Applied to biblical interpretation, the Bible could be viewed as containing many plain facts that require no interpretation. Biblical facts (assertions of truths or events) like empirical facts can be known by everyone alike whereas elaborate combinations and logical constructions composed of facts and truths provoke disagreements.

The S-CM leaders hoped to create unity among Christian believers by requiring acceptance of only those doctrines that are plainly taught in Scripture and relegating all theories and speculations to the realm of opinion on which we may allow diversity of thought. That is to say, Scripture itself serves as the confession of faith and makes additional documents superfluous. In its own day this viewpoint possessed some plausibility for the reasons mentioned above.

The Anti-Creed Stance and Postmodern Philosophy

In our day, the naiveness of the anti-creed view has become obvious. The two historical conditions that made it plausible in the nineteenth century have disappeared. We no longer live in a culture where the Bible is widely accepted as true and authoritative. Moreover, our culture has replaced commonsense philosophy with postmodern relativism wherein each individual has their own “truth” and all “facts” are subject to contextualization and interpretation. Taking account of this new historical context explains how someone could expect the argument I discussed in “A Time for Orthodoxy?” to be persuasive:

In a case wherein many thoughtful Christians disagree on an issue, the church ought to tolerate diversity of belief, expression, and practice.

If you combine the anti-creed tradition with postmodern relativism, the argument above makes perfect sense. The Bible may very well be acknowledged as the sole authority for Christian faith and practice, but according to the argument everyone must be left free to interpreted it in their own way. In my previous essay, I made a reductio ad absurdum argument by showing that the argument implies that all views are equally true. And if all views are equally true, the distinction between truth and falsehood is meaningless. The identity of the church is obscured and its unity is shattered.

How can churches and Christian colleges guard their identity and unity in face of this absurd argument? Attempts to reassert the S-CM’s commonsense distinctions between obvious facts and truths and obscure theories won’t persuade the postmodern Christian. And reasserting the necessity of creeds and confessions of faith as standards of orthodoxy will evoke cries of intolerance and authoritarianism. What to do?

The Unfortunate Necessity of Creeds

I do not claim to know a sure-to-work solution. However, I believe that in the current postmodern climate anti-creed churches and Christian colleges must rethink their opposition to creeds and statements of faith. In spite of complaints of intolerance and authoritarianism, we must be willing to state publicly what we believe, practice and teach, and in some cases, what we reject. The details of such statements, the level of conformity expected of community members, and enforcement mechanisms will need to be worked out by those communities. The alternative is gradual erosion of institutional identity and unity. Our age is, I believe, “A Time for Orthodoxy.”

Identity Politics and the People of God (Part Two)

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In part one of this two-part series (June 13, 2024), I described the essential features of identity politics. Identity politics divides people into oppressors and the oppressed and further subdivides the oppressed into a hierarchy of oppression. One’s place in this hierarchy determines all personal relationships, communal bonds, and social policies. This vision of society is characterized by division, hostility, and shame. Communal bonds among the oppressed are forged by a sense of victimhood and hostility toward the oppressor classes. The oppressors are allowed into the community only if they confess their privilege and guilt, engage in rituals of shame, and pay reparations in some form. In this way, the oppressed become everything they hated in their oppressors. Just like their oppressors, they seek power, wealth, privilege, and honor but use a different set of virtues to rationalize their quest: justice, diversity, respect, inclusion, truth, and equity. And like their oppressors, they display the vices of greed, envy, resentment, pride, and jealousy.

The People of God

The New Testament frankly acknowledges the existence of social divisions and hierarchies, of class and ethnic consciousness. It understands the human tendency to seek power, wealth and honor, and it is well aware of the rationalizations used to justify it. It sees the widespread injustice, violence, and oppression that plagues the world. It knows of the prevalence of greed, envy, resentment, pride, and jealousy. But the New Testament neither excuses these evils as do defenders of the status quo nor attempts to reverse the order of oppression and privilege as do theorists of identity politics. The Christian vision of community is dramatically different from either order, as we can see from 1 Peter 2:9-10:

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Peter declares that those who believe in Jesus Christ have been given a new identity superseding all others. God has united people from every tribe, tongue, and class into a people, a nation. The divine power that unites them is much greater than the worldly forces that had divided them, for their unity is grounded in God’s eternal nature, will, and power. The “identities” that identity politics makes primary—race, class, sex, gender, and all others—God subordinates to the greater harmonizing force of the Holy Spirit. God orders natural and cultural diversity into a rich harmony of love, beauty, and fellowship.

Consider the identity markers these people share. They are each and all chosen by God, each and all are ordained priests, each and all are holy to God, each and all are called by God, each and all have the task of praising God, each and all have been saved from darkness and blessed with light, and each and all have been given mercy. Notice especially the words bolded in the quote from 1 Peter. Peter uses three Greek words that may sound familiar because they have been incorporated into the English language: genos, ethnos, laos. They are often translated race (or generation), nation, people. It would be foolish to attempt to distinguish them. That is not Peter’s point. He uses three different words to emphasize one point: just like the ancient people of God, he says to his readers, you have a bond of kinship, calling, and purpose that takes priority over all other bonds. You are not a people because of your similar economic interests, not a nation because of your common ethnic origins, or your language, native customs, etc., but because of your divine calling and your common faith.

The Line of Division

In an essay posted May 03, 2024, I wrote about the origins of such training programs as Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity (SEED), which is used in hundreds of American colleges and universities to inculcate identity politics. In the 1980s, Erica Sherover-Marcuse developed workshops designed to promote a new intersectional consciousness among educators and other shapers of culture. The most well-known exercise in these workshops is the “privilege walk.” Participants divide into groups based on where they stand in the hierarchy of privilege and oppression. The privileged, then, must acknowledge and apologize for their racism, sexism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression. Imagine a room filled with students, school teachers, or college professors. The facilitator asks the white males to move to one side of the room. White females stand next to them. The process continues in order of least to most oppressed. Those considered oppressed are invited to share stories of abuse, shame, and marginalization. Tears abound. The privileged, however, are not allowed to defend themselves from accusation or relate their stories of oppression; instead, they must confess their undeserved privilege and engage in penitential rituals. No reconciliation here. No love. No forgiveness. No foundational unity. Only resentment, envy, shame, and hypocrisy.

The Circle of Unity

Imagine a different room. Men and women and children from different ethnic groups, languages, cultures, economic classes and educational levels gather to worship the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. They surround the Eucharistic Table to participate in the body of Christ in grateful memory of their costly redemption. United in the one baptism and full of the one Spirit, they sing praises to their Creator and Savior. They form a circle of love by joining hands. They look across, to the right, and to the left and see only dear brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers. Each has a claim on all and all have a claim on each. The love of God compels them to love each other, to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. There are no oppressors and no oppressed…no shame, no envy, and no contempt.

Lines have beginnings and ends, tops and bottoms. Circles do not. The most prominent feature of a circle is the center, the principle of its unity. A line has a middle but no center, therefore no unity. As we can see from 1 Peter 2:9-10, God is the center that makes a circle of a line and a people of a crowd.

The Christian College* and the New Left

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This essay concludes the seven-part series containing my review and reflections on Christopher Rufo, America’s Cultural Revolution. The series began on May 03, 2024. Look for it: in a few days I will post a compilation of the whole series so you will have access to the entire review in one document.

The Collapse of the Modern Liberal University

In the previous essay we learned why the era of the modern liberal university, which began around 1870, came to an undignified end around 1970. The modern university adopted a critical, skeptical, never-ending research model of academia and exempted no moral tradition or religious dogma from critical scrutiny. Though it praised the quest for truth, progress and scientific discovery as its founding principle, its operational values were completely negative. Modern academic leaders were especially on guard against Christian fundamentalism and cultural conservativism; hence they focused exclusively on the dangers from the Right. This one-sided focus, however, made them vulnerable to criticism from the Left. When the Left accused the liberal establishment of not being radical enough in its criticism of the forces of conservativism, the establishment could make no reply. For though it examines everything, it believes nothing. Because it could not appeal to positive political, moral, historical, religious or metaphysical beliefs, the modern liberal university collapsed like a house of cards.

The Christian College: A Place to Stand

In contrast to the modern liberal university, the Christian college, if it takes Christianity seriously, can draw on a worldview authoritative for the Christian tradition and integrated into the charter and mission of the school. It can resist the critical, skeptical, know-nothing philosophy of the modern liberal university as well as the New Left’s subversive combination of criticism and dogmatism. The modern liberal university founded itself on the illusion that perpetual criticism of tradition will eventually generate scientific truth. The post-modern leftist university justifies its existence by repeating the groundless dogma that destruction of every actual thing will bring about utopia. The Christian college is founded on faith in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, the authority of the canonical Scriptures accepted by the ecumenical church, and respect for the two-thousand-year Christian tradition.

The Christian college can assert with confidence that world history cannot be explained with the simple formulas of the neo-Marxists. The true human situation cannot be illuminated by dividing people into the villainous oppressors and the innocent oppressed, and it cannot be improved by instigating an endless war of liberation from ever smaller micro aggressions. For the Christian, violence, hatred, envy, greed, division, and all other sins against human community derive from abandonment of obedience and worship of God the Creator (Romans 1:18-32). There will be no reconciliation among human beings until there is reconciliation with God. Liberal platitudes and leftist threats cannot overcome division between races, classes, nations, sexes, or any other binary. Hatred cannot overcome hatred, racism cannot expel racism, violence cannot end violence. Satan cannot cast out Satan. Only the Holy Spirit can do that!

The Christian College: Friend of Truth

The liberal university argues that truth is illusive, and the post-modern university asserts that there is no such thing as truth and reason is a slave to self-interest; power alone is real and acquiring it is all that matters. The Christian college rests in the truth of faith and finds this truth reliable in producing light, love, joy, unity, and peace. Its knowledge grounded in faith gives the Christian college the right, the confidence and the determination to assert truth claims against liberal quibbling and leftist intimidation. Its faith knowledge bestows on the Christian college a mandate to establish and enforce community standards. The open secret is that liberal faculties perpetuate themselves by hiring and retaining other liberals and leftist faculties hire and promote their fellow-travelers. With much more integrity, Christian colleges have the right to hire and retain administrators, faculty, and staff who affirm Christian faith. Moreover, they have the right to define in statements of faith and codes of conduct what they mean by the “Christian faith.”

The Christian College: Courage to Push Back

Academic freedom and tenure are not absolute even in the most liberal and leftist universities. Those institutions have the right to define the boundaries of academic freedom and, under certain conditions, the right to revoke tenure and terminate employment. Like other colleges, Christian colleges do not acknowledge unlimited academic freedom or irrevocable tenure, but they define the limits differently. Christian colleges encourage faculty to speak about their faith in and outside the classroom and commend the Christian faith to their students. Professors are free to critique anti-Christian philosophies and lifestyles. In contrast, these activities are restricted by law in publicly funded universities and by custom in elite private universities. At the same time, liberal and post-modern universities give faculty unrestricted freedom to affirm atheism, Marxism, and libertinism. As long as they do not engage in sexual harassment, they are free to live immoral lives. Christian colleges deny faculty members these freedoms. Faculty members who feel restricted by this denial do not belong in Christian colleges. If they are serious about maintaining their Christian identity, Christian colleges should make clear to faculty members that academic freedom and tenure will not protect them if they violate their contractual obligation to abide by the college’s faith statements and codes of conduct.

The Christian College: Its Critical Principles

Every academic endeavor must employ critical principles; otherwise, it has no criteria by which to distinguish possible from impossible, true from false, valid from invalid, probable from improbable, good from bad, wise from unwise, right from wrong, and just from unjust. For an academic community to exist and work together, its basic critical principles must be accepted by all members of that community. Christian colleges no doubt share many critical principles with other colleges, especially in the areas of logic, mathematics, and other hard sciences. In areas of morality, history, theology, and metaphysics, however, they differ dramatically. The liberal university denies that it gives any positive belief, moral, historical, theological, or metaphysical, the status of a critical principle by which to judge other beliefs of this type. The post-modern university, in contrast, asserts the morality of diversity, equity and inclusion and the narrative of oppressor versus oppressed as critical principles by which to judge other moral beliefs and narratives. The Christian college asserts the morality of faith, hope, and love and the biblical narrative of God, creation, sin, incarnation, reconciliation and redemption as critical principles by which to judge other moral beliefs and narratives. And it may in good faith exercise this power with boldness.

The Christian College: Learning to Say “No”

Most Christian college professors and administrators received their terminal degrees at universities dominated by the New Left. Having been immersed in Critical Theory, CRT, DEI, and Critical Pedagogy throughout their graduate studies—especially those studying education, social sciences, religious studies, literature, and all identity-based programs—new professors bring these theories and activist teaching methods with them to the Christian college and begin employing them in their teaching and institutionalizing them in training programs. These programs, sponsored by various administrative offices, often appear on the academic agenda without any justification at all. When questioned, their sponsors appeal to “best practices” or the latest educational literature. Or, they attempt to justify these neo-Marxist programs on Christian grounds, arguing that standing up for the poor and oppressed, working for social justice and against racism, and seeking diversity, equity, and inclusion embody the highest ethics found in the Bible and the Christian tradition. Who could object to that?

If you read the previous essays in this series, you won’t be surprised to learn that I completely reject these arguments. They are usually made by people who have only a superficial understanding of Critical Theory—of Marcuse, Davis, Freire, and Bell—and even less understanding of Christian doctrine and history. They mistake a small linguistic overlap between Christian vocabulary and neo-Marxist vocabulary for substantive agreement. The words diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism, oppression and justice as used by the New Left possess no more than verbal resemblances to Christian concepts, and sometimes they mean the direct opposite.

Suggestions for Christian Colleges

1. Don’t allow programs based on Critical Theory, CRT, DEI, intersectional identities, and Critical Pedagogy to be instituted. Discontinue them if they are already in place. Beware: these neo-Marxist programs appear under a variety of innocent sounding names. Read the fine print.

2. Replace teacher workshops rooted in Critical Pedagogy with workshops firmly centered in Christian Pedagogy, and discontinue programs that train faculty and staff in diversity, equity, and inclusion and institute programs that teach faith, hope, and love.

3. Institute continuing education programs that help your faculty and staff understand the Christian worldview at a deeper level.

4. Scrutinize every program and office in view of the critical principles listed above, and make sure that every other narrative and identity is thoroughly subordinate to the Christian narrative and identity.

*This essay focuses on higher education, but it applies equally to primary and secondary education.

How the American Education System Became Anti-Family, Anti-Capitalist, Anti-White, Anti-Western, Anti-Christian, and Hopelessly Utopian: A Review of America’s Cultural Revolution (Part Three A)

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Today I will continue my review of Christopher F. Rufo: America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (Broadside Books, 2023).  In Part III, Rufo focuses on education and gives the Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Freire (1921-1997) the lead role. As in the previous essays, I will follow Rufo’s chapter divisions.

Introduction

I come from a family of educators and have been involved with education as a student or a college professor for most of my life. I’ve thought a great deal about education and have written extensively about it on this blog. To an extent far beyond animals, human beings are capable of learning from their individual and collective experience and of passing this knowledge and skill to the generations that follow. Culture is that body of knowledge, skills, practices and creations accumulated and passed down through time. Human beings begin learning the minute they are born and continue the rest of their lives. Education is the process of “passing down” human culture to succeeding generations and is an intentional activity involving teaching and learning. Because acquiring the knowledge and skills available in one’s social world is necessary for survival and enjoying the goods of life available in a particular culture, education is valued by parents for their children and by individuals for themselves. For most people, individual and family interests are the driving forces for expending huge amounts of time, energy and money on education, kindergarten through college. But educational institutions often subordinate family and individual goals to other interests. This is especially true of institutions that are in some way (e.g., government funding) insulated from market forces and answerability to parents.

The state has always had an interest in education, and its interests are determined by its understanding of its scope and goals. There is no guarantee that the interests of the state will coincide with those of parents and individual students. As the United States of America transitioned from an agricultural to an industrial, and finally to a technological society, the government’s economic interest in education changed accordingly. But producing skilled workers for industry and technology is not the only reason for state involvement in education. Producing “good” citizens has always been a major goal, and a “good” citizen is defined as one that accepts and supports the basic values that the state holds necessary to its stability and to the general welfare. State funded and administered schools have never been value neutral.

If government schools champion values that are widely held, traditional, and limited in scope, most people hardly notice, because they, too, hold them. A list of such values might include individual civil liberties, economic freedom, hard work, respect for law, social peace, reward for merit, majority rule accompanied by minority rights, respect for marriage and family, religious liberty, etc. There have always been minority groups that dissent from many values held by the majority of people, and in response they’ve founded Christian and other private schools or educated their children at home.  But what if the government with its vast system of bureaucracies gets captured by a small group that champions a value system very different from that held by the vast majority of people? What if the American educational system came to be controlled by a philosophy that taught that the value system that privileged individual civil liberties, economic freedom, hard work, respect for law, social peace, reward for merit, majority rule accompanied by minority rights, respect for marriage and family, and religious liberty was systemically racist, heterosexist, homophobic, colonialist, and sexist? And what if the new education regime taught that the only way to reform this corrupt society was to transform all the values that legitimate it by subordinating them to the New Left’s Neo-Marxist values of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Moreover, what if these transformed values were taught to every child in America from kindergarten through graduate school by means of a method called “Critical Pedagogy”?

Dystopian? Nightmarish? Orwellian? Agreed!

But according to Rufo, this nightmare is now our new reality. Whether you send your child to kindergarten or to college, you can expect that your values—the ones mentioned above—will be attacked, subverted, and if possible, replaced by values of the New Left.

Next time we will let Rufo tell us how the nightmare became a reality, how a small group of Neo-Marxists gained almost total control over the American educational system.

“Dignitas Infinita” (Infinite Dignity) A Recommendation, Part Three

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In this post I will conclude my reflections on the just released declaration of the Roman Catholic Church’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on “Dignitas Infinita” (Human Dignity). Below is the outline of the document. Today I will address the bolded point #4.

Presentation

Introduction

1. A Growing Awareness of the Centrality of Human Dignity

2. The Church Proclaims, Promotes, and Guarantees Human Dignity

3. Dignity, the Foundation of Human Rights and Duties

4. Some Grave Violations of Human Dignity

Conclusion

Some Grave Violations of Human Dignity

Under this heading Dignitas Infinita addresses several violations of human dignity:

poverty, war, mistreatment of migrants, human trafficking, sexual abuse, violence against women, abortion, surrogacy, euthanasia and assisted suicide, marginalization of people with disabilities, gender theory, sex change, and digital violence.

In each subsection, the Declaration draws on the theology of human dignity articulated in sections one and two as well as the secularized form stated in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948). [For this story, see the first essay in this series.] In my view, these abuses of human rights fall into two classes, although a few embody elements of both: (1) abuses wherein individuals or groups violate the inherent dignity of other individuals or groups; (2) abuses in which individuals violate their own dignity sometimes encouraged or aided by others.

Class One: Violations of the Dignity of Others

In this class we can place poverty, war, mistreatment of migrants, human trafficking, sexual abuse, violence against women, surrogacy, marginalization of people with disabilities, and digital violence.

As I said above, the Declaration draws on the biblical anthropology common to the ecumenical church. But it also wants to speak to those more at home with the secular language of human rights. Except for surrogacy—in which the genetic child of one couple is artificially placed in the womb of another woman, carried to term, and surrendered to the genetic parents—Western secular societies also view the items on this list as violations of human rights and dignity. The declaration condemns surrogacy as violation of the dignity of the birth mother and the child. Both parties as persons of infinite dignity should not be made the objects of a commercial transaction. Children should not be for sale. As for the other abuses of human dignity in Class One, many societies that formally condemn these violations overlook them in practice.

Class Two: Violations of One’s Own Dignity and Borderline Cases

In this class fall abortion, surrogacy, euthanasia and assisted suicide, gender theory, sex change, and digital violence. I will make comments on abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide, gender theory, and sex change.

Abortion is a grave offense against the dignity of the mother and the destroyed child. Abortion is most often justified as the prerogative of the woman, who supposedly has a right to control her own body. Ironically, this assertion appeals to the very principle of infinite dignity under discussion in the Declaration. It perverts an objective, ontological characteristic into a subjective, arbitrary right. And of course, the child is treated as a non-person that possesses no dignity or rights. However, the legitimate right to control one’s body has in view only violation and coercion by another person. But in relation to God, the Creator and one’s ontological dignity as the image of God, no one has a right to use their body as they wish; it is just as wrong to violate one’s own dignity as it is to violate another person’s dignity. Moreover, a woman carrying a child is not dealing merely with her own body. She is responsible to the Creator for the life of another. To treat her unborn child as a disposable thing is a grave violation of human dignity and an offense to the divine Giver of life. It not only robs a human being of life, it also sears the conscience of the mother. Additionally, it involves the assisting medical personnel in serious sin. The Declaration quotes Pope St. John Paul II:

Among all the crimes which can be committed against life, procured abortion has characteristics making it particularly serious and deplorable. […] But today, in many people’s consciences, the perception of its gravity has become progressively obscured. The acceptance of abortion in the popular mind, in behavior, and even in law itself is a telling sign of an extremely dangerous crisis of the moral sense, which is becoming more and more incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, even when the fundamental right to life is at stake (Encyclical Letter Evangelium Vitae (25 March 1995), no. 58).

Advocates of euthanasia and assisted suicide often appeal to the concept of dignity as if human dignity consisted of autonomy and independence. But identifying dignity with independence robs dignity of its inherent and ontological status and makes it dependent on a quality that can be lost, gained, or augmented. Suicide, whether self-inflicted or assisted, is not asserting one’s dignity but violating it. Like life itself, human dignity is a gift of God. No one has the right to destroy it.

Gender theory, which makes gender—an infinite scale of gradation of male to female characteristics—completely independent of biological sex. Gender, not biological sex, becomes central to one’s identity. Instead of embracing our God-given bodies as foundational to our personal identities, gender theory disengages personal identity from the created structures of reality. As the Declaration points out,

Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel.

Attempting to change one’s sex through surgery or hormone therapy rejects God’s creative will. It mutilates and destroys the body, which shares in the dignity of the image of God. For the image of God applies not to the soul alone or the body alone but to the union of body and soul. Pope Fransis asserted that “creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift. At the same time, we are called to protect our humanity, and this means, in the first place, accepting it and respecting it as it was created” (Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia (19 March 2016), no. 56).

Reflections on Dignitas Infinita

I hesitate to make any comment that sounds like a criticism. For this document is a brilliant and timely piece of practical theology. Allow me respectfully to make two observations that could be perceived as mild criticisms. (1) Like many Papal documents, Dignitas Infinita attempts to bridge the divide—or at least engage in dialogue—between Christian theology and ethics and secular anthropology and ethics. The Declaration’s several references to the UN Declaration on Human Rights (1948) witnesses to this desire. Hence the Declaration betrays an interest in influencing public policy at national and international levels. But the demarcation between what can be known about human beings’ nature and destiny through reason alone and what can be known only in faith in divine Creation and the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus Christ is not clearly drawn. Hence many arguments, especially those concerning surrogacy, abortion, gender theory, and sex change seem less persuasive, because it’s not clear to which norm the document is appealing: to a self-evident natural law that can be known by reason alone or to norms grounded only in faith in divine revelation.

(2) My second mild criticism derives from the confusion described in the first. The concept of dignity, that is, infinite dignity, makes sense only within the biblical framework; for apart from a relationship to God nothing about humanity can command infinite respect. When cut loose from its grounding in Christian faith, dignity loses its precise meaning and can easily be perverted into the autonomy of the self. The moral force of assertions of human dignity is very persuasive when applied to respecting other people, but in application to oneself they become subject to confusion. The concept of dignity, then, needs to be supplemented with a concept of obligation to God. We are obligated to the Creator to be thankful and respectful of his gift of ourselves, body and soul, and the bodies and souls of others.

Cafeteria Catholics and Cafeteria Protestants: Different Denomination, Same Hypocrisy

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In the March 31 episode of CBS’s Face the Nation, Roman Catholic Cardinal Gregory Walton of Washington DC spoke of President Joe Biden as a “cafeteria Catholic.” The Cardinal explained to the audience that cafeteria Catholics pick and choose which church teachings to believe and practice based on expediency and preference. Walton hastened to add that Mr. Biden is “sincere,” which to my mind strains credulity. For I can’t square flagrant disobedience and direct contradiction of the Church’s clear teaching with sincerity. What stands out in the cafeteria Catholic mentality is the lack of a spirit of obedience. They want the advantages of being known as good Catholics without actually having to live like one. And so, they add the sin of hypocrisy to the sin of disobedience. A “sincere” cafeteria Catholic is an oxymoron, like a square circle or married bachelor.

Cafeteria Protestants join their Catholic counterparts in the same spirit of selectivity and hypocrisy. Cafeteria Protestants treat the Bible the way cafeteria Catholics treat the teaching authority of the Roman Catholic Church. For them, Jesus’s teaching can be summed up in two commandments: (1) don’t judge the choices of others, and (2) do what makes you happy. They quietly pass over Jesus’s teaching forbidding divorce, lust, and greed. They soften Jesus’s warnings about the narrow and the broad ways. They practice injustice, abortion, fornication, and adultery. The only cross they bear is the one the wear around their necks. Of the spirit of obedience, they know nothing. Sincerity means purity of heart. You can’t be a sincere hypocrite!

In the Bible, especially in the New Testament, the test of sincerity is your willingness to suffer for the faith. Faithfulness unto death is the mark of a true disciple of Jesus. Willingness to confess Christ as Lord before hostile audiences is the proof of faith. The words of Peter expose and condemn in the clearest terms the hypocrisy of “cafeteria” faith in both its Catholic and Protestant forms:

Therefore, with minds that are alert and fully sober, set your hope on the grace to be brought to you when Jesus Christ is revealed at his coming. As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: “Be holy, because I am holy.”

Since you call on a Father who judges each person’s work impartially, live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear. For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake. Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God (1 Peter 1:13-21).

“Alert and fully sober,” “obedient children,” “holy,” “reverent fear”? These are not terms that come to mind when I think of cafeteria Christians. Like all hypocrites, cafeteria Catholics and cafeteria Protestants possess no real consciousness of God, that is, of the “Father who judges each person’s work impartially.” They seek only “to be seen by others” as virtuous. Jesus says of them, “Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full” (Matthew 6:5-6).

Conclusion: The Road to Moral “Progress”: From Obedience to Self-Governance to Autonomy and Beyond

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Today I will conclude the series “The Road to Moral Progress” in which I’ve been working to uncover the historical origins of the progressive morality that dominates higher education, most of the media, and other centers of power in the West. In this series I have been in conversation with J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1998). In the two hundred years covered by Schneewind (1600 to 1800), moral philosophers worked to construct an alternative to the traditional morality of obedience (See the post of July 10, 2023). By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the idea of morality as obedience to authority had come into disrepute not only because of wide-spread abuse; it now seemed insulting to the freedom and dignity of humanity to demand that one rational agent submit to moral guidance from another. The search began for a moral theory in which each rational agent is self-governing.

According to the ideal of moral self-governance every rational agent has independent access to the moral knowledge they need to guide their lives and the motivation to act in keeping with this knowledge. Of the many moral philosophers that worked on this project during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I chose to focus on Hugo Grotius. But Grotius along with all the others failed to discover a satisfactory theory of self-governance (See the post of July 24, 2023). In that post I concluded:

Indeed, individuals were presumed to be competent to use their reason to discern the moral law given in nature. Nevertheless, that law—whatever its origin—was not the product of the human will. Though reason possesses power to discover the moral law, it cannot create it. Self-governance, then, does not live up to its name. As long as the moral laws we must obey derive from the will of another or from blind and purposeless nature, we are not truly self-governing. A truly self-governing agent must not only be able to discern the moral law embedded in nature but must also be the author of those laws.

It seems that early modern philosophers did not realize that implicit in their rejection of the morality of obedience is rejection of all moral sources external to the rational agent. Writing in the late eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant drew this inference and incorporated it into his theory of autonomy.

Immanuel Kant and the Invention of Autonomy

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) proposed a new way to reconcile maximum human freedom and dignity with the idea of obedience to moral law. Kant was the first moral philosopher to use the concept of “autonomy” in a moral theory. Before his time, it had been used in political thought to designate a sovereign state that can legislate and enforce laws within its territory. In the morality of autonomy rational agents give the moral law to themselves. Explaining the steps by which Kant developed his theory of autonomy and how previous thinkers influenced him is beyond the scope of this essay and my expertise. But I think I can state his theory in simple terms without too much distortion.

According to Kant, a truly moral act must be motivated by something more than desire for happiness, goodness, perfection, or beauty. These ends may accompany a moral act, but they are not definitive for its moral status. To be moral, an act must be done because it is right, without regard to the consequences. In other words, to act morally is to obey the moral law simply because it is the moral law.

Is Kant, then, turning his back on the ideal of self-governance and returning to the morality of obedience? No. He is reconciling the two ideals in a higher order. The moral law we obey is the law of reason, which is constitutive of human nature. It is the command legislated by the factor that constitutes us as rational agents. That is to say, this law derives from the inherent structure of reason. Kant labels it the “categorical imperative,” in opposition to a “hypothetical” imperative. The categorical imperative is an unconditional command, obedience to which is an end in itself. A hypothetical imperative is reason’s recommendation of an effective means to an end other than obedience.

The self that gives itself the moral law is a higher self, a self that is free from the deterministic forces of nature, including those of the lower aspects of human nature, which apart from the guidance of reason are irrational, blind, and chaotic. The rational self is the region of the universal and harmonious. In a way similar to mathematics and logic, its moral content is the same for all rational beings. It is as true for God as it is for human beings. The categorical imperative demands that we will for ourselves and others only what we can will as a universal law for all rational agents.

Obedience in Kant’s theory of autonomy has nothing to do with servility. We do not serve an alien authority: clergy, kings, philosophers, or even God. We obey ourselves. We are truly and fully self-governing in a way that affirms our maximum freedom and dignity.  To avoid misrepresenting Kant, however, we must remember that the “self” that governs is a transcendental self, universal reason common to all rational agents, known only through the categorical imperative. The empirical self that is governed is the lower, unruly, desiring self.

Beyond Autonomy

As we have seen, Kant’s morality of autonomy is anything but arbitrary, subjective, and indulgent. Kant reconciles the morality of obedience with human freedom and dignity by placing both the legislator and the recipient of legislation within the one human person. In self-governance, the transcendental self commands the empirical self to submit to universal reason. The moral person envisioned by Kant is a paragon of self-control, motivated solely by duty. From all accounts, Kant’s personal morality was of a strict type, almost Stoic. Nevertheless, Kant’s conclusion that maximum human freedom and dignity demand a moral theory in which human beings create their own laws is pregnant with some very un-Kantian possibilities.

Attempting to trace contemporary progressive morality back to Kant’s theory of autonomy would oversimplify matters greatly; contemporary culture was created by the confluence of many streams. However, because Kant saw clearly the radical implications of rejecting the morality of obedience, he set the benchmark for all future moral philosophies that share this rejection. Once one accepts the principle that human freedom and dignity are incompatible with obedience to external law, the only option left is to transfer the grounds and guiding principles of morality from outside to inside the human person. Kant located the guiding principle in universal reason. But many people find reason too abstract and duty too cold for their tastes. After all, should not moral action lead to individual happiness? Would not our feelings be better guides to happiness than universal reason? Why locate our true identity in a transcendental self we experience only indirectly as a legal demand when we experience directly a stable combination of tastes, feelings, and desires that urges us toward our own unique form of happiness?

Contemporary progressive morality flips Kant’s autonomy theory upside down. Instead of reason, feelings become the ruling self, the guiding principle that issues the categorical imperative, and reason becomes the obeying self, a mere instrument to serve the feelings.

Where Do We Go From Here?

As this series has made clear, working out the moral implications of attributing maximum freedom and dignity to human beings was among the central driving forces for modern moral philosophy. It seemed obvious to many thinkers that the morality of obedience is incompatible with such a view of humanity. Is there a way of escaping the moral logic that drove modern culture to the edge of nihilism?

Perhaps the way forward beyond the impasse in which we find ourselves today is to rethink the original transition from the morality of obedience to the morality of self-governance. In my opinion, we should not give up on attributing maximum freedom and dignity to human beings, and clearly a slavish type of obedience is incompatible with such a view of humanity. The first step in rethinking morality is asking from where western thinkers derived the firm conviction that human beings possess maximum freedom and dignity? To make a long story short, they derived these ideas from the Christian doctrines of creation, incarnation, salvation, and redemption. Human beings are made in the image of God and the Son of God became one of us, loved us enough to die for us, and will unite us to God in the resurrection to eternal life.

But obedience to God and moral law is also an essential part of the Christian faith. How does Christianity harmonize the maximum freedom and dignity of humanity with a life of obedience when the enlightenment thinkers could not? The one-word answer is eschatology. Christianity envisions humanity as living in two states. The present state in the body is a time of wandering and temptation, a time where faith and hope and the first fruits of the Spirit are the ways we participate in the future state. In the present life we need to trust and obey. In the future resurrection we will be endowed with eternal life and with perfect freedom and dignity. We will be united to God in a state Paul called glory, incorruptibility, and immortality (1Corinthians 15) and the Greek church fathers called theosis or divinization.

Apparently, the enlightenment thinkers collapsed the two states into one, got rid of eschatology, and attributed a kind of divinity to humanity before the time. Kant transferred the Christian tension between the present and the future states into the human person as the distinction between the empirical self and the transcendental self.

It seems to me that one of the most urgent tasks for Christian thinkers today is articulating a Christian view of the moral life in direct confrontation with bankrupt progressive culture. Such a view will demonstrate how Christianity incorporates obedience, self-control, moral law, and humility into a way of life that does far greater justice to human freedom and dignity than progressive alternatives.

In case you are interested in thinking about this project further, you can find my thoughts in two books:

1. God, Freedom & Human Dignity: Embracing a God-Centered Identity in a Me-Centered World (InterVarsity Press, 2013)

2. The New Adam: What the Early Church Can Teach Evangelicals (And Liberals) About the Atonement (Cascade, 2021).

Interlude: Why Bother?

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Today I want to step back from the current series (The Road to Moral “Progress”: From Obedience to Self-governance to Autonomy and Beyond) and address a question some of you may be asking:  Why bother with so much history? Why approach the contemporary moral climate in such a roundabout way?

Why History?

As many of you know, I am very interested—bordering on obsession—in how certain very powerful segments of contemporary culture came to think as they do about morality. But some readers may be wondering why we need to understand the historical origins of the crazy ideas that emanate from university social science, education, and literature departments. What does it matter from where Hollywood and Silicon Valley got their twisted values? Whatever their origin—you may be saying to yourself—these ideas contradict the reason and common sense of every right-thinking person: everyone knows that we are born male or female, men can’t have babies, and people are not born equal in every respect.

Indeed (you may concede), it is helpful to realize that progressive philosophy presupposes that the goal of human progress is liberation from all limits. But we don’t need to study the entire history of modern moral philosophy to see that striving toward this goal is futile. We already know that achieving it is impossible! And if the goal that drives a historical process is impossible, we can be sure that this striving has been misdirected from the beginning. So, why trace out how it went wrong?

Good Observations…

I admit that you don’t need to know the historical origin of a bad idea to see that it is illogical or immoral or empirically false or impractical. It may be only curiosity that leads some of us to ask how otherwise intelligent people could believe that a person can be born in the “wrong” body or that it is morally permissible (or even imperative) to give female hormones to an underage school boy (with or without parental consent) or to attempt by way of surgery to transform a female body into a male body. Perhaps so. But there may be more at stake than merely satisfying a curiosity.

I see your point, but consider that these ideas appear absurd to you only because you hold to a different way of looking at the world. And your worldview also has a history. You believe in the God revealed in the Bible: the all-knowing, omnipotent, all-wise, Creator of heaven and earth, the author of the moral law, and the hope of the world. You were taught to accept the limits imposed by the Creator, to trust God even when you do not understand God’s ways, and to worship God alone. Judged by this worldview, the modern progressive view—that we ought to aspire to divine status—appears not only rebellious, disobedient, and immoral but absurd, insane, and suicidal! Viewed through this lens, we see that the divisions in contemporary culture result not merely from the clash of a few contradictory moral ideas but from the collision of two diametrically opposed worldviews.

You may suggest, then, that the most reasonable response to the errors of progressive culture is to preach the Christian gospel and explain the worldview implicit therein and call for conversion. For only then can people see what is wrong with progressive moral philosophy. I agree with this strategy up to a point. Each misguided moral perspective makes sense only when placed within the complete progressive worldview. Likewise, Christian morals make sense only within the Christian worldview. Challenging each progressive absurdity individually will probably be ineffective. Complete conversion is needed.

To share Christianity effectively with some people, however, it may be necessary to explain the historical origins of the progressive worldview. Most progressive-leaning people are not postmodern philosophers or social science professors who incessantly quote postmodern philosophers—usually, I might add, without understanding them. They are not Hollywood actors or tech industry workers who say whatever they need to say to fit into their corporate cultures. Nor are they politicians who do whatever it takes to hold together a progressive coalition. For the most part they are college educated professionals whose main impulse is to conform to the trends dominant among other college educated professionals. Their moral beliefs are an unstable mixture of progressive and traditional ideas.

Reasons for Studying History

How might learning about the historical origins of contemporary progressive philosophy help people to rethink their progressive ideas? Three ways come to mind:

1. It dispels the illusion that progressive ideas are self-evident.

When everyone around us voices progressive ideas, the rewards for conformity are great and the punishment for nonconformity is severe. We have little motivation to question them. But the study of history demonstrates the contingency of progressive morality. Chance and circumstance—not merely reason and goodwill—contributed to the construction of progressive culture. When a way of thinking loses the aura of self-evidence, we are forced to ask the question of its truth.

2. Understanding the genesis of the progressive worldview frees us to ask where it might lead in the future.

I admit the difference between historical development of an idea and the logical unfolding of an idea. Logic is timeless; history is temporal. History does not necessarily follow the path of logical implication. Chance and human freedom and caprice also influence the flow of history. Nevertheless, there is a certain resemblance between logical and historical movement. Each generation tends to modify or contradict or extend the ideas of preceding generations. One generation argues that belief in human dignity demands freedom from kings and priests. The next generation demands freedom from all traditional moral rules, and the next asserts freedom from God and nature. What’s next? Where will it all lead?

3. Historical study places before us a decision between two starkly different worldviews and ways of living.

As I said above, most people hold to a mixture of progressive and traditional beliefs. Studying the origin and historical development of progressivism demonstrates that these two types of beliefs are incompatible. Progressive moral values presuppose a progressive worldview and traditional beliefs presuppose a traditional worldview. The history that led to the creation of contemporary progressive culture gradually replaced God, Christ, and creation with humanity, science, and technology. Perhaps the study of history will help some people see that these two worldviews are incompatible. You can’t have it both ways. You have to choose between them and reform your life accordingly.