Written by Ben C. Dunson |
Tuesday, February 6, 2024
At the founding, and for most of America’s history, the moral formation at America’s schools and universities included instruction in religion. George Washington warned, for example, in his Farewell Address that we must not “indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.” Massachusetts’ Constitution speaks similarly: “The happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depends upon piety, religion, and morality.” John Adams’ comments on the necessity of religion for true virtue show that it was Christianity, not some nebulous sense of the divine, that must be promoted. Christians recognize, or should do so, that education independent of moral formation is not only impossible, it is undesirable.

Every day or so I encounter a conservative (sometimes even an exasperated moderate on the left) bemoaning the capture of America’s educational system by woke zealots; 2+2=5 and related nonsense. I bemoan the capture of this system too. Although my children are home-schooled I know how bad it is going to be when today’s publicly-schooled children grow up and land in positions of power and influence in government, business, and culture. We’ve got plenty of signs already for what that will mean. However, what I can’t do is join in the refrain of well-meaning conservatives: “Just teach the facts. Education, not indoctrination. Etc.” Such slogans are not only impossible; they are undesirable, even if attainable. They arise out of the same mentality that has left conservatives unable to respond adequately to transgenderism and other social maladies. Instead of addressing the root problem, they address a symptom. We get opposition to men in women’s sports and locker rooms, when the real problem is that transgenderism is a perverse rebellion against the created order that must be opposed in its totality. Likewise, timid conservatives think that the only way to remove harmful ideologies from the nation’s schools is to require schools to teach nothing but supposedly neutral facts, the basics of math, grammar, writing, and so on.
But education cannot avoid moral formation. That is the point of education. Schools exist (they should anyway) to form hearts and minds, to provide students with facts and the moral framework in which to understand those facts. “Education, not indoctrination,” if pressed to its logical conclusion, would produce mindless repositories of random facts, perhaps capable of performing tasks in the marketplace and making money, but little more.
No subject can be adequately taught in a moral vacuum. Consider history. Is the study of history simply the memorization of names, places, and dates? I suppose one could attempt to approach it in that way. In addition to being intensely boring, however, such a study would be utterly pointless. The reason we study history is to learn from the past, not in a superficial “history repeats itself” way in which we think we can predict the future based on historical parallels, but in the sense that we see in our study that people, despite many technological advances, tend to act in certain ways. We learn that certain kinds of situations tend to produce certain kinds of outcomes; “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” Benjamin Franklin warned; “As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” And so on (all quotations in this column are from Thomas West, The Political Theory of the American Founding, chapters 8-9). What about literature? Is literature of value only as a diversion and time-waster? Or is it not beneficial because it enables us to peer into the human soul in its manifold diversity? Can math facts, or physics facts, or grammar facts, be learned without considering the use to which those facts should be put?
With a little reflection I think most people can see that an amoral approach is not only impossible, it is undesirable. While I share the dismay of my fellow citizens as they watch leftist ideologies destroy America’s schools, what is needed is moral formation in what is good, true, and beautiful, rather than an attempt to reject moral formation completely. American conservatives would do well to return to the founders of our nation to see what they thought about education. Doing so would reveal how thoroughly out of step the “neutral” approach to education is with the founding spirit.
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by Reuben M. Bredenhof |
Thursday, December 1, 2022
Christ our King has already defeated the kingdom of darkness. He did it when he hung on the cross, when he died, and he came back to life three days later. Now Christ is in heaven, reigning over all things. Jesus still has many enemies, like we do. But in your struggle, take heart. Your victory in Christ is secure!

Why did David have so many enemies? When we read his psalms, it seems like he’s always fending off another attack from his adversaries, trying to escape yet another conspiracy. Do you ever wonder what made him so hated?
He was Israel’s king, which meant he was involved in regular warfare against the nation’s political enemies. The Philistines and the Amorites had good reason to hate David, seeing as he was Israel’s highly successful wartime leader. Hard to like someone who has wiped out your battalions, time after time!
But there was more to it. For David was on the side of God. And those who hate God will also hate those who stand with him.
This is why we have enemies too. We’ve all learned from our Catechism that a Christian has three sworn adversaries: the devil, the world, and our own sinful flesh (Q&A 127). Far more than we realize or admit, we are in constant warfare against the spiritual forces of evil.
And for this confrontation we need so much divine help and steadfast protection.
That’s what David understood too, for he prays in Psalm 143 that God would judge all his enemies. They had been hounding him again, and David feels almost crushed. 
Read More
Related Posts:

A clash between a conservative Senator and progressive law professor has served as a Rorschach test for culture warriors, with each side convinced it has coasted to victory on the strength of a few devastating sentences. Professor Khiara Bridges of Berkeley Law and Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) gave the pretense of speaking only for themselves at a July 12 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing ostensibly about abortion policy after Dobbs. Still, the reception of their tête-à-tête shows how our public discourse on the issue of gender theory and transgenderism is bogged down in shallow soundbites, with emotion substituted for argument. Both sides of the debate have vast incentives to stay stuck in the rhetorical mud, but it does our public discourse no favors. And it is a particularly bad strategy for gender theory’s opponents.
Both combatants in the Bridges-Hawley affair have reached the pinnacle of their fields, and serve as fitting captains of warring cultural teams. Both were well-suited to represent their sides, reflecting the deeper phenomenon at play, which is the widening chasm between Americans who cannot believe there is anyone who subscribes to gender theory, and those who cannot believe that anyone cannot believe it. It is a shallow debate for our shallow times.
You could not have picked more perfect figures to distill the argument into a few pointed soundbites. Bridges has made a career off of arguments exactly befitting most Americans’ idea of a Berkeley Law professor. She has made a career off of academic papers whose goals include “defending and rehabilitating the concept of white privilege by identifying poor white people’s race-based advantages,” and advocating a narrow understanding of what constitutes “life” to the point that “protecting  fetal  ‘life’ is no longer an interest that the state may legitimately pursue.”
Senator Hawley (R-MO) has made his fair share of waves by adopting the Nationalist Conservative mantle (and embracing the NatCons’ industrial-policy-and-trustbusting agenda), cosplaying a defiant revolutionary with raised fist during the January 6th, 2021 riot at the Capitol, and subsequently basking in the martyrdom of cancellation when his publisher dropped his book. (“A direct assault on the First Amendment,” he called it.)
On July 12, Hawley opened his remarks by asking Bridges to clarify what she meant by “people with the capacity for pregnancy” in her previous work.
Of course, he knew exactly what she meant: Female human beings with child-bearing capacities. But he also understood the emotions that gender ideology stirs. The fringe but increasingly popular idea that females can be men, males can be women, and people of both sexes can be any number of non-binary genders, still sounds ridiculous to most Americans. He wanted to hear Bridges repeat it.
Bridges was all too happy to oblige. “Many women, cis women, have the capacity for pregnancy,” she answered. “There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy, as well as non-binary people who are capable of pregnancy.”
Media, social and mainstream alike, lit up. Conservatives touted the incident as proof that the left is so wrapped up in Orwellian jargon that it has lost its grasp of basic concepts. Progressives applauded Bridges for putting a man they see as a bigot in his place, with simple facts and logic. Within each group’s philosophical framework, they are right.
Another day at the theater. But we have seen this show before—many times, in fact. It is precisely the same as now—Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson saying she does not know what a woman is during her Senate confirmation hearing. It’s the same as Apple rolling out its pregnant man emoji, or the NCAA allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports. It is assuredly not a referendum on anything new—not even close.
For the umpteenth time, some viral moment revolves around whether transgender people are meant to be defined by their biological sex or by the gender with which they identify. That is all. If a biological female is properly understood as a man, then there is no novel inference to say that men can become pregnant and bear children. If a biological female is and can only be a woman, then only women can do so. And if one accepts the former proposition, the language of “people with the capacity for pregnancy” is simply an accurate term, however clunky.
Read More