Thoughts for my Fellow Teachers, on Christianity, Politics, and Liberal Education

By: Wilfred M. McClay

Wilfred M. McClay holds the Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization at Hillsdale College, having taught at the university level for over thirty years. He has authored numerous books, articles, and reviews, including the superb Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story (Encounter Books, 2019). He serves as a Senior Fellow at Trinity Forum, a member of the Board of Directors of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a Fellow of the Society of Scholars, James Madison Program, Princeton University. McClay has won numerous awards for his scholarship and teaching, including a Danforth Fellowship and the 2006 Richard M. Weaver Prize for Scholarly Letters.

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Thoughts for my Fellow Teachers, on Christianity, Politics, and Liberal Education

There are several large and linked questions that I would like to address in this meditation. But first, let me make a statement of my larger intentions. I am thinking of it mainly as addressed to my fellow teachers, on all levels of education, and to the furtherance of an ideal of Christian liberal education that I believe to be more vitally important today than ever before.

To begin with, then, I want to consider the proper role of Christians in politics, and the proper role of politics in the Christian life. These are both large, complex, slippery, and contentious subjects, for which there is no final answer. There is no one particular “Christian” way of doing politics, or understanding political issues, or even of arranging our political affairs. Christianity can flourish under a variety of regimes; and it can wither just as easily under those same regimes. Nor is there any absolute requirement that Christians engage in politics. Cloistered nuns do not cease to be Christian by withdrawing from active participation in the world. It is even quite reasonable to argue, as some faithful sects do, that Christians ought to forswear any involvement in politics at all, or at least decline to hold public office or serve in the armed forces.

So finding meaningful generalizations to draw out of such complex circumstances will be difficult. And as if that were not hard enough, we also need to think more deeply about how we ought as teachers and educators to be approaching the intellectual and moral formation of our students—and what disposition toward politics, and the larger culture of which they are a part, we should strive to instill in our students. The net effect of this combination is a bit overwhelming. But it also has the inestimable value of forcing us to think long and hard about each of its elements, and how they come together, in ways we likely wouldn’t have considered, had we not placed them side by side.

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Let’s begin, then, by considering some of the questions posed by the intersection of Christianity and politics. Are the two mutually exclusive? Or to put it more pointedly, does the effective practice of politics, especially in a pluralistic society which has become more or less post-Christian, involve a serious Christian in so many compromises of principle that it almost demands a practical compartmentalization of faith, or a conception of the Christian life as something entirely private and devotional in character, and the political realm as a free-fire zone set apart from the moral desiderata that we claim are at the center of our Christian witness? Must Christianity in politics be assiduously observant of the boundaries established by John Rawls’s notions of “public reason,” obedient to the requirement that all moral assertions must be translatable into a secular idiom if they are to be uttered in public and applied to our collective life? If that dictum is accepted, and Christians are unable to draw on the language of their faith in public, what is left of that faith that could not be expressed just as well, and with less fuss and friction, by secular means?

Or is the point of Christianity in politics precisely to be an uncompromisingly faithful witness to the truth as we understand it? And if so, how far does one go with that? How do we go about addressing moral problems in politics? Is our model to be that of the great Quaker abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, whose political stance in favor of immediate emancipation was one of fierce intransigent faith-based moral judgment, in the light of which even the Constitution itself (the secular foundation of our political life) stood condemned as a pact with Satan? Or do such non-negotiable politics, based as they are on an unbending commitment to what Max Weber called “the ethic of moral conviction,” or “the ethic of ultimate ends,” run the risk of valuing moral purity over all else, and thereby failing to accomplish concrete movement in the direction of the ends it seeks?

Nor is that the only possible approach. Meliorism and proceduralism have their persuasive defenders. In his great essay “Politics as Vocation,” Weber contrasted such Garrisonian purity with the careful sobriety of what he called “the ethic of responsibility,” which holds that leaders must move cautiously, taking into account the totality of real and potential consequences arising out of their actions. One might think of Abraham Lincoln, with his much more gradual and nuanced view of how slavery would be extirpated, as a contrast to Garrison. Such leaders must take into account the tragic and unpredictable character of history, the fact that one can easily do the right thing at the wrong time, or in the wrong way, and do an immense amount of damage in the process. We are never faced with pure choices, and politics has to take into account the crooked timber of all those that practice it, and the complex circumstances in which they must operate. The ethic of moral conviction is deontological, the ethic of responsibility is consequentialist. It is not clear that one is less, or more, genuinely Christian than the other. Each can fail, each can succeed.

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These difficulties proceed from a deeper and more intrinsic cause. Politics is one of the central activities of the “world,” and Christianity has a complicated, even paradoxical, relationship to the world. Christianity is, first and foremost, an incarnational faith, which means that it is neither entirely transcendent nor entirely worldly in character. It partakes of both. It is in the world. The Word became Flesh, and dwelt among us. And Christianity departs from its true nature when it leans too much in the direction of one or the other polarity, overemphasizing either the transcendental or the worldly. Both deserve to be accorded their proper weight. And the most influential of the classic Christian heresies are traceable not to wild distortions but to more subtle errors of imbalance and one-sidedness, failures to sustain both sides of the central mystery. Arianism denied Christ’s divine nature; Docetism denied his human nature. Each fell short of the full Christian understanding by failing to embrace the full meaning of the Incarnation.

Christians are to cherish the world, then, and accord it a high degree of respect in keeping with the majesty and dignity of its Maker. This injunction applies not only to the things of nature, which is relatively easy, but also to the things of man, which can be rather more challenging, especially when one is talking about the realm of politics. Yet it is required. It is easy for us to see God’s hand in a beautiful sunset, but rather harder to see it operating at meetings of the local Board of Public Works, let alone the United States Congress. Yet Jesus’ great saying about the need to distinguish between what is Caesar’s and what is God’s is, among other things, a remarkable endorsement of the legitimacy of secular political authority.

As such, it serves as a basis for one of the great distinguishing marks of Christianity: Caesar is accorded his own proper sphere of influence. We sometimes fail to take in the full significance of that fact, even though it is explicitly confirmed in the language of Romans 13. But Jesus’ words also amount to an unyielding declaration regarding the unpassable limits upon Caesar’s authority. So the honor and respect accorded the world, and its worldly authorities, are genuine but finite. And they become wrongheaded and idolatrous if allowed to extend further than is their due.

The principle is clear enough. But sorting out the specific and practical implications of this position has always been exceedingly difficult. Just what does it mean, practically speaking, to be in the world but not of it? What are we to do when our Caesars turn vicious or corrupt? Why couldn’t Jesus have given us more specific details, instead of all those elusive parables? Why didn’t he spell out his positions on war, representative democracy, capitalism, the death penalty, arranged marriages, term limits, and the Electoral College?

We cannot know the reason for the omission, but it seems the better part of wisdom to assume that it was intentional. Christ did not come to put an end to politics—at least not yet. We are not meant to rest easy in a faith that is reducible to a set of neat and inert propositions. We are meant to wrestle with this tense duality of flesh and spirit through all the days of our earthly lives—as Jesus himself did in his own—and in the process we will be forced to fall back on the grace and mercy and unfathomable riches of God for guidance. Somehow, mysteriously, the endless wrestling of flesh and spirit is what shapes the character God wants to build in us, a character both humble and resilient.

As part of this, we wrestle with the meaning of human history itself. There is no doubt that Christians and Jews accord singular importance to history, since they believe that God’s purposes for humanity are expressed that way—not all at once in one fell swoop, one revelatory disclosure, but in the gradual unspooling of time, in the form of a narrative or story. They also believe that God intervenes in human history in ways both large and small—not only, let us say, to decide the fate of great wars, but also to heal the sicknesses of the lowly and bless the marriages of the historically obscure. It is not always clear which of these interventions is the more important, in the context of a narrative faith that constantly delights in ironic reversals of status and contends that the last shall be first, and the first last; and that the stone that was rejected shall become the cornerstone.

In other words, even for a historical and incarnational religion like Christianity, the meaning of human history must sometimes be sought outside of history, where it is revealed rather than discovered. The entire pageant of human history, painstakingly assembled by generations of historians, with all its glittering panoply of great eras, large events, and major figures, may be no more important in the mind of God than the plight of the single sparrow that falls to the earth. Perhaps even less so. We should remember that, and should accordingly have a keen sense of modesty about our grasp of the ultimate meaning of human events—and of their relation, if any, to the ultimate. We should be diligent in searching for meaning in history, but be modest and skeptical about what we believe we have found therein. After all, we might be wrong. God may have something new and unexpected up His sleeve, something that will retrospectively transform our understanding completely, the way a surprise ending utterly changes the meaning of a story that we thought we had understood, or a sonata whose mood and tenor we thought we had grasped….until the surprise element enters the scene, and reframes it all.

So, to repeat, the Christian faith itself has an ambivalent relationship to the world. It leads us into the world, but it also leads us out of the world. It promises to bind us more closely and lovingly to the particulars of our material existence. But it also promises to give us liberation from the confining hold of precisely those particulars. There is a tension here, and it is one central to the Christian faith. There is no way to resolve it. We are meant to live it rather than resolve it.

Leading us into the world: It has been said that Christianity is the most world-affirming of the world’s great religions, and there is a strong basis for the claim. As an incarnational faith, it celebrates the goodness of the created order, an order in which God became man, and in which the promised vision of the end of time is not a placeless seance of disembodied spirits, but of the flesh, resurrected and perfected, and of life eternal in a city called the New Jerusalem.

And yet, also leading us out of the world: Think how often, and how darkly, Jesus warned us about the world, and pointedly insisted that His Kingdom is not of this world. “If you belonged to the world,” he told his disciples, “it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.” (John 15:19) Are we not called, in part, to overcome the world, just as He did? As we have said above, doesn’t Christianity in fact relentlessly and triumphantly reverse all the world’s priorities—the last first and the first last, the rejected stone into the cornerstone, the weak into the strong and the wise into the foolish? What could be more radical than our affirming, in our baptism, that following Christ into death is the path to life? Or than the insistence that one must be born again of the spirit, and must be willing to walk away from father and mother and sister and brother, all the dearest things, the very conditions of our natality—or as Luther’s great signature hymn expresses it, "Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also;/ The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still,/His kingdom is forever.”

We cannot ever resolve this antinomy in our understanding of this world. As with the central affirmation of our faith, that Jesus Christ is both fully God and fully man, so with the question of the status we accord to the things of this world, including the places that we make and inhabit, and the political arrangements we seek to sustain in them. We must affirm that both sides of the antinomy are true. We find ourselves in the realm of mystery and paradox here: the things of this world are infinitely precious, and yet they can be deeply dangerous, deceiving, unworthy of our highest desires and loyalties, which are themselves deeply unreliable. We are formed by the first things of our natality, and are commanded to honor them, in the form of our fathers and mothers; yet we find our ultimate meaning in our overcoming of them, our independence from their controlling influence—in being given a new name. The Christian solution to the politics of identity is therefore simple: our identity is in Christ, and all else is incidental. But what then of that famous world-affirming side of our faith? How is one to include that in the formula? With that imperative, all the particulars come roaring back like a mighty rapids, with all their affects, loyalties, memories, and wounds carried along, insisting upon being valued in their own right. Political engagement too comes with that flow.

But that is not all. Political engagement is full of temptations. To be smart and effective in politics one needs more than conviction. One must also be cunning, must take as much attention with appearances as with realities, must learn how to treat people (if only temporarily and heuristically) as objects and categories, as “identities,” members of particular categorical blocs, learn to calibrate one’s appeal according to that, to craft speeches carefully so as to feature some things and occlude or blur other things, to calculate how to forge electoral and legislative majorities, to be shrewdly opaque and often masterfully inscrutable, to triangulate, taking for granted your loyal base of support in order to attract those who are less naturally loyal. It is a whole distinct way of thinking, and while there are more and less admirable examples of it, it is not always a process that bears close examination. Much of Reinhold Niebuhr’s influential thinking on this subject (as put forward especially in his 1932 classic Moral Man and Immoral Society) stems from his perception that we must be willing to risk dirtying our hands from time to time, learning to understand politics as an arena of power, and be willing to undertake morally hazardous actions in the pursuit of some larger public good. And I think this is largely true. But the hazards are very real, and very serious. We can easily disguise them from ourselves in practice, assuring ourselves that the ends justify the means, because our intentions are so transparently and indisputably good and just. Clearly this is a grave sin, when it happens. But how is one to guard against it?

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All of this must seem light-years removed from the question of Christian liberal education. But I don’t think so. The combination, the juxtaposition, is no more odd, no more paradoxical, than Jesus’s declaration that we should be as wise as serpents and harmless as doves (Matthew 10:16), or that we should endeavor to be “in” the world without being “of” the world. But I would insist upon one assertion undiluted by irony. There is a purity about the mission of Christian liberal education that should not be compromised by the fact that we live in a messy and uncertain world in which Christians now find themselves on the defensive, a diminishing and somewhat embattled factor. In fact, the chaos and hostility around them in a secularizing and decaying culture makes the rationale for institutions of Christian liberal education stronger than ever.  

Let me then suggest three principles of liberal education to guide them, and us, as teachers.

The first comes from Plato’s Republic, which has supplied our civilization with one of its most imperishable parables of education: the Allegory of the Cave. You all know the story. It is a strange, even weird, tale of a benighted race of people who have been compelled since birth to view shadowy images projected upon a wall as if they were the only real things in existence. Without something or someone intervening, they would never know that reality was otherwise. But when these people are released from their bondage, and brought into the blinding light of day—they at last are able to see things as they really are. And in emerging into the light, they are also being ushered into a public world, a common world, a shared world, the world that they share in common with other human beings. A world of what is, and not merely of what appears.

Which is why Plato’s great allegorical image of liberation remains at the core of education, even if it does not constitute the whole of it. Before we can do anything truly magnificent and lasting, in art or craft or love, we too must be drawn out of our various caves. We must enlarge our sense of the universe, extend the range of our human sympathies, learn what came before us, and weave all this knowledge into the fabric of a rich and various moral imagination. Needless to say, too, we must be liberated from the sirens of propaganda, or the enchantments of virtual experience, before we can accomplish anything worthwhile, and bringing about that liberation in the minds of our students will be a greater and greater part of our task as teachers in the years ahead. No one in Plato’s story is able to free himself from the cave by his own powers alone.

One doesn’t have to believe that we are inhabiting our own soft-core version of The Matrix to believe that an unhealthy proportion of our experience has come to be mediated by the artificial instruments we use to apprehend the world. Our students spend too much of their lives in the flickering darkness of virtual caves. Such a tendency carries with it great dangers.

Which brings me to the second consideration: teachers need to be guided by the admonition that Paul offers at the end of his epistle to the Philippians: “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”

There is a whole philosophy of education embedded in these words, and it is to some extent a countercultural one. It’s very much at odds with the view that no one can really know for sure what is true, pure, and just---that it is a strictly individual judgment, and that it therefore would be an arrogant imposition of one’s values or tastes to assume otherwise. Therefore the only really fair and honest way to educate young people is to “expose” them to many things, as many things as possible, respect their “feelings,” and leave it to them to sort it all out.

That is an approach to education that appears on the surface to be generous and liberatory, but is in fact far from being either. For it is an approach whose liberality is really only a veil for its lack of conviction, and for its indifference to the fate of the very ones consigned to its care. Not indifference to their physical fates, but indifference to their intellectual and spiritual fates, about which an attitude of neutrality is in fact an attitude of abdication.

Paul’s words show us a better way. It assumes that the fundamental channels of education are mimetic, that they involve learning by imitation, a process in which the choice of admirable examples to be imitated is all important: deep calls unto deep, refinement begets refinement, high ideals call forth high ideals, noble deeds leave a deposit of noble character. We become the things we contemplate. At the same time, a steady diet of triviality, mediocrity, baseness, and propaganda in education has a very different effect, and leaves us far less than what we could have been. Those things we choose as exemplary become, in the end, a window onto what we believe that it means to be most fully human---the belief that is at the bottom of all other subjects and pursuits in a real education.

And to be most fully human is always to aspire to be something more than what we are---to aspire to overcome ourselves, improve ourselves, and ennoble ourselves, by holding before ourselves images of high achievement and admirable character, to which we compare ourselves and hold ourselves accountable. It is important to get our students out of their caves, but it is equally important to give them the most estimable things to contemplate, once their eyes have adjusted to the light. Yes, they need to learn the art of “critical thinking.” But they also need, even more, the art of appreciation, of learning to fall in love with beautiful things—not just the beauty of art and literature and music, but the beauty of geometrical form, of mathematical order, of the earth and heavens, of the astonishing variety of organic life.

So…we should bring our young out of their various caves, into the light of a common world, and we should teach them to love estimable things. Finally, and this is my third point about teaching, we should resolve always to do these things in such a way as to confirm the proposition that there is no substitute for the classroom teacher himself or herself, notwithstanding our fascination with the wonders and cost-efficiencies of digital education, artificial intelligence, and all the rest. This may sound a little self-serving—and in some ways it is—but let me explain.

A teacher is an exemplar—not merely a person who imparts knowledge to others by an orderly process, but a living, walking, breathing example of the kind of person that a superior education can produce, one whose soul has been formed, and is still being formed, by love of whatsoever things are true, and fine, and noble. Nothing is more important to young people than such examples. Nothing that you can teach them is likely to be more important than what you model for them.

In a sense, you can put all three of my precepts together, and they begin to look like three aspects of what is in fact one activity. We free the young from their caves; usher them into the light and into a larger, common world; give them the most admirable and beautiful things to contemplate; and all the while, seek to embody as best we can the love of those very things in our own lives, and in the special communities within which we live. The education of Christians is nothing if it is not embodied and lived out. The human presence is the key to it all; and the human presence is, and always must be, modeled in the life and person of the teacher, and of the community in which that teacher operates.

I’ve slipped in the word “community” here, because I’m thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument in his 1987 Gifford Lectures, later published as Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, that coherent moral inquiry must be grounded in the particularities and traditions of a distinct and coherent moral community. It does not take place in an antiseptically neutral setting, a view from nowhere. This suggests a very different way of thinking about the special task of the academic who is also a committed Christian, a role that resists a complete identification with “the profession,” as we refer to our fields of specialization, but instead understands our professional identity as something subordinate to the fact of its being situated in the life of particular institutions, whose mission is devoted in a serious and holistically Christian way to the formation of the young. Christianity is not merely a subject on the curriculum, or a “worldview” to be inculcated; it is a way of living together, in the abiding light of truths that the world does not comprehend.

Far from wanting to make our students more politically engaged and adept in influencing the larger world, I would want to see them use their time in school to cultivate other skills, other forms of consciousness that the world does not encourage. It calls to my mind a great passage from Herbert Butterfield’s famous 1931 sortie against “Whig history,” with which I shall conclude my remarks. As those of you who know his book will recall, Butterfield begins by invoking the image of History as an “avenging judge,” and then rejects it, going on to suggest a far more irenic and less judgmental alternative:

….if history is in this way something like the memory of mankind and represents the spirit of man brooding over man’s past, we must imagine it as working not to accentuate antagonisms or to ratify old party-cries but to find the unities that underlie the differences and to see all lives as part of the one web of life. The historian trying to feel his way towards this may be striving to be like a god but perhaps he is less foolish than the one who poses as god the avenger. Studying the quarrels of an ancient day he can at least seek to understand both parties to the struggle and he must want to understand them better than they understood themselves; watching them entangled in the net of time and circumstance he can take pity on them – these men who perhaps had no pity for one another; and, though he can never be perfect, it is difficult to see why he should aspire to anything less than taking these men and their quarrels into a world where everything is understood and all sins are forgiven.

We tend not to honor such generous and godly understanding in our historians, since it not only fails to provide us with new weapons for present struggles, but threatens to deprive us of full use of the weapons we already have. We long for the simplicity of good guys and bad guys, and the moral satisfaction of aligning ourselves with the former, and distancing ourselves from the latter. And of tearing down the statues of those we deem unworthy of being remembered.  

But perhaps a Christian liberal education should encourage us to think differently about the past. Perhaps this attitude of capaciousness, this renunciation of the desire to make the spirit of history into an avenging angel, or a hanging judge, or even to pronounce upon whither the “arc of history” is tending, is a way of thinking about political conflict that Christians, as Christians, might want to consider.

Such a way makes historical inquiry into an act of deeply meditative devotion, and even a form of spiritual discipline, aimed at the achievement of a very high and rare form of love. It might not equip us well for every kind of political battle, or enhance our ability to smite our enemies hip and thigh, effectively and remorselessly. But it might help teach us what it means to love our enemies, and to live with them, and battle with them, in that light. That would be a lesson far more excellent, a lesson that the world generally does not teach.