Losing—and Recovering—Our Religion

When a professor at Princeton begins a Washington Post column by recounting that students at one of the world’s most prestigious universities had to have the Ten Commandments explained to them, the natural reaction is disbelief. Surely Gregory Conti was exaggerating? But within days, his essay had drawn corroborating testimony from a chorus of academics at other elite institutions.

A Northwestern professor reported teaching students who had never encountered the word “Exodus.” A former University of Virginia faculty member described undergraduates who could not parse Martin Luther King Jr.’s references to that same story — references that animate the moral architecture of the “I Have a Dream” speech and “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” A Bard College professor lamented that “most students [are] completely ignorant of Bible stories (Hebrew Bible and New Testament) and history of religion,” adding that “we fail them by not requiring exposure to religious texts and tradition.”

These are not stories about parochial schools failing to produce catechists. They are stories about the country’s flagship universities producing graduates who cannot comprehend their own civilization.

Conti, a self-described non-believer, is careful to frame his concern in secular terms. The problem he identifies is not impiety but cultural illiteracy. “It’s increasingly common on college campuses to encounter students who are unfamiliar with the most basic features of Christianity, such as the difference between the Old and New testaments or between Catholics and Protestants,” he writes. “They seldom recognize the allusions to the Bible that appear in Shakespeare’s work or in Lincoln’s second inaugural address (or in Obama’s first, for that matter).” A student who does not know what the Ten Commandments are cannot understand Michelangelo or Milton, Bach or Bellow, Dostoevsky or Douglass. “Neither Shakespeare nor Austen nor Mozart nor Rembrandt nor John Ford nor Oscar Wilde can be appreciated absent a grounding in Christianity,” Conti notes. The history of political thought, his own field, is no exception: one cannot grasp Hobbes, Locke, Burke, or Tocqueville without grasping the theological concepts undergirding their political philosophies.

The problem, however, runs deeper than aesthetics or even pedagogy. It strikes at the legitimating premise of the American constitutional order. Our nation was not founded on procedural neutrality or on the will of a majority. It was founded on a metaphysical claim stated with deliberate plainness in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

Strip out the theology, and the sentence collapses into incoherence. If men are not created in God’s image, then they are not equal; they are merely a population of differently endowed mammals jockeying for advantage. If their rights are not endowed by a Creator, then they are endowed by the State — and the State may, by the same authority, revoke those rights. The American idea of human dignity is biblical at its root. It is the doctrine of imago Dei and tzelem Elokim, the conviction that every human being bears the image of God, translated into the political grammar of the Enlightenment by men who knew their Bible.

Or, as Alexander Hamilton put it: “The sacred rights of mankind…are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”

Sadly, 250 years after the Declaration of Independence was adopted, the biblical roots of the American constitutional order are now so unfamiliar to Americans that even sitting United States senators stumble over it. Last September, in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia found a Trump nominee’s invocation of God-given rights “extremely troubling. … The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator,” Kaine said, “that’s what the Iranian government believes.”

Kaine’s confusion between the founding premise of the American republic and the ideology of an Islamist theocracy is breathtaking. The Iranian regime claims that clerics are the authorized interpreters of divine law, whereas the American founders held that every human being, by virtue of being made in God’s image, possesses inalienable rights antecedent to any government. But the more telling point is that a Harvard Law School graduate representing Thomas Jefferson’s home state did not recognize that he was rejecting the Declaration of Independence. Religious illiteracy is no longer a problem confined to undergraduates.

The mid-century Jewish theologian Will Herberg saw this coming. In Protestant–Catholic–Jew and a series of essays in the 1950s and 1960s, Herberg argued that the moral capital of the West was being drawn down faster than it was being replenished. The dominant secular ethics of his day — talk of “human dignity,” “human rights,” “the brotherhood of man” — were, he observed, parasitic on biblical premises that the same secular intellectuals were busy denying. To describe this phenomenon, he popularized the term “cut-flower culture.”

“Cut flowers retain their original beauty and fragrance,” Herberg wrote, “but only so long as they retain the vitality that they have drawn from their now-severed roots; after that is exhausted, they wither and die. So with freedom, brotherhood, justice, and personal dignity — the values that form the moral foundation of our civilization.” Herberg warned that the decline of biblical literacy and faith would inevitably translate into the decline of the civilization which grew out of that biblical soil: “Without the life-giving power of the faith out of which they have sprung, they possess neither meaning nor vitality.”

Herberg’s metaphor captures something the religiously illiterate cannot easily see, precisely because the flowers still look fresh. A society can coast for a generation or two on the moral residue of a faith it has abandoned. The Ivy League graduate who has never heard of the Ten Commandments, the Exodus, or the Creation narrative in Genesis still inherits, dimly, the moral intuitions of a civilization shaped by them — the convictions that murder is wrong, that the truth matters, that people should be free because they are born equal. But those intuitions, untethered from the soil that grew them, will not survive serious challenge. A people who cannot say why “all men are created equal” is self-evidently true will not long be able to act as though it is.

None of this is grounds for despair, however. Cultural decline is a choice, not a fate. Biblical illiteracy is reversible. What was once taught can be taught again. The chief obstacle is not the difficulty of the material but the timidity of educational institutions that have lost the conviction that any particular cultural inheritance is worth handing down at all.

The recently promulgated Phoenix Declaration, drafted by a coalition of education scholars and policymakers and unanimously adopted last November by the Florida State Board of Education, charts a way out. At its heart is a recovery of the educator’s oldest and most basic vocation: cultural transmission. The central plank of the Phoenix Declaration states:

A central purpose of education is to transmit humanity’s accumulated knowledge and wisdom, as well as our nation’s particular culture and heritage, to the next generation. A civilization survives only if it intentionally transmits its history, traditions, and values—including its yet unrealized aspirations—to the next generation. True progress comes only by building on what has been learned and achieved in the past. Students should therefore learn about America’s founding principles and roots in the broader Western and Judeo-Christian traditions. Students should study the best that has been thought and said, engaging in the great conversation among the competing viewpoints that comprise our intellectual heritage, so that they freely make the best views their own.

That final clause is the answer to those who would call such a curriculum “indoctrination.” The Phoenix Declaration does not demand that schools teach only one point of view and expect unquestioning support. Rather, it encourages them to provide students access to the “competing viewpoints” of the “great conversation” of Western civilization. But that great conversation cannot be entered, and its competing voices cannot be freely weighed, by students who do not know what Exodus was, or what the Ten Commandments are, or what claim the imago Dei makes on the consciences of citizens.

With other states already moving to follow Florida’s lead, the prospect of genuine renewal — of replanting the flowers in the soil that grew them — is no longer merely aspirational.

The cut flowers are wilting. But the garden remains, and it can still be renewed.

Jason Bedrick is a Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.