On Being Amateur Academics

Philip God does draw straight with crooked lines. And so, reading these books even from that framework, from that worldview of being a Christian, and actually knowing that there is a standard that judges secularism — there is a standard that John Locke and James Madison and Alexander Hamilton and these guys do have to submit to. And by God’s grace, we have access to that standard.

All right, welcome to another episode of All Are Yours.

Sean All Are Yours.

Philip This time Sean has a more tame background and a more tame shirt.

Sean Wow. It’s at least new, if it’s not tame.

Philip Yeah, I have my normal one.

Sean Your Monday shirt. It’s not just your normal — it’s your Monday shirt.

Philip That’s right. Exactly right.

So, we are in this episode. And I think last time I did not have a book background and you did. This time you don’t, I do.

Sean I’m still the old guy.

Philip You are. And for now, I’m still the young guy — relative to almost everybody I interact with. So there you have it.

Sean Yeah, I’ve crested that. I keep now being older than the percentage of people that I’m interested in. I’m the old guy in the room.

Philip There you go. And maybe it’s worth our audience knowing — whoever the audience is — that as of this recording, we’re almost twenty-four hours from me putting a pie in Sean’s face. And you’re looking pretty good.

Sean Yeah, as you know, because we’ve shared some information before we pressed record — because that’s what podcasters always talk about, how they have their conversations before —

Philip Correct. “Like we talked about before we started.”

Sean Yeah. It is true that, for anybody who is interested, I can still taste the chocolate in my mouth. It took a long time in the bathroom at church to get some amount cleaned up. But I still got home and there was chocolate pudding — because it was chocolate pie with whipped cream and a graham cracker crust — and I still had chocolate in my ears.

Oh man. It was in my beard until I got home and took a shower, for as much as I tried to clean it out. It was all fine. All fun and games. But I still have the taste.

Philip Somebody did mention to me, “Hey, it looked like you avoided most of his beard.” So it could have been worse.

Sean I think your comment to me afterwards was, “Oh, I could have gone lower.”

Philip That’s right.

Sean But the encouragement I got for cleaning up was to work from the top down. So it all got into the beard eventually anyway. It was in there.

Philip That was kind of my thought — that it would leak down. If I go low, you’ll never get it on top. If I go high, it’ll come down.

Sean Did you see the picture that Ian posted?

Philip Oh, the picture of you — yes, I did. And I saw a video that Ryan took as well.

Sean Yeah.

Philip So there’s evidence. There you go. So that’s what we do for fun: we just put pie in each other’s face.

Sean I don’t think we can go that far yet. So far, what we do for fun is you put a pie in my face. It’s not reciprocal. Not yet.

Philip Hopefully never. I have no interest.

Sean You were definitely — because you still had your dress shirt on. And not just a dress shirt, but —

Philip White. Yeah, white.

Sean So you were prepared to get chocolate pie in the face?

Philip I was that confident that I would win.

Sean Yeah.

Philip No, I had an undershirt. If I had to, I’d take off the dress shirt and just be in the t-shirt. But yeah, I had my rallying campaign going: “Pie for Higgins.”

Sean There was a nice rhythm to it, as everybody was chanting that for a while.

Philip Very different than “Pie for Kulishov.” There was no flow there.

Sean Didn’t even sound good. Well, because when you think about Russia, you don’t think about pie.

Philip Right.

Sean It wasn’t just the number of syllables. It was the whole idea.

Philip That’s right.

Sean Something’s wrong there. But it could have happened.

Philip Yeah.

Sean It was close.

Philip It was close. It was too close.

But I’m done with it. You apparently are still dealing with some of the aftertaste.

Sean The residual impact.

Philip So there you go. Hopefully next time I see you, you’ll be all cleaned up, inside and out.

Sean We can hope.

Philip Yeah. But this episode is not going to be about pie. Nothing to do with pie at all.

We have been talking off camera — for years actually, and months and weeks — about a couple of different ideas. One is the idea of Christians and reading, Christians and academics, Christians and long sentences and big books that are even outside of just theology. We have that episode talking about the attributes of God and some more specifics on theology, diving deep. But if we hold to an all-are-yours framework, then we do think Christians very much should be not just interested in, but at the forefront of, much more reading and intellectual study than just theology proper.

If Jesus is Lord of all of it, then all of it has to do with him and is for him — whether it’s history, whether it’s philosophy, whether it’s current studies, even observing the world around us. All of that is connected with the lordship of Christ. So Christians loving God with all their mind includes loving the world he’s made, and the people he’s made who are thinking about that world, who have put words on paper to express their thoughts. It includes all of that.

And we’ve also been talking about the idea that most Christians are not going to be able to be high-end graduate academics. I’m one of those who is a college dropout, so there’s no degree abroad.

Sean And yet you did not get the pie in the face.

Philip Yeah, that’s true. See?

Sean I’ve got my master’s degree — and what did that get me?

Philip Pie in the face. That’s right.

I think we’ve mentioned this before, but Robert Capon emphasizes the idea of being an amateur, and amateur as connected to the idea of lover. So not just somebody who doesn’t know, but somebody who is seeking to know because he loves, who does because he loves. He’s not a professional. He’s an amateur — as lover, coming from the root meaning of that word.

Sean Yeah. Amo is the Latin verb for “I love,” so it’s there at the beginning of “amateur.” Doing it for the love of the game, rather than because you’re getting paid to do it. And potentially you could do a thing and get paid for what you love to do — that also is fine. But “amateur” has gotten a bad rap, like you’re incompetent or unskilled, when that’s not necessarily its root meaning. It’s that you keep doing it because you love doing that thing.

Philip Right.

Sean So you could actually be a very skilled amateur. Like in sports: it used to be the case that you couldn’t go to the Olympics if you got paid to do that sport — at least in the United States. It was only within the last ten or twenty years, I forget exactly when, that the Dream Team played basketball, that NBA players for the first time played in the Olympics. Our NBA players are supposed to be better than our college players, but our college players were amateurs, because at that point there weren’t any deals to pay college athletes for their name, image, or likeness, or whatever some of the new rules are today. But they played because they loved it.

And you can do lots of things because you love it. I’m a fiction reader in particular — not because I get paid to read or paid to teach it, but because I delight in it. I enjoy it. And there should be some more intellectual effort, intellectual and academic deep diving, especially by men but by women as well, because they enjoy it as a gift from God. It’s part of their image bearing, so they can love it even if that’s not their job, not their profession.

Philip Right. And it seems like that’s the beginning of our sanctification, and also the goal of our sanctification. We’re learning to love more. We love because he loved us, and we get to know him more as we love him more, so that we would love him more. That idea of love being involved in everything we do and think — not just the work, but our existence being connected with loving the thing in front of us.

The more sanctified we are, the more maturity we grow toward, the more love is at the root of even the reasons why we’re pursuing something, why we’re doing it. Our delight in the thing ought not be disconnected from our action of doing that thing.

Sean And who says that they love social media? Who says they love reading three sentences on Twitter, or that they love that nine-second video, that nine-second reel? Those are fun things — this isn’t bashing those things. It’s just saying that “I am a lover of Facebook” is not something I’ve heard people say. Now, they do it for free. They are amateurs in that sense. But not because it is a deep delight.

And books especially reward that sort of attention, given the sustained focus and thoughtfulness that goes into trying to understand an author’s story or an author’s argument. That’s actually really hard to do in a short little clip. So, again — both, and all are yours. But loving, getting deeper into something we’re reading, is worth working on.

Philip Right. So there are a few things that, even as a community with Trinity Evangel Church, the people within our community are together trying to pull in that direction — to be amateur academics, if you could say it that way, to love books, to love thinking, reading, learning together. Apart from even the Kuyperian camaraderie, there are a lot of more intellectual topics that we discuss that are more difficult to discuss if you don’t know the greater context of those ideas. So: men drawing together in that direction, and then some of our ladies do the Momnibus. That’s just a fun way that they’ve named a thing where they read big books together and get together twice a year to celebrate finishing big books and discussing them.

Sean Don’t they even dress up? They try to —

Philip Often. Not all of the ladies.

Sean But some of them even try to get into period dress, period costumes, from whatever the style of that age might have been. And they try to wear that, in addition to snacks. So that also seems appropriate.

Philip Yeah, I don’t know how consistent that part is. I know they’ve done it. But at the very least, I know there are food themes or something like that. They finished Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace — that one they did over a full year, so they had a celebration party after the first half of the big book, and then a second one as well. And they’d have Russian-themed food, or —

Sean Not pie.

Philip Not that. They did not have pie.

Sean When they celebrated finishing War and Peace. No.

Philip That’s right. But yeah, big books like that would be more challenging for busy moms to read on their own. It’s challenging for any mom to read. But there’s a group of them rowing together, pulling in the same direction, encouraging one another.

Right now I think they’re finishing Pride and Prejudice, so that’s a little bit of an easier read than War and Peace, and there are more people involved with it. War and Peace had a few less people, or maybe people kind of —

Sean That’s right.

Philip They’re looking for people who are interested enough to put in the work, to do the reading and come prepared with some thoughts and opinions. And it’s also very open-handed and welcoming to people who haven’t done it — they want people to be drawn toward it, to be pulled toward it.

Sean Yeah.

Philip Correct.

Sean I think Momnibus might be one of my favorite things that I have absolutely nothing to do with that I know is happening in our group, in our community. I’m not an amateur Omnibusser, because I’m a guy, so I don’t get to go. But I love the name. I love that the ladies are doing it. I love what books they’ve tried and keep working on.

Philip Yeah.

Sean That’s just perfect. If our moms were reading War and Peace in a month and they had two meetings a week, maybe that would be too far. But the flexible pace, enough time in between to read and then to be able to talk about it — that’s way encouraging, like you’re saying. Can you go to Amazon and buy a set of great books? Sure. But it’s not quite as good if you have to do that by yourself.

It’s amazing that we have those kinds of resources, to get almost any book you want today. Or to listen to the book. What a great technological advance, for people who are folding laundry to be able to listen to a book at the same time. I don’t do a lot of lower-cognitive physical work, to then value being able to listen to something at the same time. Plus, as a dude, I multitask less good altogether. But various cleaning things, or doing dishes, or doing laundry — these kinds of things allow for a lot of listening. I think Jordan Peterson has talked about the rise of being able to get in good information during a variety of low-cognitive physical tasks. That’s great.

So: the moms who are listening, the moms who are reading. Momnibus is a fun name. I think that’s fantastic. The guys have other opportunities to do it, even if it’s not quite as formal when the guys get together — but even the Comeford College classes that we have had, that we’re continuing to try to do again, a lot of them are: you don’t have to try to learn this stuff on your own, we can do it together.

Philip Right.

Sean There’s some amateuring, some developing of loves, that we get to do in community.

Philip Exactly right. So Comeford is another way we’re trying to encourage that. Right now the emphasis is on people like us — people who are not necessarily high school graduates or of college age, but already have kids, families, work, and yet see value in this and want to go further in, want to have a deeper dive and learn more about it. So we want to create more of those opportunities, invite more people to join that sort of thing. Whatever your life situation, to have the desire and then the opportunity to be able to do that.

Sean Yeah. So you have your own spreadsheet — I’m guessing it’s a spreadsheet. I know you have your own schedule to plod through a bunch of these kinds of books. Can you say more about your personal amateuring aim to read these books?

Philip Yeah. I would have loved to go to NSA or some sort of liberal arts classical higher education program where they’d make me write essays for reading these books. I enjoy stuff like that.

Sean So, as an aside — I ignored it. I was trying to avoid it when I was in college. Maybe you’ve heard this story before.

I was trying to play baseball in college. I started out at Liberty University and then transferred to a small school called Milligan College in Johnson City, Tennessee. And the myth was that Harvard actually modeled their humanities program after Milligan College’s. Is that true? I don’t know. But the humanities class alone at Milligan College was a twenty-four-credit-hour class. You had to take six hours of it your first four semesters — so freshman and sophomore years of college, six hours. It was a class you had every day in some format. Tuesdays and Thursdays, every freshman was in a big lecture hall and you got an hour or two of lectures, and then Monday, Wednesday, Friday you had breakout sessions where you talked more specifically with your class.

But I remember one semester we read — I should actually say we were assigned to read. I’ve been assigned to read some really good books. I was not a reader at this point in my life, but I was required to take these classes. So one semester we must have read Faust by Goethe, and I think we were supposed to have read Moby-Dick, and then we read something by Dostoevsky.

Philip Mm-hmm.

Sean So we got to the final paper. Have you heard me tell this story before?

Philip I don’t think so.

Sean So we got the last exam of that semester, and the first question was something like: Dostoevsky, Melville, and Goethe are having a roundtable discussion about Goethe’s character Faust. Give Dostoevsky’s and Melville’s feedback and recommendations for improving the character, and then Goethe’s response to each in turn. That was the essay question.

Philip Sounds awesome.

Sean And I remember girls started crying. Because it was only worth 30% of the exam — there was more still that you were going to have to do. But I have no idea what I wrote, because I hadn’t read any of the books.

Philip AI.

Sean Yeah. We were making up ten-page papers before AI, without even having read the books.

Philip Exactly.

Sean But yeah, I missed out on what was a fantastic humanities program. Little did I know when I was in college that I would care so much now.

Philip Maybe that’s why you got the pie in your face.

Sean It’s like karma coming back around.

Philip Anyway. So —

Sean I had opportunity and I blew it. You didn’t even get to go to one of those kinds of schools.

Philip Yeah. So I enjoy that. I like reading, learning. I’m a footnote reader. I’ll do background research on an idea or a person or a date.

One book I really enjoyed — we weren’t going to talk about this book — is The Guns of August, by Barbara… hmm, I forget her last name. It’s somewhere here. She’s talking about the years leading up to World War I, and then in particular the first month of World War I, which is August. The entire book is pretty long and it’s about the first month, August, of World War I. A lot of detail, a lot of context. She makes it very interesting. That was a book I gave five out of five stars, because I did want to reread it right away. I wish she would have kept going. But she has a lot of history books.

A lot of people, I get, aren’t like that. They like more synopsis and summary, high-level flyovers. But I enjoyed the detail, the context, the background information of every character and all of that.

Sean Well, you’re a plaque reader. Having traveled to the East Coast this past spring together, with students from the school, you were regularly late to the group meetup because you still had more things you were trying to read, the details. I guess plaques are like physical footnotes, maybe. So you’re just tracing the plaque footnotes wherever they lead you.

Philip Yeah, some plaques I took pictures of so I could read up on them later. But in that way it does make me, if I’m reading for pleasure like that, a much slower reader. I plod through it.

And I get being assigned a reading, and I get different types of reading — how to read a book, that you’re reading different books for different purposes. There’s a high-level flyover approach; there’s more of a micro-detailed approach. You shouldn’t read everything the same way. I appreciate those distinctions, those categories.

But particularly for the great books, the classical readings, books that have to do with the move of Western civilization and how we got to where we are today with our ideas and concepts — both history and philosophy, people who were influential, wars that changed the trajectory of civilization, or that could have if they’d gone a different way — there’s a lot of information there that I do value knowing. I think it’s important. So I want to give myself the adequate time to understand the different backgrounds and contexts of all of that.

So my approach: I have a morning routine that’s the same every day, and that routine ends with about forty minutes of reading. The category I read there is this classical reading.

Sean Yeah, and where’d you get your list? How’d you come up with that?

Philip What I started with was the Omnibus list. From ECS, or from the connection with Logos and ACCS — so the Omnibus material of ancient, medieval, modern, and then it repeats again: ancient, medieval, modern. So, going through those texts.

And I did like your identification of those categories when we did the adult auditing class. The first one was Tenebrae, right? Darkness. Categorizing that ancient world, pre-Christ, as a world of darkness, with paganism — even though there was still a lot of common grace that God showed even for cultures outside of the biblical narrative, whatever was happening in Europe during the time of the prophets or whatnot. But it still is a time of darkness before Christ.

So, Tenebrae. Then you had called the medieval world —

Sean Lux.

Philip That’s right, Lux. So, light. Omnibus Lux: light came into the world. A big change in the trajectory of human thought, and the development of concepts that Christianity brought with it. Even the church fathers building on the apostolic fathers, and how they led Western culture through the fall of Rome and into the medieval period. And then that in some sense culminating with the Reformation, and then transitioning into the modern world, which you had called Modius. Or Modium.

Sean Modius, yeah.

Philip Modius. And that’s the idea of a basket.

Sean In the parable Jesus tells, no one lights a lamp and sticks it in the middle of the room and then puts a basket over it. The Vulgate’s translation is modius for basket. So we had the light, and then moderns have put a covering over top of it.

Philip Yeah.

Sean Ignorantly, stupidly, rebelliously.

Philip Yeah. I think those identifiers are helpful to categorize the part of the world you’re reading about right now. So you’re reading something in the ancient world: okay, this is pre-Christ, this is paganism, they don’t have a lot of the concepts that we take for granted, that we just assume. Even reading the beginning of the medieval period, before Augustine or right after Augustine, pre-Nicene Creed, pre-Apostles’ Creed — a lot of the ideas we take for granted about theology proper, about the attributes of God, they were working out, discovering, arguing through. And then seeing how people started taking those things for granted.

So we thought that maybe some of our All Are Yours episodes, every now and then, could take a book or two and talk about it — as amateur academics, discussing some of the ideas and concepts of those books.

Right now I’m working through Alexis de Tocqueville — I don’t know how to pronounce his French name — his Democracy in America. So, Democracy in America, and then he has two essays on America as well. Maybe this is just a teaser and we could talk about that at a later time. I’m halfway or so done with that one.

Sean Tocqueville. Do you remember what years he was visiting the United States?

Philip 1830. He was here during Andrew Jackson, and then he wrote his book in two volumes a few years after that. He finished the second volume by the end of that decade.

Sean So fifty-ish years after the War for Independence, traveling through and seeing what made America tick, what made the United States in its form at that point tick. I’ve read part of it previously, as part of Omnibus. It was very interesting, some of the observations he was making as an outsider, about things we’ve lost. We in America have put a basket over some of the good light that we had, even politically. But seeing what he described was fascinating. We can talk about that more.

Philip Yeah. In particular, his perspective on America as a European, a European Frenchman. France at that time was still in the middle of their back-and-forth revolution — starting from 1789, and then Napoleon, then they had another revolution. For a hundred years France kept being in this revolution. And Tocqueville was more of an aristocrat, more of the nobility, but he seemed to try to have a balanced approach to valuing and appreciating both democracy and aristocracy.

So he’s writing about American democracy as a test case for how things could be, because democracy was not working in France — but also people were criticizing aristocracy. And he covers not just the politics, but everyday life, family, religion. He talks a lot about Christianity, and the everyday Christianity that affects America’s life.

Sean Which wasn’t affecting France. There was no way to attach Christian principles to the French Revolution. There are actually ways to see how some of the assumptions of Christianity — including that no man is absolute sovereign over another man —

Philip Mm-hmm.

Sean — because God is sovereign. Whereas the French Revolution wanted to argue that no man is sovereign over another man, but there was no God over top of any of the men. So the French Revolution and the American War for Independence: very much different.

Philip Right.

Sean I don’t remember getting told that when I was in high school. I think the Revolutionary War in America and the French Revolution, even in terms of what they were called, were understood to be largely the same. But it turns out they weren’t.

Philip Right.

Sean And Tocqueville knows that as well.

Philip Yeah. And even then, understanding how we got to where we did, with both France and America.

There is a very direct, step-by-step walk from the Protestant Reformation into the revolutions in England — with the Scottish Covenanters, the establishment of Parliament, what England did with the king, what they did with the Commonwealth, how they tried to set all that up. And then a lot of that foundation being both used in the American War for Independence and used by the French philosophers, like Rousseau, to set the foundation for the French eventually saying, “No God, no masters.” A very, very different, contrasted approach.

But guys like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were secularists. Thomas Jefferson in particular was a deist. James Madison was still a secularist in his approach; he wanted that sort of neutral state. But their culture, the air they breathed, even the words they spoke, was very much Christian. So a lot of their ideas in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution connected very closely. It was on the tail end of the English Revolution, of that whole time period — the Glorious Revolution in the 1680s, so a little less than a hundred years before the American War for Independence. And then a lot of those Covenanters and Scottish Presbyterians left England, came to America, and stirred up the atmosphere for what ended up happening here.

So without understanding a lot of that conversation, you can’t really continue the conversation about what’s happening in America today. I mean, you can — but not without seeing the connection going all the way back to the English Revolution, and how all those ideas are just building on top of each other. It’s very intertwined: we’re here because of this, because of this, because of this.

In particular, during that time in the 1650s or so, you had Thomas Hobbes, who wrote Leviathan. That was the English people trying to figure out the idea of man’s state of nature. That’s the idea that came about, and that phrase kept being brought up: the state of nature is a state of chaos, it’s a state of war, that’s man’s natural state. And the conversation moved from a Christian approach to a much more humanistic, secular analysis. They would assume God, they would assume Scripture, but it became much more implicit and much more rational.

So Thomas Hobbes and Leviathan argue that because man left to himself is anarchy, we need a strong state. We need the state controlling the church, we need the state controlling the people. And in response to that, John Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Civil Government. A lot of Locke’s thoughts were in response to Thomas Hobbes’s thoughts about what to do with the state of nature. Locke used a lot of that state-of-nature idea to bring about how people made rational decisions to bring about consent. That’s Locke’s foundation for his philosophy of how society ought to be run: by the consent of the governed.

Sean Yeah, the social contract — he’s the one who’s mostly attributed even with that phrase, that idea.

Philip Social contract. Yeah. That part of the people agreeing to get into a mutual relationship to govern society. I don’t know if he could have used the word “consent” more — he keeps bringing it up. The consent of the governed, the consent of the people. He’s basing all government on the people’s consent, even to the point that government is not legitimate if it is not based on the people’s consent.

Sean Which still is humanistic, and still then has a god. It’s just that the god is the people, or somehow this idea of the people’s will — which can’t actually be separated from persons, but there’s this mythical will that can be found, that necessarily must be found. And then that is the god, the functional god. Obviously Locke wasn’t calling the people’s will God, divine — and yet that is the great authority. If the people will a particular ridiculous thing, then the god of the system is willing that particular thing.

So, better than Rousseau in some ways, I guess. Or Hobbes. Better than Hobbes, and definitely better than Rousseau. But still missing what is actually making up human beings, and what’s wrong with us.

Philip Right.

Sean And just getting a bunch of us in a room to agree on something doesn’t actually mean we’re going to thrive, that we’re going to be fruitful.

Philip Right. He’s riding on the tail end of a century-long battle, not just in England but in all of Europe post-Reformation, about understanding the relationship between church and state and where the common man falls into that. He’s moving that ball forward in the game of modern liberty, so to speak.

So his idea of emphasizing consent, and focusing on natural law as the foundation for civil interaction — kind of what you’re talking about, natural law as that foundation instead of God’s law — and arguing for that consent, is laying the foundation for secularism. Rousseau then follows on; a lot of Rousseau’s stuff is built on Locke’s stuff. He works Locke’s stuff into his work, and then the French Revolution builds on that.

John Locke seemed to be a real believer. He does talk about God. He talks about God’s authority. But it seems like he very much takes it for granted. He doesn’t just take God’s law for granted — he takes Christendom for granted. Just reading Locke, I don’t think he could imagine what real secularism would look like. “Well, of course we would always know that Jesus is Lord of the system. We’re all Christians — but under this umbrella of being Christians, how do we live?”

So I think some of the downfall we see in today’s modern world, even postmodern world, can very much be attributed to Locke’s secular ideas: disconnecting our morality from Christ, disconnecting our morality from the Bible, and basing it just on the consent of the governed, as if that is the ultimate authority. We would not have the sort of liberty we enjoy in America without John Locke. And also, we wouldn’t have the sort of secular disaster we experience without a lot of those ideas. So it’s messy — and it’s how we got here.

Sean Yeah. I was assigned, I’m sure, to read the founding documents in high school, and potentially at some point in college. I didn’t, until going through Omnibus kinds of things when we started ECS. At least by then my eyes were open, or I was ready to see it in a different way.

Even the lack of a religious test for holding office — I remember thinking, “Hmm, I think that probably is too big of an open door, that’s wrong.” Which is just a different application of what you just described, where there were some cultural assumptions, some implicit agreements, including generally assuming that people were Protestant in the United States. Were there some Catholics? Were there some Jews? Yeah. But generally speaking, the majority of the population would have been connected to a Protestant church of some kind, regardless of denomination.

So it does seem like “no religious test” meant: you didn’t have to be Presbyterian or Baptist or Anglican or Congregational or whatever it was going to be. You didn’t have to be one of those — because the assumption was that you were probably at least a Trinitarian Christian. Though again, not everybody was. But there was the assumption of some God above the state, and then, okay, we can build on that.

Except now we’ve moved far enough. We’ve seen in our history that some of those principles of freedom opened the door to people who didn’t share those assumptions. And a religious test of some kind probably would have been appropriate. What would it have been? A religious test of the Apostles’ Creed, because that’s pretty basic — that’s the shortest one out of the main creeds and confessions. All right, well, does that mean everybody who could say “I accept the Apostles’ Creed” is a genuine Christian? No, because you can’t guarantee that either. But the lack of any kind of conversation like that has led us to a freedom that’s destroying us from the inside.

Philip Right. You may not talk about that. That’s different even than — it’s not the explicit foundation.

Sean I’m sure that for a long time I thought the division between church and state meant what you’re describing there, which is almost a separation of morality and state — a separation of any kind of religious conviction or worldview that relates to morality or transcendent things, transcendent truths, let alone a transcendent God, such that the state could function on its own and make up its own ideas. I am sure that I thought that, because that’s how we would have been taught. The assumption is that political theory has nothing to do with any kind of heart issue.

Philip Right.

Sean When in fact the comments that Hobbes, or that even Locke, were making about man’s nature, man’s condition, are actually an acknowledgment of a sin problem. And you need something more than political laws or political theory or a two-party system to actually overcome and deal with man’s sin.

Not that you can’t make any other decisions, or that there’s no place to consider the will of the governed. It’s not that we just put the Bible there and say “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” so therefore what people want doesn’t matter. But to divide them entirely, like we’ve gotten to the point of more so in our country — that has not helped us.

Philip No doubt. Yeah, the secular worldview — we’re born into it. It’s just people born in the last hundred and fifty years, maybe two hundred years, who are born into that growing assumption that secularism is actually a viable option. We live in this kind of aquarium and all we know is these walls.

But for thousands of years, all of human history, there was no separation between religion and politics. Those things go hand in hand all the time in any kind of society, whether it’s Christian or pagan. There is always that sort of devotion, loyalty, connection with who your god is. And a lot of times, yes, that has been nominal and habitual and cultural, maybe — but it has been acknowledged.

And yes, you’ve had plenty of Christian rulers and Christian societies that are not living Christianly, that are not Christlike, that are not obedient. I mean, look at the entire history of Israel’s theocracy — a very explicit and acknowledged God of that system, and a lot of sin, a lot of hypocrisy, a lot of disobedience.

Sean Yeah.

Philip But the concept of secularism — where it’s possible to be in some sort of neutral cloud nirvana disconnected from any religion — is not just a very new idea, but an idea that has quickly failed. We have quickly seen the end result of what that leads to.

And I think guys like John Locke were maybe at the beginning of that, trying to see: can this work? For example, right before John Locke you had the Scottish reformer —

Sean John Knox.

Philip Right, John Knox. And he’s very explicit about God’s law, and he’s trying to rebuke the political rulers of Scotland and England based on God’s law. There was no neutrality for him. And it was just a few decades after that that somebody like John Locke tried to formulate that sort of “maybe there is some sort of — not secular neutrality, but consent of the people that is the ultimate authority. That’s what we should base it on.”

So then eventually that did lead to the American War for Independence and those ideas. That’s just the same conversation that was happening with the English Revolution, continued in America. When Parliament started acting like a tyrant over America, it’s the same ideas that people drew out of in order to push back against that.

So you have Christian speak and Christian aroma and a lot of Christian assumptions, but you still do have a secular type of understanding at the foundation of America’s founding. Even some of the things that Thomas Jefferson and the founders were writing and talking about were pushing more toward that secularism.

Then James Madison, who wrote most of our Constitution, had a lot of those ideas pressed forward. And you had Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay together, under the name Publius, write the Federalist Papers. This was an organized attempt — by Alexander Hamilton mostly — to promote the Constitution and bring it forward, because the states, or the people of the states, had to ratify it.

You had a lot of people who were maybe old-timers, guys like Patrick Henry, who fought in or were big promoters of America’s War for Independence, who hated the idea of a federal government, who hated the idea of a U.S. Constitution. They were just fine living under the Articles of Confederation. But the Articles of Confederation were quickly showing themselves to be weak in how states interacted with each other. So that’s why James Madison and Alexander Hamilton — maybe the top two guys — were trying to push forward this idea of the states uniting under one national government.

Originally it was the Federalists who were for state government and the nationalists who were for national government. Then the nationalists rebranded themselves as Federalists in order to take that image. And they were organized and thought through, and published the Federalist Papers as a newspaper release that they had organized and planned and intended to compile into a book. That was the idea — the book was going to be called The Federalist. Whereas the other people, who were opposed to that, were publishing kind of sporadic and maybe even contradicting views that now we have together called the Anti-Federalist Papers.

Sean Which is losing branding.

Philip Right.

Sean Anytime you have to say “anti-something,” you’re in trouble.

Philip Right.

Sean I mean, probably you’re in trouble. In addition to — how do you make a collective force of the people who don’t want a collective force, to argue against the people who really want the collective force?

Philip Yeah.

Sean You can see the irony of it now, farther out.

Philip Right.

Sean But yeah, they were in trouble from the beginning.

Philip Right.

Sean Even though — a couple years ago at ECS I taught the Omnibus class that reads through the founding documents, the Declaration and the Constitution. We read some of the Federalist and some of the Anti-Federalist Papers and we had a debate in class. It took a couple of days, I think, where half the class were the Anti-Federalists and half the class were the Federalists, and they had to argue for which was better.

Knowing what we know now, the Anti-Federalists were largely right in seeing that as soon as you start centralizing the power, that central power is not going to give it back up. The more you give them, the more they’re going to take, and they’re going to be able to protect it and hold onto it.

And yet you can also see — okay, if all of our fifty states, let’s say, and it wouldn’t have worked out like that, I’m sure, but if all of our fifty states had to defend themselves individually against states that had become great nations, well, Missouri is not defending itself. Missouri at least is in the middle of nowhere and maybe not very many people want it. But how is California going to be able to protect itself from Japan or China coming across the Pacific Ocean?

So it’s a great discussion, but it’s also not just theoretical. We’re actually living in some of the good and a good portion of the bad from where we went.

Philip Right. And these guys were building things. For them it was not just hypothetical theory. We talk about it looking back, from a more removed situation — I think sometimes when we talk about history we have that privilege. But when we’re trying to build things, when we’re trying to create institutions and make things happen, you don’t have the privilege of abstractions that cannot be made real today.

Sometimes maybe you can give yourself the time to create your context, to allow for your ideal world to come about. But most ideologues are revolutionaries who end up burning up more than they actually build. Those who build, those who are reformers, do have to work with the material that they have.

And so we look at history, how it ebbs and flows, and we build on top of that as well. By God’s grace, hopefully we can learn from the mistakes of our fathers. But we can also appreciate the work they did.

Even living in the America we do today: just like with John Locke, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton very much based it on a secular worldview. It was explicit in the Federalist Papers — there’s a lot of that sort of thing. James Madison, as did Thomas Jefferson, were much more removed from the world of Christendom than even John Locke was. John Locke smelled of it. Reading John Locke, you get the sense that he’s living in the cloud of Christendom. James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton are not like that. It’s much more rational, much more scientific, much more modern.

So at the foundation of America is this mixture. It’s a concrete mix of tail-end Christendom and front-end modernity that hardened, that solidified together. And we are now the recipients of that. We have the consequences of that.

So even a lot of our arguments today across the aisle — or these big contrasted viewpoints of people who are just speaking past each other — I think are these different ingredients: of Christendom, of “Jesus is Lord,” of the “every square inch” type of thing, even though Kuyper said that after all those guys. And also of secularism worked out to its full conclusion, that none of it actually has any foundation. That’s what postmodernity is. Modernity is humanism rising to the top. It’s rationalism: man is god, the state is god. Postmodernity has seen the failures of that in World War I and World War II and has said actually none of it matters, none of it is real, there is no morality. And we are the children of that, living in this world now.

Sean Because blind people can’t see, instead of acknowledging that the problem of modernity was the human pieces in it — not the morality pieces or truth pieces — it just keeps being human-centered. It’s man-centered. Which is what Kuyper in his context was trying to acknowledge: that God’s sovereignty or man’s sovereignty are really your only options.

And our postmodernity is recognizing that a man-sovereign society stinks. It’s destructive. And so now we’re back to hopeless. We hoped in man, who could bring us to utopia, and that brought us war. Right — but that doesn’t mean that the morality or the truth part also should go away. It was men who were ignoring truth and morality who actually got us into the problem we’re in. So postmodernity’s identification of the problem is wrong.

It’s interesting: we were talking just a few minutes ago about the bad branding of “anti-something.”

Philip Mm-hmm.

Sean Kuyper, who started a political party, called his the Anti-Revolutionary Party — specifically as an alternative to French revolutionary thinking of “no God, no masters.” No: we need a God above the state. We need something transcendent above men. “Anti-Revolutionary,” or the Historical Christian Party, which was his other option, the more positive side — that also was not a great name, too vague to be any good. But yeah: it’s either God is sovereign or men are sovereign.

Philip Right.

Sean And even the idea of being able to read the books and participate in this society is what we’re trying to do ourselves, but also trying to encourage other people to do as well.

Philip Right.

Sean The arguments across the aisle that we watch on TV — donkeys and elephants — how many of them even know what they’re talking about?

Philip Right.

Sean It doesn’t actually seem like very many of them know what they’re talking about. And then the demand for immediate fixes. What book can you read where there was an immediate fix to something, or something got immediately fixed that had long-term benefit? A Caesar could immediately make a new law and put it into immediate effect. But did that actually work out when that Caesar was gone — or even four weeks from when he made that change?

So being able to be patient enough to finish a book is a good practice for being able to be patient while waiting for a good law to come into effect. Or whatever it is — for “Jesus is Lord” to actually become the defining principle of even Christian life. Living like Jesus is Lord of all of this doesn’t even really seem to be how most professing Christians act. So then how are we going to get a broader society, which in general is more secular, postmodern?

Philip Yeah.

Sean That’s going to require a lot more work than just a tweet. And if we read some more, we’d probably get that better perspective.

Philip Yeah. And again, it was Christians who introduced the idea of secularism, who brought that about.

This is not a great book, or a classical book — this one was written in the ’90s — but it does a really good job. It’s a thin book called The Emergence of Liberty in the Modern World, by Douglas Kelly. I’d recommend this. It covers the move of Calvin’s thoughts — John Calvin, his thoughts, even his political theory — through Geneva, Huguenot France, Knox’s Scotland, Puritan England, and colonial America. Again, the idea of how the lordship of Christ then moved toward a more secular approach, and the good that a lot of that did do, and then some of the bad eggs in the omelet that got put in as well.

Sean And where’d you find the Kelly book? Was that in a footnote? Because I don’t think that’s in the Omnibus curriculum.

Philip It’s not the Omnibus curriculum. This is from the ’90s. I don’t remember — somebody mentioned it at some point, somewhere, probably on some podcast.

Sean Podcasts change the world.

Philip That’s right. But it’s short, it’s like 140 pages, and I think he does a good job explaining. So if people are interested, they could check that out as well.

But again, the idea is even just to love knowing how we got to where we are today. To love understanding, and even throughout all of that string, seeing God’s work in all of it too. It’s centuries of man’s ideas and man’s thoughts, but that is not undivided from God — even if those men are trying to divide themselves from God, God is using that, he’s working that in. You see men be wrong, and that then leads to some sort of glory for Jesus, some sort of glory for God. So God does draw straight with crooked lines.

And so, reading these books even from that framework, from that worldview of being a Christian, and actually knowing that there is a standard that judges secularism — there is a standard that John Locke and James Madison and Alexander Hamilton and these guys do have to submit to. And by God’s grace, we have access to that standard. We have access to the words that are not wrong, are not in error. We put these guys’ words in comparison with God’s word to see where they are mistaken or wrong.

So I think that is a huge advantage of reading Western history from a Christian perspective — and then knowing the end of the story, that Jesus is working all this out for his glory and for the good of his people.

Sean So if people have made it this far into the podcast, to be clear: we think you should read the Bible first.

Philip Correct.

Sean We think you should take the words in the Bible seriously for what they are, not impose meaning from the outside. So yes: read the Bible, read the Bible, read the Bible. Which is why Omnibus Lux got to be what it is. Jesus came and he was the light of the world, obviously. But the difference that the medieval age had compared to before Jesus came — because Jesus came and then left — was that then we had his word, and so we got the actual canon of the Bible, before we care about the Western canon of the books that have helped shape and direct Western civilization.

So read the Bible, read the Bible, read the Bible — then read all the other books in light of the Bible.

Philip Right.

Sean Which is just a different way to jump up and down on the point you were making. And it’s what we’re trying to do for our kids at Evangel Classical School. Obviously homeschoolers can have the same sort of priority and be doing the same kind of thing. But at ECS we’re trying to give our kids that love, the amateur reading ability, and a worldview that we didn’t get when we were younger. And then with Comeford College, providing that sort of thing whether they’re right out of high school or they’re adults.

We’re trying to provide for people like us, who want more, who realize what they didn’t get — or who are wanting it for their kids as well and are trying to grow in their academic loves. Because it’s true that we want our kids to go further than us, but we’re probably not going to have kids who do differently than us. If I have no amateur academic interests, I’m probably not going to be raising kids who have academic interests beyond me. Maybe that could happen, and they can go past me in terms of what they grasp. But I should at least be showing them which direction — which means I’ve got to keep reading, and I’ve got to keep loving and learning and developing even further, to show them that way.

That’s what we’re trying to do in our community. That’s what the moms are doing. The kids are going to benefit from their moms reading War and Peace or Pride and Prejudice or whatever it is. And not because mom is sitting them down at the breakfast table over oatmeal and going over the character and plot of the novel — their moms are going to be blessing their families.

Guys have different opportunities to do that same kind of thing. And if we don’t do that, then our society is going to continue to get into greater trouble, and potentially move us back into a different kind of dark ages. When we’re putting the bucket over the light, we’re turning the lights out and heading into more darkness. It’s up to us. Who else is going to do something about it, if Christians aren’t trying to do something about it?

Philip Right.

Sean We’ll probably have to read a book more than a tweet.

Philip That’s right. All right, well, there you have it. So that’s on being an amateur academic. You just love it. You don’t get paid for it.

Sean Love it.

Philip All right. Out.