Warriors & Kings | Senator Josh Hawley | EP 361
And so part of our message to young people is, you know, learn to master yourself. That is, to be capable of a kind of liberty, a profound kind of liberty, that really has been—we've lost sight of in the modern world—but that is profoundly, profoundly transformative and also fulfilling.
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Hello everyone! Today, I'm speaking once again with constitutional lawyer, Missouri Senator, and best-selling author Josh Hawley. We discuss his new book, "Manhood," exploring the structural significance of biblical tradition within people's lives, how those enduring narratives elevate us above human defaults such as tyranny and slavery, why self-mastery is the precondition for ordered liberty, why young men have lapsed in education, industry, and reproduction, and what steps might be available to help individuals and our society put itself back in something like habitable order. Looking forward to it!
So I've been reading your book this morning, and it was sort of a strange experience, I would say, because, strangely enough—or maybe not—it's structured in a manner that's almost identical to the book that I'm writing at the moment. How about that?
Yeah, yeah. So I'm writing this book called "We Who Wrestle with God," and I'm obviously animated by the same spirit, so to speak, that you are, because the books parallel each other quite remarkably. And so I'm hoping my book will be better, but we'll see.
I have no doubt.
I have no doubt.
Well, yeah, I don't know; I don't know. I mean, you know, I have my doubts, but we're aiming at the same thing. One of the things I've been trying to struggle with too is, you list in your book a number of stories—you're using biblical stories primarily—and then a number of attributes that you think constitute what might constitute or what might comprise the central aspect of masculinity. You know, so one of the things I've been seeing in this as I've been walking through the same process is that the biblical corpus, which is a library, aggregates a set of illustrative stories and then uses those stories to describe a character to be emulated and then makes the proposition that that character to be emulated is the manifestation of a single spirit, right?
So—and that spirit would be the unity you're in your conceptualization. When you bring this down to earth, so to speak, you talk about men being husbands, fathers, warriors, builders, priests, and kings, right? Then you could imagine that there's something behind that that makes all of that possible for all of that to become manifest, and that's the monotheistic spirit that the biblical corpus is attempting to characterize, right? And it looks to me anthropologically, it looks to me like what's happened—and I'm not going to speak religiously—but it looks to me like what's happened is that people in their various tribal groups had dramatized patterns of adaptations, central patterns of adaptation, and then characterized those central patterns of adaptation with the attributes of something like a transcendent deity. And then as the tribes aggregated themselves, each of those visions of transcendent deity had to be integrated. That actually often necessitated war; there's actual war between different tribes for what vision is going to be dominant.
But there's metaphysical battle too, you know? Even Mircea Eliade, the Romanian historian of religions, talked about the universal battle between the gods in heaven, which was an attempt, in the metaphysical realm—the pleroma is what Jung called it—for these concepts to go to war with one another and then arrange themselves in a hierarchy.
And so anyways, it's quite fascinating to see that the same underlying drive—there's actually quite a few similarities in our experience. You know, you have Scandinavian ancestry; you had a child who had arthritis as well, and you seem to be wrestling with many of the same problems that have beset me for, you know, forever. So that was kind of interesting to see.
I also read the Guardian article—Guardian review of your book—which was everything you'd expect and hope for from the Guardian.
Yeah, hope for is there. I haven't read it, so you’re one up on me there, but...
Well, you can just imagine it.
Oh, I'm sure. If they're praising you, then you've done something wrong; that's my usual motto.
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's—it's—it’s the thing, you know? If, to some degree, if you're not irritating the correct people, you're doing something wrong. That's something we could talk about too because one of the dangers of the sort of enterprise we're involved in is the possibility of increasing the degree of polarization rather than offering a positive vision, which is what you're trying to do.
It's a strange book for a politician to write. So let's start with that; why'd you write this book? Tell everybody a little bit about the book and then tell me why you were motivated to write it.
Well, I was motivated to write it because I've got two little boys at home. I'm a father of three, and my two older are boys, and then I’ve got a baby girl who's two years old. But really, Jordan, it was thinking about them. They're ten and eight, my boys, and my oldest is Elijah, and my second is Blaze. And I write in the book about Blaise Pascal, so you begin to—though I don’t draw this out in the book, I don’t say it explicitly—if you read the book, you begin to get a sense of why my boys are named the way they’re named and why these ideas that I write about are so significant to me. They show up even in my kids' names and lives.
But thinking about my boys—Elijah, what's your—sorry, the other boy's Blaze for Blaze Pascal?
Yeah, yeah, yeah—who I write about in the book. But it really, it was thinking of my boys and my obligation as a father to help them grow into the men that they're capable of being that set me thinking about the book. And then in my work representing Missouri in the Senate, you know, I get to meet so many men from around Missouri, from around the nation, frankly, and seeing their struggles is seeing the sense of alienation they're dealing with, the sense of depression, the sense of lack of purpose. I have so many young men tell me that they feel like they don’t have any vision for their lives, that they feel that the media is against them as men, that their educational system is against them as men. So, it was really trying to key off of that and offer a positive, affirmative vision for what men are for and why it's good to be a man.
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So, this idea you covered a couple of things there—so that with your sons, for example, that you would like to encourage them to be the men that they're capable of being, you know? And I kind of wonder—I don't know if this is a reasonable proposition or not—but it might be the maternal tendency is, I think, to value children for what they are, and the paternal tendency is to value children for what they could be. And then if you have that nicely balanced—and I mean, a man can value children for who they are as well, and a woman can encourage what they could be, but broadly speaking, the symbolic proclivity, the essential proclivity seems to be that.
And I think that's partly perhaps—you tell me what you think about this—women have to bear the responsibility for primary caregiving in early infancy in particular the first year. And there isn't a lot of—there's an awful lot of taking care of immediate needs in that first year, like that child's immediate needs are paramount because the child is so utterly dependent, born early as our human infants are, and in the state of utter dependency. And then, of course, women have to wrestle with the difficulty of transforming from that state of hyper caregiving, where needs are predominant, into facilitating the independence of the child.
And that seems to me to be where the paternal—the patriarchal—the father is particularly paramount to encourage. Maybe that's the primary paternal role, is to encourage. So, is that in keeping with the experience that you had as a father? Does that make sense to you? Is there anything you'd add to that?
No, that is—that has been my experience. And I can remember before I was a father, and I tell the story in the book when I was a coach. I was a young man; I was 23 at the time. I was coaching a group of rowers, kids—a young high school team, a crew team, and this was in the UK actually. And I remember—I tell the story in the book—I had this moment where there was a scene during one of our training sessions where I saw one of the rowers encourage—take a leadership role with one of the younger ones. And in that split second, I saw like a flash what this kid—this, you know, he’s probably a junior at the time, 17 years old—what he might be in the future. I saw a maturity in him; I saw characteristics I had never seen before. And I just—it struck me. It's like, "Oh wow! He could really become something. He could become a great leader, a strong leader." I saw a flash of the man he could be. And suddenly, in seeing that, I realized my role, my job as a coach to him was to help encourage that and call it forth.
And for me, Jordan, I tell that story because that is, to me, a parental fatherhood that helped me get ready for what I think fatherhood is, which is to see that in my kids, my boys and my girl, and to help call that forth—help call forth what they could be—and to be willing to sacrifice myself and my interests in order to see them develop and grow.
I was fortunate enough to conduct a seminar in Exodus in Miami, and one of the stories we evaluated in some depth was the story of the burning bush. In that story, which occurs in that episode which occurs before Moses is a leader, he's wandering along, minding his own business, intent on his own purposes, you might say, and something captures his interest and glitters and gleams. It’s a phenomenon—phenomenon means it’s from the Greek "phainesthai," and phainesthai means to shine forth. So something grips his attention and makes itself manifest, and he turns off the path to investigate it, right? He decides to further investigate, and he does that of his own free choice. The story makes that quite clear. So something calls to him, but it’s him that decides to go investigate it.
As he gets closer to it, he hears a voice, and it tells him that he's starting to tread on sacred ground. So he has to take off his shoes, and what that seems to mean is that if you—if something makes itself manifest to you and you pursue it deeply, you go deeper, and if you go deep enough, you go—you enter sacred ground.
And that's, by definition, right? Because what's deep and what's sacred? That’s the same thing; technically, it's the same idea. And everybody has a sense of depth compared to shallowness, let's say. And so Moses doesn't stop merely because he's on sacred ground; he continues to investigate further. And at some point, as a consequence of his engagement, at least in part, it’s the voice of God itself that speaks to him. And it speaks with the voice of being and becoming. God says something like, "I am that I am," or "I am what I will be," or "I have been what I will become." It's the voice of being and becoming and of eternity that speaks to him.
What that seems to mean is something like if you pursue something that captures your interest with sufficient intensity, then the voice of being itself will make itself manifest to you. And that's what happens when people take something seriously, you know? And that’s when Moses becomes a leader, right? Because that's when God tells him to go talk to the Pharaoh. It's not until that transformation occurs. And it's very much akin to the story that you tell about because it's a minor story in some ways, right? That experience you had when you were coaching rowing, you know, it's a mundane story. It's the sort of thing in some way that could happen to anyone, but you said it struck you, and it also shaped the way that you conceptualized fatherhood, and that you could see the potential in this young man—all that happened at the same time.
Yes, yes, all that happened at the same time, and it was a significant moment. It was a mundane setting, I suppose, much like a bush in the wilderness, right? But it was a significant moment in that it really shaped my sense of, at the time as a 23-year-old, you know, coaching a group of kids, "What is it I'm supposed to be doing with these kids?" And just like a flash, I thought, "I'm supposed to be helping them not only become better athletes, of course, but to become the men that they might be." There was a sense of responsibility that came with that, having seen who these kids might be, having seen what they might be, having seen their potential—I was obligated to help call that forth.
And I think, as a father, that's absolutely what we do as fathers, and that's the responsibility we have as fathers. Well, you know, it's interesting. One of the things that has been a phenomenon that's been continual in the lectures that I've been doing around the world is the proclivity of the audience to fall absolutely silent when I discuss the relationship between responsibility and meaning. I'm suggesting to the people that I'm talking to that one of the things that you need in life is a meaning that will sustain you through suffering—that's almost like a definition of a deep meaning, right? It'll sustain you through suffering.
And I offer the possibility that the place you find out is in responsibility. This is something conservatives have been bad at; they're bad at it because they hector and lecture young people about what they should do as if it's a kind of detached morality: "You should be good because being good is the right thing." You know, it's like an abstract call to duty, and there's something in that—I don't want to be cynical about that—but that's not the core issue. The core issue, I think, is the fact that in that adoption of responsibility, you find the deepest meaning. And that's really true on the mentoring front. You know, like my graduate supervisor, for example, his name was Robert Peale; he's still alive, I still work with him. I went to his first shift, which was a celebration of his academic career when he retired, and he had about 40 people there—they were students mostly that he had mentored—and it was an extremely positive event.
The reason for that was because Bob was a very, very good mentor. He gave credit where credit was due; he tried to develop people, and he didn’t take—they he distributed his ideas widely and was generous with them, and he taught people how to be independent and how to conduct themselves as independent researchers. He helped them develop their lives and their careers as scientists and academics and clinicians, and he was really good at it, and he really liked doing it. That's the crucial issue here: there's a meaningfulness in mentorship that justifies the sacrifice. Because you might say, "Well, why bother developing other people?" And part of the answer to that—that isn't just a hedonistic answer—is that, well, there isn't anything that's more delightful and meaningful to do than that, as far as I can tell. I mean, maybe my relationship with my wife in some ways would triumph over that, and some of the intellectual interests that I've pursued, but other than that, that pleasure in aiding the best in other people to come forward—I don't think there is a deeper pleasure than that.
Though I agree with you, I don't think there is either. And just to your point about the power of responsibility and why it's—sure, we want to call people to duty, yeah, of course. But the power of responsibility, it is the most transformative thing in your life, I believe. That’s been my experience and my observation. If you want to exercise influence in life, I think every man wants to be influential and wants to leave a legacy. And I become convinced over the years that if you want to have influence, if you want to leave a legacy, take on responsibility and pour into other people. I mean, you talk about transforming yourself, yes, but also transforming the lives of others and ultimately transforming the world around you—that is done through shouldering responsibility and sacrifice, living in a sacrificial way that empowers and enables others.
It's the ultimate legacy. And I think there's something in that for men that they want to hear. They want to be called to that.
Yeah, well, that sacrificial element is extremely interesting. And this, I suppose, brings us back to the biblical motifs that proper work is sacrificing. And that's a definition again, is that if you're working, what you're doing is sacrificing. And you might say, "Well, what do you mean sacrificing?" And the answer is, well, you're sacrificing the hedonistic whims of the moment for the medium to long term. That's literally what you're doing.
Well, you could say—and you can think about that in two ways, I think this is very useful: as number one, like if you just do what you want right now all the time, one of the problems with that is you're going to get yourself in trouble, and everyone knows that. This is why two-year-olds can't really live on their own because they're whim-predicated, and they will do what they want to do, right? Bloody well now with no thought whatsoever for the iterating consequences of that into the future.
And so, because people are self-conscious and can see the future, we have to bind our actions in the present in relationship to our future selves. So you have to act now so you don't hurt you tomorrow and you next week and you next month and you in a year and five years and ten years, and maybe even when you retire. And that's actually a community, right? It's a community of potential selves that extends across time.
And I don't think there's any difference between that and serving the community as a whole; I think that's the same ethos. And so the sacrifice would be joint—it's this: you sacrifice the whims of the moment, so that's delayed gratification, and maybe a definition of maturity. You sacrifice that because it's a better medium to long-term contractor covenant with yourself—but at the same time, that applies to everyone else because there's no difference between me serving who I'm going to be when I'm 75 and me serving other people.
And so that ethos unites, and then the payoff for that, I think the payoff for that emotionally is the sense of meaning and purpose that suffuses that enterprise, and that's not exactly a hedonic—it's not a hedonic pleasure, right? It's not, say—it's not infantile satiation; it’s a deeper and more comprehensive motive experience, and it's worth sacrificing for, and it’s real.
Yes, and there’s a connection here, I think, also with liberty and freedom. And this is something that I talk about in the book, you know, that in order to experience true liberty, self-discipline, self-mastery, and self-sacrifice are necessary. And of course, this is a tradition that goes all the way back to the Greeks and the Romans; it’s certainly there in the Bible. That says, as we learn to discipline our passions in the moment, as we learn to discipline our whims in the moment, as we learn to master ourselves, we become capable of a kind of liberty where we can see our true interest in the long term. We can see the interests of those around us, who we serve, and we can become self-governors, literally, and then participate in self-government.
And I think that the modern left and probably the modern right have completely lost sight of that whole tradition. And so part of our message to young people is, you know, learn to master yourself. That is to be capable of a kind of liberty, a profound kind of liberty that really has been—we’ve lost sight of in the modern world—but that is profoundly, profoundly transformative and also fulfilling.
You know, most young men understand that. Most young men are interested, at least to some degree, in games and sports. And if it’s not physical sports, at least it’s video games. And the thing about video games is—and games in general—is that they are ordered. They’re forms of ordered liberty; they’re not chaotic because they have rules. And if you’re going to be good at the game—first of all, if you’re not good at the game or if you’re not interested in the game, then why the hell play it? So if you’re going to play the game, it’s because you want to be good at it, and you want to play it.
And so you’ve already bought in. And if you’re going to do that, then you have to follow—you have to abide by the rules, and hopefully, you can do that skillfully. And that scales; like it’s not just true of games per se; it should be true of your life. You know, when God makes himself manifest to Moses and calls him to be a leader, what he tells him to tell the Pharaoh is something very specific. He says, "Tell the Pharaoh to let my people go so that they may worship me."
Now, the civil rights leaders almost always stress the first part of that statement, but they don’t pull in the second part, and that’s a big mistake because the second part speaks of ordered liberty and disordered liberty. That’s the desert, right? That’s where the Israelites end up after they flee the tyranny. It’s a chaotic realm; they can go anywhere and do anything—there’s no up or down, there’s no direction, there’s no leadership—and that’s so terrible that they start to pine for the tyranny, right? While they also start to worship false idols, which is definitely a story for our time, but they also start to pine for that tyranny.
And you know you’re making the case, and you make it repeatedly in the book, that self-mastery is the precondition for ordered liberty. And if the conservatives—and you are doing this in your book—if the conservatives could get the notion that the deepest meaning in life is to be found in the mastery of that ordered liberty, then they have a message they can tell to young men in particular.
And yes, yes, yeah, yeah.
So now you’re writing a book here that’s not primarily political.
No.
And yet you’re operating in the political realm. And so how do you experience the tension between those two, and how do you believe that we could bridge the gap between the motivation, let’s say, and the narrative—the sacred, fundamentally—and the political? How do you manage to do that in your own life, or do you, and how do you fall short?
Good, great question. I think that one of the reasons I wrote the book—and you’re right, it’s really not a political book at all—but my conviction is that we have in our culture—and particularly on the left, but also some on the right—we’ve lost touch with our most foundational moral intuitions and moral foundations. And that’s why I go back to the Bible in the book, you know, and I make the case early on that the biblical tradition is, in many ways, the foundational story and narrative of the entire Western tradition, certainly the American tradition.
So I think that we live in a world—and this is true for young men in particular—where there’s no story, there’s no narrative. You know, what is it that it means to be a man? There’s no narrative there. What is it that I’m supposed to do with my life? There’s no narrative. So, I think we’ve got to go back to and recover those narratives, and that’s why I try to recover some of the symbolism of Genesis. You know, what is it the man is called to do? It’s called to make the wilderness into a garden, right? To expand that garden—God makes a garden; the rest of the world is wilderness.
What’s Adam there, the garden to do? He’s there to expand the garden into the wilderness. There’s something profound there about what it means to be a man, and you talk about a high calling because really what God does in Genesis is He gives His work to Adam. He says, "Alright, I’ve created the world; now I’ve created a garden in the midst of the wilderness. Now, Adam, you follow my example; you take this garden, you expand it, you use your responsibility, you use your authority, you use your strength, and you expand it into all the world." My conviction is men need to hear that story.
The Bible is making a point with that, of course, that there is—there’s an archetype there, an archetypal pattern of what it is men are supposed to do: to expand the garden, to make—to bring order from chaos, to make beauty where there’s chaos. And so I think telling those stories is critical then to recovering in our culture some sense of order and purpose and meaning.
And then we’ve got to give—in our politics, the key is how do we give that voice? You know, how do we then cash that out into policy? And, you know, we talk about that if you want. I’ve got all kinds of ideas about that, but I think there’s tremendous value personally and culturally in recovering these foundational stories about what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman and what we’re here to do.
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So, I want to go in two directions with that. So, the first direction, we might say, is there’s only three situations that we can find ourselves in: we can find ourselves united psychologically and socially by an overarching narrative, or we can let that narrative fragment, which means that we’ll be tribal once again, both socially and psychologically. And the cost of that fragmented tribalism is anxiety and hopelessness and social conflict—that’s the chaotic state of nature: anxiety, hopelessness, and social conflict.
Okay, now, if you see that—and I think the evidence for that, by the way, is incontrovertible—if you see that, a question arises, which is, well, what might the central unified narrative be? Now what’s happened on the left is the central unifying narrative—although the leftists often claim there isn’t one—what they’ve replaced it with, at least implicitly and often explicitly, is a narrative of power.
And this is—and this is something you touch on in your book too—with regards to the ideas of toxic masculinity. And so the accusation is that all social relationships are structured as a consequence of domination and oppression and victimization, and that’s true for marriage, and it’s true for family, traditional family, and it’s true for economic organizations and political organizations—it’s all about power.
And so, if you accept that, you can see very quickly why the narrative of toxic masculinity might have arisen and been accepted. Because if you believe—and maybe you believe this because you’ve never had any experience with a good man even once in your life, this is often the case; you know, I talked to Naomi Wolf recently who’s been a very powerful voice on the leftist front, and you know, she had some bloody brutal experiences with men. She was raped when she was 11, and that didn’t help.
And then when she went to university, instead of being mentored, she was hit upon in a way that, you know, was reminiscent of what happened to her when she was early. So then she didn’t get mentored, and her whole conception of masculinity, which I believe is rather fragmented, is predicated on her genuine experience of being exploited and hurt. And then we get a cycle, right? You can see a cycle developing there.
And so your claim is that the narrative that’s running through the biblical corpus is a good unifying narrative; it’s the right unifying narrative. Now, I just talked with Stephen Fry a couple of days ago, and Stephen is very interested in mythology. And although he’s—I say he likes to shake his fist at God and he has his reasons and he isn’t convinced at all that there’s a reason that the biblical narrative code, per se, should be set up as primary—like I happen to disagree with him because I think it should be—but it isn’t obvious to me why it should be, you know?
And I’ve done a fair bit of delving into mythologies and so forth from all over the world and found lots of useful information in them. So how would you justify—how do you think it’s reasonable to justify your assumption that, you know, it’s back to the Bible to use a, you know, an old evangelical phrase. Why do you think that makes sense, and why do you think it’s not just like an extension of patriarchal neocolonialism or something of that sort?
Yeah, two answers. The first one is historical, and the more surface answer—and that is for American history, this is a purely historical matter—no text has been more influential, no set of ideas has been more profound in shaping our system of government, our basic moral intuitions than the Bible and the biblical tradition. So, in a sense, the first answer is it’s our tradition. Our most fundamental moral intuitions are grounded in that tradition.
And I go further; I’d say that’s actually true of the entire Western tradition. You know, Leo Strauss, as you know, had this great saying that it was the interplay of Athens and Jerusalem that really forms the West, and there’s something to that. I’m not a Straussian, but there’s some—there’s something to that. But the biblical tradition, the Jerusalem tradition, is so foundational as a historical cultural matter, number one. Number two, I would say, as a Christian, a practicing Christian myself, I think that it’s power, direction—the fact that it’s fundamentally true.
I mean, there’s a reason why the stories of the Bible, both the Old Testament and the Christian New Testament, are so profoundly effective and transformative in different cultures over time, and certainly in ours. I would argue—and that’s because they touch on something—they're true, in fact. I would argue they are the truth, capital T. So, you know, whether you accept that second claim or not, I certainly think that the cultural element—it's just hard to deny that American culture is organized around and derives its, you know, what Charles Taylor would have called the moral sources, right—the moral sources of our culture—the Bible is the moral source. So, those would be my arguments.
Okay, okay. So let’s take—let’s take each of those in turn. Let’s start with the historical argument. And so one of the things that strikes me as problematic, let’s say with projects like the 1619 project or the leftist insistence in the United States that America, per se, was founded on, let’s say, slavery and oppression, the reason it really bothers me is because I think it’s an anti-truth. I don’t think it’s just a lie because a lie is sort of like a deviation from the truth, but an anti-truth is something that’s exactly the opposite of what’s true.
And this is how I look at it. So the first question might be, well, is slavery a universal human proclivity or not? And the answer to me, as far as I can tell—and I’ve done some research into the topic—is yes, it’s the default mode of operation for human cultures. Has been slavery. And that might be a consequence of our proclivity to engage in war because my suspicions are that the institution of slavery arose as a consequence of capturing enemy combatants, deciding not to kill them, which would be the simple thing to do, and then utilizing them and also feeling justified in doing that because, well, after all, they were trying to kill you or there was a reason you were at war.
And so we could say, well, slavery is the default condition for social organization. So then what emerges out of that is a kind of miracle, and the miracle, to me, is that any society ever decided that that was a bad idea. And as far as I can tell, the society that decided that most particularly and explicitly was Great Britain, and that was particularly Wilberforce. And he was an evangelical Christian. And the reason that he opposed slavery—100 percent—the reason that he opposed slavery was because he was steeped in the biblical tradition.
And then the Brits fought slavery on the high seas for 175 years and basically eradicated it as at least a morally acceptable enterprise. And the American tradition comes out of that tradition. And even if the U.S., like other cultures, is contaminated by the desire for power, it’s the anti-slavery ethos that’s actually central to the entire project. And so when the radical types are making the claim that Western culture is essentially slaveholding in its essence, as far as I can tell, they are opposing the only strain of culture which also wasn’t Western, by the way, because it’s not like the Bible is a Western book, exactly. It’s not European; it’s an import.
And so they’re opposing the only strain of thought that’s ever existed that made, in both a powerful implicit and explicit anti-slavery case. And so that seems to be entirely counterproductive if they actually care about slavery.
And then one more twist on that, historically speaking—well, I don’t think that it’s debatable. You know, the Enlightenment types, like Stephen Pinker, would debate this, I think, but I think he’s wrong; I think all the societies in the world that are free and productive and generous—and those would be the societies that people would flee to if they had their choice—all of those are offshoots of the biblical tradition; every single one of them. And I can’t see that as chance.
And I also think the same thing about literacy, is that without the biblical tradition—it was the biblical tradition and the invention of the printing press that brought literacy to the world. It needed both of those. The Chinese had the printing press, but they didn’t have that evangelical fervor to bring everyone up to the pinnacle of self-governance and self-realization. The bloody Brits, they wanted to do that even to their colonies, you know?
And Wilberforce talked a lot about that too—that it was the obligation of the Brits as the colonial administrators, say, to inculcate in the people who they had colonized the spirit of independence and freedom that would enable them to be self-governing citizens. And I also think that the British Empire managed that to a great degree. You know, there’s plenty of terrible mess and catastrophe along the way, but the U.S., and Canada, and Australia, and New Zealand—these are great countries. And you can say the same about many of the other Commonwealth countries, including India—they're beneficiaries of that tradition. And it’s English, but it’s also more deeply biblical.
So I think you can make an extremely strong historical case for this. I don’t know what the contrary case would be; it's gotta be the Enlightenment idea, right? That it was the Enlightenment that produced—
Now let’s talk about that because you talk about the French revolutionaries.
Yes.
And okay, so do you want to just outline that part of your book and your thoughts on the French rational revolutionaries?
Yeah, absolutely. But first, can I disagree with you by restating Wilberforce’s argument? Because I think you’ve made a profound point there. Wilberforce’s argument from the Bible, from the biblical tradition, was, I think, twofold. Number one, it is the idea in the Old Testament—and you mentioned it when you talked about Moses—God says to Moses, “Tell Pharaoh, let my people go.” Why? So that they can worship me. There is an equality there that is implied. There’s only one king, right?
I mean the message of the Old Testament is there’s one God, only one sovereign; everyone else serves him. But because of that, everyone else is equal. You know, you don’t have this hierarchy of gods and therefore hierarchy of humans in the Old Testament. God eventually does give the Israelites a king, but that’s a concession to them. And of course, in the Old Testament, God says, “They’ve rejected me from being king; they want a king over themselves,” and he warns them about the king. He says, “You’re not gonna like this king; the king’s gonna oppress you; the king’s not going to treat you as equals.”
So you have the Old Testament tradition, which is very strongly God is sovereign, and he calls all humans are equal before Him—number one. Number two is the Christian tradition, which, of course, extends that, and the Christian tradition is that in Christ there is no slave or free, Paul says that explicitly; there is no male or female; there is no Jew nor Gentile; all are equal in Christ. And the spirit of God is poured out on all people. Those are profoundly revolutionary ideas.
Revolutionary it is. And Wilberforce got that and extended that—applied it, if you like, in his own time. But to your point about why the tradition of the Bible is a revolutionary tradition, everywhere it goes, every culture it touches, whether we’re talking about Ancient Rome or Britain or America, it always cuts against what I think you correctly identified as the natural human tendency to organize culture around the elite who have the power and everybody else who are basically slaves. And the biblical tradition cuts against that everywhere it’s applied. So there’s something very powerful and profound about that.
Now, the French Revolution—here’s what I said: Babel—that’s the Tower of Babel.
Proclaim! Yes, by the way, right?
Correct. The erection of Babylon as a profane alternative to proper sovereignty. And the proper sovereignty—it’s part of what the Bible is attempting to do—is actually to define what constitutes the proper sovereignty. And it isn’t the king; it’s not the earthly ruler; it’s something transcendent and eternal—what—and that would be the principle of sovereignty itself.
It’s something like that, whatever that happens to be, and you’re trying to outline that in your book. Yes, can I just ask actually on this point because this is an interesting point with ancient mythology and the contrast with the Bible—and this is your area much more than mine—but in the Bible, we don’t have a hierarchy of gods; we have one God. We don’t have a myth in which, you know, the gods order themselves.
You’ve got one God who’s in charge; all the other gods are servants or slaves to him. And then that replicates itself in the human realm, right? You see, in the other mythologies, you have the hierarchy of the gods, and then that hierarchy replicates itself among the humans, right? And so it’s natural, in a sense, to think of, “Oh, well, if there’s a hierarchy of gods and there’s one lead god or several, and then there are slave gods, if you like, the same thing would be true in human cultures.”
The Bible—different picture altogether. No, there’s one God; humans are not his slaves. He does never treat them as slaves; he treats them as partners who are called in to cooperate with him. And in some sense, called into his divine life with them—very different picture. And I just wonder, back to the idea of why is the biblical tradition—why does it tend to produce equality, self-government, liberty? These other traditions don’t. Maybe that’s part of it; maybe it’s this fundamental difference in how they picture the universe.
So anyway, well, it’s also not just the New Testament that stresses that too because one of the miraculous elements of the earliest biblical writings—in Genesis 1—is the insistence—this is a very strange insistence—that first of all, whatever God is, is equivalent to the spirit that calls the habitable order that is good out of chaos and potential, which is, I think, what you're doing when you’re mentoring, for example. It’s an example of that.
But that Spirit characterizes men and women alike and equally. Yes! And this is another thing: you know, I’ve talked to feminists who say, “Well, you know, the Old Testament, in particular, is a patriarchal document.” And I think you’re completely out of your mind.
It’s so anti-patriarchal that it really is a kind of miracle because the notion that there was a fundamental equality between men and women and that that was grounded in equal access or equal characterization by the Divine—there isn’t a more radical claim than that on the gender or sex front. And the notion in the New Testament that each person is a locus of divinity and intrinsic worth is a reflection of that initial statement.
And that’s established—it’s like the fifth thing that happens in the biblical corpus. It’s a fundamental proclamation. And maybe the most—you know, what’s the proclamation? Human beings are created in two forms, and that’s something that of course we’re questioning like mad at the moment, to our great chagrin, because it might be the most fundamental perceptual axiom, you know? The distinction between the sexes.
And the second one is that men and women alike are created in the image of God. And you know, that’s quite—that’s a ridiculously radical proposition. It is. I do think it is the essence of the Christian stance against slavery in particular.
Now we’re going to talk about the French revolutionaries as well; they’re Tower of Babel types, by the way. Those—
They are totally power battle types.
Yeah, so I mean their approach is a fundamentally atheistic one. It is to root out the biblical influence, really any religious influence, and to set up in its—and instead—the human reason, they said, but, as you pointed out, what it really becomes is the rule of the powerful.
So once you take out the biblical insistence on the equality of all people, once you take out the powerful biblical message that every person is called to work with God, every person is called to advance God’s purposes—every person can have God’s spirit within them, right? I mean this is the teaching of the New Testament. You come to Christ; he pours his Spirit out on you; it doesn’t matter if you’re a man, woman, Jew, Gentile, slave, free. Once you take all of that away and it becomes about, “Oh well, you know, we’re going to worship human reason,” well—according to whom? Right? Who defines that? Who's in control? Exactly—to what end?
Exactly, well, the um, it’s been interesting to me to watch what happened with the—the four horsemen of—the four atheist horsemen over the last few years. I mean, Hitchens died, so he's obviously off the table, but it’s interesting to consider what's happened to both Dawkins and Harris. So Harris—and I say this with all due respect—I like both those men, and I think that—I actually think they’re honest men, and I think they’re trying to strive upward.
I think they’re both wrestling with God in their own way, and I mean that like seriously with all due respect. Dawkins is a real scientist, and I think Harris is a real moral actor. Now, one of the things that’s happened to Sam is that he’s kind of left the rational arena altogether, like he’s pursuing meditation— that’s his fundamental goal. And so Sam has created for himself a sort of—what would you say? A disembodied Buddhist deity. And I think the reason that Sam leaves his deity inarticulate is because if he made it articulate, he would criticize it to death with his rationality.
And so he leaves he has an ineffable God and he’s now—he’s decided to devote his life to that. And so that’s interesting. You know, when Harris was motivated—I talked to Sam Lawrence—Harris was motivated fundamentally by the problem of evil, and he wanted to ground morality in something unshakable, and he thought the only thing unshakable was objective truth. But it turns out that grounding morality and objective truth actually isn’t possible for all sorts of technical reasons, and I write about that a little bit in this new book.
And so Sam turned to Buddhism, and then with Dawkins—like I think Dawkins has seen—and I know I’m speaking for him, but I believe this to be true in good faith—that the rationalist humanists that he thought would replace the superstitious biblical religious types turned out to be whim governed tyrants, right?
And so that rationality—that unmoored rationality—it seems to degenerate in two ways very rapidly. It degenerates into something like power claim that’s driven by worship of the intellect, right? And Marx is a great example of that because he was so intellectually arrogant, and that characterizes universities like—Matt and it’s part of the spirit that raises the Tower of Babel, you know? Because that’s associated with luciferian presumption.
And so that worship of the intellect produces a luciferian Tower of Babel. And that’s happening all around us at an absolutely mad rate. But the other thing it seems to produce is a kind of disintegration of narrative into hedonism. You know, and Hedonism is a kind of polytheism, right? It’s just—you just worship whatever whim happens to seize you at the moment. And so you get a luciferian presumption on the one part on hand that produces endless towers of Babel, or you get a degeneration into kind of mindless hedonism, and our culture at the moment is—well, it’s toying real hard with both.
It’s like we got the worst of 1984 and Brave New World at the same time. And so the alternative to that is I think what the biblical corpus does is lay out the alternative to that; that’s its—that’s what it’s striving to do, you know?
So, alright, so back to the French revolutionary types. So how do you read what happened in France? You said it was elevation of rationality to the highest place, for example.
Yeah, and I mean rationality is—yeah, with a capital R—which is really just “vignette.” It begs the question again: what’s the substance of that?
Here’s my thesis: If you look historically and also sort of philosophically, what the French Revolution—and maybe the Enlightenment writ large—and those are separate things, I realize, but just mushing them together for a second—what they really do is they try and take the moral content of the biblical tradition and then separate it from the biblical God and biblical obligation, I think.
And so what they’re really doing is living on borrowed time, right? I mean, so they’re really trying to separate out these fundamental moral precepts, and they’re trying to ground them in something else. And it just doesn’t work. I mean, we’ve had centuries of experiment with it, right? I mean we’ve seen it; it doesn’t work. I mean what the French Revolution quickly ends up with, of course, historically, is they’re all killing one another because it becomes purely a power play.
Yeah, I mean it’s who has the power? The Enlightenment types, so I’ll make their argument for them, and this is a sort of argument that Pinker would make, is, “No, you’re wrong about that, Senator Hawley, because we didn’t really see any progress towards the states of being that characterize the modern state till we established the scientific method, and it was the Enlightenment types that drove that.”
And it was the divorce of science from the religious underpinnings that allowed that to occur. That escape from, say, biblical superstition and other forms of superstition allowed for that clarity of mind. And so, what is it?
That—now, let’s talk about that for a minute, because you talk about the French revolutionaries. Yes, and okay.
So do you want to just outline that part of your book and your thoughts on the French rational revolutionaries?
Absolutely, but first can I disagree with you by restating Wilberforce’s argument? Because I think you’ve made a profound point there. Wilberforce’s argument from the Bible, from the biblical tradition, was, I think, twofold. Number one it is the idea in the Old Testament—and you mentioned it when you talked about Moses—God says to Moses, “Tell Pharaoh: let my people go—why?” So that they can worship me. There is an equality there that is implied. There’s only one king, right?
I mean the message of the Old Testament is there’s one God, only one sovereign; everyone else serves him. But because of that, everyone else is equal. You know, you don’t have this hierarchy of gods—and therefore a hierarchy of humans in the Old Testament.
God eventually does give the Israelites a king, but that’s a concession to them. And of course, in the Old Testament, God says, “They’ve rejected me from being king; they want a king over themselves,” and he warns them about the king. He says, “You’re not gonna like this king; the king’s gonna oppress you; the king’s not going to treat you as equals.”
So you have the Old Testament tradition, which is very strongly, God is sovereign, and he calls all humans are equal before Him—number one. Number two is the Christian tradition, which, of course, extends that. And the Christian tradition is that in Christ there is no slave or free, Paul says that explicitly; there is no male or female; there is no Jew nor Gentile; all are equal in Christ. And the spirit of God is poured out on all people.
Those are profoundly revolutionary ideas.
Revolutionary it is. And Wilberforce got that and extended that—applied it, if you like, in his own time. But to your point about why the tradition of the Bible is a revolutionary tradition everywhere it goes, every culture it touches, whether we’re talking about Ancient Rome or Britain or America, it always cuts against what I think you correctly identified as the natural human tendency to organize culture around the elite who have the power and everybody else who are basically slaves.
And the biblical tradition cuts against that everywhere it’s applied. So there’s something very powerful and profound about that.
Now the French Revolution—here’s what I said: Babel—that is the Tower of Babel.
Proclaim!
Yes, by the way, right?
Correct. The erection of Babylon as a profane alternative to proper sovereignty. And the proper sovereignty—it’s part of what the Bible is attempting to do—is actually to define what constitutes the proper sovereignty. And it isn’t the king; it’s not the earthly ruler; it’s something transcendent and eternal—what, and that would be the principle of sovereignty itself.
It’s something like that, whatever that happens to be, and you’re trying to outline that in your book. Yes, can I just ask actually on this point because this is an interesting point with ancient mythology and the contrast with the Bible—and this is your area much more than mine—but in the Bible, we don’t have a hierarchy of gods; we have one God. We don’t have a myth in which, you know, the gods order themselves.
You’ve got one God who’s in charge; all the other gods are servants or slaves to him. And then that replicates itself in the human realm, right? You see, in the other mythologies, you have the hierarchy of the gods, and then that hierarchy replicates itself among the humans, right?
And so it’s natural, in a sense, to think of, “Oh, well, if there’s a hierarchy of gods and there’s one lead god or several, and then there are slave gods, if you like, the same thing would be true in human cultures.”
The Bible—different picture altogether. No, there’s one God; humans are not his slaves. He does never treat them as slaves; he treats them as partners who are called in to cooperate with him. And in some sense, called into his divine life with them—very different picture.
And I just wonder, back to the idea of why is the biblical tradition—why does it tend to produce equality, self-government, liberty? These other traditions don’t. Maybe that’s part of it; maybe it’s this fundamental difference in how they picture the universe.
So anyway, well it’s also not just the New Testament that stresses that too because one of the miraculous elements of the earliest biblical writings—in Genesis 1—is the insistence—this is a very strange insistence—that first of all, whatever God is, is equivalent to the spirit that calls the habitable order that is good out of chaos and potential, which is, I think, what you're doing when you’re mentoring, for example. It’s an example of that.
But that Spirit characterizes men and women alike and equally. Yes! And this is another thing: you know, I’ve talked to feminists who say, “Well, you know, the Old Testament, in particular, is a patriarchal document.” And I think you’re completely out of your mind.
It’s so anti-patriarchal that it really is a kind of miracle because the notion that there was a fundamental equality between men and women and that that was grounded in equal access or equal characterization by the Divine—there isn’t a more radical claim than that on the gender or sex front. And the notion in the New Testament that each person is a locus of divinity and intrinsic worth is a reflection of that initial statement.
And that’s established—it’s like the fifth thing that happens in the biblical corpus. It’s a fundamental proclamation. And maybe the most—you know, what’s the proclamation? Human beings are created in two forms, and that’s something that of course we’re questioning like mad at the moment, to our great chagrin, because it might be the most fundamental perceptual axiom, you know? The distinction between the sexes.
And the second one is that men and women alike are created in the image of God. And you know, that’s quite—that’s a ridiculously radical proposition. It is. I do think it is the essence of the Christian stance against slavery in particular.
Now we’re going to talk about the French revolutionaries as well; they’re Tower of Babel types, by the way. Those—
They are totally power battle types.
Yeah, so I mean their approach is a fundamentally atheistic one. It is to root out the biblical influence, really any religious influence, and to set up in its—and instead—the human reason, they said, but, as you pointed out, what it really becomes is the rule of the powerful.
So once you take out the biblical insistence on the equality of all people, once you take out the powerful biblical message that every person is called to work with God, every person is called to advance God’s purposes—every person can have God’s spirit within them, right? I mean this is the teaching of the New Testament. You come to Christ; he pours his Spirit out on you; it doesn’t matter if you’re a man, woman, Jew, Gentile, slave, free. Once you take all of that away and it becomes about, “Oh well, you know, we’re going to worship human reason,” well—according to whom? Right? Who defines that? Who's in control? Exactly—to what end?
Exactly, well, the um, it’s been interesting to me to watch what happened with the—the four horsemen of—the four atheist horsemen over the last few years. I mean, Hitchens died, so he's obviously off the table, but it’s interesting to consider what's happened to both Dawkins and Harris. So Harris—and I say this with all due respect—I like both those men, and I think that—I actually think they’re honest men, and I think they’re trying to strive upward.
I think they’re both wrestling with God in their own way, and I mean that like seriously with all due respect. Dawkins is a real scientist, and I think Harris is a real moral actor. Now, one of the things that’s happened to Sam is that he’s kind of left the rational arena altogether, like he’s pursuing meditation—that’s his fundamental goal. And so Sam has created for himself a sort of—what would you say? A disembodied Buddhist deity. And I think the reason that Sam leaves his deity inarticulate is because if he made it articulate, he would criticize it to death with his rationality.
And so he leaves he has an ineffable God and he’s now—he’s decided to devote his life to that. And so that’s interesting. You know, when Harris was motivated—I talked to Sam Lawrence—Harris was motivated fundamentally by the problem of evil, and he wanted to ground morality in something unshakable, and he thought the only thing unshakable was objective truth. But it turns out that grounding morality and objective truth actually isn’t possible for all sorts of technical reasons, and I write about that a little bit in this new book.
And so Sam turned to Buddhism, and then with Dawkins—like I think Dawkins has seen—and I know I’m speaking for him, but I believe this to be true in good faith—that the rationalist humanists that he thought would replace the superstitious biblical religious types turned out to be whim governed tyrants, right?
And so that rationality—that unmoored rationality—it seems to degenerate in two ways very rapidly. It degenerates into something like power claim that’s driven by worship of the intellect, right? And Marx is a great example of that because he was so intellectually arrogant and that characterizes universities like—Matt and it’s part of the spirit that raises the Tower of Babel, you know?
Because that’s associated with luciferian presumption. And so that worship of the intellect produces a luciferian Tower of Babel. And that’s happening all around us at an absolutely mad rate. But the other thing it seems to produce is a kind of disintegration of narrative into hedonism. You know, and Hedonism is a kind of polytheism, right? It’s just—you just worship whatever whim happens to seize you at the moment.
And so you get a luciferian presumption on the one part, on hand that produces endless towers of Babel, or you get a degeneration into kind of mindless hedonism, and our culture at the moment is—well, it’s toying real hard with both.
It’s like we got the worst of 1984 and Brave New World at the same time. And so the alternative to that is, I think, what the biblical corpus does is lay out the alternative to that—that’s what it’s striving to do, you know?
So, alright, so back to the French revolutionary types. So how do you read what happened in France? You said it was elevation of rationality to the highest place, for example.
Yeah, and I mean rationality is—yeah, with a capital R—which is really just “vignette.” It begs the question again: what’s the substance of that?
Here’s my thesis: If you look historically and also sort of philosophically, what the French Revolution—and maybe the Enlightenment writ large—and those are separate things, I realize, but just mushing them together for a second—what they really do is they try and take the moral content of the biblical tradition and then separate it from the biblical God and biblical obligation, I think.
And so what they’re really doing is living on borrowed time, right? I mean, so they’re really trying to separate out these fundamental moral precepts, and they’re trying to ground them in something else. And it just doesn’t work. I mean, we’ve had centuries of experiment with it, right?
I mean, we’ve seen it; it doesn’t work. I mean what the French Revolution quickly ends up with, of course, historically, is they’re all killing one another because it becomes purely a power play.
Yeah, I mean it’s who has the power? The Enlightenment types, so I’ll make their argument for them, and this is a sort of argument that Pinker would make, is, “No, you’re wrong about that, Senator Hawley, because we didn’t really see any progress toward the states of being that characterize the modern state till we established the scientific method, and it was the Enlightenment types that drove that.”
And it was the divorce of science from the religious underpinnings that allowed that to occur. That escape from, say, biblical superstition and other forms of superstition allowed for that clarity of mind.
And so, what is it?
That—now let’s talk about that for a minute, because you talk about the French revolutionaries. Yes, and okay.
So do you want to just outline that part of your book and your thoughts on the French rational revolutionaries?
Absolutely, but first can I disagree with you by restating Wilberforce’s argument? Because I think you’ve made a profound point there. Wilberforce’s argument from the Bible, from the biblical tradition, was, I think, twofold. Number one, it is the idea in the Old Testament—and you mentioned it when you talked about Moses—God says to Moses, “Tell Pharaoh: let my people go—why?” So that they can worship me. There is an equality there that is implied. There’s only one king, right?
I mean the message of the Old Testament is there’s one God, only one sovereign; everyone else serves him. But because of that, everyone else is equal. You know, you don’t have this hierarchy of gods—and therefore a hierarchy of humans in the Old Testament.
God eventually does give the Israelites a king, but that’s a concession to them. And of course, in the Old Testament, God says, “They’ve rejected me from being king; they want a king over themselves,” and he warns them about the king. He says, “You’re not gonna like this king; the king’s gonna oppress you; the king’s not going to treat you as equals.”
So you have the Old Testament tradition, which is very strongly, God is sovereign, and he calls all humans are equal before Him—number one. Number two is the Christian tradition, which, of course, extends that. And the Christian tradition is that in Christ there is no slave or free, Paul says that explicitly; there is no male or female; there is no Jew nor Gentile; all are equal in Christ. And the spirit of God is poured out on all people.
Those are profoundly revolutionary ideas.
Revolutionary it is. And Wilberforce got that and extended that—applied it, if you like, in his own time. But to your point about why the tradition of the Bible is a revolutionary tradition everywhere it goes, every culture it touches, whether we’re talking about Ancient Rome or Britain or America, it always cuts against what I think you correctly identified as the natural human tendency to organize culture around the elite who have the power and everybody else who are basically slaves.
And the biblical tradition cuts against that everywhere it’s applied. So there’s something very powerful and profound about that.
Now the French Revolution—here’s what I said: Babel—that is the Tower of Babel.
Proclaim!
Yes, by the way, right?
Correct. The erection of Babylon as a profane alternative to proper sovereignty. And the proper sovereignty—it’s part of what the Bible is attempting to do—is actually to define what constitutes the proper sovereignty. And it isn’t the king; it’s not the earthly ruler; it’s something transcendent and eternal—what, and that would be the principle of sovereignty itself.
It’s something like that, whatever that happens to be, and you’re trying to outline that in your book. Yes, can I just ask actually on this point because this is an interesting point with ancient mythology and the contrast with the Bible—and this is your area much more than mine—but in the Bible, we don’t have a hierarchy of gods; we have one God. We don’t have a myth in which, you know, the gods order themselves.
You’ve got one God who’s in charge; all the other gods are servants or slaves to him. And then that replicates itself in the human realm, right? You see, in the other mythologies, you have the hierarchy of the gods, and then that hierarchy replicates itself among the humans, right?
And so it’s natural, in a sense, to think of, “Oh, well, if there’s a hierarchy of gods and there’s one lead god or several, and then there are slave gods, if you like, the same thing would be true in human cultures.”
The Bible—different picture altogether. No, there’s one God; humans are not his slaves. He does never treat them as slaves; he treats them as partners who are called in to cooperate with him. And in some sense, called into his divine life with them—very different picture.
And I just wonder, back to the idea of why is the biblical tradition—why does it tend to produce equality, self-government, liberty? These other traditions don’t. Maybe that’s part of it; maybe it’s this fundamental difference in how they picture the universe.
So anyway, well it’s also not just the New Testament that stresses that too because one of the miraculous elements of the earliest biblical writings—in Genesis 1—is the insistence—this is a very strange insistence—that first of all, whatever God is, is equivalent to the spirit that calls the habitable order that is good out of chaos and potential, which is, I think, what you're doing when you’re mentoring, for example. It’s an example of that.
But that Spirit characterizes men and women alike and equally. Yes! And this is another thing: you know, I’ve talked to feminists who say, “Well, you know, the Old Testament, in particular, is a patriarchal document.” And I think you’re completely out of your mind.
It’s so anti-patriarchal that it really is a kind of miracle because the notion that there was a fundamental equality between men and women and that that was grounded in equal access or equal characterization by the Divine—there isn’t a more radical claim than that on the gender or sex front. And the notion in the New Testament that each person is a locus of divinity and intrinsic worth is a reflection of that initial statement.
And that’s established—it’s like the fifth thing that happens in the biblical corpus. It’s a fundamental proclamation. And maybe the most—you know, what’s the proclamation? Human beings are created in two forms, and that’s something that of course we’re questioning like mad at the moment, to our great chagrin, because it might be the most fundamental perceptual axiom, you know? The distinction between the sexes.
And the second one is that men and women alike are created in the image of God. And you know, that’s quite—that’s a ridiculously radical proposition. It is. I do think it is the essence of the Christian stance against slavery in particular.
Now we’re going to talk about the French revolutionaries as well; they’re Tower of Babel types, by the way. Those—
They are totally power battle types.
Yeah, so I mean their approach is a fundamentally atheistic one. It is to root out the biblical influence, really any religious influence, and to set up in its—and instead—the human reason, they said, but, as you pointed out, what it really becomes is the rule of the powerful.
So once you take out the biblical insistence on the equality of all people, once you take out the powerful biblical message that every person is called to work with God, every person is called to advance God’s purposes—every person can have God’s spirit within them, right? I mean this is the teaching of the New Testament. You come to Christ; he pours his Spirit out on you; it doesn’t matter if you’re a man, woman, Jew, Gentile, slave, free. Once you take all of that away and it becomes about, “Oh well, you know, we’re going to worship human reason,” well—according to whom? Right? Who defines that? Who's in control? Exactly—to what end?
Exactly, well, the um, it’s been interesting to me to watch what happened with the—the four horsemen of—the four atheist horsemen over the last few years. I mean, Hitchens died, so he's obviously off the table, but it’s interesting to consider what's happened to both Dawkins and Harris. So Harris—and I say this with all due respect—I like both those men, and I think that—I actually think they’re honest men, and I think they’re trying to strive upward.
I think they’re both wrestling with God in their own way, and I mean that like seriously with all due respect. Dawkins is a real scientist, and I think Harris is a real moral actor. Now, one of the things that’s happened to Sam is that he’s kind of left the rational arena altogether, like he’s pursuing meditation—that’s his fundamental goal. And so Sam has created for himself a sort of—what would you say? A disembodied Buddhist deity. And I think the reason that Sam leaves his deity inarticulate is because if he made it articulate, he would criticize it to death with his rationality.
And so he leaves he has an ineffable God and he’s now—he’s decided to devote his life to that. And so that’s interesting. You know, when Harris was motivated—I talked to Sam Lawrence—Harris was motivated fundamentally by the problem of evil, and he wanted to ground morality in something unshakable, and he thought the only thing unshakable was objective truth. But it turns out that grounding morality and objective truth actually isn’t possible for all sorts of technical reasons, and I write about that a little bit in this new book.
And so Sam turned to Buddhism, and then with Dawkins—like I think Dawkins has seen—and I know I’m speaking for him, but I believe this to be true in good faith—that the rationalist humanists that he thought would replace the superstitious biblical religious types turned out to be whim governed tyrants, right?
And so that rationality—that unmoored rationality—it seems to degenerate in two ways very rapidly. It degenerates into something like power claim that’s driven by worship of the intellect, right? And Marx is a great example of that because he was so intellectually arrogant and that characterizes universities like—Matt and it’s part of the spirit that raises the Tower of Babel, you know?
Because that’s associated with luciferian presumption. And so that worship of the intellect produces a luciferian Tower of Babel. And that’s happening all around us at an absolutely mad rate. But the other thing it seems to produce is a kind of disintegration of narrative into hedonism. You know, and Hedonism is a kind of polytheism, right? It’s just—you just worship whatever whim happens to seize you at the moment.
And so you get a luciferian presumption on the one part on hand that produces endless towers of Babel, or you get a degeneration into kind of mindless hedonism, and our culture at the moment is—well, it’s toying real hard with both.
It’s like we got the worst of 1984 and Brave New World at the same time. And so the alternative to that is, I think, what the biblical corpus does is lay out the alternative to that; that’s—that’s what it’s striving to do, you know?
So, alright, so back to the French revolutionary types. So how do you read what happened in France? You said it was elevation of rationality to the highest place, for example.
Yeah, and I mean rationality is—yeah, with a capital R—which is really just “vignette.” It begs the question again: what’s the substance of that?
Here’s my thesis: If you look historically and also sort of philosophically, what the French Revolution—and maybe the Enlightenment writ large—and those are separate things, I realize, but just mushing them together for a second—what they really do is they try and take the moral content of the biblical tradition and then separate it from the biblical God and biblical obligation, I think.
And so what they’re really doing is living on borrowed time, right? I mean, so they’re really trying to separate out these fundamental moral precepts, and they’re trying to ground them in something else. And it just doesn’t work. I mean, we’ve had centuries of experiment with it, right?
I mean, we’ve seen it; it doesn’t work. I mean what the French Revolution quickly ends up with, of course, historically, is they’re all killing one another because it becomes purely a power play.
Yeah, I mean it’s who has the power? The Enlightenment types, so I’ll make their argument for them, and this is a sort of argument that Pinker would make, is, “No, you’re wrong about that, Senator Hawley, because we didn’t really see any progress towards the states of being that characterize the modern state till we established the scientific method, and it was the Enlightenment types that drove that.”
And it was the divorce of science from the religious underpinnings that allowed that to occur. That escape from, say, biblical superstition and other forms of superstition allowed for that clarity of mind.
And so, what is it?
That—now let’s talk about that for a minute, because you talk about the French revolutionaries. Yes, and okay.
So do you want to just outline that part of your book and your thoughts on the French rational revolutionaries?
Absolutely, but first can I disagree with you by restating Wilberforce’s argument? Because I think you’ve made a profound point there. Wilberforce’s argument from the Bible, from the biblical tradition, was, I think, twofold. Number one, it is the idea in the Old Testament—and you mentioned it when you talked about Moses—God says to Moses, “Tell Pharaoh: let my people go—why?” So that they can worship me. There is an equality there that is implied. There’s only one king, right?
I mean the message of the Old Testament is there’s one God, only one sovereign; everyone else serves him. But because of that, everyone else is equal. You know, you don’t have this hierarchy of gods—and therefore a hierarchy of humans in the Old Testament.
God eventually does give the Israelites a king, but that’s a concession to them. And of