Last updated on May 24, 2023
What follows is an authentic statement with a mostly-fictitious context. I (Josh) was treated very kindly by my former employer, this speech never took place, and the brewery mentioned, sadly, does not exist.
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Friends, Nobles, Countrymen, and whoever that guy is,
Thank you for coming here tonight for what feels like a secret meeting; but, as many of you will recall, this was not the original plan. At your invitation, I was scheduled to deliver this address on campus. Instead, I was reported to the Assistant Associate Dean for Emotional Support Animal Assessment and the Coordinator for Gender Diversity for failing to give a land acknowledgment at the beginning of the course by someone I apparently mis-gendered. Conservative Christians who still believe in “radical” things like biology, the Bible, and private property are just too risky for the modern college campus.
Anyway, I’m grateful to Polycarp Brewing Company for generously providing us this room. I implore you to indulge them liberally and tip generously. Please, though, do not take any pictures. As my students and former colleagues, association with me is a liability. You’ll probably get fired just for tweeting this. We also do not want to give away any evidence that the Baptists present are drinking.
Although I managed to acquire a PhD before turning 30, my academic career as a university faculty member has ended before the age of 40. I do not know whether my days in the classroom are over, but the future is in God’s hands now as always.
But in the days leading up to this, I found myself slipping into a silly habit I share with my dad. He and I have a tendency to daydream about giving speeches. These speeches could be to any audience and on any subject, but dad and I are convinced we have something to say and that someone may actually want to listen. Whether that’s true or not, I decided it was time to at least put one of those imaginative addresses to paper. Should my words fall flat, I will at least be comforted that it all sounded way better in my head sitting in the Spring woods hunting turkeys.
A “Recovering Political Scientist”
During office hours a month ago, a student asked me what I would say if this really was my last lecture in front of college students. How would I want them to remember me and what would I want them to take away?
Reflecting on this, I can at least say my last lecture would not be in the service of political science. The longer I have studied in this discipline, the further I feel from it. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a genuine social scientist. Indeed, I have grown suspicious of the entire enterprise. I am, instead, a Christian humanist who tends to focus on political questions. I am also not a political theorist. I am much more sympathetic to the ancient tradition of trying to understand political reality in the broadest sense, and not with ahistorical abstractions. The world does not need more political ideologies and political theories. It needs to recover a sense of reality: of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
I found myself working against my discipline more than with it; always trying to resist the behavioralists and positivists whose faith in statistics I cannot embrace. It was also increasingly clear that political science is no longer sure why it exists. They seem unable to distinguish themselves from other disciplines because the political scientist must always rely on someone else to really understand the “independent variables” (if such a thing even makes sense) or our primary unit of analysis: individual human persons. One may justifiably ask if political science is distinguished only by the dependent variables it’s most concerned with. Even its methodologies are borrowed. Why have a separate academic department?
The late great statesman and my friend, William Batchelder III, once said to his son trying to choose a college major, “”Son, political science is nonsense. Study philosophy, or study history. Everything in political science worth knowing is already in those departments.”
To be fair, though, the political scientist may not be entirely to blame. In our increasingly totalitarian culture, virtually all things have become political – or, at least, partisan. The historian, the sociologist, the economist, the literary scholar, the performing artists, and even the medical professions have been co-opted as means for partisan and activist ends. Every course, syllabus, assessment, journal, and conference seems called upon in service to the “revolution.” Like one of their most prominent muses, Karl Marx, they take seriously the call to change the world rather than to understand or interpret it. Among so many who believe we have “killed” God and that the scientific method alone reveals truth, what other cause would be worthwhile? In a disenchanted and, at best, agnostic modernity, salvation necessarily takes a political and scientific flavor. Salvation from what, you ask? Salvation from anything that threatens the autonomous therapeutic self, whose sole passion is to remake the world in its image.
To be sure, since Plato’s Republic, we have known that it is impossible to consider political questions – or the questions of any discipline – utterly separate from the pursuit of knowledge as a whole. Any scholar, teacher, and learner worth the name must ultimately be interdisciplinary if they want to see the world as it actually is.
Diagnosing the Darkness
What’s different about our time is the all-encompassing way in which, not only our academic disciplines, but every aspect of our life, is consumed by partisanship. Identity politics, in its quest to efface individuality in favor of group homogeneity, has made everything from bathrooms to beer a political dog-whistle. Interactions with students and colleagues, as well as with bartenders, human resource departments, and local librarians have become a landmine of codewords and doublespeak. As modern students, you know this better than most. It’s why you seldom speak up in class. You are terrified of your classmates and their judgment. You knew if you said anything unorthodox, the payment for your social “sins” back at the dorm could be merciless – and all this at an ostensibly Christian college!
I do not wish to belabor the diagnosis, however. Any sentient, somewhat-educated consumer of modern news and social media can see that all is not as it should be. Even that drunk Baptist back there on his third double-IPA knows what I’m talking about.
We cannot undo or eliminate the plagues of nihilism, scientism, and ideology wreaking havoc on the world. No election or policy can dig us out of the darkness whose origins predate the wicked tradition emanating from Rousseau, Marx, Freud, and others; for the origins of our present crisis are, at their core, no different than what has inspired calamities since the Garden of Eden. The problem is human sin.
But once you recognize that – once you acknowledge that sin is at the heart of all this – it is also a reason to hope. Yes, I think the decades ahead will be increasingly difficult for Christians economically, socially, politically, and so on. I think we will be forced to make many difficult choices as individuals and groups that will cost us the many privileges we’ve enjoyed in the Western world, for we are no longer tolerated. With breathtaking speed, as Aaron Renn has argued, we have gone from a world where a residual Christianity permeated everything to one in which following Christ has become a liability. We are, it seems, quickly returning to the experience of the early Church after Christ’s Ascension (or, as Carl Trueman notes, p. 406, to the Second Century). I hope and pray this is a sign that Jesus will return soon.
Until that time, though, there is still reason for hope. Sin has been defeated! We are forgiven! We serve a living, risen God who has overcome death and the devil. This means that there is no evil, pain, sorrow, or trial that will not someday end. Salvation and the overwhelming grace of God has been given to us freely. Remember, as well, that Christ did not leave you to your own devices, for the Holy Spirit dwells within you. You are an immortal child of God destined to be with Christ forever. Praise God!
True as that may be, I acknowledge that the pain, frustration, and fear are still very real. For most of us, it takes a lifetime for those transformative truths to really sink in and impact how we live. Indeed, the truth of the Gospel should inspire in us great courage, joy, resolve, compassion, faith, hope, and love. But let’s face it; after a brief doom-scroll through Twitter, we feel downcast, hopeless, guilty, and increasingly enraged. The darkness both in us and around us can seem so overwhelming, and so we retreat. In our therapeutic culture, we are especially prone to self-medicate through drugs, alcohol, pornography, or some substitute that more or less serves the same purpose. We make excuses, explain it away, and just look for an escape.
Yet we know, intuitively it seems, that we cannot live feeling like this. We long for hope and the grace of God. Despair, rage, fear, and guilt cannot be the basis of a flourishing life.
What, then, can we do?
First – and do not miss this – the work that Christ began in us WILL be brought to completion by him and him alone (Philippians 1:6). Whatever we choose to do, it must necessarily be incomplete. The last “stage” is in God’s hands.
In the meantime, I might summarize our task as threefold: remembrance, truth-telling, and friendship.
Remember
The task of remembrance is complicated, since the imaginations of my millennial generation, especially, have been starved of examples that might help us confront this challenge. Indeed, among the most sinister aspects of critical theory and modern education is its animosity toward tradition and what Edmund Burke called “the bank and capitol of nations.” As a result, we have forgotten not only the Word of God, but also the truths found in classical and Christian literature. We desperately need to recover archetypes to follow and stories to inspire us.
Do you know, for example, who this brewery is named after? Do you know who Polycarp is?
*blank stares*
Polycarp was the Christian Bishop of Smyrna in the early Second Century A.D. who, in his 80s was martyred for refusing to ceremonially burn incense in reverence to the Roman Emperor. He is reported to have said, at the end: “Eighty and six years I have served [Jesus], and He has done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King and Savior? You threaten me with a fire that burns for a season, and after a little while is quenched; but you are ignorant of the fire of everlasting punishment that is prepared for the wicked.”
The old man was then set on fire, but – like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (Dan.3) – he miraculously did not burn up. The officials then stabbed him to finish the job. Dying, he said, “I bless you, Father, for judging me worthy of this hour, so that in the company of the martyrs I may share the cup of Christ.”
We desperately need this kind of faith and courage. Those of us in the West do not yet face a threat like that of Polycarp’s day, but we – myself included – shamefully shrink in the face of much less. In this I’m reminded of God’s reply to an indignant prophet Jeremiah (12:5): “If you have raced with men on foot and they have worn you out, how can you compete with horses? If you stumble in safe country how will you manage in the thickets by the Jordan?” Put another way, if we shrink in the face of mere social and economic marginalization, how will we respond in the face of more insidious threats?
Whatever we need to do next, then, we must restore the inheritance of the Western imagination and ensure it survives. As Orwell showed, forgetfulness was always essential for totalitarianism to endure. In the dystopian hellscape of 1984, he writes of the fictitious Oceana: “The past…had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory?”
Indeed, one of the ways that the evils of chattel slavery endured was by keeping the memories and inheritance of the past from the slaves themselves, lest they discover the truths that could set them free. Responding to this attitude, W.E.B. Du Bois responds in Ch. 6 of The Souls of Black Folk (1903):
I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong–limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?
The same memory and the same inheritance belongs to all of us who wish to be free. This was, in part, why the great Frederick Douglass memorized excerpts of Cicero’s speeches from the old Colombian Orator anthology. He explicitly acknowledged the debt he owed to such classics in his quest to expose the injustice around him. Douglass knew that it was not the Western tradition that had wrought his chains. It was, in part, the blatant disregard and censoring of that heritage that kept the slaves where they were.
So I do not cling to my Bible, Dante, Homer, Cicero, and Tolkien for the sake of some arbitrary privilege. I hold on to them as reminders of what it means to be human and so I never forget what it means to be free. As the brilliant historian, Wilfred M. Mcclay, remarked
A culture without memory will hardly be a culture at all; it will be barbarous and easily tyrannized, even if it is technologically advanced, because the incessant drumbeat of daily events will drown out all reflective efforts to connect past, present, and future, and thereby understand the things that unfold in time, including the path of our own lives.
Speak the Truth
So we must remember and preserve our inheritance, but we must also tell the truth. This truth is not simply found in the modern therapeutic “self”, and so we rely on our inheritance and the Holy Spirit to discern what it is and what truths we must tell.
Some may suggest that we should look to politics, elections, and policy to share and restore the truth. But that is, in part, how we arrived at our moment of crisis in the first place. Rather than seeking first the Kingdom of God, many Christians foolishly sought to seize or transform an earthly Kingdom. The result, even among Christians themselves, has been society’s subordination to an impersonal state. To this tendency, the great Dutch statesman and truth-teller, Abraham Kuyper wrote:
…if you, in line with the state socialists, allow society to be absorbed by the state, you offer incense to the deification of the state. You will be putting the state in the place of God and destroying a divinely ordered, free society for the sake of the apotheosis of the state.
The Social Question and the Christian Religion
Father, forgive us.
To be sure, I’m not discouraging all of you from politics (some of you…maybe), but social and political pathologies rooted in sin must be confronted with the Truth, which is far more powerful than any vote or policy.
When I say the “Truth” I mean it in two ways. I mean “truth” as in the traditional way of describing what is real and possible. But, more importantly, I mean the Truth as in the person of Jesus Christ. He is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6).
So when students and others ask me what we must do to face the darkness around us, I will respond by saying, “live by the truth” and, in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s words, “live not by lies.”
To be sure, the call to be prudent and shrewd need not be cast aside. We must also not abandon the all-important virtue of humility. It must be said, additionally, that, except in genuine self-defense, I do not counsel violence or autocracy as some have done. Do not hold on to your life so tightly that you lose it. Furthermore, we gain no ground fighting sin with sin.
But if Caesar demands a pinch of incense, you must say no. If your professors or employer demands you speak or act against your faith, you must refuse. 2+2 does not equal 5, and you must never concede otherwise. As Peter declares in Acts 5:29, “We must obey God rather than human beings!”
Pursue and Protect Friendship
If we are going to live by the truth and not by lies, then, there is one more thing we must do. In some ways, it is the most difficult piece because much of our lives and culture work against it. We must remember and live by the truth together; in Churches, in communities, in families, and as friends. As the writer of Hebrews said (10:24-25), “And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.”
Facebook groups, webinars, and virtual reading groups are not enough. We must resist, with all our being, the tendency to mediate our relationships primarily through digital means. We cannot survive the days ahead in physical isolation from one another or without the encouragement of real, face-to-face engagement.
In dystopian fiction, one of the ways the totalitarian authorities win is by destroying any semblance of community. In 1984, people simply live alone and are formed not as moral and spiritual persons but as dehumanized bureaucratic cogs in the machine of state. In Brave New World, there is no genuine community. All relationships are transactional and sexual. It is the lowest form of friendship.
After graduation, even if you’re lucky enough to land a job, many of you will experience this isolation first hand. You’re educated now and you have new skills and opportunities, but something is missing: community. You may find yourself, to your great surprise, missing life in the dorm or longing for a particular club, team, or choir. But alas, where are the associations to replace such experiences? The friendships at work are often not like the friendships with classmates, and it is simply not the case that families are meant to fill the voids left by lost friends.
Don’t give up. Be a friend and make new friends. Don’t neglect your church and the cultivation of friendships outside your family as well. You will always be more vulnerable to lies, to fear, and to cowardice when you are alone.
Having and loving your spouse and kids is indeed a modern act of resistance, as is attending church. Tell the truth, read your Bible, pray, improve your health, and always learn more. Even simple things like…not getting offended…are acts of resistance.
Pray and laugh together, speak truth into each other’s lives. Watch movies together and talk about them, argue about some Podcast, share books and recipes, help each other move furniture, go on a hike, and enjoy a meal with one another.
Before I conclude, though, I want to share a quick story with my former colleagues and fellow academics fortunate enough to still be in front of a classroom. When working at LSU a few years ago, I frequently met with a student who was passionately atheist and who loved to talk to me about faith. I enjoyed our time together. I once told him that, had I not pursued life as a professor, I likely would have gone into ministry. To my astonishment, he said, “But had you done that, how would you have reached me?” Always be prepared for those moments.
I am grateful for my brief time in academia, and especially for the students who put up with me. My prayer is that by God’s grace you will be Christians that preserve the good and the beautiful, who speak the truth, and who love one another as Christ loves us.
So, as my friends, I do not wish for us to say goodbye in any permanent sense. I have lost my job, but not my hope. I may need you to spot me for a beer occasionally in the months ahead, but I believe, by God’s grace, I’ll eventually have the means to pay you back. My hope and prayer is that I can finally stay in one place and reject the transience of the academic life and our exploitative gig-economy. If I am granted the grace to remain, I hope we can love this place together.
Let us raise our glasses together and toast to friendship and to the Truth.
Here! Here!
Now, who’s going to drive the Catholics home?