Defenders of the Faith?
Extremism in Classical Christian Education
Growing up, my mom and I would joke from time to time about how narrowly I’d avoided homeschool. She felt guilty about it for a while. She was and is a devout Christian, and the fact that the homeschool families she knew were almost all Christian made it seem like she wasn’t doing enough for her kids. Ultimately, though, homeschool would have suited neither her nor me, and so I went through a religious elementary school, a second secular elementary school, and a secular high school.
I went to church every Sunday, but I kept my weekdays for myself. I read everything I could get my hands on; my parents were confident enough in their influence over their children’s lives to be largely uninterested in censorship. Like so many of us in Classics, I read picture books of Odysseus’s adventures and devoured stories like those of Arachne, Hercules, and King Midas with unabashed joy. My father started a seminary degree when I was four or five, and I have many memories of listening to him talk about a Greek root word or some detail of early Christian philosophy. Classical stories and early medieval history became the pleasant background hum of my childhood.
The secularity of my education, however, meant that the first time I was systematically introduced to classical texts was through a religiously neutral lens. When my teachers introduced me to Cicero, Horace, Caesar, and Catullus, I was quite happy to leave behind Paul and Aquinas for something unassociated with church on Sunday and other rituals of intellectual obedience. The texts I read were my window into a different world, like and perfectly unlike the one I lived in, and I couldn’t get enough. I wanted desperately to see that world more clearly; there, I was not the only one who had felt the surging, almost painful desires and longings I was experiencing as a teenager. That pull, inextricable from the breadth of my classical education, kept me in Classics, but sometimes I wonder: what would my relationship be to the field I love if my introduction were in a fully religious context?
That question is at the forefront of a surging educational movement: classical Christian education. Loosely formalized in the nineties, it seeks to redefine what it means to educate children in the liberal arts. The Western canon interwoven with traditional Christian teaching forms the foundation of students’ education. The Center for Independent Research on Classical Education, or the CiRCE Institute, gained non-profit status in 2002 and now works closely with the Association of Classical Christian Schools to support and promote classical Christian educational environments. As of 2017, 304 schools are under the ACCS banner; this doesn’t include the large number of families who choose to homeschool their children in the classical Christian model.
Classical educators, according to the CiRCE Institute’s webpage, start from the fundamental belief that the world makes sense and its workings are knowable through a knowledge of God. Their primary charge, however, is not exclusively student-centric: it is to “take responsibility for the western tradition: to receive it, to assess it, to preserve it, and to hand it on to the next generation.” Teachers achieve this through a focus on carefully selected primary classical texts and secondary sources privileging Western history. Students read Homer, Dante, Virgil, and Cicero as foundational elements of their studies, and pick up books like Socrates Meets Jesus for the rest. Latin is studied as the theological language of the Church and Greek as the language of New Testament scripture and early Western texts.
When I first heard of the classical Christian school movement, I was curious, and thrilled, but I came up short as I looked at syllabi and summer reading lists of prominent classical Christian schools. I was looking for a link to my own classical education, a way to understand what it might be like to grow up entirely in this context. “I just want to know who they read,” I groaned to myself several times, but that was the wrong question. I was thinking about my high school Latin and Greek, the thrill of Cicero’s sharpest invective or Catullus’s most cutting metaphor, and assuming those students must have the same experience, if through their own religious lens.
As far as I can tell, they don’t: when and to what degree students are exposed to which texts is difficult to ascertain. In their original language, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, and Virgil are frequent line items on a classical Christian syllabus, but why and when do teachers choose to excerpt their voices and exclude others in turn? Are the authors presented by themselves or in a textbook? Does anyone get to roll their eyes when Catullus complains about his love life again, or laugh at Cicero’s mimes in the pro Caelio? Linguistic education is a priority for every classical Christian school, and I am certain their students are excellent readers of Latin and Greek, but the texts they read beyond textbooks are heavily distorted by the pedagogical aims that bring them to those texts in the first place.
A look at one of the reading lists for Sequitur Classical Academy in Baton Rouge gives some good examples. Seventh graders spend their school year focusing on Greek history and culture. During their summer, they are encouraged to read Xenophon and condensed versions of the Iliad and Odyssey alongside Bible stories like Noah’s Ark. Eighth graders start with Roman civilization, eventually moving to the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and then early modernity by the time they reach senior year. On Sequitur’s reading list, eighth grade marks an important turning point: they begin the book they will be required to read until the summer before their junior year: Rodney Stark’s 2015 book How the West Won.
If your eyes rolled a little bit when you read that title, follow your instinct. The book’s full title is How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity. (“Neglected” is certainly an interesting choice of words given how dominant Western narratives remain in our culture today.) The description of the book given on Amazon is also quite something. The book’s central thesis is that “modernity” developed exclusively in the West, and scholars are too cowed by “political correctness” to tell what Stark considers to be the truth. Among its claims are that the Dark Ages never happened, the Crusades had nothing to do with anti-Muslim sentiment or material gain, and the idea that Europe became rich by plundering and colonizing is “an absurd fabrication.”
Such language is familiar for those of us who keep track of what “the West” becomes in the eyes of its self-appointed champions: a victim of the culture it helped create, maligned by “political correctness” and mangled by “identity politics.” It’s a story we’ve all seen before and quickly become familiar with as maturing classicists. But Sequitur’s students start reading this book in eighth grade.
How the West Won is required reading for four years of these students’ lives. They are quizzed on the book, and it presumably forms the foundation of their year’s historical and cultural education. When they begin to see the ancient world in their classes and discussions, they see it at least partially through this lens; reading modernity into antiquity is always inevitable, but this particular lens is warped and insidious. It promotes the idea that Western civilization is somehow diminished by the achievements of other, less white ones. It calls the students to the same vocation as their teachers: the “preservation” of a Western civilization perceived as under threat.
Turning defenders of the faith into defenders of “Western civilization” does a few things. It encourages a less critical approach: you become your own enemy when you note the chinks in “Western” ideological armor, and so the gaps and flaws and contradictions of a “West-is-best” mentality become smoothed over and eventually invisible. Many of these students will go to college, and their instinctive response to the more poststructural evaluations of Western culture and society they may find there will be more defensive and closed-off than it might have been otherwise. Most importantly, it weakens the Western tradition by implying that it is not strong enough to endure on its own merits. If the classical Christian construction of Western civilization needs Rodney Stark and the CiRCE Institute and a new generation of devotees to survive, it makes Western civilization the property of its defenders and in that exclusivity weakens the very ubiquity that has allowed the West to endure.
This is the ugly heart of classical Christian education, or at least a glimpse of what it can become if left belittled by scholars and dismissed by the more liberally minded. In his book The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher gives an adept summary of the more extreme wing of the classical Christian movement: “because public education in America is [not] . . . able to form an imagination devoted to Western civilization, it is time for all Christians to pull their children out of the public school system.” (155) He immediately sets up a bogeyman for “Western civilization” to fight: the “latest and worst trends in popular culture . . . [like] normalizing transgenderism.” (156) Fearmongering like this sets Western civilization against changes in human self-conception and identity and forces an arbitrary choice between the two.
For some of us, there is no choice. We bring our identities and experiences with us into the texts we read; we can be intentional about our methods, but no historical canvas is truly blank. The unified Christian approach to classical Christian education is supposed to subsume mortal subjectivity into a singular divine identity, but the introduction of Western cultural chauvinism undermines this aim. Christians are called to be defenders of the faith, but one god can quickly replace another; the loyalty of some proponents of classical Christian education to a hazy conception of Western culture dilutes an otherwise noble goal.
In some ways, Christianity and the cultural development of the West are inextricable from each other. We might not have the works our field relies on today without the copying of classical texts facilitated and funded by the Church, even though the Church’s involvement as curator and censor means there are many missing pieces. Classics has moved away from the monks of the Middle Ages, of course, and the existence of the discipline no longer relies on the Christian church, but Christianity has not forgotten its classical roots. Christianity has become subtly synonymous with the concurrent development of Western civilization, sometimes responsible for the latter’s most powerful trends (i.e. the Renaissance), and that concurrency is both an argument and powerful legitimating force for Christianity’s relationship with secular culture. Without the narrative of “Western civilization” that links the two, Christian educators and thinkers have a hard time justifying Christianity’s necessity to the secular world.
Still, if God had a heavy hand in the development of the West, he certainly also made the rest of the world. A classical Christian education does rely on a philosophical and cultural connection to the development of the West, and it’s difficult, if not impossible, to get around that. Still, there are many cultural contributions essential to education that came from outside Europe (Arabic numerals, anybody?), and many other places Christianity has touched. The second category can be ugly; Christians cannot be proud of their involvement in the colonization of Africa and North America, even if that involvement helped make the world we have today. An expansive mindset doesn’t require constant self-flagellation, but a golden mean may exist. It is certainly possible to honor Homer and Dante alongside the Epic of Gilgamesh without permanently elevating one over the other. Whether the classical Christian movement is willing to do so is another question entirely.
Intellectual inheritance is a complicated thing. If I were asked to define my own as a white American raised in a Western tradition, I don’t know what I’d say. I still know that whatever that inheritance is, it isn’t meant to be hoarded. The art and writing and cultural memory of the West have had an incredibly strong influence on my life and the Christian tradition I grew up in. That strength alone does not mean that the West can only speak to the lives of Christians and Westerners. Universalizing Western culture has its own consequences; when we say that the West is for everybody, we can implicitly support the claim that its universality makes it the best and most suitable culture for intellectual precedence. The history and literature of Africa, South and East Asia, and the Middle East have also influenced and informed the development of the West and humanity at large. To that end, the classical Christian suggestion of “Western civilization” as a closed and static category is nonsensical and does a great disservice not only to the other cultures that contributed to the rise of the West, but to the legacy of the West itself.
I know this because I see it in my own intellectual life every day. Growing up exposed to both religious and secular culture meant that my life was richer, and the influence of both remains indelible. I engaged more fully with Christian doctrine as a teenager because of, not despite, the opportunities the secular world offered to interrogate it. I would be a less thoughtful writer and scholar if I had never been exposed to a Christian view of classics and humanism: my faith has honed my compassion, prevented me from entering a bubble of secular confirmation bias, and enhanced my sense of wonder. “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another” (Proverbs 27:17), and the work I have done reconciling the social ethics of my religious tradition with the culture I love and often deeply identify with has sharpened me. I seek to connect my worlds wherever I can and to identify the many disciplines, religious and secular, that have something to offer the center of Classics but are still forced to hover at the edges.
By the same token, I often wonder what happens when students educated in the classical Christian tradition want more. Inevitably, they will stumble on Catullus 16 or the Wikipedia article on Achilles and Patroclus; if the classical tradition does nothing else, it encourages curiosity. Maybe they will look away in disgust, properly inculcated, but maybe, like me, they will not be able to stop looking. These students will have questions for their parents, teachers, and college professors. What will those questions be?
I know mine, bubbling up in my chest and pricking at my eyes. I want to know when God ordained the West as the sole nexus of important culture. I want to know why the pride and self-assurance of a few demand the total denigration of any non-Western cultural contributions, as if the Greeks and Romans or early Christians could have started from nothing. I want access to the past, all of it, and the opportunity to test my faith and decide for myself. I don’t think I’d be the only one.
Classical Christian education is an incredibly promising model for introducing children to the classics at a young age and feeding their curiosity and enthusiasm. Its students may choose to stay in the field, and it would be a disservice to them to be ignorant of the particulars of their educational background. The intersection of classical and Christian history also spans the arbitrary and disputed gap between Classics and Medieval Studies, and has the potential to enrich both fields.
The world of academia and the world of belief are not so far apart as we would sometimes like them to be. Classical Christian education straddles the divide and in doing so presents even the most secular academics with a challenge: how do we interpret the voices we’ve heard so many times already when they are presented in new ways? The relative novelty of classical Christian education represents an opportunity to rethink the exclusionary nature of previous scholarly classical thought and avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
The CiRCE Institute lays another charge beyond the preservation of Western civilization: “Classical educators are logocentric. In a word, that means they believe that the world makes sense and that the sense it makes is knowable. They base their approach to education on discovering that sense … classical educators believe in and pursue a logos, or a unifying principle, for all knowledge and action.” Perhaps there’s quite a lot of value in thinking about the world as something whose contingent parts can be connected, by a shared vision of humanity if not by God. We study Classics because we know that something binds us to the Greeks and Romans just as it binds us to our fellow humans today. The pedagogical approach of classical Christian education is founded on the hope of finding that something, and that’s a goal worth pursuing. If the movement can pull itself out of the trap that is taking on a defense of Western civilization, it can do right by its students and the classics alike.
Madeleine Johnson is a student classicist and political theorist at the University of Chicago. She believes in the importance of classical reception, the power of “fringe” disciplines to enrich the center, and the life-changing magic of a good cup of coffee.
