Picking Up a Piece of Paper

Last updated on: June 2, 2025 at 1:39 pm By Gene Veith

What I told the 2025 graduates of Concordia University Nebraska:

When I was in college, long, long ago, during the first week of classes, I picked up a piece of paper from the ground. I don’t know why I did that. I don’t normally pick up other people’s litter. But the paper looked kind of official.

It was a drop/add slip. I didn’t exactly know what that was at the time, but there was a name with a telephone number, so, just in case it was important, I thought I’d give the person a call.

We arranged to meet so that I could give it to her. It turned out, she had gone to this French class but she couldn’t stand the professor, so she decided to drop the course.

To make a very long story very short, two years later, we got married. We would have three children and eventually twelve grandchildren.

If I hadn’t picked up that piece of paper from the ground, my life would be completely different and almost certainly not nearly so happy. If I just stepped on the paper and walked on by, my three children would never have been born. If I were a good citizen and picked up the paper but threw it into the nearby trash bin, my twelve grandchildren would not exist.

If my future wife’s professor had had an extra cup of coffee that morning, maybe he wouldn’t have been so boring. She would have stayed in the class, not filled out a drop slip, and we would never have met. And if she had been just slightly more careful about her personal belongings, she would have kept her drop/add slip in her backpack instead of losing it and would probably have found someone better to marry, while I would have become a lonely, bitter old man.

Our lives are filled with small, seemingly insignificant moments. But they can turn out to be very significant, though we cannot know that significance at the time. Only when we look back can we see the complicated pattern that brought us to this present moment.

Such seemingly random moments with huge consequences multiply as we go deeper into the past. Big events also can have very personal consequences. If the Japanese had not bombed Pearl Harbor, my father would not have left the farm to join the army, which later enabled him to go to college on the GI Bill. On his way to class, he decided for some reason to walk on the other side of the street. My future mother was walking in the other direction. They approached each other and started talking. If that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be here giving a commencement address. I would not exist. My wife’s father joined the Marines and fought at Iwo Jima. In his unit, only five men survived, and he was one of them. If he had been killed, my wife would never have been born, nor would our three children, nor would our twelve grandchildren.

I urge all of you to play this game, to think about all of the coincidences, random events, casual decisions, and happenings that could have gone in a completely different direction and how they all worked together to bring you where you are today. A pattern will emerge. It will look like your life was orchestrated by some higher power. This is because it was.

Concordia’s theme for this academic year is 1 Corinthians 15:10: “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.”

You are what you are by the grace of God. This does not mean you haven’t worked hard to get to this point in your life, graduating from college and getting ready to launch out into the world. But God is with you. Specifically, the grace of God—his unmerited favor that is ours through Christ—is with you every step of your way.

This promise is repeated again and again in Scripture. “The heart of man plans his way,” says Proverbs 16: 9, “but the Lord establishes his steps.” We do and should plan our way—making countless decisions, setting our goals, doing what we can to achieve them—and yet, at the same time, the Lord is establishing our steps: guiding us even when we aren’t aware of it, making things happen, protecting us, leading us where He wants us to serve.

Perhaps the most well-known Scriptural passage on this theme is Romans 8:28: “We know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” Now this is not teaching blind optimism. All things do not work together for good for everyone. This promise is “for those who love God” and “are called according to his purpose.” That is to say, this passage is about Christian vocation. (Some of you have been waiting for me to bring up that concept.)

According to Luther’s doctrine of vocation, God will call you to tasks and relationships in the family, the workplace, the society, and the church. Sometimes you may not see how all things are working together for good in all of your vocations, but the emphasis in this text from Romans is on God’s purpose, not necessarily your own. The purpose that God gives you in all of the vocations to which He will call you is to love and serve your neighbors: your spouse if He calls you to marriage; your children if He calls you to parenthood; your customers when He calls you to a job; your fellow citizens when He calls you to communities and your country; your fellow Christians when He calls you to the church. And when your purpose is aligned with God’s purpose, His love and service to His creation is carried out through your love and service to His creation.

Right now, at this pivotal moment of your life when you graduate from college, you may be wondering what is ahead, even worrying about what is ahead: Will I find the right person to marry? Will I have children of my own? Where will I live? Will I get a good job? Some of you have already travelled a ways down this path, but you are all probably wondering right now, how will my life unfold?

Just remember Psalm 31:15: “My times are in your hand.”

When David was made king of Israel, he prayed, “Who am I, O Lord God, and what is my house, that you have brought me thus far?” (1 Chronicles 17:16). God has brought you thus far, through your childhood, your adolescence, your adulthood, and now your college education. Look back, and you can clearly see His hand through it all.

The present may be confusing, and the future is uncertain. But realize that God is with you now and will continue to be with you in the future, just as He has been with you in the past—bringing people into your life, leading you where He wants you to be, always blessing you abundantly with His grace.

Photo by StefanSalavatore, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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A New Book on Applying the Three Estates

Last updated on: May 9, 2025 at 4:44 pm By Gene Veith

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Lutheran theology has three doctrines about culture that can help Christians navigate our cultural problems: the Two Kingdoms; Vocation; and the Three Estates. Of these, Luther’s doctrine of the Estates is probably least known, but it is especially helpful in addressing the specific issues we face today.

Pastor Paul R. Williams of the Lutheran Church of Canada has written a book entitled Church, Family, and State in Contemporary Canada. Not only does he thoroughly explore Luther’s teaching about the estates and its Biblical foundation, he applies them in an illuminating way to the improper incursions of the state on the family and the church, which lies behind many of the cultural and legal conflicts that Christians are facing today, especially in Canada but also in the United States and the rest of the world.

In light of those conflicts, Pastor Williams also includes an extensive discussion of Lutheran resistance to tyrannical governments. That might come as a surprise to many of us, since Lutherans have a reputation for passivity in the face of secular authority, but there is, in fact, a strong tradition, going back to the Reformation, of “obeying God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).

Exactly when and how to do that is defined in the Magdeburg Confession (1550), which Rev. Williams discusses. (A new translation by Rev. Dr. Christian Preus of this important and inspiring document has just been published by Concordia Publishing House. More on that later!)

The book has been published by Ad Crucem Press, which has generously posted the whole text online for free! You can read it here. (I encourage you, though, to buy the book if you can, if only to support the author and the publishers.)

I wrote the foreword to the book. You can read it in its entirety online, but I’ll just post a few excerpts here:

The modern church has endured repression and persecution under Communism, Fascism, Islamism, and other totalitarian regimes. Who would have expected during the Cold War that today the church would be in conflict with governments in the democratic West? Who could have imagined that “free countries” would be shutting down worship services, restricting what church practices would be allowed, and criminalizing the teaching of Christian morality?

Christians in Canada, the United States, Australia, and Europe are not used to such treatment from their own governments, though their brothers and sisters in much of the rest of the world have known it all too well. But it is hard to know how to respond. Christians know that Scripture commands them to submit to the governing authorities (Romans 13), and yet Scripture also states, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). How do we apply both of those teachings, and how can we discern when and how we should submit and when and how we should resist? . . . .

This work by Pastor Paul Williams unpacks the Doctrine of the Estates, outlining its principles in a systematic way, and, in doing so, he sets forth a compelling template for analyzing social dysfunctions. God has purposes for each of the estates and has designed the church, the family, and the state with its government to work together for the good of all. When those purposes are violated, society becomes dysfunctional and its members suffer. Things also go wrong when one estate usurps the others, violating their authority and attempting to take on their functions.

Just as it is wrong when the church seeks to rule the state, as in the medieval church or modern social gospels whether of the left or the right, the earthly governments of the state should respect the distinct spheres of the church and the family. Pastor Williams shows, by applying the Doctrine of the Estates, that the modern state is trampling over the other estates and is violating its own God-given purpose.

Today, the state has been presuming to determine what the church is allowed to teach, as when it criminalizes teaching what the Bible says about homosexuality as “hate speech.” During the COVID shutdowns, the state interfered with worship, prohibiting singing and the Communion chalice, and ultimately forbidding corporate worship altogether.

The state has been presuming to overrule and to change the estate of the family by creating same-sex marriage, allowing the abortion of children, and using the schools to indoctrinate children to oppose their parents’ values.

The state is even violating the estate of the state! God ordained the state to protect the lives of its citizens. A state that facilitates the abortion of children and the euthanasia of its weakest members is defying its own purpose. Scripture says that earthly governors are sent by God “to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good.” When the state punishes those who do good, such as pro-life protesters and truck drivers asserting their liberties, and praises those who do evil, such as mutilators of children in the name of transgenderism, it is contradicting its own authority. . . .

Pastor Williams’ work here focuses on the issues in Canada, but churches throughout the world are facing similar pressures. My impression is that Canada has slipped farther down the slippery slope than some other countries, including my own United States. Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) law was sold as an act of mercy for the dying, which is problematic enough, but it has expanded to allow the killing of those with non-terminal illnesses, the disabled, the mentally ill, the depressed, and the poor. Today over 4% of the deaths in Canada are caused by the state. Canada’s euthanasia laws are shocking even to secularists, scandalizing not just Christians but the civilized world.

Canada’s decline from a generous, friendly, famously “nice” nation into one that puts to death its weakest citizens who are most in need of care, has become an object lesson, showing that social evils once introduced become worse and worse. What the Canadian church is going through is likely to spread and intensify through all of the “free countries.”

But Pastor Williams’ work here will prove to be enormously helpful throughout the world, as Christians seek to defend and restore the church, the family, and the state.

I am making this a free post to help spread the word about this resource, so forward it far and wide.

Illustration from the Marriage and Religion Research Institute

The Three Modes of Religion (and What May Come Next)

Last updated on: May 4, 2025 at 5:39 pm By Gene Veith

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If we are moving into a post-secular era, a broad-based recovery of religion in society, we mustn’t assume that this will necessarily be Christian, as such. We can hope that it will be, but if it isn’t, what kind of religion might it be?

My fellow Patheos blogger Anthony Costello had an interesting post a few months ago that can help us think through the different kinds of religious expression:

Ever since Panaetius of Rhodes (185-110/109 BC) philosophers have recognized three modes of theological expression. These are: the poetic, the philosophic and the political. I have written in detail about each here. In brief, the poetic relates to the imaginative aspect of man’s thoughts about god, those that speak most powerfully to man’s existential concerns: meaning, purpose, and value. Consider Jordan Peterson as an example of someone who thinks about God, or god, in this mode. The philosophic mode deals primarily with our metaphysical and epistemic concerns. It considers what is or is not real, what can be shown or demonstrated to be true, and what are our moral obligations given those realities and truths. William Lane Craig or Richard Swinburne would be good examples of this kind of thinker.

Finally, there is the political, or civic, mode of theology, that “which maintains the traditional cult and is indispensable for public education.” (Copleston, A History of Philosophy Vol 1., 422). The political expression of theological ideas does not discount either of the other forms. But its chief aim is to organize society and see that it functions properly. This is given the societal fact that man is an inherently religious creature. Man is homo religiosus, or, homo credens, who knows intuitively that his social dealings must be grounded in something divine, something god-like.

Panaetius, of course, was thinking in terms of Greco-Roman paganism. There were the myths, the wonderful tales of gods and goddesses that sometimes conveyed profound meanings. They address the imagination, which can often resonate deeply into the human heart. That would be the poetic approach to religion.

Then there were the philosophers who reflected on the universe and what it means, including the reality of God. Socrates argued that the myths about the gods could not be true because they often act worse than mortals do. The true God must be righteous. Aristotle argued that there must only be one God who transcends this physical realm, though since he must be complete in himself, he would take no interest and have no involvement with mortals. These thinkers address the reason. This is the philosophic approach to religion.

Then there was the public cult, the rituals of supplication and sacrifice to the gods that were an important, unifying function to Greco-Roman society. This civil religion held the nations and city states together, sanctifying the culture, giving divine sanction to the political order, and promoting good citizenship. The priests of the official cult addressed the social good.

If we accept this classification, even though it comes out of pre-Christian religion, we can see that Christianity can contain them all. The narratives of Scripture, the experience of the saints of yesterday and today, the rich heritage of Christian art, literature, and music, all these exemplify the poetic mode. Christianity also has its theologians, apologists, scholars, and thinkers all of whom employ the philosophic mode. And Christianity has always influenced the culture and promoted social morality. This would be the political mode.

But Panaetius was not finished. He believed that the political is the only mode of religion that has any relevance. This is because he was a Stoic. Consider today’s topic a sequel to our recent post The Stoic Revival.

In Costello’s more extensive Substack essay that he links to here, Three Kinds of Theology: The Poetic, The Philosophic, and The Political, he quotes the great historian of philosophy Frederick Copleston on the position of Panaetius and his fellow Stoics: “The theology of the poets,” he says, “is anthropomorphic and false.” “The theology of the philosophers,” on the other hand, “is rational and true, but unfitted for popular use.” “The theology of the statesmen,” however, is valuable because it “maintains the traditional cult and is indispensable for public education.”

Today, as we saw in yesterday’s post, social scientists are rediscovering the social and psychological benefits of religion. Progressive Christians have long been preaching a “social gospel” of the left. Now, many conservative Christians are preaching a “social gospel” of the right. We might see the “prosperity gospel” of many Pentecostals as a variation of that.

Again, Christianity can have a “political” mode in the sense of a social conscience, one which opposes the evils of society, such as abortion and other kinds of child abuse. And in their vocations as citizens in the civil estate, they can take political action against such injustices. But the “political” must not displace the personal salvation offered by God’s Word (Panaetius’s term “poetic” is too weak of a term for this), nor the truths of Christian doctrine (“theological” is a better term than “philosophic”).

In fact, we might say that truth is what can tie all of these modes together for Christians: God’s Word is not just a collection of psychologically helpful stories as Jordan Peterson sometimes reduces them to; rather, God’s Word is true. Christian theology is not just metaphysical speculation or reasoning about abstractions; rather, insofar as it is based on God’s Word, theology is true. Christian social influence is not about acquiring political power or social prestige; rather, Christian social influence grows out of the truth of God’s Word and the truth of Christian theology, which reveals transcendent moral absolutes that are true.

But if are seeing a revival of Stoicism, as our post on the subject suggested, a religion in the “political” mode may be in our future. Just remember that the last time Stoicism was in vogue, in ancient Rome, its vaunted religious toleration, since it required belief in no particular god, did not extend to Christians. That is because Christians refused to take part in “the traditional cult” of the civil religion. Not burning the incense to Caesar was a rejection of the one dimension of religion that the Stoics thought was important. Remember too that the great Stoic sage, the emperor Marcus Aurelius, author of the still-popular Meditations, presided over one of the most intense periods of Christian persecution for this very reason.

Photo: Bust of Marcus Aurelius (ca. 161–169 A.D.), Louvre Museum, CC BY 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons

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Changing the Culture from Above or Below?

Last updated on: May 7, 2025 at 8:26 am By Gene Veith

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Is culture changed primarily from below, by masses of people transforming their thinking and behavior, or from above, as a small number of elites exert their influence over everyone else? Both secularists and Christians have been debating which tactic is the best strategy.

Last week we blogged about Antonio Gramsci, who urged his fellow Communists to switch from trying to mobilize the working class to taking over institutions so as to create a revolution from the top down.

The Left took that advice. Today they dominate our elite institutions–universities, the arts, journalism, the media, to name a few–and their biggest revolutions have been in overthrowing the traditional family (as in the sexual revolution, feminism, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, the raising of children by the state, etc.)

Although Gramsci’s ideas were heretical from the perspective of orthodox Marxism, he did describe how Communism actually worked in practice. In the countries that went Communist, there was no withering away of the state, as Marx predicted. Rather, the countries were ruled by party strongmen who installed an elite corps of nomenklaturato impose state control of all of life.

That the base of today’s Democratic party is no longer the working class, but affluent, university-educated professionals, leaving the working class to the Republicans thus makes perfect sense.

It turns out, a similar debate over tactics has been churning among Christians who would like to change the culture in a more Christian-friendly direction.

I came across an article in First Things by one of my former students who is now a formidable Christian (and Lutheran) thinker, John Ehrett. In his article Colson’s Last Word, Ehrett tells about how a book by James Davison Hunter fell into his hands that belonged to former Nixon-operative turned Christian activist Charles Colson. The book, in which Hunter urged the top-down approach, was filled with marginal notes from Colson, who favored the bottom-up approach, resulting in a kind of debate between them.

Ehrett’s account of that debate and his own contributions to it are worth reading, but I want to make some points of my own. I’ll let Ehrett explain Hunter’s position:

In 2010, James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World landed like a bombshell among Christian intellectuals. It is difficult to do justice to the scale and sophistication of Hunter’s argument, but at bottom To Change the World argued for a new “Christian strategy.”

In Hunter’s telling, the possibility of Christian social transformation had far less to do with “worldview” than with “culture,” a social matrix of values and assumptions that “often seems eerily independent of majority opinion.” That matrix was shaped by influential people “operating in common purpose within institutions at the high-prestige centers of cultural production.” These elites, Hunter argued, tended to form tight networks that exercised creative power in ways unavailable to those outside the inner rings. The decline of Western Christian influence was due to Christians’ “absen[ce] from the arenas in which the greatest influence in the culture is exerted.” (The decline was also, Hunter made clear, linked to the fact that mainstream Christian tastes “run to the lower-middle and middle brow rather than the high brow.”)

Hunter concluded that generations of Christian efforts to shape society through conversion and revival had been fundamentally misguided, because “cultures change from the top down, rarely if ever from the bottom up.”

How did I miss that bombshell? I was vaguely aware of Hunter’s book, but I didn’t read it or follow the controversy. I guess I was too busy as an administrator and teacher at Patrick Henry College. I see now that PHC was working both sides, encouraging the grass-roots popular movement of homeschooling, while giving bright homeschooled kids a powerful classical education that equipped them to blow the top off of law school and other graduate school entrance exams and so break into the nation’s elite institutions. Ehrett, for example, went to law school at Yale. Many other PHC grads now have Ivy League pedigrees. PHC grads can be found scattered throughout the nation’s think tanks, legal systems, and political staffs. One of my students, Gabe Evans, is now a congressman from Colorado.

Let me add another distinction. We can speak of “folk culture,” the culture of the people as a whole. And we can speak of the “high culture,” the realm of unique individual achievement. Folk culture is about traditions, customs, and assumptions. It is innately conservative, which is why Gramsci gave up on it. High culture comes from a civilization’s artists, thinkers, scientists, inventors, and other elite creators. These denizens of the high culture are often at odds with the unwashed masses of the folk culture, criticizing them and bringing new ideas that the people don’t approve of.

The conflict between the two makes for a dynamic civilization. Sometimes the high culture of the elite class does indeed influence the masses, as in the sexual revolution, often to their harm. Sometimes the folk culture influences the elite, as in the Romantic movement of the 19th century. Sometimes, though, they work together, as in the American revolution.

Where does Christianity come into this? As Colson points out, Christianity took root in the Roman Empire as a popular movement, but then when the Emperor Constantine was converted, it took hold among the elite. As Colson also points out, the Reformation was a popular movement, though it needed the Protestant princes to protect it. Throughout Western civilization, up until the last few centuries, Christianity played an important role in the high culture, with its artists, musicians, theologians, writers, and thinkers. Today, Christianity is still plays an important role in our folk culture–what with the churches, the holidays, and many of the values held even by non-believers. While the high culture, with some significant exceptions, has largely turned against Christianity.

That last point, as Ehrett also says, poses a problem for Christians wanting to pursue Hunter’s strategy. It’s hard for a Christian to break into an elite circle, such as the dominant art scene, if it actively excludes not just Christians but any religious expression. It’s possible, but it often requires Christians to keep quiet about their beliefs, which defeats the purpose of Christian cultural change.

When I was at Concordia University Wisconsin, the Cranach Institute sponsored a symposium on H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, which examined the various historical possibilities of that relationship: Culture over Christ; Christ over culture; Christ transforming culture; Christ against culture; and Christ and culture in paradox.

My friend Wayne Martindale, a professor from Wheaton who had spent time in China, said that Niebuhr left out the possibility that was most pertinent for Christians in China and is increasingly pertinent for Christians in the West: Culture against Christ.

We naively assume that we can just pick a position, but when the culture, whether high or low, actively opposes Christianity we do not have the luxury of a choice. Being faithful and living the Christian life in a culture that hates you, even persecutes you, is a different kind of challenge.

To be sure, some elite professions are easier to infiltrate than others and Christians pop up in surprising places.

When Christians find themselves excluded from some professions because of their faith, one alternative is the parallel Christian institutions that have come into existence. For example, there are many Christian colleges and universities that can keep the Christian intellectual tradition alive. Though these might sometimes be tempted to conform to their secularist counterparts, on the whole they can be a haven for Christian academics and students. (That’s the route I chose.)

Christians’ main goal, though, should not be changing the culture, as such, but saving souls. There are still Christian churches, Christian families, Christian art, Christian music, Christian authors, Christian scholars, both from today and from our past. Learning our Christian heritage can give us a cultural and civilizational grounding that can get us through many of the conflicts we find today. So can the doctrine of vocation, which shows Christians how they can pursue even secular-seeming callings in love and service to their neighbors, and so be salt and light wherever God places them.

And vocation answers the question of how to change a culture. If you are displeased with the current society and want to make it better, start where you are: in your own life, your own family, your own workplace, your own church, your own community. Maybe you do have a vocation of major influence, but, if not, you can influence the people around you in the estates to which God has called you. And that’s usually the most significant.

Culture is people, and the goal of the culture-shaping elites is to shape and usually control “the people.” But we don’t have to let them. Our task first is be the people God wants us to be. As St. Peter reminds us, “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people” (1 Peter 2:10).

Illustration: Collage Christian Culture by User:jobas – self-made fromOther photosThe lecturing priest is scientific Georges Lemaître, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31465391

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Tariffs and the Labor Problem

Last updated on: April 28, 2025 at 3:10 pm By Gene Veith

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Mike Rowe is the former opera singer whose TV show Dirty Jobs champions the blue collar workers and their often unpleasant labor that our society depends on. Rowe supports Trump’s tariffs and his goal of bringing manufacturing back, but he notes some problems that are not being addressed.

He is quoted by Nicole Silverio at The Daily Caller:

“If, in general, [Trump] gets manufacturing reinvigorated in this country, then there’s gonna be a challenge that a lot of people aren’t talking about, which is labor,” Rowe said. “So, in January there were 482,000 open positions in manufacturing in this country, 480,000 open positions. If he gets his way and this all gets reinvigorated. You’re talking about 2 or 3 million new jobs, but there’s no workforce sitting there going, ‘this is what I want to do.’ They’re not prepared. There’s a skilled gap for sure, but there’s also a will gap.”

“Donald Trump is going down a road, and if he succeeds, he’s going to create millions of manufacturing jobs in a country that currently has 500,000 manufacturing jobs open because the people who run those factories can’t find people who want to do the work. So it’s not enough to create the jobs,” Rowe continued.

To look at the issue from another perspective, the latest reported unemployment rate was 4.2%. Who is going to take the millions of new jobs that will be created if we shut down imports and start manufacturing everything here?

Right now, if you go on a typical factory floor, you will find lots of recent immigrants. One would like to think that most of them are here legally, but employers haven’t been asking a lot of questions. If we send back those who are here illegally, what will that do to the labor shortage that, as Rowe says, is already something manufacturers are struggling with?

Another problem is that our educational system is not turning out people who have the skills for this kind of work. Rowe makes that point:

“The bigger issue still is there’s no enthusiasm for the work. We took shop class out of high school, we robbed kids of the opportunity to even see what that kind of work even looks like and then we told a whole generation of kids that they’re fricken screwed if they didn’t get a four-year degree,” Rowe told Vonn.

This is also a cultural problem. Blue collar jobs aren’t high status enough, we think, so, given the value we place on upward mobility, young people, their parents, and schools fixate on white collar jobs.

Then there is the impending “birth dearth,” the demographic population drop due to fewer people having children, which will intensify our labor shortages in all fields.

Theoretically, the increased demand for factory workers will send up wages, making those jobs more attractive and probably more socially in demand. (That means prices for the manufactured goods will also go up, but that’s a different problem.) People currently employed in white collar jobs will have to change the color of their collars, which may mean shortages in the service and professional professions, but the economy can probably endure that.

Technology can also be expected to pick up some or a good deal of the slack, making factory workers more productive, which means we don’t need as many of them. And, in fact, technology may mean that we need fewer white collar workers. Automation has taken the jobs of manual workers for centuries, but now AI is threatening white collar workers. I am skeptical of the hyped-up potential of AI, but it may be that teachers, lawyers, journalists, managers, coders, analysts, report writers, health-care professionals, and others will be looking for work. But this too will be disruptive.

The point is, switching from a service-based economy to a manufacturing-based economy and from a white collar-oriented labor market to a blue collar-oriented labor market, will mean monumental changes to this country. They may well be good changes in the long-run, but the transition will have a monumental effect, not only economic but also educational, social, and cultural. Some of these we can predict, though there will also likely be unintended consequences that we’ll have to navigate. If we are serious about going in this direction, we need to start making preparations.

We might look to Germany, which has a modern and prosperous economy while also being a manufacturing powerhouse. Part of their secret is their three-tiered educational system. Children are rigorously tested at various ages and funned into one of three kinds of secondary education: Those with the highest scores are funneled to a Gymnasium, where they are given a largely-classical education that prepares them for a university and for white collar careers. Those who don’t score as high can qualify for a Realschule, which prepares them for higher level vocational training. Those with the lowest scores are sent to a Hauptschule, which prepares them for lower-skilled trades.

This tends to go against the grain for Americans, due to our belief in equal opportunity and social mobility. We also don’t like the pressures put on a child, whose whole future depends on one test. Such a system may be in accord with the remnants of the European class system, which it perpetuates, but it tends to strike us Americans as just wrong. But it certainly “works.”

And how do all of these proposals jibe with the doctrine of vocation? I’ve been told by Germans that this teaching of Luther, even in their highly secularized society today, gives dignity to every kind of labor, so that Germans have a high respect for Realschule and Hauptschule graduates and the work that they do. Maybe that is the key to the socio-economic transition that faces the United States.

Photo: Mike Rowe by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region – Ready for a Dirty Job, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56810957

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The Stoic Revival

Last updated on: April 24, 2025 at 6:03 pm By Gene Veith

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Christians have been discussing, analyzing, and trying to account for the evident decline in affiliations with Christianity. Well, other religions are also declining, and they are worried too, though they are worried about different factors.

I randomly chanced upon a Buddhist site that frets about how many Buddhists and potential Buddhists are flocking instead to Stoicism.

Doug Bates, on his Substack Ataraxia or Bust! has written a piece entitled Interest in Buddhism Declines While Stoicism Soars. “In a zeitgeist where the concerns are about psychological well-being during a period of societal and political turbulence,” he writes, “no wonder people are turning to Stoicism and away from Buddhism.”

The Buddha, he says, had no interest in politics. Stoicism, though–the philosophy of Roman statesmen and emperors–does:

While Stoicism encourages political engagement, contemporary Stoicism has a big tent. It accommodates Stoic authors such as Trump-loathing Ryan Holiday and the Trump-supporting West Virginia legislator Pat McGeehan. . . . Other popular Stoic authors have backgrounds of full engagement with worldly concerns. There are businessmen such as Ryan Holiday, Chuck Chakrapani, and Stephen Hanselman; and entrepreneurs such as Tim Ferris and Phil Van Treuren. In contrast, Buddhist authors are often runcinants, or engaged in vocations at farther remove from worldly concerns.

People today are also interested in psychology:

The Stoics speak to the psychological concerns of our era, perhaps in a better way than Buddhism does. It’s well-known that the practices of the ancient Stoics inspired Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). One of the most popular contemporary Stoic authors, Donald Robinson, is a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist.

While much has been made of Buddhist psychological approaches, much of it has been watered down and commercialized to the point of being almost unrecognizable – aka “McMindfulness.”

Buddhism is also hard. It requires discipline, difficult meditational practices, and the commitment required by an actual religion. Stoicism is more easily grasped and requires less of a commitment.

Two of the best-selling Stoic authors, Massimo Pigliucci and William Irvine, said they considered Buddhism and chose to adopt Stoicism instead. Stoicism is turning out to be a better fit for the self-improvement and societal improvement issues of the present moment. No wonder Stoicism is having a cultural moment, and in doing so, it seems to be taking a share of mind that Buddhism once attracted.

I can see the similarities between the Buddhist religion and this ancient Hellenistic-Roman philosophy. Neither requires a belief in an actual god, as such. Their concern is to attain a particular frame of mind.

Buddhism seeks to extinguish desire. Stoicism seeks to be free of the passions.

Buddhist meditation promotes “mindfulness,” defined in Wikipedia as “sustaining meta-attentive awareness towards the contents of one’s own mind in the present moment.” That concept, in a secularized form, has been picked up by psychology and pop-psychology and has become a staple of various therapies and meditation programs in schools and businesses. Bates is scorning such things as “McMindfulness.”

Stoicism promotes Ataraxia, defined as a state of serene calmness. Bates’s Substack of that name ties into his interest in the connections between Buddhism and Greek philosophy.

Stoicism is also focused on reason, on living by reason instead of by our emotions. To its credit, though, Stoicism also promotes a life of virtue. It also did a lot with the Logos, the universal reason that underlies nature and all existence, a term the term also used by other Greek thinkers. St. John took the concept and totally transformed it to describe the Son of God (John 1: 1-18).

Do you think Stoicism will also be a serious competitor to Christianity? Bates lists a plethora of books and authors that are apparently selling well. In Tom Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full, the main characters find a sort of redemption when they turn to Stoicism.

My sense is that our culture has little interest in virtue, self-control, reason, or suppression of the passions. Instead, it values the opposite of Stoicism, treasuring immorality, self-expression, irrationalism, subjectivity, and indulgence in the passions.

Then again, casualties of one way of thinking often resort to the opposite extreme. Furthermore, Stoicism is itself an extreme, denying our full humanity in favor of a truncated rationalism.

I think of C. S. Lewis’s point about “thin” and “thick” religions. The “thin” are “philosophical, ethical, and universalizing.” Like Stoicism. The “thick” religions are full of mysteries, ecstasies, and sacred places. Like Buddhism.

Christianity has both, at the same time. It has both a wide-ranging theology and the mysteries of the Sacraments, proclaiming a universal God who was incarnate in Christ, the Logos made flesh.

Photo: Bust of Zeno of Citium [considered the founder of Stoicism] by Paolo Monti – Available in the BEIC digital library and uploaded in partnership with BEIC Foundation.The image comes from the Fondo Paolo Monti, owned by BEIC and located in the Civico Archivio Fotografico of Milan., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48067347

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