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<\/a><\/p>\nFirst academia threw out religion.\u00a0 But then religion was replaced with \u201cWestern Civilization\u201d as the source of values, inspiration, and all that is good.\u00a0 Now academia has thrown out \u201cWestern Civilization\u201d on the grounds that the great books and great ideas that had become the focus of the liberal arts curriculum are too male, too white, and too European.<\/p>\n
That is the thesis, in a nutshell, of Stanley Kurtz in his National Review<\/em> article\u00a0Two Secularizations and the Fate of Conservatism.<\/a><\/p>\n It has recently been argued that the sharp decline in the popularity of the humanities on campus is the result of a \u201csecond secularization,\u201d a collapse of our regard for high culture that parallels and reflects the broader decline of religious faith. . . .<\/p>\n The \u201cultimate things\u201d in dispute in the second secularization are the goodness, continuity, and even the very reality of Western Civilization, and of America\u2019s place within it. From the left side, the second secularization began with works like Stanley Fish\u2019s 1980,\u00a0Is There a Text in This Class?<\/em>\u00a0There Fish challenged our faith in the very existence of objectivity, reality, and truth. In the wake of declining belief in God, faith in almost any anchor outside ourselves had dimmed.<\/p>\n We can think of politics today as the effect of continuing conservative pushback against both the first and second secularizations. Just as it has taken more than three decades for campus humanities departments to commit enrollment suicide by destroying faith in Western Civilization, the Great Books, objectivity, and reality itself, so it has taken several decades for the specifically political consequences of the second secularization to emerge.<\/p>\n What began as a fascinating cultural sideshow has become our politics. The dispute between campus multiculturalism and traditional American conceptions of citizenship launched at Stanford in 1987 is now the everyday stuff of our debates. Controversies over race, gender, and ethnicity are ubiquitous. The ideal of global citizenship contends with faith in America and the West. Even the core Western commitment to freedom of speech is challenged now by intersectional orthodoxy. All of this was in play at Stanford in the late 1980s. It has taken three decades, but today who we vote for has everything to do with how we see these disputes.<\/p>\n Properly, Christianity and Western Civilization can complement each other.\u00a0 Christianity, which has always existed in multiple cultures, was never just a matter of \u201cWestern Civilization,\u201d though European culture was profoundly shaped by the Christian faith.\u00a0 European culture has much that is worth studying, preserving, and passing down, including what is not explicitly religious.\u00a0 The classical liberal arts (the mastery of language, in the trivium<\/em> of grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and the mastery of mathematics, in the quadrivium<\/em> of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) are not particularly culture-bound at all.\u00a0 Indeed, some practitioners of the Western Civilization curriculum were either Christians or, as in the case of Mortimer Adler, converted to Christianity.<\/p>\n The Reformers, who did so much to revive both classical education and theological education, show how it is possible to study both the secular and the sacred realms, without confusing the two, as each has its distinct place in God\u2019s temporal and His eternal kingdoms.<\/p>\n But Kurtz is certainly correct that both faith and \u201ccivilization\u201d as cornerstones of education have the same enemies and have been torn down for the same reason.\u00a0 He discusses William F. Buckley\u2019s God and Man at Yale<\/a>\u00a0(1951), in which the recent graduate who would become one of the most important conservative figures of his day criticizes the anti-religion bias of Yale and higher education in general.\u00a0 Kurtz says that this book proved to be the catalyst for the modern conservative movement.\u00a0 He then quotes\u00a0\u201cthe most controversial passage\u201d in the book:<\/p>\n I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Buckley was thinking about Communism, which is militantly atheistic and which also opposes liberal democracy,\u00a0including its values of individualism, freedom, inalienable rights, etc.<\/p>\n Not just Marxists but the post-Marxists of our own day also oppose those values, as well as the civilization that gave rise to them and that has been built upon them.\u00a0 And they are the ones who have overthrown \u201cWestern civilization\u201d courses on college campuses.<\/p>\n We could call that a \u201csecond secularization,\u201d as Kurtz does.\u00a0 Or we could see this new emphasis on sex, gender, race, and privilege as a third religion, replacing humanism on college campuses, just as humanism replaced Christianity.\u00a0 Kurtz himself uses a whimsical version of yet another religious term to describe the phenomenon:\u00a0 \u201cthe Great Awokening.\u201d<\/p>\n