a way of having a vision of positive freedom without a theological anthropology, or do we need to reclaim the theological anthropology of our forefathers?<\/strong><\/p>\nI don\u2019t think there is. But of course that is not the business of the government. In other words, you have three primary nurturing institutions necessary for republican freedom. The family, the school, and the faith community. If those three fail to produce what you\u2019ve righty called a positive view of freedom \u2014 and each of those three is outside the realm of government \u2014 then the whole experiment is in deep trouble. That\u2019s exactly what\u2019s wrong today. Take a crucial one \u2014 not freedom but human dignity. Ever since the Renaissance, there has been a humanism that was post-Christian but claimed to have just as high a view of human dignity as Christians had. But now you have the so-called anti-humanists who have come along to say, wait a minute, you\u2019re borrowing Christian views of human dignity, but if there\u2019s no Christianity you have no right to that. So you can see today that a science-based naturalism is giving us lower and lower and lower views of human dignity. So there\u2019s a good example. Only the Jewish and Christian anthropology, view of human dignity, is keeping alive certain things like human rights.<\/p>\n
So yes, you\u2019re absolutely right. But my point is that it\u2019s not the business of government. The government\u00a0requires\u00a0<\/em>that, but it has no right to promulgate it in any way. The thing that the government should look after is civic education, and I have a key argument on that in the book.<\/p>\nYou can even see within the Christian church itself a real crisis of ethics. You can see in the public schools the crisis of civic education. No one is taught what it means to be American. You take the American motto \u2014 which is also its greatest achievement, e\u00a0pluribus unum \u2014\u00a0<\/em>but the\u00a0unum<\/em>\u00a0has collapsed. As you move across from Christian to educational to banking to leadership circles, there is a profound crisis on all sorts of levels. It\u2019s not just the consensus that\u2019s collapsed.<\/p>\nIn a free society, everyone is born free, but not everyone is equal to freedom. They have to be \u201ceducated for liberty\u201d \u2013 what used to be called liberal education. But since the 1960s, civic education in America has virtually collapsed. The government\u00a0does\u00a0<\/em>have a responsibility there because of its leadership in the public schools. And if there is no civic education then there will be no American\u00a0unum<\/em>, and then the country will be profoundly in trouble.<\/p>\nWhy has civic education collapsed in the United States? It strikes me that there\u2019s almost an allergic reaction to being too pro-American.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nConsider the role the public schools played. They weren\u2019t just free universal education. They were free universal schooling that taught the common core unities that all Americans should believe. That was the\u00a0unum<\/em>. Now if you go around to different parts of the country \u2013 colleges or churches or civic institutions \u2014 and say, \u201cWrite down for me the first ten things that are a part of that\u00a0unum<\/em>,\u201d hardly anyone can get beyond one or two or three. It\u2019s pathetic. Civic education has collapsed partly because of neglect and partly because many of the educational elites are against the notion of Americanism, which they consider coercive.<\/p>\n*<\/p>\n
See the first post in this series for more information on Dr Guinness, and please check out his book,\u00a0A Free People\u2019s Suicide<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Os Guinness is one of the premier orators and cultural critics in the western world today, and his latest book,\u00a0A Free People\u2019s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future, speaks to the demise of the proper American concept of liberty. Guinness, in the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville, is a foreign-born admirer of the audacity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":2352,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[561,825],"tags":[930,1371,185,908,907],"class_list":["post-2231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","category-interviews","tag-civic-education","tag-education","tag-faith-and-politics","tag-liberty","tag-os-guinness"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>You\u2019ve said that the Founders envisioned more of a positive freedom, a freedom for<\/em>, a freedom to be good and virtuous, instead of a freedom from<\/em>, which is a freedom from the constraints of law and morality. In order for us to pursue a positive freedom\u00a0for<\/em>, however, it seems that we need a consensus view on who we really are. We need a theological anthropology, a rich and robust vision of what it means to be a flourishing human being in relation to others and in relation to God. In this postmodern milieu, where no ultimate answers are allowed, is there\u00a0<\/strong>a way of having a vision of positive freedom without a theological anthropology, or do we need to reclaim the theological anthropology of our forefathers?<\/strong><\/p>\n