Education, Culture, and Human Flourishing
Recovering Christian Humanism for a Post-Christian Culture
These are my notes from a talk I gave at the Southeastern Consortium of Classical Educators in Wake Forest, NC.
During Easter last year (2024), Richard Dawkins joined Rachel Johnson of the LBC to reflect on the role of Christianity in British life. In this interview, Johnson asked Dawkins what he thought of the statistics that showed a dramatic decline in the number of people in Britain who professed Christianity and attended church. The following was Dawkins reply:
I must say I was slightly horrified to hear that Ramadan is being promoted instead. I do think that we are culturally a Christian country. I call myself a cultural Christian. I'm not a Believer, but there's a distinction between being a believing Christian and being a cultural Christian; and so you know I love hymns and Christmas carols and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense. It's true that statistically the number of people who actually believe in Christianity is going down and I'm happy with that; but I would not be happy if, for example, we lost all our Cathedrals and our beautiful Parish churches. I count myself a cultural Christian. I think it would matter, certainly, if we substituted any alternative religion; that would be truly Dreadful…if I had to choose between Christianity and Islam I choose Christianity every single time. I mean it seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion in a way that I think Islam is not.
Richard Dawkins’ self-identification as a “cultural Christian” illustrates the deep incoherence at the heart of secular humanism. While he celebrates the architectural grandeur of the cathedrals, the moral sensibility of the Christian ethos, and the aesthetic comfort of the traditional Christian hymns and carols, he simultaneously disavows the theological soil from which these cultural expressions have sprang up.
Dawkins wants the fruit of Christian civilization without the faith that nourished that fruit. In short, he wants the bloom without its root.
This is a form of cut-flower humanism—the attempt to preserve beauty, order, and meaning that makes life in the West desirable while discarding the transcendent source that made them possible. Just as a severed flower withers when it’s detached from its root, so too does culture decay when it is stripped of the religious vision that gave it coherence and vitality.
Secular humanism, as articulated, for example, in all three iterations of the Humanist Manifesto (I, II, and III), presents itself as a comprehensive, progressive philosophy that explicitly rejects Christianity and all other forms of religion or supernaturalism.
It asserts that the universe is self-existing and not created. It denies the need for a Creator or divine revelation. Traditional theism—particularly belief in a personal God, the immortality of the soul, and divine judgment—is dismissed as unprovable, outdated, and ultimately harmful to human flourishing. Instead of beginning with a Creator, secular humanism begins with autonomous humanity.
It asserts that moral responsibility, meaning, and progress are grounded solely in human reason, scientific inquiry, and self-determination. In other words, man is not the middle of all things as the Renaissance humanists would affirm; rather, in a way Protagoras certainly never meant, secular humanists believe that man is indeed the measure of all things.
In short, Secular humanism, by insisting on moral and aesthetic goods apart from divine reality, demands an inheritance that it refuses to steward. Dawkins’ selective reverence for Christianity’s cultural remnants exposes this contradiction: he desires the lingering fragrance of a worldview his own philosophy seeks to uproot.
In today’s talk, I want to submit that, in the twilight of Christendom, the postmodern critique of secularism—even though this movement itself is born of some of the most radical skeptics—has ironically reopened a path to recovering Christian humanism in our day.
Postmodern thought, by acknowledging the interpretive nature of “knowing,” has exposed secularism’s conceit: the erroneous belief that pure reason is neutral, universal, and self-sufficient. Further, Postmodernism has positioned the conversation such that Christianity deserves to receive a full consideration of its purchase on human flourishing.
In fact, the very crisis Western culture faces today—crises of meaning, identity, and institutional coherence—is a direct result of the loss of our religious foundations.
Just this week, the president of Pepperdine University, Jim Gash, highlighted this very point in an op-ed in US News and World Report. He uses the metaphor of the tetherball to demonstrate how belief in God actually affords more academic freedom to pursue what is good, true, and beautiful. Gash posits that,
Because the ball is tethered to a pole, you can hit it back and forth with complete freedom and intensity, knowing that it will always orbit back around to the pole. In a similar way, when our approach to academic freedom is tethered to our belief in God as the source of truth, we can explore ideas and grapple with even the most difficult topics.
My case is that Christian humanism offers the most compelling vision for restoring human dignity, reanimating education, renewing cultural coherence, and fostering true human flourishing. By recovering a Christian humanism for our age, we can exchange the barren ground of anthropocentric idealism (T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land and Hollow Men) for the rich soil of incarnational humanism.
I want to make my case in five points of focus:
The Crisis of Secularism and the Postmodern Reveal
Christian Humanism in the Public Square and the Halls of Academia
Toward a Definition of Christian Humanism
Christian Humanism in the History of the West
Features of Christian Humanism
The Crisis of Secularism and the Postmodern Reveal
Western culture’s current and profound crisis of identity and purpose is not new; it’s been trending for at least the past 100 years.
Arguably, we witnessed our crisis reach an apex in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, and in the US, particularly, with the most recent election. As an aside, it’s interesting to note these sorts of crises seem to always flush themselves out in the political arena, that final outlet in the drain of cultural sewage. My point being, that beneath the vitriolic political arena, we have all felt the seismic cultural tremors over the last five years and in some particular ways things have come to a head. I doubt that this is The Apex, but it’s a notable pinnacle in the mountain range of modern Western culture—which means we have an opportunity to consider Christian humanism anew.
I want to repeat, this isn’t the beginning of our current cultural crises. And we could fill libraries with books arguing for numerous historical instances where the consequences of ideas have been felt, and call those the beginning. Was it the fall of Rome, Aquinas’s baptism of Aristotle, Occam’s nominalism, the secularism of the Renaissance, the solipsism of Descartes, the skepticism of Kant and Hume, or the transvaluation of Nietzsche? All of these ideas have played significant roles in the great conversation of the West. But I’m not convinced any of these were the sole creator of our postmodern cultural crisis.
Stanford Professor Mark Greif has noted that between the years 1933-1973, the West reached a similar cultural crisis over the nature of man. Between those years, more books—fiction and non-fiction—were published that asked some version of the perennial question, “What is Man?” than were published on any other single topic.
Rightly so, given that Britain’s National Peace Council published a journal in the spring of 1914 that announced that the West was so technologically and socially advanced that war was now anachronistic and virtually impossible. This example is a case in point illustrating the fanatical optimistic spirit of the autonomous modern man.
Because, as we all know in hind sight, by the end of the summer of that year, the West launched its most advanced genocidal attack on humanity ever to be experienced in human history. It unleashed two World Wars that were responsible for an estimated 100 million souls who lost their lives at the end of a gun barrel or in a gas chamber. The 20th century bore witness to a cataclysmic failure of both Enlightenment optimism and technological progressivism that resulted in the postmodern response.
Among those of the period who addressed this crisis of man was C. S. Lewis whose lectures on the subject became his beloved book, The Abolition of Man. In another lecture Lewis gave at the reception of his chair at Cambridge, a lecture titled, “De Descriptione Temporum,” Lewis argued that the most profound shift in the Western world took place, not at the fall of Rome, or even the Renaissance, but sometime between Walter Scott and Jane Austin.
This threshold marks the period in history in which modern man is decidedly less like his Pre-Christian and Christian ancestors than either of them are unlike each other. Said another way, Lewis argues the Pagan and the Christian were more like each other than either of them are like modern, post-Christian man. Something radical happened. The modern man is deluded, argues Lewis, like a woman who tries to regain her virginity by seeking a divorce. Just like her, modern man is now doubly cut off from his maiden state. He has no natural conception of, and no taste for, transcendence.
Jens Zimmerman says modern man has "lost the ability to answer the fundamental questions of who we are and what we are here for," due to our "unmooring from religious sources of human dignity." We are witnessing the exhaustion of secular reason.
For example:
Modern scientific inquiry, though powerful in its own domain, offers little help in addressing the existential questions.
The secular university—described by Jean Baudrillard as a “spiraling cadaver”—“is in ruins; nonfunctional in the social arenas of the market and employment, lacking cultural substance or an end purpose of knowledge.”
Liberal democracy, stripped of its moral underpinnings, is faltering under the weight of technocratic reductionism.
Ironically, it’s the non-Christian, postmodern philosophers—especially Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Heidegger—that have helped to dismantle the myth of Enlightenment objectivity.
These thinkers have exposed that reason is never neutral or universal but always conditioned by tradition, perspective, and power. Nietzsche ridiculed the veneration of abstract reason; Marx unveiled its ideological function; Freud uncovered the unconscious forces beneath our self-perception; Heidegger redefined truth as hermeneutical (i.e., interpretive) and not objective.
Michael Polanyi built on this insight and demonstrated that even science depends on imagination, tradition, and belief in a rational cosmos. Emmanuel Levinas expands on these insights and contends that ethics actually arise before cognition as a primordial rupture of responsibility given by the Other. In other words, alterity is itself a pre-cognitive moral call.
Jean-François Lyotard’s rejection of meta-narratives and Michel Foucault’s analysis of power further revealed that secularism is not a neutral arena; it’s a civil religion with its own dogmas and exclusions.
The atheist philosopher, Thomas Nagel, has demonstrated convincingly that the materialist conception of nature is almost certainly false and cannot be maintained in light of current scholarship.
As all these critiques converged, the Enlightenment dream of autonomous man collapsed. Postmodernism has rendered secularism implausible. It has shown that the concept of pure reason secularism exalted is historically contingent, interpretive, and unable to ground meaning, morality, or community.
Recovering Christian Humanism in the Public Square and the Halls of Academia
This implosion of secularism has created a vacuum—and it’s into that vacuum, Christian humanism can speak with renewed vigor. It offers something more than nostalgia or fundamentalism; it proposes a reanimated vision for human flourishing.
As Zimmerman argues, Christianity is not the enemy of secularity rightly understood; it’s the foundation of it. Christian Humanism affirms the shared public space of the saeculum, the dignity of all persons, and the call to love neighbor and cultivate creation. Thus, I propose four reasons the humanism of Christianity needs to be given the public consideration it deserves:
Because it retrieves a fuller, hermeneutic understanding of truth rooted in tradition and transcendence.
Because it retrieves a liberal arts and humanities education animated by the Incarnation, one that forms and transforms the soul and doesn’t simply train consumers and cogs for the workforce.
Because it retrieves a political vision grounded in natural law, secularity, and the common good of all human beings.
Because it retrieves a renewed moral imagination capable of resisting technocratic and other ideological reductionisms.
Christian humanism invites us to think with the whole soul, to recover what T. S. Eliot called “our heritage of Christian culture” and to labor—through education, culture, and worship—for a society that reflects beauty, order, and dignity.
What Eliot says of Europe is true of America and the West in general: “It is against a backdrop of Christianity that all our thought has significance. Even if a European individual does not adhere to Christianity, what he says, and makes, and does will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning.”
In an age fragmented by rootlessness, Christian humanism reestablishes roots in a reality that is realized and that dignifies the human being.
Toward a Definition of Christian Humanism
Defining the term Christian Humanism can be fairly elusive for a number of reasons, mainly because humanism has taken on numerous definitions throughout history, but also because the most common belief today by both Christians and secularists, is that Christianity and humanism are mutually exclusive.
Further, there has been some strange fire offered on the altar of Christian Humanism’s meaning. For instance, various theological liberals like Anthony Freeman and Shelby Spong have sought to claim the expression for their own personal interpretative framework, one which is arguably neither Christian nor humanist.
The expression, Christian Humanism, was first coined by the 19th-century German philosopher, Friedrich Niethammer (1766–1848), in an 1808 work in which he referred to the Renaissance humanists as Christian Humanists. His work sought to distinguish between two competing educational paradigms:
Philanthropinism emphasized utilitarian and practical education based on Enlightenment rationalism.
Humanism, in his usage, referred to the classical tradition of holistic, formative education rooted in the liberal arts.
Niethammer advocated for a Christian humanism that harmonized the classical educational ideals of moral and intellectual formation with Christian theological convictions. His formulation laid the groundwork for later thinkers like John Henry Newman, Jacques Maritain, and Etienne Gilson to articulate fuller visions of Christian humanism in response to modernity’s crises.
It is here that I want to pause to acknowledge that the need for qualifications on this point abound, and we don’t have time to unpack them all. Thus, my definitions and explanations may raise more questions than they answer. I intend to flesh these out in subsequent work.
The Christian Humanism for which I am advocating can be understood most simply as a synthesis of non-sectarian Christian theology and classical humanism.
While the expression as it was coined originally, pointed to the Renaissance humanists, Jens Zimmerman and numerous other scholars like Virgil Nemoianu, Willam Franklin, Joseph Shaw, and Richard Francis, and even more contemporary scholars like Lee Oser, Brad Birzer, and Alan Jacobs, posit that while perhaps not in name, most certainly in substance, Christian Humanism not only predates secular, atheistic humanism, but has existed since Christianity itself.
And before the Incarnation, it even existed in inchoate forms.
Inchoate humanism sprang from two fountains, Greek Idealism and Christianity, and merged in the ancient world. Although they were fundamentally different in dogma, they “coexisted in relative harmony because both understood human beings as having a preeminent place in the universe distinct from and above the nonhuman natural world.”
In the first century, “Christianity absorbed and synthesized…the religious outlook of the Hebrew people…and the philosophical outlook of classical antiquity,” whose Idealism “set a high value on human reason.” Essentially, Christianity animated Greek Idealism when God took on human form (i.e., the Incarnation) which became “good news for all humanity.”
William. Franklin and Joseph M. Shaw, in their work, The Case for Christian Humanism, asserts that “At the heart of Christian humanism stands the Incarnation of the divine Word in the living, historical actuality of Jesus. The clear gospel basis for this statement is John 1:14: ‘And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory.’”
Christian Humanism acknowledges that even though not all human beings are Christians, all Christians are first human beings; and, all human beings are created imago Dei, possess common grace, and are therefore creatures of immense worth, dignity, reason, and responsibility.
In this sense, Christian humanism is not man-centered but incarnationally centered. That is, the Incarnation affirms the dignity of humanity and God’s lovingkindness toward mankind. And, while man is not the measure of all things, he is in the middle of all things—higher than the beasts and a little lower than the angels.
Additionally, Christian humanism acknowledges that Christ is the ideal human. He is the ultimate tyrannizing image, to put it in David Hicks words. In Christ, we recover the fullness of our humanity. Therefore, Christian Humanism seeks to recover and restore a vision of human flourishing under the lordship of Christ, integrating faith, reason, and the moral imagination.
Finally, rooted in the tradition of thinkers like St. Augustine, Boethius, Dante, Erasmus, and C. S. Lewis—thinkers who saw that truth, goodness, and beauty cohere in Christ and are accessible through a disciplined and grace-informed intellect—Christian Humanism is not sectarian, nor does it hold a vision of Christian Dominionism that is spiritually or politically coercive; it is a gracious and irenic tradition that seeks the peace and welfare of the city of man with an eye toward the common good of all.
As such, Christian humanism cherishes education, culture, civic life, and moral formation as arenas of redemptive participation. It further holds that rational inquiry, artistic expression, and civic virtue are not merely human endeavors; they’re divine callings. To paraphrase Jacques Maritain, “Christian humanism is the complete humanism.”
Christian Humanism in the History of the West
As I have previously explained, Christian humanism has deep roots in the Western tradition. The patristic theologians, like Justin Martyr and St. Augustine, integrated classical learning with Christian doctrine. Clement of Alexandria and Origen, and later even Basil, viewed Greek philosophy as a preparation for the Gospel. In the medieval period, Thomas Aquinas harmonized Aristotelian thought with Christian theology, asserting that grace perfects nature.
During the Renaissance, Christian humanism blossomed in the works of Erasmus, More, Vergerio, Bruni, and even those some might consider to be on the secular fringe, like Pico della Mirandola. They championed the humanities and liberal learning as essential to moral and spiritual formation, believing that education was a means of cultivating wisdom and virtue in society’s civic leaders.
The Protestant Reformers, especially Martin Luther and John Calvin, reaffirmed the sanctity of all vocations and emphasized the dignity of the layperson in the saeculum.
In the modern period, thinkers like Maritain, C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and Russell Kirk preserved and defended the Christian humanist vision against the encroachments of scientism, relativism, and nihilism. Adding to their work, we might include the efforts of modern institutions such as the Imaginative Conservative and First Things, etc. These stand as a bulwark against the erosion of humane learning.
Features of Christian Humanism
I’ve written about this more extensively, but for our purposes today, I’d like to summarize the features as follows:
The Incarnational Principle: The union of the divine and the human in Christ affirms the goodness of the created order and the legitimacy of human culture.
Imago Dei: Every human being bears the image of God and therefore possesses inherent dignity and worth, rational capacity, and moral responsibility.
Integration of Faith and Reason: Christian humanism rejects both fideism and pure rationalism, embracing a reason informed by faith and a faith seeking understanding. Thus it absolutely rejects fundamentalism, whether religious or secular.
Moral Order: It asserts an objective moral law grounded in divine justice and love. Natural law rooted in and derived from eternal law.
Cultural Stewardship: Christian humanists are called to cultivate the world—to pursue the arts, sciences, politics, and education as inherently legitimate vocations under God.
Language and Letters. Since language is an essential component of the divine order, a conceptual bridge for conveying divine truth and human thought, letters, conceived in the broadest sense (i.e., literature or texts), are the essential building blocks of every civilized culture and society (Ad fontes!).
Optimistic Eschatology: While acknowledging the fallenness of the world, Christian humanism is animated by hope in the renewal of all things through Christ. Christian humanists are not fatalists.
Conclusion
Richard Dawkins wants the cathedrals without the creeds.
He wants the resonance of the hymns without the Incarnation.
But the future of Western culture cannot be secured by aesthetic sentimentality and it can’t be recovered by a civilizational inertia which outran its original Christian vitality.
It must be rooted anew in the transcendent—in the true, the good, and the beautiful as revealed in the Incarnation of Christ.
The recovery of Christian humanism is not an attempt to retreat into the past. It’s not even the noble work of Christian evangelization, per se.
It is the replanting of perennial wisdom in post-Christian soil. It is an invitation to consider the Logos beneath the liturgy, the Word behind the wisdom, the incarnate Truth that dignifies all learning and all labor.
It’s an invitation to cultivate a world where education forms the whole person, where the cultural conversation fosters meaning and reverence for the permanent things, and where flourishing is measured not by self-assertion but by love of God and neighbor.
The future of human flourishing doesn’t depend on our technological progress or ingenuity; it depends on our willingness to be rooted once more in the transcendent source of our humanity.
My hope is you will join me in becoming the planters and gardeners of such a future.