Thus Cicero’s decades-long struggle to preserve Rome’s republic — with its “mixed” or “balanced” constitution — came to an end. The advocates of oppression and terror had triumphed. For all practical purposes, when Cicero fell the republic fell with him. “Cicero came to stand for future generations as a model of defiance against tyranny,” writes Anthony Everitt in Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician. “For the Christian Fathers he was a model of the good pagan.”

Of course, the decay of Rome’s political institutions — what Cicero called “the enemy within” — had been raging for many years. When he wrote his seminal works, The Republic and The Laws, the age of the Caesars was already upon him. What strikes the modern reader is how Cicero’s analysis of Rome’s decline — the betrayal of its republican constitution, the rampant corruption, the partisan divisions — offers the West some profoundly disturbing lessons.

Rome initially managed to absorb and tolerate a great diversity of cultures, and gradually expanded its offer of citizenship to conquered peoples. But by the time Cicero drafted The Republic (54-52 BC), Rome’s political institutions were ineffective. Worldly senators blocked economic reforms being demanded by an urban proletariat alienated from the political system. There were deep economic disparities, worsened by a tax system that crippled private initiative. There were massive public works programmes, with no sensible scheme to finance them. Mob violence was on the rise. An over-extended military, dominated by ambitious generals, struggled to maintain discipline. In the city of Rome — a cosmopolitan centre of roughly a million people — everybody complained about the traffic.

Historians observe that Cicero failed to take account of Rome’s structural failings, focusing instead on its cultural problems. Rome’s institutional weaknesses were real enough: it was not a city-state, as Cicero sometimes imagined it, but rather a vast and multicultural empire built upon slave labour. In his fierce attachment to Rome’s constitution, Cicero neglected its shortcomings.

Nevertheless, the political maelstroms of his day did not occur in a moral vacuum, and no ancient pagan author wrote with greater clarity about the link between cultural rot and political decline: “For it is not by some accident — no, it is because of our own moral failings — that we are left with the name of the Republic, having long since lost its substance.”

Let’s start with Cicero’s understanding of natural law, which seems to be the touchstone for his discussion of politics and ethics. Cicero believed that a rational Providence oversaw the universe — a universe embedded in divine law, or a set of moral and religious truths that govern the human condition. This was the basis for all sound civil law. “The nature of law must be sought in the nature of man,” he wrote in The Laws. “Man is a single species which has a share in divine reason and is bound together by a partnership in justice.”

A political commitment to justice, according to Cicero, was only possible because of the universal and immutable character of natural law. It alone provided “the bond which holds together a community of citizens”:

We cannot be exempted from this law by any decree of the Senate or the people; nor do we need anyone else to expound or explain it. There will not be one such law in Rome and another in Athens, one now and another in the future, but all peoples at all times will be embraced by a single and eternal and unchangeable law; and there will be, as it were, one lord and master of us all — the god who is the author, proposer and interpreter of that law. Whoever refuses to obey it will be turning his back on himself. Because he has denied his nature as a human being he will face the gravest penalties for this alone.

It’s worth remembering that the Anglo-American political tradition — from John Locke to James Madison — owes a profound debt to the natural law philosophy that can be traced to Cicero. Without a belief in “the Moral Law”, there would have been no argument for the “inalienable rights” of every human being. Without natural law, there was no foundation for a political community based on equal justice. Whoever refuses to obey it will be turning his back on himself.

Today, of course, the natural law tradition has been discarded by Western liberal elites. And what have been the results? Cicero might have predicted them, based on what he had to say about the moral trajectory of Rome. There were staggering social injustices, and little regard for the common good; factions were the order of the day. “Nothing can be sweeter than liberty,” he wrote. “Yet if it isn’t equal throughout, it isn’t liberty at all.”

Is there any more conspicuous feature of contemporary democracies — especially the United States — than the denigration of the idea of the common good? The breakdown in a “partnership in justice” is nearly complete.

For Cicero, the great symptom of decline was Rome’s ongoing crisis in political leadership. By rejecting natural law — and its ability to both restrain vice and inspire virtue — Rome’s leaders behaved as though their “private lives” bore no relationship to the public good. The wrong kinds of men were entering politics for all the wrong reasons. Thanks to a “vulgar misconception,” Cicero wrote, “a few with money, not worth, have gained control of the state.” Welcome to American political culture on the eve of a presidential election.

A massive societal shift was taking place, Cicero wrote, and it was laying waste to the foundations of the republic: through greed, ambition, and malice Rome’s leaders were squandering their republican inheritance. Nothing was more appalling to Cicero than the desperate deficit of enlightened and principled leadership. “Long before living memory our ancestral way of life produced outstanding men, and those excellent men preserved the old way of life and the institutions of their forefathers,” he observed. “Our generation, however, after inheriting our political organisation like a magnificent picture now fading with age, not only neglected to restore its original colours but did not even bother to ensure that it retained its basic form and, as it were, its faintest outlines.”

No wonder Cicero has been such a popular author among the champions of constitutional government. Renowned for his oratory, he rose through the ranks of Rome’s political order, serving as consul in 63 BC. As Anthony Everitt observes, Cicero’s rhetorical style can be detected in the speeches of Thomas Jefferson, William Pitt the Younger, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. The American Founders searched his writings for insights about how political communities either thrive or perish.

Unbridled, selfish ambition was among the greatest fears of the framers of the constitution. Republican government, they believed, offered the best hope of checking ambition and preserving both freedom and order — provided its citizens possessed the virtues necessary for self-government.

“In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself,” wrote James Madison in The Federalist Papers. “A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on their government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

The precautions against an oppressive state have largely atrophied. Why? In part because of the political abandonment of universal moral laws: their rejection has set loose the corrosive forces of factionalism. An ethos of relativism and materialism promises to eviscerate civic and political life, inviting greater state intervention.

Such was the Rome of Cicero’s day: a republic in name only, riven by divisions, corruption and remorseless violence. Yet until the moment that assassins took his life, he resisted dictatorships, for they represented a political community with a degraded conscience. For Cicero, Rome was in the dock. “Of this great tragedy we are not only bound to give a description,” he wrote, “we must somehow defend ourselves as if we were arraigned on a capital charge.”

Today, it seems, another great republic is on trial for its life. George Washington, known as America’s “indispensable man”, once warned of the global consequences should its experiment in self-government end in failure: “What a triumph for the advocates of despotism, to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal and fallacious.”  
 

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The danger, at least for the moment, has been averted. An upstart left-wing pro-Kurdish party, winning parliamentary representation for the first time,  thwarted the ambitions of the AKP by helping to deprive it of a majority in the national assembly. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu must either form a coalition government, try to govern without a majority, or submit to another general election.

While many commentators are stressing the political missteps of the AKP, it is important to reflect on the party’s met-eoric rise to power and the deep cleavages in Turkish society that made it possible. Hailed as a moderating force on political Islam, Turkey’s democratic experiment is by no means settled. In barely a decade, an openly Islamist party has challenged and transformed the nation’s secular political scheme — a fact left unchanged by the election results. Turkey could descend into religious militancy or civil strife, further weakening the cause of human rights and democratic ideals throughout the Muslim world.

Erdogan, a former mayor of Istanbul, established the “conservative democratic” party, the AKP, with the help of some friends in 2001. The next year, the party won a stunning two-thirds of the 550 seats in parliament, catapulting Erdogan into the role of prime minister. The AKP went on to win three consecutive parliamentary elections, by larger margins each time. In 2014, after two terms as prime minister, Erdogan was elected president with just over 51 per cent of the vote. The June election awarded the AKP 258 seats in the assembly, nearly double the Republican Peoples’ Party (CHP), the main opposition party and historic defender of Turkey’s secular system.

Media attention has focused on the surprise showing of the progressive Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) and its charismatic young leader, Selahattin Demirtas. Founded in 2012, the HDP has positioned itself as a champion of minority rights, chiefly that of the Kurds, but also of leftists, feminists and gays. Although the Kurdish minority makes up some 20 per cent of the population, it has lacked a political voice: the HDP could not previously overcome the 10 per cent threshold in national elections to place members in parliament. But this time the party won enough popular support — nearly 13 per cent — to gain 80 seats, making it a critical player in Turkish politics overnight.

Yet the AKP remains the most widely supported party in Turkey. The reason is that the secular paradigm of governance imposed upon modern Turkey by its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, has proven to be problematic for an overwhelmingly Muslim population. “Turkey’s twentieth-century experience with Kemalism — a Europe-oriented top-down Westernisation model — has largely come to an end,” writes Soner Cagaptay in The Rise of Turkey: The Twenty-First Century’s First Muslim Power (£16.71, Potomac Books). “Hard as it might be, secularist Turks need to understand and accept this fact.”

If so, much of the blame goes to the French model of secularism, or laicité, which Ataturk wrote into the Turkish constitution. Under his regime Islam was virtually purged from public life. “It’s based on the French Revolution, the thinking that religion represents backwardness and needs to be controlled and oppressed,” said Alpay. “It is an authoritarian kind of secularism.” In essence, Kemalism insisted that Turkey’s Muslim and Western identities were incompatible.

Enter Erdogan and the AKP, which swept to power offering a new vision, one that embraced Turkey’s Muslim identity. At first, the party promoted Islamic values while reaching out to Europe and courting membership of the European Union. Erdogan’s early political moves, aimed at reforming the authoritarian character of the Turkish state, were carried out in the name of “democratic” reform, not under the banner of Islam. With stable political leadership for more than a decade, Turkey has boasted historic economic growth, attracting record levels of foreign investment.

All of this led many Western leaders and observers to conclude that Turkey was on the path towards a liberal Islamic democracy, one that could influence the Arab Spring and reconcile the Muslim world to the West. President Barack Obama has praised Erdogan as one of five world leaders with whom he has the closest relationship. “For all his Islamist sympathies, Mr Erdogan is at root a pragmatist,” concluded the New York Times in 2011. “After working within Turkey’s democratic framework rather than outside it, he is recognised as perhaps the Middle East’s most influential figure.”

Few people still cling to such dreamy delusions. Ilter Turan, a political science professor at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, was blunt. “It is totally unrealistic to think that Erdogan could moderate the Arab Spring,” he told me as we sipped tea in his wine shop. He went on to warn that Turkey will not advance toward a fully liberal democracy with Erdogan in charge. “It is impossible as long as the president continues to wield enormous influence on the party.”

Even the editors at the New York Times have done an about-turn: they now compare Erdogan’s autocratic style to that of Vladimir Putin and complain about Turkey’s “battered democracy” under his rule.

Democracy has indeed taken a beating in recent years. In 2013 the government violently quashed demonstrations in Istanbul’s Gezi Park, where thousands had gathered peacefully to protest against the park’s demolition. Among the list of grievances against Erdogan and the AKP: a sustained crackdown on media critical of the government; prosecutions for “insulting” public officials; the sacking of hundreds of police and judges; and a new security policy that expands the use of police power and creates stiffer penalties for protesters. Even party officials such as Dengir Mir Mehmet Firat, one of the founders of the AKP, recently complained that Erdogan was “seeking to become a dictator.”

This fear became widespread among Erdogan’s critics when he announced his plan to transform Turkey’s parliamentary system into a presidential system, thus expanding and legitimising his presidential powers. That would have required the AKP to ram through parliament a constitutional amendment, which Erdogan fully intended to do had his party won the required 330-seat majority. “The election results mean that liberal democracy has taken root in Turkey,” Alpay, a columnist at Today’s Zaman, told me, “and that the people will not accept arbitrary and authoritarian rule.”

That may be so, but Erdogan and the AKP have altered the political culture in Turkey in ways that will not be easy to undo. Consider the new education agenda. The government has begun to convert secular state schools into imam-hatips, religious schools that dedicate up to 30 per cent of class time to Sunni Islamic study. Erdogan, who attended an imam-hatip school as a child, told an assembly of AKP youth: “We want to raise pious generations.”

Piety or not, the government has vastly expanded the number of imam-hatip schools. In 2002, when the AKP took power, there were about 65,000 students in the religious schools. Today there are nearly a million. In addition, the state has made religion classes — promoting Sunni Islam — mandatory throughout state schools, involving about 17 million students. As recognised religious minorities, Christians and Jews can opt out. But Alevis, who follow a mystical branch of Islam and are the second-largest religious community in Turkey, are unrecognised and hence required to attend.

“It looks like religious indoctrination,” Isil Oral, an analyst at the Educational Reform Initiative, told me. As we spoke in her office at Sabanci Universtity, Oral worried that the new religious agenda will weaken a public school system already struggling with issues of quality and equity. In 2012, the government launched a controversial information and technology initiative in the schools known as the Fatih Project, evoking the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II, the “Fatih,” or conqueror, of Constantinople. As Oral put it: “There is a trend in this country that being religious pays off.”

Erdogan has been the chief trendsetter. His speeches are infused with religious references, recalling Islam’s glorious past. At the AKP’s fourth party congress he evoked the Battle of Manzikert (1071), in which the Seljuk Turks dealt a decisive blow to the Byzantine Empire and went on to conquer most of Anatolia. At a March ceremony honouring army veterans, Erdogan delivered a fiery mix of Turkish nationalism, Islamism and paranoia. “Don’t even think that the struggle that began 1,400 years ago between truth and fallacy is over,” he said. “This long-standing struggle is going on and will go on.” Erdogan warns about “those who want to turn Turkey into another Andalusia” — a reference to the fall of the Muslim city of Granada to Catholic forces in 1492, ending nearly eight centuries of Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula.

In all this Erdogan seems to fancy himself as a new caliph in a rejuvenated Turkish Ottoman empire. “The Ottoman caliph was the standard bearer and he wants to restore Turkey to that historic mission,” Mustafa Akyol, an author and columnist at the Hurriyet Daily News, told me over lunch. “That’s why Erdogan needs these conspiracy theories.”

Erdogan’s opponents are in two minds about his ultimate motivation. For some, he and the AKP have become intoxicated with power and exploit Islam in the pursuit of it. “It has nothing to do with Islam,” Alpay said. “It is sheer corruption that is driving the AKP machine.” Corruption charges were levelled against top-ranking government officials in December 2013, and have left a cloud of suspicion.

For others, Erdogan’s early reformist talk was a mere façade for his hardcore Islamism. “He wants Islam to be the main determinant in society,” said Hursit Gunes, a former deputy chairman of the CHP. “That has always been the agenda.” The state has doubled the budget of the Religious Affairs Directorate (known as the Diyanet) and added tens of thousands of new employees attached to Sunni mosques around the country.

Of course, both theories may be correct. The lust for power corrupts religion, just as the quest for piety is vulnerable to hubris. As Cengiz Erdogan, a CHP member who runs a car repair workshop, put it to me: “He’s power-hungry and he’s dedicated to the Islamist way.” Or, as C.S. Lewis once warned: “Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst.”

That may be reason enough to cheer Turkey’s election results: they offer the hope that corrupted religion will find it harder to derail the nation’s experiment in democratic self-government. More than hope, of course, will be needed. For if secular authoritarianism has left the stage in Turkey, its religious counterpart is waiting hungrily in the wings.
 

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On November 29, 1954, in his inaugural lecture upon assuming the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Lewis argued that the greatest cultural shift in the West was not its transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, or from the pre-scientific to the scientific age. It was, rather, “the great religious change” in which Judaeo-Christian belief became unintelligible and unacceptable to most educated people: when the West became “post-Christian”.

Lewis was not the first to use the phrase, but he was among the first to realise the tectonic significance of the change in outlook. The “Christianising” of a pagan Roman Empire, seen as irreversible by our ancestors, was a radical development. But a post-Christian Europe — in which religious ideas about man’s nature and destiny were largely discarded — was even more radical. “Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian,” Lewis said. “The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not.”

The best of pagan thought, Lewis believed, anticipated the Jewish and Christian teachings about holiness, sacrifice and atonement. Thus Lewis chided contemporary Jeremiahs who warned that society was relapsing into paganism. “It might be fun if we were,” he quipped. “It would be pleasant to see some future prime minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in Westminster Hall.”

As Lewis saw it, the problem is that the post-Christian man is not only cut off from the Christian past but also from the pagan past. When confronted with “the idols of our own marketplace” — the assaults on human dignity from psychology, economics or science — he lacks the moral and spiritual resources to resist. The worst impulses of the materialistic and scientific mind are granted a free hand. “Its liberated presence in our midst,” Lewis warned, “will become one of the most important factors in everyone’s daily life.”

The catastrophe of the First World War had deepened the spiritual crisis in Europe in the post-war years. By the time Lewis launched his academic career at Oxford in the 1920s, the disintegration of orthodox Christian belief, which had begun in earnest in the 19th century, was almost complete. New ideologies arose in the exhaustion of the European democracies: Freudian psychology, eugenics, scientism, socialism, Communism and fascism. All began by promising liberation from oppression; all became instruments of the will to power.

Almost immediately after his conversion from atheism to Christianity, Lewis committed himself to combatting this cultural revolution. In works such as The Space Trilogy and The Chronicles of Narnia, his characters are invariably depicted as physical and spiritual beings, caught up before God in a great moral contest for their souls. This is as true for the most diminutive creatures in Lewis’s stories — including a mouse named Reepicheep — as it is for the human characters. “I know I am hardly worthy,” Reepicheep tells Aslan, the great Lion, “but with your permission I would lay down my sword for the joy of seeing your country.”

In his Cambridge lecture Lewis applied an academic objectivity to the post-Christian individual, noting only his psychological distance from centuries of Western thought. He playfully acknowledged that his lonely role as a “spokesman of Old Western Culture” was as alarming to himself as it might be to his audience. “Where I fail as a critic,” he said, “I may yet be useful as a specimen.” Yet everyone knew what Lewis believed about the folly of man without God: the secular delusions of human progress that had ravaged the 20th century.

Indeed, there is hardly a more wretched and horrifying character in science fiction than Lewis’s Professor Edward Weston, an eminent physicist on a quest for immortality. He becomes, almost inexorably, “the Un-man,” a negation of mankind’s moral and spiritual capacities. Weston serves as a warning against the “despair of objective truth” that had insinuated itself into the modern scientific mind. “Dreams of the far future destiny of man,” Lewis wrote, “were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God.”

Sixty years on and the old dream has returned with a vengeance. I suspect that Lewis would implore us to shake the sleep from our own eyes, join the company of the wakeful and — no matter how unfashionable — get back into the fight.

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In what seems a curious way to begin a book advancing a more “principled” and “morally defensible” approach to religion in public life, the Chicago philosopher and legal scholar Brian Leiter makes little effort to conceal his contempt for people of faith. It was, he confesses, “the pernicious influence of reactionary Christians” — a charge never explained or defended — that prompted his inquiry.

The result, Why Tolerate Religion?, is a slim polemic that would unleash its own version of religious zealotry: a brooding, merciless, and militant secularism.

The core argument of Leiter’s book is that religion must be stripped of its privileged status in the American constitutional order. Religious belief, he writes, deserves no special legal treatment or accommodation because it possesses no greater moral or social currency than any other claims of conscience. Quite the opposite: unlike secular appeals to conscience, religious   convictions are hopelessly irrational and prone to dangerous and undemocratic behaviors:

There is no apparent moral reason why states should carve out special protections that encourage individuals to structure their lives around categorical demands that are insulated from the standards of evidence and reasoning we everywhere else expect to constitute constraints on judgment and action. 

The author seems astonishingly unaware of the Judaeo-Christian intellectual tradition and its contribution to the foundations of liberal democracy. The scientific revolution, the concept of human dignity, an ethos of compassion for the poor, the political ideals of equal rights and government by consent — all of these developments are unthinkable without the influence of the Judaeo-Christian tradition in the West.

In Leiter’s secularised account, seminal thinkers such as John Locke advanced liberal, tolerationist views on purely utilitarian grounds. Locke defended freedom of conscience “not because there is some principled or moral reason to permit the heretics to flourish but because the State lacks the right tools to cure them of their heresy”.

But if Leiter had simply read the opening paragraphs of Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), he would have realised the implausibility of his secularisation campaign: “The toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion, is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the genuine reason of mankind, that it seems monstrous for men to be so blind, as not to perceive the necessity and advantage of it, in so clear a light.”

 Likewise, in a book on the relationship of Church and State, there is no treatment of James Madison and his signal contribution to the legal architecture governing these two realms — the First Amendment — which Leiter hopes to reconstruct. Ever mindful of the dangers of an oppressive state, Madison insisted upon the civic freedom of every individual to live out his obligations to the Creator. As he wrote in Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments (1785): 

It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe.

By elevating our spiritual and moral obligations to God above all others, Madison helped to enshrine the unique status of religion in America’s legal regime. The Founders viewed religious liberty as the bedrock of civic and political freedom; as such, the state should think long and hard before it curtailed religious expression. As the social thinker Os Guinness has written, this principle has functioned as an “article of peace” by which the United States has accommodated its religious diversity while avoiding sectarian strife and preserving freedom. All of this history — all of the social and political progress made possible by religion’s privileged place in the public square — is ignored by Leiter’s cold rationalism.

The author apparently cannot imagine a world in which most of its inhabitants order their lives around deeply held religious beliefs. In other words, he cannot accept the world in which we actually find ourselves. Hence his shrivelled, anaemic anthropology: there is no spiritual dimension to human personality, no innate yearning for the holy, no conscience informed by belief in a just and loving God. Consequently, people of faith can claim no conscientious exemptions from the secular dictates of government. Running throughout Why Tolerate Religion? is a grievously flawed assumption: that the modern State needs no religious or transcendent ideals to restrain its worst impulses. Instead, it is free to impose its own secular vision of society upon faith communities at its pleasure.

“To impose such things, is, in effect, to command them to offend God,” wrote John Locke, “which, considering that the end of all religion is to please him, and that liberty is essentially necessary to that end, appears to be absurd beyond expression.”

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And they have it mostly wrong, writes Ross Douthat in Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (Free Press, £16.24). The deep problem facing America is not the decline of religious belief. It is the collapse of traditional Christianity and the explosion of destructive pseudo-Christianities in its place. “For all its piety and fervour,” Douthat writes, “the United States needs to be recognised for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.”

A conservative columnist at the New York Times, Douthat is that rarest of specimens among the media elite: an orthodox Christian who isn’t ashamed of his (Catholic) church’s teachings, yet doesn’t blink at the foibles of the faithful. He even manages to find some kind words for heresy: its existence can keep the Christian faith from navel-gazing irrelevance.

Douthat takes aim at “the Church of America”, which worships not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but the god within. Publishing phenomena such as Eat, Pray, Love — the story of a woman who abandons her husband to seek spiritual fulfilment — represent the religious zeitgeist. It is the happy discovery that deep within every human soul is divinity itself, waiting to emerge and help us actualise our dreams (or our sexual whims).

As Douthat sees it, the Church of America also promotes the heresy of nationalism, confusing the mission of the gospel with the mission of the United States. At home, this heresy is championed by religious liberals, who mistake the kingdom of heaven for their visions of a “great society”, having anointed Barack Obama as its latest high priest. For their part, many evangelicals and “theocons” became unduly enamoured of George Bush’s democracy agenda in the Muslim world, as if free elections and the US military could usher in the political equivalent of the Second Coming of Christ.

These heresies are not new, but the decline of traditional belief has given them a ferocious influence over our culture and our politics. Only biblical religion can resist the hubris of nationalism, Douthat argues, because every party, every political agenda and every nation stands under the judgment of Almighty God. Likewise, only the weighty virtues of the ancient faith — such as humility and charity — have any power to curb self-absorption and consumerism in all their varied forms (including by-products of runaway capitalism).

In Douthat’s skilful critique, even the disillusioned doubter is given reasons to hope for the renewal of Christian orthodoxy. “There is something to be said for returning to the source,” he writes, “for looking again at your half-forgotten patrimony, for considering anew the possibility that Christianity might be an inheritance rather than a burden.” Amen to that.

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This Western ideal is worth recalling now, as more governments struggle to manage the costs of higher education. It has become a major issue during the US election season, as worries mount about escalating tuition fees and student debt to cover them. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 75 per cent of adults think higher education has become unaffordable — and most believe it’s not worth the money.

Liberals see a “student loan crisis” and denounce cuts in government spending on education. Newspapers such as the New York Times blame for-profit colleges for “defrauding” students with deceptive recruitment policies. Conservatives, for their part, criticise the expansion of federal loan programmes for encouraging inflated tuition rates and student indebtedness. 

Mostly missing from the discussion, however, is meaningful talk about the fundamental purposes of higher education and how best to achieve them.

So far, conservatives are not contributing much to this debate. Too many have focused narrowly on costs, techniques, and new technologies. Writing in National Affairs, the Heritage Foundation’s Stuart Butler lauds the arrival of online degree courses as the saviour of higher education. He writes: “Improvements in customised and sophisticated student-education data . . . make it easy to imagine the interaction quality of online tutorials surpassing the effectiveness of the traditional system.” We are assured that nothing of enduring value would be lost in this brave new virtual world.

Here is a well-meaning approach to education reform that is as subversive as it is impoverished. Does anyone really imagine that, given the choice, teachers such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Jesus and Maimonides would opt for the online tutorial?

The great minds of the Western tradition believed that real knowledge — including moral wisdom — is communicated through concrete, embodied relationships. It is the give-and-take of the classroom, the educator fully present with his students, which makes possible the highest purposes of the academy. For the aim is not only to nurture minds that can think for themselves, but which pursue with integrity the great truths about the human condition. It is here, in the bricks and mortar of the academy, that deep friendships are formed, the moral and spiritual relationships that help us on our life’s journey.

Can we afford to remain ignorant of this legacy in the West? Butler shrugs it off. “For most young people today,” he writes, “electronic friendships and networks are the norm.” There is no hint that anything whatsoever may be amiss with this trend.

Cicero sounded the alarm when he saw republican ideals fading from the public consciousness: “Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.” Our historical amnesia about the ends of the academy is widespread. We no longer treasure or guard those things once considered essential to education. No wonder we produce so many graduates with bad souls who cannot govern themselves.

Yet if we do not recover our cultural memory — if we worship at the altar of efficiency and economy — the explosive costs of a college degree will become a footnote in the crisis of the West.

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In a religiously diverse society, Madison’s principle created a compact for civic peace.

President Obama’s healthcare plan, by radically redefining one’s duties to Big Government, threatens to send the compact into the shredder. The administration insists that Catholic and other religious institutions must fund a full range of birth-control services in the health insurance plans they offer their employees — regardless of whether they consider such services morally objectionable.

The ruling has unleashed a hailstorm of criticism — enough to force Team Obama to announce an “accommodation” that would shift the emphasis to insurance companies. Many see this as an accounting gimmick, however, because Catholic organisations would still be forced to subsidise drugs and procedures that violate Church teaching, including sterilisation, contraception, and drugs that induce abortion. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops has denounced the law as a violation of religious freedom, and pledges to oppose it. 

For now, at least, the legislation exempts churches, synagogues, mosques and other houses of worship on the basis of religious conscience. But the burden will fall upon all religiously-affiliated organisations: colleges, universities, hospitals, clinics, charities and other faith-based groups. Failure to comply will result in fines of $2,000 per employee.

The administration insists that most Catholics use birth control and that no one is forced to buy contraception under the law. The argument misses the point entirely: the First Amendment, as interpreted by numerous Supreme Court rulings, places a severe burden on government before it may limit religious freedom. With birth control and abortion so widely available, what rationale — other than a demand for ideological purity — justifies state discrimination against religious by-affiliated organisations?

The ruling, which would come into effect next year, could help shape the outcome of the presidential race. House Republicans vow to overturn the measure and Republican presidential candidates such as Rick Santorum, a Catholic, are promising to “make it an issue every day of this campaign”. Timothy Dolan, Cardinal Archbishop of New York and president of the US Catholic Bishops’ Conference, warns of further attacks on religious liberty. “When the government tampers with a freedom so fundamental to the life of our nation,” he says, “one shudders to think what lies ahead.” Despite token concessions by Obama, the plan looks likely to go ahead.

What lies ahead is an Orwellian legal regime underwritten by a creed of uncompromising secularism. Under the nomenclature of “health”, “choice”, “access” and “prevention”, the sanctity of religious conscience is now up for grabs. The problem is not merely the privatisation of religious belief. By refusing to exempt church-based groups from the law, the state is deciding which bodies carry out a “religious” mission worthy of legal protection and which do not.

Put simply, the Obama administration is prepared to criminalise religious views that fall foul of its social agenda. 

James Madison had a name for that. “The Rulers who are guilty of such an encroachment, exceed the commission from which they derive their authority, and are Tyrants,” he warned. “The People who submit to it are governed by laws made neither by themselves nor by an authority derived from them, and are slaves.”

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A longtime Anglican minister at All Souls, Langham Place in London’s West End, Stott was one of the world’s most influential figures in evangelical Christianity over the past half-century. He was a key framer of the 1974 Lausanne Covenant, a touchstone document in the rise of global evangelicalism. He wrote nearly 50 books, and his preaching and teaching reached beyond England and the United States into the developing world. He died in July at the age of 90.

In his column, Kristof contrasts the ministry of Stott with the religious “blowhards” and “hypocrites” pilloried in liberal enclaves. “Mr Stott didn’t preach fire and brimstone on a Christian television network,” he writes. “He…counselled Christians to emulate the life of Jesus — especially his concern for the poor and oppressed — and confront social ills like racial oppression and environmental pollution.”
It is true that Stott, unlike some evangelicals, refused to ignore the social implications of the gospel. Years ago I attended a private luncheon with him to discuss his book, The Contemporary Christian: Applying God’s Word to Today’s World. “Once we have become new people in Christ, and are members of his new society,” he wrote, “we must accept the responsibility he gives us to permeate the old society as its salt and light.”

But to suggest, as Kristof and others have done, that Stott interpreted the mission of Jesus as a call to social justice — as if Christ was crucified for his jeremiads against global warming — is to belittle the heart and soul of his ministry.

For Stott, clear thinking about contemporary problems began with a belief in the Bible as God’s Word and in Jesus as his Son, come to earth to rescue humanity from its guilt and shame. In his 400-page commentary on the New Testament book of Romans, he calls this “the most humbling and levelling of all Christian truths”. Stott urged this truth upon his audience repeatedly, in every culture and country in which he ministered. He was devoted to the controversial task of evangelism — the task of persuading others that their eternal happiness depends on their belief in Jesus as their Saviour.

This was Stott’s foundation for social action: a faith that inspired a deep and costly love for every human soul. “Is it then, healthy or unhealthy to insist on the gravity of sin and the necessity of atonement, to hold people responsible for their actions, to warn them of the peril of divine judgment, and to urge them to confess, repent, and turn to Christ?” he asked in The Cross of Christ. “It is healthy.”

It is also unpopular, especially among the secular-minded, who tend to dismiss such ideas as arrogant, hateful, primitive — and dangerous. Thus there is no mention of Stott’s actual beliefs in Kristof’s essay: the intellectual equivalent of discussing Italy’s Chianti region with no reference to wine. “We tend to come to [the Bible] with our minds made up,” Stott warned, “anxious to hear only the reassuring echoes of our own prejudice.”

John Stott allowed the teachings of Jesus to transform his ideas about justice and mercy, even if it brought him criticism. It would be heartening to see more liberal elites do the same. At the very least, they might venture out of their echo chambers for a moment, if only properly to honour the dead.

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In the Western Civilisation course that I teach at the King’s College in the Empire State Building, New York, we were discussing the bloodsoaked saga of the French Revolution, circa 1790. Halfway through the lecture, on February 11, we got word of Mubarak’s departure. Students who doubted the relevance of any historical event before the arrival of smartphones were in for a shock. Like the revolution unfolding on the streets of Cairo, the French version was steeped in the language of “justice”, “freedom”, and “the rights of man”. As in Egypt, an ageing and despotic monarch was toppled by a popular rebellion in which the military chose not to intervene. Among the French revolutionaries were the Jacobins, ideological zealots whose radicalism was not fully appreciated. Like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, they were a minority party but they were better organised and disciplined than their competitors.
We all know the rest of the story: the Jacobins seized control of the National Assembly and set up the Committee of Public Safety — the organ that launched the Reign of Terror. Within a year, at least 30,000 people were dispatched by the guillotine. This “democratic revolution” was applauded by many enlightened minds of the day, including Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. Others, such as Edmund Burke, saw in the French experience a rapid descent from freedom to barbarism. This is a major theme of his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
Burke’s work is noted for its conservatism, but it was a conservatism that went much deeper than a regard for the monarchy. He praised the “little platoons” — the civic and religious institutions outside the State — that produce citizens capable of representative government. “By this means,” he wrote, “our liberty becomes noble freedom.” By contrast, a revolution with no respect for custom, tradition or fundamental rights will not create a more just society. For Burke, without a realistic view of human nature — without the Christian concept of sin — liberty becomes a dangerous metaphysical abstraction.
Now that Mubarak is under arrest, will he share the fate of Louis XVI? “Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle,” wrote Burke. What would Burke say about the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other Muslim states? He might warn that a revolution launched by utopians — secular or religious — will lead only to grief. The lust for power will overwhelm good intentions. “The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please,” he wrote. “We ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints.”

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Obama pledged to fight violent extremism “in all its forms”, for example, and then proceeded to relieve Islam of any responsibility for the culture of rage that darkens more than a few Muslim-majority nations. His administration has consistently projected this psychological mood of unreality. The massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, the Christmas Day airline bomber, the failed bomb plot in Times Square-each was reflexively treated by team Obama as an “isolated” or “one-off” anomaly with no connection to a network of radical Islamic jihadists. In each case the White House spoke with self-assured ignorance about the nature of the attack, and then backpedalled within 24 hours.

Nevertheless, none of these “wake-up calls” have disturbed the mendacious mannequins at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The White House is reportedly drafting a new National Security Strategy that removes any suggestion of a link between Islam and terrorist violence. Religious references such as “Islamic extremism” to describe the ideology of al-Qaeda or other terrorist networks are to be purged. Memos from the State Department and Homeland Security reveal a similar sanitising lurch toward political correctness. In painful-to-watch testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder obdurately refused to admit a connection between radical Islam and recent terrorists plots in the United States. “There are a variety of reasons why people do these things,” he said. “Some of them are potentially religious.”

Potentially religious? Even militant atheists like Christopher Hitchens might fall into that category. 

The Obama administration is so obsessed with repudiating the Bush administration — which correctly described a US-led war against “militant Islamic radicalism” — that it has abandoned common sense. Indeed, the authors of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report explicitly rejected generic references to a “war on terrorism” in national security documents. “This vagueness blurs the strategy,” they wrote. “The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is more specific. It is the threat posed by Islamist terrorism — especially the al-Qaeda network, its affiliates, and its ideology.” A recent report by civilian analysts at US Central Command agreed: “We must look at the theological motivations for violence in the same way we view its sociological and economical aspects.”

 When President Bush warned that nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of religious extremists, he was accused by liberals such as Zbigniew Brzezinski — the national security adviser in the feckless Carter administration — of promoting a “paranoiac view of the world.” Obama gives lip service to the same threat, not to retool America’s strategy to defeat the radicals, but to advance his vision of a nuclear-free planet. The president sincerely, fantastically believes that America’s example of arms reduction and “transparency” — he revealed for the first time the exact number of US nuclear warheads — will inspire pacific behaviour among its enemies. Yet even his own Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, admitted in a leaked memo that the administration “does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability.”

In his Cairo speech, Obama assured his global audience that they could remake the world, “if we have the courage to make a new beginning”. What he offers, however, is well-worn territory: the dissolute daydream of the utopian. It is a vision of a world that does not require moral courage. It represents, rather, a moral evasion that refuses to face the world as we find it. “For it is one thing to see the Land of Peace from a wooded ridge,” wrote St Augustine, “and another to tread the road that leads to it.”

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