By Paul Krause, The Federalist, April 13, 2023
Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is the author of “Finding Arcadia: Wisdom, Truth, and Love in the Classics” (Academica Press, 2023), “The Odyssey of Love: A Christian Guide to the Great Books” (Wipf and Stock, 2021), and contributed to “The College Lecture Today” (Lexington, 2019) and “Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters” (Routledge, 2022).
Critics of the natural law try to eliminate Christianity because it places demands on humans as moral and rational agents.
When discussing the American founding, it is common to hear that the Founding Fathers were not Christian and not influenced by Christian ideas. This is patently untrue.
Yet the anti-Christian scholarship of the past century, especially the past 50 years, has “downplayed or denied the degree to which the animating ideas of the American founding were deeply indebted to the Christian natural law tradition.”
In their new book, “The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics,” published by Cambridge University Press, professors Kody W. Cooper and Justin Buckley Dyer return our attention to the fact that Christian ideas permeated the revolutionary generation. …
