Westminster Institute talks Robert R. Reilly Was America’s Founding Fatally Flawed by the Provenance of Its Ideas
In early December, Westminster director Robert Reilly gave a talk to the Center for the Restoration of Christian Culture at Thomas More College in New Hampshire. Troubled by the ample evidence of a moral decline in the United States, some Christian and other thinkers trace the problem to what they see as a fatal flaw in the American Founding: a reliance on the philosophical principles of the Enlightenment – to wit, the assertion of radical individual autonomy. Reilly, the author of America on Trial, disagrees. He argues that the genealogy of the ideas that made the founding conceivable is grounded in classical Greek philosophy, Jewish revelation, and Christianity. The founders’ principles come from pre-Enlightenment sources. They are compatible with—and indeed derived from—the tradition of respect for Reason and Revelation, Church and State, developed and refined by philosophers of the Middle Ages. After a period of state absolutism, the founders restored these principles. Reilly shows on what basis political scientist Ellis Sandoz could claim that “the whole of medieval Christian constitutional and political theory . . . lay squarely behind the American determination [to achieve independence].”
The Westminster Institute is grateful to the Center for the Restoration of Christian Culture for the use of this video.