A Conversation on Genesis 1 and America’s Founding 

Editors’ Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

MW: How do you introduce yourself? What do you say that you do?  

RPG: I was born and brought up in the heart of Appalachia in north central West Virginia. Both of my grandfathers were coal miners. I spent my boyhood hunting and fishing, running around in the woods, and playing bluegrass banjo. How do I introduce myself? I’m Robby George from the hills. What do I do? I’m a teacher. 

MW: In terms of your profession, Wikipedia says you’re an American legal scholar, a political philosopher and a public intellectual. So how would you describe what you do?  

RPG: The most fundamental thing I do is teach. That is my vocation. I was inspired to become an academic by my teachers. I looked up to them and learned so much from them and admired them so much. I wanted to be like them. I wanted to do for others what they did for me. That’s what I’ve devoted myself to doing, now for forty-one years, in academic life. And I’ve been blessed with wonderful students, many of whom are off in the world doing great things. So that’s what I do. I’m a teacher. 

MW: There are a few steps between hunting and fishing to where you are right now. What made you discover the subject matter that you’re dealing with: the law, philosophy, and the intersection with faith? 

RPG: The most important academic or intellectual experience I’ve ever had happened when I was a sophomore in college at Swarthmore—a small, very intellectually intense liberal arts college. I did not have very good preparation for college, so I was struggling a bit. I certainly had no background in philosophy, but I was assigned for the first time one of Plato’s dialogues. It was the dialogue called Gorgias. I’m not sure if I knew who Plato was before I went to college or had heard the name, but I was taking an introductory survey course in political theory, and I was assigned the Gorgias. It was an epiphany for me. When I read the dialogue, a light bulb went off over my head.  

Suddenly I understood things that I had no comprehension of before. Most importantly, what the dialogue made me see was that knowledge and truth are not fundamentally valuable simply as means to other ends, but rather they’re most fundamentally valuable as ends in themselves. Our most basic reason for seeking the truth is not some extrinsic thing to which truth is a means. It’s the intrinsic value of truth itself. Well, I’d never considered that possibility. I had a very instrumentalist understanding of knowledge and of education. I assumed that the point of education was to get ahead—get a better job, make more money, achieve a higher social rank. 

No one in my family had been to college before I went. I was brought up by my parents wanting to go to college, and they very much wanted me and my four younger siblings, all brothers, to go to college. But it was always with a view to getting ahead in life, making more money, having professional status, being somebody. So, I had casually adopted an instrumentalist view of education. That evaporated, though, the moment I read the Gorgias, and I could see that whatever instrumental value knowledge and truth may have, and certainly they have instrumental value, that’s not what our most basic reason for seeking them is. Rather, it is the intrinsic value of truth itself, of knowledge itself. In other words, knowledge of truth fulfills us as the kinds of creatures we are. It’s inherently fulfilling, not simply instrumentally valuable. So that was the closest thing I have ever had to a conversion experience. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a religious conversion, although it certainly had implications for my spiritual life. It was an intellectual conversion, but a very profound conversion nonetheless. And it gives me a sense of what it’s like for people who experience religious conversions. 

MW: You bring up faith. What role did faith play in your upbringing and in your decision to pursue the career that you walked in?  

RPG: Well, faith was very important to my upbringing. Both of my parents were very devout Christians. My mother’s parents were from southern Italy, from Calabria; they came to this country in the early part of the twentieth century, fleeing the poverty of southern Italy in those days. So, they were Catholic. My father’s parents came about the same time, at the beginning of the twentieth century, from Syria, where they were fleeing Ottoman oppression as members of a small religious minority group, Antiochian Orthodox Christians. And as I say, both of my parents were devout, so we were raised with faith, almost imbued with it. And one nice thing about my growing up is that I was exposed to the spiritual treasures of both Western Christianity on the Catholic side of my family and Eastern Christianity, which is very different in many ways, on my father’s side of the family. So by the time I got to college, I was certainly a person of faith, a believing Christian. But when I had that experience with Plato, when that old Greek took me by the lapels and shook me and made me think about why we value knowledge, why we should be interested in truth, it caused me to think that I really need to examine why I believe what I believe. I hadn’t, prior to that point, ever truly examined my reasons for believing whatever I believed about religion, about politics, about morality, about anything. 

MW: You inherited it from your parents.  

RPG: I just inherited it from my parents and from the ambient culture. As an undergraduate at a place like Swarthmore, as you can imagine, I thought, “Well, there are certain things that sophisticated people believe—people who went to fancy schools and read The New York Times. And I want to be a sophisticated person, so I should probably believe those things.” I was very tempted, therefore, to pick up beliefs that I thought I should hold without actually understanding what the reasons for or against the beliefs were. But that experience with Plato and the Gorgias caused me to think, “I’ve just got to stop believing things because I’m told to believe them or I think it’s a good thing to believe them or people I like or admire believe them. I’ve really got to start exploring what the reasons are for believing things.” And so, I found myself putting all of my beliefs on the table for examination: my political beliefs, my moral beliefs, my religious beliefs.  

It was both an exhilarating experience and a scary one, because you don’t know who you’re going to be at the end of that process. To some extent, we build our identity around our beliefs. We wrap our emotions more or less tightly around our convictions. Our sense of who we are is tied up with our beliefs. And, of course, our membership in certain groups, almost like tribes, sometimes depends on sharing, or at least affecting to share, the beliefs of the group. So again, when that old Greek took me by the lapels and shook me, he put me in this position where I wanted to know what the reasons were for believing this and that and the other thing. So, all of my beliefs were now on the table for scrutiny, and I really thought I needed to subject them to pretty intense rational examination. 

Interestingly, I found that some of my beliefs really quite fundamentally changed. My political beliefs really did change.  

MW: In what sense?  

RPG: I moved from being a kind of liberal Democrat, which was the political faith that I was raised in, to being more conservative. Later, I would even become a Republican abandoning my familial allegiances to the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt. My moral beliefs did not, however, significantly change. I was pro-life. I was pro-traditional marriage, traditional morality concerning marriage, and those sorts of things. And none of that changed, nor did my religious beliefs fundamentally change. On the contrary, they strengthened. So, when I subjected my beliefs to examination, I concluded that these hold up pretty well, and I got more interested in understanding the reasons for Christian doctrinal beliefs. I began examining church history and the teachings of the ancient councils. I got much more interested in the Bible than I had been before. I got interested in theological debates, historical theological debates, the debates of the early church, the ancient heresies, things like Arianism and Nestorianism, the debates in the Middle Ages, the debates at the time of the Protestant Reformation, the debates over modernism and liberal Christianity, the rise of form criticism, especially among nineteenth-century German biblical scholars.  

All of that became very interesting to me. I particularly became interested in philosophy and most especially philosophy of law and moral and political philosophy. Why do we have the political structures and legal norms that we have? Should we have them? Should we trade them in for others? Is there a best regime? How do we distinguish good laws from bad laws, just laws from unjust laws? I became absolutely fascinated with these questions. And that’s what led me to go to law school and then on to Oxford University where I did my doctorate in philosophy of law and then into an academic career, which, as a high school student, I never would’ve predicted for myself. I would’ve laughed at the idea that I would be an academic. But nevertheless, there I was starting out at Princeton in the fall of 1985 teaching and writing in the areas of philosophy of law and moral and political philosophy.  

MW: So, you really dug deep, considering where you came from, how you were raised, and this epiphany, it took you very deep. Now, not everybody picks up everything that you just walked us through in terms of what you dove into. There’s got to be a force behind it. 

RPG: Well, I wanted to know what the reasons were. I wanted to get to the bottom of these things. For example, I never found atheism an attractive view. It was of course a common view where I was in college and in the broader intellectual milieu that I began to inhabit, but it never had much appeal to me. Nevertheless, just as an act of sort of intellectual will, I decided, “I need to consider the case for atheism. After all, it’s possible that it’s true.” So, I went to one of my professors, a wonderful man who taught me philosophy of religion, and I said, “Who makes the best case for atheism? I want to read the best case for atheism.” And he said, “Well, it’s Nietzsche.” And I said, “Whocha?” And he said, “Nietzsche.” I said, “Well, who’s Nietzsche?” And so, he told me about the great nineteenth-century German atheist critic of Christianity, critic of religion, Friedrich Nietzsche, who was indeed a very powerful critic of faith.  

And so off I went to the library and got a couple of works of Nietzsche’s and began to read through them and tried to do it in as open-minded a way as I could. Nietzsche, though, couldn’t make the sale with me for atheism. I thought, “This is all very interesting. It’s not compelling, though.” So that was my examination of that particular tradition. I also became very interested in Buddhism, which I’m still very interested in as a matter of fact. And I had the privilege of studying the Theravada tradition of Buddhism: that’s the tradition that’s dominant in Southeast Asia, in places like Thailand. I had the privilege of studying with a great Buddhist master, the Chao Khun Rajavaramuni, who was a visiting professor one year when I was an undergraduate. And I studied the Theravada tradition of Buddhism quite intensively with him and came to have a great respect, which I still do, for the tradition.  

There are some truths that that tradition captures that I think are important. So, I find it interesting and fascinating, and I very much valued my opportunity to study with someone who was as profound a practitioner of the faith as the Chao Khun was.  

MW: What makes you stick around? Was it purely intellectual, the logic of Christian faith, or was there a spiritual component in that process?  

RPG: I don’t distinguish those two. I don’t think there’s a sharp distinction between the spirit and the intellect. So from a certain perspective, a perspective that puts more emphasis than I would put on the emotional or affective side of ourselves when it comes to questions of faith, from the perspective of someone who looks at faith and embraces faith from that perspective, I’m sure my faith looks very rationalist and intellectual. And it’s true, I am interested in what the reasons are for believing.  

What are the reasons for believing in the resurrection of Jesus, which really come down to the testimony of the apostles? What are the reasons for believing that the Bible has a certain authority? What are the reasons for believing that Jesus established an ecclesia—a Church—in which he invested a kind of authority to speak his mind? So it’s my views about all those sorts of issues that caused me to be a believing Christian, to believe that, as a matter of fact, Jesus Christ did rise from the dead, that his death and resurrection, his triumph over death, liberates us from sin and from bondage, that the Bible does tell us the truth about the human condition, about our fallenness, about God’s role as creator of all that is, about our being made in the very image and likeness of God. I became persuaded by rational inquiry of the truth of these Christian propositions, and that is the foundation of my faith.  

Now, it’s not as if I am entirely emotionally detached from Christianity or it’s a purely intellectual thing with me, but at its core it really is a set of convictions arrived at through the examination of evidence and argument, just as I come to my beliefs about other things.  

MW: I don’t think everybody takes such a substantive or deep journey into the evaluation of what we actually believe. But even for somebody who turned as many stones as you did, there must be areas where you reach the limit of what our intellect can understand?  

RPG: Oh, certainly.  

MW: And how do you deal with that?  

RPG: Well, the question is, do we have then good reasons for believing that the Scripture, which tells us something that we can’t arrive at simply by reason, or that the Church, which tells us something that we can’t arrive at simply by reason, is believable, has authority and should be believed? I think that’s the role of reason in going beyond reason. Do we have reasons for taking on authority the teaching of this Scripture, or the institution of the Church where it’s telling us something we cannot know by unaided reason, for example, that God is triune? There’s no way, I think, to get to the proposition that God is Father, Son, and Spirit on the basis of reason alone. We have to take it on the authority of Scripture or on the authority of the early councils of the Church. But then I think it’s a legitimate question: why should we believe Scripture, or why should we believe the councils of the Church? And I think there are good reasons for believing those things. 

MW: The Bible keeps popping up throughout your work. How would you define the role of the Bible in your work?  

RPG: Well, just that it is the word of God. It’s mediated to us, of course, by human authors. There’s Moses. There’s Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There’s Paul. There’s James. There’s Peter. But it represents the word of God, the dei verbum, and so it has authority precisely as such, as the word of God. Now, it’s obviously not obvious what some of the teachings of Scripture mean, which means that it takes a kind of reflection and critical inquiry—about which we can get things wrong—to interpret biblical text. Some things are straightforward, but other things are not at all straightforward, which is why you have theological debates among Christians of different traditions of faith or even within the same Christian tradition about the meaning of particular scriptural passages or their application to concrete questions of our day. 

MW: In the context that you work in, you encountered a lot of people who would disagree with you to elevate the Bible to the level of authority that you give it. How did you manage that with them?  

RPG: For people who don’t accept the authority of scripture, let’s say we’re debating the question of euthanasia, simply citing the Ten Commandments—“Thou shalt not commit murder”—isn’t going to get you anywhere. In that case, I want to say, “Look, let’s treat as authoritative for purposes of this conversation, not the Bible (which I regard as authoritative but you don’t, so if we’re going to have a conversation I can’t force you to accept something as authoritative that I accept but you don’t), but reason itself. And then I will develop lines of argument that are known in our tradition as “natural law” arguments, arguments that are in principle accessible to any rational person, whether or not that person believes in divine revelation, or whether there is any revelation on the topic at all. So, the great bulk of my scholarly work is not scriptural interpretation or application. It’s natural law argumentation.  

MW: Which is a good segue to the question; how did you move from the personal importance of the Bible on you and your belief system to you as a historian and as an American? Where did that transition happen to discover what impact the Bible had on the founding and the ongoing history of our nation?  

RPG: Well, I’m not a historian; I’m a philosopher. My areas are philosophy of law and moral and political philosophy. My historian friends are scandalized by how little I actually know about history, but I have to know a few things about history because I teach constitutional law and civil liberties.  And of course, I’m therefore interested in the meaning of the foundational documents of the American civic order, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. And I do believe that we need to understand those documents in light of the understanding of what’s being proposed in the documents by the founders themselves. We need to know what they meant by, for example, “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” 

MW: It’s pretty clear who that Creator is from their point of view.  

RPG: Yes, that’s right. I mean, you have to know something about where these ideas come from. And of course, if we look at the writings of the American Founders, or what we know them to have said, we realize that there are multiple sources, ancient and modern, for their thinking—multiple streams of thought that influence the American founding and its core principles. But quite central among these is the Bible. It couldn’t possibly be otherwise because these men didn’t just pop out of nowhere. Even Thomas Jefferson, who, though not an atheist, was not religiously orthodox or devout, comes from Western civilization, a civilization shaped by the Bible. Much of his understanding is a biblical understanding. The same is true of Benjamin Franklin, who is another Founder who, though again not an atheist, was not religiously orthodox or observant. 

MW: You’re touching on a hypothesis that we obviously make here at Museum of the Bible celebrating this book. We just had our 250th anniversary as a nation, and there’s a lot of debate about what the identity of this nation is, how we started, and how we got here. We make the hypothesis that the Bible is the book that shaped this nation. So, based on what you said, you wouldn’t say that’s a claim too big and that it’s actually true? 

RPG: Well, it’s a book—a collection of books, really—that had a central role in shaping [the Founding]. It’s not the only book. Thomas Jefferson, shortly before he died on July 4th, 1826, fifty years to the day of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, on the same day that his friend then enemy then friend again John Adams died, responded to an inquiry from Henry Lee, asking him, as if they were new ideas, “Where did you get the ideas for the American founding?” And Jefferson, quite honestly, with no false humility, replied that there were actually no truly new ideas in the American Founding. He said, in effect, that all that he and the other founders did was to give voice to “the common sense” and “the harmonizing sentiments” of the American people. 

Then he mentioned some great thinkers who had influenced the American mind. He gave a non-exhaustive list of four authors. Interestingly, two of them were modern, we would today say Enlightenment, thinkers, and two were ancient. The two moderns were John Locke and Algernon Sidney. The two ancients were Aristotle and Cicero. Jefferson said, in effect, “Do you want to know where the ideas for the American Revolution came? No new insights from me or from Brother Franklin or Brother Adams or any of the others. We drew from a broader tradition: Athens, Rome, and then from Enlightenment thinkers as well.” 

Now, Jefferson didn’t mention the Bible, but there’s no question that Jerusalem is, if anything, even more important than Rome and Athens or the Enlightenment in shaping the basic understandings of the Declaration of Independence. And you can see that most clearly if you just reflect for a moment on the most famous sentence in the entire declaration, one of the most famous sentences in all of human history. That is the second sentence of the Declaration in which it is asserted that all men are created equal.  

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” 

You don’t get that from Aristotle. I yield to no one in my admiration for Aristotle. I’ve learned so much from Aristotle’s writings. I teach Aristotle. I consider him one of the greatest thinkers of all of history, East or West. You don’t get it from Cicero. You get a few hints actually in that direction, but you don’t get it from Cicero. It comes from Genesis 1, the idea of the imago Dei, that the human being, though fashioned from the mere dust of the earth, mere mortal stuff, material stuff that will someday die and dissolve, is nevertheless made in the divine image, the image and likeness of the divine creator and ruler of all that is. 

MW: How does Greek philosophy, the Enlightenment, the natural law, and the Bible fit together?  

RPG: In a certain sense, in the same way that they are brought together to create Christian philosophy in the first place. So, if you look at figures like St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Anselm, other great thinkers who for the first 1400 years of Christianity are shaping it, what are they drawing on? Jerusalem, Rome, and Athens. Yes, there’s the Hebrew Bible. And then of course we add the New Testament. But there’s Plato; there’s Aristotle. The great Christian thinkers don’t push those guys out. They draw insights from them to help to explicate the Christian message. St. Thomas Aquinas, writing in the high Middle Ages, refers to Aristotle, whom he invokes countless times, as “the philosopher.” Other even earlier thinkers rely very heavily on Plato. They’re using the tools of Greek and Roman philosophy to help to understand the Gospel, to understand the Christian message and to broadcast it.  

MW: So, you say the Bible is not the, but one of the books that shaped the nation. What are two biblical contributions to a nation that you would point out? 

RPG: First, and above all, there is the principle of the imago Dei. Without it, you don’t get anything. You don’t get the second sentence of the Declaration, which is the key sentence on which the American civic order is founded, the key proposition. What does Lincoln say at Gettysburg? “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Where on earth did he get that? Not from Aristotle, who believes in natural slavery. Again, I yield to no one in my admiration for Aristotle. But he gets the slavery question really badly wrong. Lincoln doesn’t get it from Cicero. He—and we—get it from the teaching of Genesis 1, the very first chapter of the very first book of the Bible, that great revelation to the Jewish people that human beings, unlike any terrestrial creature we know about other than human beings, are bearers of certain Godlike qualities, reason and freedom, and as such possess profound, inherent, and equal dignity.  

Now, Christians have never been great at living up to that biblical principle, nor were the Jewish people to whom the teaching was first given. We’re constantly straying. God’s people are constantly straying away from the principles. And so we do things like have slavery and polygamy and all sorts of other evils, but the principle is nevertheless there. And at our best, we do our best to live up to the principle. Our country proclaims “All men are created equal” at a time when slavery is not abolished. And some of the very men, beginning the list with Jefferson himself, who do the declaring that “All men are created equal,” themselves hold slaves.  

MW: Obviously, that was a big debate about what ends up in the Constitution.  

RPG: Exactly right. Now, it’s not that the Founders didn’t realize that they were contradicting their own moral principles. Jefferson, despite being a slaveholder, said, speaking of slavery, the following, and I’m quoting him now word for word, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Jefferson, a slaveholder speaking of slavery, fearing divine punishment, retribution, for what was clearly to Jefferson the sin of slavery. Why is it a sin? Because it is flatly inconsistent with the proposition that all men are created equal. How is it that all men are created equal? We’re made in the very image and likeness of God and as such are bearers of profound, inherent, and equal dignity.  

MW: Another principle that you would point out?  

RPG: Certainly, the basic and most fundamental principle of justice, the principle that we should treat each other as a fellow image bearer in the way we ourselves wish to be treated, what sometimes goes by the name “the Golden Rule.” Now that’s not a uniquely Christian principle or a uniquely Jewish principle. You find some version of that principle in many of the world’s other great religions. But the reason we believe it, the historic reason it’s part of our heritage here, is clearly from the Bible, because our civilization was shaped by biblical morality.  

MW: There are people who claim, and I think you somewhat make it clear where you stand on this, that the United States is or should be a Christian nation. While the desire makes sense from a Christian perspective, what are people missing when they make that statement?  

RPG: I think people just need to be clear on what they mean. If they mean that Christianity is or was meant to be or should be the official religion of the nation, then they’re simply wrong. We are not a Christian nation in the sense that Christianity is our established religion or should be our established religion. Our Founders made very clear, it’s right there in the First Amendment, that there is to be no national church. There is to be no national religion. On the contrary, what we’re going to have is religious pluralism. That is the freedom of religion, so that the right of each American to follow his conscience when it comes to matters of faith, to spiritual questions, is guarded by the state. Now that is itself not merely compatible with Christian teaching. It’s the fruit of Christian teaching: that faith must be free if it’s to be faith.  

A coerced faith is no faith at all. You can coerce the external indicia of faith. You could make people go to church or make people say these prayers, but what coercion cannot reach are the internal acts of intellect and will that are the substance of faith. So, what the American Founders wanted was a country in which religion could flourish because people could be religious truth seekers and live by their convictions. They could ask the big questions, the questions of meaning and value, of human nature, the human good, human dignity, human destiny, the great spiritual questions. Where did I come from? Where am I going? Is there a more than merely human source of meaning and value? Where people could answer those questions honestly, not give phony answers to them in order to get ahead or avoid getting in trouble or whatever, and then could live with authenticity and integrity in light of their best answers.  

From a Christian point of view, as well as from a fundamental American point of view, that’s a centrally important value. And I think that’s what the Founders’ thinking was when it came to religion. Now, John Adams famously said (and George Washington says something similar), “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The very institutions of our civic order require that citizens on the whole be people of faith. If we lose that status, if we’re no longer people of faith, then the civic institutions are not going to work very well for us. And what religion does Adams have in mind when he’s thinking about that? Basically, biblical religion. He knows that there are other religions in the world, the Hindu religion, the Buddhist religion, the Muslim religion, but what he’s got in mind when he’s thinking about religion, his archetypal model of religion, is biblical faith.  

MW: Well, that raised the question, can somebody who doesn’t believe or even have a relationship with God buy into the truth of biblical principles and their enormous impact on the founding of the nation?  

RPG: I do think it’s just about possible for us to reason our way to the principle that human beings as such are bearers of profound, inherent, and equal dignity. You can reason your way there from our understanding that people are rational and free, that we have a rational nature. We’re capable of deliberation, judgment, choice and action, and in that way are very different from even the most sophisticated brute animals: dolphins, chimpanzees, pigs, dogs. So, you could say, even if you don’t believe in God, “Human beings have these godlike powers of reason and freedom and therefore are bearers of inherent and equal dignity.” Now that’s actually, as a historical matter, not how we got to this judgment. We got there through the Bible, but it’s possible to think your way to that judgment. What you can’t give an account of, if you’re an atheist, is how it is the case that there are creatures who have those godlike, literally awesome powers. The people who (and there are such people; it’s a complicated world) believe, despite being atheists, in the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family, basically believe that we are not made in God’s image because there is no God. We’ve made (in the sense of “made up”) “God,” or the idea of God, in our own image. We notice that we ourselves have these extraordinary qualities of reason and freedom, and then we project them onto a supreme being. 

MW: It comes to the point of truth, right? And you say that truth is objective, that it’s something we don’t invent but explore or discover. Why is that idea so important?  

RPG: If there’s no truth, then anything goes. If there’s no truth, it can’t even be true that there’s no truth, because that would then be a truth in contradiction of the proposition. So, the radical denial of truth turns out to be self-refuting. 

MW: But that’s where we are today. The truth, your truth, my truth, right?  

RPG: A lot of young people, but not exclusively young people, have lost the sense of objective truth. It’s not that they think there is no truth. They think there’s “your truth” and “my truth.” And while initially that may sound as though it’s a predicate for tolerance and liberty, as a matter of fact, and in practice, it’s the very opposite. It’s a predicate for authoritarianism and repression, because if I have “my truth” and you have “your truth,” and your truth and my truth are contradictory, then we have no basis on which to have a conversation. We have no basis to sort this thing out, to get to the bottom of this, to figure out what’s actually—objectively—true. It’s just, “You have your truth, and I have my truth.” And then the question is, which of us has or can acquire the power to impose our truth on the other or to impose our truth as what’s going to be the case for this society? It takes us into a world where there’s no reasoning or conversation. There’s just cancelling or destroying our opponents.  

MW: How do we solve this? Whether you agree with the Bible or not, it certainly served as a foundational definition of what truth is. With that eroding, what replaces it? Is there a chance that we can come to a consensus?  

RPG: I just want to get people back on the road to truth-seeking. I think that’s the key thing right now. As long as they think, well, “You have your truth, and I have my truth,” and you figure out what your truth is by consulting your feelings, your viscera, and I figure out what my truth is by consulting my viscera, that’s going to lead to a very bad, very dark, very destructive place. So, I want people to say, “You know what? There is such a thing as the truth. All of us are fallible. All of us can get it wrong, but we should be about the business of pursuing it. But we can only pursue it if we recognize each other’s freedom to express an opinion on what the truth is. And then if we engage each other, we’ve got to engage each other in a spirit of civil dialogue where our common goal is not to defeat the other guy, but to try to get at the truth.” We need to engage each other in a truth-seeking spirit, understanding that while we may have something to teach our interlocutors, we may also have something to learn from them.  

MW: And based on what you described, if we follow the pathway of asking questions to seek truth, we will land at God? 

RPG: My own view is that if we seek the truth in a truly open-minded spirit, if we do not allow ourselves to be distracted or taken off path by wayward feelings, desires, appetites, then we will come to see that the sound understanding of the world and the human condition is the one that you get in the Bible. It’s the one that’s proclaimed by Jewish and Christian faith. 

MW: Historians describe the Middle Ages as the “Age of Faith,” the Enlightenment as the “Age of Reason.” If you had to give our time, our age today, a name, how would you describe it?  

RPG: I would call it—and have called it—the Age of Feeling, and I’ll tell you why. Ask yourself, “Why do some historians call the Middle Ages the Age of Faith? The reason is that, for the great medieval thinkers, not just the Christian ones, for example, Anselm or Aquinas, but also for Jewish thinkers like Maimonides, and Islamic thinkers like Al-Farabi, the touchstone of truth and therefore of goodness, of right, of virtue, of justice is conformity with the teachings of religion. Now, that’s an oversimplification, and it can be misleading if you take it to mean that the great thinkers of the Middle Ages deprecated reason. They did not. They certainly believed in faith, but they believed in the harmony of faith and reason. 

These were great intellectuals as well as people of faith. Nevertheless, there’s some truth in the proposition that the medieval period was the Age of Faith because there’s truth in the claim that for the medievals the ultimate touchstone of truth and goodness was conformity with religion. And then for the Enlightenment, the so-called age of reason, we just ask the same question. What was the touchstone of truth or goodness, virtue, right, justice for the great thinkers of the Enlightenment? Well, it was conformity with the findings of rational inquiry, especially but not exclusively in the natural sciences, which becomes then the model for all rational inquiry. Now again, that’s an oversimplification. It too can be misleading. It’s misleading if you take it to mean that all of the great enlightenment thinkers were atheists or secularists. They certainly weren’t. There were some who were deeply hostile to religious faith, especially in France, but certainly not all were. Many were themselves people of faith. You can begin that list with Sir Isaac Newton. Still, there’s some truth in the idea that the Enlightenment (or Enlightenments, for the German, French, Scottish, and English Enlightenments were interestingly different in important respects) was the age of reason. 

Well, what do so many people today treat as the touchstone of truth and therefore goodness, of virtue of right or justice? It’s not faith, and it’s not reason. And it’s not what I think it should be, namely, faith and reason working together, mutually supporting each other, working in harmony. Rather, it’s feeling. “How do I feel about this?” You even have people now imagining that you’re a male or a female, not depending on some objective biological reality, some fact, but on whether you feel like you’re male or female, biology allegedly being irrelevant to the question of what “gender” you are. That shows you’re really pretty far down the road into supposing that feeling is the touchstone of truth and of reality. Now the trouble with that, and it really is a bad view, is that we know from long human experience that feeling is a very, very unreliable guide to truth. 

Our feelings can be wayward. They can lead us far astray. Our reason is fallible, to be sure. We’re imperfect. We’re frail, fallen, fallible creatures. Even if we’re devoted to our faith, we can get faith wrong. We can make mistakes in the name of our faith. Many bad things have been done in the name of religions, even good religion. But we’ve got a much better shot getting things right, and not being led astray, if we are guided by faith and reason rather than by feeling. 

MW: In this culture of seeking identity, emotions and personal experience, what role can the Bible play in giving guidance or a compass? 

RPG: Let’s return to the first chapter of Genesis—to the imago Dei. That provides an account of how it is that human beings are bearers of profound, inherent, and equal dignity. And that principle of profound, inherent, and equal dignity is the ur principle, the foundational principle, of all sound morality. Whether we’re thinking about politics or whether we’re thinking about how we conduct our family lives or relationships with our friends, indeed in any domain in which we make morally significant choices, the most foundational principle is that principle of inherent dignity. And if our dignity is inherent, then we have it in virtue of our humanity and all human beings have it equally. This is the teaching of the Bible, set forth in its very opening words. 

Then we can move to Genesis 2. A lot of our contemporary debates and problems have to do with marriage and family life. We can’t even define marriage today. Well, let’s look at Genesis 2. What does Genesis 2 tell us? That “a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.” There we have the basic understanding of marriage as a comprehensive sharing of life whose foundation and matrix is the biological complementarity, the sexual reproductive complementarity, of man and woman. That’s fundamentally what marriage is. We see this articulated right there in the second chapter, the very beginning of the second chapter, of the book of Genesis. As a guide to life, the Ten Commandments aren’t bad. Think of what the world would be like if we honored our fathers and our mothers, if we didn’t think killing was the right answer to solving personal or social problems, if we stuck to the principle of not bearing false witness against our neighbor or coveting or stealing his property. Well, that shows you a good deal of wisdom right there in the Bible. And I haven’t even gotten beyond the first couple of books of the Old Testament.  

MW: It seems like we have these two competing fears, right? One, the fear of losing any biblical values that we had in the past, and the other one, that religion wants to impose a certain way of life, a certain approach on everybody. Is there hope? Is there a way if we took the label of the Bible out of the equation and narrowed it down to some extent, like Jefferson did, to the principles of the Bible, that we can find consensus?  

RPG: I doubt that we can find consensus, not in this vale of tears. We human beings are a fractious bunch. What’s more, I don’t think the goal should be consensus. I think the goal is getting to the truth and then trying to live consistently with what we soundly judge to be true. There’s always going to be conflict. There’s always going to be politics. There’s always going to be disagreement. Now, how are we going to handle all that? Will our disagreements be ultimately destructive of our community? Or can we achieve civil disagreement? Are we going to be dogmatists who don’t recognize our own fallibility, or are we going to be believers in truth, but believers in truth who recognize that we’re never going to know it perfectly, we’re never going to know it fully? 

We need to be respectful of each other and try to learn from each other. To do that, we need to recognize our own fallibility and be willing to change our minds when we’re shown that we’ve gotten things wrong. 

You can, by the way, have consensus about something that’s false. It’s not going to get us anywhere very good if we manage to get agreement, but we get agreement on things that aren’t true.  

MW: You’re still a teacher. You say that’s the core of who you are. In teaching young students today and being who you are, believing what you believe, to a generation that wonders if the Bible still has anything meaningful to say for their lives today, if they don’t have a Christian background or a Jewish background for that matter, what would you tell them that they can still draw from the Bible?  

RPG: There’s a tremendous amount of wisdom through the whole Bible. You don’t have to start at the beginning. I myself like to start at the beginning, but maybe you don’t. Instead of Genesis, maybe you should read the Sermon on the Mount if you’re not familiar with the Bible. See what there is to be learned in Jesus’s teaching here about who is blessed. “Blessed are the meek.” “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice.” There are all sorts of things to be learned from these teachings. And, of course, there are Jesus’s parables, such as the story of the good Samaritan. Anybody of any tradition can learn from that. Anyone from any culture or tradition of religion can feel the force of the teaching when we learn that the priest passes by the man who’s been beaten and injured, but doesn’t do anything to help him. The Levite passes by, doing nothing. But it’s the stranger, the enemy, who takes pity, who has compassion, who cares for the man who has been beaten and is in need of help.  

That’s a beautiful story, and there’s great wisdom in there about how we should behave toward other people. Or go back to the story of David and Bathsheba and Uriah the Hittite and Nathan. Do you want to learn about justice? Where can you learn more about justice than in the story of David coveting Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba, whom he sees bathing, and he commits adultery with her. She conceives a child. Uriah comes back. David tries to get him to go and visit his wife so he can believe that the baby is his. Uriah won’t go because of loyalty to Israel. So David orders him into the heat of battle where he’s killed. Nathan, the prophet, comes to see David and tells him a story. “There was a man who had many flocks and herds. He was a rich man, a wealthy man. And when a visitor came to him, he didn’t want to take from his own flock or herd to give the man a feast. So, he stole the one little ewe sheep that a poor man had.” David, on hearing this story, flies into a rage and says, “The man must die because he showed no pity.” And Nathan looks at him and says, “You are the man.” Boom! The prophet confronts the king. That tells you about justice. I don’t care who you are. You may have never heard of the Bible. If you hear that story, you’ve just learned something very important about justice.  

MW: What’s the reception when you propose something like this to your students?  

RPG: Students are very receptive to these kinds of things. There’s no resistance among students. If there’s any resistance, it’s among very dogmatic faculty who have a measure of hostility, an irrational aversion, to religion and don’t like it to be brought into anything. But even that’s a relatively small minority of people, at least in my own experience.  

MW: I want to paraphrase a section from your book Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth. There’s a passage in there, a final word about American greatness. And in there you say, rather than defining greatness in terms of military power, wealth, or national prestige, you argue that the nation’s greatness is ultimately measured by its moral character and its commitment to truth and justice. Listening to the public discourse today, there doesn’t seem to be, whether it’s on social media or in the capital, many people who are still on the same page there. What gives you hope for this nation? 

RPG: Really what gives me hope above all is the young men and women, the not only brilliant, but incredibly brave, young men and women that I am privileged to teach. Many of them are themselves religious believers and they don’t hide their faith. Many of them have views that are out of step with a lot of their peers and with mainstream elite culture on questions like the sanctity of human life in all stages and conditions; marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife. They have views like my own on these issues, but they don’t hide them. They actually defend them in my classes, in the larger university context, and then they go out into the world and they defend them. I see my students now all over the country. You may be familiar with some of them. Ryan Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Sherif Girgis at Notre Dame and Harvard, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik at Yeshiva University, Melissa Moschella at the University of Notre Dame, Daniel Mark at Villanova, Micah Watson at Calvin University, David Tubbs at Princeton, Joel Alicea at Catholic University, Daniel Frost at BYU. 

I could go on and on. I have so many, I probably shouldn’t single any out because then there’s so many I leave unmentioned. They are, as I say, not only brilliant, but courageous—absolutely fearless and driven by a commitment to the truth. They are determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers, and they make me proud and fill me with hope. Now you’re right, in that new book of mine called Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, I do make the point at the very end that it’s a mistake to suppose that a nation’s greatness lies in its wealth or its military power or its prestige. Those aren’t bad things, but that’s not ultimately what greatness is. A nation is great if its people are great. A nation is great if its people are people of good character, people of virtue. It’s not wealth, it’s not power, it’s not prestige that ultimately matters.  

It’s virtue. Are we a virtuous people or are we not a virtuous people? And if we are not a virtuous people, how do we get ourselves back on the road to virtue? And, by the way, as our founders pointed out, if we are not a virtuous people, if we fall away from virtue, we’ll not be able to sustain the republican civic order that they bequeathed to us. That order itself depends on at least a significant amount of virtue in the people. That’s why Adams made that statement I quoted earlier, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” To be able to handle freedom, you need to have virtue. If you don’t have virtue, freedom becomes license, and licentiousness brings self-destruction.