The Constitutional Personality and Christian Pedagogy
American conservatives have long recognized that the American constitutional framework was one expression of the cultural, religious, moral, and traditional order embodying the American tradition alive during the founding era. Russell Kirk called this order America’s “unwritten constitution.”[1] Claes Ryn called it the “constitutional personality.”[2] Richard Gummere has described, “The American Colonial Mind.”[3] In any case, it is a recognition that ordered liberty is dependent on a people’s pre-political conception of themselves and the world they inhabit. Two hundred and fifty years after its inception, American constitutional order is stressed to a substantial degree. The primary cause of its decay is not the external pressures America has had to face, but a loss of the cultural, moral, historical, and religious roots that gave rise to American constitutionalism in the first place. The loss of this cultural understanding has allowed external pressures to further undermine the American social fabric. Without a recovery of the pre-political shared cultural fabric, American constitutional order will continue to decay as it is eroded by unmoored individualism, unfettered immigration, and cultural disorder. Without the constraint of the constitutional personality, the American government risks becoming an ever-expanding administrative state, as it attempts to enshrine a broader cultural consensus in place of a cohesive unwritten constitution.
Despite this threat, classical Christian primary education is best situated to recover the constitutional personality in the next generation by grounding the foundations of the American project in self-conscious transcendent reality mediated through the American experience. The primary objective of classical Christian primary education is not a recovery of the constitutional personality, but that recovery is a necessary consequence of classical Christian education. A classical Christian education inculcates a respect for the past and deference to tradition while also providing the transcendent moral authority necessary for the stewardship of a properly ordered American liberty.
American constitutionalism is a historically rooted phenomenon. It did not arise from a vacuum or abstract ideas. Rather, it came from particular people with a shared vision of life. A basic worldview, informed by tradition, history, morality, anthropology, and religion shaped the rise of the American order. John Adam’s famous argument that the American system of government was “made for a moral and religious people” and that “it is unfit to govern any other” gets to the heart of this idea.[4] In Adam’s statement is the presupposition that there was a kind of pre-political conditioning in the people that made the American system of government possible. The Federalist Papers are full of this same presupposition. James Madison argued in Federalist 55 that Republican government presupposed the existence of virtue in the people more than any other form of government.[5] In short, American order and government exists as it does because of the unwritten constitution found in the fabric of American culture and carried in the people themselves. Despite the documents and procedures drawn up for government at the founding, if those notions and values are not preserved in the people themselves, constitutionalism will decline and descend.
A significant way this unwritten constitution is passed down is through education. The constitutional personality survives from father to son by the passing on of moral frameworks, social expectations, religious dispositions, and historical narratives. Education is more than the flimsy transfer of information from person to person. It is an enculturating process that invites the young to uphold an inheritance given to them as a gift by parents, teachers, mentors, and society. In short, education is the transmission of the unwritten constitution of a people from generation to generation.
Even those who have sought to change the content of the education through progressive restructuring have recognized the worldview implications of education. America’s largest modern teacher’s union, the National Education Association, claims that the purpose of the educational project is to capture the “whole person” and to invest in the social, emotional, physical, and spiritual needs of the student.[6] So, it is not whether but which. It is not whether education is an act of worldview transmission, but what worldview will it transmit. The maintenance of the American unwritten constitution, as a worldview, must begin with a faithful communication of it to our young.
Fundamental to this constitutional personality, passed down through education of the young, is the religious foundation shared by the people. Russell Kirk, in his book The Roots of American Order, argued that religion has primacy, even in the unwritten constitution. He wrote, “All the aspects of any civilization arise out of a people’s religion: its politics, its economics, its arts, its sciences, even its simple crafts are the by-products of religious insights and religious cult.”[7] By this he argued that what a people worship will inform what a people do, how they organize themselves, and what series of values will have the governing sway over their cooperation with one another. To neglect the religious foundations of the constitutional personality is to neglect the tap root of the civilization.
Any serious recovery of the American unwritten constitution necessarily will include the recovery of this Christian heritage. This recovery cannot be a merely historical acknowledgement of the Christian influence on American cultural life but must include an embrace of a kind of Christian piety. The value of religion to the constitutional personality is not merely its ethical teachings, but on the explanatory power of where those moral teachings originate. Kirk again wrote on religion that, “at the heart of every culture is a body of ethics, of distinctions between good and evil; and in the beginning, at least, those distinctions are founded upon the authority of revealed religion.”[8] It is not enough to recover the moral framework of the American unwritten constitution by acknowledging a debt to Christianity; rather, the mantle of sincere piety must be restored as the moral worldview is lived out in the people themselves.
Given the relationship between education, religion, and the constitutional personality, the resurgence of a classical Christian education movement in the United States should greatly encourage those seeking to revive and pass down the unwritten constitution consistent with the American order to the next generation. It is not a pedagogy seeking to baptize American order and history in religious language. However, there is substantial partnership between the American order and classical Christian education. While an endeavor in the recovery of the American constitutional personality is not the chief aim of classical Christian education, it is a necessary consequence. This is because the values and dispositions consistent with the unwritten constitution of the American founding are bound up with roots of both classical and Christian traditions. Today, classical Christian education is a self-aware pedagogical and curricular approach that nourishes and cherishes those roots.
Inherent to classical Christian education is a respect for the past and a deference to tradition; both Christian and American. A faithful classical Christian education has no room for the chronological snobbery rampant in modern times. In the same way that Carl Richard has convincingly articulated the Founder’s vast intellectual debt to the ancients, classical Christian education acknowledges a debt to those who came before, and therefore an inheritance passed down to those in the present.[9] Classical Christian education cannot but venerate the category of tradition, for the entire philosophy of the worldview transmitted in this pedagogical approach is historically rooted.
An acknowledgement of a debt to the past and a reverence for the tradition passed down from the generations is not exclusive to a classical Christian education. However, the distinctly Christian contribution in this pedagogical approach is the reception of tradition as a gift. Tradition is not only an inheritance received through title of natural relationship, but also a gift of God meant to be stewarded and enjoyed. The Christian conviction inculcated through a classical Christian educational framework is that tradition is more than an acknowledgement of the way things have been; it is a good meant to stir the affections of the living for both those who have gone before and the God who has given blessings through the generations. The true usefulness, then, of tradition in this framework the inculcation of piety, or the Christian disposition toward life downstream of what Clark and Jain define as “the proper love and fear of God and man.”[10] Proponents of classical Christian education seek to understand the tradition of the past to stir the piety of the student.
Yet, Classical Christian education also provides a moral framework for judgement over tradition and the depravity of man. In Federalist 14, James Madison wrote that it is, “the glory of the people of America that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity for custom or for names.” This disposition, however, is only possible with a worldview that with a transcendent moral standard that governs the traditions passed down through the ages. Similarly, the classical Christian approach to education reveres tradition as a category while supporting a discriminating moral judgement on particular traditions themselves.
This Christian moral framework that also makes sense of the tension of what James Madison called the, “degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust,” and the, “other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.”[11] The tension between order and liberty maintained in the constitutional personality at the American founding is also upheld by a classical Christian education that can account for a moral vision of man and society.
One can look at society and understand this reality through empirical experience, but the classical Christian educational framework can attempt to answer two pressing questions that immediately arise from an acknowledgement of this tension. First, why is this the nature of man? Second, by what standard ought the actions of man be determined to be either good or evil? Merely acknowledging the flawed nature of man himself does not answer these questions. Rather than only a description of what is, teachers in a classical Christian setting can attempt to account for why these ontological realities exist in the first place. These are, after all, questions that demand a religious response. Explanations for why human nature is what it is and what moral standard is to arbitrate the flawed actions of man requires a moral consensus outside of the individual; a standard communicated through universal religious truths lived out and passed down in the experiences of society. This standard of traditionally embodied universal moral norms is the notion of virtue that classical Christian education chiefly seeks to transmit.
It is the neglect of this kind of moral framework that gave Richard Weaver cause to believe that “modern man has become a moral idiot.”[12] Without a shared pre-political moral conception, American constitutionalism frays and fractures. For this reason, Ryn has described the understanding of man’s nature at the founding as informed by “a particular type of moral responsibility with deep roots in classical and Christian civilization.”[13]
The overlap between the moral framework of the American unwritten constitution and the goals of classical Christian education on these points are striking. The nature of man and moral standards of society around bound one to another. The worldview that constrained President Washington to see that “religion and morality are indispensable supports” to political prosperity is recovered when one places religion and morality at the bedrock of the educational effort.[14] As one is faithfully taught in a classical Christian paradigm, he perceives a distrust in the inherent goodness or perfectibility of man, the need for moral guidance as a corrective to individual sinfulness, and a Christian standard by which that moral guidance may be known. He is recovering the worldview prerequisite to American constitutionalism.
While other educational models may perpetuate these aspects of the constitutional personality, classical Christian education does so from a position that can account for where these dispositions come from. Therefore, it can also account for why they have motivating force in society. This is because classical Christian education appeals to the transcendent authority of God as supreme over the affairs of men and has communicated truth, objective and knowable, through the Scriptures and the experience of men. Education is the most explicit worldview transmission project a culture undertakes. Neglect of the religious foundations of that worldview is a disregard for the most important questions that worldview must answer. Without answers to these most basic questions, there is not a compelling reason why that worldview should continue to be held. A recovery of the worldview of the constitutional personality will require a recovery of the explicit religious foundations of that worldview.
The compatibility between the constitutional personality and the modern resurgent movement of classical Christian education has most to do with the reality that they are worldviews with similar basic presuppositions. Richard Gummere once described the American Colonial mind as a worldview in which, “the classical heritage ranks as a good third to the Bible and the English Common Law.”[15] Ultimately, then, the kind of education that produced the men that heled shape American constitutionalism is the same kind of education that is best situated to recover that constitutionalism.
Classical Christian education is not the only movement in the American educational landscape where there is hope of recovering aspects of the constitutional personality. It is encouraging to see the fruit of other pedagogical approaches that can approximate this task. However, if we, like Kirk, recognize the fundamentally religious nature of the moral and political questions of our day, we too will see the need for a religious foundation tied to tradition on which the efforts to transmit a worldview must rest. If American constitutionalism is going to be safeguarded for another two hundred and fifty years, it will require the recovery and proliferation of the pre-political constitutional personality. We must hand down the worldview that gave rise to our national project. This recovery will not be an easy endeavor. But, one of the blessings downstream of a joyfully rigorous classical Christian primary education is the revivification of the foundations of American order.
Endnotes
[1] Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order (New York: Regnery, 2003), 416.
[2] Claes G. Ryn, The Failure of American Conservatism and the Road Not Taken (New York: Republic, 2023), 37.
[3] Richard M. Gummere, The American Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 1.
[4] John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: with a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations, by his Grandson Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1856). 10 volumes. Vol. 9. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/adams-the-works-of-john-adams-vol-9-letters-and-state-papers-1799-1811#lf1431-09_head_222.
[5] James Madison, The Federalist Papers (New York: Signet Classics, 2003), 343.
[6] “National Education Association Policy Statements 2021-2022,” 2022 NEA Representative Assembly, https://www.nea.org/sites/default/files/2022-06/NEA%20Policy%20Statements%202021-2022.pdf.
[7] Kirk, The Roots of American Order, 14.
[8] Kirk, The Roots of American Order, 14.
[9] Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 12.
[10] Clark and Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition, 18.
[11] James Madison, The Federalist Papers, 343.
[12] Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013), 1.
[13] Ryn, The Failure of American Conservatism, 170.
[14] George Washington, “Farewell Address to the People of the United States,” United States Senate, Last modified Dec, 2017. https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/Washingtons_Farewell_Address.pdf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email.
[15] Gummere, The American Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition, xii.
