The Eric Metaxas Show - Robert R. Reilly

Episode Date: July 9, 2020

Robert R. Reilly, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, takes a look at the unique greatness of this country, and the push to fundamentally transform it, with a defense of the founding presented in his book, "America on Trial."

You know, sometimes Eric pretends to be interested in his guest. But he's really just doing a crossword puzzle and rolling his eyes in what they say. He told me never to say that ever. But look, I made a mistake. Oh, I'm human. In my way. Only I'm not. And now your host, Eric Mataxis.

Hey there, folks. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. Have I got a guest for you? This guest comes by way of recommendation from John Zmirak. So I think you know what we're getting into here. I have as my guest today, somebody who's the director of the Westminster Institute. His name is Robert Riley. He was with the Reagan White House.

10 years ago, he wrote a book called The Closing of the Muslim Mind, and he is out with a new book called America on Trial, a defense of the founding published by Ignatius Press. You know, I'm a big fan of Ignatius Press. There's a foreword written by Larry Arne of Hillsdale, and here he is, Robert Riley, welcome to this program. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be with you.

You, you know, when I read about the book, John, Zemarck, sent me the information on it. I got so excited because what you write about is something that's extremely close to my heart. So let's get right into it. The book by you, Robert, R. Riley, America on trial, a defense of the founding. what is the backstory here? What led you to write this book? What led me to write it was to answer some of the attacks that have been made on the American founding.

Curiously enough, I don't mean here so much the attacks from the left, which are ordinary, something that's to be expected and has been going on for so many, many years. But these are critiques from what we call conservative and Christian religious circles who are saying that why are we in the mess today? Why do we have homosexuals so-called marriage

and a flood of drugs and the dissolution of the family? You know the litany. And the answer they come up with is it's because of the founding, which they take as having been a poison pill with a time release formula and we're the victims.

The problem with the founding, they say, is that it was infected with a notion of radical individual autonomy from the Enlightenment. And as Christian faith has receded in this country, this radical autonomy has come to the surface, as manifested in so many Supreme Court decisions and other things, most recently, Gorsuch, all of which really are a denial of the fact that there are such things as the laws of nature and nature's God. So that's where they locate the problem. Now, first of all, I think that they're wrong.

I don't think they can sustain that position. But I didn't want to write a book that just critiques their views. and I use two thinkers as principal sort of model exponents of the poison pill thesis, who are both very good in every other respect. So I say, well, if it's not a radical enlightenment product, what is it the product up? So I asked the question, what made the American founding conceivable? What's the lineage of the ideas that made it?

possible. And the answer to that question took me back to the ancient world, to the monotheism of the Jews, to the gift of reason from the Greeks, by which I mean philosophy, and then, of course, perhaps the most revolutionary event in history, the arrival of Christ in the incarnation. Then how was this all reflected in political order and how did it manifest itself? Christianity is not a political philosophy, but nonetheless it has truths that impact on how we live. Then I examined the Middle Ages of all things to see how every single basic principle of constitutional rule was surprised, articulated and developed in that era, rather. So just to finish the critique, well, why then weren't these principles just directly brought to us in the American founding? What disrupted that? It wasn't a straight line. And the answer to that is two things.

Divine right absolutism that was articulated in the late 16th, early 17th century, and secular absolutism. the all-powerful sovereign state, the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes. Then I try to demonstrate the American founding was a reaction against those things. It was a re-articulation and further development of those constitutional principles that had been introduced in the Middle Ages. So it was a return to the primacy of reason and the rule of law, which we had in, inherited in the American colonies and which was denied to them by the absolute just claims of the British Parliament. Well, that's in a nutshell. That was, yeah.

Well, it's a big nutshell, but I like it. Let me keep on this track here. First of all, would it be wrong? Well, actually, before that, who are the two proponents that you touch on in the book? You said there were two people you use as models of this in terms of expressing your thesis, or did I misread you there? Yeah, they express the opposite thesis. They give the poison pill thesis about the American founding.

Who are they? It's Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame, and it's Michael Hanby at the John Paul II Institute here in Washington, D.C. As I say, these are two very impressive men who are right about many things, but I believe profoundly wrong about the American founding. they're very good giving a critique of the disordered state of moral degeneration in which we live. I just think they ascribe it to the wrong source. Okay, let me ask you, would it be wrong to sum up your argument or maybe to try to understand it in this way?

It's often been said too often, you know, that we have the, the Enlightenment mixed in with kind of a Christian view among the founders, that these two things kind of have grown up like wheat and tears, and there's really no separating them. A lot of people have said that. When I wrote my book, If You Can Keep It, what I found was that the Christian element was much stronger than I had ever dreamt, and that the so-called Enlightenment founders like Franklin or Jefferson,

they really had a biblical view of things. They didn't have that radical Enlightenment view that I had been told over and over again that they had. So is that part of what you're saying that at its core our founding is inescapably a biblical and Judeo-Christian and that the people who talk about the Enlightenment are overstating that case? It wouldn't have happened without it. And I do agree with you, and it's a major portion of this book to demonstrate the truth of what you've said. One way in which I do that is comparing the French and the American revolutions, because I think the critics of the American Revolution are saying, well, they're basically the same revolution. And, of course, we're seeing that in the streets of America today from the people who think that is true.

However, the French Revolution was premised on the idea of the perfectability of man here now that if we can only put within the power of the state absolute control, man can be perfected. The American founding was an explicit denial of that. As you just mentioned, it was a Christian nation that had a profound, sense of the imperfectibility of man due to original sin, and that the only perfectibility available to man was through the grace of Jesus Christ, and not through his own powers. I was going to say, an ordered liberty would be the best we could ever do. We're going to have to go to break here, but I'm very excited. We're talking with Robert R. Riley, the author of

a new book, America on trial, a defense of the founding. Don't go away. I'm talking to Robert R. Riley, who has a new book out called America on Trial, The Defense of the Founding. There's a foreword by the president of Hillsdale College, Larry Arne. It's published by Ignatius Press. It seems to me, Robert, if I may, that you, in this book, by putting, by comparing the French Revolution to the American Revolution, you make it really, really clear. But the point is that there are many Americans that are very confused on this.

They think fondly of the French Revolution. What you just said, and maybe you can jump off of this, is that the French Revolution believed in the perfectibility of man. And that, to me, is a utopianist project that ultimately is a satanic project. It's like the Tower of Babel. We, on our own efforts, can reach heaven. That really is, you know, Satan in the Garden of Eden. tempting Adam and Eve, you know, you can be as gods, that we have that power somehow,

which, of course, we don't because we're sinners. The founders had a biblical view. They said, no, people are sinners. People, if they're going to govern themselves, we need to have some checks and balances. We need to encourage virtue. Otherwise, the whole thing goes to hell. That's not been taught in our schools. And I just think it's very important for people to understand that the essence of your comparison between the French Revolution, which was a bloodbath and which ended in horrors, and our revolution, which ended in the freest, most prosperous country in the history of the planet. Yeah, I think the only point I would add, which is, you know, it's in what you already said, but just to make it more prominent, is that Christianity made very clear that man

had a personal relationship with a transcendent God, and it was through that relationship that he would reach his salvation, not through government agency. It was not the state, it was not the prince. It was not the semi-divine ruler that gave him. access to God. He had that access directly outside of the state. That necessarily limits the state. And you already articulated the other reasons why there had to be separation of powers, limited rule, and so forth. Remove that view of man, and you're going to get to the Leviathan absolute state. And in the French Revolution, premised on the perfectability of man, they saw that their greatest enemy was Christianity itself, and it had to be eliminated.

Otherwise, man would have the dual sovereignty, not to the state, but to his transcendent God and Christ is his Savior. So there was a radical de-Christianization campaign in Revolutionary France, crosses removed from graveyards, churches desecrated and turned into temples of reason. Religious orders disbanded. 25,000 priests deported. Many executed, nuns executed. The grotesqueness of this, and I think you've used, Eric, if I may call you that, the exact right term, satanic. One of the members of the National Assembly referred to the guillotine as the red altar. on which the sacrifices were made to their new God and the execution of so many peoples by the guillotine.

One only has to ask oneself, would a de-Christianization campaign in the American colonies during the revolution be conceivable? It's inconceivable. Well, the contrary. I mean, it's precisely the opposite. In other words, it seems to me that they, you know, they, it wasn't a side issue.

They, they understood that, you know, without virtue and without faith, people can't govern themselves. In other words, the idea of self-government cannot, it cannot work unless the people actually govern themselves because they're listening to a higher authority than that of the state. If the founders were unanimous on anything, it was on what you have just said. That virtue is the thing without which the American Republic could not survive.

The loss of virtue meant the loss of the republic. What was the principal source of virtue? I was reading some remarks of Gouverner Morris, a very significant American founder the other night. By the way, who was in Paris as the U.S. representative during the terror, he saw, wrote about, and correctly diagnosed. what was wrong with the French Revolution. He said that you can't survive without virtue. What is the principal source of virtue? It's religion.

You know, I often remember George Washington's first inaugural address when he spoke of, quote, the indissoluble union of virtue with happiness. unquote. So when we read in the great preamble of the Declaration of Independence that we have these inalienable rights from God, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, what did that mean? It didn't mean some libertarian license for libidinous living. It meant the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of virtue. There is no happiness outside of virtue. Again, whatever Christian, sect, members of the Constitutional Assembly or the early Congress belonged to, they were

unanimous in that. John Adams, you know, one of the great, great founders was not what you'd call a conventional Christian, though he very much was a Christian, wrote to Jefferson, laid in their lives and said, you know, what made this possible? what bound the American people together for this great enterprise. And he said it's the whatever their sect was. He said it was the principles of Christianity that made this possible. And he said, I will here say that those principles and the nature of man are immutable.

They will never change. They're true here now and in the future, everywhere. for all people. Now, either that is true, and we can keep what we have if we return to virtuous living, or it's not true, and we're on our way to the rule of will, not the rule of reason. And that rule of will is, again, being manifested in our streets today or that independent rump state in the Seattle suburb. Yeah, well, it's also fascinating to see this being played out. In other words, I guess I was talking to Victor Davis Hansen on this program, and I posited the notion that what we're seeing played out now is a kind of civil war between those on the side of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment and those on the side of the American founding. It's almost as though there are wheat and,

in tears in our country and that, you know, in 1860, we had to deal with, with some of the tears, you know, that you come to a moment where you can no longer coexist with the tears and there's an existential battle. And praise God, the union forces, you know, defeated the pro-slavery forces. And we dealt with that then. It strikes me that we're dealing with something similar now that we've allowed in a sense some of this enlightenment thinking to go on and that now we're seeing the fruit and we're having to deal with it rather openly.

Well, Eric, I think it's enlightenment in the sense that the French Revolution, we're talking about the radical enlightenment. The Enlightenment was not a homogeneous thing. Of course. But as you well know, the French Revolution provided the model for the totalitarian revolutions of the 20th century, which were even more sanguinary.

And I believe you're correct that it is those ideas that are animating many of the people in the street today. Let me try to put it this way. Christians and others believe that they are in need of contrition, that they must submit to the will of God who alone can save them, can alone make them perfect in His grace and love. Many of these people believe that they should already be perfect,

and the reason they're not is someone else's fault. And their sense of grievance arises from that. Someone is keeping us from this perfection. which is indeed our natural state. So let's go get them. And maybe it's the institution. So let's tear those down. Right.

They have no idea of what these fundamental ideas are. But, you know, at the end of the book, I have an epilogue in which I try to sketch out an answer. Hang on. Okay, I'm sorry. No, I just realized we're going to go to a break. When we come back, I hope you will. sketch out that answer from my audience, folks. Don't go away. The Trump campaign has a special offer just for you. President Trump wants to meet you.

This will be the first opportunity he's had to meet with American patriots like you since our country started reopening. His team will cover the flight and hotel and give you VIP access for yourself and a guest. He'll even take a picture with you. All you have to do is text VIP to 88022 today for your chance to meet President Trump. Again, that's VIP-2-88022 for your chance to win and join President Trump in the fight to keep America great for four more years. Folks, I'm talking to Robert Riley. The new book is America on trial, a defense of the founding. Robert R. Riley, you were just saying that in the epilogue of the book, you try to sketch out what you see as an answer. So please help us understand what you say there.

I ask, well, if it's not the founder's fault, whose fault? is it? You know, how did this happen? And what ideas are responsible for it? The short answer was the Germans did it. And the promotion of historicist thinking, which morphed into progressivist thinking, you know that story well. But you're, okay, but just in case somebody's just tuning in, when you say what led to this, you mean to this, the current progressive utopianist misunderstanding that this radical enlightenment view can work in America. And you're saying it, obviously it doesn't, and I agree, but you're saying where it came from, tell us again, through Hegel. I wasn't really clear. Yes, I mean, many Americans went to Germany for

their higher education. German professors were brought here, and they were dominated by this historicist's strain of thinking, which said, you know, truth, quote-unquote, truth is a product of its time of various historical forces. When times change, so do truths. There are no permanent immutable truths. And this historicist notion infected American higher education. Over the course of years, it very much seeped in. And if you went into the streets today and asked people do you agree with the founders that there are immutable transcendent truths that never change, that man's nature never change? I'd be surprised if you found many who agree.

But, Eric, I'd like to encapsulate this whole thing in a statement which makes the consequences so very clear. And this is a line from President Barack Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope. Here we go. quote, implicit in the Constitution's structure, and the very idea of ordered liberty was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or ism, and any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course. So it's not the truth that sets you free. It's the truth that sets you free. it's the truth that enslaves you. So you must remove the shackles of truth so you can be free. That's astounding that that's from the audacity of hope by our former president.

I'd never heard that quoted before. That's a dramatic revelation. So if a president of the United States thinks this, he doesn't believe what the founders did about those principles which they took to be rooted in the transcendent and the unchanging nature of man. There you go. Well, when you say the unchanging nature of man, again,

that's the biblical view. But in case people don't buy into that, you have to ask then, what is the other view? If the nature of man is not immutable, then many things are not true, right? In other words, if we're creating the image of God and we believe in the fall, a number of things follow from that. But if that's not the case, then people inevitably do believe in this kind of progression, this evolution of humanity, which leads to the idea of the perfectibility of mankind. And, you know, that would be nice if it were true.

But any time proponents of that view get any political power, it just leads to a bull. bloodbath, that no one ever seems to get anywhere near any of these utopiest, utopianist society. So it's a dramatic thing that they keep believing this over and over and over again. And the people looting in the streets and tearing down statues seem to believe something good will come of this, even though over and over again, very bad things have come of this in the past. I think you put your finger on it. The notion is that man is mutable. so what is required to change him into our desired idea of him?

And the answer is power and usually absolute power because if something escapes your control, well then the man may escape and you won't change him into what you desire him to be. Now, what is that thing you desire him to be? Well, it's kind of whatever you want, whatever you have a, desire for. In other words, a product of your passions, for the reason no longer rules. Your passions do. And it's the primacy of will. And therefore, you lose the primacy of reason and the rule of law. So you lose everything. And as you said, this intellectually, inevitably results in gulags and

charnel houses and mass slaughter. Because what actually turns out to be the case is that human nature does exist and that you can't change it. And it's not only the biblical view, it's the Aristotelian view. It's how the notion of the laws of nature first arose because of the rational order in creation. And those are the laws that our founders, referred to as the foundation of this enterprise, to leave man free, to live his life

according to the revelation of God and his destiny in him. What the value of Christianity, if I can just say, Christianity revealed the mystery of man in Christ, that now we know what man is for. Okay, hang on. We're going to go to another hard break. This is deep and important. Nobody is going away. I won't even ask them not to. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Robert R. Riley. The new book is America on trial, a defense of the founding. Robert, you were just saying something so profound. I want you to say it again and keep going. Well, it's, it's, you know, the purpose of man, as far as Christians understand it, is in the life of Christ, which he offers to share that this extraordinary teaching and revelation within Christianity is that the destiny of man or his purpose is to become divine, that Christ wants to share the inner life of the Trinity with the person, the demonization of the person. is a gift from God to those who obey him, which is reached finally in the transcendent,

in the parisia in the view of God himself. You know, St. John says, now we don't know what we shall be, but we will when we see him, see who, see God. Then we shall be like him. Like who? Like God. Well, this is a tricky thing because, you know, I think that many people, might mishear you. And so I want to clarify there is a genuinely satanic way to become as gods. And of course,

it doesn't succeed, but it attempts to go by our own accord, by our own merits into heaven. We don't need God. The biblical view, the Christian view, says, we need the cross. We need Jesus. And then by faith in him, humbling ourselves utterly, we will rise, we can rise with him. It's dramatically different because one is exaltation of the self and the other is humiliation of the self-abasement. It's so dramatic, but the idea that you are linking this to the founding is what's so fascinating to me because we know that not all of the founders were theologically Orthodox Christians, but they all seemed to get this. Even Franklin, he was very friendly with George Whitford, He saw the value in these things.

They seemed all to understand that there was no way to have real self-government and real freedom without what you're talking about. Put another way, the independence of the United States was premised upon the total dependence upon God. Who, as you know, in the Declaration of Independence is mentioned as creator, as providence, as judge, to whom they were submitting themselves in this enterprise. No one was more avid in the insistence that they pray in the constitutional convention than Benjamin Franklin, curiously enough. And he had other friendships, too, including with John Carroll, who was a Catholic priest, who traveled with Franklin up to Canada,

in that misbegotten effort to try to get the Canadians to join the American colonists. They became very good friends. Yes, see, the problem with what's called modernity, and on this, Michael Hanby and Patrick Neneen are terrific. It's to not accept this promised divinity in Christ. that it's something God gives you, but to take it. It's a process of self-divinization through our own powers. Yeah.

And that, as you say, is correctly characterized as satanic. It's just precisely what Luther, you know. I remember the famous statement of Nietzsche, how could I stand not to be a God if there were gods? Yeah. Well, it's, I mean, it is funny because when we say satanic project, I mean, literally, going back to Genesis 1 or 3, it's this idea that I can get it myself. I don't need a savior. I can save myself.

And what the founding gives us is the opportunity and the freedom to go the path that Scripture and joins us. that God enjoins us to take, to have that freedom. And it is interesting to me that this other way, which is the radical Enlightenment way of the French Revolution, of any number of revolutions, the Soviet Revolution, and on and on and on, they are always dramatically anti-clerical, dramatically, dramatically secular, violently, let's say, anti-Christian. I just find that very interesting, and I've talked to Johns Merrick about this, but it seems that, you know, the Black Lives Matter movement, it's not about people who really care about George Floyd. It's people about who want to remake America as some kind of a Marxist utopia. They're going one way. And Martin Luther King had a Christian view of race. He wanted to go beyond race. That was the goal. They're sort of stuck in going, uh,

kind of doubling down on the importance of race. And one is Christian and one is Marxist, secular. So that's really what's at play here, at least into my mind. How many of the marchers and demonstrators with their signs have read Martin Luther King's letter from the Birmingham jail? How many of them know how deeply grounded he was in Augustine and Thomas. Aquinas. He appealed to natural law. He appealed to natural rights. He was appealing to the principles of the American founding, of the Declaration of Independence, and doing so within the law and perfectly willing, as he so courageously did, was to accept the consequences of civil

disobedience. He said, I accept this. But this is a demonstration of the fact that American blacks have been denied the full exercise of their rights is articulated in our own founding documents. So he had the right standard and he had the right behavior. Obviously, these people wouldn't know what he's talking about precisely because of what you said, they have the toppling of the statues made this absolutely clear. First we get the Confederate generals, then we get the Union generals, then we get the founders of the United States. Their object is not to transform us to so much as disavow and to destroy the United States.

And of course, another hard break coming up. We'll be right back with Robert R. Riley, don't go away. I met you there was peace unknown. I set out to get you with a fine to... Folks, I'm talking to Robert R. Riley. He is the author of a book, America on trial, a defense of the founding. Robert R. Riley, do you have a copy of that book

that you could hold up for my audience so they can see the founders right there? Thank you. Is that... There you go. I'm afraid the light is... A lot of flair. Well, there are the founders. It's a beautiful book.

And it's an important. important book. And I think that, you know, we're living at a time when these ideas, as we're just discussing in the previous segment, are being writ large today in our streets literally. We are seeing these two worldviews, one which is an utter repudiation of Martin Luther King and his legacy and his efforts and a repudiation, of course, then, of the founders and of those documents, which Martin Luther King called Promissory Notes. That's what we're seeing. And I think the only good news that comes out of it is that folks like you and me and others

are able to articulate the dramatic difference. It's so clear what those folks are doing and saying, and we need to make it all the clearer because I really think that we're in an existential crisis for the soul of America. and that if those forces are allowed to get the upper hand, God forbid Biden, for example, would win in this election and become the puppet of these forces, that's the end of America. That, unfortunately, is not hyperbole. And that that's why I'm so grateful for your book. And I think, Eric, this is absolutely the worst time in which to say the reason why we're in this mess

is because of the American founding, not despite it. And the case I try to make in this book is no, no, no, no, these things are happening in contradiction to the American principles. And our hope of recovery is not in renouncing the American founding, but in returning to those principles. And you have to know what the principles are. And you have to know their pedigree. You have to know the lineage of these ideas, where they came from. and at what price they were embraced, the cost of them, and most above all, the truth of them.

I just want to say that it's just so wonderful to talk to you. You've written other books. I'd like to get you back to talk about them. The one that you had just come out with 10 years ago when we met in Vienna, thanks for reminding me, it's called The Closing of the Muslim Mind. The subtitle is How Intellectual Suicide, created the modern Islamist crisis. You wrote another book called Making Gay Okay.

I would love you to come back and talk about those books. Just wonderful to talk about ideas with you. If I could quickly, Eric, just got to give the subtitle of Making Gay Okay, otherwise it creates the wrong impression. The subtitle is how rationalizing homosexual behavior is changing everything. Well, it's a very, very brave thesis. And as a good Catholic, you're more familiar with natural law than most evangelicals. And so it's very important to me that you're given a chance to articulate how natural law plays out on all these issues. Today, of course, we've been talking about your new book, America, on trial, the defense of the founding. But I think it would be fun to have you back and to talk. talk about that, you know, these very controversial issues, radical Islam and the gay situation

in America. It would be a joy to have you back. So Robert R. Riley, thanks for being with me. I hope a lot of folks will get your book, America on trial, a defense of the founding. Thanks for being my guest. Eric, thank you so much. Great pleasure.