Secular Superficiality Versus the Rootedness of Culture
by Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine:
The other day we Americans were informed by National Public Radio that it was Easter Sunday, when Christians celebrate the fact that Jesus did not have to go to hell or purgatory, but rose straight into heaven. It is like saying that Christopher was named Columbus after the capital of Oklahoma, or that Joan of Arc sailed with Noah across the English Channel to fight against the Saxons.
This is what you get for your tax dollars. You also get schools in which nobody learns anything about Scripture or about the civilization built upon it, because that would involve what is called, as if it were the most shocking of indelicacies, “religion,” and, as we know, because National Public Radio would tell us, religion has no place in our public schools.
Now, nobody will say openly that Chaucer, Dante, Giotto, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Rembrandt, Milton, Bach, Handel, Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Hawthorne, Melville, Tennyson, Browning, and basically everyone else who breathed the air of western civilization and who was not a committed atheist have no place in our public schools. So you may hear that we should of course allow the study of Dante as a poet, but not as specifically a religious poet, or of Bach as a composer, but not specifically as a religious composer. That is like saying that it is all right to study the moon, so long as you keep geology and astronomy out of it, or that it is all right to play Bach’s Jesu, Meine Freude, so long as you don’t sing the words, or you may sing the words, so long as you keep to the German and nobody translates them for you.
Well, the obvious result of such thinking is that Bach and the rest are sent to the principal and then dismissed from school. I have seen it from my college freshmen over the last thirty-odd years. If you have to tiptoe through a mine-field to read the gospel-saturated novels of Dickens, you’ll find it a relief not to bother to teach Dickens at all. Since so much of the greatest English poetry written before 1900, and a good deal of it afterwards as well, is religious in its soul—The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, The Vanity of Human Wishes, The Idylls of the King, The Waste Land, Four Quartets—and since poetry is a little off-putting, and since schoolteachers and even college English professors don’t know a lot about it, it’s easy to just shrug it away. Don’t read In Memoriam. Read some miserable young adult fiction instead.
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