by Gerald R McDermott, Public Discourse
If God saves this nation from utter ruin, He surely will have used the young men and women being produced by classical Christian schools in this land. For they will have the intellectual firepower and strength of character to reform this nation both politically and socially.
Editors’ Note: This essay is adapted from a talk for the Society for Classical Learning at Capstone Classical Academy in Fargo, North Dakota, on March 12, 2026.
Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, wrote recently about a young man at the college named Luke who has started an organization named after the 12th Legion Fulminata of ancient Rome. The emperor Lucinius put members of the 12th Legion in freezing water to die unless they renounced Christianity. In memory of that Legion, Luke and the members of his group go out to a lake in freezing weather before the sun rises and stand in the water singing hymns and reciting Bible passages.
Arnn writes, “This is a very young-mannish thing to do, but what do they learn from it? To serve. To be strong. To be free. To look up. These are the kind of young Americans who will save our country.”
These young students’ steely determination to embrace suffering in pursuit of virtue calls to mind C. S. Lewis’s favorite philosopher, Boethius. Chris Armstrong has written that Lewis thought of himself as a British Boethius because both were living on the cusp of a dark age and both believed the wisdom of the Greco-Roman classics provided sanity in an age overrun by barbarians.