Culture, faith and the arts
🕯️ Culture Comes First: Francis Schaeffer, Western Culture and Politics Downstream
Why so many thinkers say politics is downstream from culture: Francis Schaeffer and L'Abri, How Should We Then Live? and A Christian Manifesto, the roots of Western culture in Jerusalem, Athens and Rome, the writers who argued culture shapes law, and what the idea asks of citizens.
- 1Culture Before Politics: The Idea and Its RootsWhere the phrase came from, what Andrew Breitbart actually said, and the much older idea behind it in Plato, Andrew Fletcher, Tocqueville and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. What the claim means, what it does not mean, and the evidence on both sides.20 min
- 2Francis Schaeffer: A Life of Hard QuestionsThe life of Francis A. Schaeffer (1912 to 1984): a Philadelphia boy who became a pastor, a missionary and then the host of a small Swiss chalet where thousands of young people came with hard questions. How he and Edith founded L'Abri in 1955, who came and why, the books that began with The God Who Is There in 1968, and his habit of taking every question seriously.19 min
- 3Schaeffer Reads the West: The 1976 Book and Film SeriesSchaeffer's 1976 book and 1977 ten-part film series How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture: his reading of the West from Rome to the 1970s, the line of despair, fragmentation, and his warning about a people who want only personal peace and affluence. With a fair account of what historians have said against it.22 min
- 4Schaeffer on Art, Truth and the ChristianThe ideas under all of Schaeffer's cultural criticism: nature and grace, the upper and lower story, the leap, and 'true truth,' from Escape from Reason and The God Who Is There (1968); his reading of art as the voice of a worldview; his call in Art and the Bible (1973) for Christians to make art; his friend Hans Rookmaaker; and what scholars have said against them both.21 min
- 5Schaeffer on Law and Resistance: The 1979 and 1981 BooksSchaeffer's turn to law and politics: Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (1979, with C. Everett Koop) and A Christian Manifesto (1981). Law grounded in God versus law as human will, Samuel Rutherford's Lex, Rex, John Witherspoon, civil disobedience and its limits, his influence on American Christians in the 1980s, and his son Frank Schaeffer's later account.24 min
- 6Roots of Western Culture: Jerusalem, Athens and RomeWhere the American founders got their ideas about law, liberty and the people: the Hebrew law over the king, Greek philosophy, Roman law and the republic, the church and the medieval synthesis, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, as Russell Kirk told the story in 1974 and as Donald Lutz counted it in 1984.24 min
- 7Writers Who Put Culture FirstBurke's little platoons, Tocqueville's mores, Kuyper's sphere sovereignty, Eliot, Dawson, Weaver, Kirk and C. S. Lewis on why culture shapes law, and the same claim made from the opposite direction by Gramsci, the Frankfurt School and the slogan of a long march through the institutions.26 min
- 8Culture and Law in American HistoryAmerican cases where culture moved first and law followed, from the Great Awakening to Uncle Tom's Cabin to the civil rights churches, and cases where law moved first and culture caught up, from school desegregation to seat belts, with the numbers.27 min
- 9What Culture First Asks of CitizensIf politics is downstream from culture, the work falls to ordinary people: families, congregations, associations, schools, local arts and local news, and the habits of self-government. Schaeffer's own call, the duty of ordered liberty, and the dangers of using culture as an excuse to ignore law or to coerce.22 min