A Review of Pete Hegseth’s Battle for the American Mind
Since his nomination as Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth has faced a smear campaign reminiscent of Brett Kavanaugh and various other conservative figures. Such campaigns rely on anonymous allegations, piecemeal truths, exaggeration, and a view of human nature that cannot grasp the transformative power of the Gospel. In a recent conversation with Megyn Kelly, Hegseth articulates Christ working in his own life, particularly over the last few years. I had the privilege in October of hearing Hegseth speak, and was able to talk with him briefly afterward. There was one thing, particularly, which stood out as a testament to this conversion: Hegseth visited classical, Christian schools across the country to find a distinctly Christian culture for his family.
Why would a host of Fox and Friends be willing to move halfway across the country for a school? In 2022, Hegseth published Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation in America. His move to a small Christian school in Tennessee is the logical result of this book. Battle for the American Mind gives a history of education in America, bringing to light much that has been hidden from most Americans. Hegseth then takes on the challenge of how to move forward. His proposal is a recovery of classical, Christian education (CCE); a recovery that balances the history of education (good and bad) with a vision for the future. Although Hegseth only discovered CCE recently, his book displays a commitment to this model of education, recognizing its ability to shape a future Christian society. This project seems even more pertinent in light of the ongoing smear campaign. As the media seems intent on telling us how to understand Hegseth’s past, he is concerned with moving forward––not just individually, but as a family, church, and country.
On the one hand, it would be easy to critique Hegseth’s book because he is so new to CCE. On the other hand, this novelty may put him in the perfect place to write such a book. Socrates understood that, before we can attain true knowledge, our false presuppositions must be stripped away. Hegseth comes to the project with the relentless pursuit of a journalist, and the earnestness of one who wants to understand honestly. The extent of his research demonstrates his willingness to strip away problematic assumptions about education, and a desire to find a real way forward.
David Goodwin, Hegseth’s co-author, walked through this process a while ago. Goodwin discovered CCE in 1994, and left big tech in 2003 to help a classical, Christian school get off the ground. Currently the president of the ACCS (Association of Classical Christian Schools), Goodwin provides the knowledge and resources needed to guide Hegseth’s earnest pursuit of the truth. Goodwin is the Virgil to Hegseth’s Dante. Hegseth has questions, Goodwin has answers, or knows where to send Hegseth to find them. Hegseth and Goodwin, together, come to the project with a distinctly Christian understanding of their task: “It is my brokenness that brings me to this book… Nothing but the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ affords these two authors… the sufficiency to undertake such an audacious task” (xv).
One of the central discoveries by Hegseth and Goodwin is that of paideia: a Greek word which has no immediate English translation. This word was significant enough to prompt Goodwin’s transition from Hewlett-Packard to CCE. Hegseth explains paideia as “the deeply seated affections, thinking, viewpoints, and virtues embedded in children at a young age, or, more simply, the rearing, molding, and education of a child” (44). David Hicks, author of Norms and Nobility, describes paideia as education and culture simultaneously. Goodwin recognized the problem of paideia before he discovered CCE: “Christians and secularists seemed to live out the same story in their lives, more or less––myself included, in many ways” (x). The reason Christians can claim to serve God, but live like secularists, is because Christians and secularists share the same paideia. It should make sense, then, why this word is such an important discovery. Many Christians sense that something is culturally wrong, but haven’t known where to locate the problem. They have trouble discerning between the Christian and secular aspects of modern life. The concept of paideia offers an answer by connecting education and culture. Education is the driving force behind culture: it directs the ideas, beliefs, loves, and fears, and hopes of the people who shape culture. At the same time, education comes from and is influenced by a cultural context. If Christians are concerned with the state of the culture, look to the schools, where children spend 16,000 hours from kindergarten to 12th grade. From what culture do these schools come, and what culture do they seek to establish?
Drawing from his military background, Hegseth uses Afghanistan as an example of paideia’s power. American armed forces entered Afghanistan in 2001, quickly expelling the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Afghanistan appeared to adopt the democratic ideals of America––until 2021. Within weeks of America’s withdrawal, democracy was over, and the Taliban recovered power. Why? Because of paideia. The democratic ideals of America (freedom of religion, freedom of speech, natural rights, etc.) took centuries to develop and put into practice. Afghanistan had a different set of ideals––ideals aligned more with the Taliban’s mode of rule than American democracy. The cultural assumptions behind democracy, passed on through education, cannot be grafted into a society in two decades. It takes generations to develop paideia, and hard work to maintain it.
Consider some examples of paideia closer to home. In the south, “Yes, sir” and “Yes, Ma’am” are more common than in the north. Immodest dress and crude language are more common at a nightclub than a church. The Smiths eat out daily, the Browns eat out once a year. Thomas takes his family to church every Sunday––even on vacation––while James takes his family to church once or twice a month. These are all examples of paideia, some more trivial than others. Consider another difference: I believe that I am and always will be a man, but another man genuinely believes he is or can be a woman. Paideia is the difference. He and I have deep, conflicting assumptions about the nature of reality, developed in us by the culture and education in which we were raised.
Paideia is a kind of self-propagating reality. Education shapes culture, which in turn shapes education. Television is both influenced by culture, and promotes a certain culture. In other words, every television show has a paideia. Tik Toks have a paideia. Pop artists have a paideia. The layout of a home has a paideia. Each family has a paideia.
The Church Father Tertullian’s question “What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?” is, at least in part, concerned with paideia. The Apostle Paul exhorted fathers to raise their children in the paideia of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4). Christians recognized the importance of some of the things taught in Roman schools, but couldn’t stomach other curricular choices. Young Marcus, a Christian in Rome, would receive one kind of paideia in school, and another at home. Christian educators began to develop a Christian paideia which adopted the good elements of pagan education by submitting them to God’s revelation in Scripture. This created a distinctly Christian paideia which met Paul’s exhortation, and developed into the Christo-centric worldview of the Middle Ages and early modern period.
Fast forward a few centuries to 2024. Mark is being taught one paideia in his public or private school, while his parents are trying to “filter out” the problematic elements through Christian education in the evenings, Sunday morning, and maybe Wednesday night. Mark has to choose between two paideia. Add to that the paideia coming from whatever he’s watching, listening to, reading, and scrolling through. It is one thing for Mark’s parents to sort through the information he’s receiving at school. The problem is that education often bypasses the mind and goes straight to the heart (this is why paideia targets the heart and affections). Mark probably loves whatever his Spotify playlist, Netflix queue, and YouTube history love.
In CCE, paideia is cultivated through every aspect of education. What books do the students read? How do we conduct science and math classes? What does it look like to teach STEM from a Christian perspective? How does the headmaster deal with difficult parents? Is a certain child corrupting the school culture, and if so, at what point is he expelled? Paideia creates what Hegseth calls the “aroma” of the school. Classical art fills the hallways. Students greet guests with eye contact and can maintain a conversation (a rarity among children these days). Singing rings out through the building. Hair is out of eyes and off collars. Boys hold doors for girls. Paideia runs from the deepest decisions of a school to what comes out on the surface. I have met a number of Christian families who, like Hegseth, have moved across the country after smelling this “aroma.” Even if unable to articulate the difference, they recognize that CCE schools possess a distinct culture. This educational culture often moves to the home. In fact, the educational culture will probably fail if it is not reinforced in the home. If Mark, our friend from earlier, attends a CCE school and then goes home to TikTok, Taylor Swift, and How I Met Your Mother, he still has to choose which paideia to follow (and one is a lot more appealing to a high schooler than the other). The bed of the adulterous woman is fragrant, but the aroma of her house is a paideia unto death. The way that Wisdom offers is infinitely greater, but takes time to learn and love.
Hegseth’s book reads as the tragedy of Western Christian Paideia’s usurpation by American Progressive Paideia and Cultural Marxist Paideia. Each paideia represents a distinct set of presuppositions, goals, and practices. Western Christian Paideia developed as the church taught students to “seek first the kingdom of God” (Mathew 6:33). This Paideia almost exclusively permeated the Western world up until the Enlightenment. Although the American Founders were products of this Western Christian Paideia, Enlightenment ideas began to bite the hand that fed it. Ironically, the emphasis on reason was only feasible because of reason’s centrality to the Western tradition. However, this new, “enlightened” reason began to undercut the “Christian” part of Western Christian Paideia. Consider, for example, the Jefferson Bible, which sacrificed the truth of the Gospels for the sake of “reason.”
The influence of Deism and reason sans Christ created gaps in America’s founding which progressives would exploit. In the 1800s, Christianity split between the Social Gospel and Fundamentalism. The former quickly became a puppet of progressive politicians; the latter held to Biblical orthodoxy but struggled to connect Christian life to the political and social realms. As Christianity split, education became increasingly mandatory through state schools. Various efforts attempted to remove Christianity from these state schools. Francis Bellamy, for instance, drafted a pledge of allegiance to replace the Christian creeds. The original pledge intended to make America the center of American Paideia instead of God. The clause “under God” was only added later to combat the atheism that attended Russian communism.
Oregon attempted (unsuccessfully) to outlaw Christian schools as early as 1925 in a case that went before the Supreme Court. The Gary Plan, enacted in the early decades of the 20th century, attempted (by the admission of its proponents) to remove religion from schools. A telling article from The New Republic, a leading progressive journal, argued that democratic education requires “that the plasticity of the child shall not be artificially and prematurely hardened into a philosophy of life” (quoted on 88). In other words, parents have no right to force their children into any belief system––they have no right to pass on paideia.
This particular article was published in 1916. It pretends to remove paideia from the classroom so that the child can choose their own. When Covid brought public school classes into family living rooms, Hegseth recognized (along with countless others) that schools were, in fact, teaching a paideia: one he refers to as a Cultural Marxist Paideia. This paideia, as Hesgeth demonstrates, has a history stretching back to the beginning of the 20th century. Paideia is inescapable. The educators who sought to remove Western Christian Paideia had to replace it with an alternative. Although it took various steps along the way, the paideia of today––education and culture––are a direct result of attempts to remove Christianity from the classroom. The entire model of public education can trace its roots to progressive and Marxist theorists who came to Columbia University (America’s foremost school of education) in the 1930’s. “Social studies,” for example, are a distinctly Marxist way of approaching the humanities. As sciences, they are best served by analysis, which disintegrates them from each other and allows the “critical method” to prevail, interpreting these “sciences” through an oppressor/oppressed lens.
The historical view of American education is significant for a few reasons. First, it explains why many Christian schools, though well-intentioned, are fighting a losing battle. Paideia is education and culture. Christian schools which add a Bible class and prayer, but whose curriculum and pedagogical methods are borrowed from the public school, are operating under a progressive and Marxist paideia. They are fighting the enemy on his own terms.
Hegseth’s historical view also shows how much the battle for education takes place in the political realm. One of the critiques I have heard of the book is that it is “too political.” If the problem of Christian education is political, it is because the progressives used politics as their way of taking over education. Hegseth is not so naive as to think that the battle is primarily political, nor is he naive enough to think that CCE is the solution for our problems. Education is only a battle in a larger war. Hegseth stresses the importance of church, home, and, most importantly, the grace of God. Nonetheless, his emphasis on CCE as a cultural force relies on a view of the church and state relationship derived from Western Christian Paideia: we are first citizens of the kingdom of heaven, then of our state. This view emphasizes deep continuity, rather than dissonance, between our roles as Christians and Americans. Because CCE aims to develop the Paideia of Heaven, it will, as a result, influence the paideia of America. The Social Gospel pulls down the church’s role into the state’s role. Fundamentalists struggle to see the intersection between state and church at all. Historical Christianity placed the church above the state in such a way that each relied upon and protected the other. The Christian’s battle is not primarily political, but it is political nonetheless.
In this light, Hegseth’s nomination for Trump’s cabinet could be a crucial moment for Christian education. It’s almost hard to believe that someone with his platform is so closely connected to this fledgling movement of classical, Christian education. It would be all the more incredible to have someone so passionate about CCE in the President’s cabinet. In the short time between his discovery of CCE and the publication of Battle for the American Mind, Hegseth has grasped its essence––paideia––well enough to articulate the necessity of Christian education. He and his family have experienced Christian Paideia firsthand and have, like many others, relocated to make it a part of their lives. His book demonstrates that however new to this world he may be, the Western Christian Paideia is beginning to shape his way of seeing the world.
I have met a number of identifying Christians (and have heard of many others) who hold Trump on par with the devil and consider the evangelical support of Trump as a betrayal of Christianity (although I get the impression that they also feel personally betrayed). What discerning evangelicals (and other Christians, for that matter) recognize is that Trump, while perhaps a Christian in name only, is a friend to Christianity. He is by no means a moral exemplar. Neither was Pharaoh. Neither was Nebuchadnezzar. Neither was Artaxerxes, nor Ahasuerus, nor Darius. But these rulers of the ancient world exalted Joseph, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, and Daniel. Hegseth and Vance, among other appointees and advisors, are like these Biblical figures in their proximity to Trump. Hegseth recognizes a part of our past that needs to be recovered in order to move forward.
Hegseth’s nomination to Secretary of Defense is, admittedly, a few steps removed from education. Perhaps his work in this role would overshadow the work his book sets out. On the other hand, he does call the book Battle for the American Mind, and military language outlines a number of themes in the book. He also seems to recognize that we are primarily citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven and do not struggle with flesh and blood. Hegseth’s understanding of paideia, and its effect in his own life in recent years, could make him a powerful weapon in the hands of God.
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