Without Knowing Our Creator, The American Experiment Collapses into Incoherence
If I were to summarize, in a single sentence, the radical philosophy that has infiltrated and ruled the American university for the past seventy years, it would be this: the continuing French Revolution. There was a time when the American and French Revolutions were contrasted, with the American emerging as the superior model. Even a cursory glance at the events in France is enough to make the stomach turn. And yet, we remain under the sway of its philosophy. The cries of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité still echo, now repackaged in the rhetoric of DEI and conflict theory. The question is whether we can recover the ideals of the American Revolution before the guillotine of ideological purity claims its next victim.
The French Revolution styled itself as the triumph of Reason. Humanity, at long last, was emerging from the Dark Ages, and it was only a matter of time before scientists and philosophers ushered in the perfect society. Everything had to be remade because everything had been mistaken. The revolutionaries taught that humans were born good and were corrupted only by their environment. If education could be made universally accessible, then enlightened teachers could train up a generation that would reconstruct society, eliminating material want—the supposed root of all evil. Ultimately, Rousseau taught that private property was the true source of human corruption, and therefore, its abolition would bring about the good society.
Hopefully, you can easily see how Marx simply picked up this line of thought. From there, it was only a small step to today’s professors, eager to teach your children for the modest sum of $80,000. Marx formalized the material dialectic, relying on Rousseau’s belief that man is born innocent but corrupted by a society marked by an unequal distribution of material resources. This conflict took many forms, but it always seemed to converge on a single culprit: the white Protestant man, who, we are told, constructed a structurally unjust society to preserve his wealth and oppress everyone else.
The liberty promised by the French Revolution was a liberty from both God and human tradition. For the French philosopher, these were one and the same—since there is no God, anything attributed to Him is merely a human construct. Here, we see the crucial difference between the French Revolution and the Reformation. The Reformers also insisted that human tradition must be judged by a higher standard—but that standard was The Word of God.
It might surprise you, but the heart of this conflict was not the written Word—the Bible—but rather creation itself.
The Reformation taught that all of God’s works reveal His glory—including creation. General revelation makes the knowledge of God available to all people at all times through creation and providence. The light of nature could be used to understand the truths of God. Ultimately, it was God who ruled the nations, not man.
For the French Revolution to succeed, it had to declare liberty from God and any form of His revelation. To the revolutionaries, creation revealed nothing transcendent—only the material world existed. For a few deists at the beginning, there may have been a deity who started the process, but this one is no longer actively involved in the world and is little more than a Demiurge. This meant that humans were equal only in the most material sense. If they were to form governments, it would be solely to regulate their shared economic lives and nothing more. Such a government had to be infallible because it was the expression of the General Will of man. The French Revolution still longed for an infallible authority, but instead of finding it in divine revelation, it placed that authority in man—man, all alone. We still see this today in how these current revolutionaries think of government. It is not the sword to punish evil-doers but the source of economic resources and political peace to pursue economic gain. Human life is reduced to the material.
It is remarkable how quickly the French Revolution devolved into a Napoleonic empire. All of the idealistic talk about democracy and brotherhood turned, within little more than a decade, into one of the worst tyrants in European history–one crowned by the Pope. Yet, in hindsight, it was not difficult to foresee. Although the French rejected their Roman Catholic tradition, they were still shaped by its philosophical framework. They simply replaced the Roman Catholic Church with Rousseau’s General Will. Both refused to be governed by the Word of God as the final authority; both lifted up Our Lady—Mary for one, the goddess Reason for the other. Both also believed in an empire with a divine right to politically rule over others.
An empire, by its very nature, is built on conquest and war. The French Revolution, like the Marxists after it, justified conquest by promising that it would ultimately lead to enlightenment. The DEI professors who now inhabit our universities share these same beliefs. They argue that if material property and access to the means of attaining it were equally distributed, society would be good. Such a society would no longer suffer from sin because, in their view, sin is merely a byproduct of inequality. They teach that technology can solve all human problems, creating this ideal society without any need for God or redemption in Christ.
They seek liberty not only from religious tradition but from any human convention—including sex, gender, and even merit and competence. The one distinction between them and their revolutionary predecessors is that they have now discovered that Reason itself is part of structural racism. We cannot trust Reason or even our own minds, as they have been irreparably polluted by intersectionality. Instead, we must simply trust them—the enlightened experts—who, by sheer coincidence, have managed to rise above these contaminating influences and now operate out of pure, selfless motives.
You are likely familiar with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. He also traces the problems in American thought back to Rousseau. Bloom argues that Locke provided the intellectual foundation for the American Revolution, while Rousseau inspired the French and later the Marxist revolutions. However, his analysis contained a fatal flaw: he divided religion and reason, treating faith as separate from rational inquiry. This division left room for Rousseau and Marx to redefine the terms of human understanding.
The correct analysis—one that builds on the Reformation—recognizes that Rousseau’s fundamental error was not merely his rejection of revealed religion, but his failure to use Right Reason (Warfield). He employed Reason selectively and inconsistently. Had he truly loved Reason, he would have seen that his foundational beliefs were incoherent and that it clearly reveals the eternal power and divine nature of God.
Bloom assumed a division between general and special revelation. But if we are to overcome the ongoing French Revolution,, it must be through the unity of these two, as declared in the Westminster Confession of Faith 1.1:
Although the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence, do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable; yet are they not sufficient to give that knowledge of God, and of his will, which is necessary unto salvation: therefore it pleased the Lord, at sundry times, and in divers manners, to reveal himself, and to declare that his will unto his Church; and afterward, for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the Church against the corruption of the flesh, and the malice of Satan, and of the world, to commit the same wholly unto writing: which maketh the Holy Scripture to be most necessary; those former ways of God’s revealing his will unto his people being now ceased.
The Reformers understood that Reason, when rightly used, leads to God rather than away from Him. It shows us God and his moral law which means it also shows us our sin and need for redemption. Reason teaches us of the necessity of scripture to learn how we might be restored to communion with God. The failure of Rousseau—and of modern DEI theorists—was not merely a rejection of revealed religion but an inconsistent use of Reason itself. If Reason and revelation are set in opposition, as Bloom assumed, the result will always be the victory of irrationalism over truth.
The United States does not have a state church, but we do have an official natural theology. Our nation was founded on a clear philosophical foundation in the Declaration of Independence—one that undergirds all our laws and ideals: God the Creator, humans created equal, and rights given by God. Without these truths, the rest of the American experiment collapses into incoherence. Yet, the contemporary secular professor is not interested in preserving this foundation. Instead, he is attempting to live out the unfinished legacy of the French Revolution. It is time to return to the clarity about God on which the United States was founded.
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Like many other Reformed thinkers, Anderson wants to play Jenga with his target. His target here is the French Revolution. And in comparing the two revolutions, he starts talking like the Pharisee from the parable of the two men praying.
The main fault of the French Revolution was that it became a pong game between all-or-nothing thinkers. All-or-nothing thinking is the cognitive base for authoritarianism. It also causes us to overreact to injustices so that we tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And it robs us of the ability to make distinctions.
Somehow Romans 2 got lost in the discussion of the two revolutions. The beginning of Romans 2 tells those who believe in God not to judge those who don’t because they commit the same sins as the unbelievers they look down on. And that invites arrogance. In addition, Paul uses the actions of the unbeliever when they follow their consciences to shame the believers who are all too eager to judge them. What Paul wrote in Romans 1-2 culminates with Romans 3:9:
‘What then? Are we better than they? Not at all; for we have already charged that both Jews and Greeks are all under sin;‘
The sins of those who started the French Revolution are all to obvious to Anderson because they should be. But what he seems to have relegated to a state of insignificance are the sins of the American Revolution: the continuation of slavery and the treating of blacks as not even 2nd class citizens, and the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans from the land. Should we compare the death tolls? Or better yet, what if Americans back then had taken the French motto more seriously than the French did? Would they have treated blacks and Native Americans as shabbily as they did with their Constitution and their faith in God?
And even after slavery ended, after a brief respite for blacks in the South, came Jim Crow with its license for whites to punish and kill blacks and their allies with impunity. And while Anderson rightly complains about Napoleon, look at the empire Americans created as they continued to ethnically cleanse the land of Native Americans while exploiting the labor of foreigners to build railroads. I guess Anderson didn’t see the comparison between America moving west while Napoleon moved east because Americans were taking land away from Native Americans while Napoleon was taking land away from Europeans.
Just as Americans fell far short of living up to what the Scriptures, which they declared they were guided by, so too did the French, back then, fail to live up to their motto: ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.’ Perhaps it is that middle word in the French motto that has drawn Anderson’s ire in the above article. But right now, the French are living up to their motto better than how the Trump supporting Christians are living up to what the New Testament teaches.
You’re right, a similar article needs to be written about the corruption of the Democrats from the very beginning of the U.S. They are the party of slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, redlining, resisting the civil rights movement, and now DEI that divides people into groups and teaches them to hate each other. But you’re wrong about Romans 2. On your reading, Paul himself is committing a sin simply by writing the chapter and pointing out the sin of others. What a nonsense reading of Romans 2.