TDR Exclusive Interview: Peter Kreeft

By William D. Aubin | Saturday, October 4, 2008

Editor’s note: Last spring, Boston College’s PeterKreeftvisited Dartmouth to give a talk honoring St. Catherine of Siena. Professor Kreeft teaches philosophy at Boston College and is the renowned author of over 45 books, including a Handbook of Christian Apologetics, Christianity for Modern Pagans, Making Choices, Fundamentals of the Faith, and Making Sense out of Suffering. He sat down with The Dartmouth Review at that point to discuss the role of religion on a college campus.

The Dartmouth Review: What has been your experience as someone who is both a professor of philosophy and a Christian? What do you believe is important for your students and readers to take way from the confluence of faith and analytical thought?

Kreeft: They have to see for themselves that the two are allies and not enemies. They have to see that they’re more like two wings of a bird than they are like two armies meeting for either battle or treaty. Both religious faith and philosophical reasoning come from the same source, namely the human mind, the human heart, and human curiosity. They have to see the common origin of both in asking fundamental questions, and the common goal of both in finding truth.

TDR You teach at a Catholic university, an experience that for a variety of reasons the students and faculty at Dartmouth have eschewed. What do you believe is the benefit of a Christian undergraduate experience?

Kreeft Well if you’re a Christian, this is a part of your life and a part of your philosophy, and a college education is also part of your life. You have philosophical reasons for choosing it. There’s a natural joining of those two things over those four years. It’s not necessary; you can get those two things separately, but why not bring them together if they’re both so important? If you’re a Christian and you want a college education, why not go to a Christian college? The onus of proof is not on the one who would justify a Christian college; the onus of proof is on the one who would question it.

TDR What should be the ideal role of religion in a liberal arts education at an institution like Dartmouth, one that has modified its official mission from its original Christian founding?

Kreeft A secular institution can’t claim to have religious eyes because it doesn’t, but it has to study religion as it studies everything else, in a fair and objective way: as it studies literature, as it studies art, as it studies science, as it studies history. It’s one of the major features in human history. It’s the thing that has motivated most of the people most of the time to do the most passionate things that they do, so it can’t be ignored. On the other hand, it can’t be studied in a different way than other academic studies are studied; it must be studied objectively and fairly.

TDR Something I know you have discussed in your lectures and writing are the pitfalls of religious pluralism, as we understand the concept in modern America. What do you think of efforts and institutions that toss around terms like “pluralism” and “multi-faith”?

Kreeft My problem with pluralism is that it doesn’t exist. People who mouth the word most loudly are the farthest from being really pluralistic. They develop institutions and curriculums that have to hew to the party line of deconstructionism, relativism, feminism, etc. I have no problem at all with real pluralism; I think the ideal university would be radically pluralistic, a microcosm of the whole world.

TDR Debates between atheists and Christians are in vogue on college campuses today, yet there does not seem to exist a single case of conversion one way or the other that has resulted from such events. What is the benefit of engaging in theological arguments from your point of view, as a Christian apologist?

Kreeft When you wash clothes, you first put them in a hamper, and a hamper is not an airtight environment; it’s got little interstices where the air gets in. So you have to air the dirty laundry first before you put it in the washing machine. A debate airs the two sides out and exposes the logical problems of both sides. It doesn’t do the actual work of converting, but at least it gets the data out. It’s an educational enterprise.

TDR Faith on college campuses: do you see a generation that is becoming further removed from religious faith or one that is returning to spirituality after the departure started in the 1960s?

Kreeft Both. I think it’s moving in two opposite directions. People are opposing religious faith more adamantly and regaining it more adamantly. So instead of a neutral, conformist’s ‘Let’s all get together and not argue’ situation, we’ve got a more polarized situation, as illustrated by the theist-atheist debates. I guess that’s healthy; light and darkness, good and evil—both show their true colors when you let them shine in contrast. College has always been a place where people go to lose their faith because if that’s what you want to do, you’re repressed when you live at home. You can do it at college. But it’s also a place where you can go to find faith for yourself. It maximizes freedom, so you can expect that both of those choices are going to be found there.

TDR You’ve written that neither economics nor politics will exist in Heaven, as they are the creations not of God but of man. That said, do you believe either major political party in the United States has pushed an agenda that is closer to God’s law than the other?

Kreeft Well, no one of them is ideal. On some issues I tend to think that the Democrats have traditionally been closer: on ecology, on suspicion of war; but on the most important issues, namely abortion and individual responsibility, rather than trusting everything to the government, I think the Republicans are clearly closer to classical Christian political thought than the Democrats are today. I remember a survey in 1958, of the thirty most prestigious universities in America, asking the faculty, ‘Did you vote Republican or Democrat in the last election?’ Eighty-five percent voted Republican. The same study was repeated a few years ago, with almost exactly the same figures in reverse, somewhere in the eighty percent range were Democrats.

I asked myself the question, “Why?” And I think I figured out the answer. The most passionate public issue in the late 50s and early 60s was civil rights, and the Democrats were arguing, on the basis of a natural law ethic, that segregationist laws had to be changed. Republicans were saying no, it’s economically unfeasible. Today, the most passionate issue is abortion, and euthanasia, and now it’s the Republicans who are arguing on the basis of natural law that these things are wrong, and the Democrats are arguing against. So I guess academia naturally goes to the lowest ethical level. Professors should be expected to support moral monsters and tyrants.

Most of the tyrants of the 20th century had a lot of professors behind them. Pol Pot, the great Southeast Asian master of genocide, studied under Jean-Paul Sartre. John Dewey lauded Stalin. There was a Harvard sociologist who studied Hitler’s executioners. She paralleled level of education with willingness to support Hitler, and she thought there would be an inverse relationship; there was a direct proportion. The more educated you were, the more you tended to favor Hitler’s work and volunteer to do it.

TDR St. Catherine of Siena, the woman whom you honored with your lecture today, lived in a time of conflict and made great sacrifices, the likes of which are entirely foreign to most people living in the West today. What does the rise in creature comforts mean for faith?

Kreeft It’s temptation—to worldliness, to laziness, to selfishness. Temptations, when overcome, strengthen you; when given in to, they weaken you, so it’s up to us which way it goes. Human nature being what it is, most of us succumb to temptation most of the time, so statistically the poorer you are, the more likely it is you’ll have a strong religious faith, the richer you are, the less likely. But that’s not necessary: it’s up to us.

TDR What trends will characterize Christian faith in America and the world in the decades to come?

Kreeft: No idea. I have no crystal ball. I hope it will be like the early Church. I hope we’ll have a willingness to fight, to sacrifice, to suffer if necessary. That comes from a moral and intellectual clarity. We certainly need it. The compromises, the cultivation of creature comforts, the desire to conform and be accepted has dominated American life for a century. It’s time for a change – time to stand up and be counted.

TDR: What can the Catholic Church do specifically to repair its image with the adolescents of America? What can be done to overcome the stigma young adults sense because of the recent scandals?

Kreeft: I’m tempted to answer that question either as a philosopher or as a strategist. But there are no effective answers there. The effective answers are to be found in a place like Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity houses. Visit those people and there’s no argument left against being a Catholic. They are the happiest and most saintly people in the world, and there’s no argument against that.

TDR: Thank you, Professor Kreeft.

TDR Exclusive Interview: Peter Kreeft

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