Ben Crenshaw [00:00:00]:

Every single culture has certain things that you're going to honor as a people and you're going to shame as a people. No one's going to find you and throw you in jail for, you know, disrespecting your elder. But you might get in trouble with your parents and you might get in trouble with the school superintendent. You might get chastised by a neighbor or something like that. You know, there will be some kind of social feedback.

Jim Spiegel [00:00:25]:

Welcome to the Kalos Center Podcast.

Ben Crenshaw [00:00:32]:

Foreign.

Jim Spiegel [00:00:36]:

Welcome to another episode of the Kalos Center Podcast. Our guest today is political scholar Ben Crenshaw. Ben is a visiting assistant professor at the Declaration of Independence center at the University of Mississippi, and he's a PhD candidate in politics at the Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale College. Ben's work has appeared in several periodicals, and he's a weekly contributor to the American Reformer. His last two articles have dealt with Charlie Kirk and our national response to his assassination, and I encourage our listeners to check those out. So, Ben Crenshaw, welcome to the Calo Center Podcast.

Ben Crenshaw [00:01:17]:

Good to be here, Jim. Thanks so much for having me on.

Jim Spiegel [00:01:20]:

So in our conversation today, I'd like to focus mainly on the right of free speech. That's an issue that has always been the subject of much debate in our country, as you know. But now, in the aftermath of the Kirk assassination, it's taken on a new urgency. So I'd like to get some of your thoughts on that first. So given all that's transpired in the weeks since Charlie's death, what are some of the lessons that you think we are learning as a nation?

Ben Crenshaw [00:01:51]:

That's a tough question. It's hard to know exactly. It's still so recent. It's so fresh in our memory. We're still kind of in the early stages of figuring out what comes after, after this. Is there a place, is there a future for campus ministry like what Charlie was doing? Will TP USA continue to grow and do that? Will other organizations take his, you know, take up that mantle and continue in that role, will it have an effect? The people that I talk to and that I know, a lot of them will say something like, you know, when you assassinate an advocate of free speech who is essentially involved in peaceful, civil debate, trying to understand the other side and work out differences and convince people through persuasion, when you resort to violence, you kill the debate. Debate's over. Debate is dead.

Ben Crenshaw [00:02:39]:

And the only thing you can expect at that point is some kind of perhaps not violent response, but some kind of powerful Response that goes beyond persuasion, the use of civil law in some manner to prosecute those who are threatening violence or actually committing it. And I think that that is, that's a real issue. I think that's a serious position that has to be grappled with. I think though, that the nature of America and, you know, the history of America is that we won't ever stop debating, speaking, reasoning with each other, shouting at each other sometimes. So I do think the debate will continue, but I think that it certainly is now in a different dimension than it was before. Part of it is the realization that if you are speaking publicly and you are actually threatening the power centers of what I would call the dominant left in America, leftist ideology, whether it's on campus or it touches Congress or donors, lobbyists, Hollywood, the media, whatever it may be, if you're actually intruding on their power centers, then you are a target, if not for lawfare of some sort, then perhaps even, you know, murder or elimination, assassination of some kind. So I do think that it'll cause some people to think twice, to shut up to or it'll, it might very well shift public discussion toward an even more elite group of people who can now afford a very expensive security detail. I just saw Ben Shapiro saying that he spends multi millions a year on his security when he goes out in public.

Ben Crenshaw [00:04:20]:

So unless you have an institution that's going to protect you, and not every university or political organization is going to do that, you're going to have to provide for your own security detail or just gamble, roll the dice that wherever you're speaking is civil enough, that no crazy person's gonna come out and try to gun you down there. It's very possible that free speech in America will change significantly or shift in terms of who does the speaking, how the speaking takes place. Like, you know, you saw with, with Charlie's memorial, there was a plexiglass or some kind of bulletproof glass enclosure in front of every speaker. And so this is now going to become the norm. You know, even people speaking publicly like we had here at Ole Miss, we have a pavilion outside in which speakers come and they, they can talk to a large crowd of students. In the Grove, which is a huge section of trees and grass where students can sit, you just wonder like, well, okay, now we all public speakers are going to be sitting behind these bulletproof glass protective cases. It's hard to know. We're, we're, you know, kind of entering into unknown territory in recent American history.

Ben Crenshaw [00:05:34]:

So I, I hope that debate and continues but you know, Charlie's assassination certainly puts an edge to it that we haven't seen. You know, this was basically the highest profile public assassination since RFK was. Robert F. Kennedy was shot in 1970, right after Martin Luther King. So it's been a long time and certainly it's the most politically momentous, civilly disruptive event since 9 11. So a whole generation. So this, this is a big deal. And I would not discount how things might change.

Ben Crenshaw [00:06:08]:

But I certainly hope that the, the conservative movement in America learns that free speech can work. I mean, this is why Charlie be shot, because he, he was getting to the student population, he was changing their minds. And so we have to continue with that, you know, that project. And you have to recognize that Charlie's mission was to campuses, to students whose minds were still young enough and immature enough, questioning. They could change their minds, they could question their professors. He wasn't debating activists, lobbyists, or, you know, leftist professors who had been tenured in their positions for, you know, 20 or 30 years. He was trying to get to the young minds that were still impressionable. So his, his speech had a very specific mission to it.

Ben Crenshaw [00:07:01]:

And I think that mission should continue because reaching the youth in America is incredibly important for the future of our country.

Jim Spiegel [00:07:08]:

So you referenced the memorial from two Sundays ago, which really was quite remarkable and maybe surprising just in terms of how gospel centered it was, that the response to Kirk's assassination has been in many ways very spiritually impassioned. Have you been surprised at that?

Ben Crenshaw [00:07:28]:

I don't know if shocked is the right word, but certainly pleasantly surprised and kind of just dumbfounded in a way with just how, not just spiritually, but explicitly Christianity and the gospel. I lost track of the number of times the gospel was preached at his memorial from the highest ranking officials. I don't think Trump did, but Tulsi Gabbard and Marco Rubio and JD Vance and Pete Hegseth and even RFK Jr. So it is remarkable. And in fact, I would probably say nothing like Charlie's memorial has ever happened in US history. Not a Billy Graham crusade, not a first or second great awakening. I mean, those were certainly momentous occasions, but those were always led by evangelists and certainly huge open air revivals or preaching altar calls and so forth. But the distinction here is that Charlie was not just a Christian or a missionary or the founder of a church.

Ben Crenshaw [00:08:34]:

He was a public political figure. He was a very prominent activist on the right. He was instrumental in getting Trump elected and reelected. I think I saw something where Charlie was texting Trump in 2011, telling him that he thought he was a great man who would Change America. So five years before Trump even thought, four years before he opened his campaign in 2015. So Charlie had Trump on his radar long before anybody knew who Charlie was. And Charlie was, he was in many ways, I would say, a great souled man. He had tremendous vision, energy, intelligence, the capacity to speak very clearly and succinctly argue well with people.

Ben Crenshaw [00:09:20]:

He was being mentored by Frank Torick, who was a well known Christian apologist. And he, I mean, I, I went to Denver Seminary where I have a master's degree in Christian apologetics, Philosophy of religion and ethics. And we read this little book called Tactics by Paul Copen on how to debate. And like I just everything Charlie, like watching through Charlie's debates with campus students, I'm like, oh man, he's pulling right from this Tactics book. Frank Turek is mentoring him. I know exactly what's going on here and he's so good at it. So Charlie was obviously, he was a college dropout, but as Dr. Larry Arns said in his speech at the memorial, Charlie completed like 32 certificates of completion in Hillsdale's online courses.

Ben Crenshaw [00:10:02]:

Having been a graduate and PhD student at Hillsdale and then actually I worked in online courses for a while there and I proctored the Con 101, the Constitution 101 course, and I helped develop the course on Dante. I will tell you that those courses are basically what you would get in an undergraduate or a graduate course, just slightly less material, but it's the same stuff. So Charlie was drinking straight from the trough, so to speak, getting a really good education through Hillsdale. And you know, he can't, I don't think he can be replaced. Anybody claiming to be his successor, you know, there's no such thing as a successor to a great souled individual. But what was so powerful about his memorial is that it really was the encapsulation of Charlie's love for God and his life being transformed by Christ and how he used his political position within as the head of the president of TPUSA to not just love America and try to save our country, which he strongly believed in, but to use that platform to preach Christ. Even in the midst of debating students on social and political issues. These things went together for Charlie.

Ben Crenshaw [00:11:16]:

You want to know why I oppose abortion? Well, because each human being is loved and created by God, and you are loved by God too. And guess what? Christ died for you. I mean, it's like this is what Charlie did All the time. Every single issue for him could be tied back into the existence of God, the coming of Christ, his death and resurrection for us, his atonement for us, our great need for a savior, and how our lives can be transformed and we can have meaning. We can live with meaning and purpose. We don't have to have this kind of nihilism, this cult of selfishness and, and death on the left. So I think, like the very nature of Charlie's life, that he put these things together in such a public, powerful witness led to such an incredible memorial that I really, in many ways hope is a kind of revival in America unlike we've ever seen.

Jim Spiegel [00:12:03]:

Well, yeah, we can only pray. It's been interesting to see even figures like Tucker Carlson and Charlie's own fellow leaders at Tapuza refer to him as a kind of prophet, as a literal prophet, and others have called him a martyr. I think by any standard definition of martyr, he qualifies. Maybe by a reasonable definition of prophet, he qualifies it, though it was certainly not something that people would have described him as while he was alive, you know, but then you go back and you watch so many of his talks, the way he engaged people, what he proclaimed tirelessly, and you say, well, that actually has a lot of plausibility. His pastor has noted on several occasions that, you know, Charlie didn't see a kind of clear split or distinction or segregation of theological ideas, Christian doctrine, biblical doctrine and politics, or arguments and ideas that apply to public policy. He saw, you know, the positions that conservatives take regarding everything from abortion to immigration as really just downstream, as you were noting, from fundamental biblical doctrines, the ones you mentioned, and the imago dei, the idea that human beings are made in the image of God and so on. A lot of Christians on the left and the right are very skittish about integrating Christian theology and political thought. I'm sure this is something you've thought a lot about given your work and your field.

Jim Spiegel [00:13:48]:

So how has all of this impacted your own sense of mission and maybe strategy as a Christian political scholar?

Ben Crenshaw [00:13:58]:

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, certainly it encourages all of us as Christians working in a so called secular field to be bold in our faith and to not just be bold in our faith. You know, I wrote an article last week on Charlie Kirk as a Christian nationalist, so to speak, and I noted that he had a. I don't remember, I don't know what event it was, but he was at an event and someone challenged him on America being a Christian nation and said The Declaration only mentions God four times. The Constitution, not at all. The common law is the foundation of our law, not Christianity. And Charlie immediately responded in a video that I think got almost 10 million views. He was like, no, no, you totally misunderstand.

Ben Crenshaw [00:14:41]:

We are a Christian nation because we are a Christian people. And for those of us doing work, and especially American political thought, political philosophy, Constitution, law, and so forth, when you go back and you study the 17th century, 18th, 19th century, you realize very quickly that it is virtually impossible to do any good work without running into Christianity at some point, a Christian people, Christian theology, even a very explicit, what we would call political Hebraism, which was a looking to the Mosaic law by the founders, by the Puritans to figure out how to establish just civil polity in Commonwealth. We need to follow the Bible, basically. And yeah, we also have reason and we have nature. These things aren't opposed. Natural law and divine law are not opposed to go together. Reason and revelation can go together. There's harmonious view of those all throughout the 17th and 18th century.

Ben Crenshaw [00:15:36]:

And so when you, when you realize that your, your forefathers, the people that you descended from, were explicitly Christian and they're not just their political philosophizing, but of their actual political action, they're creating legislatures and voting and making law and implementing the law, they were doing this as Christians, in many ways explicitly with Christian laws. It makes you bold and it makes you unashamed of your own history. And then it makes you wonder, how did we get to where we are today? Because that's certainly not the case in much of our laws. We basically function. America functions under what I would call what others have called public atheism. Wouldn't technically call itself that would say, well, no, it's liberal neutrality, but really it leads to functionally a public atheism in which there is no God or no God can be proclaimed as the true God. But if you go back and you read the state constitutions from the 1770s and 1780s, the right to religious liberty was the right to worship, the duty to worship the one true God. They say that the one almighty living God.

Ben Crenshaw [00:16:37]:

And it was a duty. That's how they phrase it. That's how the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 phrases it in Article 2. And so when you, when you realize these things, you realize, oh, we've come a long way, fallen a long way, there is work to be done to correct what has happened, to unearth what has happened, to teach Americans their real, their history, their heritage, and that there's been an intentional disruption of that anti Christian political movements since the 50s and 60s to completely erase the west, you know, the American and Western heritage and its Christian roots. So it makes you very bold and it gives you a lot of urgency. There's a lot of work to do and it has to be done now. Can't wait around any longer because in many ways I think, you know, it's kind of cliche at this point that we're at a turning point in America, but we are on a knife's edge. And we're either going to restore order and, you know, kind of permanently defeat a godless anti American leftist political movement that would essentially destroy and collapse America.

Ben Crenshaw [00:17:41]:

And we're going to do so through both wise political action and statesmanship, but also resurgent public Christianity, or we're going to slowly fade and collapse. And it would take a long time, I think, for America to collapse. But the Roman Empire. But it would happen. And we see how it would happen with millions and millions of illegal immigrants fiscally being unrestrained, which of course is a big problem and has been for a long time, you know, kind of the influence of global liberalism forever. Wars overseas and so forth. We can see the future if we don't do something now. And so it does give you a lot of, a lot of boldness, a lot of urgency, confidence.

Ben Crenshaw [00:18:23]:

And just seeing Charlie was unashamed to speak Christ in public, like God is unashamed of him. That, that verse in Romans, I'm not ashamed of the Gospel because it's the power of God. And it's just, you see it, we read these things, we study them theologically, we exegete the heck out of these passages in the Bible. You know, we look at them six ways. But then when you actually see it lived out in real life, somebody in your own life, in your own society, it's more powerful to see it actually right there in front of you. And it emboldens you to do it yourself. Those are, those are a few thoughts. And it's exciting time to be working in politics.

Jim Spiegel [00:19:02]:

So what you identify there with regard to this trend, this public atheism, as you call it, what John Rawls called kind of observance of public reason, is one that basically marginalizes or dismisses religious and spiritual supernatural concerns. That's one dimension of a much broader trend across the disciplines that is called methodological naturalism. Right. That you name a field, you describe it in politics, right. That arguments and ideas, concepts that appeal to anything supernatural or religious are out of bounds and are not to be seriously considered when we're talking about public policy and the making of laws and so on. That's methodological naturalism. It applies in the political sphere. It's also in, say, psychology, in the social sciences, that whatever diagnostics you do regarding a person's behavioral issues, don't bring anything supernatural or spiritual into it.

Jim Spiegel [00:20:03]:

And by all means don't refer to a soul or even worse, anything potentially demonic or spiritual warfare. That's out of bounds in the sciences, the harder sciences, to talk about a special creation of the universe, anything like that, that's out of bounds. That's not scientific. So we can't take creationist ideas or even intelligent design theory seriously. Sorry, we can't listen to that or take it seriously. Or in biblical studies, even the whole notion that there really are miracles, right, that whatever Jesus did to supposedly cure that leper or that demonized person, it wasn't really supernatural. We can't take that seriously. So even in biblical studies, in the mainstream guild, you're not to take seriously anything supernatural.

Jim Spiegel [00:20:56]:

It's all methodological naturalism. And for anybody listening, whatever your field is, there is that specter of naturalism that you know that the case for it is always, well, it's just methodological where, you know, you don't have to really be an atheist or even agnostic, but to respect the rigor of the field, you need to proceed. And as if there is nothing supernatural going on and you encounter it, you're nodding, of course. You see it all over the place in political philosophy and political science.

Ben Crenshaw [00:21:32]:

Yeah, that's correct. In political science, you could peg Thomas Hobbes and his Leviathan as proceeding along these lines. The first 12 chapters in Leviathan, Hobbes is very specific that he wants to create a political science that's analogous to geometry. So we're going to use terms, and we're going to consider man as a mechanical being, and we're going to use terms and the relations of terms to describe him and kind of slice and dice him, and then we'll be able to solve our problems politically. So very scientific, very analytical, very kind of logical approach. And you could say even that this goes back to. Back to Machiavelli and his work on the discourses of Livy and the Prince and so forth, where Machiavelli. I mean, some political philosophers will say that Machiavelli was the beginning of modern politics and it's the divide between the classics and the moderns.

Ben Crenshaw [00:22:29]:

And I won't go into that whole debate. But what you find With Machiavelli is the consideration of man merely as a material being, as a passionate being. You have to just take man as he is, as he presents himself to you, and he presents himself to you as being materially needy, passionate, capricious, needing to be ruled. You need public executions so that he learns who to fear. And he's, you know, he's both virtuous and vicious at the same time. And so classical distinctions between the virtues and the vices have to be. Be eliminated. And you just do whatever.

Ben Crenshaw [00:23:10]:

Cruelty is virtue, Machiavelli says. And so you lose the divine element of man. You lose his eternal perspective. And so the lowering to this kind of material, scientific, political science, some would say, begins with Machiavelli. But it's the same exact thing. It happens, like you said, through all of these fields. The critical thing, last thing I'll say on this is that what you don't find with the founding generation in America is they were not Machiavellians and they were not Hobbits. They actually many times explicitly reject Hobbes.

Ben Crenshaw [00:23:44]:

Now, they would pit Hobbes against Locke. They would say, well, we're Lockean, we're not Hobbesian.

Jim Spiegel [00:23:48]:

That's right.

Ben Crenshaw [00:23:49]:

Of course, scholars today would argue that Locke is Hobbes in different clothing. So there's a whole debate there. But you find, like, say, Alexander Hamilton and his farmer refuted in 17. He chastises Reverend Samuel Seabury and says, your conception of man and nature is that of Hobbes. You need to be reading Blackstone. You need to be following Blackstone. So he contrasts Hobbes as kind of this, you know, kind of this conventionalist and this scientific thinker with Blackstone. He was more Christian and common law.

Ben Crenshaw [00:24:23]:

And so you find with the founders that they were still carrying on a different tradition than this kind of modern methodological naturalism or social scientific approach to politics.

Jim Spiegel [00:24:37]:

So let me pivot here to another contemporary development or recent development regarding the termination, the firing the discipline of a number of people on the left for insensitive comments regarding Charlie Kirk or his followers. And many on the left have complained that that is a kind of reverse cancel culture. And that should be decried by conservatives, since conservatives were generally critical of that trend just a few years ago. And even some conservatives share that perspective. In one of your recent American Reformer articles, though, you challenge that. Can you talk about that?

Ben Crenshaw [00:25:17]:

Yes. So I did challenge the idea that conservatives should be against, quote, unquote, cancel culture. And I do so from basically a classical and more historical perspective, and that is that, you know, first of all, there is no such thing as a constitution or commonwealth or a nation or a regime, whatever term you want to use, that is not at its foundation founded upon public opinion. Every, even the tyrant has to have public approval, otherwise he'll be killed and overthrown. So public, public opinion is extraordinarily important for any kind of political constitution. It's legitimacy in the eyes of the people, the legitimacy of the king or the prince or the representatives or the governors who rule under that constitution. And the problem with our modern conception of free speech is that we don't acknowledge that. We don't think that public opinion and speech have anything to do with the vitality and legitimacy of a constitution.

Ben Crenshaw [00:26:20]:

But the whole issue here is that it's not a matter of whether or not you're going to have a kind of public consensus of decorum in your speech, civility or not, what's uncivil. It's not a matter of whether you're going to have it, it's which. When. What is going to deter what standards, what decorum, what kind of speech is going to be determined to be appropriate, civil or uncivil. And so what the left has done recently is they've just, they recognize that and they're unashamed to impose a kind of cancel culture on the right. But the inputs, the standards that they have have been so just warped and distorted. You know, it's like if you're Brendan Ike in I don't remember when, that was mid 10 or something, and he had given a couple thousand dollars to Proposition 8 in California to defeat the same sex marriage proposal. And he got cancelled, he got canceled as the CEO of Mozilla, you know, for merely giving money to the wrong cause on the sexual revolution liberation front.

Ben Crenshaw [00:27:20]:

So their whole project here is wrong because of their ideas, their ideology, their moral standards, their conception of what it means to be human, human sexuality and freedom and so forth. But the idea of cancel culture itself is really a kind of, it's a. How is best to say it, it's a, a kind of vulgarity for what's known as the law of fashion. And the law of fashion is just the ancient idea of the law of honor and shame. Every single culture has certain things that you're going to honor as a people and you're going to shame as a people. And somebody like John Locke in his essay Concerning Human Understanding, he talks about the different kinds of law. He talks about natural or divine law, civil law, and then he talks about this law of fashion. He calls it a law of fashion.

Ben Crenshaw [00:28:11]:

And he's talking about the law of honor and shame. This has been around for hundreds, thousands of years. Every society functions according to this kind of soft, I call it soft power in comparison or contrast to kind of hard civil law. You know, no one's going to fine you and throw you in jail for, you know, disrespecting your elder, but you might get in trouble with your parents and you might get in trouble with the school superintendent, you might get chastised by a neighbor or something like that. You know, there will be some kind of social feedback. So, you know, cancel culture has been a hot topic and the problem is that it's been perverted by the left and so it's been rejected by the right on the basis of that perversion. And the modern conservative right, which has functioned in kind of this liberal neutrality, methodological naturalism, public atheism for almost a century now, has kind of gotten rid of these old fashioned views of the law of fashion, of virtue and vice, of honor and shame. We don't need those anymore.

Ben Crenshaw [00:29:13]:

We all agree, or at least we're agreeing to disagree, something like that. It's all civil here. Well, no, we're actually in a different position now where we need to recover a very strong understanding on the right of what's honorable and what's shameful according to proper standards, both tradition in the United States, which I would say is closely aligned with orthodox Christianity, and so a natural or divine defined standard that can be known. And so I actually think that it's healthy for the right to have such a powerful response to the left when they do something as egregious as publicly make TikTok videos mocking Charlie, making fun of Erica for being a widow and his children for being fatherless, dancing on his grave. I mean, it is despicable, it is shameful, it is uncivilized. And there does need to be a collective response by conservatives to say this is unacceptable, this is unacceptable for civil society according to the American way of life. And so I think that I don't like the term cancel culture. This is why I talk about soft power, law of fashion, honor and shame and so forth.

Ben Crenshaw [00:30:30]:

I think that's a much more classical, general way that people will understand there's kind of this visceral reaction to celebrating the assassination of somebody who is innocent and good, wholesome man doing something very peaceful and very traditional in America, free speech and debating. So I don't like the term cancel culture so much, but I do think that the conservatives in the right need to kind of regain or re educate themselves on this response and, you know, and, you know, make it clear to the left that if, if you're going to do this, there will be social repercussions. So far, there hasn't been any, there hasn't been any criminal charges filed against people who make TikTok videos. But yeah, getting somebody fired from their job, it's like I don't really want to work with somebody who's openly celebrating the assassination of a guy who might have been my colleague. I mean, it could be me. My wife could be widowed in my son without a father. It's crazy. So I do think that there has to be a reaction I this.

Ben Crenshaw [00:31:29]:

By the way.

Jim Spiegel [00:31:31]:

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