Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization.

• Author: Frohnen, Bruce P.
• Position: Book review

Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization

By Samuel Gregg

Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2019.

Pp. xv, 192. $28 hardcover.

Ongoing conflict with and within the Middle East has spawned a significant literature regarding the "clash of civilizations" between Western liberal democracies and Islamic nations in particular (see Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996]). The war on terror, combined with mass emigration from the Middle East to Europe, has added urgency to this concern. Does ordered liberty require a deep, cultural adherence to institutions and practices with historical roots not to be found in Islamic countries? Or is ordered liberty the product of a specific set of beliefs to which any rational person can and, given the chance, would subscribe?

Samuel Gregg sides with those who see ordered liberty as fundamentally a matter of right thinking. But right thinking, in his view, is encouraged or discouraged depending on the nature of one's intellectual tradition. Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization is an attempt to lay out for a popular audience the reasons why Western civilization has been uniquely favorable to human dignity and freedom. Unfortunately, according to Gregg, peoples in the West have forgotten or even come to despise the tradition of rational thought on which ordered liberty relies, thus leaving it and our civilization as a whole vulnerable to decline and even conquest at the hands of those who reject the reasonableness of human dignity and ordered liberty. For Gregg, our misunderstanding of the relationship between reason and faith stands in the way of right thinking as that misunderstanding spawns hostility toward rational faith, adherence to false faiths, and a failure to confront religious irrationality.

According to Gregg, Western civilization is fundamentally ordered by rational inquiry into the good. The reason for this? Western religions within the Judeo-Christian tradition view God as logos, which is to say divine reason. And this vision has shaped Western culture, defined as "that which is adorned, cultivated, protected, and worshiped" (p. 8). Thus, if "we want to understand what is central to a civilization's culture, we must ask what it seeks to uphold. What does it revere? What 'cult' is at its heart?" (p. 8). In the West, the answer is "reasoned inquiry in search of truth" (p. 9).

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