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What can classical Christian education teach us about restoring America’s cultural and spiritual foundations? In this episode, we sit down with Os Guinness, renowned author and social critic, to explore the revival of classical education and its role in countering the politicization of modern society. Os discusses how faith, family, and education form a "golden matrix" for a meaningful life and combat cultural decline by grounding students in biblical principles and a robust worldview.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode.

Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us Doctor Oz Guinness as thanks for joining us.

Os Guinness:
My pleasure. Thank you Marlin.

Marlin Detweiler:
It's really exciting to have you here. Many of us have been admirers of yours for a long time. Tell us a little bit about yourself from a personal standpoint. Your family, your education, that sort of thing.

Os Guinness:
Well, I'm Anglo Irish, born from the Guinness brewing family. Although I'm a part of the family that has kept the faith from the very beginning. Which, if anyone's seen the current Netflix series, the House of Guinness, some of them at the wealthier end of the family did not keep the faith. Anyway, that's my background. My own parents were medical missionaries in China, and that's where I was born and had my first ten years, which were a kind of crash course in realism, to put it mildly, about life.

And then I went back to Britain and I went to school and to University, London University and then Oxford University in England. And I have since made my way as a writer, worked for the BBC for a while and enjoyed being over here in the US as a visitor ever since 1984.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, in addition to being an author, would you embrace the term Christian apologist?

Os Guinness:
Yes, I'd be happy to. Yeah. I think all of us have the privilege and responsibility for making a case for the Christian faith. And certainly I would love to do that.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, I would say that you're better than most. Yes, yes. I think that that's a term that would apply to you more than almost anybody that I know. Now, having heard a little bit about your background previously. My sense is that you would describe the education that you got as a boy as a classical education. Is that fair?

Os Guinness:
It didn't have that name. Not in my day, which is a long time ago. You know, all English education was partly classical, so Greek and Latin and for me, above all, I loved Greek and Roman history. They were things that we were taught as a matter of course. And I've often said, I can still see. When I was ten, my headmaster twirling his gown and talking about Pericles as if he knew him well.

And he did know Winston Churchill well. He joked about the two of them in roughly the same way. And so Greek and Roman history really came alive for me.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, were there other elements that we would think of as parallel or similar to what we're seeing in the revival of classical education as a category in America. Great. Yeah. Excellent. Logic and rhetoric are three of the things I'm thinking of.

Os Guinness:
Yeah, we did all that. But just as a matter of course. It wasn't made intentional or deliberate or self-conscious. It was just part of education in those days. But as I meet people today, it sounds like something extremely rare.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, in America, I think it has been. And sometimes I think we get a little bit narrow in our thinking to think that there hasn't been such a thing as classical education since hundreds of years ago. And in some sense, that's really not true, is it?

Os Guinness:
No. I'm certainly very grateful to have what was basically a good Christian and classical education and has stood me in good stead ever since.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, what observations—I know that you are in some places quite close to what's going on in America with classical Christian education. What observations would you make about what you see? Where do you see the opportunities and what cautions might you offer?

Os Guinness:
Well, I'm not sure I'm that close to offer anything very profound. But mainly I would just say I'm very encouraged by what I've seen. So, I was introduced to a lot of it by Louise Cowan from Dallas University and then people there and then of course, schools up in Jackson, Wyoming and so on. Everything I've seen has been incredibly good and extremely encouraging. But I'm looking more at the sort of background because, you know, one of the curses of today is politicization, as if politics is the be all and end all of everything.

And you know, the old saying, the first thing to say about politics. Politics is not the first thing. It's important, but not everything. Yeah. Now, to recover that, we've got to go back. And I think we have in the Bible and certainly in classical education the idea that there's—I call it the golden matrix of a meaningful life.

In other words, the church, the family and the school. In other words, faith, family and school. And when those three are strong, the heart of everything is in its place. And politics has its place, but it's downstream. And I think America's got things so out of proportion today. So the recovery of the Christian and classical schools is enormously important on all sorts of fronts.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, I know that the people with whom I've had a lot of interaction with and would agree with most have not only been involved in this classical education movement, but have also had important things to say about Christian family. So that resonates. Well, where does the church fit into all this today?

Os Guinness:
Well, the church should be the guardian. And obviously, faith is the very deepest, because that gives us our worldview and our ethics and our whole deepest relationship to life and what human existence is about. Sadly, many churches fail miserably in that, just as many families fail and the whole number of schools equally fail. So we've got to have healthy churches, synagogues, healthy families and healthy schools.

But when they're all functioning well, they address the very deepest questions of life.

Marlin Detweiler:
Where would you say the beginning of the well, I make I'm trying not to make too much of a presupposition here, so let me tell you what I'm presupposing. I'm presupposing that we have things a bit backwards, as you have alluded to, even suggested with government. We tend to think in terms of government solutions.

And expect far too much of an institution ordained by God but not intended to be all for everything about everything. Where would you say we went wrong culturally in America regarding far too much what politics and the political sphere can do for us?

Os Guinness:
Well, the politicization actually goes back to thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who recommends that politics directs everything, and the whole idea of the all-embracing state goes back to Rousseau and the French Revolution, too. But you can see in this country it came in through things like John Dewey and his views of education and the Wilsonian progressives in the 1920s and 30s.

And really, the left ever since the beginning of the century has pressed for politicization. And the trouble is that many Christians have gone along with it without realizing it, you know. So when I first came to this country as a visitor in 1968, I was here six weeks, went from the East Coast to the West Coast, Harvard, Berkeley, all sorts of things.

I hardly met any evangelicals who really understood what was going on, except like Carl Henry, who had a really deep grasp. Most were just shocked or outraged or lamented by the things they disagreed with. But then evangelicals joined the mainstream in the 70s. They effectively slept through the 60s, and then they plunged into politics. But our Catholic friends and our Jewish friends have a much greater sense of worldview, whereas many Americans didn't.

And when they plunged into politics, the sleeping giant's woken up and is not going to be pushed around anymore. They just did politics as others did politics but with Christian passion and zeal too. Well, that meant that increasingly they became worldly and almost political, like the people on the left were political. And so much of the evangelical faith is now dismissed as toxic because it's got too politicized.

And that's a shame. And I think getting education right, as you do, and the classical schools movement does, is a huge antidote to that.

Marlin Detweiler:
I agree with you. Can you offer some practical suggestions for how we tie the education that we promote with better political thinking? Obviously, we recognize politics to be something that needs to serve the citizen and not the citizen serving politics. But what are some practical ways that you've seen the problem and maybe the solution?

Os Guinness:
Well, take the old 19th-century line about doing the Lord's work in the Lord's way. In other words, the medium and the means are as important as the goals and the end. So take the current situation. There's no doubt that we're seeing a healthy pushback against an illiberal left, wokeism, and the extreme cultural Marxism and the dangers of a political state.

Right. But much of the conservative movement is making the mistake of following the ethics of power. Now, that's actually the global menace today, following Nietzsche and various movements since Nietzsche. And you can see there's been a subversion of the Christian view of power. And we're going back to a pagan and pre-Christian view. Yeah. So the idea that it takes power to do it and whatever it takes you do to do it, you know, there are many on the right.

You can take the executive ordering and so on. It's all a matter of power. Now, it's odd that President Biden talked about restoring the soul of America, and President Trump talks about making America great again, but neither of them said what the soul was or what made America great in the first place. And it wasn't power alone. Unprincipled, unbridled power is an incredible danger.

And yet many on the right are falling for that, and that could be equally as dangerous as the left. No, my point is we should criticize anything from deep Christian principles wherever we believe it's off course.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Yeah. One of the things, I think it was in Eric Metaxas’ book If You Can Keep It, he described for me in a way that I had not previously understood what it meant when we talk about American exceptionalism. Is that a little bit what you're talking about?

Os Guinness:
Well, yes. No.

Marlin Detweiler:
Okay. And I realize that.

Os Guinness:
I'm not American. And Eric thanked me for that book because he got the idea of the Golden Triangle from me. I wonder if the framers, you know, they had different views of faith and they had different views of religion and public life, but there's almost general consensual agreement on what I've called the Golden Triangle. They didn't call it that.

But the idea that faith requires virtue, virtue requires faith, and faith requires freedom, which requires virtue, and so on. And it goes round and round. Now, where I just differ with Eric and with many Americans is over exceptionalism.

Marlin Detweiler:
Okay.

Os Guinness:
You know, the great historian Sir Niall Ferguson points out that in 70-odd great superpowers, the only real exception would be one that didn't consider itself exceptional. In other words, everyone in its time has certain distinctives. So, for instance, British power was very much related to ships and the navy, which was natural to us as a seagoing people coming out from an island.

And when air power came in, that was one of the reasons the British Empire was finished. And so it's true. All countries have certain distinct IDs, but the idea that America is uniquely exceptional, I think, is a matter of hubris.

Marlin Detweiler:
And I think, well, that's what I thought too, as I heard the term, and it was Metaxas pointing out to me that it wasn't about Americans and it wasn't about this, the American experiment, but rather a commitment to, at some level, the God of Scripture. I understand an argument can be made.

It is made and is made against whether or not we're a Christian nation, but the idea of Christian values being at the core of the design for America was what I saw come out in that. Do you take issue with that as well?

Os Guinness:
Well, I know as I say, he got his book from me, and he says so very often, so that was the most distinctive way of showing how faith and freedom are related. And I think that's incredible. And I would argue, though, that next year, the 250th anniversary, Americans need to ask where are they now? Because, as Robert Bellah wrote at the bicentennial, the covenant is broken.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah.

Os Guinness:
That was at the 200th. No one has since tried to restore the covenant. Now, you can't keep harking back to the way the framers set it up if you've abandoned it. And I'm calling America next year to reflect and measure where they are and where things are really off course. There's got to be remedy and also confession and repentance.

And I think America needs, let me put it in biblical terms, a kind of Ezra-Nehemiah rededication. Because if you think of Judaism, they had the lost ten tribes. Most of the Jews were lost. And if Ezra and Nehemiah hadn't recovered what they did, that would have been the end of Judaism. But they did. Yeah. Yeah.

In the same way, America has largely abandoned the system by which the Republic was set up. People talk about democracy. The framers weren't interested in democracy. They set up a Republic with very different ideas. Unless you recover it, America is in decline. Now, will Americans next year think like that and put things right? I don't know. I pray so. Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, you start, you've actually fed very neatly in what you've just said into my next question. I think it was two weeks ago, I was in Washington and heard you speak. And one of the things that you said that was very galvanizing, I won't forget it easily, was that we're running out of time.

We're running out of opportunity. You're alluding to that now. Unpack that a bit. And then the natural question is, what does repentance and reformation look like?

Os Guinness:
Well, let me answer the second first. I mean, many people know the Greek word for repentance, metanoia, an about-turn of heart and mind. The Hebrew term shuv adds something else. It's an about-turn of heart and mind, but it's a homecoming. People who repent face up to the fact they've gone wrong, come back to the right, come back to truth, and come back to the Lord.

You think of the prodigal son. He came to himself and went home to his father. And that's what Americans have to do — to go back to the real base realities from which the greatness of American freedom came. Now, you can't be in a land declining forever, right? Just as Elijah said, the people had to choose between the Lord and Baal.

Lincoln said they had to choose between slavery and freedom. Today, you have to choose between going the way of the French Revolution or going back to the ways of the American Revolution. You can't sit on the fence forever. Even a spinning coin will come down, heads or tails. And in that sense, it's not going to happen in five minutes.

But there is a period after which you will stop. So Americans have to take it seriously. The key word is now or today. There isn't much time. The Republic is a long way down the slope of decline. It's not over. I'm not a pessimist. Unlike, say, secularist friends who have a strong view of determinism, while the ancients, with their strong view of fate.

Jews and Christians have a strong view of freedom and freedom, including the freedom to repent and turn around, but we're well down the slope.

Marlin Detweiler:
Wow. You're likening where we are to a choice between the French Revolution and the recovery of what we had is stunning to me. Can you help me and others that may need help, like I do, understand the parallels with the French Revolution with some examples?

Os Guinness:
Well, there are huge differences, starting with their views of humanity. So the French Revolution was utopian, which is strongly linked to its eventual violent state, China. But the American Revolution was realistic. You have a separation of powers because of the potential for the abuse of power because of sin. And you can see John Witherspoon to Madison, to Federalist 51, to the Constitution.

The American Revolution is realistic, and that's a huge difference. And you can learn all the way down the line. Currently, the big difference is justice. Now, both sides fight injustice. But the French Revolution looks for the victim, weaponizes the victim, and sets up a conflict of powers. And as the Romans said, quite clearly back to classics again.

If that happens, the only possible peace is a peace of despotism because you will have a power that can put down every other power. And that's despotic. What is the biblical way for the American Revolution is to address injustice through justice and to seek confession and repentance and forgiveness and reconciliation and put things right. So, as Lincoln says, you turn enemies into friends.

And that's the Jewish way of atonement and the Christian way of atonement, forgiveness too. And those ways are radically different, and they come out very differently. Now, sadly, I don't know. Again, with his use of power, he's going the wrong way. But as he said at Charlie Cooke's funeral, he disagreed with Eric. He was going to hate his opponents.

And you can see he goes after his opponents even. He's certainly been badly wrong. But to go after them in that revenge retaliation way only makes the problem worse. It doesn't.

Marlin Detweiler:
It's an escalating problem that never stops.

Os Guinness:
Yeah, exactly.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, yeah.

Os Guinness:
You can put it, Mullen and Christian terms. You know, Saint Paul says to the Christians in Galatia who's bewitched you, you came to faith through one gospel, and now you're following another gospel. Yeah. And I'm saying essentially the same to America. Who's bewitched you? You came to freedom through one revolution, 1776, largely biblical. And now you're following postmodernism, multiculturalism, critical race theory, and so on.

Ideas have come down from the French Revolution, which is another revolution and leads in a very different direction. Yeah, their revolutions never succeed. Their oppressions never end, and their futures that they promise never arrive. And Americans have to choose. The radical ideas of the left are as much a secession from the American Revolution as the South was in breaking with the North and the Civil War.

Marlin Detweiler:
What?

This, the word that comes to mind is a form of repentance. What does national repentance look like? At a practical level, it might be realized in 2026.

Os Guinness:
When Michel Foucault, who is an atheist and postmodernist, hated the Christian faith. But I once heard him say that there was one thing he admired, which was confession. Why it struck me, he said, when someone confesses, they go on record against themself. Yeah. Which is very rare.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah.

Os Guinness:
No, I was, I screwed up, I lied, I cheated my taxes, I committed adultery, that's the biblical way. There's no airbrushing in the Bible. David was a murderer and an adulterer, a Bible airbrushes nothing. And so confession is facing up to reality and going on record now you say that's biblical, pious, religious people. No, no. Look at Lincoln.

Lincoln's confession and the 1860s were remarkable and deep and a very key part of the reconciliation he was trying to lead towards. Can America do that today in I was.

You take the wonderful second paragraph of the declaration. We hold these truths to be and so on. They are magnificent. How could they then have sustained slavery? It was wrong. And Americans have got to put it right, and every last vestige has to be atoned and forgiven and gone, because at the moment, you know, if you have minds left over from a previous war, citizens may trip on them or foreign enemies may set them off.

And that's what the guilt over racism and slavery is. And the left was able to twist its knife in the wound because there were unhealed leftovers even after the civil rights movement. The time has come. If that's not to be America's ball and chain forever, it's got to be resolved, and I hope 2026 will go a long way in doing that.

Marlin Detweiler:
But that is remarkable. Well, I have loved the opportunity to, in my career, be a part of classical Christian education. And I am so glad that you are a friend of classical education the way that you are. And your insights are remarkable. I have to think about this because I don't know what it's like.

I don't know what it looks like for us to think in terms of a form of a national repentance that can help right things. But it sure makes sense to me.

Os Guinness:
Well, Marlin, let me just say that growing out of a group in the Congress, proposals being put for the next year on the National Day of Prayer, which is May the 7th, the first Thursday, May, there will be a national act of rededication, and it'll have a celebration. All the greatness of freedom in 250 years. But there will also be Thanksgiving and confession and that, very importantly, the third element, a rededication to America First principles.

Because what made America great? Reagan was good at this. And, you know, Reagan was the first one to say MAGA, make America.

Marlin Detweiler:
Right?

Os Guinness:
Yeah. And that phrase comes from Ronald Reagan. And Reagan was magnificent in saying what it was. In other words, what were the first principles of freedom? And next year there has to be an act of rededication to those. So Americans need to understand them. Many Americans don't. And that's where your wonderful classical and Christian schools come in. You were teaching the first things that are so necessary.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you coming on our podcast today and making those things clear. And you can be sure that I will be praying with you that we see national repentance and restoration of those wonderful first things. I would love to see that happen. Thank you.

Os Guinness:
Thank you.

Marlin Detweiler:
And, folks, thank you for joining us on another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. We hope to see you next time. Bye-bye.