Show Notes
What grounds a nation morally? In this episode of the Nuance podcast, Case sits down with Dr. Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University. Together, they explore the philosophical and theological foundations that undergird American public life.
Drawing on his extensive background in natural law, human rights, and moral philosophy, Dr. George shares insights from his decades of civic leadership. Whether you are interested in the roots of the American republic, the future of civil discourse, or how to model virtue for the next generation, this conversation offers profound wisdom for navigating today’s cultural landscape.
🔑 Key Topics Covered in This Episode:
Unlikely Alliances: Dr. George discusses his decades-long collaboration and deep friendship with Dr. Cornel West, highlighting the importance of engaging across political divides to seek the truth.
Defending Free Speech: Hear why both scholars have taken to the road to advocate for freedom of expression and open debate on college campuses.
Redefining Human Rights: Dr. George details his experience chairing the Commission on Unalienable Rights under former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and why the commission was formed to clarify American diplomacy.
The American Founding vs. Modernity: Discover how the original American understanding of “liberty” and “the pursuit of happiness” (rooted in flourishing and virtue) differs from the modern concept of “license”.
The Source of Human Dignity: The conversation explores how true human rights are rooted in Genesis 1 and the concept of Imago Dei, rather than being arbitrary gifts from governments or human powers.
Raising Virtuous Citizens: Why “more is caught than taught” when it comes to passing down character, self-restraint, and courage to the next generation.
📚 Episode Resources:
Natural Rights, Culture, and the Common Good: https://america250.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/George_Natural-Rights-Culture-and-the-Common-Good.pdf
Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights: https://fedsoc.org/events/the-commission-on-unalienable-rights-report-human-rights-and-u-s-foreign-policy
America’s Pastor, the biography of Billy Graham: https://a.co/d/hbmPOGB
Learn more about Salem Camp Meeting: https://www.salemcampmeeting.org/
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Episode Transcript
Case Thorp
What grounds a nation morally? What holds a people together, not by sheer power or shared tribe, but by the truths to which we claim our allegiance? Well, today we’re exploring the philosophical and theological foundations undergirding American public life. Welcome to Nuance, where we seek to be faithful in the public square. Well, today I’m speaking with Dr. Robert George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University. His work in natural law, human rights, moral philosophy, and the common good has shaped public debate for more than three decades. So we’re asking how his faith informs not just his scholarship, but also his own civic leadership. Robert, welcome to the show.
Robert George
It’s my very great pleasure; Case, thank you for having me on.
Case Thorp
Well, as I shared with you before we started, I’m a bit of a Robert George junkie. And I think it’s good for our listeners to know that.
Robert George
As I said, poor you.
Case Thorp
Well, I appreciate your time. Let me remind our listeners, please like and share or leave a comment. You wouldn’t believe how that gives us great exposure and helps our ideas get out even further. Well, Robert George is, as Supreme Court Justice and former Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan said, one of the nation’s most respected legal theorists. His influence extends nationally and internationally through service on major advisory bodies and scholarly societies. He’s been a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights served on the President’s Council and Bioethics. He’s also a recipient of the Bradley Prize, one of the nation’s most prestigious awards in intellectual and civic leadership, holds real doctorates and honorary doctorates for multiple institutions.
It should be noted the ones he actually earned though are from Harvard and Oxford. Yeah. He’s a fellow with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, served on the board of the American Enterprise Institute, the Templeton Religion Trust, then until recently the board of the Heritage Foundation. Prolific scholar and writer, he’s widely known for his arguments and his wonderful public engagement. Now Robert, I want to lift up your engagement with Cornel West.
For those that don’t know, Dr. West is also a scholar, but quite the activist, and carries a prophetic voice so very different from a lot of Robert’s political commitments, and even my own. But the work that y’all have done on preserving and advocating for freedom of expression and speech on campuses is a wonderful example, and I think needed more so. How has that experience been for you in your work with Cornel?
Robert George
Well, my work with Cornel has been a very, very great blessing. We have been at it now together for about 20 years. We began teaching together, yes, back in 2005, 2006. So we began teaching a seminar which we called Adventures of Ideas. We were echoing there the title of a great work by an important philosopher at Harvard in the 19 teens and 20s and 30s named Alfred North Whitehead. Both of us are admirers of the late Professor Whitehead. And it’s an introduction to the great works of Western civilization. We begin usually with Sophocles, we read the Antigone. We always read one or more of Plato’s dialogues, perhaps Aristotle’s ethics. We always read St. Augustine’s confessions. And then we work our way forward through the medieval period, the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment era, and all the way up to the 19th century and then into the 20th and now the 21st centuries. We’re reading figures like John Stuart Mill and John Henry Newman, John Dewey and C.S. Lewis, Martin Luther King, his letter from Birmingham jail. And we engage with our students in a way that tries to bring those debates that these great historical figures were involved in into their own lives, up into the present. They’re talking about perennial questions, questions that don’t go away, questions that are not confined to any one time period. Questions like, what does it mean to be human? What is justice? What is truth? Does truth really matter? How should we lead our lives ethically?
These are questions that don’t go away. Human beings have been wrestling with them for as long as there have been human beings. And we think the great thinkers of history have some important lessons to teach us and to teach our students. And so that’s why we teach not only the works of the living, but the works of the dead. We think there’s a lot of wisdom in the two or three great streams of thought that have fed our own traditions, Athens, Jerusalem, Rome.
Case Thorp
Well for our leaders that may not know, you’re a very committed Roman Catholic and would be categorized in the conservative side of American political thinking and writing. Is that fair?
Robert George
That’s completely fair.
Case Thorp
Well for those that may not know Cornel West, how would you describe his position on things or position according to you?
Robert George
Well, Cornel is a devout Christian. He’s from the historic Black Baptist tradition in the United States. He was formed in Shiloh Baptist Church in or near Sacramento, California, where he was brought up. He was actually born in Tulsa, but moved as a very, very young child with his family to Sacramento. He was formed in the church there. His politics are very different from mine. Brother Cornel is Honorary Chairman of Democratic Socialists of America. I am not connected with the Democratic Socialists of America. I’m an old fashioned traditional American conservative. So we have some differences, but those differences, far from dividing us, are opportunities for us to engage with each other and learn from each other, to think critically about the most important issues. We’re able to push each other and tussle over these questions. We’re both committed to the same thing in the end, and that is getting at the truth of these matters. Both of us try to love truth more than we love our own opinions. We don’t want to fall so deeply in love with our own opinions that we favor them over the truth if it turns out we have good reasons to think that we should change our opinions and our opinions on this or that or the other thing are wrong. And both of us know, as all human beings should know, that we’re not going to be right about everything. We’re wrong about some things. I mean, think about that, Case. Every person on the planet, right, every single one holds some ideas in his or her head that are not true.
The problem is, of course, we don’t know which ones they are. We believe things because we believe them to be true. That’s what it means to believe things. That’s what it means to hold an opinion on something. You believe something’s true. We know that they all aren’t true because we know our own fallibility. We are frail, fallen, fallible human beings. We know we’re wrong about some things and we know we can be wrong not only about the minor, superficial, trivial things of life. We can be wrong about the big, important things as well. Questions of meaning and value, justice, the common good, human nature, the human good, dignity, human rights, human destiny, big important questions. Now the only way we’re going to ever swap out some of those false beliefs for true beliefs is if we’re willing to listen to somebody who’s going to challenge our beliefs and give us reasons and arguments and evidence for thinking that we might be wrong about something. So that’s a deep sharing despite our very strong, extensive political differences. There’s a deep sharing in that shared commitment to get at the truth and our shared recognition that we know we’re wrong about some things.
Case Thorp
And you both have gone on the road to stand up for the seeming attack on free expression and freedom of speech on college campuses. Things have gotten so wonky and y’all just said this is not right. We have to be able to share differences.
Robert George
It’s another shared value.
That’s exactly right. Both of us believe that if we’re to get at the truth of things, especially in universities, not exclusively, but especially in universities, whose whole mission is to get at the truth of things, if we’re going to get at the truth of things, then we need to make sure people have the freedom to explore ideas, to make arguments, to weigh the evidence, to speak their minds, to challenge each other, and to be challenged by others.
That’s another point of deep sharing between Cornel and myself.
Case Thorp
I would encourage our listeners and we’ll put some links to these conversations, go online and Google or search for Cornel West and Robert George and you’ll find a number of conferences and interviews where they are trying to push back against the cancel culture that does not want to hear or listen and I appreciate that work. Now you’re coming to us from Princeton, the most beautiful place in the world.
Robert George
It’s got to compete in my mind with Oxford, England for that title. Another place that I have deep connections with and I’m deeply devoted to, but Princeton is a very beautiful place and I’ve been very blessed to be able to make my career here.
Case Thorp
Well, my three years there at the seminary were idyllic and I say often that I’ve traveled a lot and I’ll always come back to the most beautiful place in the world. Well, we have you here today because you recently wrote an outstanding article for the American Enterprise Institute. And I wanted to, I think it has a timely message and one as our listeners are thinking about their faith, particularly in the public square. That’s something that I emphasize a great deal, a lot of times that gets very much applied in the workplace and some of this can do that. But this article entitled Natural Rights, the Common Good and the American Revolution. Now I understand that was a book or the category for these particular articles.
Robert George
Yes, I think something like that.
Case Thorp
Yeah. And then your particular article is natural rights culture and the common good. So you begin by sharing your experience during the first Trump administration where you were invited to work on human rights and redefine the diplomatic policy for how human rights are understood. How did that come about?
Robert George
That’s right. Well, I was sitting minding my own business when I got an email message from a lady who identified herself as the secretary to then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. And her message said that Secretary of State Pompeo would like me to come down to Washington to attend a meeting at his office on a certain date. It was in March, as I recall. At first I wasn’t quite sure whether this was legit, whether it was for real. I thought it might be one of my rascally younger brothers playing a joke on me. It wouldn’t be the first time that I got a phony invitation to have tea with the Queen of England or visit the President of United States. But I noticed that she put her phone number and address and it was a 202 number, not a 304 number in West Virginia where my brother’s from. And it was a .gov email address. So I thought, well, this could be for real. So I went ahead and phoned that number and sure enough, got through to Secretary Pompeo’s personal secretary. And I said, this is Robert George. I just got your very nice invitation to attend a meeting at Secretary Pompeo’s office. I am available on the date. I’ve checked my calendar. But I’d love to know a bit more about what the meeting concerns, what the topic of the meeting will be, and who else will be there. And she said, well, I’m afraid I can’t help you with the first. I don’t know what the topic is, Secretary Pompeo didn’t tell me that, but I can tell you that, but she said, I can tell you that nobody else will be at the meeting. It’ll be just you and Secretary Pompeo. Well, now that really got my attention because I’m wondering, I’ve never met Mike Pompeo. We don’t know each other, we’re not communicating. But I said, well, sure, if the secretary wants to meet with me, I’ll be happy to come down. So on the appointed day, I went on down to DC. I went to the State Department offices, went through the security system there, you know, it’s like getting on an airplane, you have to go through the security system, and was taken up to his beautiful office. I was greeted by the nice secretary who had reached out to me, and then he came out and personally greeted me and then took me into the interior space there of his offices. And there was a beautiful table set with two-place settings. It a great big long, long, long table, but it had two-place settings. I got a kick out of the fact that there were name cards as if we needed the name cards in our two places. And a nice lunch was served and we chatted a bit, made small talk for a few minutes and got to know each other a little. And then he finally said, because I hadn’t pushed the issue, he said, I’ll bet you’re wondering why I invited you down here. And I said, well, yes, Mr. Secretary, as a matter of fact, I am curious about why you invited me down here. And he said the following. He said, you know, in this building, the State Department, he was referring to the State Department, in this building there’s a kind of currency of our discourse, and that currency is the discourse of human rights. He said, now, I’m a believer in human rights, and I believe that part of our job in forming and executing our foreign and diplomatic policy is to advance the cause of human rights. So I’m with the program as far as that’s concerned. But he said, most of the people in this building, I fear, have a very different understanding of human rights from the understanding that I have. And as a matter of fact, I think their understanding is really quite out of whack, out of line with the historic American understanding of human rights going all the way back to our our founding, to our Declaration of Independence and to our Constitution and its first amendment.
And I said, well, Mr. Secretary, you’re preaching to the choir on that with me because I think you’re absolutely right. I think that the dominant view of human rights in the elite sector of our culture, certainly that includes among academics, is one that has gotten out of whack with a sound understanding and with a historic American understanding of human rights. Human rights have been reduced to things people want, but to want something is not to have a right to it. We need to think much more rigorously about rights, and rights have to be rooted in a sound conception of human well-being and fulfillment, the human good, human nature, human dignity.
Case Thorp
Well, if I may, in your article you write, “rights reviewed as rooted in nothing more than ill-defined and highly abstract notions of autonomy, self-determination, self-authorship, and the ability to fulfill one’s desires.”
Robert George
And that’s not what human rights were for the American founders. That’s not what human rights were understood to be by the architects of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, to which the United States was a signatory nation. And it’s certainly not my conception of human rights. And it’s not one, I think, that is consistent with the larger Western tradition, the biblical tradition.
So I said, Mr. Secretary, how can I help you? I’d be happy to help in any way I can. And he said, well, I’d like to restore a sound, authentically American understanding of human rights here in the State Department that will then guide our foreign policy and our diplomatic policy going forward. And I would like you to help me to do that. He said I’d like to establish a commission, and I’d like you to chair the commission that will create a kind of working document to revitalize, renew, reform our understanding of human rights and give us the blueprint for going forward. And I said, well, Mr. Secretary, I’ll be happy to help in any way I can. I don’t know if I would be the right person to be chairman of this commission because I have been quite critical of President Trump on moral grounds.
So it could be that you’d need someone that the administration, your superiors here in the administration wouldn’t object to. And he said, well, no, he said, you know, I regularly meet with the president and I realized that you’ve had criticisms of the president, but I think we can work this out. So I said, well, if so, fine, I’ll be happy to do it. And then he said, well, you know, I need your suggestions for who should serve on this commission. And I said, well, I’ll be happy to give those to you. And then I went back and thought a little about it and then got back in touch with him to make the suggestions. And he very kindly arranged for all of them to be appointed. Then there was a chain of events which resulted, as I had predicted, in my not being chairman of the commission and indeed of my not being on the commission, although all of the people that I recommended ended up serving on the commission and it ended up being chaired again at my suggestion by my very, very dear friend, the very great American legal scholar and champion of human rights, Mary Ann Glendon of the Harvard Law School. So she chaired the commission. They produced an excellent report and it became the report guiding what was left then of the administration under which Secretary Pompeo was serving. And then of course, President Biden was elected in the next election, in the 2020 election, and he immediately, or his secretary of state Blinken, immediately repudiated the Glendon blueprint for human rights. And so the state department at that point went back to the very vision of human rights, of which I had been so critical.
And now we’re in a new Trump administration with a new Secretary of State, Secretary of State Rubio. I have urged the Secretary of State in an op-ed that I did for the Wall Street Journal to readopt the Glendon report as the vision going forward. I know that that vision is much more consistent with Secretary Rubio’s personal views about human rights. As far as I know, there’s been no formal readoption of the Glendon report, but that report is out there and it’s out there for any American to read, it’s available online. And I think if you read that, you’ll understand and see the profound value of the American vision, the vision of the American founders of unalienable rights. In fact, it was called the Report on Unalienable Rights. You also see that that vision of human rights is consistent with the vision of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 in a way that this revisionist understanding that I was criticizing is not consistent with the vision of the 1948 declaration.
Case Thorp
And that declaration has not been changed in spite of the many progressive voices at the UN. Why do you think it’s not evolved as US policy has evolved?
Robert George
Well, part of that’s the work of, frankly, Muslim nations often allied with the Vatican in international affairs to make sure that that document doesn’t get corrupted by amendments that would introduce an alleged human right to abortion or alleged human right to sexual freedom or same sex marriage or any of these other modern ideas. So far, any efforts to amend the human rights declaration to basically turn it into a progressive, a document of progressive ideology have been rebuffed.
Case Thorp
Interesting. Right. Now you write that the American founders sought to root rights and happiness particularly in flourishing and fulfillment. How does that differ? And tell us more about flourishing and fulfillment.
Robert George
Yeah. Well, we all know, we’ve all committed to memory that second sentence, that great second sentence of the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Now let’s think about that profound statement. Number one, notice where it says our rights come from, our most fundamental rights.
Not the right to a driver’s license. They are unalienable rights like life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Notice that they are not gifts of the government. They’re not presented as coming from the king or the president or the parliament or the congress or the supreme court. No, they come from no merely human power. And that’s important because if that’s true, that means that no merely human power may legitimately violate them or take them away. It’s critical to the American understanding of human rights that they are not given to us by governments or other human powers, but by the very hand of God. Number two, notice that it’s a statement of the moral principle of the profound inherent and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family. Now, where does that idea come from? Actually, it doesn’t come from, as much as I admire the great Greek and Roman thinkers, and I really yield to no one in my admiration of Plato and Aristotle and Cicero and figures like that. As I mentioned, Cornel and I teach them every time we teach together. But no, they are not the ones who gave us. It wasn’t Greek antiquity or Roman antiquity that gave us the principle of the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family. It comes rather from Genesis 1, the very first book of the Bible, the very first chapter of the very first book of the Bible, where we’re taught that the human being, though fashioned from the mere dust of the earth, mere material stuff that will someday die and dissolve, is nevertheless made in the very image and likeness of the divine creator and ruler of all that is, the very image and likeness of God. So notice the continuity between the biblical understanding of human or philosophical anthropology of the nature of man and the Declaration. And then third, notice that in the non-exhaustive list of unalienable rights we’re given life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those have been misunderstood in many cases, where people have supposed that by liberty, for example, our founding fathers meant the right to do whatever you want, whenever you want, with whoever you want, so long as you don’t violate the rights of others.
Case Thorp
Liberty requires responsibility.
Robert George
No, that’s right. For the American founders, there was a big difference between liberty and what they called license. License in the sense that we have it in the word licentiousness. Exactly. No, liberty means the freedom to fulfill yourself, the freedom to do the things that are good and because they are good are fulfilling to us as human beings…to do things that are wicked, to use your freedom to do things that are wicked is not liberty. That is license. It’s to be distinguished from liberty. And then take that concept of the pursuit of happiness. You know, words change in their meaning over time, you know, with usage. Now, to our forebears, the word happiness was morally inflected. By happiness, they didn’t mean what so many people mean today by happiness. That is a pleasant psychological state. You know, having a smile on your face, getting what you want, being satisfied psychologically. You know, a state that could be induced by Darvon or some other drug or being put on some sort of a happiness machine. No, they don’t mean, they didn’t mean that at all. They meant by happiness, well-being, fulfillment, flourishing, beatitude, having a blessed life, having a fulfilled life, having a flourishing life, being all you can be, being virtuous. The concept of virtue is inherent in the concept of happiness as the term is used in the, for example, 18th and 19th centuries. You’ll still get a flavor of that. It’ll sound archaic. But I say to my students, for example, you’ll understand what I’m talking about if I say, happy the man who walks in the path of justice, right? But when I say that and you understand exactly what I’m saying, happy the man who walks in the path of justice, you realize, I’m not saying that if you walk in the path of justice, you will go around with a smile on your face all the time. You’ll have this pleasant psychological state. You might, in fact, from that perspective, be very unhappy because as walking in the path of justice could mean that you’re going to be exposed or subjected to a lot of suffering like Jesus Christ himself, for example, you know, he’s walking in the path of justice. And what did it get him? Crucifixion. And many martyrs have walked in the path of justice and been made to suffer for it. No, when we say happy the man who walks in the paths of justice, we mean virtuous, upright, truly fulfilled is the man who walks in the path of justice. So we need to recover the founders’ concepts of liberty and happiness, if we’re to really understand the meaning of that great second sentence, all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
Case Thorp
Well, preach. I really, really appreciate that and you attach it to the most well-known sentence in American culture. Now, yes, when it comes to virtue, that is so very important. And that’s one of the great motivators for me as a pastor and one of the reasons why we do this Nuance Podcast. You write that “there’s a requirement of certain virtues and you mentioned the strength of character among the people but then you say but these virtues do not just fall down on people from the heavens they have to be transmitted through the generations and nurtured by each generation.” Does our transmission of virtue and strength of character today worry you?
Robert George
Yes, I mean, clearly we’re suffering from a paucity of virtue in our public lives and in our private lives. I mean, just all you have to do is go to your favorite website and read the news on any given day. Now, of course, human beings have always been what we are, frail, at least since the tragedy in the garden, frail, fallen, fallible creatures. We’re sometimes not going to understand the difference between right and wrong. And sometimes we’ll even know what’s right and nevertheless do what’s wrong. So, St. Paul tells us all about that. And it’s a very accurate picture of our condition that he paints.
We need virtue even to run a Republican government. A government not only of the people which all government is, not only for the people which all good government is, even if it’s the government of the benign, but government by the people. That’s what Republican government is.
But another thing our founders taught was even with the best constitution in the world, and ours is a very, very good constitution, Madisonian constitution, lots of checks on power, checks and balances, our system of federalism, these are all very important and very valuable ideas. But with even the best constitution in the world, you’re not going to sustain a republic absent virtue in the people self-restraint, self-control. You need to be able to govern yourself in order to be self-governing in the political sense. Now the question is, where do those virtues come from? Notice that they don’t come from government. Government can’t just order you to be virtuous and make you virtuous. A court can’t order that. The economy doesn’t by itself generate virtuous people.
All employers need basically virtuous people who will show up at work on time, not drunk or on drugs, who won’t embezzle, not steal, right? But business corporations can’t create those people. You need honest jurors for a trial, right? Who can’t be bribed, won’t be corrupted, will really attend to the facts and make a judgment on whatever the standard of proof is.
Courts can’t order that people be virtuous so that they can serve on juries. No, all the institutions of our society: political, legal, economic, rely on a certain threshold, minimum of virtue in the people. And yet, they can’t produce it. So who produces it if it is produced at all? Well, here’s who produces it. Mom and dad, grandma and grandpa, auntie and uncle, coach and teacher and pastor and librarian, the people who touch the lives of children, the people who know the children by name and who are in turn known by name by the children. In other words, it’s the institutions of civil society beginning with the family and the church and other religious community that plays the outsized role in forming our young men and women to be decent people, lead successful lives, and be responsible citizens. If the institutions of civil society fail, if they are undermined by government policy, if they no longer function to transmit virtue, then virtue will be lost. And there go all the other institutions of society, our economic institutions, our legal institutions, our very political institutions, our Republican government. The Constitution’s restraints on power were said by the founders themselves. Don’t take my word for it. Read their words in the Federalist Papers. Were said by the founders themselves to be merely auxiliary protections. The real protections of Republican government, the primary protections, are not the system of checks and balances of the Constitution. They are the virtues of the people transmitted by the institutions of civil society.
Case Thorp
Yes. Well, here at the Collaborative, our methodology is very much in the light of the work of James Davison Hunter at University of Virginia. And our concern for institutions being those change agents in culture often, and those are led by individuals. And so we seek to bring along, disciple, and resource those individuals.
Robert George
Absolutely. Wonderful. Wonderful work.
Case Thorp
Someone listening might say, well, this perspective works well if you’re a Christian. How do you root American virtue in Genesis 1 when someone may not see Genesis 1 to be authoritative?
Robert George
Yeah, well, you need some source for it.
It can be the traditions of our ancestors. There have been successful societies, I think none that have fully appreciated outside of those shaped by the biblical vision, the truly profound, inherent and equal dignity of every member of the human family. And even those of us in the West and even ourselves here in the United States, it has taken us centuries and we’re yet to get there fully to the point at which we truly honor the profound, inherent and equal dignity of each and every member the human family, our own experience with slavery going all the way up to 1865, and then the legacy of Jim Crow and segregation after that shows us that simply having the heritage of the biblical tradition will not guarantee that people will live up to the principles that they’ve been taught.
But at least we in the West have that principle. We have that ideal. We could produce something like the second sentence of the declaration and something like our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. It’s no accident that Republican government, the first really truly successful experiment in Republican government was in the West. And as it happens here in the United States where we do have that heritage.
Case Thorp
I would agree. Now you talk about all this leading towards the common good and the common good is a phrase and a concept on which we often reflect. Your definition of the common good before I… well I don’t want to trick you with what you quote in the paper but just tell us how would you define the common good?
Robert George
Well, it’s the good of the people as a whole. In other words, not the good of any particular individual, the good of, not the good of any particular group, any particular tribe, any particular ethnic body, any particular racial group. It’s the good of the whole community in which everyone is regarded as equal in fundamental worth and dignity. So when a ruler, whether it’s a democratic body like a democratically constituted legislature or whether it’s a king, whatever the ruler is, when the ruler rules in the interests of the common good, then that ruler is not ruling in his personal interest or the interest of his family or his clan or his tribe. His decisions are guided by what is for the benefit of everybody in the community, considered as bearers of equal worth.
Case Thorp
So your encouragement to the man and the woman who are faithfully seeking to serve Christ, but also showing up every day in their places of work, in their schools, at soccer practice. Your encouragement to them in these times.
Robert George
Yeah, do your job. And your job is to model the virtues that you would like to see your children themselves exemplify as they grow into adolescence and adulthood. Children do learn by precept. It’s important to talk, even to do a little preaching, as well as a lot of teaching. But children learn even more from example. Brother West and I, Cornel and I, say about our own teaching that we understand our vocation to be forming the young men and women entrusted to our charge, to be determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers. The title of our book together is Truth Matters. But in our long experience, between us we have more than 80 years of experience teaching young men and women. They learn more from what they see us do than from what they hear us say. If we want to form them to be determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers, we have to model that. We have to show them what it means by our own actions to be determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers. Even in our dialogues, even in our discussions, how we engage our disagreements. Do we do so in a spirit of self-criticism? Do we do it in a spirit of learning? Or are we partisans? Are we ideologues? If we’re the latter, then we’re not modeling the behavior that we want them someday to adopt. We’re not modeling what it means to be a determined truth seeker and a courageous truth speaker. If we think we know the truth, but the truth is unpopular and we refuse to speak it, we’re not modeling the conduct that those kids need to have modeled. We’re letting the side down. If we want them to be courageous truth speakers, they’ve got to see us speaking out courageously when it’s dangerous, when it’s risky, when it’s unpopular, when you might pay a price professionally, socially, economically for speaking the truth as God gives you to understand the truth. You know, you might be wrong, you’re fallible, but if you have conviction and you see something that’s, you know, the truth that needs to be spoken and nobody else is willing to speak out, you gotta speak out.
Case Thorp
Well, I have two children in college and an eighth grader, but I see and hear a lot from the young dads who are just starting out. And one of the phrases that I have adopted is, more is caught than taught.
Robert George
Yes, I’m afraid that’s right.
Case Thorp
And I feel like it reflects what you’re saying there, that they will catch so much of who you are and how you live your life. Yes, teach for sure, but don’t feel like you’ve failed if you aren’t having Bible study with the family or trying to sit down and do such study. More is caught than taught. Well, Professor George, thank you. This has been incredibly rich. Next week, friends, I hope that you will come back and be with us. We’ll continue the conversation and we’re going to focus on Robert George’s journey as a person of faith and how it supports and guides his work as a public intellectual. So Robert, you’re going to talk to Cornel, tell him to come be a guest. I would love to talk to him. I’m a Cornel West junkie as well.
Robert George
Absolutely.
Case Thorp
Friends, you’ll find a link to several of the things we’ve discussed as well as to this article that Dr. George has written, Natural Rights, Culture, and the Common Good. Well, thank you for inviting us into your day. If this conversation sharpened your thinking, share it with a colleague, leave a review, it really helps. Drop us your email at wecolabor.com and I’ll send you Zeitgeist, our latest journal on faith, work, and culture. Many thanks to the Magruder Foundation for supporting today’s episode. I’m Case Thorp, and God’s blessings on you.
