Letters—December 2026

We welcome letters to the editor. Letters appear two issues after the article to which they are responding. Letters under three hundred words are preferred, and they may be edited for length and clarity.

Letters responding to articles published in this issue should be received by December 4 for publication in the February issue. Send them to submissions@firstthings.com.

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The Great Book

In “The Left Is Right About the Bible” (October 2026), Mark Bauerlein makes a strong case that cultural literacy may provide a sound pedagogical rationale for teaching the Bible in high school on religiously neutral grounds, but that coming to grips with the way Christianity has shaped American life and letters brings us closer to questions of value that liberal neutrality abhors. Yet, in taking up this issue in the abstract, he fails to consider that how these questions arise in the classroom matters a great deal. 

As a product of Texas public schools myself, I can say with some confidence that proselytism will be an inevitable consequence of these curricular changes in a way that will harm both Church and state. It harms the Church by reducing the faith to a presupposition of public life, the same presupposition that so often leads Sunday school—treated as an optional activity—to give way to youth sports in Texas and other places. It harms the state by making the solemn enterprise of public education another site for the culture war instead of a basis for civic solidarity.

That said, a sound liberal education ought to include the study of the Bible and of Christianity’s influence on Western civilization and American institutions. Colleges and universities are better placed than high schools to take up this task. The inclusion of Genesis, Exodus, Job, the Gospels, and so on in Columbia University’s Core Curriculum, which I taught for several years, has never to my knowledge been a matter of controversy, and serious and sympathetic study of these texts inevitably leads to questions of value. It is hard, for instance, to understand such secular values as the dignity and equality of human beings without appreciating the Judeo-Christian ethic from which these values descend. If students thereby acquire a further appreciation for that ethic taken in itself, that would be well. But it is far better for them to trace these intellectual paths for themselves than to be guided or forced in that direction in the name of civic education. 

In any case, serious study of the humanities is in abeyance nearly everywhere, and it is striking that so few Christian colleges and universities, let alone the secular ones, make any Great Books required reading for their students at all. (Indeed, Columbia students must also make a careful study of a number of other Christian authors in the core, such as St. Augustine and Dante.) I recommend starting there.

Dhananjay Jagannathan
new york, new york  

Three cheers for Mark Bauerlein and his bold article “The Left Is Right About the Bible.” Throughout the last century, our positivist elite has told us that nothing transcends this world and that there are no universally applicable values. The result has been the decline of our institutions and the erosion of our communities.

 Either Christianity is true, or it isn’t. Either the teachings of the Bible and our Christian tradition are true, or they’re not. As Richard John Neuhaus wrote in The Naked Public Square, if Christianity is true, it is a public truth that must impinge on the public square; it must be allowed to speak to and inform public policy at some points of morality and ethics. And he reminded us that, if we concede Christianity has no place in the public square, we are complicit in discrediting our faith. Yes, the Bible and our nation go together, and the Bible is essential in “teaching America.”

 Thank you, Mark Bauerlein and First Things , for contending for the faith that was once and for all delivered to the saints. 

David R. Duggan
alcoa, tennessee

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A Divided Right

Christopher Caldwell’s account of the AfD’s rise (“Why the AfD Wins,” October 2026) omits another firewall that is as vexing as Germany’s militant democracy: the establishment appeasers among AfD’s supposed European allies. 

For most of these parties, Alice Weidel only became palatable in the last year, when Orbán lifted his veto on engaging her. Ahead of crucial EU elections in 2024, in which fissures between Poland and Hungary’s respective right-wing parties over Ukraine prevented a major Euro-party from forming, the AfD’s exclusion was a foregone conclusion. The AfD also received previous allegations of harboring spies on behalf of foreign entities, which did not help. 

The European right relegated a would-be ally from the bloc’s most populous country to the smallest of the European Parliament’s three right-wing groups, the Europe of Sovereign Nations, rather than the Patriots for Europe, which includes Orbán’s Fidesz and Le Pen’s National Rally, or the European Conservatives and Reformists, which includes Meloni’s Brothers of Italy and Poland’s Law and Justice. As a result, Weidel’s fifteen members of the European Parliament dominate this twenty-seven-member bench of fringe groups. Even so, the Europe of Sovereign Nations has recently played an important role in major votes on migration, joining with the center-right European People’s Party. Another political barrier has been broken.

Why would right-populists accede to demonizing one another? For both Le Pen and Meloni’s respective parties, de-demonizing themselves at home seems part of it. Neither has celebrated the AfD’s recent wins in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Saxony-Anhalt. Having opted for convergence on the establishment, too close a partnership with Weidel could derail their path to power, or the consolidation of it. 

The need for an intra-right scapegoat may never disappear, but AfD’s rise may help others realize they’re trapped within the same cordon sanitaire. The party’s trajectory is sui generis, too—a localized response to Germany’s many exceptions—having transitioned from its “watchdog” origins to its present populist form, with the countervailing challenge of taming radicalism. Elsewhere, it’s been one over the other: trying to obfuscate radical origins (National Rally, Brothers of Italy, and Sweden Democrats) or breaking out of libertarian-bourgeois origins (Vox, UK Independence Party, and Law and Justice). The shared intuition among these diverging parties, that a one-size-fits-all supranationalism does not work, should also help them recognize that different national predicaments call for different strategies toward mass appeal. 

Conservatives angling to rebalance supranational politics from within and populists hoping to turn the tables altogether could at least agree that tiptoeing around Weidel helps neither strategy. Otherwise, they will become pawns in a progressive plot to undermine them all.

Jorge González-Gallarza
madrid, spain

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Babcias Boost Birth Rates 

Social scientists take note. Mark Regnerus’s article “Living Humane Vitae in Poland” (October 2026) illuminates an underexamined factor that may be contributing to the decline in birth rates across countries—a second-order consequence of a contracepting society—hollowed out families and the loss of relational bonds across the generations.

His interviews with Polish Catholic couples navigating the Catholic Church’s teaching on contraception and probing their own openness to having children reveal that health care, economic factors, apartment size, and material comforts are not always the only (or even most important) limiting factors to welcoming an additional child. It is a culture that sees children as burdensome. Could it be that the lack of extended family, and particularly grandparents, makes couples’ decisions to be open to new life, “to do hard things,” especially difficult? As one woman candidly states, reflecting on the stresses faced by young families, “We badly need a babcia!”

Here, Catholic Social Thought may point the way forward. Reversing demographic decline won’t be found in fiscal, social, or technological engineering, but in the small choices that families make to recover intergenerational solidarity—building bonds of mutual support in gratitude and love. Poland showed the world nearly a half century ago the power of solidarity to overturn an unjust order. Perhaps we can use its lessons today to restore the family, the essential building block of a truly free and peaceful society.

Eileen Norcross
arlington, virginia

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The Art of Scrutony

I would like to thank Dan Hitchens for his article about one of my (many) bêtes noires (“The Making of Roger Scruton,” October 2026). It interested me because I was at Cambridge from ’62, and my recollections are rather different. Even with regard to the nature of the Philosophy Tripos, my friends (who cheerfully went on to become dons) did not seem to find the course quite as dry as the essay suggests; indeed, I took a distant interest myself. But obviously there were all sorts, and clearly Scruton suffered somewhat, at least in his first year—particularly since tutors were generally within one’s college, so it was the luck of the draw.

But I was mainly struck by remarks like this: “‘If Roger had come up a couple of years later than he did,’ Mary Hoffman remarks, ‘he might have had a quite different Cambridge experience.’ Within her time, the Beatles and the Stones became the soundtrack to student life, cannabis began to weave its spell, and Cambridge’s rigidity and stuffiness drew back.” 

For me and my acquaintances generally, there was no particular oppression by “strict curfews and patrolling proctors,” in spite of nights spent frivoling or acting, nor do I recall ever asking permission to leave town. Friends smoked grass if they wished; the Beatles were present. And there were captivating people (not me). So I suspect any oppressiveness must have been largely due to his experience of his college, and poor reactions to people in it.

A. R. Duncan-Jones
hérault, france

Dan Hitchens has written yet another surpassing piece on Roger Scruton. Two years ago, he penned an excellent article on Scruton’s early political associations, mostly of the 1970s. That piece is well worth the attention. What he has produced now, however, is a uniquely valuable contribution to our understanding of the man. In the ever-burgeoning pile of writings on Scruton, to my knowledge, nothing else sheds light on his undergraduate days. This is before his self-acclaimed watershed of 1968. The archives, with which I have some acquaintance, are thin on the subject, to say the least. It is all the more impressive, therefore, that Hitchens has been able to develop such a compelling portrait of these unlit territories.

Hitchens suggests that the 1960s, when “the modern world came of age,” were one of the last moments in our civilization when there existed, and perhaps could exist, “cathedral-like” personalities. All of us, he says, following Richard Foreman, now feel a certain poverty of inner resources. These are not moral resources, at least not in the expected sense. They are something like the scope of possible feeling and the capacity for precise expression. It does not seem unfair to say that it is the sort of richness that F. R. Leavis, and before him I. A. Richards, had in mind as the precious but dwindling resource found in poetry and criticism.

No doubt, such concerns can be overstated, if only because concerns of a dearth in cultivation have been a feature of Western culture since at least Goethe. Even so, one would be foolish to laugh. Roger Scruton, quite certainly, felt the need to cultivate himself as a matter of the greatest urgency. To my mind, this is a defining imperative in his writings. A picture of this imperative, in the young Scruton, is not by any means all that Hitchens achieves. But it strikes me as particularly valuable, not least because it seems so obviously to anticipate the rest of what he wrote.

Where I would be interested to learn Hitchens’s thought is regarding Scruton’s insecurity. This feature of his personality is well observed in the article. The desire for cultivation, and also for political significance, can be conceived as an answer to insecurity about importance. And, of course, we all feel this, especially when young. But Scruton’s philosophy remained thoroughly concerned—in my view, almost obsessively—with the Austenian virtue of constancy. This is not the insecurity of not being respected, but the insecurity of (to be a little Platonic) not being. It is not so very far away from the notion of original sin. I wonder whether this accent ought to combine with the nevertheless persuasive account of insecurity that Hitchens has put forward. And, if so, I suspect we can see another aspect to what Scruton found in high culture: a repository of emotional certainty, a medicine for the inner flux that haunted him.

Jack Haughton
london, england

Kudos to Dan Hitchens for writing such a thoughtful and engaging piece on “The Making of Roger Scruton.” I am, in principle, skeptical of a primarily biographical approach to thinkers of outstanding merit. Such an approach can hardly resist becoming reductive, a facile substitute for a serious engagement with the enduring wisdom of the author at hand. In Hitchens’s case, however, the exploration of how Roger Scruton became Roger Scruton is informed by a thorough and sympathetic knowledge of Scruton’s thought as a whole. 

Hitchens fully appreciates the kind of intellectual and spiritual “wholeness” Scruton embodied in an age dominated by intellectual fragmentation and the willful repudiation of our civilized inheritance. As Hitchens ably shows, from a very early age Scruton was “in rebellion against rebellion” and committed himself to reflecting seriously on the full range of human experience. His rebellion ultimately took the form of a profound commitment to illuminating the fragile and precious wisdom passed on to us by our forebears. It is thus inseparable from a deeper affirmation of truth, beauty, and the wellsprings of the human soul. 

It is interesting to hear from the men and women who knew Scruton when his remarkably capacious soul and mature conservative philosophy were beginning to take shape. Their testimony helps one avoid approaching such themes in a spirit of excessive abstraction. Still, some of Scruton’s youthful friends and acquaintances see superficially, finding rebellion and self-affirmation in place of the spiritual, political, and cultural affirmation that ultimately defined Scruton’s mature life and work. And some of them are (or were) rather too angry with Scruton for exposing “the culture of repudiation” with passion and insight before its work of destruction had cleared away the remnants of classical culture and morality from which they had benefited. The dignified and demanding education provided to them at Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe (RGS) has long been buried and replaced by the ideological clichés and disfiguring mobilization of anger that today substitute for high culture and shared civic life. Cambridge, where Scruton studied philosophy, is no better these days. 

In failing to recognize this, some of Scruton’s youthful peers reveal themselves to be rather deficient in self-knowledge. For a fuller picture of the mix of rebellion and affirmation that defined Scruton’s coming of age, one should turn to chapter 2 (“How I Discovered my Name”) of Scruton’s autobiographical Gentle Regrets, where the shy and refined “Vernon” (the name Scruton rejected once and for all at the age of ten) competes with the superficially combative Roger. In contrast to his peers, there is a great deal of self-knowledge on display in that chapter. 

Hitchens is right that Kant was a formative thinker for Scruton (although Scruton’s phenomenological approach allowed him to intuit more fully those things to be discerned on “the edge of things”). Later on, Burke, Hegel (the author of The Philosophy of Right and not the philosopher of History), and Aristotle gave richer moral texture to his conservative political philosophy. 

Like most commentators, Hitchens understates Scruton’s turn away from the “atheistic apprenticeship” that initially informed his first theoretical articulation of conservatism. With growing vigor in a later series of books and essays, Scruton defended the integrity of the human soul against scientism and every form of “nothing-buttery.” He kept alive a space for thoughtful religious affirmation. However hesitantly, he “regained [his] religion,” as he put it in the concluding chapter of Gentle Regrets. There, he freely cited and affirmed the truth proclaimed in Psalm 100, “Be ye sure that the Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves.” And as Hitchens has observed elsewhere, the forgiveness and irony made possible by the Christian religion were at the heart of Scruton’s conception of the path forward for human beings and what is left of Western civilization.

Daniel J. Mahoney
washington, d.c.

When not having lunch with colleagues, I usually spend my break in one of two ways: scrolling on my phone or staring blankly at the walls of the office canteen where I work—neither option offers much excitement. Therefore, it was an unusual lunch a few weeks ago when my mother sent me Dan Hitchens’s article “The Making of Roger Scruton,” and I sat there reading it on my phone, deeply moved by the stories of my father’s early years.

I was born when my father was fifty-five years old, and so, to me, he was never exactly a young man (although he was always full of energy). Therefore, it is strange imagining him at university, awkwardly finding his footing in the world. Of course, my father did tell me stories from his youth, including of his strained relationship with his father, his rebelliousness at school, and his hitchhiking adventure to Greece. But other stories, such as the trip to Norfolk on the motorbike or tales involving ex-girlfriends, I never knew.

What struck me most, though, were the elements of his character that I knew so well that also shone through in the article. Dan Hitchens mentions “the constant urge to make things happen.” I remember that urge he had very well. Indeed, it was rare to see him ever switch it off and truly relax and, when you did, as Hitchens drew attention to in the article, music was almost always involved.

His expansive knowledge, too. In the first paragraph, Mary Hoffman talks about how impressed she was that he knew so much about English literature, despite not studying it. I remember once, when I was about thirteen, I asked him to help me with my math homework (that is, do it for me)—I think it was quadratic equations. When my teacher handed it back to me, he told me that I’d have to do it again in detention since I clearly cheated and got my father to do it for me. I asked him how he knew, and he said that “there is just no way a thirteen-year-old could have used such an ingenious method for solving these questions!”

I thank Dan Hitchens and First Things for publishing such a brilliant article. In a world where my father seems to be mentioned more and more in a political sense, it is lovely to read something that focuses on the gentle and kind man he was.

Sam Scruton
london, england

Dan Hitchens replies: 

I’m very grateful, in four different ways, to these correspondents. First of all, of course, to Sam Scruton, for his generous comments, for sharing these reminiscences of his father, and for the reminder that Sir Roger’s polymathic gifts extended well beyond even what one would guess from his published works. A more chastened thanks to A. R. Duncan-Jones, whose experience of Cambridge during that time, as he says, undermines my account—or at least usefully qualifies it. Perhaps there was something about the grammar school boys’ experience, on which I focused; perhaps there was something about Jesus College. Perhaps it’s just that cultural change happens less tidily than one might think. “The old order changeth, yielding way to new,” but never all at once.

 Jack Haughton’s PhD on Scruton is an essential piece of scholarship, opening up new angles on some of the most challenging questions about Scruton’s work. (For a start: What was his first book, Art and Imagination, all about, who was it addressed to, and what links its highly technical argument to the Scruton who wrote The Meaning of Conservatism and, eventually, Death-Devoted Heart?) So I’m gratified that he links those inquiries to my own more journalistic digging. Yes, no doubt Scruton’s burning desire to be cultured—to cultivate “the scope of possible feeling and the capacity for precise expression,” as Haughton puts it—is related to his insecurity. Culture is a matter of belonging, and nobody would have pursued that thought as far as Scruton did if he had not been haunted by a sense of belonging nowhere.  

Finally, a resounding thank you to Daniel Mahoney, one of the great champions of Scruton’s work, for placing the sixties story in the context of Scruton’s whole life and work. It’s hard to disagree that Scruton’s ’68 rebellion against rebellion was, in the end, pretty much entirely vindicated. And the Roger/Vernon distinction, which people observed throughout his life, is an important one. As for Scruton and religion, the whole subject is extremely difficult, and even his friends struggled to pin down where he stood. Alongside the critiques of materialism that Mahoney mentioned should be set such remarks as this, in 2019: “I have not, as I had hoped, found in cognitive dualism [Scruton’s philosophy of mind] an escape route to the divine.” What can be said is that Scruton’s work has meant an enormous amount to many religious readers, because he seemed able to give voice both to the experience of the sacred and to the skepticism of his generation. In some of his most beautiful writings he seems to build a bridge from doubt to belief; and if he never quite stepped onto it, doubting a structure that appeared to be made only of words, many of his readers have had no problem in walking straight across. 

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The Progressive Scheme 

I greatly enjoyed reading Jaspreet Singh Boparai’s review of The Golden Thread in the October issue of First Things (“Reasons to Be Proud”). It reminded me of those long-form, relaxed essays in the Times Literary Supplement during its golden age, in which a highly cultivated man of letters, speaking as it were from his book-lined study, would take down a few volumes and discourse elegantly about them in the manner of Montaigne, making some amusingly contrarian remarks along the way, before settling down to discuss the book open on his desk. In this case, The Golden Thread. 

Boparai is remarkably generous in his treatment of TGT (as our editorial team at Encounter Books and curricular partners at Hillsdale College call it). He credits me and Allen Guelzo with being equal to the present moment, when claims about the value and even the existence of the Western tradition have been subjected to mockery and skepticism from academics. The very persons who in times past took seriously the preservation of that tradition have now become its enemies.

The task of continuing the Western tradition has now fallen to what in America are called “classical” schools—that is, high schools that teach the traditional liberal arts—which, as Boparai notes, are the primary intended audience of TGT. Our book has also been written for adults who have belatedly realized the yawning gap in their education left by the anti-Western, “multicultural” pedagogy of the last four decades. I would add to this audience undergraduates enrolled in what are called “civics centers,” many of them established in recent years. These are, as a rule, intended, like so many Trojan Horses, to release into the progressive academy defenders of sound American and Western traditions.

By using the word “tradition,” Guelzo and I mean to show that we share Boparai’s reluctance to characterize the West as a single civilization and America as a distinct civilization within it. Our book is indeed intended to demonstrate our conviction that America, in its laws, political institutions, religion, and culture, remains part of the latest phase of the Western tradition, the phase in which the European civilization founded in the High Middle Ages has undergone radical modernization. We both believe that the West cannot survive and flourish if it forgets its deep roots in this civilization and the civilizations of Greece, Rome, and Christian Rome (or Byzantium) that preceded it. 

One disappointing feature of Boparai’s review is that, despite his wide and deep learning, he has not spotted what we intended to be its most revolutionary aspect: its periodization. This is not a failing unique to him; as far as I know no reviewers of the book have picked this up. The reason, I think, is this: The book hasn’t been and probably won’t be reviewed by anyone on the left. It’s the left’s modus operandi to ignore any book that would require serious engagement with its arguments. The more conservative part of the globus intellectualis is populated mostly by literary folk and political scientists who teach in Great Books programs or the like. Historians of a conservative bent are few and far between. So it’s no surprise, really, that the thinking behind the books’ periodization has been overlooked. Among the quotations at the beginning of TGT is a quotation from the greatest historian of nineteenth-century Germany, Leopold von Ranke: “All ages are equidistant from eternity and just as immediately accessible to God’s presence.” The periodization of TGT is intended to overturn the progressive periodization that has dominated the West for the last 250 years. 

Guelzo and I do not see the story of the West as one of unbroken progress. There is certainly progress in many areas of life, above all in the modern age’s scientific achievements and in its capacity for attaining wealth and prosperity beyond the imaginings of the premodern West. But there is also regress and loss, especially in things spiritual. Guelzo and I both think that the standard progressive narrative ultimately disables the West’s spiritual powers of renaissance and reform. We would argue that a more realistic view of human development, in the traditional rise-and-fall pattern, is a better basis for both tradition-oriented reformers and forward-looking innovators. Rejecting the Hegelian–Marxist metaphysics of inevitable progress is vital to maintaining the balance between these two competing impulses that have characterized the West from its beginnings in classical Greece.

In my volume, I have thoroughly revised the periodization of the premodern West, taking the difficult but ultimately fruitful blending of Greco-Roman with Judeo-Christian traditions as the primary point of reference. I reject the Enlightenment view that the medieval period is one of superstition and feudalism, the ground zero of human civilization from which later periods gradually recover through the upward sweep of Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment. Hence the second part of volume 1, on Christendom (now available in a separate printed book: volume 1, part two), takes that blending as its main theme. A good deal is said in the volume itself about my principles of periodization. As far as I’m aware, there is no other book aiming to tell the story of the West as a whole that does this. I hope in some future contribution to First Things to explicate this architecture more fully.

James Hankins
gainesville, florida

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More Joe than Saddam

R. R. Reno writes, “Don Jr. and Eric Trump are the Uday and Qusay Hussein of our unhappy times” in “The Stench of Corruption” (October 2026). Uday Hussein was a sadist who indulged in levels of cruelty that even his father, Saddam, could not abide. Head of the Fedayeen militia, he was known for his excessive cruelty, abuse of women, erratic behavior, torture, rape, and murder. Qusay, who held key positions in Saddam’s secret police agency, the Mukhabarat, was also known for severe human rights abuses including mass executions and the torture of political prisoners. 

Surely you can raise important points about possible Trump family financial improprieties by making a more apt comparison—perhaps to the influence-peddling and family financial shenanigans that marked the Biden years? Unless you know things about the Trump children that the rest of us do not, beginning your piece with the Trump Derangement Syndrome ruminations of a Hollywood screen director diminishes the impact of a good piece. 

Mike Maher
east lyme, connecticut