Author’s note: This is Part One of a series of conversations with J. Budziszewski, a Fellow with the Center for Science and Culture and author most recently of Pandemic of Lunacy: How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy. See my review of the book here.
J. Budziszewski has taught at the University of Texas at Austin for 45 years. His scholarship centers on natural law ethics and the ethical basis of politics. Ironically, when he began his teaching career, he didn’t believe that there existed any objective basis for the ethics of anything, let alone something as complicated as politics.
Soon after finishing grad school, he gave a talk before the faculty of the university’s government department — what he later called his “here’s-why-you-should-hire-me lecture.” He made two points: (1) We humans made up the difference between good and evil, and (2) We are not responsible for our actions. And then he laid out a ten-year plan for reconstructing ethical and political theory on those two propositions. He was hired.
After living for several years as a practical atheist and nihilist, he returned to the Christian faith of his youth. His reflections on the years-long spiritual and intellectual journey highlight the effects on one’s mind when it abandons objective truth and tries to make sense of the world on materialistic presuppositions.
Questions and Answers
You were baptized at age ten but abandoned all religious faith, as well as belief in objective right and wrong, while in college.
I was a member of the Young People’s Socialist League, the youth wing of the then-Socialist Party. They hoped for evolutionary change toward socialism. We were socialists but anti-communist. We wanted to “complete the New Deal.” Needless to say, that’s not where the Socialist Party and all those organizations are now. They have become much more radical.
But my real radicalism was less in my politics than in my nihilism. I didn’t believe in a God who mattered, or in an objectively discernable difference between good and evil, or even personal responsibility, because I thought I was just a process.
After all that, how did you come to profess Christian faith once again?
I can’t take any credit for that. In fact, for about two years, I was very disturbed because I couldn’t explain rationally why I had returned. I had come to realize that I was believing in God again, but I couldn’t give a rational explanation of why. I can give rational defenses of my beliefs now, but I couldn’t then.
It was divine mercy that I couldn’t. You see, I hadn’t lost my faith by a rational process either. I just thought I saw through it. In my milieu, all the smart people didn’t believe in God. And I unconsciously wanted to believe I was one of the smart people. There were many other things that pushed me away from faith, but that’s one example of my own motivated irrationality. Another is that I’d committed some sins. I didn’t want to face God, so I stopped believing in him. That’s irrational, too.
Since I had deserted faith not by means of intellect but by means of intellectual pride, God chose to bring me back in a manner for which I couldn’t take intellectual credit. I don’t know how I could have come back rationally anyway, because I’d pretty much wrecked my mind during my period of nihilism. There were things that I was no longer able to think about, ways in which I was no longer able to think, whole rooms and corridors of memory that I’d had to blot out and not think about. I had done all that to myself.
In the reconstruction period, it was as though I had been living in a dark attic, but now the shutters were being thrown back. Beams of light were coming in, so bright that they were almost solid. Even my memory was becoming whole again, as though it were a photograph from which I had scratched out some of the faces and scenes, but now their images were reappearing. I was learning to feel again certain things that I had tried to keep myself from feeling. It was all quite amazing, but it wasn’t until I came back to faith that this repair and renovation could take place. And it wasn’t until it had taken place that I could begin to think really clearly and ask, “Now, why is this rational? Why is this reasonable?”
You see, when I lost my faith in Jesus Christ, and then started believing there wasn’t a God, there had never been a moment when I thought, Oh, that can’t be true, I don’t believe that anymore. But there were moments when I realized, I haven’t been believing that for some time.
It was like that when I came back, too. There was never a moment when I thought, Now, at this moment, I believe! But there were moments when I realized, I have been believing this again for some time.
What triggered the process?
I’m sure there were all kinds of things going on that I don’t know about — God doing things in me, people praying for me — that I wasn’t aware of at the time. But perhaps I can tell you the first step in the process.
I had come to think that there couldn’t be any real moral authority for anything, that good and evil were things we made up; I am just a process; I don’t have personal responsibility for my actions; I’m not free. But I loved my wife and children. Now consider: love is a commitment of the will to the true good of another person. But I didn’t believe in objective good, I didn’t believe in persons, and I didn’t believe my commitments were in my control. So it wasn’t that I didn’t love them. It was that I couldn’t make sense of this love. That was horrible.
One evening, my wife and I had quarreled, and I was pretty upset. She’d gone to bed, and I was sitting in a chair. And I was weeping. I wasn’t thinking very much about the quarrel. The weeping turned into something else. I just felt wretched.
I remembered something from my high school church youth group years before. Somebody had given a talk in which he said, “You can pray to God hypothetically, even if you don’t know he’s there.” And I did. I said, “God, I don’t think you are there. I think I’m talking to the wall. If you are there, you can have me. But I can’t tell anymore. So you will have to show me.”
There were no choirs of angels. The wall did not open up with a vision of Heaven. Nothing happened at all, so far as I could tell. There was dead silence. And I thought, I was right. I was talking to the wall.
But I wasn’t talking to the wall. I had meant what I said, and God answered. Over the next six weeks or so, there began to come over me — I won’t say a feeling but a perception, not a feeling of wretchedness but a recognition — a perception that my condition was objectively evil. It was objectively wretched.
Even during my nihilism I had learned about Augustine’s “privation theory of evil,” as it’s called. It says that there can’t be such a thing as evil unless you start with a good thing and mess it up — evil is something that is missing from, or disordered in, something that would otherwise be good.
The implication is that, if my condition were objectively evil, it must be a distortion of something that is objectively good. If there was a horrible, there must be a wonderful of which this horrible was a perversion. I had no idea what that wonderful could be, except that it must be possible, because I was experiencing the horrible. That blew me out of the water, because it broke through my mental censors. I had not permitted myself to entertain such a thought before. I realized that if this is so — and it had to be — then I’ve been so wrong for so long about so many things that anything might be true.
I began seriously reading things I should have read and doing things I should have done before I lost faith in God. I devoured all of C. S. Lewis. I read Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, Dante. I read all kinds of things. And as I said, I realized one day that I had been believing again for some time.
Parents are often terribly concerned about their children, including their grown children. I would say to them, don’t give up hope. If someone as “gone” as I was can come back even in adulthood, as I did, then your grown children can, too.