Peter Robinson [born 1957] is an American author, research fellow, television host, and former speechwriter for then-Vice President George H.W. Bush and President Ronald Reagan. He hosts Uncommon Knowledge, an interview show by Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and recently interviewed Niall Ferguson.
Niall Ferguson [born 1964], MA, D.Phil., is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, where he served for 12 years as the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History.
Ferguson is the author of 16 books, including The Pity Of War: Explaining World War I; The House of Rothschild: Money’s Prophets 1798-1848; Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World; Civilization: The West and the Rest; and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist.
His 2021 book Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe was praised by The Times as “a compelling history of catastrophes and their consequences, from the most brilliant British historian of his generation.”
Ferguson’s essay from December 2023, titled The Treason of the Intellectuals, appeared just before the mad manifestations of the heedless pro-Hamas hordes started to occur across the nation’s university campuses. “What’s fascinating about academic life in America in the last 10 years is that the ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI], let’s call it wokeism for short, it’s been a great career opportunity for some people, and it’s also been a terrific opportunity to kick anybody suspected of conservatism out of academia.
“So the systematic discrimination against people who are ideologically to the right, which is quite overt in most universities now, has, of course, been a career opportunity for others. That’s a good way to think about how institutions get captured. It’s the combination of believers and opportunists.
“Ten years ago my wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and I came into contact with cancel culture for the first time, and that was when she was invited to give a commencement address at Brandeis University, and then shortly before the event was told that she was disinvited because a strange coalition of progressive and Islamist elements.
“I remember digging into it and trying to understand what was going on, and being kind of mystified by this unholy alliance between radical leftists, gay rights activists, and Islamists who thought that somebody like my wife should be publicly humiliated as, of course, she was, to be disinvited publicly in that way.”
Niall Ferguson’s 48-minute interview on Uncommon Knowledge is well worth taking in.
www.hoover.org/research/treason-intellectuals-niall-ferguson
Ferguson’s wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali [born 1969], a Somali-born, Dutch-American writer, activist, and former politician, is a fierce critic of Islam and advocates for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women, opposing forced marriage, honor killing, child marriage, and female genital mutilation.
Both Niall Ferguson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali defined themselves as ‘atheists’ until recently. Hirsi Ali committed her life to Jesus Christ in 2023.1 Ferguson attends church with her regularly, which brings us to John Daniel Davidson’s new book of 2024: Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come.
Davidson writes that John Locke’s [1632-1704] declaration of the necessity of “pursuing happiness” was incorporated into Thomas Jefferson’s famous statement of a people’s inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” drafted into the Declaration of Independence published on July 4, 1776. The phrase was not just some libertarian creed to allow each man to define what was true and good, but a recognition that happiness and moral virtue are intricately intertwined and that it’s impossible to secure one without the other.
America’s Founders did not intend for a government to be neutral or indifferent to religion and morality, and they were quite clear about it. Samuel Adams, among many others, said as much by warning that “Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He, therefore, is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue.”
The degree to which the Founders were concerned with the character of its citizenry, with moral virtue, is hard to overstate … “Otherwise, the whole thing comes apart,” writes Davidson. “A republic would only work with a virtuous and religiously pious citizenry.”
As to the Biblically based culture and worldview, the Founders codified into law that Providence’s order is ever the same: the one who has no fear of God before his eyes has no genuine respect for the rights of his neighbor.2
The tragedy of what’s happened to America over the last 125 years or so arose from the spiritual realm in which the arch-enemy works. Satan calls into question the Word of God, casts doubt on its integrity and denies its veracity.
The pestilential pro-Palestinian ideology and protests affecting Columbia and causing unrest across the nation’s universities can be traced back to a handful calamitous judicial decisions:
• Removal of prayer to Jehovah God from public education in 1962 [Engel v. Vitale].
• In 1963, the removal of the Bible from public schools (following 300 years of America’s meteoric rise) in Abington School District v. Schempp.
• Removal of the Ten Commandments from public schools, courthouses, and government buildings in 1980 [Stone v. Graham].
• Constitutional right detected in the Constitution to kill unborn babies in 1973 [Roe v. Wade].
• Constitutional right discovered to exalt, normalize, and codify into law homosexual intercourse and same-sex marriage in 2015 [Obergefell v. Hodges].
• Aggrandizement and ‘special rights’ for homosexuals and transgenders in 2020 [Bostock v. Clayton County].
“The trouble with man is not external but internal, what he needs most is not a new berth, but a new birth.”3
Two competing religions – secularism and Christianity – are vying for control of the public square in America. Since they are often in proximity, they propose alternative choices to America’s youth; yet one is eternal and immutable Christianity and the other is transient and mutable secularism. Unable to coexist, one will ultimately go down as a consequence of the elevation of the other.
Therefore, if we are to survive, every church in America should have a pastor, elder, deacon, or congregant running for local offices in 2026, 2028, and 2030, and thereafter, with Christians registered and voting in each and every election.
Thankfully, Gideons and Rahabs have begun to stand.
David Lane
American Renewal Project
1. unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/
2-3. Arthur W. Pink, Gleanings in Genesis.
