By Bob Linn

The appearance of Gentner Drummond as a public figure reminds me of the anti-Christian shift in thought Machiavelli (1469-1527) brought to the political world in 1513.

In his brief commentary of Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, author and professor W. B. Allen wrote an article in a 1997 Yale University Press publication that explains Drummond’s stand against historic Western thought. He wrote:

“It is remarkable that so many of the architects of modern politics find Machiavelli’s Prince a source of inspiration and that so many of them defend Machiavelli against the adherents of religion and classical philosophy.”

Machiavelli was the 16th century’s author of a brazen narcissistic political theory advocating a clear separation of church and state. For Machiavelli, God and religion have no place in government. Machiavelli’s concept of government was that of a powerful political force whose top-down agenda shapes the nation’s concept of ethics and morality.

Machiavelli was not the first to boldly articulate this brash concept. Not quite 1,000 years earlier (around 400 B.C.), Athenian conquerors stated: “The strong do what they can. The weak suffer what they must.”

More recently, American political radical, Arthur Desmond (1859-1929), applied Darwin’s ideas of origins to political theory to arrive at the same political equation. In his book Might is Right (1896), Desmond, writing under the pseudonym Ragnar Redbeard, articulated Machiavellian thought in three words: Might Makes Right.

Machiavelli did not just advocate the complete separation of church and state, he advocated those ideals which were directly contrary to Christian teaching. In chapter eighteen of The Prince, Machiavelli writes: “A prince cannot observe all those things by which men are considered good. It is often necessary for the maintenance of the state, to operate against faith, against charity, against humaneness, against religion.”

Eviscerating religion from the affairs of state was fundamental to Machiavelli. It has become fundamental in American politics, representing a complete reversal of our founding documents.

And like Machiavelli, America’s drift had brought us to a point that the major features of our cultural institutions are advocating that which Christian teaching considers moral abomination.

It is the drift to secularism that inspired Professor Angelo Codevilla (1943-2021), in partnership with Yale University and the committee for Rethinking the Western Tradition to publish, in 1997, an edition of Machiavelli’s Prince with 20th century commentary. The writing team sought to sound a warning at the dawn of 21st century America.

Codevilla writes: “Machiavelli is more than a teacher of a list of evils. Rather, somewhat like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, Machiavelli leads modern man to grasp for the power to make his own good and evil for his own sovereign convenience.”

“On the level of political thought, the notion that people can create their own values long ago passed from heresy through controversy and into orthodoxy.”

The level of acceptance of the idea that morality is a product of mankind as opposed to the law of God has increased exponentially since the birth of the nation. American politics and its institutions have moved away from the founding ideals of Western culture and its Biblical thought.

Machiavellian political thought has survived to dominate the 21st Century’s political class. As Codevilla pointed out, it continues to define political orthodoxy.

Writer, philosopher, and politician, Edmund Burke (1729-1797), is known as the founder of political and cultural conservatism. He was a major influence on the thought of the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

Burke wrote: “Men have no right to alter the laws as their fancy suggests; the superior law is not in the power of any political community to amend. Ours is a moral order and our laws are derived from immortal [divine] moral laws. The higher happiness is moral happiness.”

Russell Kirk wrote of Burke’s political thought in his volume The Conservative Mind. Kirk affirmed the advice of Burke that political law must follow Biblical law: “His doctrine of divine purpose puts a great gulf between his ‘expedience’ and the expediency of Machiavelli . . . Burke knew that just under the skin of modern man stirs the savage, the brute, the demon.”

Both Burke and Kirk played major roles in the foundation of conservative thought in America. They were in agreement that man has an obligation, when building political structures, to weave the law of God into the nation’s fabric. Referring again to the thoughts of Burke, Kirk continued: “Burke declared that men do not make laws: they merely ratify or distort the laws of God . . . Man’s rights exist only when man obeys God’s law, for right is the child of law.”

America is today unravelling because of its flight from the divine salt designed to flavor human culture. The antagonistic view of the role of Christianity in government has led to an America where even the church is mostly in agreement that the separation of church and state is appropriate.

Just fifty years ago in his book, The Roots of American Order, Russell Kirk sought to remind us of the radical nature of the path we now tread. He writes: “The vast majority of people in the Thirteen Colonies professed the Christian religion in one or another of its Protestant aspects – chiefly Anglicanism, Puritanism (an offshoot of Calvinism), or in Presbyterianism (an offshoot of Calvinism).”

For Kirk, the departure is, as history demonstrates, the pathway to the moral decay represented by a darker interlude (the Renaissance) in the otherwise Christian history of the West. He writes: “The Renaissance amounted, often, to a denial of the Christian understanding of the human condition. The Renaissance exalted man’s egoism, in defiance of Christian teachings of humility, charity, and community. The Renaissance glorified fleshly pleasures and accepted the crafty ‘power politics’ of Machiavelli, as distinguished from the Christian political theories of justice and freedom and order that had prevailed from the time of Gregory the Great to the time of Dante. The Renaissance was essentially pagan in its view of human nature.’”

When Gentner Drummond initiated an assault on the St. Isadore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School, it was because of the Christian nature of the curriculum. I saw it as Drummond’s war on religion.

I began my comments by quoting Dr. W.B. Allen’s Machiavelli and Modernity. Allen closed his comments on Machiavelli by writing:

“All modern thinkers who have wanted to be free to think without regard to the constraints of natural and divine law are the fruits of the Machiavellian revolution.”