I won't claim to have a lot of familiarity with Hillsdale, but what I do know, bothers me. From my very little exposure to it, it seems to focus in part on a sort of rah rah Americanism, in so far as culture and history are concerned (and of course the two are highly related.
That sort of view of American history was once very common in general. I'm old enough to have seen the very end of it when I was in grade school, and I'm also young enough to see it pass away. To give a really bad example, as it doesn't involve school text or teaching at all, if you grew up in the 1970s, you could simultaneously see She Wore A Yellow Ribbon run as a not that old rerun on television, and find Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee in the bookstore.
Students had received a pretty narrowly focused history education prior to the 1970s The United States was always right. There was that slavery thing but that was fixed. The West had been won, not conquered, and even if it had been conquered, it was to the benefit of the conquered people.
The Vietnam War really changed all that in a way that it had not been since the 1840s when the country had gone through the Mexican War. Conservatives never got over that.
The oddity to it is that people in this cultural camp would rather be taught lies than the truth, which never serves anything, and they want children taught lies if it means they'll come out of school believing in an unvarnished version of American Exceptionalism. The fact of the matter is, as this article points out, it won't. In the age of the Internet, while many evils have been spread, you really can't just keep a lid on the past. Pete Hegseth can restore Medals of Honor conveyed for action at Wounded Knee but you can't keep the facts, on both sides, from being known about what happened there.
People who are following Hillsdale on stuff like this think you can. In reality, however, what happens is the miseducated student eventually hits university or just real life. It only takes one crack in the dam to cause a flood, and soon they're off and questioning everything.
This is already happening in various spheres, I might note. One of the most interesting example is in Christianity. The entire Protestant Reformation was based on ignorance and its pretty provable. Of all the Reformation era reformers, only Luther had some serious points, and he didn't intend to cause a separation from the Church at all but, rather, once he started rebelling, he couldn't stop. At any rate, what this leaves Protestants with is that every single Protestant faith is founded on some sort of error, and often back with lies. For those with enough savvy or interest, it's easy enough now to find that out. What was the early Church like, they pose. Well, the Didache isn't too hard to find, nor are the works of the Apostolic Fathers. Lots of very serious Protestants have done this, often trying to support their view that their brand of Protestantism reflects the early Church, only to find that it doesn't, and then convert to Apostolic Christianity.
The same is true of history. The American Revolution was founded upon some amazing principals, but at the same time amongst the reason the colonists cited for rebelling was that the Crown was trying to halt westward expansion in recognition that the natives were also his subjects and that they were upset as the Crown hadn't forced the Church of England upon Quebec. The Constitution is amazing but there was a giant acknowledged hypocritical compromise allowing Southern states partial credit for slaves for representation purposes. The Civil War wasn't a glorious highly decorative contest between two equally valid points of views, but a rebellion against decency and humanity by Southern oligarchs. We didn't enter World War Two to save humanity, but entered it only because were were attacked in spite of a real effort by FDR to get us into the war earlier, and once in it, we didn't defeat the Germans or Japanese single handedly by any means. The British had more troops in the field in Europe until late 1944 and the Soviets always had many more in the field. The Japanese regarded the war in China as the main event up until some point in 43 or 44.
It's just the attempt to whitewash American history, which by and large is admirable, that leads to something like Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Indeed, that book came out while I was still in high school and within the last two years I was continually in a situation where a highly educated person who just discovered it was repeatedly engaging me with "did you know"?
Locally there's been a movement in the Trump era to allow for "charter schools" here which are nothing other than private schools that come as close to being Protestant schools as conceivably possible. I'm familiar with one and it proclaims that teaches an "American Classical Education" and that it is "a Hillsdale College Member School, a distinction that offers our school access to curriculum and training from the Hillsdale College K-12 Education Office.". I've known at least two families that chose it as their own world view was in the MAGA camp. The irony here is, as it is so often, that neither of the two families who are so concerned about their children receiving an "American Classical Education" are living an "American Classical Life".
They probably just don't know that.
Which gets back to, well, this:
In order to get back to what you think needs to be restored, you need to know what actually was.
I don't know about the rest of it, but history wise, the current variant of an "American Classical Education" ain't going to get you there.
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I was going to post on it individually, but the July 4, or thereabouts, editions of Catholic Answers had some fascinating discussions on Catholics and the United States.
In spite of what poorly catechized American Catholics may think, there's always been tension between being a Catholic and an American, and early on the country was outright hostile to Catholics. As Catholics always have a worldview that's international in scope, as they view the Church as the Bride of Christ and serving all humanity, Catholics never have the really narrow world view that quite a few very far right wing Evangelical Protestants do. The episodes are worth checking out, but the second of the two is really fascinating on how Catholicism can and is impacting the United States and American culture long term.
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I was also going to post on the recent excommunication of the SSPX and relate it to how far right conservatism has crawled out very far on a branch that's going to snap off. I ended up shelving that, even though I'd started a pretty developed post on it. I'll just complete my thoughts on it here.
Pope Leo XIV recently took an action which his immediate predecessors wouldn't. He excommunicated the SSPX, the Society of Saint Pius X . As this is sort of a confusing topic, we will refer you to this, which explains it.
This is a really serious action. The Vatican didn't just address a few figures in the SSPX, but the whole SSPX. If you are going to an SSPX Mass, you are excommunicated.
Frankly,. while the Pope doesn't consult me on such matters, he did what needed to be done here. And there may be some who should take heed on on this, such as German bishops. Pope Leo isn't messing around. The SSPX is in schism which, in turn, introduces a certain element of irony.
The SSPX is not as large of group as the controversy might cause a person to suppose. Part of the reason this briefly received so much attention is that the SSPX stream sort of flows into the lake of traditional Catholicism, and that's a much larger group.
The actual SSPX has approximately 1,500 formal, professed members globally, including about 750 priests. The SSPX claims around 600,000 worshippers worldwide, with an estimated 25,000 adherents in the United States, but that's a rough number as not everyone who enters the doors of an SSPX church actually quite appreciates what it is, and some are Trads flirting with the society. The SSPX dates back to November 1, 1970 when French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who had served the Catholic Church as Apostolic Delegate for French-speaking Africa, Archbishop of Dakar, and Superior General of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, a missionary order of priests, formed it in contravention to the Vatican. In 1988 the organization went into schism the first time when it ordained Bishops without the authority of the Vatican. The ordinations, as they were done by Bishops with valid holy orders, were illicit, but valid ordinations. They were slowly brought back into the Church and the ordinations lifted, but now they've done it a second time.
Okay, so what's behind this all?
Archbishop Lefebvre, who was at Vatican II and seemingly approved of it at the time, was in the group of traditionalist Catholics that came to take exception to it, most specifically, in the case of the SSPX, ecumenicalism and the new form of the Mass. Ecumenicalism is more of a European thing than an American one, so that one might baffle Americans a bit. It was a big deal here for awhile, but as the Baptist and Baptist like churches are such a big deal here, as opposed to everywhere else, it's more or less gone away. At the same time, in the US, the churches that were closest to Catholicism, the Anglican churches and the Lutheran churches, have been suffering a substantial decline and, as their churches "liberalized" and they began to self educate, they've started to cross over to Catholicism on their own.
For that matter, the Catholic Church globally has become more conservative in recent decades. The Latin Mass, however, is another matter. After Vatican II, and actually separate from it, the new form of the Mass came in and it came in with the "vernacular".
The Latin Mass, in its high version particularly, is beautiful, but frankly the new ordinary form of the Mass is as well, and, well, it has real advantages, the ability to understand it in your own language being a big one. Beyond that, however, the Church enormously expanded the set of readings with the new Ordinary Form from the much more limited set in the Latin Mass. There are real historical reason for both the long lasting use of Latin, which had started off as the vernacular for the Roman Rite, and the limited number of readings, but neither of them held any longer by the mid 20th Century.
The real dispute, however, is over Vatican II's reforms or more particularly, "Dignitatis Humanae," which recognizes a civil right to religious freedom, and "Nostra Aetate," which encourages dialogue with non-Christian religions while recognizing elements of truth and holiness within them. The SSPX feels that these went too far because (to reduce the argument unfairly) "there's no salvation outside the church". The SSPX maintains that these documents are not magisterial whereas the Church maintains they are.
The ultimate irony here is that there's no question that all observant Catholics acknowledge a duty of obedience and that the Pope is the head of the Church. As ultra traditionalist, the SSPX acknowledges this as well. Given that, it's almost impossible to rationalize their taking the SSPX into schism, which is a grave sin.
There's probably a forlorn hope in the part of members of the SSPX that the Church will change its mind on the excommunication and, for that matter, on "Dignitatis Humanae," and "Nostra Aetate". It's not going to.
While the SSPX may refuse to accept that, the entire event brings into focus why Pope Francis clamped down on the Latin Mass. The Mass can still be said, and for that matter the Ordinary Form of the Mass can still be said in Latin, but to say the Traditional Latin Mass requires permission and that's largely been withdrawn.
This was baffling to American Catholics when it happened, but the fact of the matter is that Traditionalist Catholics center around TLM, even if that's not what makes them traditionalist. It's probably difficult to explain to outsiders, but it's one form of observance that's very obviously traditional. Added to that, the persistent use of forms from the TLM in the Ordinary Form (kneeling when others are standing, not taking communion form Extraordinary Ministers, the wearing of manteas, all are visible form. You could be, however, a traditionalist, and I'm sympathetic with traditionalist, without doing any of those things. The line, I suppose, is when a type of devotion crosses into intolerance of a certain sort, or a rejection of something that's magisterial.
I'd thought that Pope Leo might open the TLM back up, but now that this has occurred, I doubt it. I think he's acting forcefully in keeping the sheep inside the gate for their own good.
Before "liberal" Catholics start rejoicing, however, I suspect certain "liberal" groups within the Church are next.
A hint that Pope Leo may be redirecting cames nearly simultaneously. The Pope has called for meeting of the Presidents of the world's Bishops' conferences to discuss Amoris laetitia, Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation on marriage and the family, and which was not popular with "conservatives". On June 30 Pope Leo announced that he is calling the presidents of the world’s bishops’ conferences to Rome in October for “synodal discernment” on how “to proclaim the Gospel to families today, in light of Amoris laetitia.” My guess is that it's going to be scaled back.
Pope Leo has been left with the Synod on Synodality, started by Pope Francis, which is supposed to issue its final report in October, 2028. June 30, 2027 is the deadline for Dioceses and Eparchies to prepare their reports. An international Ecclesial Assembly is slated to occur in October 2028. Some of the group reports have been released already, although that gives input on their thoughts and not really on where the Vatican may be headed. Pope Francis had throughout this process wrestled with the German Bishops who, in the eyes of many, were headed towards schism.
Whether it comes in October, or in 2028, I suspect the German Bishops are going to get the same message the SSPX did and told to conform or be excommunicated. The big difference, however, is that the laity who follow the SSPX are all volunteers, so now they have to determine if they follow their desires, or the Church. My guess is that a fair number will follow the Church. German Catholics, however are to the right of their Bishops by quite some measure and are much more conservative, and the Bishops themselves have been faced with the fact that their leadership has been plagued with declining attendance. If Pope Leo excommunicates the Bishops, or some of them, a large number of their laity are not going to be that upset, and the Bishops for that part have no real ability to follow the example of Martin Luther and take entire congregations out of communion with Rome. Those days are over unless you have a willing laity, and they do not.
All of this means, accordingly that Pope Leo is acting, well, very Catholic, and very traditional Catholic at that. For those who were hoping for a Pope that acted that way, it appears we now have one.
Speaking of Bishops, it was Pope St. John Paul II who required Catholic clergy to no longer hold elective office, as a small number did. That didn't prevent association with politicians, however. One figure who has done that a fair amount since Donald Trump's second term started has been Bishop Robert Barron, who was a highly popular Bishop with a blog. Bishop Barron's close association with Donald Trump has made some of us quite nervous, as Trump definitely isn't a religious man.
There's a lot that occurs within the Trump administration that should worry Catholics. A core membership of the Trump inner circle are American Evangelicals of the far right persuasion who don't believe Catholics are even Christians (and therefore share an interesting mindset with the SSPX which believes that pretty much all American Evangelicals are going to Hell).
Trump's far right positions has naturally caused the rise of the far left in some quarters, notably in New York, which will be sending a Democratic Socialist to Congress, and in Colorado which appears slated to do so. Democratic Socialists are not Communist and, indeed, in the revolutions of the 1910s through 1970s, Democratic Socialist would get the bullet in any country Communists took over. Nonetheless, Donald Trump, who did not seem that gung ho about fighting communists in the 1960s when he actually literally could have, had he wanted to, is all about fighting the Reds now.
All of the above gets back to what should true conservatives and true traditionalist do?
In terms of the Church, as I noted above, I'm sympathetic with traditionalist and I feel badly for them about the general loss of the Latin Mass. But I've noted that when there's a very orthodox priest and traditionalist Catholics in the Catholic population, it tends to show up best a devotionals in their behavior. Frequent attendance at confession, the wearing of outwardly Catholic clothing, and often large families Good for them. They serve, I'd note, as an influence on the larger Catholic community as a sobering and inspiring reminder of the core of the Faith.
But here's the thing. The education of everyone, like it or not, at a younger age, is much better now than it was in the 1960s. For that matter, it's much better now than it was in the 1990s, or 2000s. Vatican II is actually part of that. Following Vatican II the new Mass included many more readings than the TLM did, and no wonder. Advances in printing and the like no longer meant that the Church was challenged with the transmission of the Gospel to a polyglot world the way it had once been. If there are beautiful traditions to look back on, we have to acknowledge at the same time that restoring something means restoring what should benefit us, and that we can't go back, as much as we might want to, to an era when most people knew less and their world was smaller.
Put another way, modern Americans are not going back to what they think the 1950s were like in terms of education (what the 50s were actually like is another matter) and even Rod Dreher doesn't think we're going to build Benedictine walled cities any longer.
That doesn't mean accepting the present either, particularly one in which Americans, civilly, are in the Age of Stupidity.
