The Question Nobody Would Answer
Jack Miller in 1964 on a refusal we are still living with
By Michael A. Graham
In March 2022 a senator asked a nominee to the Supreme Court to define the word “woman.” The nominee said she could not, at least in that setting, because she was not a biologist. The exchange was argued over for weeks.
A man I have spent twenty years studying described that refusal in 1964, and what happens to a society when the refusal becomes a rule.
The manuscript
In 1963 Jack Miller was thirty-five. He had taught high school English for six years and college composition after that, and he was a candidate for a doctorate in English. That February he went to work as a research consultant at the Center for American Studies in Burlingame, California.
The Center was the William Volker Fund under a new name, and the Volker Fund was a principal funder of postwar conservatism. It paid for the first meetings of the Mont Pelerin Society. It funded the university chairs of Friedrich Hayek at Chicago and Ludwig von Mises at NYU. Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, and F. A. Harper worked on its support. It started the Foundation for Economic Education and the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, and it put money into Goldwater’s 1964 campaign. Historians have called the network it built “one of the most important intellectual constructs of mid-century U.S. culture.”
In 1962 its president, Harold Luhnow, decided the movement could no longer avoid the question of Christianity. The postwar conservative coalition had been a pact. Libertarians, traditionalists, Catholics, and Calvinists agreed to work together and leave God out of the argument. Luhnow concluded the pact had failed. A movement that would not discuss the place of Christianity in education and politics could not hold. He renamed the fund and hired three men to remake it: R. J. Rushdoony to bring in the theology, William Terry Couch, former editor-in-chief of the University of Chicago Press, to run publishing, and the Harvard historian David Hoggan to recruit scholars. Rushdoony hired Jack.
Luhnow’s conclusion is the thesis of Jack’s book, reached in a think tank instead of a school. Luhnow got there as a funder watching a coalition come apart. Jack got there as a student of Cornelius Van Til. Luhnow had the conclusion and Jack had the argument for it, which is why the Center soon asked its new consultant to draft its Statement of Purpose.
The Center paid him to read and write. Over eighteen months he produced a three-volume study of American education called Man in Modern Education. Couch read the first two volumes and commented favorably. Frank Morley, an Oxford mathematician with the Nuffield Foundation, reviewed the manuscript and praised it. The Center engaged Herbert Kay, formerly of Time-Life, to edit it for publication.
There is an irony here, and Jack saw it at the time. Couch had rejected his draft Statement of Purpose as too Calvinistic. A friend who read the manuscript noticed that Jack had toned down his language there too. Jack agreed, and explained that “the CAS are shy on matters that are controversial,” and that this was the only way to get the manuscript written. Luhnow wanted the conclusion without the presuppositions that produced it. Jack wrote a book about the least common denominator for an institution that was operating under it.
It was never published. Rushdoony was dismissed within the year. Hoggan’s Holocaust denial came out in the press. Luhnow had a stroke. The Center closed in 1964. Jack went to Westminster Seminary and became the pastor and teacher he is remembered as. The typescript went into the archive. This year I transcribed and reassembled it so that it can be read.
His thesis, in his own words to Edmund Clowney, was “that modern education is without a coherent anthropology.” American schools had no working doctrine of man. The people running them had no agreed answer to what a human being is, so they had no agreed answer to what a school is for. Reform after reform stopped short of that question. He put it plainly in the third volume:
Teaching without a clear concept of human nature is a poor, one-legged business, a near contradiction in terms simply because “to educate” is literally “to lead forth.” Without a clear doctrine of man who is able to say what it is we are to lead forth?
How the question was removed
The heart of the book is his account of how the question disappeared.
He begins with John Dewey. Dewey, as Jack reads him, treated the question of human nature as a question with no answer to find. There is no fixed human essence to be discovered, no permanent nature. Man is what can be made of him. Dewey agreed here with the positivists, who wanted to be done with metaphysical questions about God and the soul altogether. To them the whole subject of human nature was a rationalization of “social and moral strifes.”
Then Jack describes what the schools did with that inheritance. There was no longer any agreed answer to what man is. So educators adopted a rule, which Jack calls the law of the least common denominator. The rule is to “work only with those ideas broad enough to be accepted by nearly everyone in the democratic society.”
Jack’s objection is that the rule “bypasses the truth or falsity of any particular idea in favor of establishing a democratic ideology.” Whether an idea is true stops mattering. What matters is whether it will offend anyone. Controversial matters go out of bounds. Human nature is a controversial matter, so, he writes, “any direct confrontation with the underlying philosophical issues about human nature is likely to be avoided as out of step with the times.” What is left is talk with “a vaguely hollow ring,” conducted in “general, contentless terms.”
The rule is familiar from the family table. Certain subjects are not raised at Thanksgiving so that dinner can go on. Jack’s complaint is about what that peace costs. Politeness gets mistaken for agreement. The question underneath goes unargued. Because it goes unargued it goes undecided. Because it goes undecided, it gets decided by default, by whoever acts while everyone else is being polite.
There is one difference between the table and the schools. At the table the rule is known to be a rule. In the schools the rule became invisible. People forgot they had agreed not to ask, and they took the silence for consensus.
A question can be set aside for the length of an argument. It cannot be set aside for sixty years. Jack’s diagnosis is that a moment’s bracketing became a permanent rule. A rule against deciding the question is itself a decision about it.
The refusal is a definition
Here is the turn in his argument that the rest depends on. It is the one Van Til taught him to make.
The least common denominator presents itself as the absence of a position. Jack’s reply is that “Man is what can be made of him” is a doctrine of man. It says man is plastic. It says he is a social organism adjusting to his environment. It says he has no nature that could stand in judgment on what is done to him. That doctrine runs the schools. It is never asked to defend itself, because the rule forbids arguing about man. It passes as neutrality. Jack names the result: “this kind of thinking represents a secret victory for John Dewey because this was the way he wanted the game to be conducted.”
Van Til’s claim was that everyone has presuppositions, Christians included. The division is between people who know what theirs are and people who call theirs method. Dewey had a presupposition about man and named it science. The educators who inherited it had the same presupposition and named it neutrality.
Jack’s word for what they lacked is epistemological self-consciousness. He credits the phrase in this book to R. J. Rushdoony. It means knowing what you are standing on. He uses it again at the close of the second volume, where he says of the whole educational debate that “our own ultimate identity and commitments are often unknown to us.”
Argument is his remedy, and he means something specific by the word. “Argument carried on in this manner is basically a getting to the bottom of things. It asks that those who choose to argue make clear their starting point and their pretheoretical commitments.” A culture that will not do this settles little. Jack says of it that “ideas are not refuted; they merely pass out of fashion or die from lack of checkmate.”
All of this describes an institutional habit in 1964. It is also a prediction. A society that has taken the question of man off the table has arranged not to be asked it. The question comes back in institution after institution, unsettled, as conflict. The conflict stays unresolved, because the rule that removed the question is still in force.
Sixty years on
“I’m not a biologist” is an instance of Jack’s prediction. A public official is asked to define a category of human being. She declines and defers to a specialist. That is the move he describes: the question handed to experts and taken off the field where it has to be argued. Plenty of public figures would have answered the question plainly, and some have. What matters is what the rule does to the two answers. Inside the least common denominator, the refusal is the safe answer and the plain one is the dangerous answer. That is the rule working as Jack said it would.
Men competing in women’s sports is one expression of a larger claim: that a person’s sex is a matter of identity rather than of body. Both turn on the exact question Jack poses at the opening of his third volume: “In what sense is man a unity?” and “Do all men participate in some common essence?” If human nature is given, the body is part of it, and a man is a man whatever he declares. If man is what can be made of him, then sex is one more thing he makes, and the categories follow the will. The arguments I have heard on the matter fall into those two positions. Few of the people making them know they are standing on a doctrine of man.
Marriage and gender fluidity rest on the same claim. Marriage was defined by what the two parties are. Take away a given nature and marriage becomes whatever we agree to make it. Gender fluidity is the same move carried one step further: sex is chosen, and can be chosen again. This is what the doctrine allows. What Dewey and his adherents wanted is on the record, and Jack documents it: a remade social order, with man as the material and the schools as the workshop, and no fixed nature allowed to stand in the way. Jack says Dewey wanted the game conducted with the question of man off the table. That is what he wanted. What has since been made of man is what happens when he gets it. Jack did not name what would follow. He said the doctrine had no way to prevent it.
Our own denominational college, Covenant, has just announced a new core curriculum. It is drawing strident criticism from people who decided in advance what it must mean. This fits Jack’s argument differently. A confessional college has a doctrine of man. The fight there is over whether the curriculum follows from it. But Jack’s other point applies. When a curriculum fight is conducted at the level of labels, with the question of what a Christian education is for left unspoken, that is the hollow argument he describes. Either side can conduct it.
What his argument is, and what it is not
Jack described a society that could not answer the question “what is man,” and he said the failure would surface across the culture. It has. Which disputes it surfaces in is a matter of history. What he claimed for his own answer is a separate matter, and he was careful about it.
His own answer is not neutral, and he says so. He commits the book “without any claim to be neutral, but seeking to be just and fair according to my light.” His position is that man is a creature, made in the image of God, whose nature is given rather than chosen. A reader who rejects that will say the present disputes prove the older anthropology was always contested.
Jack answers this with Mark Van Doren, whose Liberal Education he admires. Van Doren agrees with Jack that education needs a doctrine of man. Unless men share a “common nature,” he says, the whole task loses its meaning. Then he offers one. Man is best understood “in a middle position between animals and angels.” In the next sentence he takes it back: “Such a scale is one of man’s most brilliant inventions.” He will not say whether it is true.
Jack presses him. Marx and Spengler denied that any common human nature exists. Aristotle denied it to slaves and barbarians. Look at people one at a time and the evidence points the other way. “By an analysis of evidence, autonomous reason cannot possibly conclude that all men participate in the same humanity.” So where does Van Doren’s belief come from? Jack answers that it “can only rest upon a religious conviction, a presupposition about man’s nature borrowed substantially from Christian teaching.” Van Doren holds a Christian belief about man and will not say so.
That is Jack’s reply to the objection. The alternative to a stated doctrine of man is an unstated one. Van Doren is standing somewhere too. Jack says where he stands.
Church and state
A reader will hear in all this an argument against the separation of church and state, and against religious liberty. Jack’s argument runs the other way. The distinction takes a little care, and Jack’s own tradition took that care before him.
Start with what Jack does claim. No school is religiously empty. Every curriculum embodies a doctrine of man, whether or not anyone wrote it down. He presses this hard, and he presses it in both directions. In the second volume he reprints a chapter from Dewey’s A Common Faith, to let Dewey show in his own words that secular humanism is a faith with a doctrine of man of its own. In the same volume he reprints A. A. Hodge, under the title “Neutral Schools?”, to argue that a religiously neutral school is a fiction. Jack’s claim is about knowledge. It says that neutrality is impossible, for anyone.
Now set beside it a different claim, which is about government. This one says that the state should establish no religion. It is a claim about what governments may do, and it says nothing about whether neutrality is possible. Jack holds the first claim. He leaves the second standing. Nowhere in the three volumes does he argue that the state should impose Christianity.
He got this from the men he learned from. Hodge, Machen and Van Til denied that neutrality was possible, and they affirmed that the church should be disestablished. They saw no contradiction between the two. Machen went to Washington to fight the creation of a federal Department of Education, and he fought it on grounds of liberty.
So what does Jack want? At the end of the second volume he lays it out. First, honesty. Stop calling the public school neutral. Admit that it runs on a doctrine of man, and say which one. Second, alternatives. Give parents and churches real choices. His proposals are modest: teach about religion, restore religious content where a community wants it, and build private schools.
That is a liberty argument. It asks the state to give up a pretense, and nothing more.
If everyone agreed with him
Suppose the country accepted Jack’s doctrine of man. What would follow? The answer is in his own pages.
Begin with the Creator-creature distinction, which is the foundation of his argument. If man is a creature, then every human authority is a creature too. That limits the state. It limits the majority. Jack closes his constructive case with James Fenimore Cooper’s warning against those who “substitute the voice of the created for that of the Creator, who shout ‘the people, the people.’” A doctrine of man that begins with a Creator limits every government.
Next, the image of God. If every human being bears it, then every human being has dignity and every human being can be taught. Jack writes that “all men in spite of their corruption are invested in worth and dignity because they bear the divine image.” That is a dignity no government confers and none can remove.
Next, sphere sovereignty, which he takes from Herman Dooyeweerd. The state, the church, the school and the family each have their own authority under God. None of them owns the others. So the state does not own the school, and it does not own the doctrine of man.
Last, his two communities. They are Augustine’s two cities, the city of God and the city of man, and in this age they are mixed together. They cannot be separated by law. Membership in the city of God is by conversion, and Jack says plainly that “many of these latter citizens daily cross over to the community of faith.”
Put those four together and you have what a society built on Jack’s doctrine of man would look like. Schools that could say what they were for. A real plurality of them. Hard limits on what any government could claim about human beings. In his frame the church’s instrument is argument and the two cities stay mixed until the end, so there is no theocracy in it.
Theonomy
Non-Christians who hear “there is no neutrality” grow wary, and they have reason. Rushdoony, the man who hired Jack, later became the father of Christian Reconstruction. He took the same first premise Jack took, that no one is neutral. Then he added a second: therefore God’s law must govern the state. That is theonomy. It is what people fear the argument leads to.
Jack shared the first premise and never added the second. What he added instead was: therefore be honest, argue in the open, and let people choose. He reprinted his opponents in his own book, at length and at their strongest, and told his readers to judge for themselves. He left the Center in 1964. He told his students later that the Theonomy people “verged on prejudice” and that the Christian-America project was one he “couldn’t entirely buy into.” The difference between the two men is that second premise.
Jack’s argument cuts against the theocrat as hard as against the secularist. A Christian who uses the state to install Christianity without winning the argument is doing what Dewey did with the schools. He is installing a doctrine of man by means of an institution. Jack’s remedy for Dewey is the remedy he would apply to Rushdoony. Say what you believe about man, and defend it in the open.
How he argued
I have left for last the thing the rest depends on. The book is about a doctrine of man. The place a doctrine of man shows itself is in how a man treats the person who disagrees with him. The rest of the book can be held as an opinion. This part has to be practiced, and it is the part our moment has lost.
Jack thought the stakes were high. He wrote that “what goes on in the schools is more important than the program for national defense.” He went after the root question in the field and held his position. And he did it like this:
My concern with the schools relates to principles, not to personalities, even though these two are intimately related. Nor am I hostile to any particular school or school system. My best wishes are extended to the many conscientious teachers and administrators who hear many complaints and few praises. My desire is to hold up for myself, con amor, an ideal that is realized only imperfectly in this study: to be strong for principle, yet pleasant in manner.
A reader may see a contradiction here. Jack attacks the politeness that keeps the hard question off the table. Then he commends pleasantness of manner. The two look alike and are different things.
The politeness he attacks is procedural. We agree not to raise the question. It keeps the peace by giving up the argument. Underneath it is a low view of the other person, who is treated as someone who cannot bear to hear what you think.
The pleasantness he practices works the other way. Raise the question. Take it to the root. And treat the man across the table as a man while you do it. The first kind of politeness says do not argue. The second says argue, and here is how.
There is a reason he could do both at once, and it is theological. Presuppositions, in Van Til’s account, are religious. They are the direction of a person’s heart, and only God turns a heart. That belief made Jack bold. Years later he put the principle in Kuyper’s words. A man may lack the power to do a thing and still have the duty to do it, so the preacher must “tell every man that conversion is his urgent duty,” and afterward give thanks to God, “who alone has accomplished it.” Jack called men to repent and believe, and he called plainly, for the rest of his life. Producing the result was God’s part.
So for Jack the what and the how carried equal weight, and for the same reason. The truth had to be told whole, because the man in front of him needed it. It had to be told with love, because the same God who sent the truth loved the man. A hard truth delivered with contempt misrepresents the one who sent it. How a man argues shows what he believes about the person across the table, and about who changes hearts.
This is where Jack and Rushdoony part, and the parting matters more now than it did in 1964, because Rushdoony is being read again. His name comes up on the right in places where it would not have been known ten years ago. He deserves a fair statement. He was learned and prolific. He took the no-neutrality premise with full seriousness, and he called men to faith. Both men believed God does the converting. The difference is what each man does when the other man says no. Rushdoony’s answer is that God’s law binds the unbeliever whether he consents or not, and the magistrate should enforce it. His refusal is rebellion, and rebellion is to be subdued. Jack’s answer is to keep telling him the truth, keep loving him, keep praying for him, and leave his refusal between him and God. He is still a neighbor, still made in the image of God, still worth the argument tomorrow. That is where the manner comes from. Contempt comes easily toward a man you mean to subdue. It has no place toward a man you mean to win. Both men were bold. The gentleness that set Jack apart came from the same theology as his boldness, and it is what the present moment needs from him.
The pastor of the 1970s is present in this book. The man who taught repentance as a way of life and prayer as the activation of God’s missionary promises held these convictions in 1964. The theology came first, and the ministry followed from it.
He kept the argument tied to the people inside it. He had stood in front of a classroom for six years. He knew who absorbs the shock when the argument turns ugly. My son taught high school English in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. A syllabus he spent two years building was thrown out in the first week of a school year when the fight over assigned books reached his district. He has stopped teaching. Jack’s sentence about teachers who hear many complaints and few praises is about someone I know.
The argument over what a school is for is real, and Jack says so. He also says that the people inside it are real. A man who forgets that has done harm whatever the outcome of the argument.
To the Christian who is tired of being told to be nice
Some conservative Christians will read this far and stop. They have been told for thirty years to be winsome. What they got for it is a culture that calls them bigots, a movement that has turned militant and in places violent, and institutions that treat their convictions as evil. They are done being told to be nice. I understand it. So would Jack. Here is what he would say.
First, what he asks for is different from nice. Being nice, in the sense they mean, is the first kind of politeness, the kind that leaves the question off the table so that dinner can go on. Jack spent three volumes attacking it. When his own employer asked him to tone it down, he softened the adjectives and kept the questions. He is telling you to say what man is, in public, at the root, and to refuse the invitation to hand the question to the biologists. A reader who is tired of being told to be quiet has Jack on his side.
Second, what he refuses is contempt, and his reason stands apart from the other side’s behavior. The reason is what contempt says about God and about the man in front of you. Contempt says the man is beyond God’s reach and beneath your concern. Both statements are false whatever he has done. That does not change when the other side becomes militant. What changes is the price. In 1964 a Christian who argued without contempt risked being ignored. Today he risks being called a coward by his own side and a bigot by the other, and he may pay for his convictions with his job or his safety. The price has gone up. The duty is the same one it was, because the duty was never grounded in how the other side behaves. It is grounded in who God is and what the other man is.
Third, and this is where the essay has been going. The militancy is what a doctrine of man without a Creator produces. If man is what can be made of him, then the man who resists being remade is an obstacle, and obstacles are removed. A Christian who answers in kind, who treats the progressive as an obstacle to be removed, has adopted the doctrine of man he came to fight. He has conceded the argument at the level where Jack says arguments are decided, and he may never know it. He has adopted his opponent’s premise about man while opposing his opponent’s conclusions.
Jack argued from a position of weakness. In 1964 his side had lost the schools, his employer was shy of controversy, and Dewey’s heirs ran American education. He wrote that the stakes were higher than national defense, and then he reprinted Dewey at full length so that his readers could judge for themselves. He knew the argument was over the doctrine of man, and he kept it there.
What we can take from him
Everyone at the table has a doctrine of man. The senator has one. The nominee has one. The athlete, the school board and the critic of the curriculum each have one. Most of them do not know it, and the rule of our institutions is that they need never find out.
Jack’s first lesson is to know your own.
His second is to say it, plainly and in public, without pretending it is science or common sense or the view from nowhere.
His third lesson is the one I most need. Having said what you believe, and called for a response, you are not required to produce it. You are required to be honest and clear, and to treat the person in front of you as a neighbor to be won, because how you treat him is your doctrine of man in practice. The change of heart, if it comes, is God’s work. Knowing that is what lets you argue hard and stay kind at the same time. Jack did both in his Preface, in the three volumes that followed it, and then for thirty years of ministry. Social media rewards contempt on all sides.
I flagged this manuscript in my dissertation as a subject for further research. I am more convinced of that now than I was then. The question I am left with is whether a man who could argue this hard and this fairly at the same time has something to say to us that we have not yet heard, because it sat unread for sixty years.
I will write more as the work continues.
Jack Miller’s Man in Modern Education (1964) is an unpublished three-volume typescript held in the C. John Miller Manuscript Collection. Quotations are from the author’s reading edition. The letter to Edmund Clowney is dated 26 March 1964. The Kuyper quotations are from Jack’s “Reformed Evangelism Revisited” (20 July 1979). The account of the Volker Fund and the Center follows chapter 3 of Cheer Up! (2019) and the sources cited there. William Edgar’s recollection of Jack’s reasons for leaving the Center is from an interview of 17 September 2015, cited in the same chapter.