Dr. Joseph Loconte, a historian, writer, and visiting Professor at Grove City, joins Sarah Soltis to discuss Tolkien and Lewis, conservative Christian endeavors, and engaging culture by creating culture.
This interview was originally featured in the Spring 2023 Print Edition and has been edited for length and clarity.
SS: What brings you to Grove City?
JL: I wrapped up 10 years at the King’s College, teaching there in Western Civ, and then had a sojourn at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC as their director for the Center for American Studies, defending the principles of the American founding, the Constitution, civil society, and religious freedom. And then for different reasons, it just seemed time to move on.
Some pals at Grove City – Paul Kengor and others – said, “Come and be a visiting professor at Grove for a year.” That position started last June, and it’s going to wrap up this June. I’m just a visiting professor on campus here in the spring, teaching a couple of courses – Western Civ and a new course on Tolkien and Lewis.
SS: Tell me about this Tolkien and Lewis class.
JL: The working title for the class is, “CS Lewis and JRR.Tolkien: Confronting the Crisis of the Modern Age.” It’s really an intellectual history class. I’m trying to help our students understand the ideological currents of the first half of the 20th century: fascism, communism, eugenics, Freudianism, but seen through the lives and the literary imagination of Tolkien and Lewis. We’re looking at their lives, we’re looking at their biographies, we’re looking at their writings, but we’re treating their writings – speaking as a historian now – as if they were primary source documents. We’re trying to understand the cultural-political context in which they wrote their works.
That’s the working thesis of the class – that their actual lived historical context really affected their imaginations.
SS: With that, especially with, “confronting the crisis of the modern age,” what are some of the principles that you want students to take away? I’m thinking especially about living in this culture, in a postmodern world that is still fighting the culture war. How do you want students to walk away from this class?
JL: Well, we’re building the airplane as we’re flying it. That’s what I keep telling the students. Certainly the themes that are in my mind have emerged from my careful study of their lives, lives that were bracketed by two world wars. For the First World War, they were members of the British Expeditionary Force, both, and they were second lieutenants in the British Military Force in the trenches. Now they have to live through the second World War, 20 years later.
None of us has any idea of this. What I’m hoping to communicate and understand together with my students is: how did the crucible of war affect their literary imagination, how were they able to continue to be creative in amazing ways with all the pressures and the struggles and and the uncertainties?
They weren’t living in a mountain cabin in Colorado Springs, living a comfortable life, being able to think great thoughts. They were in this genuinely existential crisis: is Great Britain going to survive? They don’t know the answer to that question, given the success of the Blitzkrieg and Nazi Germany. Yet they’re getting on with their academic work after getting on with their great literary works at the same time, under all those pressures.
There’s something to be learned there about the dynamic of war and crisis. It can help be a great catalyst for great friendship. The friendship comes out of this crucible, but then, also, the friendship makes possible creation of great creative work.
If I had to boil down to three words. It’s war, friendship, and imagination. It’s the crucible of war that helps to deepen and enrich and make possible their friendship. And it’s their friendship that really helps to make possible these amazing epic works.
SS: How did you become interested in Tolkien and Lewis?
JL: I always enjoyed the C.S. Lewis since my early days as a Christian at the University of Illinois, where I became a believer and discovered C.S. Lewis as a young Christian. So I’ve always been a Lewis fan.
I was not a Tolkien fan until my mid 40s, when I was doing my doctoral work on John Locke, at King’s College London. I start reading The Lord of the Rings at night in a little English pub (which is where you want to be doing it!). And I just was so captivated by the story – I felt so morally invigorated and challenged by the story.
The idea of writing a book and getting more involved came from my role as an educator at the King’s College: teaching my students the 20th century, particularly the First World War, and understanding for the first time, as a scholar, how devastating that was to Europeans, particularly to the British.
Both [Tolkien and Lewis] fought in the trenches in the first World War; they become friends at Oxford. Then they go on to write these epic stories, where, if you think about it, war is at the center. The Lord of the Rings is a war story. The Chronicles of Narnia is a war story. And the light goes on: there’s gotta be a book in that!
SS: You’ve worked in various conservative cultural spheres – like The Trinity Forum, the Heritage Foundation, King’s College… With all of these cultural endeavors, what sort of lessons have you learned about engaging the culture?
JL: The strengths and weaknesses of the conservative movement, politically speaking, are similar to the strengths and weaknesses of the conservative Christian movement. And there’s trouble in River City; let’s face it.
I think there’s an intellectual crisis in both these sectors – political conservatism and the conservative Christian movement. And a lot of this goes back to the life of the mind. I don’t think we’ve taken seriously enough the need to engage the brain at a serious level to understand the great cultural inheritance that we have in the West: the classical Christian inheritance.
Understand the bad and the ugly. But there’s some good in the good, the bad, and the ugly. I don’t think we have a generation of leaders who understand the great legacy – what we’ve achieved, by the grace of God, and the role of the gospel in producing the West and all of the wonderful blessings of this civilization that we don’t understand, intellectually. And so we’re ready to throw it away. I see that on the hard political right, and I see it on the hard Christian right, and it distresses me.
And that kind of helps to explain some of these endeavors, the books and the film projects. Because if you just take CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, for example, they were rooted in the classical Christian tradition.There’s no way you can explain what they produced in their great epic works without understanding the debt that they had to this great literary tradition, whether it’s over Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton – that is their intellectual world. Out of that soil, that seedling, came these great imaginative works. Who even knows that anymore?
SS: Do you think there’s hope for that classical Christian tradition? In the conservative sphere, people sector off and will hold to that in smaller communities. Do you think that the tradition will be revived on a large scale, or do we need to kind of pull off and do this in our small Christian communities?
JL: The more we vacate the space – in the academy, popular culture, the mass media – there’s only one possible result. It will grow in what is now – a morally degraded, intellectually bankrupt, spiritually bankrupt culture. I think we’re reaping that in so many ways, especially in higher education, having vacated that space and left it to a more progressive, secular, materialist viewpoint.
We have a very cynical and morally-degraded educational system. That’s a problem. So I want to see Christians re-engage that space. Do we also need to create our own enclaves? Yes – charter schools, classical Christian education. But I think we need to do both. It’s not an either/ or.
That’s going to take a commitment on the part of philanthropists. It’s a question of persuading the people with the deep pockets to take the long view. If you want to try to help keep us from going off a cliff culturally, no election cycle is going to turn that around.
As for the earlier question, I want to borrow from my good friend Os Guinness. I think the doctrine of calling is so beautifully expressed in his book, The Call, which I highly recommend – the doctrine of calling that Martin Luther helped to reintroduce. It is just crucial for Christians to recover this idea of Christian vocation in every sphere of human life. In every realm of human endeavor, we bring our Christian faith there. And that can be in very explicit ways, but very implicitly as well. I’m not sure Protestants have grasped the importance of that legacy that I think they helped reintroduce – the broad sense of Christian calling, like Luther’s “priesthood of all believers.” I don’t know where it is now – how well it’s understood.
Why has it been so hard for Christians to change culture? I think they’ve forgotten how to create culture. We have to do a better job of actually writing great stories and making great movies. We’ve been talking about it for decades, and I’m old enough to know how long we’ve been talking about it. But we haven’t been doing enough. We have to produce in ways that are powerful, representing the deep Christian truths and speaking to people’s deep longings.
So often, when Christians want to engage culture, it’s a hammer to somebody, right? We poke them in the eye with a Christian message. And we have to be wiser. Maybe it’s that our faith relationship with Jesus Christ has to be so real and manifest and rooted in us that it is unconscious. As we address certain issues, or weigh into certain areas of our culture, instinctively, without thinking, we need to be thinking the thoughts of Christ. Figuring out instinctively with the help of the Holy Spirit, what could be said here to raise the right questions? Just to raise the right questions, as Jesus did all the time in his ministry.
SS: On the asking questions front, you’ve worked for the National Review and other conservative journalism outlets. I’m curious how you got into that.
JL: I started out my journalism career getting a degree from a journalism school in the country, University of Illinois. I then started working with small daily newspapers first and then in the DC area. I went from that world into political journalism, wanting to be more conscious about how I could bring my Christian faith to bear in my writing. It eventually led me to magazine writing and editing, and that opened up a whole world of doing investigative stories.
If you look at my essays, they weren’t necessarily about Christianity. They were about these big moral questions going on in the culture. But I was trying to bring a Christian sensibility quietly to bear on the topic at hand.
In the last 15 years or so, my essays have drawn on the academic work that I’ve done. But I guess the themes have been: how do we connect the Christian faith to this particular issue? I’m almost always trying to bring a historian’s perspective to bear on the thing. What does a historically-formed view of our civilization have to say about this issue? To say, here’s an insight or lesson from the past that can shed some light on contemporary issues.
SS: That connects nicely with the whole idea of the classical Christian tradition – learning from the past…
JL: Yes, absolutely.
