Worldview tells us what it means to be human and what it means to be virtuous. Unfortunately, conservatives too often pick a “conservative” position on a certain policy and then justify it using the language and tenets of progressivism. If I don’t want my children to grow up to be moral relativists, I need to make sure that I myself don’t sound like a moral relativist when I talk about the world.

This year the movie God Is Not Dead preyed on every Christian parent’s fear of sending a child off to college only to have their family’s faith and values undermined by an atheist college professor espousing some form of moral relativism. The movie hinges on a certain cliché, but the cliché is a cliché because many of us took a class with “that professor.” He might not have been so over-the-top, but his prejudices were evident.

The American university tends to be fairly hostile to the conservative movement. One of the core tenets of conservatism is the Judeo-Christian teaching that humans are fallen creatures. Moral right and wrong are objective categories, and human nature tends toward the wrong in absence of coercion. God-given social structures, e.g., family, community, and government, help restrain wickedness.

Progressivism, on the other hand, tends to view the human spirit as intrinsically good. For some progressives, “good” becomes a relative term defined by the individual. The only “bad” is to infringe on another person’s ability to express their own version of “good.”

It is no secret that most university professors are progressives, and over the last forty years, universities have replaced real virtues with tolerance and diversity. The prevailing spirit of progressivism has led to many forms of insanity on college campuses. Yale’s Sex Week is perhaps the most notorious example of how American universities celebrate the demise of tradition, but moral relativism permeates every college classroom.

Many conservatives blame left-leaning professors for this rise in moral relativism. Certainly a liberal faculty will promote progressive values, but the battle for conservatism was lost long before these students ever met their first college professor. In my experience, freshmen arrive on campus as moral relativists.

I realized the problem in my first year of teaching when a class of freshmen tried to rehabilitate Hitler. After reading some of Mein Kampf a couple of students in the class suggested that Hitler had a few good ideas. As our discussion unfolded, more than half the class agreed that perhaps what was good and true for the Germans was not good and true for the Jews. They suggested that we were dealing with a difference of perspective. Most of these kids identified themselves as conservatives. They were shocked when I informed them that truth was not dependent on nationalism. Over the years, dozens of students have earnestly asked me what made Hitler do what he did. They need a social-scientific explanation because they do not understand the conservative notion that humans are fallen. When we have lost the ability to call Hitler evil, we have lost much.

Recently, my students gave me further proof of their moral relativism. In my freshman history class, I assigned a short paper based on excerpts from Thucydides. Thucydides wrote about the devastating war that took place in the fifth century BC between the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta. In addition to having them read Thucydides, I lectured on the war and assigned readings from secondary sources. I thought that I had prepared them.

The assignment covered Thucydides’ account of the funeral speech by Pericles and Thucydides’ account of the dialogue between the Athenians and the people of Melos. In the funeral oration which takes place at the beginning of the war, Pericles lauds Athens as being the school of Hellas. Athens is the greatest of the Greek city-states. She is the greatest in both military and artistic achievement, and her greatness rests on her democracy. In the Melian dialogue which takes place mid-way through the war, Thucydides describes how the Athenians attempt to force the neutral island of Melos to join their alliance. When the Melians ask why they should join, the Athenians threaten to destroy them if they resist. The Athenians explicitly argue that might makes right. In the end, the Athenians kill all the men on the island of Melos and sell all the women and children into slavery. Athens, so proud of its own democracy, refused to allow its neighbors self-determination.

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The link (URL) to the original article is unavailable and has been removed.]