This Section 1.1.2 provides more of the necessary foundation for adequately determining and understanding the ontology of a movement. This additional necessity is a framework for analysis, or “paradigm.” More than thirty-five years ago, our Blackstone ministry created Figure 1; and we have continued to utilize this framework—carefully and with a constant eye for any need to change (none having occurred until recently with the addition Level #2C, as explained below). This Blackstonian Worldview Model was first publicly presented by us in a lectureship series at the Simon Greenleaf School of Law (now the Trinity School of Law) in the early 1980s. The oral presentations were subsequently published in the School’s “Law Review.” This model depicts only the law-related disciplines of the worldview. Other areas of life—economics, medicine, education, etc. could be, but are not, covered here.
The term “paradigm” is familiar to academia, where it is used as a model. In the social sciences the term is used a bit more broadly, as an organizing device. It provides the scholar with an identification of the critical issues and questions that he must address. It then offers a methodology for addressing those issues and questions, and specifies the outcome of the application of that methodology. The particular paradigm we employ in this study is the “worldview” paradigm. The Germans have a very robust word for this paradigm, the German being: “Weltanschuung.”
Three facts about Blackstone’s worldview model are worth noting at the outset. First, it comprehensively covers all of the critical issues a paradigm must address. Second, it reveals the interrelationship among the disciplines included. Third, application of the paradigm, as we will demonstrate in this Study Series, verifies that America’s internal conflict has indeed been a “Culture War,” a battle first highlighted and labeled by American sociologist John Davison Hunter (1991). Now, however, the fissures in American and English cultures have so proliferated and polarized that we face an even more dangerous phenomenon appropriately described as “Culture Wars” (Irish social science professor Bryan Fanning, 2023).
The worldview ingredients which have always affected our Constitution and legal system fall into five realms of thought: (1) theology/religion, (2) general philosophy, (3) jurisprudence (“legal/political philosophy”), (4) U. S. Constitutional text, theory, and interpretation, and (5) specific issues and cases. The ingredient level #2C is a recent addition to the paradigm. We briefly define below each of these indispensable ingredients as they pertain to our study.
Level #4: “Specific issues and cases” includes individual cases such as the infamous Roe v. Wade, or a constitutional issue such as how “precedents” (previous court decision) should be applied by courts in a current case.
Level #3: “The Constitution” covers the text of the document, plus the constitutional theory which one brings to his or her consideration of the document, and the body of court decisions interpreting the document (“constitutional law”).
Level #2C: “General Culture” is the recent addition to our model and thus requires extra explanation. This encompasses the growing number of powerful ideologies which interrelate with, and so strongly affect, general philosophy, theology, law, etc. This current set of ideologies we label as a group “Radical Theories” (also known as “Critical Theories”— “Critical” being a general title we avoid because of its confusion with specific movements within the set also labeled “critical”). The mediating effects in the West of the general culture on theology (to which we add “law”) was first outlined in a major American publication by the preeminent apologist, Francis Schaeffer (1968), cited earlier. These effects have now reached the point that a full paradigm of America’s worldview war must give the general culture its proper position in our worldview model. Note: “the arts (music, literature, etc.)” are “cultural” but are omitted from our discussion because of their more remote relationship to law, government, etc.
Level #2B: “Jurisprudence” (“legal philosophy”) and “political philosophy” address the issues of law and government—their nature, source(s), fundamental principles, relationship to other societal institutions, etc.
Level #2A: “General philosophy” encompasses such questions as reality and existence, origins, truth and knowledge, the nature of man and society, purpose(s), and values/principles/ morality.
Level #1: “Theology” concerns God—His existence, nature, etc. “Religion” concerns man’s view of that which is supreme in his life and his relationship to that supreme entity.
The use and value of this model we can illustrate with one relatively simple view of each component to demonstrate how the model applies to TM and law (we will elaborate later on the various points made here). Given below for each Level is a specific issue illustrating that Level and the contrasting worldview positions on that issue.
LEVEL #4: ONE SPECIFIC ISSUE: Scardina v. Masterpiece Cakeshop (2023)—Does Colorado baker Jack Phillips, in violation of his Christian beliefs, have to create a “transitioning celebration cake” for an attorney who “transitioned from male to female” (Autumn Scardina)? “YES” fiercely proclaim the Humanists; “NO” just as fiercely counter Judeo-Christian forces. a From this most specific level, arguments move to deeper levels of our model. LEVEL #3: ONE SPECIFIC ISSUE: Under the Constitution’s provisions/interpretation: Special Trans protections: ARE required (Humanistic worldview) V. are NOT required and may even be prohibited (Judeo-Christian worldview). Trans proponents invoke such Constitutional provisions as the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments protections of “liberty,” by arguing that “liberty” covers the transgenderism spectrum. But Trans opponents counter with the rebuttal that neither the text, theories, nor past interpretations of the Constitution support Trans “rights.”
LEVEL #2C: ONE SPECIFIC ISSUE: The effects of intellectual cultural movements on law and related disciplines have been, and continue to be, gigantic. Have these movements/ effects been beneficial to America and necessary to continuing national “progress”? “YES” stoutly argue Humanists; “NO” declare Judeo-Christian advocates, who view these movements as having thrown America into a severe, perhaps fatal, decline. Level 2C has contributed enormously to generating and expanding the fundamental humpty-dumpty societal and legal convulsions of roughly the last sixty years. Views and behaviors considered beyond even the limits of polite conversation roughly sixty years ago now dominate public discourse. These radical movements have elevated the “psychological and sexualized self” into a dominant factor transmogrifying society, law, and government. The “victimhood culture,” fixated on “aggressions” by “the oppressor class” against the “victimized classes,” is viewed as endemic to Judeo-Christian America. And the Constitution and legal system are prime weapons of the oppressors. Thus, these radical movements have fought to deconstruct (destroy) not just specific laws, moral standards, or behavior patterns, but the very idea that a structured, sustained Judeo Christian society and legal system is valid or desirable. Contrariwise, a new radical system of relationships and values is necessary. This set of radical movements dates from approximately the 1920s, and includes Feminism (second through fourth waves), Critical Theory (three waves rooted in the interwar Frankfurt School), Critical Legal Studies (three waves first erupting in the 1970s), Critical Race Theory (emerging in the late 1970s and the 1980s) and Queer Theory (appearing in the 1990s).
LEVEL #2B: ONE SPECIFIC ISSUE: A “just” Constitution/legal system embodying fixed values, structures, and processes is impossible and deadly to human happiness and progress (Humanists) v. is possible and essential to human happiness and progress as demonstrated by America’s extraordinary history and culture (Judeo-Christian advocates).
LEVEL #2A: ONE SPECIFIC ISSUE: Traditional American (Judeo-Christian) concepts of “marriage” as a permanent relationship between two persons of the opposite “sex” (defined as binary and biological) are mere ”human constructs” impeding the “deeper human experience and happiness” (Humanism) v. “marriage” as a “permanent, binanry relationship” is divinely-ordained and is the only foundation for “human happiness” as well as for the just and stable legal system necessary for society as a whole to survive and thrive (Judeo Christian position).
LEVEL #1: BASIC ISSUE: God. “god is dead, and we have killed him” (Nietzsche); thus, there is no “divine or natural law” and each individual is a “sovereign self” (Fanning) tasked with his own “self-creation” unimpaired by “human laws, institutions, etc.” (Humanism) v. the universe and all within it have been created by the theistic God of the Bible who has authored values and meaning and has created fixed truth and value which human law/government ordained by him must obey, as must each individual (Judeo-Christian position).
This most brief, cursory, and intial application of the Blackstone Worldview Model reveals a chaotic culture and legal system we might appropriately refer to as”America’s Alphabet Soup Society.” We Christians can recover at least somewhat from this dizzying morass by reminiding ourselves of the words of Sir William Blackstone himself: “”[The “will of [man’s] Maker” is called the law of Nature. . . . . [This law] . . . dicatated by God hinself, is of course superior in obligation to any other; . . . no human laws are of any validity if contrary to this . . . .(Blackstone’s Commentaries, Tucker ed., 1803).
