As an academic from Virginia with a healthy admiration for the Founding Fathers, Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va., is in good position to ponder Thomas Jefferson’s imperiled reputation at his state’s flagship university. Jefferson is increasingly controversial at the University of Virginia, a school he founded in 1819, where students have taken to protesting statues of him in recent months.
Asked about disputes over the statues in a Wednesday meeting with the Washington Examiner’s editorial board, Brat said the tributes to Jefferson should remain standing.
“If you’ve educated these kids, and you see that Jefferson opens the mind, and he’s part of the Enlightenment project about emancipating the human spirit and liberating people politically, and is in that historical epoch, on that side of history, moving for human reason to be alive and well— I mean, you gotta view those folks as to the contribution they made, right?” said the second-term Republican. “And he and Madison both wanted it on their tombstone. They didn’t want ‘president’ and all this — [they were] most proud of their statues on religious toleration.”
“If anyone knows anything— which is the problem, no one knows anything anymore about these figures. If you educate people, which would be a radical endeavor for the education folks to engage in any time, then I think the questions would be more sophisticated, and my responses could be more sophisticated,” Brat continued.
Pressed to explain why campus protests of Jefferson are happening at this particular moment in history, Brat pointed to an erosion in respect for the Judeo-Christian tradition.
“The piece that’s missing from it that answers a lot and is the utter foundation of everything in the West is the Judeo-Christian tradition,” the congressman argued, later asserting, “the Western synthesis is basically the synthesis between the Judeo-Christian tradition and Greek reason.”
“In every century, I can name you the philosopher who incorporates the Judeo-Christian tradition and puts it together, and in the Enlightenment, that’s what you get, right?” said Brat. “And so, just in a nutshell, I think part of the problem we’re in this moment is that the Judeo-Christian tradition is totally under attack. And if you’re missing that piece of it, it makes it utterly impossible to understand a Jefferson, or a Martin Luther King, who had a Ph.D in theology – systematic theology.”
“I think that piece has just been left off,” Brat concluded.
