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J. Budziszewski is professor of Government and Philosophy at the University of Texas, where he specializes in researching natural law. His books include Resurrection of Nature: Political Theory and the Human Character (Cornell, 1986), The Nearest Coast of Darkness: A Vindication of the Politics of Virtues (Cornell, 1988), True Tolerance: Liberalism and the Necessity of Judgment (Transaction, 1992), Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law (InterVarsity, 1997), The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man (Spence, 1999), and How to Stay Christian in College (NavPress, 1999). Dick Staub recently talked with him about his latest book, What We Can't Not Know (Spence, 2003).

You start your book by saying explicitly that every writer has a point of view, and that yours is Christian. How was it that you came to embrace a Christian worldview?

Well, I haven't always held one. I was raised in a Christian home. I walked the aisle and was baptized at age 10. I knew what I was doing and I believed it. But when I was in my early 20s, when I went off to college, I lost my faith completely.

And did a lot more than losing it, as a matter of fact.

Where did you attend?

For the first two years I was at the University of Chicago. I dropped out then for a couple of years. I was a socialist in those days, waiting for the revolution, and decided that I didn't need to be at a rich kid's school. I should be out with the proletariat. So I went out and learned a trade.

Wow. So what trade did you practice?

Welding. I ended up working at the Tampa shipyards for not a terribly long time, but I did work there.

So you are a rare man whose philosophical outlook actually led him into the blue-collar life for awhile.

Yes, and one of the things I discovered is that the workers weren't interested in revolution.

What was it that attracted you to socialism in the first place?

I wanted to save the world. What led me into socialism was very similar to what led me out of Christianity, because at that time I had my own ideas about how to save the world—and they didn't have very much to do with Jesus Christ. I think really deep down, I didn't want God to be God, I wanted J. Budziszewski to be God.

So what began as a drift from the faith, ended up a complete retreat. I'm one of these guys who tends to take premises to their conclusions, so when I abandoned belief in God I also abandoned belief in God's moral law. I thought that there was no real objective right or wrong, no objective good or evil, and that we just made up these things for ourselves.

I didn't go out and rob convenience stores, sleep with everybody I could find, and do a lot of drugs. My sins, I guess, were mostly of the mind.

I committed treason against obvious truth.

So how is it that you moved from being committed to socialism to following Jesus?

Well, there's a step missing there. I threw out socialism and became an atheist and a nihilist. But when I came back, I didn't know it at the time, but it's what John's gospel calls the conviction of sin. I didn't recognize it, but I had an intuition. It came to me. It was overwhelmingly strong. I couldn't really resist it that my own condition was objectively evil. This from a guy who doesn't believe that there's an objective difference between good and evil. But I could no longer tell myself there was no such thing as evil because it was right behind my eyes. It was like a fellow walking out of the door one morning who had been telling himself that the sky is red, suddenly looking up and realizing not only that the sky is blue, but that it had been blue all along.

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June (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47