Published November 3, 2025
Church attendance is rising among Gen Z and Millennial men. There are even signs of a religious revival in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. What we need alongside and in harmony with any potential religious revival, however, is a Renaissance.
The West has had three of note. The Carolingian Renaissance of the eighth and ninth centuries peaked under Charlemagne, who revived classical and Christian learning, rescued and reproduced many nearly lost classical works, and greatly increased public literacy. Next, the twelfth-century Renaissance emerged from the chaos that followed the Carolingian dynasty’s collapse. Classical and Christian learning were again revived, Europe’s first universities were founded, Roman law was deployed, and Gothic cathedrals soared. Finally, there was the Renaissance proper, born amidst the chaos, civil decay, and narrow university orthodoxy of the 14th century. An effort to restore the study of lost or forgotten classics sparked a cultural revival that produced Erasmus, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael.
For two generations now, the study of Western civilization at our colleges and universities has lain in disrepair. The old requirements are gone, of course, but so, increasingly, are even electives on Western history and the classics, along with faculty capable of teaching these as anything other than targets of deconstruction. Still more concerning is the caricature of a supposedly oppressive West, which has permeated society at large.
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Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow in the Education and American Ideals Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. For over a decade, he has been a national leader in the reform of both K-12 and higher education, authoring or co-authoring model legislation designed to protect campus free speech, reintroduce the study of Western civilization, restore the reading of classic literature, prevent high school walkouts for purposes of political protest, block mandatory DEI indoctrination, bring public policy debate back to college campuses, and more. He writes regularly on education issues for a wide range of outlets, particularly National Review Online, where he has been a contributing editor for over two decades.
