Embarrassingly, it took me until my fifties to read Pilgrim’s Progress—an omission I cannot pretend was due to obscurity or inaccessibility. A book in continuous print since 1678 and arguably more influential in the English-speaking world than any other text besides the Bible itself, John Bunyan’s masterwork remains a touchstone of Western religious and secular culture alike. At home, our three copies include my grandparents’, parents’, and our own, in different stages of physical wear and language modernization. Yet despite my early grounding in the faith and knowledge of the text’s religious, historical, and cultural significance, it took me decades to finally read it for myself. And if it took me that long as a classics-minded Christian to read Bunyan, how much more unlikely would it be for those of limited or no faith background, unconvinced of the importance of this foundational text of the Protestant worldview and Western canon?
As an allegory of the Christian experience, Pilgrim’s Progress continues to offer deep wisdom and insight into the universal triumphs, trials, tribulations, and ultimate victory that await every believer who chooses the narrow path. Told as a dream, the story follows its protagonist—Christian—from new birth to death, with scenes along the way exposing both the challenges and the joys of growing in faith. It’s also a fun story and the delightful source of concepts and verbiage that remain au courant almost 350 years later: Vanity Fair, Slough of Despond, Worldly Wise, just to name several. The wider culture remains in Bunyan’s debt.
I thought of Pilgrim’s Progress recently while reading a piece in the Washington Post by Princeton politics professor Gregory Conti entitled “Ivy League students are suffering from religious illiteracy.” Speaking as a non-believer, Conti urges universities rethinking curricula in the wake of popular backlash against the academy to incorporate basic instruction in the Bible and Christianity as a means to be more conversant with the wealth of moral insight Western civilization has passed down. His is a powerful argument, lamenting that religiously illiterate students cannot fully appreciate the majesty or magnificence of Shakespeare, Rembrandt, or Mozart (I would have substituted Bach, but whatever), much less the rich history of political philosophy borne out of Christian precepts.
Can students understand the underpinnings of a society built on the rule of law if they are unaware there are Ten Commandments, much less what they command? Can they appreciate the genesis of human rights, including for the unborn, infirm, and the condemned without an appreciation for the doctrine of the Imago dei? Or the imperatives of just war theory for international relations? Or the history of anti-slavery, improved race relations, and women’s rights without any explicit knowledge of Jesus’ teachings and the resulting work of Christians to put words into practice? Or the importance of conservation and animal rights apart from knowing the order of Creation and God’s plan in the Garden of Eden?
Yes, millions of people maintain strong beliefs on these issues apart from religion, but the questions remain: what role did religion play in the development of the modern world and what does that indicate about the bigger questions of governance, democracy, equality under law, rights as well as duties, human nature, and Western civilization itself?
These are some of the questions that universities are, in fact, established to explore. (Indeed, Princeton was founded in 1746 as the College of New Jersey to train Presbyterian clergy.) Yet a student body ignorant of the religious foundations of the Western social and democratic experiment, both due to their own learning trajectory as well as general academic neglect, can quickly become unmoored.
On cue, Princeton religion professor Judith Weisenfeld published a letter to the Post editor on May 12, 2026 building on Conti and lamenting that colleges are cutting religion classes and suggesting that students therefore lack the resources for the sort of education Conti seeks. She’s not wrong to suggest that cutbacks are hurting such departments, but I would submit that the solution is not necessarily for students to take a semester-long comparative religions class to become religiously literate. By then, religion is but one of many competing voices, one more thing to “study,” one more topic to critique, rather than a life-affirming foundation of belief that infuses a broader understanding of all other disciplines. By the time students get to college, spiritual formation will ideally already be well underway, and can be applied to a chosen discipline, rather than being a revelation when they first pass through the campus gates.
Yet the reality is that students generally come to college woefully unprepared on spiritual matters. And that deprivation cannot be laid solely at the foot of the academy. Parents are responsible for their children’s upbringing, including early and consistent exposure to their own beliefs which may be agnostic or opposed to Christianity and its values. But without appreciation of the building blocks of politics and culture, the broader edifice of Western civilization is undermined. That’s where the university must lean in.
This is no utopian impulse. Even non-believers such as Conti understand the depth of loss when the foundations of the culture are ignored. Next door in the comparative politics or history or sociology or anthropology departments the argument can be made that, for instance, you cannot fully understand Chinese culture without Confucianism, Japanese culture without Shintoism, India without Hinduism, the Middle East apart from Islam, or Latin America without Catholicism. How, then, can students be expected to understand and appreciate their own cultural and political inheritance in North America and Europe apart from the principles and beliefs arising from religion, whether or not they personally profess such beliefs? And what does that then say about the strength and ultimate sustainability of democratic governance based on individual freedoms and obligations if the structure on which they have been built is allowed to decay or is actively dismantled?
There’s more at stake here than simply the knowledge of a book by John Bunyan written almost 350 years ago. Though Pilgrim’s Progress is just one title, it stands atop a grand edifice of Western culture that has been neglected for far too long. And from that perspective, it becomes imperative that institutions once again include key religious reference points in the course of broader instruction necessary to consider oneself “educated.” It may not be a new argument, but when secular professors at elite universities are making the same point, it has, frankly, become too urgent to ignore.
