Building a Culture, Not Just Critiquing One

In an era when many Christian institutions are negotiating uneasy truces with the cultural mainstream, Daniel Kemp has chosen a different path—one that leads to the frontier of Christian higher education at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho. For Kemp, a philosopher by training and a builder by conviction, the call is not to make peace with the spirit of the age, but to lay the foundations of a Christian culture strong enough to endure it.

In an insightful conversation, the layered chapters of his story unfold as he recounts what led him to this precise moment.

Lennox: Talk to me about your background. How do you recount the various experiences throughout your life that have brought you to this point?

Daniel: “I was raised in Burlington, North Carolina in a Christian home. I don’t remember a time when I did not share the faith of my parents. We attended a non-denominational church where I learned about the gospel and the Bible. After a few years in a private school, my parents decided that I should be homeschooled. We lived in a musical house on a large plot of land in the country, so I welcomed the change. At that time, homeschooling was still pretty unstructured. I didn’t have CC or anything like that. I could finish my school by noon and then do what I wanted. I split that extra time between exploring the property, swimming in ponds, and playing music. I was a drummer for a few bands. One of my first jobs was making demos for artists and bands who wanted cheap recordings of their songs. Few things have shaped my worldview more than those days.

One Summer in high school, I attended one of the two-week camps hosted by Summit Ministries. They called it a “world view boot camp.” They weren’t kidding, at least for a kid like me. I think they delivered something like 80 hours of lecture on 60 different topics about everything from how to read the Bible to the history of Communism to the arts. I learned there that the thinking life is not a luxury for the Christian. 

Until Summit, my plan was to attend one of NC’s state universities to study drums and recording arts. My time at Summit prompted me to delay that for a year, and I attended their gap-year program called Summit Semester where I took classes on the history of the Church, English literature, Christianity and politics, and (of course) philosophy. I was like a kid in a candy store. I wanted more, so I asked one of the resident faculty members of the program where I should go to college. He recommended The King’s College in New York, so that’s where I went.

King’s College had a lively intellectual culture. The whole faculty at the time seemed willing to engage in debate. Occasionally, these debates would erupt throughout the institution, and the entire student body seemed involved. What is the extent of the psychological differences between the sexes? Jazz or classical music? Free markets or Chesterton-style distributivism? Protestantism or Rome? And (not joking) Bloom’s or Grube’s translation of Plato’s Republic? It may sound pretentious, but this environment was perfect for someone like me. It was challenging, and few could get away with a half-hearted effort.

I gravitated toward the philosophy courses with David Talcott and the other professors there. It also helped that a pretty girl, Carol Anne (my wife), was a philosophy minor, and we met in logic class. We were wed the summer before my senior year. I was also thinking about the future. Philosophy seemed like a decent career choice (at least compared to jazz drumming).

I started graduate school at Georgia State in August of 2015. Two weeks later, our first child was born (Elsie). My second child (Jack) was born in June of 2017. We attended an Orthodox Presbyterian church during this time, and we found a home in that denomination for the next several years. We moved to Waco for the Ph.D. at Baylor, had two more children (Arthur and Katharine), and wrote a dissertation on goodness and the Good. The development of my faith up through this time was pretty straightforward. I was convinced of sola scriptura while at King’s College, the Reformed “system” in Georgia, and its jots and tittles in Texas.

I landed my first full-time job at Grand Canyon University in 2023, where I taught Intro to Philosophy and Christian Worldview. It was difficult to leave our Waco friends, but the Lord was good to us and gave us a wonderful church home during our time there. My children grew in their own way during the two short years there. Elsie developed a love of reading and has surpassed (I think) the number of books I have read. Jack and Arthur started school and learned martial arts. Katharine learned to talk, which amounted to telling us which ballet she wanted to watch.

I am thrilled to join the ranks of NSA. The school has been on my radar for a long time. It seems like a special place, and I look forward to serving in every way I can.”

Lennox: What about NSA’s mission and vision resonates with you most?

Daniel: “NSA understands that Christ is Lord. The glory of God is the chief end of man, then it ought to be the chief end of all his actions. Everything else plays second fiddle. What’s the point of “transforming culture” if what it is transformed into is no good? Well, NSA understands that the meaning of life and all of its subordinate institutions begins and ends with Christ. 

NSA has also made it clear that they will not join the priestly class of the new American civic religion. Western culture over the last century has been working on Christians, and the slow result has been to make us pathologically incapable of maintaining the moral order established by Christianity. The consensus has changed, and the new one offers Christians one option: “Clean up our carnage, and we will tolerate you”. This turns Christianity into a humanitarian club with vaguely spiritual overtones.

Unfortunately, many Christian institutions have gladly signed up and taken on an essentially remedial purpose. Their mission is to help men and women cope with the symptoms—often avoidable and always heartbreaking—of progressive secularism. They hope the pagan custodians of the new consensus will keep their end of the bargain.

Christian institutions need to opt out of that arrangement. That’s one of the many things that draws me to NSA. On that front, it actually undersells itself. NSA is not merely “shaping culture,” it’s building one. And they’re doing it with the meat-and-potatoes of lasting reformation: worship, family, music, a real education engaging our highest faculties of thought, and all governed by the Word of God. This is the stuff of life.”

Lennox: What are you hoping to arm your students with to withstand the evil and build Christ's Kingdom in this world?

Daniel: “I want to teach students how to really think through things carefully and clearly. That may sound cliche, but it’s important. A lot is going on right now, and there are a lot of ways to pay attention to what’s going on. Great evil may require a decisive and bold response, but it never requires a thoughtless one. That takes practice. I think there are several pressures on us—the performative nature of social media, for example—to treat the steady requirements of careful thinking as uncertainty and therefore, weakness.

Also, careful thinking is a prerequisite for attentive contemplation, and paying attention to the world is one of the main ways God has provided for us to enjoy Him.”

Lennox: How would you describe your preferred style of teaching?

Daniel: “I shoot for an even mix of discussion and lecture. I will typically develop several shorter lectures for a single class session to establish the basic principles followed by targeted discussion.

I’m intrigued by NSA’s seminar-to-recitation system. The 2-to-1/seminar-to-discussion ratio seems like a good rule of thumb. Students need both, I think. Lectures give them new information and the opportunity to exercise their abilities of attention, and guided discussion allows students to develop and engage a line of argument for themselves.”

Lennox:  Do you have a favorite or preferred aspect of philosophy?

Daniel: The philosophical mind hungers to know how things work or fit together. It is the desire to know not just discrete truths, but their explanations. For example, we know by divine revelation that Parmenidean monism—the belief that there is only one thing and that it never changes—is false. It’s false not least of all because it would annihilate the Creator/creature distinction. If Parmenidean monism were true, then the conjunction of statements, “God created the heavens and the earth and creation is not God” would be false. So great. We know that it is false. But we haven’t yet explained how it is that there can be more than one thing, or better yet, how the many could come from one.

I’ve given a stereotypically philosophical example, but the point applies across all domains of knowledge. There is a difference between knowing that something is true and knowing why. The former is called understanding, and it is the desire of the philosopher. Take whatever you like—God, knowledge, justice, human rights, the common good, history, determinism—and philosophical questions arise, which is just to say that questions arise concerning the nature and explanations of these things. That inquiry usually begins with a question like, “Why is it that way rather than another way?”

That is why philosophy is often confused for its counterfeit--skepticism. Both the philosopher and the skeptic ask why-questions—Why do we know things? Why should we be moral? Why is there anything at all? —but for different purposes. The philosopher hopes to find knowledge and delights when he gets it. The skeptic is dissatisfied until the appearance of knowledge is entirely gone. Of course, the philosopher also wants to test the appearance of knowledge, but because he wants to get to the real solid stuff.

Lennox: You are in an interesting season of your life, and I am interested in seeing how it unfolds over time. How would you describe the current season of your life?

Daniel: Busy, a bit cluttered, but exciting and hopeful. I have several things going on right now: a new job, a co-authored book contract on the divine origins of morality, and a fifth edition to our family to arrive this December.

Lennox: Congratulations! Children are a great blessing from our Lord. Speaking of family, how did you and your wife meet?

Daniel: We met on the first day of logic class with Peter Kreeft at The King’s College. Dr. Kreeft’s train from Boston was late, and we had about 90 minutes to kill. As a class, we decided to see the roof of the Vogue building and see the city from above. A smaller group of us broke off and we hit it off. Carol Anne and I were just friends at first, and it took a few months for romance to blossom, but we got there!

Lennox: As you and your family make the transition to Moscow, Idaho, how can people be praying for you as you settle down in Moscow?

Daniel: Pray that we can settle into the normal rhythms of life quickly, and that I can get everything done!

In a time when many Christian institutions choose survival over principle, Daniel Kemp’s arrival at NSA, as a Fellow of philosophy emphasizes something rarer: thoughtful resistance, joyful confidence, and the quiet determination to build again from the ground up. For Kemp—and for NSA—the work is just beginning.