Education Quote by Alfred A. Montapert

Montapert’s line treats “raw and wild” not as a poetic compliment but as a diagnosis: human nature, left to itself, defaults to appetite, status-seeking, and the quick satisfactions that make communities brittle. The sentence is built like a moral syllogism, with “that is one of the reasons” doing quiet work. He’s not claiming Christianity is the only cure or that people are irredeemable; he’s narrowing the argument to a pragmatic need for formation. The phrase “Christian teaching” lands less as dogma than as a civilizing technology: a set of habits (restraint, humility, forgiveness, care for the weak) designed to domesticate the feral parts we’d rather romanticize.

The subtext is a mid-20th-century worry about what happens when modern life strips away shared moral grammar. Montapert lived through world wars, the rise of mass propaganda, and the cultural churn of the postwar West. In that context, “raw and wild” reads like an indictment of both individual impulses and collective chaos: nations can be “wild,” too, when power is unmoored from conscience. His wording also sidesteps sentimental religion. Christianity isn’t presented as comfort but as discipline, which is why the claim has bite even for secular readers: it frames ethics as training, not vibes.

Still, the line carries a gamble. By grounding the need for Christianity in human unruliness, he risks shrinking the faith into a moral leash rather than a transformative vision. The rhetoric works because it’s austere, almost unsparing: it flatters no one, and it implies that freedom without moral formation is just another name for drift.