In late April of 1849, as the long winter’s snow was beginning to melt in Saint Petersburg, a group of Russian literary enthusiasts were arrested by Tsar Nicolas I and Count Alexey Fyodorovich Orlov and put on trial for reading and disseminating treasonous materials. Less than 25 years after the violent Decemberist Revolt, the Tsar feared another uprising and had the dissident Russian readers imprisoned in the nigh-impregnable Peter and Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg. The literary club was found guilty and sentenced to death. As they lined up before the firing squad and said their final prayers, a letter arrived: the Tsar had commuted their sentences. Instead of death, the dissident literary club members would serve four years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp.

One of the young men shipped to the labor camp was a writer himself. His first novel, “Poor Folk,” had received some acclaim as a social satire stereotypical of the age. A second novel, a literary rebuttal to the grotesque author Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, was less well-received, sending the young author into a depression. A handful of short stories and a novella followed, before the writer’s arrest, which again centered on themes of poverty and even romance, adhering to the style and content popular among young liberals at the time. While imprisoned in Siberia, the young man was kept constantly shackled and manacled, and the only literature the writer was allowed to read was an old copy of the New Testament.

A decade after his release from prison, the young Russian published a series of novels which have come to be recognized as among the most profound, influential, and spiritually searching in the canon of literature. Over a century after the publication, “Crime and Punishment,” “The Idiot,” “Demons,” and “The Brothers Karamazov” are just a few of the writer’s most enduring classics, still read, taught, quoted, discussed, and debated in classrooms and amongst friends and families around the world. It is in “The Idiot” that Prince Myshkin distills the writer’s worldview into a single line: “Beauty will save the world.”

Indeed, the age in which the Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyesvsky, lived was one filled with beauty, but teetering on the precipice of decadence, just years away from plunging into a moral and aesthetic decay that would consume much of the next century. Saint Petersburg, home of the Winter Palace and the Cathedrals of Peter and Paul and Saint Isaac, would soon be replaced by Moscow as the capital of Russia, the Romanov family would be slain by Bolshevik revolutionaries, and the succeeding Soviet regime would impose a horrific architectural style known as brutalism across much of Eastern Europe. Brutalism reflected the godlessness at the pinnacle of the authoritarian Soviet ideology, but it was mirrored in the West by modern and avant-garde styles in art, architecture, and music.

No violent revolt was needed in the West, no Tsar needed to be murdered, no capital city needed to be renamed. Instead, well-meaning liberal ideologies cleared the way for progressive ideologies; the Sexual Revolution and the “free love” movement gave way to abortion-on-demand, internet pornography, and hookup culture; the civil rights movement snowballed into an oppressive regime of race-based diktats; Western elites declared that the world was becoming freer and more equal, but the evidence was clear for all to see: things were only becoming uglier. The ugliness has persisted even into the present age. Public buildings often resemble little more than institutionalized cinder blocks, devoid of charm or character; the film industry has descended into a never-ending cycle of computer graphics-heavy superhero spectacles, remakes, and reboots; modern music is almost entirely synthetic, with lyrics extolling lust, drugs, and progressive ideals; vandalism has become almost the norm, with major cities featuring entire neighborhoods decked in graffiti; attire has become sloppy and monotonous, consisting of an endless sweatpants, leggings, hoodies, t-shirts, sports jerseys, and sneakers, while suits and ties are often reserved for weddings and funerals.

The avant-garde is no longer avant-garde. It may have been, a century ago, when Pablo Picasso was turning his models into deformed cubist freaks and James Joyce was dedicating an entire chapter of “Ulysses” to masturbation, but the “advance guard” has now become simply the “guard.” Celebrities once delighted in debuting new and daring fashion choices at swanky movie premiers and awards ceremonies, but wearing creatively revealing dresses and oddball variations of shirtless tuxedoes and sleeveless dinner jackets is no longer daring — and it was never attractive. Ugliness has become the norm.

Things of beauty are considered things of the past. Towering Gothic cathedrals constructed less than 500 years ago are seen as relics of an ancient world, wearing a suit and tie regularly or taking off a hat indoors is considered old-fashioned, sweeping orchestral music is broadly deemed “classical,” sealing a handwritten love letter with wax is something from a Jane Austen novel, not a habit of boyfriends and girlfriends in the 21st century. Why is that? Why is ugliness a thing of the present day while beauty is relegated to ages long gone?

In the days when men built beautiful cathedrals, they did so to give honor and glory to God, to make the house in which worship is offered to Him a beautiful house. When suits and ties were commonplace, the men who wore them had a sense of their own dignity and the respect and courtesy owed to women. When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johann Sebastian Bach wrote soaring operas and haunting requiem Masses, they did so in order to elevate the human soul to contemplate the God who had given them such gifts and talents. When men took the time to sit and write out letters by hand to their sweethearts, they did so to demonstrate depth, sincerity, and commitment. Did the people of the West stop making things beautiful because they stopped reaching for God? Or did they stop reaching for God because they were surrounded by ugliness?

It’s very likely that both are at least partly true, which does not alter the fact that both religion and beauty have declined drastically in recent decades. In the late 1940s, over 90% of Americans identified as Christian, a share which fell to roughly two-thirds (68%) by 2024, according to Gallup. Other surveys suggest that the percentage of American Christians may actually be even smaller. Amongst those who call themselves Christian, the practices of the Christian faith are waning, with only 45% of Americans describing religion as “very important” to them and less than one third (32%) saying that they attend church services weekly.

In the face of tens of millions of illegal immigrants flooding into the country, conflict against Venezuela’s narco-terrorist regime on the horizon, and domestic terrorists targeting conservatives, from President Donald Trump to Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, the U.S. State Department’s decision to change official document fonts from sans-serif Calibri to Times New Roman may seem like a small matter, but it has almost as much to do with restoring American greatness and the spiritual health of the nation as decisions to arrest and deport illegal immigrants.

The Calibri typeface was implemented as the State Department’s norm under then-President Joe Biden, ostensibly as a means of making text more accessible and inclusive for the Department’s “diverse” staff. Designed in the early 2000s, Calibri is classified as a “humanist” font, featuring rounded stems and corners and, noticeably, no serifs, the ornamental projection or flourish finishing off a stroke. This is in stark contrast to the State Department standards restored under the Trump administration: Times New Roman is part of the realist serif family, named not for “realism,” as in the realistic style, but for royalty, as the realist styles originated with the orders of King Philip II of Spain and King Louis XIV of France. Times New Roman was commissioned for use by the British newspaper The Times in 1931, designed to hearken back to 17th and 18th century printing traditions.

The “Roman” part of the name is derived from the 15th and 16th century Italian handwriting and printing styles that influenced Times New Roman. Unlike Calibri, Times New Roman features fine lines, shifting weight, and decorative serifs, not debasing itself to the simplistic in the name of “accessibility,” but rather challenging the eye to appreciate the sophisticated and the beautiful even in the midst of the mundane, such as inter-departmental memos or press releases.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the department’s use of Calibri as a “wasteful” example of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies implemented by the previous administration. “Although switching to Calibri was not among the department’s most illegal, immoral, radical or wasteful instances of DEI it was nonetheless cosmetic,” Rubio explained. “Switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s correspondence.”

Whether they be the vibrant colors of medieval stained-glass windows, the soaring spires of Gothic cathedrals, the subtle shadows and lights of Renaissance paintings, the intricate details of statues embedded in fountains or walls, the delicate lines of hand-carved woodwork, the stanza of a poem that brings tears to the eye, or the passage of a literary masterpiece that changed the reader’s life, beautiful things elevate the mind and the soul, directing the eyes to God, who is the source and summit of all beauty, and is in fact Beauty Himself. Of course, things such as simmering sunsets and blazing sunrises, towering mountains and sweeping valleys, rushing rivers and roaring waterfalls, whispering forests and clear blue skies are works of beauty also, but the works of God’s hands. These images inspire mankind not only to appreciate beauty and contemplate the Maker of these beautiful images, but to imitate Him in making beautiful things for themselves.

In a world full of ugliness, dominated by the banal, the brutal, the oversimplified, and the “accessible,” an act as simple as changing a font carries some weight. Dostoyevsky, certainly, would understand: Beauty will save the world.