Conservatism, Christianity, and the West
A reader writes:
I read your entry on Anne Rice with considerable interest since I am a college teacher of literature and have taught her novels, in a semester on recent American fiction.
Based on your discussion, it appears we have two categories of Christian:
1. Conservative Christian
2. Liberal Christian.
Question: since both are Christian, is one a better or a worse Christian if one is conservative or liberal? In other words, does a person’s political ideology inform and fill out their religious commitment?
Can a conservative NOT be a Christian? In other words is a conservative a true conservative—in the fullest sense of the word—if he is Christian as well?
LA replies:
I don’t want to say that anyone called a “conservative Christian” is a true conservative or a better Christian or better in any way. That would be ridiculous. But, given that liberalism—meaning the belief in liberal principles as the supreme principles of society—is by definition bad and false, liberal Christianity is by definition bad and false. My fullest treatment of liberal Christianity is here.
You write: “In other words is a conservative a true conservative—in the fullest sense of the word—if he is Christian as well?”
First, we must remember that conservatism only has meaning in the context of a given tradition; a conservative is a person who wants to preserve or restore a particular tradition. Notwithstanding the fantasies of the neocons and Bushites, there is no such thing as a universal conservative.
So, when we speak of conservatism, it is first within the context of our own country, and then within the context of Western civilization as a whole. The West as a distinct culture slowly came into being following the fall of the Western Roman empire, as an amalgam of (1) the heritage of the vanished Greco-Roman civilization, (2) the Christian religion, and (3) the cultures of the Germanic peoples of post-Roman Europe. In the most direct sense, the West was born of Christianity, specifically the Christianity of the Catholic Church, and for a thousand years the Christian religion was the organizing principle of the West (see this for a longer discussion of the Christian aspects of the West). Since Christianity is central to the being and history of the West, a non-Christian conservative would not have a “feel” for what the West has been. Of course the same is true for many uninformed Christians. If a person, whether Christian or not, has no sense of this history, he will not be able to articulate and defend the West in its larger sense. So in that sense his conservatism will be lacking.
However, I don’t mean to be speaking just historically. The West at its core is, to use Toynbee’s phrase, a spiritual flame, that has expressed itself through particular peoples and cultures. That remains true today. If the West decisively ceases to be Christian at its core, it will cease to exist, a process that has been happening for decades and that we can see rapidly accelerating in today’s radically de-Christianized Europe.
That doesn’t mean that a non-Christian—an agnostic or a Jew—cannot be a good conservative. This is especially the case as I do not define the West as Christianity. Christianity is the core of the West, but not the totality of it. I believe in Western civilization, as a continuum extending through time, of which we are members. Western civilization has gone through many stages, transformations, and internal conflicts, but to me the experiential key to real conservatism, prior to any thoughts we may have about specific aspects of the West, about the parts of it that we approve or that we don’t approve, is an instinctive love for this civilization as a totality and the people who have comprised it—as “ours.” This experienced sense of membership in the historic West is what Western people today lack. So they stand on a void, and all they can talk about is universal rights and equality, and they are helpless to articulate and defend the West as an actual civilization.
Reader replies:
Thank you for your informative reply. It presents me with a new vista on conservatism and Christianity, specifically as you define it as occurring within a tradition—in relation to a particular time and place. Now I understand why at the university level there is so much activity to redefine the traditional Western body of literature, to replace the canonical texts (influenced by Christianity) with Asian and African writings and forge a “new past,” so to speak.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 19, 2007 08:52 PM | Send