Why conservatism needs Christianity

Alan Roebuck writes:

There are many reasons why true American conservatism requires Christianity. Here is one reason that is not often stated.

Regular readers of VFR recognize that the West is attempting to commit suicide, and that the principal motive force behind this drive is our leaders’ acceptance of the liberal imperative Thou shalt not discriminate. And what the leaders believe, ordinary people generally accept, at least passively, in large measure because they cannot (or will not) conceptualize and scrutinize forbidden thoughts. But why would our white leaders eagerly embrace a doctrine that declares them to be evil and that calls for them to surrender their heritage and birthright? An important part of the answer is the retreat of Christianity.

The spiritually sensitive (a group which includes a significant percent of the highly intelligent and the ambitious) understand intuitively that we are all sinners in need of salvation. Under the old order they would have been told the correct answer that remission of sins is found only through faith in Jesus Christ. But under the rule of liberalism, they learn something entirely different: Nonwhites, women, homosexuals and non-Christians learn that they are not really guilty, and that their feelings of inadequacy are the fault of whites, men, heterosexuals and Christians. And whites learn that their sins can be remitted only if they admit their guilt and join the great liberal jihad. Liberalism pronounces forgiveness of sins for all who will repent of their conservatism and come to faith in liberalism, a faith that is measured principally by the individual’s public and eager assent to liberal doctrines and initiatives. Since liberalism is the only worldview that is declared to be true and honorable by the leaders of the West, it provides the only officially-approved avenue for guilty whites to be cleansed of their guilt. Thus the popularity of suicidal ideas and policies among us whites.

Meanwhile, the popularity of liberalism among those who are not white, heterosexual Christian males is far easier to explain: it offers remission of their sins by denying that they are sinners.

Since religious ideas have been de facto banned from serious public discourse (that’s one of the meanings of the contemporary concept of separation of church and state), there is little if any official recognition of liberalism’s salvific message. But man has an innate desire for righteousness, and an intuitive understanding that he doesn’t have it. If he cannot attain it the correct way, through true faith in Christ, he will be misled and deformed in a very deep way. Liberalism is just the latest heresy to take center stage by offering a false salvation. This is yet another reason why true conservatism requires Christianity.

LA replies:

You’re saying something really powerful.

One amazing thing you’re saying is, liberalism deprives nonwhites, women, non-Christians of any belief that they can sin. Thus it deprives them of the single most important thing a human being must have, if he is to turn to God. Liberalism also deprives whites (including women, insofar as they see themselves as whites rather than as women) of any real sense of sin, because the sole sin it attributes to them is the false sin of anti-liberalism.

Liberalism thus takes from all people the thing they need most, the sense of their human incompleteness which only God can fill. Man is DESIGNED incomplete. He is DESIGNED so that only God can complete him. Liberalism covers up and conceals this missing or flawed part of man’s nature, thus distorting man’s nature and preventing him from ever coming into his own.

In the place of real human nature, real human sins/inadequacies, and real human repentance, liberalism constructs fake liberal substitutes for these things, leading to the “popularity of suicidal ideas and policies among us whites.”

LA continues:

To clarify: When I speak of the need for a sense of sin, I’m not speaking of the morbid and exaggerated consciousness of sin and guilt that characterizes, e.g., much of traditional American Catholicism in the decades prior to Vatican II. I have heard too many accounts from Catholics who were personally scared by a neurotic sense of guilt not to believe that such a false view was inculcated in parts of the traditional Church, at least at certain times and places. The post-Reformation Church’s over the top emphasis on suffering as the essence of human and Christian experience is false to the spirit of the Gospels. In the Gospels, the constant work of Jesus is to free people from sin and sickness into life and joy. The neurotic morbidity of much of Catholicism is not Biblical.

In saying this, I’m not criticizing the Catholic Church as a whole, but a definite tendency within the historic Church. Of course, under John Paul II, it went to the other extreme, with John Paul teaching that in the aftermath of Christ, everyone is automatically hunky dory just by virtue of having been born.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 06, 2010 11:10 AM | Send