This is the last in my series on social conservatism.  For the previous installments, look here and here and here. 

One of my underlying themes through this week has been the current lack of confidence among mainstream social conservatism.  I’ll grant this is a somewhat surprising subcurrent:  after all, the religious right hasn’t exactly earned its street cred through timidity and reserve.  But I have always been haunted by that old verse, “in quietness and confidence shall be your strength,” as though the most authentic and honest sign of assuredness is the mocking silence in the face of those who oppose us.

Still, that lack of confidence in our positions has a pervasive effect on everything social conservatives do.  It’s impossible if you’re not confident to speak of social decline without sounding a little hysterical.  The boldness of a prophetic witness will take on the tenor of the irritating shrill who simply can’t let alone.  It is impossible if we are not confident for our intellectual positions to sound like good news.  Good news is not the sort of thing that has to be browbeaten into folks.  It can be offered, cheerfully and with a smile, and it will have more influence and effect than all the cautions and warnings of social decline might ever have.

Here, the “culture war” mentality really does a number on our effectiveness.  If the point is defeating our opponents, rather than persuading them to join our side, then why should we work to make our positions sound like good news to them?  Why would we spend the ridiculous amount of energy it to see our opponent’s positions from the inside so that we can make the appeal more effectively?  I’m not sanguine about the prospects of persuasion here:  I don’t think I’ve ever talked anyone out of their position on, say, gay rights.  But in one sense, the fact of persuasion doesn’t really matter.  Because even in cultural exchanges, one man sows, another man waters.  Continue reading →

I’m in the middle of writing four theses on social conservativism.  Don’t miss the first two in the series. 

Let’s start today with a detour through David Brooks’ column from this week, which hits on some of the themes I addressed on Monday and Tuesday:

Republicans repeat formulas – government support equals dependency – that make sense according to free-market ideology, but oversimplify the real world. Republicans like Romney often rely on an economic language that seems corporate and alien to people who do not define themselves in economic terms. No wonder Romney has trouble relating.

Some people blame bad campaign managers for Romney’s underperforming campaign, but the problem is deeper. Conservatism has lost the balance between economic and traditional conservatism. The Republican Party has abandoned half of its intellectual ammunition. It appeals to people as potential business owners, but not as parents, neighbors and citizens.

I’m not quite of Brooks’s mindset that traditional conservatism has to look like government subsidized social welfare programs, but for today’s purposes that’s neither here nor there.  What’s interesting is Brooks’ tacit affirmation of the intellectual struggles that conservatism currently faces.  Economic conservatives speak in “formulas” and have forgotten the other half of the party’s “intellectual ammunition.”

Mike Huckabee in 2007 in Washington, DC at the Values Voters conference (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Unfortunately, though, social conservatives haven’t fared much better on that front.  Social conservatives and Brooks’ traditional conservatives don’t overlap as much as they should, as most social conservatives haven’t spent any more time with Burke or Kirk than anyone else.  But in terms of intellectual correspondence, social conservatives have a lot more sympathies with “traditional conservatism” than the economic conservatives seem to these days.  The emphasis on the pre-political institutions of family and church (the parts of Santorum’s clip that I really like) are as close, on any widespread level, to a Kirkean conservatism that I have found.

Having neglected our traditionalist conservative heritage (or having never received it to begin with), social conservatives have also tended to “repeat formulas” rather than reload the “intellectual ammunition.”  While there are occasional bright spots—First Things, Public Discourse, Ross Douthat, Ramesh Ponnuru—they don’t get much air time at places like the Values Voter Summit.  By and large, the mainstream of social conservatism tends to be relatively intellectually stagnant and formulaic.  Which isn’t, if you catch my drift, a sign of its health. Continue reading →

This week, I’m hammering out four theses on the future of social conservatism in America.  My first post was yesterday.  Here’s my second. 

Thesis:  For social conservatism to thrive, it needs to end its hostility toward elite institutions that are currently opposed to it.

Consider this bit by Rick Santorum from this year’s Values Voter Summit, which both stunned and saddened me:

Now, I’m a Rick Santorum fan.  I like the fellow.  Yes, he has a penchant for occasionally putting things badly (a problem rampant in social conservatism, and if I ever talk more one I’ll probably suffer from).  But when I first heard him speak, I came away thinking that he was presidential material.  Is he perfect?  No way.  But there aren’t many folks out there who can make a decent case for why family-friendly tax policies are good for America, and he’s one of them.

But still, if this is a snapshot of social conservatism, the movement is in far more trouble than we realize.  Let me be really tough on Santorum for a second and count the ways in which this statement goes wrong: Continue reading →

That’s the question my friend Greg Forster put to me after I listed four “moves” that I think conservative folks should make to avoid getting caught up by the culture wars.

It’s probably safer for me simply to agree with Greg and then move on, a course that I’m strongly tempted to take.  But the pleasant disagreements are often the most fruitful sort, so it’s worth pushing forward a step to see what we find.

A note up front, however:  I take it that Greg seems to think that I’ve tried to specify the nature of conservatism in my post and as such it fails.  That he thought I would attempt such a thing is indicative of my lack of clarity (and perhaps a reputation of biting off more than I can chew).

My point wasn’t to specify the nature of conservatism per se, but only to outline what those culture-warriors who happen to be conservative should do in order to reframe how they think about things.  The difference is subtle, but important:  there are other principles that conservatism needs, as Greg’s post clearly highlights.  Which is why I even suggested up front that I’d gone with a “misnomer,” and that my goal was to highlight the differences with the excesses of the Christian right rather than what I have in common.  Non-culture war conservatism, as it were, rather than non-culture war conservatism. 

That said, Greg points out that that a robust doctrine of creation “gives us an external standard against which to judge the social order as we find it – a standard toward which we should presumably wish the social order to make progress.”  That is doubtlessly true, which is why we shouldn’t be so hardened in our conservatism that it becomes the sort of ideology that Greg doesn’t want us to become enmeshed in.  I’ve sometimes appealed to Chesterton’s famous quip that, “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”   I’ve no interest in an “ideological dispute” if by that we mean the sort of blinkered, reactionary adherence to a position simply for the sake of keeping the opposing spirit alive.  And while “conservative” and “progressive” (or these days, “liberal”) are often ideological terms they do not need to be.

A picture of Russel Kirk (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But for whatever it’s worth, rejecting the suggestion that conservatism as an ideology is a distinctly conservative thing to do.

Second, Greg wants to know what differentiates my affirmation of the moral imagination from that of, say, Romanticism.  Not much, except that we’ll take our poetry with a bit of moral order too.  Keep moves one and two together rather than breaking them apart and you’ll stay firmly lodged within a traditional understanding of morality without being subject to the reactionary resentment that drives so much of our politics.  Greg’s critique seems to suggest a burden for the moral imagination of avoiding Romanticism all on its own:  it cannot, which is why we must get the doctrine of creation right.

Third, Greg raises the prospect that the counter-polis move is most often associated with revolutionaries, even those (like Alasdair MacIntyre) of the crypto-Marxist sort.  That may all be true, but O’Donovan is not swimming in the same stream that MacIntyre is, nor am I.  Simply because the move shows up in a variety of places does not entail that it is distinctively non-conservative.  Affirming that the church is its own culture does not mean we ought all go become localists or sign up for Benedictine communities, and if MacIntyre’s route seems the most plausible that is only because O’Donovan’s path still has not been studied enough.

Finally, I’ll leave the decision to others about whether it is “conservative” to affirm exceptionalism based on America’s responsibilities rather than its virtues. If it is not, as Greg suggests, then so much the worse for the term and the movement that claims it.

WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 23: Ted Gentile of Merrick, NY, holds a crucifix at the March for Life rally on January 23, 2012 in Washington, DC. Pro-life activists gather each year to protest on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Earlier this year I raved about an important book that has been (unfortunately) overlooked by most commentators on evangelical political engagement.  I invited Professor Shields to answer a few questions based on the work and he graciously accepted.

1) You point out James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars does not draw on participant observation.  How important is it for those who are studying evangelicals to interact with them in their research?  Should readers privilege those studies that do have participant observation over those that don’t? 

Hunter’s study was groundbreaking in so many respects and of great importance to my own intellectual development.  But it and other important studies of the culture wars did not examine what rank-and-file activists actually do and say in the public square.  The only way to assess the actual public behavior of ordinary activists is to observe them.  So insofar as one is interested in the public behavior of activists, then, yes, I think one should privilege studies that draw on participant observation.

Unfortunately, participant observation of social movements is rarely done by academics.  One recent exception is the work of Emily Ekins, a Ph.D. student at UCLA.  Ekins attended a Tea Party rally where she took hundreds of photographs of handmade signs and then did a content analysis.  Much like my own work, she found that the media’s depiction of the movement didn’t fit the reality on the ground.  Only a small percentage of Tea Party signs, for example, expressed concern over issues of race or immigration.  A mere 1.2 percent of signs, for instance, raised questions about Obama’s place of birth.

2) You write:  ”What is most striking about the varied world of pro-life activism is not the belligerency of Christian activists, but the degree to which they embrace the deliberative norm of civility.”  Why do you think Christian activists are so often painted as uncivil?

When I observed pro-life activists actually trying to talk to pro-choice citizens, I found that they were usually very civil.  But, as my book shows, this is only part of the story.  If one looks at Christian radio personalities or at direct mailings or at fringe organizations, belligerency is quite common.  The media picks up on these latter examples partly because they are somewhat more visible, partly because they make for more interesting stories, and partly because of the sociology of the newsroom itself.  So the media has identified real incivility in the Christian Right.

The problem is that the news is always “a highly refracted version of reality,” as Walter Lippman taught us years ago.  It’s an easy lesson to forget in the information age, where the media’s gaze only seems to be omnipresent.  And it is also one of the reasons that systematic academic studies that use participant observation, such as Ekins’ work on the Tea Party, is so important.

3) What role do you think moral skepticism should play in a deliberative democracy?  

Good question.  In my book I argue that we can’t expect activists to genuinely doubt the justice of their own cause or be open to embracing their opponents’ perspective.  After all, movements are driven by strong convictions rather than provisionally held beliefs.  But this is a narrow claim about the nature of politics.

Moral doubt does have a place in other contexts and institutions, especially the academy.  The problem occurs when academics, who are understandably attracted to this ideal, attempt to smuggle this value into their assessments of politics.  Doubt may be good for philosophy departments, but it’s a fatal disease in social movements.  If we value an engaged and active public, then we need to accept the dogmatism that comes with it.

4) You suggest that moral deliberation and active participation may be in “fundamental tension” with each other.  Are they incompatible virtues for social movements to try to practice?  

The relationship is not “incompatible” since there are also ways in which these virtues work together in practice.  For example, ordinary activists only receive a democratic education after they have been radicalized.  Only when citizens have committed themselves to a cause will they have any practical incentive to practice deliberation.

I also think it’s important to think about how these virtues play out not just in a single movement, but in competition with other movements.  Competing movements force one another to sharpen their arguments in light of counter arguments and objections.  In this way, they contribute to a larger marketplace of ideas.  To be sure, movements also undermine deliberation by mobilizing strong moral passions.  But there is no grand public debate over contentious questions absent the mobilization of moral passions that are not always easy to control.

5) You write:  ”Indeed, while secular critics feared that religion corrupts politics, evangelicals have long held the opposite concern: it is politics that contaminates religion.”  A lot of younger evangelicals seem to have never heard that dimension of evangelicals’ engagement with politics.   Why do you think that story has been overshadowed by that of evangelicalism’s purported subordination of their religion to their political positions? 

Whether they realize it or not, young evangelicals are part of this long tradition of worrying about the corrosive effects of politics on Christianity.  Evidence for the power of this tradition can be found in the Christian Right itself, where there is a surprising amount of ambivalence about political engagement.  When activists in Concerned Women for America were asked whether the church should “change hearts” or “change hearts and social institutions” some 84 percent chose the former.  That’s a high ratio for an organization committed to changing social institutions.

Given those facts, I’m not surprised that multi-issue Christian Right organizations such as Concerned Women for America have suffered from serious decline and have always been difficult to maintain.  The one exception to these developments has been the pro-life movement.  Evangelicals find it relatively easy to overcome their ambivalence about politics in the case of abortion since they think that human life itself is at stake.

Evangelicals are Still Trying to Figure this Out

I’ve been going on about “non-culture war” conservatism over the past two weeks, attempting to delineate its characteristic shape over and against some of its rivals.

It’s possible that the position is substantively no different than that held by the previous generation of the Christian right, at least once we get beyond the media narratives.  I’m not opposed to the thesis and have defended, as much as able, the Christian right against their critics in the past.

But the exercise has still been valuable for me, as it has helped me clarify for myself how I tend to think about my own public engagement.  Calling a “Non-culture war conservatism” is something of a misnomer, of course, but its a way of carving out the differences between this and the approach that has characterized the excesses of the Christian right’s politics that I’m going to continue to run with.

Qualifications aside, here are four moves that are important for buttressing Christian political engagement.

1)  Recover a robust doctrine of creation that is isn’t afraid to be doctrinal. 

The debates over creation, evolution, and the Bible are of massive importance.  But evangelicals have sometimes allowed the question of how God created to dominate their doctrine of creation, rather than attending to how God’s ongoing relationship to the world as Creator should shape our understanding of the world here and now, and how the world’s status as creation endows it with a unique dignity that endures despite the fall.

The need for a more robust doctrine of creation isn’t news—James Davison Hunter opens To Change the World with the point—but if you find yourself tempted to reduce questions of the church’s witness to party alliances it’s not a bad place to start.  For one, it helps explain why abortion should be prioritized for the church’s witness, but buttresses the metaphyiscal arguments that are used in public with a specifically theological case.  Such an approach helps us see the issue in theological terms, which gives us greater confidence to speak in public about it and see the necessary shallowness of those party affiliations in light of those doctrinal commitments.

One more point:  a richer doctrine of creation would also cut against the voluntarism that is rampant in evangelicalism and that proves such fertile soil for the pursuit of political power.  As long as voluntarism is the order of the day, which I take to be a formulation of the Christian’s ethical task that prioritizes the will over reason, then our efforts to translate the teachings of Scripture into secular discourse will be frustrated.  There is, for instance, an answer to the question about why God would prohibit extra-marital sex.  Saying “because it’s in the Bible” isn’t an answer, at least not one that illuminates the nature of sex or why it might be wrong outside of marriage.  But the loose and badly formed voluntarism of much of evangelicalism frustrates these efforts, treating the attempt either as sowing the seeds to rationalize not obeying or as a legalistic attempt to say what the Bible doesn’t about the world.

That voluntarist conception of ethics is, I think, partly why evangelicalism has been so susceptible to using political power and legislation for its ends (which, surprise, did not start in the 1980s).  If we’ve been told the right path (and we have) and the question is solely one of obedience or disobedience, rather than also a question of moral deliberation about the reasons for those particular commandments, then our political engagement must invariably be reduced to either using the Bible badly in public discourse or simply pursuing power to bring about the ends that we discern are in Scripture.  Or, as is more likely, both.

Book to read, academic version:  Resurrection and Moral Order.  Book to read, lay version:  Earthen Vessels. 

2)  Emphasize the moral imagination and attempt to construct arguments that both appeal to and buttress it.

The debates over when life begins are critical and helpful for clarifying the nature of the atrocity that abortion is.  But movies like Juno and Knocked Up, both pro-life in their own ways, appeal to intuitions that run just as deep:  the intrinsic nobility and goodness of parents who make deep personal sacrifices in order to bring a child into the world.

In short, it is not sufficient to argue that the positions that conservatives hold happen to be true, though they very often are.  We must set about demonstrating their intrinsic beauty and goodness.  I say demonstrate, and not describe, as the latter is helpful but doesn’t quite go far enough.  Friday Night Lights has done more for marriage in America than people will ever know.  This group was a good start, but the failure of it to draw traction is not a hopeful sign.

3)  Remember that the church does not simply engage the culture, including politics, but is a culture and so has her own political order. 

The Hauerwasian school has made the language of “counter-polis” popular, but one need not be an Anabaptist or a Hauerwasian to affirm it.  As long as we fail to recognize that the church is its own culture, with its own symbols, ways of speaking, and manners of formation, then the evangelical political witness will continue to suffer as we will not be experiencing the proper formation that we need to engage within the world without being co-opted by it.

Somewhat paradoxically, this might mean bringing Christian political engagement back into the local church as part of her witness, rather than outsourcing it to parachurch organizations.

Book to read, academic version:  Desire of the Nations.  Book to read, lay version:  Desiring the Kingdom or the new preface to All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes.

4)  Reframe American exceptionalism around America’s responsibilities rather rather than its virtues.

I owe the point to Ross Douthat’s new book Bad Religion, where he points out that John Winthrop’s famous “city on a hill” line was something of a warning that if America failed to do well than America would be judged accordingly. Douthat expands the thought, pointing out that in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural he “invokes providentialism to explain a chastisement, rather than to boast of America’s particular virtue or celebrate its particular mission in the world.” A political version of the via negativa, if you will, where excpetionalism is invoked to caution America from going wrong.

There are other ways through, no doubt, and other principles we could doubtlessly add in. But for my own sake, realizing the above four has helped me cut a way through political engagement that doesn’t strike me as quite the same as the Christian right’s general approach even if it often ends up in the same place.