An Open Letter to Social Conservatives

    

Dear social conservatives. Unlike your liberal critics I do not think you are fools or oafs. This is because I have some familiarity with the hermeneutic traditions, like Thomistic natural law, through which you frame your responses to ethical questions. Plus, I know many of you and know you are people of principle and maintain your convictions in the face of contempt before which most of us would wither.  This is why it brings me no joy to tell you to go tend your gardens, as Voltaire says, because your cause is lost. I can remember in the nineties when there was much talk about statements like “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” which laid out a rationale for traditional Christians of all stripes to unite to fight various perceived ills like abortion or the increasing acceptance of same-sex love. This statement was grounded on a delusion from both sides. Many Catholics thought, complacently, that conservative evangelicals, while rough around the edges, could be educated out of their crass fundamentalism. Evangelicals thought they could count on a conservative catholic hierarchy to stem the increasingly liberal spirit of contemporary Catholicism. Neither reckoned on one fundamental thing. American Protestantism is, at its core, hyper individualistic, rampantly utilitarian and founded on a doctrine of ethno-nationalist exceptionalism. Catholicism, on the other hand, is communitarian to a fault. It is globalist as well and, as such, was once a favorite whipping boy for conspiracy theorists of all sorts. While people like Richard Neuhaus and Michael Novak were alive embarrassing Papal documents with a socialistic ring could be explained away. John Paul II, a Pole, just needed to have capitalism and American freedom explained to him a bit more clearly. This is not possible with the current Pope who drops calculated ‘liberal’ bomb-shells as he can without undertaking an unseemly attack on his predecessors. At any rate there is nothing in the current Evangelical stance that is consistent with any kind of conservatism religious or otherwise as, in spite of making the right noises on certain hot button issues, it is fundamentally lawless in conception and contemptuous of civic institutions.  

The flash point, of course, is Donald Trump. There is no reconciling his elevation to the status of priest-king among Evangelicals (almost all of whom support him) with any social or moral teaching that could be called Catholic (including Anglo-Catholic). Evangelicals who are harshly legalistic in their attitudes to migrants dole out buckets of cheap grace and forgiveness for the president who is beyond good and evil in a way that resembles a dime store Nietzsche more than St. Paul.^[1] They do this while the president himself shows no public sign of contrition or penance in spite of his supposed ‘conversion’. What can one say except that his individualism and nativism suits theirs, so much that their most cherished conservative causes are now secondary to a president who will defend whiteness and Protestantism as a white-ethnic identity? I know what the cleverer and less nakedly deluded ‘neo-cons’ among you will say about this. You will tell me that yes the guy is a son of a bitch and a complete clown. You will tell me that yes he is a sham but that he is OUR sham. Well, I must say, I am not in the market for my own personal sham and your clever triangulation with violent nativism and populist vulgarity will take you and everything you claim to value down with it. This is a deeper delusion even than the belief that all appearances to the contrary the POTUS is really a loving husband and prayerful Christian if only we could look into his heart.^[2]    

Because here is what it has come to. National Protestantism has embraced an adulterous groper and fraudster who shares none of its supposed values. What is worse is that this new liberality of spirit does not stop at Trump. Nazis, pimps and even professed pedophiles are now fit objects of evangelical support. This is because National Protestantism has suffered the nemesis that awaits all attempts to fuse religion with ethnicity: the nationalism comes first and only then the Protestantism. When the identity is under threat morals and piety are sacrificed to expediency. This has happened many times in the Catholic and Orthodox worlds and it is happening now in America. Trump is now blessed by Evangelical Protestantism exactly as a Croatian bishop might once have blessed the Ustashi as a ‘necessary evil’ for troubled times. Now it is only necessary to be a patriot to be a good Christian. A true social conservative would never make this devil’s bargain obviously but Christian fascists have abandoned social conservatism for ethno-nationalism which DOES involve destroying families (of others) abusing children (of others) and respect for law-breaking individualism so long as our bold iconoclast is not black or female. After all, sexual perversity is simply an overenthusiastic and forgivable expression of healthy white male privilege. If you think this is harsh however I have a simple question: if forced abortion and sterilization were proposed for illegal immigrants or Muslims how many evangelicals OR their Catholic fellow travelers would react with horror? If sodomistic rape were used as a torture method on ISIS detainees how many of you would remember your opposition to sex ‘contrary to nature’? At best I suspect you will make a few noises of disapproval before noting that the situation is, of course, very complex.^[3]

So my friends it was foolish enough when you tried to tie social conservative values to neo-liberalism and hyper-capitalism as I told several of you at the time. I can recall a conservative friend whose family values lead him to oppose a protest against Hooter’s Bar because feminism was destroying the American family. Still, the illusion that pro-family and pro-life attitudes could be reconciled with Corporate kleptocracy was somewhat forgivable when Neo-Liberalism was the reigning world order and there seemed no other option.  Now of course you are attacking this very order though much of the prosperity you so praise has come to depend on it. This is not because you have come to your senses on economics or have revaluated your over-attachment to worldly goods. The prosperity gospel rages on. No, you have found a corrupt doctrine you can resist even less because it goes more deeply to the heart of who you are. Your religion is not Christianity but Christian identity. I know this is contrary to what the well intentioned among you think you believe. You have been sucked into this by forces beyond you. Like the Sorcerer’s apprentice you have summoned a spirit you cannot now control and that has infested your own minds. To use your language, these forces are demonic and anti-human and the political movements you now participate in are completely given over to them. The best thing to do in such a circumstance is to go home and examine your conscience.

Of course you will say to me that I am sellout to a mindless progressive standpoint that has become a suffocating orthodoxy in places like universities: a kind of soft fascism founded in egalitarian principle but implicitly or explicitly tyrannous and shockingly vicious when questioned or provoked. This is a caricature BUT like all caricatures it has a grain of truth. When talking to people in the progressive camp I make no bones about things like ‘call-out’ and ‘cancel culture and the pernicious moralism these stances embody. The greatest of human struggles is that with self-righteousness and while that is your struggle it is also mine and theirs. Here though I have to be blunt. There is now only one political question which is what kind of progressivism we are going to support. Be clear, I love Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and St. Thomas as much as you do. To a certain degree I can appreciate Burke and his heirs. By temperament and taste I am a traditionalist in theology, culture and politics. But we also need to be brutally honest about the world we live in for a temperament is not a philosophy OR a political program. Whatever my proclivities are in the privacy of my thoughts there is NO public stance that embodies any of these ancient and medieval accounts of wisdom. There is no fence to sit on and there is no viable alternative to angry populism or unhinged libertarianism that is not basically social democratic in character. Left to themselves these stances will consume the planet and collapse in a heap of ashes both morally and physically. In this however, you have completely abandoned a core conservative principle which is the consciousness of human finitude. You strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.  While posing as critics of unsustainable Faustian delusions you have fallen prey to one yourselves: the notion that Capitalist production and consumption can expand indefinitely with no consequences to anyone. You do this because you are under the delusion that America can, in spite of its revolutionary origin, be a conservative nation and that if material nature itself is opposed to America then it is material nature that is wrong not America. In fact, you are convinced against all evidence that it is THE pre-eminent conservative nation and because of this un-thought bias you reduce conservatism to a hollow shell of itself. I have sad news for you. Jefferson and Adams and their ilk were mid-level thinkers at best with the former issuing crass comments on Plato, the Gospels and a host of other books he did not bother to comprehend. I especially emphasize this to Canadian conservatives who are under the odd delusion that there is something ‘traditional’ about the individualism and libertarian zeal of the United States and seek to import those positions to a country where they have no place.  There are many things I love and admire about the United States (and someday I will be happy to write about that) but Canadians and conservatives especially must be wary of its mania for abstractions.

So to the extent, then, that there are ANY conservative values left in the world they are not embodied in the Republican party (this is now COMICALLY obvious) or the CPC. To the extent that there is ANY notion of a society that moderates the productive and aggressive energies active in the state under the rule of reason and justice (Plato’s basic vision of a just society) this is embodied in the progressive politics of someone like Bernie Sanders. This is brutally clear in the U.S. and will become increasingly so in Canada. The role of any TRUE conservative in this scenario is not, like Roger Scruton, to shill for tobacco companies. It is not to defend arbitrary and external privileges or compose apologies for obscene wealth as if we cannot read for ourselves Aristotle’s comments on the life of Sardanapalus. It is not to defend snobbery and exclusion as if these somehow embody the spirit of the ‘Classics’ in their true rational core. It is CERTAINLY not to turn freedom into a literal physical fetish and a cultic object by equating it with assault rifles. This the ancient Hebrews understood as idolatry and they correctly surmised that the first victims of idolatry are the children sacrificed to it. The Muslims you profess to despise know this as the sin of shirk and you seem to think you can have Christ in your heart when you do not even have Mohammed. Conservatives, alas, always err by not knowing what to conserve. At present the task of any conservative is to bring prudence and a skeptical eye to the necessary transformation we must go through as a species to survive. It is the task, I am willing even to say OUR task, to check utopian pretensions that will only end in crushing disappointment. The first sphere in which this needs to be done is with humanity’s relationship to its own material and natural basis which needs to be put on a different and more stable footing no matter how people complain and how many conspiracy theories they spin to deny the obvious. Accept this basic fact about the physical universe we live in and the task of the ‘conservative temperament’ becomes clear and a necessary part of our political fabric. Reject it and you, WE, will retreat further and further into to sectarian anger and futile resentment at a world less and less concerned about anything we might have to say.                    

                                               

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[1] You always find the odd person who, as a redeemed Christian, has transcended mere ‘good and evil’. Alas to transcend the ethical one must first attain to it which people who say this kind of thing tend not to have done.

[2] Of course part of the triangulation conservatives are making (at least the ones who are not simply populist revenge voters) concerns abortion. The need to respect the rights of the unborn trumps (pardon the pun) every other issue and it is worth having a fascist lunatic for a president if it means a pro-life vote on the supreme court. Here I must say some hard things. I understand your frustration with a position that seems to you to say “we recognize the dignity and autonomy of all human persons but these humans whose dignity we are violating are, by useful co-incidence, not persons”. This is the rationale for all atrocities ever. However, like slavery in the ancient world, legalized abortion is a structural necessity for the capitalist economy that forms the basis of your ‘prosperity gospel’ and pro-choice advocates have completely sniffed out your hypocrisy on this and it is a large part of why they refuse to take you seriously. The question of justice to fetal life cannot be addressed under current material conditions and it is current material conditions you favor above all others. This is why you do not will a genuine pro-life society but only seek to shame and punish women who have abortions. I say this in spite of the fact that, at least in the United States, you may well succeed in having the pro-choice legal regime overturned. All I can say of this is that I can’t see it ending well. Laws are only effective to the degree that people respect them and underlying economic forces will not support such a punitive, legalistic ‘pro-life’ regime for very long and all the supreme court justices in the world will not change that fact.    

[3] Just so we are all clear on the nature of this fallacy, which you Christians are in fact now employing, let me point out that from the fact that a situation is complex it does not follow that there is anything complex about the morality of torturing people as a response. In logic this is called the fallacy of division. While on this topic however let me say one thing. It may well be, as you say, that there are scriptural or theological reasons (including ‘natural law’ considerations) for valuing heterosexual generative love in the exclusive way the Christian tradition has. We could debate that some time. What are you going to do about this however? No one sane wants a society in which homosexual persons are harassed or humiliated legally or extra-legally and if you are not going to commit to do this then you are granting that any individual who wishes has the liberty to pursue a same sex relationship. Your lives will be braided with people who conceive sexual relationships differently than you as their lives will be braided with yours. I know this is difficult for some of you because you feel you cannot participate in civic rituals that valorize same sex persons and relationships and this fills you with a sense of being excluded and even persecuted. The self-righteous zeal and moral blackmail of advocates does not help in this matter: things like progressive ‘call out’ culture are genuinely noxious. It is also true that such people issue their denunciations in complete and willed ignorance of theological and scriptural traditions that you think and feel are still vital. However, you like and respect ‘progressive’ advocates as little as they like and respect you. Nor do you make much effort to understand THEIR philosophical standpoint or consider THEIR sources. Further, these positions are NOT going away barring some cataclysm. When two communities of people mutually excommunicate each other in this fashion it is time to formulate articles of peace and let God judge between them. We all need to live in a functioning society and a functioning society needs to contain conflict within a sense of the common good no matter how difficult or apparently intractable the conflict.