It has been said around this thread that Christians/the Bible say “turn the other cheek”, or “Christianity doesn’t give them a cause to fight for”, or “The Christians are the uncertain, hesitant and malleable side.”
Forgotten Rome, the Crusades and Dark Ages already? Religion is plastic; it works just as well to rationalize violence and war as it does to rationalize pacifism. Before focussing so narrowly on Christianity’s soft side, you guys need to examine their tough side. I suggest firearms forums. Here’s two:
Glock Talk
Packing.org
By all indications, the religionists are getting much more assertive, taking advantage of the vacuum obligingly created for them by the Left. And why shouldn’t they? They have the Left’s example, *as a secular faith*, to draw upon in their own assault against their enemy. And don’t be fooled into thinking that enemy is the Left. Check your history – religion’s old nemesis is the Enlightenment.
And where is it today?
Betsy S. wrote:
“The right, on the other hand, still retains and respects some American and Enlightenment ideals.”
Hooboy, Betsy, you should read what I’m reading… Russell Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind” (7th revised ed.) which illustrates how tenuous that retention really is. This book has been recommended as a definitive reference by quite a few conservatives I know.
I hereby submit a few passages. Most of these are from Chapter 3, entitled “Romantics and Utilitarians”, which is primarily concerned with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom Kirk upholds as one of conservatism’s defining thinkers.
“Coleridge adhered to the Church Fathers and Plato, declaring that full though the eighteenth century had been of enlighteners, it had been terribly empty of enlightenment.” (p134)
“Yet Bentham’s juristic utilitarianism and [Walter]Scott’s consequent indignation are representative of the whole struggle between philosophic radicalism and romantic conservatism. What the Romantics dreaded in a world subjected to Utilitarian domination was an indiscriminate destruction of variety, loveliness, and ancient rights in the name of a devouring industrialism and a philistine materialism.” (p122)
“For the Understanding, lacking Faith and Intuition, never will suffice to make men wise. Coleridge distinguishes between ‘Understanding’, – which is ‘the mere reflective faculty’, dependent on the fallible senses, physical perception – and Reason, which is a higher faculty, employing our powers of intuition, the organ of the supersensuous. Understanding is concerned with means, Reason with ends.” (pp 134-135)
“The theories of Locke were inherited by such diverse legatees as Rousseau in Geneva, Price in the Old Jewrry, Fox in St. Stephen’s, Bentham in his library, and Jefferson at Monticello; but from among the general ideas of that philosopher, conservatism retained almost nothing but Locke’s contention that government originates out of the necessity for protecting property.”
As for conservatism’s grasp of the Amerian Ideal, I submit these items:
“What men are seeking, or ought to seek, is not the right to govern themselves, but the right to be governed well.” (p131)
“Social change will indeed make it advisable, from time to time, that new bodies of persons be admitted to share in political power; but they should be considered on the particular merits of their corporate claim, and not as mere individuals seeking to assert a ‘right’ which does not exist in nature.” (p131)
“Upon considerations of expediency and convenience, we may separate the actual operation of government and of churchly authority; but at bottom, Church and State are forever united.” (p 137)
Notice that while modern conservatives rail against the hippies and tree-huggers, one of their definitive thinkers claims the philosophical fathers of the enviro-cult as part of conservatism’s philosophical heritage? And I’m only three chapters in!
This stuff isn’t confined to Kirk, either. Modern conservatives are chanting “Freedom of religion, not freedom from religion”, and attempting to twist the meaning of the establishment clause of the First Amendment as not specifying the separation of church and state.
Individual conservatives might love America, but conservatism itself is *essentially* anti-Enlightenment and thusly, anti-American. Given that philosophic base, any conflict between religious and free-market conservatives will be won by the most consistent side – the religionists. It is they who are untaming Christianity, resurrecting it “after its drubbing at the hands of eighteenth century rationalism” (Ibid. p136).
Had I the vote, I’d also go for Bush, on the grounds Betsy cited… but fully mindful of how much a contradictory veneer is some conservatives’ “respect for Enlightenment ideals”.
That being said, those contradictory elements do mean that dissent and independent thought might still be occasionally found amongst conservatives, unlike the monolithic Left. Besides, if the conservatives insist on borrowing from us, by all means assist them. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll philosophically co-opt them from within just as the Left did to liberalism. If we do, then “conservative” will be transmuted to its opposite in this century, just as “liberal” was in the last.
But that hasn’t happened yet, and certainly won’t by November.
