God: the soul of conservatism

By Eric Giunta

Readers of both RenewAmerica and American Thinker should pay careful thought and scrutiny to Mr. Shane Corsey's recent contribution to the latter's pages: "God, Conservatism, and Values." Mr. Corsey's piece is a welcome stimulant to a discussion conservatives need to have among themselves regarding the metaphysical underpinnings of their philosophy and their policy proposals.

Corsey is an agnostic, and it his aim to promote a conservatism that is religion-neutral, though not value-neutral:

One of the reasons I am a proud conservative is because it comes closest to the belief of what our Founding Fathers had in mind for this country, and the values of that system give an equal shake to anyone who wishes to come here. Religion in my opinion is not as forgiving, and can be as big of a divider in this country as race.

Notwithstanding Corsey's repeated invocations of conservatism, it is difficult to see what is distinctly conservative in his philosophy. He may be forgiven for not laying out a conservative primer, such not being the object of his article, but one should expect conservative principles to at least seep through his heartened plea for understanding. Instead, one finds tired clichés on the supposed "divisiveness" of religious dogma, and some empty platitudes about keeping "divisive" subjects like race, religion, and sexual orientation out of the public schools. What little of Corsey's political worldview shines through can be described, perhaps, as social libertarianism, but almost certainly not conservatism.

A far cry is this worldview from that articulated by the godfather of American conservatism, the late Russell Kirk, in his magnum opus The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. Dr. Kirk opens his tome with a delineation of fundamental conservative principles, the cornerstone of which is "belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience." Now, make no mistake: No one man can take it upon himself to define a political philosophy, and impose that on the rest of that system's adherents. But the strength of Kirk's work is his gift to distill and synthesize a doctrinal consensus from the great luminaries of the Anglo-American conservative tradition, a tradition that is rooted in the more ancient world of Greco-Roman Judeo-Christianity.

Corsey justifies his "proud conservatism" on the grounds that "it comes closest to the belief of what our Founding Fathers had in mind for this country," yet even a cursory review of our nation's founding principles shows that, on the whole, they are rooted precisely in the doctrine Kirk articulated above, namely, that the cornerstone for well-ordered liberty is a republic founded on the laws of God, which are knowable by reason and reinforced by the dictates of religious faith. The convictions enshrined in our Declaration of Independence typify this consensus: "[A]ll men are created equal, [] endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." (emphasis added) As has been copiously documented by many, the Declaration is not unique in this affirmation. This conviction is enshrined in federal and state monuments, oaths of office, Sabbath legislation, and the writings, official and private, of the 200 or so men who constitute the nation's Founding Fathers.

Whether the Fathers were justified in their conviction is another discussion. The point is, they cannot be dismissed simply because their convictions are "divisive." Truth is always divisive, dividing good from evil, right from wrong, the degenerate from the beautiful. Every ideological assertion, in fact, is divisive, politics and law most of all! Would Corsey suggest we stop trying to reform the legal and political order, on the grounds that "politics and law are different to everyone"?

Corsey's perspective of religious faith rests on a grossly simple-minded understanding of how religious thinkers justify their beliefs. While blind fideism may be common among the rank-and-file, this is as true of their political and cultural assumptions as it is of their religious. In fact, no historically informed observer could possibly reduce religious conviction to a battle of "he said, she said," any more than he can so trivialize the dialectic that constitutes the Western philosophical tradition. It is a fact that, for centuries, theists have deduced and induced God's existence from a variety of non-religious philosophical considerations: chiefly cosmological, but also ontological, historical, psychological, and experiential. And when it comes to Christianity, America's de facto national religion, there is no shortage of scholarly apologetic which defends the historic foundations of that belief in rational terms accessible to those with no religious faith at all. Atheists and agnostics are free to contest the validity of these arguments, but to dismiss them outright or prevent their informing public discourse is intellectually lazy.

Corsey's atheistic libertarianism makes little sense of the conservative values he wishes to uphold. For his worldview (such as he lets his readers in on) is predicated on a very concrete moral framework; he wants his readers to believe it is morally wrong for government to intrude into certain spheres. But conservatives have traditionally been of the opinion that it is next-to-impossible to derive moral imperatives if one assumes that all reality is nothing more than the summary, random combination of matter and energy. They've also been skeptical that a creature that is nothing more than the product of random mutation and survival-of-the-fittest can be the bearer of any kind of metaphysical rights, let alone the inalienable dignity on which the Western tradition insists. If human rights are not rooted in a governing intelligence that transcends the visible world, than they must be rooted in the things of this world, and if they are so rooted in earthly institutions, then those rights are anything but inalienable.

These fears are not simply the musings of an abstractive law student with too much time on his hands: There has not been a single country that has embraced state-sponsored atheism that has not committed genocide or other crimes against humanity, far paling anything ever perpetrated by the most depraved of Christian regimes: Jacobinism, Nazism, Fascism, Communism, anyone?

Yes, there do exist atheists and agnostics who are "good persons" (whatever that means), who do not believe that all morals are relative and/or conventional. But this they believe in spite of their ideology. For no matter how hard they try, they are functionally Judeo-Christian, taking for granted the ideological battles fought for and won by their religious predecessors.

Is there a place in the conservative movement for the irreligious? Sure, so long as they are honest with themselves, willing to face up to the fact that they are an ideological aberration on the radar of human thought, and that they ought not to expect the greater part of humanity to subscribe to their godlessness. From George Santayana and Oriana Fallaci, to Jurgen Habermas and Marcello Pera, conservatism has been, and continues to be, blessed by the presence of such "Christian atheists" who don't demand that their religious comrades keep their devotions and beliefs in the closet. If nonbelievers want to be respected in any mainstream social setting (faculty lounges and cocktail parties don't count), they should put aside their anti-religious prejudices, and stop demanding that the great mass of mankind pretend that the spiritual dimension of the human experience has no public implications whatsoever.

© Eric Giunta