the New Pantagruel

Imagining Conservatism in a New Light

by Daniel Larison

t has been one of the great, failed projects of conventional American conservatism to encourage the fiction that the Christian civilisation conservatives admire and the Enlightenment civilisation that destroyed it are part of a real continuity. For the purposes of this essay, I take it as a given that conservatism is, or at least ought to be, the persuasion and mentality that seeks good order and that in a Western society a conservative’s understanding of good order is unavoidably defined significantly and primarily by the Christian intellectual tradition in general and by the received teachings of the early Fathers of the Church in particular. This latter point may not seem obvious or ‘given’ to some, but when we consider that these Fathers were responsible for the formulation of most of the formal doctrines that created the latticework of all subsequent Christian thought and they were likewise the architects of the Christian synthesis of reason and faith that survived unimpaired in all of Europe at least until the Reformation, this claim should seem far more compelling. I also take it as a given that a conservative acknowledges the overwhelming and irreducible cultural significance of the claims of the Christian religion, including its claim to the be the True Faith, and I assume that many philosophical conservatives are confessing Christians who see their conservatism as a logical, if not strictly necessary, accompaniment to their confession of the Faith and their conviction that Christianity is true and that Christ is the Truth who was incarnate for our sake. Such Christian conservatives are, I suspect, committed, to one degree or another, to the preservation of what remains of Christian civilisation in Europe and North America, and they believe that the Western experiment of modernity has been, at best, deeply flawed and generally hostile to the Christian tradition.

That might be too much to assume, but I regard these points as the sine qua non of any effort to develop a philosophical conservatism of real significance. This essay is written in the conviction that it is in some real sense entirely vain to imagine that American conservatives may re-imagine a Christian civilisation and preserve its existing remnants, much less restore such a civilisation, so long as we persist in this fiction of the basic compatibility and agreement of the two traditions, the Christian and the Enlightenment. This is because we may either rely on the Faith’s understanding of human nature and the proper relationship of man to God and to his fellow men, or we can accept the understanding of one of a host of modern derivatives of the liberal tradition in the knowledge that the assumptions we embrace will define and determine what sort of society and way of life our posterity will have. If the former is true, we will have to act as if it were true. A beginning would be to reject the false assumptions of liberalism broadly defined.

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