Recently I’d been reviewing my transition from non religious Marxist to Christian conservative and I noticed something. It’s apparent and obvious; so much so that it may be easily overlooked. Though I like layers and textures of thought, especially political and religious thought, I do like to bring the tapestry down to a single thread on occasion.
The distinction was this, and why God was able to bring me to Christianity and submit to Him through politics. The quick personal story is that I was a Marxist, heard a speech by Reagan in 1980 that made begin reevaluating my world view, started studying Conservative thinkers, realized links to scripture and the Church, and fifteen years later was baptized; and became a Conservative as well.
The thread is Conservatism has a foundation of Scripture and Christian thinkers. Edmund Burke, arguably the father of modern conservatism was a Christian and linked his political thinking to God and Scripture, as did John Adams, Russell Kirk, William Kristol, William F Buckley and others. The ideas in the Declaration of Independence, Mayflower Compact, and Constitution all can be directly linked to Scripture.
Burke rejected a world limited to physical desire and appetite and man’s impulses to feed them. He accepted a world guided and governed by Purpose, an Omniscient presence making history through man. Burke thought man-made laws not laws at all, but distortions of God’s Law. Just of bit of the tapestry of Conservative thought, founded in God and natural law.
On the Leftist side, we have Engels, Marx, Lenin and Rousseau, all atheists that denied the spiritual nature of man, and proposed laws of men (distortions and violations of God’s law) with no property or ownership, and all would be happy and free. They all acknowledged only the material realm. They all proposed radical change, so we had the Maoist revolution, Bolshevik revolution, and several others that were bloody paths to change. Our current president, Barack Obama, subscribes to this notion, and pronounced so by stating frequently he and his followers “will fundamentally transform America”. At least we can be thankful he’s not a bloodthirsty revolutionary like his forebears.
Conservatives’ notion of change was best noted by Burke:
“We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation. All we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that the change shall proceed by insensible degrees. This has all the benefits which may be in change, without any of the inconveniences of mutation. This mode will, on the one hand, prevent the unfixing old interests at once: a thing which is apt to breed a black and sullen discontent in those who are at once dispossessed of all their influence and consideration. This gradual course, on the other hand, will prevent men, long under depression, from being intoxicated with a large draught of new power, which they always abuse with a licentious insolence.”
I much prefer change moderated by that; change moderated by God or we get the impatient radical deadly change of Mao and Lenin, and the socio-economic-cultural degradation America has been experiencing since the early Twentieth century, hyper-accelerated in the past two years. In the best sense the State is there to curtail human excesses. Question is, can it be done without God’s guidance? Early conservative writer JF Stephen commented on God and the State:
“The whole management of direction of human life depends upon the question whether or not there is a God and a future state of human existence. If there is a God, but no future state, God is nothing to us. If there is a future state, but no God, we can form no rational guess about the future state.”
Without God the State and the future of men is whatever the zeitgeist is at the time and whatever the powerful says it is. I think this just devolves the State into lawlessness, and the rights of men become the rights of the few to rule.
Burke again:
“The rights of men, that is to say, the natural rights of mankind, are indeed sacred things; and if any public measure is proved mischievously to affect them, the objection ought to be fatal to that measure, even if further affirmed and declared by express covenants, if they are clearly defined and secured against chicane, against power, and authority, by written instruments and positive engagements, they are a still better condition: they partake not only of the sanctity of the object so secured, but of the solemn public faith itself, which secures an object of such importance…The things secured by these instruments may, without any deceitful ambiguity, be very fitly called the charted rights of men.”
The leaders of the UN, of European countries, Islamic countries, to mention but a few, and increasingly the United States, by ignoring traditional written instruments and positive engagements, by denying God as the Prime Mover of history, denies the charted rights of man, the natural rights of men, and impose the rule of men on men.
Breaking it down to this, I challenge anyone calling themselves Christian, yet profess Liberal ideology simultaneously to reconsider. How can one be fully submitted to the will of God, yet at the same time advocate for the practice and ideology of people that deny God, Gods’ Law, and the natural rights of men?
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