Category: State

Traditionalist conservatives today face a paradox. On the one hand, as conservatives, they have inherited a habit of healthy suspicion toward state power, a sense that much that is wrong with the world today comes from governments trying to do too much. At the same time, as traditionalists, they recognize that there are a great many goods today in desperate need of conserving, which—human nature being what it is—cannot be conserved without resolute government support.

Whatever its genesis and cause—some suggest Karl Barth’s infamous “Nein!” to Emil Brunner—Protestants largely abandoned the natural law tradition sometime amidst the tumultuous twentieth century. It should be noted that this abandonment conspicuously coincided with the advent of a positivist Supreme Court led by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and his militant campaign from the bench to detach law from a “brooding omnipresence in the sky.”

The sects and factions that dominated the socio-political life of the early republic were predominantly of Protestant heritage. Their theological commitments, for better or worse, conditioned the early character and trajectory of the nation. Any who deny this are simply not paying attention to the historical data.

Much as modern secular scholars have tripped over one another in their eagerness to try and complicate the historical record of the role of religion in the American Founding, clinging like drowning men to the corpse of Thomas Jefferson as their beloved apostle of reason, the verdict of history is fairly incontestable.

While Divided We Fall is surprisingly (and commendably) critical of the left, it also reveals that French is likely to dismiss any meaningful countermeasures by conservatives as manifestations of paranoia and delusion. To acknowledge conservatives’ grievances and fears as fundamentally legitimate, after all, would be to give up on the established order for which French has become a self-appointed guardian.

G.K. Chesterton once quipped that "we are fond of talking about 'liberty'" for the very reason that it "is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good." American Christians ought to beware of this temptation with regard to religious liberty, especially in light of their duty to be good citizens and good Christians.

There is much talk of the common good today. How can it possibly be invoked intelligibly apart from a definite, concrete conception of the community to which it should be directed and applied, that is, to the nation?

Throughout the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and the first half of the Twentieth Centuries the American education regime gave the Christian Scriptures an influential–if not preeminent–place in the national education regime. In the Twenty-First Century, even in the Bible Belt, the notion that religion and particularly the Bible have a place in public education elicits howls of theocracy and fretting over “separation of church and state.”

If true piety depends on faith, and faith is an act of understanding and will, you cannot simply compel people into piety; that would defeat the very purpose. And yet is not compulsion central to the practice of politics and the exercise of sovereignty?

As the drums of war thunder let us not beat them unthinkingly “Sing, O Muse, of the rage of Achilles…” […]