Not all religious people are conservatives; and not all conservatives are religious people. Christianity prescribes no especial form of politics. There have been famous radicals who were devout Christians—though most radicals have been nothing of the sort. All the same, there could be no conservatism without a religious foundation, and it is conservative people, by and large, who defend religion in our time.
Quintin Hogg, a talented English conservative of the twentieth century, in his little book The Case for Conservatism, remarks, “There is nothing I despise more than a politician who seeks to sell his politics by preaching religion, unless it be a preacher who tries to sell his sermons by talking politics.” Yet he goes on to say that conservatism and religion cannot be kept in separate compartments, and that the true conservative at heart is a religious man. The social influence of Christianity has been nobly conservative, and a similarly conservative influence has been exerted by Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and the other higher religions.
In America, a sense of religious consecration has been joined to our political institutions from the beginning. Almost all the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were religious men. Solemn presidential proclamations, since the beginning of the Republic, have invoked the might and mercy of God. Most of our leading conservative statesmen and writers were men profoundly religious—George Washington, an Episcopalian; John Adams, a Unitarian; James Madison, an Episcopalian; John Randolph, an Episcopalian; John C. Calhoun, a Unitarian; Orestes Brownson, a Catholic; Nathaniel Hawthorne, a Congregationalist; Abraham Lincoln, a devout though independent theist; and many more. “We know and we feel inwardly that religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good and all comfort,” Edmund Burke wrote.
Now a conservative is a person who sees human society as an immortal contract between God and man, and between the generations that are dead, and the generation that is living now, and the generations which are yet to be born. It is possible to conceive of such a contract, and to feel a debt toward our ancestors and obligations toward our posterity, only if we are filled with a sense of eternal wisdom and power. We deal charitably and justly by our fellow men and women only because we believe that a divine will commands us to do so, and to love one another. The religious conservative is convinced that we have duties toward society, and that a just government is ruled by moral law, since we participate in our humble way in the divine nature and the divine love. The conservative believes that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.
The conservative desires to conserve human nature—that is, to keep men and women truly human, in God’s image. The dread radical ideologies of our century, Communism and Nazism and their allies, endeavor to stamp out religion root and branch because they know that religion is always a barrier to collectivism and tyranny. A religious person has strength and faith; and radical collectivism detests private strength and faith. Throughout Europe and Asia, the real resistance to collectivism has come from men and women who believe that there is a greater authority than the collectivistic state, and that authority is God.
A society which denies religious truth lacks faith, charity, justice, and any sanction for its acts. Today, more perhaps than ever before, Americans understand the close connection between religious conviction and just government, so that they have amended their oath of allegiance to read, “one nation, under God.” There is a divine power higher than any political power. When a nation ignores the divine authority, it soon commits the excesses of fanatic nationalism, intoxicated with its own unchecked power, which have made the twentieth century terrible.
Any religion is always in danger of corruption; and in our time, various people have endeavored to persuade us that the Christian religion endorses some sort of sentimental collectivism, a “religion of humanity,” in which the Christian idea of equality in God’s sight is converted into a dreary social and economic equality enforced by the state. But an examination of the Christian creeds and the Christian tradition will not sustain such an interpretation of Christian teaching. What Christianity offers is personal redemption, not some system of economic revolution. The human person is the great concern of Christian faith—as a person, not as part of a vague “People,” or “The Masses,” or “The Underprivileged.” And when Christians preach charity, they mean the voluntary giving of those who have to those who have not; they do not mean compulsion by the state to take away from some in order to benefit others. “Statists that labor to contrive a commonwealth without poverty,” old Sir Thomas Browne says, “take away the object of our charity; not understanding only the commonwealth of a Christian, but forgetting the prophecy of Christ.” The Christian religion does indeed enjoin us to do unto others as we would have others do unto us; it does not enjoin us to employ political power to compel others to surrender their property.
Any great religion is assailed by heresies. In the year of the Communist Manifesto, Orestes Brownson declared that Communism is a heresy from Christianity; and he is echoed today by Arnold Toynbee and Eric Voegelin. Communism perverts the charity and love of Christianity into a fierce leveling doctrine that men must be made equal upon earth; at the same time, it denounces real equality, which is equality in the ultimate judgment of God. And other ideologies which would convert Christianity into an instrument for oppressing one class for the benefit of another are heresies.
Another distortion of Christianity is the radical doctrine that “the voice of the people is the voice of God.” This, Lord Percy of Newcastle writes, is “the heresy of democracy”—that is, the disastrous error of supposing that God is simply whatever the majority of people think at any given time. The conservative knows that popular judgment commits blunder after blunder; it is anything but divine; while an immutable Justice which we perceive only imperfectly and dimly, and try to imitate in our human laws, is the real source of truth in politics.
A third perversion of Christianity is the heresy that this earthly society of ours can be made perfect, by world planners, and civil servants and enactments. The Christian knows that perfection, either in human beings or in society, never will be attained upon earth, but can be found only in a higher realm. This delusion of the possibility of earthly perfection lies behind most socialistic and totalitarian schemes. A professed Christian cannot be a professed Utopian. Our fallen nature, in the eyes of the sincere Christian, will not be redeemed until the end of all things; therefore, we are foolish if we expect that political and economic revolution will bring perfect justice and happiness. Men and women are creatures of mingled good and evil; in the best of us, some evil is present; and therefore, political constitutions, just laws, and social conventions are employed to restrain our evil impulses. Human beings without just and prudent government are delivered up to anarchy, for the brute lies just under the skin of civilization.
To presume to establish a synthetic paradise upon earth, predicated upon a fallaciously optimistic notion of human nature, will expose us to the peril of a reign of unreason. Vague schemes of world government ordinarily are afflicted by this folly. There never has been a perfect age or a perfect society, and there never will be, the religious conservative knows. All the political contrivances of mankind have been tried before, and none of them have worked to perfect satisfaction.
This is not to say that the religious conservative believes that all ages are the same, or that all evils are necessary evils. One age may be much worse than another; one society may be relatively just, and another relatively unjust; men may improve somewhat under a prudent and humane domination, and may deteriorate vastly in an insensate time. But the pseudo-gospel of Progress as the inevitable and beneficent wave of the future—a doctrine now shattered by the catastrophes of the twentieth century—never deluded the religious conservative. He does not despise the past simply because it is old, or assume that the present is delightful simply because it is ours. He judges every age and every institution in the light of certain principles of justice and order, which we have learnt in part through revelation and in part through the long and painful experience of the human race.
The religious thinker who criticizes our present society is not bound to maintain that one time is all white and another time is all black; he can pick and choose. If we pick and choose discreetly, we may hope to improve our own society considerably, though we never will succeed in making our society perfect. Human history is an account of men and women running as fast as they can, like Alice and the Red Queen, in order to stay where they are. Sometimes we grow lazy, and then society sinks into a terrible decline. We are never going to be able to run fast enough to arrive at Utopia. And we should hate Utopia if ever we got there, for it would be infinitely boring. What really makes men and women love life is the battle itself, the struggle to bring order out of disorder, to strive for right against evil. If ever that struggle should come to an end, we should expire of boredom. It is not in our nature to rest content, like the angels, in an eternal changelessness. In one sense, the religious conservative is a utopian, but in one sense only: he believes that the possibility of near-perfection does indeed exist, but it exists only within individual human persons; and when that state is attained individually, we call it sanctity.
Nor ought we to be discontented with this imperfect world of ours. G. K. Chesterton, in his “Ballad of the White Horse,” tells of how King Alfred (a high-minded conservative some centuries before the word “conservative” was thought of) had a vision of the Virgin Mary; and when he asked her what of the future, Mary told him this:
I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.
Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?
Now these words made Alfred glad, for all their seeming grimness. For Alfred, as a Christian leader, knew that we are put here upon earth to struggle for the right, to contend against evil, and to defend the legacy of human nature and civilization. This is the conservative task in all ages; and, as Jefferson wrote, the tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of martyrs.