Last week I wrote about political conservatives and their role as “Tradition’s Sheepdogs,” tasked with protecting traditionalists and, sometimes, saving them from themselves. We are living through a moment of particularly dramatic flux, which invariably strains conservatism: their services are needed most at the exact moment others are most inclined to sideline them. It is precisely when predators close in that the flock panics and scatters.
Astute readers may have noted that the task I’ve assigned to political conservatism overlaps substantially with what I’ve identified as Christianity’s perpetual strength: adaptation, renewal, and the re-articulation of old truths in new contexts. Christians and political conservatives seem to share deep common ground. Maybe they should work together? Maybe they are essentially the same people?
Sometimes they are. Sometimes not. The Venn diagram has significant overlap, but this picture is fairly complicated, so over the next two weeks I will explore the various segments of that diagram—starting with the secular variety. Think of this as “godless conservatism” week.
Godless conservatives aren’t useless. Though I myself am very much a religious conservative, I’ve come to appreciate what the more secular flank—often identifying as classical liberals or libertarians—brings to the table. Whether or not they self-identify as conservatives, I’m counting them here, because they’ve made major contributions to “the art of sheepdogging.” These thinkers have played a crucial role in protecting and ordering tradition, exposing real vulnerabilities of crown-and-altar politics and illuminating many of the mechanics of organic order. While godless conservatism has real shortcomings (which I will tackle on Thursday), we should begin by recognizing its genuine achievements.
Who do I have in mind when I refer to “godless conservatives”? Faith and politics can certainly get sticky, and looking back across the centuries, it’s clear that great thinkers have related to religious faith in many different ways, ranging from cheerful atheism (Hume) to insouciant heterodoxy (Jefferson, Franklin) or more serious-minded unorthodoxy (Locke), to a kind of plaintive agnosticism-trending-towards-belief (Roger Scruton, Charles Murray). Leo Strauss saw covert skepticism in virtually every philosophical mind, and while that seems to me like a stretch, it’s clearly true that historical figures often had strong motives to be less than candid. Inevitably, there is a lot of debate about the real convictions of figures like Montaigne, Burke, or America’s Founding Fathers.
I don’t mean to flatten those nuances by tossing everyone into a single “godless” bucket. My targeted point is simply this: intentionally non-theological conservatism has been a major force in the modern era. Despite the contributors’ varied motives and private convictions, their collective work offers indispensable insights into how human societies actually work. Obviously I cannot adequately summarize a rich, centuries-long conversation in a short Substack post, but I’ll at least touch on three important things that can be learned from godless conservatism. It forces us to be serious about certain unhappy features of this fallen world, especially scarcity and the temptations of power. It has a real appreciation of organic order. On the flip side of that, it measures the costs of inorganic order, which is not something you tend to think about if you believe in “the divine right of kings.”
Christians have always believed that the world is fallen. Nevertheless, Christianity’s hopeful or aspirational elements can trend very easily into forms of utopianism, which is where the godless conservatives can have a very salutary, bracing effect. If you’re used to rubbing shoulders with Aristotelians, meditating cheerfully on all the things a “pro-family” society would universally supply (preferential option for the poor, of course!), it can be quite useful to walk into a different room and answer the hard questions that a classical liberal is likely to pose.
Instead of happily assuming that a generous, providential God will reliably provide, they start from the assumption that resources are scarce and that people often fail to get what they need. Instead of spelling out guidelines for wise, thoughtful rulers, they expect that most rulers will use power selfishly, and that even the well-intentioned will constantly miscalculate. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely!” Alright, so that was Lord Acton, very much a religious believer. But he was unusual among Christians in his deep suspicion of power. In general, the godless conservatives have been much harder-headed, and let’s be real here: they are very often correct.
Is it possible to study the natural world with rigor and discipline, while maintaining a theistic or teleological worldview? Yes! But people do seem more motivated to seek out mechanistic explanations of natural things when the supernatural framework falls away.
This leads to the subject of organic order. Together with their suspicion of power, godless conservatives have noticed that even though authorities are (unfortunately) very prone to corruption, we don’t always need them to order the world for us. In fact, most things work better when they don’t. Scarcity may be a fact of the world, but a lot more people will get what they want and need if we don’t ask formal authorities to plan everything for us. (Or, more realistically… don’t let them.) When people work out solutions from the ground up, they are better able to grasp all the morally relevant circumstances, and they also have a much more nuanced sense of what they themselves want and need.
Adam Smith broke new ground in this realm by showing how effectively free enterprise could facilitate mutually beneficial arrangements, not just among people within a small community, but also at the national and geopolitical levels, enhancing The Wealth of Nations. Smith wasn’t naïve about the personal virtue of capitalists, but he saw that markets could often transcend their manifold vices. Friedrich Hayek set another important concept on the table with his clear articulation of “the knowledge problem”: it simply is not possible for any authority, no matter how well-intentioned or intelligent, to grasp the needs of a complex society well enough to allocate work fairly, or distribute goods and services in optimal ways. Another win for organic order.
Writing centuries after Smith, having witnessed the rise of totalitarianism, Hayek spelled out another crucial point as well. When the state arrogates to itself the task of meeting everyone’s needs, that tends to undermine natural order, to everyone’s cost. When the state “solves” a problem, people tend to stop looking for solutions, even if the top-down solution is mediocre. Over time we become habituated to petitioning the state at every turn, and lose the ability and motivation to solve problems for ourselves. Hayek wasn’t the only person to see this, of course. Robert Nisbet, Wilhelm Röpke, and Bertrand de Jouvenel were among the many thinkers who wrote insightfully on this subject. But it’s important to understand that this critique goes far beyond some hackneyed assertion that “people are poor because they are lazy.” All of us, rich and poor, have been shaped in deep (and often undesirable) ways by our relationship to the modern state.
It’s not that these points are entirely absent from the tradition, but it’s harder to appreciate them when you think in the grand, sweeping arcs of a Platonist or Scholastic. Mind you, I have no doubt at all that St. Thomas or St. Augustine could sit down and have a delightful conversation with a Smith or a Hayek. But their genius was of a different kind. Explicitly Christian or Aristotelian frameworks do often weave in moments of appreciation for organic order, but particularly in a modern context, they tend to be far too weak and underdeveloped to “do the job.” Sure, Catholic Social Teaching includes a “principle of subsidiarity,” but unless it’s supported by the longer-developed insights of a Hayek or a Nisbet, it tends to be easily swamped by a cluster of other goals and demands. The godless conservatives really have a better handle on this.
I think there is a phenomenon at work here remarkably similar to what we saw in the natural sciences in the early modern period. Is it possible to study the natural world with rigor and discipline, while maintaining a theistic or teleological worldview? Yes! But people do seem more motivated to seek out mechanistic explanations of natural things when the supernatural framework falls away. You’re likelier to look for that sort of explanation when it’s the only one “permitted.” I’ve already discussed this with reference to empirical science and the rise of philosophical materialism, and I think a similar story can be told about godless conservatism. Non-theistic frameworks proved uniquely well-suited for exploring certain truths about human life and society. Properly understood, none of these insights should be seen as proofs for the non-existence of God. Anyone who takes them that way is making the old mistake of confusing methodology with metaphysics and morals.
Godless conservatives haven’t necessarily made that mistake. Some are sincere religious believers (“godless” only in the sense of accepting methodological constraints on their political theory), and anyone with a real respect for tradition can hardly help but notice that religion plays an important role in preserving it. Thus, even non-believing conservatives generally view religion as culturally and socially salutary, and well worth preserving at least in some civic form. Even David Hume thought that clergymen had a legitimate function. (Well, sort of.) Godless conservatives aren’t usually enemies of the faith, even if the cross-Venn friendships can get a bit complicated.
I will note in passing, before concluding this post, that there are many other insights I could have brought forward from what I am christening the “godless conservative” tradition: the principle of prescription, stern warnings about ideology and rationalism, moving tributes to custom and civility, well-honed thoughts on constitutionalism and effective checks on power. Godless conservatism has a lot to offer. But it also has limits. I’ll consider those later this week.