It would be very impolite to describe any conservative thinker as “spiritual but not religious.” No serious person of any stripe should thrill to that term, but conservatives especially prioritize tradition over novelty and vapid emotionalism. Nevertheless, quite a lot of conservative intellectuals could arguably qualify. They approve of religion, but don’t clearly believe. And many non-believing conservatives clearly do crave an encounter with the transcendent, whether their preferred form is primarily aesthetic (classical music, nature, wine), mystical (high liturgy, reading the Desert Fathers), or communitarian (possibly with nationalist notes).
My Tuesday essay enumerated the genuinely important contributions of the “Godless Conservatives.” Yesterday I developed that point further with this essay on Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of the common good, which notes the (rather stringent) limits of what an Aristotelian account of politics can explain without drawing on those resources. Today though, I want to talk about the limits of godless conservatism. The problem is really quite simple. It’s not going anywhere.
It’s all very well to respect custom and convention, to celebrate the stabilizing powers of constitutionalism and separated powers, to rejoice in emergent order. They can ward off many malign possibilities, and facilitate good ones. But what are those good and bad things? Why should we care about them, either as individuals or on the level of society? What makes Western Civilization, or any civilization, worth saving? When godless conservatism tries to make itself into the whole of conservatism, we end up with a robust argument for the “low but solid” political platform, and there are indeed times for embracing that. But be warned. The “solid” part is often illusory. Man yearns for meaning, which tends to be found on higher ground.
It’s one thing to lose the public square because you’ve got principles, but another to lose because the other guy has some principles, and you left yours at home.
Godless conservatives have lots of strong reasons for keeping people like me (confessional Christians who will cheerfully talk about their faith even in the public square) at arm’s length. Religion can easily lapse into an ungrounded emotionalism, ideology (their greatest bugaboo), or power-hungry authoritarianism. I grant all those risks. I understand why Commonwealth Tories have a tendency to sniff at American conservatives, with our revivalist preachers, thundering moral causes, open invocations of Almighty God. It’s embarrassing, not to mention alarming. Nobody ever built a fascist regime on quiet country gardens, second-hand bookshops, and choral evensong.
That’s perfectly true. Quick question, though. How are those Commonwealth Tories doing nowadays?
I think Richard John Neuhaus got this broadly right in The Naked Public Square. Politics abhors a vacuum; it will always have a measure of “moral energy” to it. Consecrating your politics to Jesus most definitely won’t protect you from power-hungry ideologues, and it risks profaning the sacred. But the reality is that politics (like sex!) is not safe. Neuhaus was primarily diagnosing the external, structural banishment of faith through law and elite secularism. But the internal, polite retreat of the godless conservatives produces the same kind of vacuum. Downgrading religion to something the godless conservatives find comfortable (an element of culture, a protective coating on tradition) robs it of its power, and ultimately places it on the path to irrelevance. Which is a real problem in an age like our own, when people are absolutely famished for meaning.
What does conservatism finally amount to, when the transcendent elements are stripped away? Michael Oakeshott, a twentieth-century English philosopher and renowned conservative thinker, famously postulated the existence of “a conservative disposition.” Here is his description of it, from his 1956 essay “On Being Conservative”:
To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise. It is to be equal to one’s own fortune, to live at the level of one’s own means, to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one’s circumstances. With some people this is itself a choice; in others it is a disposition which appears, frequently or less frequently, in their preferences and aversions, and is not itself chosen or specially cultivated.
I read things like this (vintage Oakeshott!), and think, “Well, okay then. Now I understand why the Tories are losing.”
I’m being a little bit glib perhaps, but also serious. I might just be a little surly here because, on Oakeshott’s definition, I’m not sure I qualify as a conservative. But it’s more than that. A milquetoast conservatism like that has no chance against anyone with real convictions. It’ll lose to the socialists. The eco-radicals. The nativists. It’ll lose to everybody. It is losing to everybody.
In Canada the old Commonwealth Tories have been marginalized by more aggressively populist right-wing strains. In Britain Nigel Farage’s Reform Party is absolutely eating their lunch. You could argue, like my friend Elizabeth Corey (an excellent expositor of Oakeshott, and I’ve tried very sincerely to learn from her on this point), that it’s better to be a beautiful loser than to win Pyrrhic victories that destroy everything we once loved along the way. I agree, in fact, if that’s the choice. It’s a little different though if you’re losing in large part because you yourself have already jettisoned the things that infuse meaning and purpose into life (and civilization). If you’ve chosen to excise the things that most matter from the realm of the political. It’s one thing to lose the public square because you’ve got principles, but another to lose because the other guy has some principles, and you left yours at home.
I don’t mean to suggest that a sincere enjoyment of art, nature, family, and other natural goods is not of great value. And I realize of course that the ideal for many is not to banish God, but to embrace him in one’s private life. Opening space between God and Caesar is indeed a good thing, a theme I’ll circle back to over these next few weeks. For now I’ll just say: I don’t think it’s accidental that so many conservatives in that staid, Tory tradition openly acknowledge their difficulty in getting all the way to a sincere confessional faith. Even if they seem to yearn for it. A godless conservatism is always at risk of degenerating into little more than empty proceduralism and a taste for classical music.
Funny thing, too, about that classical music. When I originally sketched this essay, I included it on the list of things on which “nobody ever built a fascist regime.” Then I remembered… the Third Reich. How safe is classical music, really? Nothing in politics is safe. One thinks at this juncture of Ross Douthat’s very prescient warning in 2016 that “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.”
What am I suggesting, then? Do I want to see political conventions praising Jesus, patriarchs blessing tanks, presidents’ names on the covers of our Bibles? No. I’m live to the dangers of an excessively politicized faith, and I’ve made clear that I do want to share a tent with the godless conservatives. We need them. They discipline traditionalist excesses, and explain many things that God-fearing conservatives are slower to understand. But they can’t do everything.
We’re getting a clear view, here in the 21st century, of the things godless conservatives cannot do.
Thanks for reading. I’m going to turn my attention next to more transcendence-friendly strains of right-leaning thought, from fusionism to fascism. Unlike the godless conservatives, some of those folks are positively champing at the bit to see a reborn Christendom. That can be a mixed blessing. More on that next week.