The Impotence of Secular Conservatism

National Conservative Conference

July 9, 2024

It is an honor to be here at NatCon 2024, and we all know that we are meeting at an urgent moment and we can also see that the urgency has been made clear by some events just even over the last couple of years that have been very sobering. When last I had the opportunity to address this movement in late 2022, I spoke on the impossibility of a secular state. What I want to speak about today is the impotence of a secular conservatism. I don’t mean thereby to divide the room, but rather to speak honestly about where I think we are and what I think we should be thinking. I do speak as a Christian. I do speak as a theologian. I speak with a great deal of common concern and common cause among all of us here.

I appreciate the invitation to address this conference, but I also want to acknowledge a bomb on our moral landscape that reshapes our consideration, and that is the 2022 Dobbs decision and its aftermath. These developments force a new awareness on us.

I have been a part of the pro-life movement my entire adult life. I’ve had the privilege of being in rooms where major decisions have been made, strategies have been laid, and where facts and analytics have been considered. I can tell you that there are those now, and were those in the past, who were quite convinced that this is an argument we were winning. Many had convinced themselves that we were winning the argument for life, even if we were not winning that argument everywhere evenly. But the pro-life movement shared the confidence that if indeed all those years of work in conservative argument, and conservative organizing, and what became a conservative legal recovery, a constitutional recovery – if all that led to a reversal of Roe v. Wade, we would be ready for it and we would discover a pent-up, pro-life conviction on the part of the American people, certainly in key states painted red, where we would see pro-life conviction translated into pro-life legislation.

And of course, what we’ve seen is exactly the opposite. First in Kansas, but then also in my own Kentucky, suddenly the bomb went off, announcing to us that whatever commitment there was to the pro-life cause—commitment to the sanctity of human life, to the life of the unborn— was much less substantial than we had thought. It was much less convictional than we had thought. It was, most fundamentally, far less ontological than we had thought. And that leads me to the consideration for today. To be conservative is to hold allegiance to certain fixed truths and principles.

Now, I’m old enough to remember in my own adult lifetime the argument that conservative basically means holding to a conservative temperament and a conservative commitment to timeless tradition. But the truth I want to underline today is that the tradition without a fundamental commitment to truth – and that truth being fundamentally transcendent and theological – will soon evaporate.

I would take that argument further and insist that conservatism requires fixed religious truths as well as traditions. I would underline the fact that these fixed religious truths are grounded in specific acts of divine revelation, on which we are entirely dependent.

There are two points of urgency I want to make. Number one, conservatism is not just another form of liberalism, and then secondly, conservatism is not just liberalism or progressivism arriving later on the schedule with greater respect for the costs and challenges of what is defined as inevitable social and moral progress. Neither of these positions is genuinely conservative.

I believe the great challenge that now confronts conservatives, and I mean to include conservative Christians here, as well of course, all conservatives writ large in the United States, is the challenge of first things and fundamental truths. I do speak with a particular appeal to religious conservatives and American evangelicals. The great challenge is understanding that any worldview that does not ground itself in divine revelation, in the moral character of the self-existent, omnipotent, omniscient God – any conservative tradition that is not grounded in a prior commitment to ontology is going to evaporate. The only question is, will that evaporation happen quickly or more slowly?

One of the things we’ve witnessed in recent weeks, as a matter of fact, just in recent days, is the collapse of the Conservative Party in Great Britain. I follow that party and that Anglo-American tradition very closely, and the argument I made in an article published immediately after the election is that we should not be surprised that the so-called Conservatives lost, because the Conservative party had abandoned conservatism long ago. I would point to an incident that had taken place now more than a decade ago, when David Cameron, then the British Prime Minister and head of the Conservative Party, just basically came out and demanded that the party abandon what had been a very longstanding commitment to social conservatism. Indeed, he called for the party, and thus the government, to abandon the definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. In his memorable words: “I don’t do this despite the fact I’m a conservative. I do this because I am a conservative.”

At that point, it was just like the entire ontological structure of Creation Order was just denied by a party that still dared to call itself conservative. I don’t believe a party that does such a thing deserves a conservative reputation, much less conservative affirmation. This act, taken so brazenly, was a repudiation of Creation Order and the order that had made his civilization possible.

I’m not denying the importance of social traditions, morals, political principles, constitutional norms, and much more shared among conservatives and shared as a glad stewardship. I want to emphasize anew how important that stewardship is, but I do want to argue that if it all is a matter of constant negotiation and a process of accommodation to changing circumstances, we are losing and are destined to lose. There is no lasting conservatism that is not self-consciously grounded in revealed truth and in ontology. To be conservative is to affirm what is real. If we lose this conviction, we lose everything.

Now, when you consider the challenges we face at this moment, it’s impossible to say the challenge is not ontological. We’re living in a society that increasingly believes a boy can be a girl and a girl can be a boy. Just in terms of fundamental ontology, if we don’t understand anything else, we would just understand that it has been assumed rightly throughout virtually all human history that anatomy and ontology are definitive, and determinative, and, frankly, are not impositions but gifts.

But we now live in a time in which the progressive idea of personal autonomy has reached the point that many in our society (including a disproportionate number among the cultural elites) believe human beings to be autonomous from ontology. I think this cultural crisis underlines the fact that when you have a conservative movement that is not itself committed to ontology, everything collapses into a matter of endless negotiation. The ontological grounding of the American order was made very clear in the Declaration of Independence and in other founding documents. When the founders spoke of nature and nature’s God, when they claimed we are ‘endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights,’ that’s a language that is not just decorative, it is not just illustrative, but makes a truth claim. The language hearkens back to what in the Lutheran tradition is explicitly referred to as Creation Order, and I’m glad to say behind that the affirmation of what might rightly be called a Natural Law. The point is it is a created order. It is a revealed order, and it is an order. Behind that order is the God of the Bible, the God of Genesis. Behind Creation Order is the Creator. Behind the Natural Law is the supernatural Lawgiver.

Now, one of the interesting things we should note is that all I have stated there would have been noncontroversial at the time of the American founding. For one thing, the set of intellectual circumstances at the time was such that, prior to Darwin, there was really no other explanation for the existence of the world. The only explanation for creation was the prior existence of the Creator. Western civilization was the inheritance of Christendom, with a very clear biblical worldview, and there really was no alternative cosmology. At least not until Darwin. This is where Richard Dawkins’s interesting statement comes to mind – that it was impossible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist until Darwin. The dominant worldview of the age was not merely supernatural, not merely Christian, but explicitly Protestant. Historians even refer to the existence in North America of a Protestant Empire.

And we do see this great break in modernity with the arrival of a modern secular metaphysic and what was claimed to be a modern secular ontology, but it’s an empty ontology that comes with absolutely nothing determinative. What does it mean to affirm rights endowed by our Creator, when the Creator is denied? Our entire system of rights and reality is based in a Christian ontology and morality, which is based upon Jewish antecedents in both general and special revelation.

The secular experiment that is now underway, and has been underway for some time, is now seen in retrospect as that which is actually based upon nothing at all, nothing ontological, nothing in terms of reality, no particular metaphysic. You see this reference now in open arguments made among the Left. The ideological and political Left no longer shares any objective moral order. It seeks to impose a new morality (and view of reality) that explicitly rejects the ontology and the ontological commitments of the Christian tradition. But the Left brings to the table absolutely no ontological commitments of its own. It’s all just politics and power. It’s all they can see.

A conservatism that plays the same game and shares the same assumptions is no genuine conservatism. It just a language game or a way of playing for time.

You look at American history, at the Protestant empire, the longstanding Christian consensus, and then we understand the rise of conservatism, which came as a response to the early cleavages in our society and in particular to the Wilsonian period and beyond in the 20th century. Then, suddenly, there was this enormous appreciation among many conservative Americans for the work of someone like Edmund Burke, but it was a half-hearted appropriation of Burke. The appropriated right was Burke’s understanding of the importance of the tradition and the binding authority of tradition on society. The part many left behind was also essential to Burke. And that is the existence of an ontological order behind that tradition, truth behind that tradition. Ontology behind the tradition.

You look in the United States, and even much of what’s been called conservative turns out to be either a conservatism which is another form of liberalism, or conservatism that is nothing but an attempt at a delayed fuse. You look at back at previous Republican administrations and you understand that we can see that that’s exactly the strategy that was undertaken for so long. The post-Dobbs position now makes that very clear, even in conversations within the Republican Party. Behind all of this is also the experience of the Reagan Revolution, and behind that William F. Buckley, National Review, and fusionism.

Let me be clear: I’m not denying that Christian conservatives can have secular allies. I’m not denying that we can share vast areas of common agreement and common concern, but I am saying that at the end of the day, without an ontological commitment which is grounded in theological conviction, I don’t believe there’s any lasting conservatism to be found. Actually, I am certain that without ontological commitments (grounded in theism), conservatism is just an endless negotiation with progressivism and its progeny.

Conservatism has to be grounded in a commitment to truth. The fight to conserve reality is going to be very costly. If we are not contending for revealed truth, if our position and argument is just another theory to be placed alongside competing theories, an argument to be placed alongside other arguments – if that’s all there is to it, we are doomed.

That is not what I believe is at the very core of our argument and at the core of our convictions. An impotent conservatism that is grounded in no ontology cannot sustain itself, cannot perpetuate itself. It cannot accomplish its stated aims. It cannot defend its most basic principles and postulates. A secular worldview, consistently held, denies what we believe to be absolutely necessary and foundational.

Now, if you want to see evidence of what I mean, just look at the collapse of Protestant liberalism. Last year marked the hundredth anniversary of J. Gresham Machen’s famous book Christianity and Liberalism, in which he rightly argued that the conflict between the orthodox and the liberals in the churches was not a conflict among Christians, but a conflict between adherents of two different religions – the Christians versus the liberals. He was absolutely right, and the tragedy of liberal Protestantism is that it has become so endlessly accommodationist that it is merely a cartoon of the age. That is what accommodation produces. That is what denying ontology produces.

What we see in the larger society is the collapse of conviction, the replacement of Christianity with a new religion. That’s why we shouldn’t be surprised by the rise of Marxism in all its different forms, such as critical theory. It is a reminder to us that when Adolf Von Harnack, the paradigmatic German liberal, argued that modern Christians must learn to separate the kernel and the husk of Christianity, keeping the kernel and throwing the husk away. You keep the kernel, which is religious experience, and you get rid of the husk, which is the claims of divine revelation. What you end up with is not theological liberation but European decadence. A secular conservatism cannot meet the challenge of the day, and an accommodationist Christianity will do no better. A flimsy theism will disappear in the midst of modernity. Most has disappeared already.

In Robert Kagan’s latest book, he makes an amazingly honest argument: “Liberalism is not inherently about progress, therefore, except the progress that comes from the expanding recognition of people’s rights. It has no teleology, no final resting point toward which it aims.” What an amazing statement. He admits the bare fact that there is no end game to liberalism. It is an endlessly open game with no teleology at all. There is no ultimate goal to the unfolding of inevitable Hegelian progress. The revolution never ends. We have been warned.

My response is simple. The only answer to that argument cannot be anything short of ontological in force, and that ontology has to be grounded in theism.

Cardinal Manning, perhaps an unusual person for an evangelical Protestant Christian to cite, said something profoundly true and nearly irreducible in terms of words. He said famously, “All human conflict is ultimately theological.” I want to end by saying this is exactly right. The cardinal nailed it. All human conflict is ultimately theological. Many will claim there is no theology here, nothing remotely theological. Don’t believe your eyes.

But the reality is all human conflict is ultimately theological. It is good to know what the alternatives are. It is good to know the challenge we face. It is good to speak honestly.

We face the most insidious attacks upon human dignity and the sanctity of life, the goodness of marriage and family, the structures of human society, even the reality of good and evil. We live amidst a great rebellion against transcendent reality, the good, the beautiful, and the true. Our answer to that cannot be less than political. Our answer to that cannot be less than cultural. It cannot be less than strategic. And I also want to say it cannot be less than theological, and it is good and necessary that we acknowledge this truth

I speak as a Christian theologian. I do not want to confuse Christian theology with some vague idea of nationalism or conservatism. Vague ideas will not hold. I want to say that I do not believe this nation and all that it represents can survive abandoning its theological roots. We will recover those roots and commitments or lose everything.

May God Bless America.