Calling liberals to repentance
Alan Roebuck writes:
Your assertion, in “Why the left cannot see its own doom,” that the left is so far gone in its hatred of the West that it cannot acknowledge the threat of Islam is right on target. Many years ago, I formed the saying, “The religion of liberalism was designed to defeat Christianity; it cannot acknowledge a threat from any other religion.”
And it strikes me that this shows the problem to be fundamentally religious. Leftists do not support Islam against the West because they lack the information necessary to understand that it is a threat, they support Islam because their hearts are wicked.
And this points to a potential parallel with Christian evangelism. Before a sinner can come to Christ he must realize his own sinfulness, because only then will he acknowledge that he needs salvation through repentance and faith in Christ. Proper Christian evangelism therefore begins by showing the unbeliever the Law of God, which he has failed to keep. Knowing he needs a savior, the hearer is then ready to receive the good news with gladness.
The parallel to “conservative evangelism” would then be this: It is not enough to give non-conservatives information about the falsehood and foolishness of liberalism. We need to call liberals to repentance. We need to make it moral and personal. And we need to offer them hope: there is a body of truths and a way of life that have stood the test of time.
We must not, of course, push the analogy too far. But there is a religious dimension to this struggle that most conservatives fail to acknowledge, generally because they do not understand Christianity very well.
The left has a better understanding of the religious aspect. They decry the sins of traditional thought and life and constantly call people to “repent” by joining themselves to the great liberal Jihad. They are not afraid to denounce their opponents as wicked sinners rather than just people honestly holding different convictions. Because they hold the cultural high ground, they can often make their accusations stick.
The foundation of Christianity is repentance, which means turning your spirit away from sin and toward God, and faith, which means knowing and trusting that Jesus is your savior.
The analogy to conservatism would be this:
Repentance means turning from liberalism and toward what I’ll call conservatism (obviously we need a better name for the object of our faith). It does not mean suddenly renouncing all of your liberalism at once. It means a process that begins when you realize the foolishness of the liberalism you formerly loved and you understand that you must turn away from it. The process of gradually ridding your spirit of its love of liberalism is analogous to the process of Christian sanctification; when you first repent, you still love some of your sins, but you hate the fact that you love them, and God begins to work on you.
Faith in conservatism (or whatever we call it) means a knowledge of basic conservative principles, constantly being reminded of them (just as the Christian must constantly be reminded of the truths of the Gospel, because man is prone to wander), and a constantly developing courage and wisdom that flows from rejecting the lies of liberalism and embracing the truths that correct them.
If you find this somewhat vague, be assured that I see that just such a process occurred in me.
The problem with most conservatives is either that they don’t acknowledge that they are liberal “sinners,” or that they have no faith in a salvific doctrine or program. An example of the latter would be the atheistic conservatives such as Conservative Swede: He knows the West is lost in sin, but he has no hope of salvation, so all he can do is curse the darkness.
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Jeff W. writes:
In response to Alan Roebuck, the Tytler Cycle comes to mind. This cycle, which appears to be inaccurately attributed to the 18th-century Scottish writer Alexander Tytler, describes how nations progress from freedom to bondage and back again:
Bondage to Spiritual Faith;
Spiritual Faith to Courage;
Courage to Freedom;
Freedom to Abundance;
Abundance to Selfishness;
Selfishness to Complacency;
Complacency to Apathy;
Apathy to Fear;
Fear to Dependency;
Dependency to Bondage
I say we are now somewhere in the apathy-fear-dependency stage. Just last year a fearful Congress unlawfully appropriated hundreds of billions for the largest banks because of the fear of economic collapse. Americans today are frequently called “the sheeple” because, in addition to being stupid and apathetic, they are easy to frighten and chase into the sheep pen.
If this cycle is true, it means that the active, indignant ethical and religious spirit needed to drive liberals back cannot be generated until after the bondage stage.
A long period in slavery, if Americans survive it, will solve this problem.
Kristor writes:
I second your applause for Alan that you forwarded to me. A profound insight. More and more, the coherence of the traditionalist vision, and likewise that of the pathology thereof we call liberalism, comes clearly into view. Likewise also, therefore, the traditionalist critique of its monstrous offspring; and the solution Alan has discovered: turn from your wickedness, and live.
Alan writes:
The problem with most conservatives is either that they don’t acknowledge that they are liberal “sinners,” or that they have no faith in a salvific doctrine or program. An example of the latter would be the atheistic conservatives such as Conservative Swede: He knows the West is lost in sin, but he has no hope of salvation, so all he can do is curse the darkness.
An example of the former—those who don’t acknowledge that they are liberal “sinners”—would be the libertarians and Roissyites, who locate their salvific hope in portions of the traditionalist prescription: liberty and recognition of our sexual natures, respectively. Traditionalism includes both these elements, within an overall hierarchy of policies and values that is much more complicated.
Alan writes:
Repentance means turning from liberalism and toward what I’ll call conservatism (obviously we need a better name for the object of our faith).
How about “truth”? That will allow people to repent of liberalism and turn toward conservatism without forcing them at the same time, in one fell swoop, to repent of their erroneous religious and metaphysical beliefs and turn toward Christianity.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 29, 2009 03:21 PM | Send