The Core Conservative Question

A reader writes:

In several places in the D'Souza review you ask whether a political system "can" ever be neutral. Well, it can't. The question is therefore not whether political frameworks can be neutral, but how and against whom they ought to discriminate. At the basis of the democratic truce lies the presumption that a viewpoint-neutral framework – not absolutely neutral, but still as neutral as possible and consistent with its own survival – is the only fair and transparent one. But this excludes the true believer, who could never accept a system that proclaims neutrality between truth and error, virtue and vice. It is of course right to put true believers at a strategic disadvantage in this way, but discrimination it undeniably is. Justified it is, neutral it ain't.

As soon as a democratic system becomes sufficiently diverse, the true believer will begin to be unsatisfied with it. For a while the true believer's vision can still be enforced through democratic majorities. But then even the majorities begin to dwindle. At that point the true believer has to decide whether to lie down peacefully and see his beliefs swamped, or whether to turn anti-democratic, to reject the most basic clauses of the democratic contract. D'Souza shows the right nearing that point.

Would the religious right accept defeat gracefully? I do not mean one or two elections, I mean total defeat: Drip by drip, state by state, issue by issue, the culture wars are lost, first in the culture at large, then at the ballot box; there is first a mellowing and then a great falling off of Christian belief across the country; after 20 or 30 years, the US is well set on its way to becoming as secular as Canada. This could happen because although democracy and capitalism are not directly hostile or repressive towards faith, they are still great engines of secularisation, by a slow, relentless process of corrosion. 99% of the religious right would surely accept this with good enough grace, but a toxic remnant may just turn against the systemic engines of secularisation. A self-styled "Stonewall Jackson Brigade" of Christofascist terrorists perhaps, secretly liaising with (the successors of) Al-Qaeda.

The religious right is caught in a terrible dilemma, because they venerate both, the Lord and the constitution. But if it turns out that the classically liberal order prescribed by the US constitution is, in the long run, biased against the maintenance of fundamentalist faith, what will they do? Will they be tempted to tear up the constitution in the service of the Lord?

I agree with this reader's analysis, which is why I felt it necessary to provide an account of a Christianity that can withstand modernity and pluralism in "The Conservative Soul." Such a Christianity isn't fundamentalist. And the incompatibility with real fundamentalism and the American project is at the core of today's debate about conservatism. I'm glad to see D'Souza forcing many conservatives to reject his logical extension of recent developments. But they still have not grappled with the deeper question, I fear. My book tries, at least. I think, in some ways, it is an attempt to redefine conservatism as the antithesis to D'Souza's vision. After reading D'Souza, I understood my own case a little better.