Conservatisms

Poulos tries to draw contrasts:

Cultural conservatism, after all, needs to end up meaning something other than theological conservatism; otherwise those two concepts collapse. Theological conservatism, of course, will likely, if not always, inform a cultural conservatism.

But mere Christianity is likely, in some key respects, to inform and undergird and ensure cultural conservatism. Similarly, cultural conservatism and social conservatism cannot mean the same thing. I have argued for a while that social conservatives seek to take cultural conservative convictions and commitments and transform the practices they produce into law by way of politics. Over the past several decades, the main strategy for doing this has been a vehement resort to national Washington politics in the executive, in the legislative, and in the judiciary. There is no way around the fact that Washington matters; conservatives make a big mistake to write off national politics and federal governance as too profane or shameful or impure, especially now, especially in the voluptuous catharsis of guilt. But other conservatives err by the same token in believing that panic and despair can be sealed off, as if by tourniquet, by "getting the movement right" ideologically and nationally. Because that notion itself is incoherent unless it can separate out theological, cultural, social, and political conservatism, and Republicanism, and understand in which spheres they operate more and less robustly.