Jesus Christ promised to build His Church, and that the gates of hell would not prevail against it. I’m heartened, as Europe slumbers in secularism, and as The Nones emerge in the U.S., to see the faith, in its ecclesial Catholic and Orthodox forms, growing in places light Africa.
But secularity isn’t the whole story, even in the land that best typifies it, France. There was a huge rally against same-sex marriage there, and despite the disclaimer of being a “faith movement,” the reports are that opposition is strongest among young French, who are markedly more observant of Catholicism than their parents, having come of age under Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
Vive la France! indeed.
Alan Jacobs at The American Conservative asks “Am I A Conservative?” and answers much as I might these days:
I feel roughly as alienated from [the Republican] party as I do from the Democratic Party. I hold a number of political views that strong-minded Republicans typically find appalling: I think racism is one of the greatest problems in American society today; I am not convinced that austerity programs are helpful in addressing our economic condition; I am absolutely convinced that what many Republicans call free-market capitalism is in fact crony capitalism, calculated to favor the extremely wealthy and immensely powerful multinational corporations; I think that for all of the flaws of Obamacare, it was at least an attempt to solve a drastically unjust and often morally corrupt network of medical care in this country; I dislike military adventurism, and believe that our various attempts at nation-building over the past decade were miscalculated from the outset.
So is there any sense in which I might plausibly be called a conservative? I don’t really know; I’ll leave that to others to decide … I do have three overarching political commitments (or beliefs, or convictions) that are more important to me than any others.
The first is that I strive to be a consistently pro-life Christian. I am aware that many people believe that the whole notion of a “consistent pro-life ethic” is a way for liberal Christians to minimize the evil of abortion by wrapping it in a whole series of other issues …
My second steady commitment is to the principle of subsidiarity. I believe that almost all of our social evils and shortcomings can be handled better by small, local organizations and empowered persons than by national institutions or for that matter even state-level institutions …
My third leading political conviction is that the wisdom of our ancestors is both deeply valuable and tragically neglected …
What would you add to flesh out a Christian position on public issues?
Mark Edwards, a Professor of American History at Michigan’s Spring Arbor University, asks in a guest posting at the blog of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, Are Conservatives Parasites?
If one takes a cribbed view of “conservatives,” the elliptical answer is that “[c]onservative evangelicals since World War II have been among the most important champions of Big Government.” Quoting Axel R. Schäfer’s Piety and Public Funding:
Therefore, the key to mobilizing this electorate, and to the broader cultural resonance of the New Right, was not relentless opposition to “big government” but the ability to calibrate effectively between an antistatist rhetoric and support for the basic structures of state building. This is where the conservative evangelicals left their imprint. While they continued to assail the federal government, they combined fiery antistatist rhetoric, entrepreneurial individualism, and moral traditionalism with staunch support for large-scale military spending, the social security state, and public funding for nongovernmental social service organizations. In short, conservative evangelicalism and its new church-state stance mediated between neoconservatives’ market fundamentalism and postwar conservatives’ acceptance of the liberal state.
So I’m thinking, tentatively, that in Edwards/Schäfer terms, “subsidiarity,” unless it’s Distributist, may be parasitic: faith-based organizations taking government money, less lavish overhead, to do government’s bidding.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 