Now in working through this issue it is crucial that we not affirm the consequent. All cows have four legs, but having four legs doesn’t make it a cow. I would also want to insist that all lawful sexual behavior must be heterosexual, but that doesn’t make all heterosexual behavior lawful. There is a moral necessity for some form of heterosexuality, but that does not mean that if it is hetero, its okay. It is with this proviso that I want to argue for the moral necessity of some form of conservatism.
Many forms of conservatism are unlawful and idolatrous, some are confused and muddled, and some are overtly wicked. For the record, and right up front, I am not in favor of those. Out of these, some have no real right to be called conservatism at all; they are oxymoronic. A big government conservative, for example, is like trying to sell packages of jumbo shrimp. Other forms of conservatism have the right to be called that, but the morality of it depends on what you are conserving and why. It might (by historical usage) be a genuine form of conservatism and still be wrong.
So what am I arguing for? I am saying that if you were to sit a thoughtful Christian down and ask him a battery of questions about our public life, if you gave him a well-crafted biblical worldview test, when he was done answering, if he had answered biblically, the conclusion you would draw is that this guy is “some kind of conservative.” The only way to avoid this outcome is by getting the answers all wrong — which happened because you went to the wrong seminary, enrolled in grad school without any filters for your heart, or by watching too many sitcoms with all the discernment of a vacuum cleaner. Another possibility is if the testee realizes that
he is going to be labeled as some kind of conservative at the end of the process, and because he, for emotional reasons, doesn’t want that, he refuses to answer any questions if his answers would match those of James Dobson. He has already begun to hate labels, which means he is just in transition. Getting the answers right (privately) is a way station to getting the answers wrong.
The questions I have in mind would concern issues like the death penalty, redistributive taxation, the size and purpose of the military, homosexual marriage, abortion, global warming, the regulatory state, and so on. Make the test as long and as thoughtful and as nuanced as you want. At the end of it, if a man believes his Bible and lives by it, he will be labeled “a conservative” of some sort.
Let us change the metaphor. If you are a passenger in a car, and you have opinions, then you will, from time to time, say that you think the car should go left or right, stop or go. That is, unless you are trussed up with duct tape in the trunk, with a cloth in your mouth. Or perhaps you are in the trunk of your own volition, with a bad case of the sulks. In these two latter instances, it doesn’t matter what you think about the car’s direction — your voluntary or imposed condition is one of formal detachment. You are out of the picture, and you can truthfully say that your position constitutes a third way. So if the other car passengers have various “political parties” concerning their opinions about which direction they believe the car should go, and who should be driving, the guys in the trunk can be absolved of the whole thing.
For the rest, the choices that the car passengers face can be categorized as pretty basic and binary. Either this guy drives or he doesn’t. Either we turn left or we don’t. Either we stop or we keep going. Translate this. Either we support this man for president or we don’t. Either we execute this murderer or we don’t. Either we go to war or we don’t. Either we inflate the currency or we don’t. And when people look at you for your input on what to do at this intersection, you either give them a thumbs up, or you don’t.
Now suppose that it is a pretty long road trip, one on which your opinion has been sought many times — whether or not it has ever been followed. It has been sought enough times for the other passengers to have a pretty good idea of the way you will vote next time — you never want to stop for a White Castle burger break, and they know this. In fact, they have a name for people like you — and that name is “a conservative.”
Idealists and purists give their input in this way — they never answer the question at the intersection. They are utopians. They want to pull off the road, build a car factory, build a new kind of car from scratch, the kind that will drive right, and they insist that this be done right now. But nobody listens to those guys.
If we are “culturally engaged,” as folks put it these days, and we are talking about the issues faced by this car, under these circumstances, there is no way to avoid the charge of faithfulness to the Word apart from becoming unfaithful to that Word. The slaughter of the innocents must stop, sodomy is perversion and cannot be sanctified at city hall, the Great Commission told us to preach Christ to all nations, not to impose secularism on them, and the state is greedy and swollen to an extent that staggers the imagination and must repent of its thieveries. Oh, and the United States of America must bow the knee to Christ. Try articulating this without drawing the observation that you, my friend, are a conservative. No, make that ultra-conservative.