One of the great mysteries of life is political and religious conviction. Why are some people liberals, and others conservative? Why are some people atheists or false religionists, and others Christian? Why do beliefs or convictions, over time, remain fixed or change — by smaller degrees, or by fundamental, life-changing conversion?
In this fallen world, the Christian conservative is one who staunchly and heroically upholds God's Word and God's Law, applying them to all issues personal and public, while struggling against sin in self and in others. In politics, he wisely understands that governments are run by fallen men and so must be organized and maintained accordingly for the protection of society and the good of all. But this true, Christian conservative must not be confused with the weak and ever-compromising and ever-surrendering positional or relative conservative of mere expediency.
The latter, conservative of mere expedience, is a conservative in name only. He is a mere shadow, says R. L. Dabney, that follows Radicalism as it moves forward toward perdition.
Weak by nature and servile by habit, this false conservative stands behind conquering Radicalism as "progressivism" and modernism win the day, never retarding it, and always advancing near his Radical leader. Ambitious and false, but ever-posturing and ever virtue-signaling to gullible and betrayed supporters, this pseudo-conservative is the salt that has lost its savor (Matt. 5:13). He is impotent and worthless and cowardly and will risk nothing for the sake of the truth. Lacking backbone and sturdy principle, and guilty, at root, of the sin of incredulity toward the one and only true (Triune) God, he is controlled opposition with bark without bite, an object of contempt to both Radicals and true conservatives.
In this fallen world, the atheist liberal or Radical is one who denies God and defies and flouts His Law while excusing and rationalizing sin in self and in others. In politics, he sinfully uses government to maximize wicked pleasure, to glorify self, to oppress the Godly, and to subvert, by violent and bloody and murderous counter-engineering, the hierarchically ordered creation.
Etymology tells us that conservatism is about conserving something, while liberalism is about breaking free FROM something to be free FOR something else. The conservative assumes that something of value exists and has been established that should be protected and conserved and extended and perpetuated. Liberalism assumes the existence and establishment of a structure and way of things that is fundamentally wrong and oppressive and which must be set right by revolutionary resistance and inversion.
Liberalism and conservatism are opposite spiritual responses to the original establishments of
God and His creation. Adam and Eve, when obedient to the Lord before the Fall, were pious conservatives of the order established by God. That ended when their own finite natures, by focusing on self rather than God, were deceived and tempted by the serpent Satan. Since the
Fall, man, as a broken or fractured image of God, has been born atheist and liberal, and is everywhere in the chains of sin.
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Earthly societies, beginning with families, are admixtures of Christian sheep and atheist goats. They are fields of wheat heavily invaded and close-sewn with liberal tares. To complicate matters, the elect, before regeneration, live and think like the reprobate, and then, after conversion, struggle with sin. But, by His All-Wise plan, the goats and tares, predestined for destruction and eternal punishment, are made to serve both the earthly and eternal good of the sheep and wheat.
In the meantime, earthly societies tend to be minority elect and majority reprobate. And this is the deep reason why, from an early age, we are foolishly taught that, for the sake of peace and social harmony, we should avoid conversation on political or religious topics.
This prohibition is, at root, to spare the lost heathen among us offense and discomfiture by truth. For "Everyone who does evil hates the light, and does not come to light, lest his deeds should be reproved" (John 3:20); and, as the Apostle says to Galatians who sinned by being offended and angered by truth (4: 16): "Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth?"
But politics and religion, rightly and deeply understood, are about what Plato called "the Good"; and the Good, with a capital G, is another name for God, Who is pure being and pure goodness. And this is why politics and religion, with the Supreme Good that is God as their centers, should ever be the centerpiece of human thought and conversation, and should never be sinfully shunted -- from cowardly and slothful avoidance -- to the periphery of human life (Philippians 4:8; Isaiah 26:3). For under the stricture that prohibits discussion of politics and religion, conversation, and with it thought, is reduced to empty, unedifying, and meaningless claptrap about health, sports, and the weather.
To avoid such mental and spiritual impoverishment, we are in fact expressly commanded to set our minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth (Colossians 3:2). And earthly politics and religion on earth, being about the Good, point beyond the merely earthly, and prefigure, by the Holy injunction to live and govern and worship "on earth as in heaven", that perfect rule and government to come under the Lord in heaven. In this way, religion and politics point man to God and connect man to God as no other subjects can or do. That is why, for example, Aristotle called politics the ruling science under God, Who is the First or Uncaused Cause, or Prime or Unmoved Mover.
The natural and proper ends of politics and religion combine as a common end: the crafting --by right actualization -- of the virtuous and saved and sanctified soul. Politics and religion on earth -- rightly done -- play central and indispensable roles in the Providential enterprise of soul craft.
So, the stricture to avoid discussion of politics and religion is analogous to the insistence on separating church and state. Both are of atheist origin, conspiratorial against God, damaging and impoverishing to human souls, and ultimately, by His Sovereign Plan, futile and foredoomed to failure.
But now, if finite and fallible men do seriously inquire about and discuss politics and religion fully and boldly, what may we reasonably expect as results?
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The philosopher David Hume taught that all political authority is rooted in commonly held opinion about the Good. By political authority, Hume meant all existing governmental and social organization.
But, as the Platonists teach, opinion is not the same thing as knowledge, just as appearance is not the same as reality.
So mere opinion about the Good — and the Just and the Right and the True — differs from actual knowledge of these things. And the gulf between mere opinion and actual knowledge can be very great; and disparate are the consequences of following one and not the other.
As Proverbs 14:12 warns: "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." The corruption and final spiritual ruin of self and of affected others are the fruits of following perverted or uninstructed conscience. So, individuals and whole nations, if deluded about their own good, steer toward ruin.
And knowledge of the Good cannot come from the fallen and sinful human heart and mind. Such knowledge, as compared with mere opinion, can come only from the grace of the one and only true (Triune) God.
But those without saving and sanctifying grace, being lost in sin, and spiritually dead in their trespasses, have opinions about good and evil that are more than mere ignorant or mistaken or false opinion. With hearts desperately wicked (Jer. 17: 9), their opinions are metaphysical inversions, such that actual good appears to them and is called by them "evil", and actual evil appears to them and is called by them "good."
And from wicked and deceitful hearts flow dark feelings that masquerade as genuine kindness and goodness so as to achieve selfish and Godless earthly ends. As Proverbs 12: 10 warns: "A righteous man regards the life of his animal, but the tender mercies of the wicked are only cruelty." This means that, even the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel, when, for selfish and ungodly reasons, they pretend or intend to show mercy.
So, liberals and conservatives don't think and feel the same way.
The thinking of atheist liberals is driven by corrupt and unregenerate feeling and by filthy imagination (Jude 1:8), with reason serving as the slave of base passions. As men and women in their dreamings, with foul and perverted fancies, they defile the flesh, despise just dominion, and rail at dignitaries and dignities. In contrast, the thinking of Christian conservatives, ever mindful of fleshly influences in self and others, is driven by regenerate will pervading a regenerate reason that directs regenerate feeling, regenerate memory, and regenerate imagination under guidance derived by Divine answer to humble prayer.
But the undiscerning many are tricked by the tender mercies of the wicked. False love and false charity and false philanthropy appear to the ignorant many as genuine and true, and therefore as worthy of praise and admiration.
Moreover, humans are social animals, highly susceptible to social pressure, for myriad material and other reasons. Many are deceived by the pretensions of the wicked; and often, the deceived themselves are wicked and are willing parties to the deception. And sometimes even, a mutual and near universal deception, by a corrupt mutual consensus, can, in the most corrupt polities, become the order of the day.
And concerning the wicked many, of the majority reprobate, the witty and incisive G.K. Chesterton observed: "The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people."
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Charged with rendering affairs on earth as in heaven, the Christian statesman must consider existing opinion about the Good. To work effectively and realistically for Godly improvement to earthly society and government, he must keep in mind Hume's valuable and insightful dictum that all political authority is rooted in opinion.
Our statesman understands that, at any given time in a given human society, some ideas are considered by the masses to be acceptable while others are considered unacceptable.
Significantly, Hume's dictum has been given a more recent, corollary expression as the Overton window, which is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.
The image of a window was used to express this political scientific concept because windows have vistas that assume vantage points; and vistas from vantage points allow for the seeing of some things but not others. And, the concept of the Overton window is also known as the window of discourse; suggesting that, within a given window, some things are up for discussion while others are not. And the Overton window of discourse can be better understood when related to a postulate called Trevino's six degrees of acceptance of public ideas. These six degrees include ideas considered: Unthinkable; Radical; Acceptable; Sensible; Popular; and finally, Policy.
Examples of acceptable and unacceptable ideas in our current Overton window in the U.S. in 2023 include, respectively: private ownership of the means of production vs. State ownership:
universal adult suffrage vs. property-based suffrage; general tolerance and legality of homosexuality vs. legal prohibition of sodomy; equal and extensive liberty for adult individuals vs. liberty according to fitness by actualized virtue and personal responsibility; separation of church and state vs. the Scriptural infusion of society and government, whereby due is rendered to both God and Caesar; and so on.
So, the Overton window and Trevino's six degrees -- set against the backdrop of revealed Christian morals -- help us understand where existing opinion is and where it needs to go to satisfy and achieve the Holy injunction "on earth as in heaven." But struggle between the Church and the world ensues as each seeks to move the "is" window to their respective and diametrically opposed "ought" windows.
Today, in the U.S., from the fear of man and from fleshly ignorance, editors often suppress authentically Christian ideas found outside the Overton window. Such views are deemed verboten, or taboo, or forbidden. They are deemed offensive, and, worst of all, hurtful to the stupid and unregenerate feelings of ideologically protected groups.
Political correctness and wokeness and cancel culture are aggressive, totalitarian attempts to move and reframe the Overton window so as to totally control all thought and language in behalf of Marxist, Satanic ideals. And Christians, of course, as salt and light, are charged with opposing this atheist, Satanic tyranny with the Truth and His truths. As Christians, "We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ" (2 Cor. 10:5).
According to God's Providential plan, opinions about political authority in different nations can and do change, and Overton windows in those nations, accordingly, will move or shift. The political and spiritual history of man in the earthly life, from creation to Judgment, is a preordained, Providential unfolding of such window shifts between the extremes of Godly conservatism and satanic liberalism.
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We said earlier, mimicking Rousseau, that since the Fall, man, as a broken or fractured image of God, has been born atheist and liberal, and is everywhere in the chains of sin.
This means that, as folk grow older and gain experience in life and of the world, with some being fundamentally transformed in perspective and character and conduct by His saving and sanctifying grace, populations at large tend to become less liberal and more conservative.
An old saw, of different versions, variously attributed to Burke and Hugo and Churchill and others, points to this link between aging and life experience and conservatism, saying: "If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35, you have no brain."
So, by His Providence, youth, in its wild energy and carnality and causal inexperience, challenges the established ways of societies continuously, like winds that test and strengthen the grip of tree roots on soil and rock. Youthful challenges prompt the healthy self-examination and adaptation and shoring up of social and cultural and governmental forms.
But the challenge to society by carnal and inexperienced youth, to be salutary and not destructive, must be tempered and channeled by elders who point to and lead by the authority of accumulated wisdom and the Highest Authority.
But what then are we to make of old liberals, and especially when they are blood kin, as our "heartstrings throb like harp strings" for them (Isaiah 16: 11)? For there is no fool, we are told, like an old one, hardened against truth. So, do we despair for the ultimate fate of their souls? Do we conclude that wisdom and salvation have passed them by? Do we fold our arms in sad admission they are reprobate? Or do we, from love, work and pray to the last breath for their salvation, ever hoping that, by His grace and sovereign will, we may play a part in saving them (Jude 1:23) by snatching them — even at their last earthly moment -- from the everlasting fire?
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Winston McCuen is a metaphysician and political philosopher and Christian apologist. He is a Reformed believer, native South Carolinian, proud son of the Confederacy, and outspoken Southern patriot. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in philosophy from Emory University, is a John C. Calhoun scholar, and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Furman University in history and philosophy. Formerly a welding instructor, philosophy instructor and Latin teacher, he holds multiple welding certifications and is a senior certified nuclear metallurgical welding engineer.
