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Hickory Grove Presbyterian Church
[Upper Room] The Gospel According to Conservatism
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The "right" may line up more readily with biblical principles, but that doesn't mean it's free of its own moral and ideological shortcomings. Join us as we consider political conservatism at a high level—how it does and doesn't line up with Scripture.
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Heavenly Father, thank you for this evening where we get to come together and can consider your word and how it applies to the world in which we live. Thank you for Jesus, the church's one foundation, Lord, that ultimately we stand upon Him, not any preconceived notions of what this world should be, not any political ideologies or isms, but on Jesus our Lord. Help us, Father, tonight, to take all captives or all thoughts captive to the obedience of Christ. Help us to think well, help us to speak well, help us to understand well how your word applies to our world. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Alright. So tonight we are talking about conservatism. And for the sake of preliminaries, right, I am not a I am not an expert in conservative ideology. I'm not a political scientist. I've not studied the history of the conservative political tradition. I'm trusting that we've got a fair bit of expertise in this room, a fair bit of informed opinion. So that'll be good, right? So we're thinking these things out together more from a biblical perspective, and we're not doing a deep dive into conservative ideology itself. So another bit of preliminary of this week we're doing conservative, conservatism. Next week we're doing progressivism. And what we're not doing is stacking up political ideologies and uh trying to decide which one's the best. I'll put my cards on the table. This isn't a surprise for me. I'm for you. I'm a conservative about every sense of the term, right? Cards on the table there. But the purpose of tonight's discussion isn't to have like a rah-rah chat about conservatism and why it may or may not be the best way forward in terms of politics and governance in America. Our purpose is to look at the broad worldview that is conservatism, what it gets right, and also what it gets wrong. Because even though biblical Christianity may be conservative in its bent, and again, cards on the table, I believe it is far more conservative and it's bent than progressive if you want to map it in the political ideological ideological spectrum. But still, that doesn't mean that conservatism equals Christianity. The two things are not the same, and it's important for us to understand where they might diverge. There are idols to be sussed out and burned on either side of the political spectrum. So for anyone who might call themselves a conservative, again, that's the camp I'm in, right? Tonight's a good time to look for the log in our own political eye before next week we start looking at all the specs in uh the other side's eyes. So, with that, say one more preliminary thing. It's, you know, I think we're going to do best if we try to leave as much other siding as we can out of the discussion. Like I or someone else might say something tonight to the effect of conservatives sometimes emphasize personal responsibility at the expense of compassion for the poor. Right? Somebody might say that. That might be a thing that comes out in our conversation. And you might be tempted to say, yeah, but progressives' version of compassion makes people way too dependent on the state. Right? Yeah, but A, I think you're probably right. B, again, what we're doing is we're not trying to do a both sides kind of thing. We're not stacking up worldviews today. We're looking at conservatism through the lens of scripture so that we can hold all thoughts captive, especially those thoughts or systems of thought that we might otherwise call our own. So conservatism, we've used the word a lot. Um ignore your sheet for now. If I were to say conservatism, what am I talking about? What is that ism? Caesar?
SPEAKER_10Um it's a political worldview that's in like the big picture is the second from the middle of the political spectrum. And it's like people want they want change, but they want it in a slow deliberate and considerative way.
SPEAKER_05Nice, buddy. So it's a political worldview, believes in change, but change that is slow and deliberate change? That's good, right? And we'll talk some about that as a principle of conservative, the conservatism, as opposed to you know, uh fast and reckless change. Okay, what else? What else would we say about conservatism? Less government control. Yeah, um less government. Yeah, conservatism has to do with the amount of government, also the location of government. We'll talk some about that with voluntary association and subsidiarity. Uh, conservatives, by and large, we believe that it's better to locate power locally in smaller communities. It's better to have uh governance closer to the actual people who are affected, as opposed to having all of our laws dictated by a small group of people who live a couple thousand miles away. Over an ocean.
SPEAKER_11I'd say you take the base word conserve. They want to preserve what works. Yep. So it's a preservation. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_05That's very important too. That's always an important question in the conversation about conservatism. It's like, exactly what are you trying to conserve? Exactly what are you trying to preserve, right? And there are different answers to that question. Uh, you know, the American Foundation, the Constitution, moral order, things of that nature. Good, what else?
SPEAKER_02No. Individualism that focuses on personal responsibility. Yeah. Personal responsibility.
SPEAKER_05That goes. Yeah, we'll talk about that when we talk about moral order. Anything else? Capitalism. Capitalism? Interesting.
unknownAlright.
SPEAKER_05I didn't really space the same thing. Free enterprise. Capitalism, free enterprise, yeah. They're not exactly the same thing. A darker marker? I don't have a darker marker right now. Sorry, Al.
SPEAKER_08If you look at it, but we're better. No, it didn't work.
SPEAKER_13Tom? What? I don't want to talk about it. They believe in traditional family moral values and sexual morse. Yeah. Yeah, again, yeah.
SPEAKER_05Tradition. That blue end doesn't work. It's not darker. Is that better? No, I can't. Oh, okay. Alright, Stan. Stan corrected. I got one. Somebody's OCD is on a fire now. It's being different colors. Tradition.
SPEAKER_13Values. Sexual morse. Yeah. Oh, sexual. Yeah, right. I know we're gonna codes.
SPEAKER_02And that same thing, foundational principles. Same type of principle. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05I was just putting principles, but yeah. Constitution versus living documents. Right. Gail, is your hand up?
SPEAKER_13No, I'm sorry. Fiscal responsibility.
SPEAKER_05Fiscal responsibility. Yeah. Okay. Anything else? Caesar?
SPEAKER_10Um less. How did I put it? Oh, like uh conservatives don't believe in uh transgender things.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, transgenderism, right? That would go hand in hand with tradition, values, sexual mores. It goes hand in hand with moral order, which is the first thing on our list. So we can do that. We can, so these are great, right? These are a lot of the typical things that we think of when we think about conservatism. Whether we're thinking about conservatism and like the American political spectrum, but also just kind of in general about a sort of disposition toward the world. Like you can be a conservative in terms of your disposition without necessarily uh signing up for a particular party. I know that's that's hard, right? In our day. I mean, for some of us who might consider ourselves political conservatives, at times it's very difficult to map that onto one of the parties. There's one that fits the bill better than the other one, to be sure, but even that, not always greatly. So these are great. To give us something to kind of a set of rails to run on for our discussion tonight, what I want to look at is uh ten conservative principles. They come from an essay written by Russell Kirk in 1987 titled Ten Conservative Principles. Kirk is considered by many to be the father of the modern American conservative intellectual movement. He wrote a book in 1953 titled The Conservative Mind that helped to define conservative thought, and he wrote other books after it.
SPEAKER_12Is this Charlie Kirk?
SPEAKER_05No, this is Russell Kirk. Yeah, Charlie Kirk was very much not alive in 1953. Yeah. So conservatism today, in a lot of ways, it's less uh it's less focused on philosophy, ideology, first principles, and more interested in kind of immediate concerns, the border, economy, cultural issues. And there are reasons for that. So we're taking a kind of more intellectual approach because it helps us to best understand the worldview and how it does and doesn't line up with scripture. So there's more to say about conservatism, but these ten principles give us a good framework for our discussion. And the first principle there on your sheet, and if you're not looking at it, on the other side of your sheet music, is this sheet of ten conservative principles. This idea of moral order, that there is an abiding order to which individuals and societies ought to conform. This moral order, it exists in the world. And if we abide by it, it brings harmony to our lives as individuals and to our life as a body politic. So a society in which individuals are governed by this strong sense of right and wrong and justice and honor and morality, it'll be a good society. It'll be a society that makes proper use of its freedom. But a society in which individuals deny the existence of that order and try to go their own way, that's a bad society that makes poor use of its freedom. Now, this is different, right? This is somewhat different, I'll say, than libertarianism. Because libertarianism is a kind of freedom to pursue your own sense of order. Whereas a more classically conservative sort of viewpoint is to say, no, the the order exists outside of us and we want to abide by it. And you see some tension in that in modern political parties again, kind of this libertarian bent versus this conservative bent. And that explains why, say, like in the Republican Party, it's the tent has gotten bigger in terms of morality. So today, even as opposed to 10, 20 years ago, you'll see a lot more accommodation in the Republican platform for things like abortion or same-sex marriage or uh fiscally irresponsible approaches to the debt. What's that, Tom? I was gonna say the legalization of some drugs. Yeah, legalization of marijuana, those kinds of things. So, you know, there's there's a real pull there in that direction. And yet the basic principle remains conservatives believe in a moral order that ought to be respected for the good of all. That's the first principle. So for each of these, I thought it would be good for us if we just think about them for a few minutes kind of from a biblical perspective. What do they get right? And what might they get wrong? So think of that first one in terms of moral order. What does that get right? Following the Ten Commandments. Is there a moral order?
SPEAKER_12Well, in America, it's impossible to separate our past with the fact that we were founded as a Protestant nation. And by definition, the teachings of the Bible were where most people got their morals years and years ago, centuries ago. So we would say, yes, there is a moral, and it's founded by scripture, and most of the founding fathers at some level believe that. I mean, yeah, even if they weren't what we would call, you know, God, you know, I mean, God Thomas Jefferson for us to believe that Jesus was the greatest moral teacher that ever lived, but he also didn't believe in miracles. So that's but at some level the the Bible was the basis of our morality.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so biblically, this is true. God is on the throne. I mean, hands down in the world, yep. Um, in terms of ordering ordering society, this is awesome, but a little idealistic. Like in terms of because of the sin problem. So, I mean what does they ought to do our. Right, right, right. I I I agree. I agree. It's just there's I I'm in agreement with it. I think that there is such a thing, but it's it's a little bit of a messy gray even in the founding of our nation. It wasn't always it wasn't always a bunch of roses, and there was actually a lot of variation with people who had a lot of different ideologies coming into the United States, yeah, even prior to our formation. So it's just a lot more. Yeah. This is very simplified.
SPEAKER_05Oh, yeah. Yeah. But yeah, it's supposed to be. Yeah, it has to be. Um, even in the essay, there are very, you know, right or wrong, right? These are the principles that he kind of distilled and identified behind conservatism. It's it is coming from a very idealistic perspective. The devil's in the details, and all these things need to be applied, and there's lots of diversity even within the more conservative camp. But the basic idea that there is a moral order to which we ought to conform, you know, leaving aside all the difficulties of codifying that in law and applying it to a society, it is basically true, right? Proverbs 11:10. When it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices, and when the wicked perish, there are shouts of gladness. Right? There is a moral order. And insofar as the society supports the upholding of that moral order, the society prospers. But if it's a society in, you know, if the righteous prosper or the wicked perish, that's a morally ordered society. And the obverse or the converse is true. If the wicked prosper and the righteous perish, then what do you have? You have a morally disordered society. You have all of the kind of societies you've seen throughout history that turn to absolute moral chaos and ultimately fail, ultimately fall. Right? So, you know, even the Ten Commandments, right? The Ten Commandments are the recapitulation of the moral law applied to the situation of Israel. So the moral law is the law that is based in God's own righteous character and applies to all of creation. There was a moral law in the garden, and there will even be a moral law in the new heavens and new earth. So there's always and the glory of it is that we will be able to adhere to it and conform to it perfectly. So moral order exists, right? And put this in contrast to what we talked about when we talked about critical theory. And one of the big things about critical theory is that there is no moral order. What we have is just what we have. And any idea of moral order is an imposition of human beings in power. So the conservative wants to say, no, it's not might makes right. There actually is an order in the world. And that is deeply and biblically true. And even unbelievers have a sense of that order. Romans 2. The law of God is written on our hearts, it's in our consciences, right? Even if we don't have a Bible, we know at some level, even though we try to suppress the truth in unrighteousness, we know that things like murder are wrong. So the moral law is there, that moral order exists. But let's ask the opposite question. Where can this sense of moral order and conservatism maybe go wrong in a conservative worldview?
SPEAKER_15Is this moral order abiding order, is that presuming Judeo-Christian order? Because in India they have a different moral order. Do they? You go into their house, they have an idol. Each one has an idol, and you bow down to that idol.
SPEAKER_05Wait, do they? Is should they be doing that? In India? Yeah.
SPEAKER_12That's funny.
SPEAKER_05So are we are we saying that idolatry is okay in India?
SPEAKER_12No, but we're just No, why not? Because it doesn't follow scripture.
SPEAKER_15Yes, there is so it's it's presuming a biblical.
SPEAKER_05This is the Well, it's presuming something even more basic than that, right? It's just saying there is an order written to into creation itself to which every human being ought to conform. And that's the biblical worldview, right? We don't believe that idolatry is right just because these other countries developed a rich tradition of idolatry.
SPEAKER_06Right?
SPEAKER_05It's Romans 1, uh all the way down, that these people have turned aside and they've suppressed the truth and unrighteousness and they've worshiped the creature rather than the creator who's blessed forever. Amen. So that's what we're getting at here, right? Now, you know, and that's true. I guess one of the ways in which a conservative worldview could go wrong is that you could. You have could have different nationally inflected forms of conservatism, where it's like, you know, us in America, our moral order is the Bible, but in this country over there, their moral order is the Quran, and their moral order is the Bhagavad Gita or whatever like that. That would be a kind of conservatism. But it that would be a postmodern kind of conservatism where it would sort of say, like, your truth is good for you, your truth is good for you, you uphold your worldview, that's fine, we'll uphold our worldview, that's fine. Right? So that's that is a place where we can sense a little rub, a little tension with uh a truly biblical, a truly Christian conservatism isn't going to settle for a moral order that's just kind of hashed out by a particular community. We actually want to go deeper into the moral order that exists within creation because God put it there. And that moral order is borne witness to in Scripture. Right? That's God discloses the moral order to us in the Bible.
SPEAKER_04It's just knowing right from wrong. To me, conservatism is knowing right from wrong, but the problem with worldview is what's right for one person may not be right for another. You know, that's the worldview.
SPEAKER_05Right. That's that's just basically. Yeah, that's that's relativism, right? And that's that's what we're saying. It's like, yeah, moral order is just another way of saying right and wrong. And and right and wrong in the deepest and most foundational kind of way. It's like that thing that just happened is wrong. Not because I don't like it, not because we as a society have decided that we don't like it, but because, in God's view, according to God's order of things, that thing violates his universal law. Right? That's that's the kind of ethical worldview that the Bible. Brings to everything. Again, Neil is right. In terms of codifying that in a law, it gets sticky and it's hard to apply. Neil, what were you going to say?
SPEAKER_01To contrast with our mission as Christians, you can convince somebody that there's a moral order and they're still lost. So, in other words, moral order for me, though it points in the right direction, doesn't go far enough. Like when Paul and Barnabas saw the idolatry at Lystra, they tore their clothes because it's exactly what we're talking about. But what they do, they preach the gospel. So it we the end game isn't really, hey, I want you to be morally ordered ordered and I want you to be a good human being and no right from wrong. It's it's much more than that. So we can't stop, it falls short. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, that's yeah, you're definitely right. All right, let's look at the second uh the second principle. And we're actually gonna kind of bring two and three together. What's that? Oh, Larry, sorry.
SPEAKER_03You'd asked about where could uh conservatism kind of go off the rails, really?
SPEAKER_05Well, where it goes where that idea of a moral order can be misapplied or unhelpful.
SPEAKER_03In the area of judgment, you know, we could become, you know, God is the judge, he appoints judges, but we could become overjudgmental. How we apply the judgment.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah. All right, numbers two and three. So this idea of custom convention and continuity. And the idea is that human society is not a machine that we just happen to build in an afternoon. Human society is the product of evolving social mores and influences. We have a way of doing things that has emerged out of a lot of time, a lot of trial, a lot of error. And so we do well as a society to respect the customs and conventions that have been handed to us and to be wary of radical attempts to tear them down or replace them. You know, tagging that on to principle three, because they're so close, this idea of prescription is that we are like dwarves that stand on the shoulders of giants. There's been wisdom handed down over the generations. Morals, customs, conventions, institutions, and those things have stood the test of time for a reason. And so, because they've stood the test of time, they carry a kind of normative force for us. Like it's it's if this has worked for our ancestors, then who are we to doubt it? Right? So, receiving our social and cultural inheritance and allowing it to form us and saying, no, we have a kind of responsibility to this. We have a torch to carry, and it's not, you know, if we're gonna change that at all, we need to be really careful and circumspect about that change. All right, same questions. What does that get right? Biblically speaking, sorry.
SPEAKER_03I think it would only get right if we remember, if we actually carry the torch from generation to generation, which on the opposite side, we haven't been carrying the torch. Therefore, people are forgetting. History's being wiped out, so conservatives are not teaching the biblical approach to their children and their children. So that's yeah, that we would get it right when we do that.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah. Yeah, ignorance of your tradition is a sure way to kill it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, or you could teach them to the child and then they go to college, yeah, or if they go into the world, yeah. Yeah, that's it. I mean, then you tear it down on the that's happened a lot later.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. But think thinking biblically about this principle that we have an inheritance to receive, to conserve, to preserve, right, and to abide by. Richard.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we have a tendency to say, uh, why do you do it this way? Well, we've always done it that way. But when you ask why, sometimes you don't have an answer. Yeah. It shows you the problem. You know, hey, if it's not a belief, it's not something that has life in it, yeah, person in it. Like, why do you do things a good thing? You cut on the scripture because the scripture is the word of God and Jesus Christ, you know, yeah, he's had to believe. But so many times you get away from that. Yeah. And like the Lord's talking about, you know, you don't teach your kids. A lot of kids go to college and they don't immediately they drop out of church.
SPEAKER_08Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And then they get married, and then after they have kids, they might send you thinking, sure, sure. Yeah, they lost that personal aspect. They don't know the why. Yeah. Where we are, how we got here, and there's no other answer anymore. Of course, yeah.
SPEAKER_05It always resurves, but well, biblically, there is strong justification for receiving our inheritance. Right? The fifth commandment, honor your father and mother. Right? There's a reason why they did things the way they did them. And you may disagree at the end of the day, but maybe you should understand it before you try to go a different way. And the same is true more with you know, more broadly, with one generation in one generation. The book of Proverbs. It's one generation handing down wisdom to the next. It's fathers and mothers teaching their sons and daughters how to live. Uh, biblically speaking, Psalm 145, 4. One generation shall commend your works to another and shall declare your mighty acts. 1 Corinthians 15, 3, Paul, I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scripture. Within the Bible, this there's this strong view of handing things down from one generation to the next, uh, teaching our children and teaching them well to understand what we do, why we do it, where it comes from, the whole Passover, right? That's baked into the Passover. When your kids ask, what are we doing here? tell them what we're doing here, right? And that's how we transmit the faith. So there's, you know, there's uh that's good, that's biblical, that's right, but okay, where does it go wrong? Al.
SPEAKER_08So I was gonna say one thing where uh consistent with your point there is uh was Leviticus where don't tear down the ancient markers. Yeah. No never, because it's based on land, but I think the principle applies, you know, don't destroy something until you understand what it is destroyed. One of the places where it went wrong is even the uh genesis of our denomination is with the issue of slavery. So I'm not sure if in 1860 or 61 I would have been an abolitionist, or I just want to get rid of it slowly, or if I would have been a slave trader, I don't know what I would have been. But um, you know, what a lot of people use hey, we've always had slavery, which is true, it's been excellent, but you know, then the then good men of good men of good will split uh partly over that issue, which I say is so clear today. Yeah, but uh so you can use that traditional argument to defend something that you know you may not want to defend.
SPEAKER_05And that's where this gets squirrely, right, Caesar?
SPEAKER_09It sometimes gets squirrely when it's being passed down at a younger age. Sometimes those kids just don't want to listen or they don't understand and their parents don't explain.
SPEAKER_05Oh yeah, rebellion, yeah, child, childish rebellion, yeah, that'll destroy a society. Yeah, that's good, Caesar. But you know, Al brings up a really important point, right? And and it's uh this it yes, we should receive, yes, we should defer in certain ways, but we can look through history at all kinds of institutions that were handed down from generation to generation to generation. Uh, you know, Greco-Roman sexual immorality, infanticide, slavery, all kinds of things in the world that really didn't get rectified until something dramatic happened, like, say, the preaching of the gospel to the ends of the earth. And right, all of a sudden we stop killing babies and treating women like, you know, pleasure machines and things like that. So the the tradition argument can kind of cut both ways. It's not enough, right, to say we've always done it this way. And remember Jesus with the Pharisees in Matthew 15, for the sake of your tradition, you have made void the word of God. Where the Pharisees got to this point where, you know, this tradition that they passed down from generation to generation, this is how we do it. We ought to respect our tradition. Jesus shows up and says, Yeah, but you got sideways with the Bible. So you have to always be willing to submit and subject that handed-down tradition to what's revealed in God's word. That kind of brings us back around to the issue of moral order. Next principle on there is prudence or wisdom, right? Plato said that for a statesman, prudence is the chief of all virtues. Any new proposal should therefore be weighed against its long-term consequences. A conservative critique of progressives is that they're often eager so eager to change to change things that they don't really reckon with the long-term effects of their proposed changes. So, from the conservative worldview, sudden change in reform, we think is more likely to do harm than good. If you, you know, something's happening, right? And somebody says, don't just stand there, do something. For the conservative, it's more, don't just do something, stand there. And that's, you know, that's kind of the just the conservative's disposition. Like, don't don't move the landmarker unless you know why it's there. Or G.K. Chesterton, he talked about, you know, you don't move a fence or tear it down until you understand why the fence is there. And conservatives have that basic disposition toward the world. Uh we're willing to change, and we'll talk about that when we get down to 10, but slowly, carefully, prudently. What does that get right biblically? Rick, were you gonna say something?
SPEAKER_15Well, yeah, it does seem though like they aren't quick to put the fence back up. When the fence has been torn down, that is something that they do, they're wanting to do quickly. They want to get the fence back up. You know, oh you tore down this fence. No, no, no, we don't want to tear down the fence, we want to wait. So we're gonna put it back up.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, there's a definite bias for the status quo, and if that's disrupted, conservatives won't want to go back to it. Prudence is biblical, right? Proverbs 22, 3. The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it. It's pretty hard to make uh a biblical argument against prudence, but where might it go wrong in terms of a conservative worldview? Where we're talking about this uh this kind of slowness to act, Neil.
SPEAKER_01I was full disclosure, all right, I was a community activist for a semester, um, because I had to be through the thing. So we we were pulling a together a whole wide coalition on voting rights for felons in Tennessee. And we had people from across the political spectrum to join us in the effort. I don't actually know if it passed, but part of it was you know, if somebody has done their time and they've done their service in as incarceration, they should be, you know, free to vote, free to you know, live their life. Um but were you forced to be pro this in the well let's let's let Neil finish what he's saying. Um the the issue there was what what was what were the unintended consequences of this? You know, and that's the prudence. Right. Um and we had a we had you know liberals and conservatives and whoever on on the team to to bring this forward. Um and it was a very interesting eye-opening experience because um it was a lot more complex than I originally thought. Yeah, uh, it's a lot there's a lot more gray and weird things that go on.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And you have to have a lot of wisdom to, you know, who you align yourself with is another issue as to why I think conservatives are pushed back against change because they don't want to be aligned with someone, even if it's a good idea, they don't want to necessarily be aligned with people who want to make that change and ram it through. And so there's always that that that fear that goes on. Yeah, so that's what one of the things I learned. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08I was supposed to say uh the book right, but uh Thomas Sowell um economist uh quote something like there are no um with economic solutions, there are no solutions, there's only trade-offs. And uh we don't always think about any solution we propose, whatever it is, has some sort of trade-off. Right. And uh we need to be maybe we think more in terms uh sometimes those in terms of specific solutions, but I'm not aware of many that actually even conservatives I think don't think about that many times as well.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah, there's because that's fundamentally true, that you know, even the simplest seeming proposal that it seems like everybody could get on board with it, you know, some expert comes out of the woodwork and says, Well, have you thought of blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and like ten unintended consequences that end up to like the massacre of all the puppies in the world or something like that? Just things that you don't see. I'm kidding, right? Right? Things that you don't see. But, you know, as as conservatives, conservatives want to be slow, want to be prudent, but sometimes, you know, there is a such thing as the analysis of or the paralysis of analysis, right? In your desire to uh really think everything out, you perhaps don't act with the kind of urgency that the uh the situation requires, right? Proverbs 3 verse 28 do not say to your neighbor, go and come again, tomorrow I will give it, when you have it with you. And this I this idea that like if you're in a position to make a change that will benefit someone or to uh to bless someone in need, uh maybe you shouldn't put that off until tomorrow and just go ahead and do it now. Right? We don't want to misuse that, we don't want to be turn everything into an urgency, but that there is a kind of bias for inaction in a conservative sort of worldview.
SPEAKER_02I think sometimes we have or are perceived as having a knee-jerk reaction against any change.
SPEAKER_05Sure. Yeah, Jane?
SPEAKER_00You know what the one thing I always remember is that I've learned very child is once you open that door for whatever they ask for, you can't close it back so often. Yeah, it's not like we can say, oh no, but it's too late a lot of times.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_00That's a thought.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. All right, next principle we have is variety. In a thriving society, there will always be distinctions in class and station. Inequality is not inherently unjust or undesirable. So basically, there's there's diversity in society, not just in terms of institutions and viewpoints and ways of life, but also diversity of order, diversity of class. There's a such thing as winners and losers, high achievers and low performers, and a society that actually tries to flatten that out, whether it's by way of socialism or communism or any other Marxist variety, that actually saps that that society of its dynamism and energy. Uh, Kirk, here's a quote from Kirk Russell, not Charlie. The only true forms of equality are equality at the last judgment and equality before a just court of law. All other attempts at leveling must lead at best to social stagnation. Society requires honest and able leadership. And if natural and institutional differences are destroyed, presently some tyrant or host of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality. So this is, you know, different conservatives will have different views on stuff, right? So we don't want to paint everything with the same brush. But it's this basic kind of bias against things like affirmative action or things like, you know, a kind of regulatory enforcement of equality of outcomes, right? Where we where we just make sure everybody in society is on the same level, right? For conservatives, we say no. In a thriving society, there are winners and there are losers, and yes, some may have more than others, but compare that to other societies in which you have this artificial leveling from the government. The lowest in our society is higher than the highest in those kinds of societies. This idea that the rising tide raises all ships. This idea of variety, biblically speaking.
SPEAKER_12We want a hierarchy of competencies. You do not want me to operate on your eyes.
SPEAKER_15Well, different parts of the body.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, different parts of the body. Yeah.
SPEAKER_15We're not all doing the same thing.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Yeah. Is this prescriptive or descriptive? This is descriptive, right? And you know, depending on your kind of this is what conservative kind of is, right? Conservatism, right? So that's part of why we're evaluating it biblically to see what aspects of it pass the scripture smell test and what others were kind of like, eh. Because there's an extent to which this is kind of right. You know, if you look at the early church, Luke is addressed to a wealthy Gentile by the name of Theophilus. In Acts, they have house churches. Well, those house churches are owned by Christians, and they welcome other Christians in who don't have houses in which you can have stuff. They're sharing all things in common, which suggests that some have more than other people have. Uh Jesus in Matthew 26, 11, you will always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me. So, like a descriptive reality uh in the church, in society, you have different people at different stations, right? That's that's the reality.
SPEAKER_12It does depend on, to some extent, why the inequality is there. If it's there because you're keeping people by law out of places by race or they're Jewish or something like that, which unfortunately has happened in our past, right? Then you do want to get rid of that aspect of inequality. Right. So if everyone has an equal shot and some people don't do as well as others, then you know that's um and and there and um there are reasons. I mean, there are past things that have happened that in the past that that hold people down. Yeah. Um I have to tell a story. I have met people from Ireland, and when I tell them my name is Sullivan and I'm Irish, they go, There's no Sullivan's in Ireland. And when I first heard it, they said your ancestors dropped the O because of the persecution of Irish, which I've I've never thought of, but it's true, but I don't think about it. But people from Ireland do. People from Ireland actually are upset about the persecution of the Irish in America. So it depends on your attitude towards it, not only the reality, but also your attitude. Yeah, so just because something happened in the past doesn't mean it has to hold you down. That was my point.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. It's one thing to acknowledge that there are disparities in society and to recognize that if you're going to have a competitive marketplace, that you know, that's kind of has to be the case. Uh, and the alternative is far less desirable. But it's it's another thing to create a situation in which you intentionally hold people down. Right? What you're saying is right about you know having a free shot, and you know, not everybody wins the race. It is what it is. That's different than kneecapping the people who are winning the race and then picking up the ones who are losing the race and putting them on a golf cart. Uh, the idea of kind of the government picking winners and losing losers and trying to level out a society like that, that actually goes against conservative principles, and it ought to go against biblical principles of justice. Proverbs 14, 31, whoever oppresses a poor man insults his maker, but he who is generous to the needy honors him. Proverbs 22, 16, whoever oppresses the poor to increase his own wealth or gives to the rich will only come to poverty. So this is one of those aspects in which the conservative worldview only takes us so far. We realize, like in a competitive marketplace, a competitive world, there are going to be winners and losers, and that dynamic is probably going to get us more progress, more success. You know, insert all the arguments for capitalism here. But okay, what's a Christian supposed to do? Knowing the moral order is inscribed in Scripture, what sort of attitude are we supposed to have towards success and wealth? And we go right back to all the Bible examples I cited before. You have the haves, quote unquote, voluntarily, even joyfully, sharing what they have with the have nots. So it's not a sort of leveling that's imposed by a government, but it's a community of believers coming together and saying, we're gonna have our stuff in common. I'm not going to count my possessions as all my own and all for my own purposes. I'm going to do like Levi, like we talked about this morning. I'm going to leave it all behind in the sense and that I'm going to hold it out, and what Jesus wants me to do with it, I'll do it for the sake of my brothers and sisters. Conservatism won't necessarily take you that far, but Christianity will. Next principle, imperfectibility. And we'll kind of step on the gas a little bit so we don't run out of time before we can cover this. But this one says there will never be a social utopia this side of glory. And history has shown that utopian promises invariably lead to injustice. Human beings are imperfect, therefore we can never have a perfect social order. And we're deluded if we think we can. All kinds of tyranny historically perpetrated under this idea. And so the best we can hope for is an ordered, just, and free society in which evils are mitigated and reformed as best as possible. So what does this one get right from a biblical point of view?
SPEAKER_08We're not going to be perfect this side of heaven. Yeah. However, I think there should be a striving towards that.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_08But the presumption that perfectability on earth is possible. Yeah, I have the example of Rugby, Tennessee, where they wanted to establish a Christian socialist type of order for Second Sons from England. It took about five or ten years, I think, before it collapse.
SPEAKER_05Right. Except for my philosophie, but otherwise, I would consider, you know, consider our biblical doctrine of man, our anthropology. We're created in the image of God, which is a great, which is a great privilege. It's a great dignity, it's a great value, it's a great work. And yet we're falling. So because everything we are, everything we do is tainted by sin, how could we possibly create a perfect society here on earth? We are laced with imperfection. We are perfectly happy to confess that we're imperfect, our homes are imperfect, our churches are imperfect. Okay, so why would we think that we can make our government perfect? Now, Al is right, right? We can strive toward a particular ideal. And it's all sticky again when we talk about codifying the moral order and applying it. But this is something that we definitely do diverge on with our uh the more progressive side of things. And I say we, I don't want to assume things about you, but the conservative worldview over against the progressive worldview. Because these promises of kind of a progressive utopia, we talked some about that with critical theory and ideas of social justice. It's like an overrealized eschatology. It's an idea that we can make heaven on earth, and it's heaven according to our own sort of Marxist ideals. The conservative can kind of tend that in the other direction and think, you know, uh it could potentially be a kind of underrealized eschatology, a sort of pessimism about what we actually can accomplish in the world. And we don't want to fall off that, fall into that ditch either. We can strive, we do have biblical principles, we do have a revelation of what is true and what is good and what is beautiful, and we can work together to try and move toward that. We can do that. We don't have to just say, well, we're all just sinners or we're gonna screw it up, so why bother? Property. Free and prosperous societies are those in which private property is encouraged and respected. Uh, for Kirk, uh there's a close connection between property and freedom. The more private property is owned by individuals, that's not to say like one person in the room owns all the private property, but that all the property that is out there to be owned, it's owned more by individuals as opposed to like some corporation or some government. You have you do that and you have more of a vested interest from the populace in the actual prosperity of the society. So ownership property teaches people responsibility, it provides economic security, it engages people in duty, and duty toward themselves, toward their families, their property, their community, all these kinds of things. So in conservatism, there is a deep, deep respect for private property. Now evaluate that biblically, either for or against it. Richard?
SPEAKER_02Do you remember in 2008 when we had that big financial catastrophe? Um a lot of um a lot of a lot of a lot that led up to that was the idea of fulfilling the American dream, you know, everybody owned a house, a lot of stuff everything. Well, I think we found out that not everybody can handle a type of prosperity and uh created rooms like it just destroyed everything. So all every issue, everything you're talking about here, it's always so much more complex. It's simple, I think one thing. There's nothing simple about any of those, yeah, and it's just more complex. So you gotta deal with that, you know. You still pursue and property, yeah, you share it, you know, and all that stuff, and you better fight against collectivism and all that stuff. But somewhere in there needs to be, as Christian folks, we need to educate our own families, educate our people, so that they allow these situations to grow. We're never going to get there until you get to heaven. Instead of just saying, well, that's the way it is, you know, we're gonna do anything, whatever. But it's hard. It's hard.
SPEAKER_05People mess up everything. Well, scripture definitely does affirm the fact of private property. Uh, the eighth commandment, you shall not steal. Well, stealing doesn't like it doesn't exist as a concept if people don't own things, right? I can't take something that belongs to you if nothing belongs to you by definition, and vice versa. So there's definitely an acknowledgement of that.
SPEAKER_08Also, the allocation of the land of uh Canaan for the Israelites was clear, not just private property, but family clear ownership, and yeah, there's lots of that.
SPEAKER_05The interesting thing about that is that you know that's where I wanted to take it in terms of like maybe trying to nuance the property principle. It's like ever every seven sevens, right? Every Sabbath of Sabbaths, you were supposed to have the Jubilee year. And what happened in the Jubilee year? Reset fund, right? Everything goes back to its original owner, owner, and the idea there behind all that was like most foundationally, none of y'all own this land. I own this land, and I apportion it to you to steward it in particular ways, and you ought not to uh extort and manipulate one another by way of the land that I've given you as a gift, right? So we ought to affirm this principle of property biblically, but maybe the category that we use is less one of ownership and more one of stewardship. Realizing that like ownership is kind of a horizontal category. It's good that we have distinctions, we have lines, we, you know, I've got a little plot of land that I'm responsible for, my family's responsible for. And it's not the same as your plot of land, but in engaging our responsibility over our respective little places, hey, we're working together to actually build this community together. That's a good thing. But as a Christian, you take it a step further and you recognize, well, ultimately, God owns everything. He's entrusted me with the care of this particular piece of land and these resources and stuff, and I'm gonna steward them ultimately for his glory. And that makes a difference between property possession versus like acquisitiveness, right? Where I'm gonna gain everything I can possibly gain and I'm gonna like uh manipulate this principle of private property to make myself as fat as I possibly can. Next one, voluntary association. And this is the idea that communities should be run by those who inhabit them as opposed to those who stand removed from them. Another way to think about this is the word subsidiarity, that power is best vested in the individuals who kind of live and move in a particular space and not those who are far removed. Alright, so who's gonna do a better job of um like overseeing Mount Juliet and seeing to it that we have the kind of community that we want to have here that benefits the people who live here and all that sort of thing? Who's gonna have a better chance to enact that? Uh us, some extent, or you know, maybe our locally re elected representatives who kind of know us and live with us, who we can go talk to if we need to? Or a small group of people in Washington, DC, who've probably never visited Mount Juliet, Tennessee and don't know a thing about what it means to live here. The locals, right? And that's just a basic principle.
SPEAKER_12And I'm just thinking many of them do not like people from rural areas. I've got friends who live there. And um, I mean, it's it's it's beyond just they don't care about it.
SPEAKER_05Well, sure, sure, but yeah.
SPEAKER_12Yeah, fly over America.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, right. Fly over America is definitely a messed up term, right? Um, you know, biblically, what does that get right? You know, Galatians 6, bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. Or think of Exodus 18, where Moses is running himself ragged trying to judge everybody and they're deal with all their problems. And his father-in-law says, Hey, this thing that you're doing is not good. And what he ends up doing is appointing judges over different districts of Israel. More locally, kind of decentralized sort of power. Uh, 1 Samuel 8, when the people want a king like all the other eight nations, Samuel warns them, hey, you're gonna have this king, and he's not gonna look out for your best interests. He's basically gonna use you as pawns in his own game to amass power and property. Right? This idea of a centralizing, it doesn't have to be that way with a king, but often that's that's how it works. Now, where that where can that go wrong? Right? This idea that the local community, the local gathering of people is best suited to order its own affairs.
SPEAKER_02Some problems are getting whether it's you know, uh COVID, yeah, it's pollution, and these things must be addressed on a larger level.
SPEAKER_05How about war? Yeah, um, defense. Yeah. And that's why conservatives generally would say like there are a few things that the government should be good for and good at. You know, fire stations, armies, navies, that sort of thing. Because that's not the kind of thing that we can do for ourselves in Mount Juliet. But it's it's possible for an entire community to be wrong, isn't it? Uh the Tower of Babel, right? That community, they were all in on doing that together. Republican New York. What's that? Republic of New York. Sure, sure. Right? The actions of a body aren't always inherently right. And it's not necessarily wrong for a larger body to supervene on a smaller body. I mean, we're Presbyterians, right? We believe in graded courts. Our local community, this church, does not exist in isolation from the broader church that is the Nashville Presbytery, and the even broader church that is the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America. So generally speaking, yeah, we are best suited to handle our affairs. But if we start doing some crazy stuff, the Presbytery is going to lean in and say, hey, you guys can't do that. And that's a good thing. That's a biblical thing. That's an that's a Council of Jerusalem, Acts 15, kind of thing. I think this one uh needs uh correction.
unknownUh the correction is you need to have freedom of movement.
SPEAKER_08You're trapped in a community, that's going wrong, and you can't leave the People's Republic of New York. Yeah. And that's that kind of goes uh goes home with that too.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. All right, number nine, restraint. Conservatives believe in prudent restraint on power and passion. So constitutional checks and balances are needed to maintain a healthy distribution of power between individuals and institutions. Conservatives basically assume that people are going to want to get as much power as they possibly can and start enacting their will all over everybody. And so there need to be checks and balances in place that aren't just convention, but are actually codified. A thing like a constitution with the articles that delineate, you know, uh the executive's power, the legislature's power, the judiciary's power. We need to have those things in place so that this kind of war, this desire to amass power ends up canceling itself out. That's part of the problem with our current situation where our entire legislative branch is not as jealous for its power as the as the founders and the writers of the Constitution imagined they would be, but that's an argument for another time.
SPEAKER_11I think this is also the responsibility of the parties, political parties. Yeah. Yeah. To keep the other in check. Yeah. I've mentioned several times to my daughter, who's completely opposite of me politically. Yeah. You know, it's she sounds like she wants to just do away with the Republican Party. I said, well, if you do away with one party or the other, you've got a bigger problem than you have right now.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_05And we see that locally, like in the People's Republic of New York, right? With San Francisco. What's the People's Republic of New York? Ask me later. But no, I mean, and you can come up with uh examples on the Republican side too. Generally, when uh when a locale is taken over by one party and they have no meaningful opposition, the power is unchecked and they start doing stuff, right? And without somebody to restrain them and make them think about what they're doing, you know, ridiculous things start happening.
SPEAKER_11If you have one party, they can just say, well, we're just not going to worry with the Constitution.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. And these things go out the window. Right. So restraint, you know, as a principle, it's really hard to argue against it, right? Thinking of our of our of our anthropology, right, of our doctrine of sin, our understanding of total depravity. Yeah, of course, we're going to be uh aware of the sinful tendency to abuse power. Right? So I don't know. Can you can you think of a good biblical critique of this conservative principle of restraint? I had trouble thinking of one.
SPEAKER_07God's warning against having kings.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Yeah. But that's not a critique, that's a support of it, right?
SPEAKER_07No, he was he was saying that that having kings would lead to um uncontrolled power and no restraints. And so he warned the people not to Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Well, the interesting thing there is that when the people asked for the king, the problem wasn't that they asked for a king. It was the problem that they wanted a king like all the other nations. Yeah. Remember when uh when when uh Jacob blessed his sons, and he gives the blessing to Judah specifically, he says, the scepter shall not depart from your line. It's already looking forward to the establishment of a king there. Deuteronomy 17, Moses gives that second generation of Israelite specific laws for what the king is supposed to do when he comes to power. The king ought to uh actually hand copy the Torah so that he could have his own copy of the screen of the Pentateuch or the Book of the Law. Right? Uh so Israel's problem was that they wanted a king like all the other nations. If they wanted a king like the man after God's own heart, that kingly institution actually comes with its own built-in restraint because he's supposed to write down the book of the law and abide by it. Right? So that is really interesting. I guess that is a kind of critique in saying that you know you can kind of build a pessimistic worldview where you're gonna keep everybody in check because you know everybody wants to abuse their power, but coming from a biblical perspective, you're able to give more to that and say, to say not just how are we gonna keep your power in check, but actually how are we gonna channel the power that God has given you in the appropriate directions. Alright, last one: permanence and progression. So conservatives do believe in change. Conservatives believe we need to learn, to grow, to reform as a society, that the challenges of every day evolve, that we need to meet those challenges, we need to actually build on what's come before. But conservatives don't worship at the altar of progress. So conservatives believe that change should be slow because not everything new is good. And as we change, we ought not to forget the deep principles that make us who we are. So think uh a good example is a body, right? Our bodies are always changing, they're always growing, they're always renewing in some sense, they're breaking down in a lot of ways, but they're renewing in other ways. So there's a harmony to that change that doesn't violate what the body fundamentally is. And if you do violate that harmony, you end up with unchecked, uncontrolled change. Medically, you end up with cancer. Right? So the conservative principle is yes to change, but be who you are in the midst of change. Change slowly so that you don't lose yourself in the process and so that you don't accidentally screw it all up. How do we want to evaluate that biblically?
SPEAKER_12If you connect that with imperfectibility and number of nine, then it's a it's a healthy and safe way to approach change.
SPEAKER_01There's guardrails.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01My critique uh of this um really stems on the kingdom of God advances. Church is not going to be uh overtaken. The gates of hell are not going to be able to prevail against church. I think we we can't think in a conservative, I guess, mindset when it comes to the gospel and the advancement of the we we really do need to plow ahead. We really do need to be on the path of upending the world order as it is with the gospel. I mean, in in that doesn't sound conservative. I don't know what that sounds like, but I mean I'm not even labeling it, but I think I think that God's kingdom is moving. There are Christians in Iran right now. You know, like there are Christians all over the world. Uh and so we just kind of have to think, and even on the local side of things, we're a global movement. This God's world mission. So I'm like, I'm not gonna just think about my isolated community, I'm gonna think way beyond that because that's what God is, that's what He's doing. So, for that's working.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's good, Richard. About the church and the different theological positions of churches. We are a reformed church. So reform really means reform and keep reforming because it's a constant progress, always checking. Are we what's our position on this? Is that the biblical position? You know, how about this? Well, or we just call them what you say conservatism or whatever. That's why it's always been, or it's so opposite from where they are that yeah, I don't care what it is, it's been. Better, no, we're kingdom of God people, not kingdom of man. Yeah, but we have to be constantly reforming to the word of God by the Spirit of God for the glory of God.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_11I don't know if this goes in this category, but I sometimes feel that conservatives are fearful of obviously change, uh, technology. It seems like every five years something new is coming out, and you hear people on conservative, well, not conservative so much as evangelical, maybe, saying, oh, well, that's going to be the mark of the beast if we do that. So I think, and this gets back to the we're too slow to act sometimes. I think we're kind of fearful or paranoid about the future that we shouldn't be. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, bringing together what you guys have said, I mean, the way we think about permanence, progression, continuity, discontinuity, the unfolding of history, our eschatology, our understanding of how this story ends really does a lot of work here. And it really should do a lot of work. Because, you know, there's one way to think about it in that, you know, we are on a sinking, or this the world is burning, and we need to hide in our holy huddle and just wait for Jesus to come back. That leads to a lot of the conservative kind of fear-mongering you hear. And then there's this is a more progressive kind of worldview, but you get it with some conservative, certain kinds of conservatives. The other one is like, we're gonna build the kingdom here on earth. Uh, where, you know, not exactly. And yet, you know, in Christ, we have the breaking in of the end into the center of history. And as Christians, we live we live in such a way as we look back to the cross, this first coming of Christ, this thing that has happened that has radically altered all of history, and again, brought the end into the middle. So we live in a way as we look back at that, and yet we look forward to the second coming of Christ when he makes all things new. And so there is a firm foundation on which we stand, and there's a lot about that that we seek to conserve, like the moral order, right? That's not evolving. Right and wrong is not, the application of the moral order evolves as the situation changes in the world, but the Ten Commandments don't get updated every decade, right? It's an abiding moral order. So we conserve that, we preserve that, we stand on that, and yet we, as we stand on it, we also strive forward for a new heavens and new earth. We live in light of glory, we even anticipate it. We pray thy kingdom come, don't we? And so we ought to be seeking that. We ought to be seeking to live in such a way that everything we do is informed by our biblical principles. And because we believe that we live in an imperfect world, in imperfect societies, we recognize there are all kinds of things that are broken in our communities, in our country, in our world. So if we have the ability to bring some biblical wisdom to those situations to bring reform and change, good. We do that not because we're bringing the kingdom here on earth or we think we're building the kingdom, but because we're thoughtful Christians who believe that truth is truth and we apply the truth to whatever situation God gives us. So we live in light of the fact that when the end comes and Jesus comes back, we do have the heavenly Jerusalem descending from the sky, new heavens, new earth. Everything is perfect, everything is fixed. Our society is exactly the way it should be. We are progressing toward that. So we don't want to lose sight of that. Well, thank you all for being here tonight. Take these, these are yours to keep and to think about. And the song I want to close us with tonight is This is My Father's World. Because it reminds us that ultimately the battle is his, and he is the one who will bring all things to their consummation. So if you would, let's stand together and sing this closing hymn.
SPEAKER_14All nature sings and around me rings the music of the spears. This is my father's world. I listen the fall of rocks and trees of skies and season of wonders wrong. This is my father's world. This is my father's world. He shines in all that's fair in the brustling grass I hear him pass, he speaks to me everywhere. This is my father's world. Oh let me near forget.
SPEAKER_05Heavenly Father, thank you again for this night and for these brothers and sisters. Thank you for the fact that this is your world and you are ordering it according to your perfect wisdom. Help us to be faithful in whatever context that you place us, Lord, and help us to trust that you are making all things new, that one day Jesus will come again in glory, and all of the political questions that vex us today will very much be things of the past as we live in a society of perfect peace and perfect righteousness. We long for that day, Lord. Help us to live in light of it. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.