Can a Conservative Moral Vision Succeed in a Secular America? I Say Yes.
And more from this week...
Each year I try to invest particular effort into one major piece of writing, typically in the spring. This year’s installment took the form of the First Things D.C. Lecture, which I delivered back in March. You can watch the lecture and we also released a recording as an episode of the American Compass podcast. But First Things has now published an adapted essay version in its latest issue. So, you guessed it…
Your one thing to read this week is by me, “Constructing Conservatism in a Secular Age.”
The essay’s main topic is the role of religion in politics and public morality. Conservatives loves to quote John Adams: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” But purely as a descriptive matter, Americans are no longer a religious People, and they repeatedly make clear in public opinion research that most do not see or want religion as the basis for morality.
“We also have a more acute problem,” I note, “one that requires particular attention: the aggressive secularism of our highly educated managerial elite, which controls the commanding heights of our economy, culture, and media.” I blame the meritocracy, which leaves elites “not just lacking in faith, but hostile to it.”
They cannot see faith as a complementary means of seeking truth. It must be the antithesis, inherently unreasonable. A case supported by a faith-based argument is presumptively wrong, a concession that no colorable argument from reason is available. Reason must be on the other side. The person making the argument must be unreliable as well, because the resort to faith indicates either an inability or an unwillingness to be reasonable. Arguments from faith are not merely unpersuasive within the cult of reason that holds overwhelming power in our society. They are disqualifying.
Conservatives are not handling this challenge well. “Has a religious argument based in Christian morality won in American politics in the past fifty years?” I ask. “I cannot think of one instance.”
We know that “the common good, and thus a coherent politics, requires a shared definition of virtue derived from a shared moral vision and set of values, which in turn must reflect the traditions and character of the nation and its culture.” Yet, lacking a secular definition, vision, and set of values, we have instead relied on a libertarian argument that disavows the need for a shared anything beyond “liberty,” and a religious conservatism whose success requires somehow re-Christianizing society.
Frustrated by their failures to resonate, both camps are taking radical turns. The former is devolving into nihilism and outright fascism on the too-online Right, where “Mencius Moldbug and Bronze Age Pervert offer the thrill of transgression, but not a workable vision for a political movement that has any hope of governing our country.” The latter is now trying “to restore Christian morality by fiat.”
These efforts go by various names, such as integralism and Christian nationalism, and disagreement rages over what the terms even mean. But a reasonable, general characterization would be that they propose conducting our politics as if Christianity were the foundation of the nation’s public morality, regardless of contemporary reality. Views of the people be damned, we should simply begin governing as if an overwhelming majority wanted an explicitly Christian morality to shape public policy, and then hope everyone catches up.
I argue against this turn toward Christian nationalism on theoretical grounds, but then emphasize especially the practical problem,
which might be characterized as either the “I want a pony” conundrum or the “You and what army?” fallacy. It goes like this: So you want your preferred version of Christian morality to be that of the nation? And I want a pony. You want to impose a value system disfavored by the majority of the electorate in a democracy? You and what army?
My diagnosis concludes:
By anchoring our account of virtue in an explicitly religious foundation, conservatives weaken our own cause, quiet our own voice. We are left not only ineffective in countering the left, but derelict in reforming the right, which, denuded of a useful political morality, has for too long veered into market fundamentalism. We conservatives have, perhaps inadvertently and with the best intentions for the nation’s moral fiber, done our part in bringing about the nation’s moral decay. Certainly we have not done much to reverse it.
And yet, I am optimistic! Why am I optimistic? You’ll have to read the essay. But in short, I think evidence abounds that Americans still crave a shared moral vision, albeit a secular one, and conservatives are well equipped to provide it.
How would that look? You almost got me there, but I again refer you to the essay. To whet your appetite, I propose starting with a passage from A Story of Us, by Lesley Newson and Peter Richerson. They write:
Over the course of human evolutionary history, there may have been some independent-minded women who thought things through and decided to avoid the pain and risks of motherhood. These women are not our ancestors. There may also have been families that decided to do away with the rules and customs that encouraged the raising of children. Our ancestors didn’t belong to families like this. Our ancestors were part of families that believed in the importance of children and worked hard to produce the next generation. That’s why we exist.
The implication, I believe, is that: “We begin our lives with an incalculable debt. That we did not choose this debt is of no moral import—it is inherent to our existence. And we have only one way of repaying it: to work equally hard to bring about the next generation.” I’d like to think this idea could help us find a way through the many political debates around the meaning, worth, and obligations of family that have only become more salient in the months since the lecture was delivered.
I hope you’ll read the essay and consider sharing it with others. At the essay’s end, First Things includes thoughtful responses from several prominent scholars—I’d welcome your reactions. A few people have suggested that I should occasionally use the Substack to feature and respond to reader comments, and this would be a great topic for trying it.
THIS WEEK AT AMERICAN COMPASS
The Compass Point is from Iowans for Tax Relief’s John Hendrickson, rejecting the narrative that the citizens of agricultural states care more about soybean exports than about America’s future: Economic Nationalism in the Heartland
Another critical fact to understand about a state like Iowa is that, while it may be known for its endless expanses of corn, it is first and foremost a manufacturing powerhouse. The 18% of GDP in its manufacturing sector dwarfs the 6% in agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting, and exports of manufactured goods equal exports of agricultural goods.
Also on The Commons
Is The U.S. Workforce Prepared to Reindustrialize?: Electrician and construction project manager Skyler Adleta explains how to cultivate a workforce ready for industrial policy.
Harris’s Global ‘Green New Deal’: American Compass’s Mark DiPlacido dissects and dismantles Vice President Kamala Harris’s energy policy platform.
And, on the American Compass Podcast this week, Hillsdale College’s Matthew Mehan joins me to discuss my First Things essay and the role of virtue in politics.
WHAT ELSE SHOULD YOU BE READING?
Re: The Service Economy… Jonathan Berry writes in First Things on Renewing Labor
Berry adds a theological dimension to the growing conservative focus on workers, arguing that “any policy committed to workers must focus first on the human person rather than the systems in which work is performed.” The perspective provides an additional basis for pro-worker policy and a vision for good jobs and labor-management relations that go far beyond wages and benefits.
Re: Let It Go… the New York Times tells the tale of The Palace Coup at the Magic Kingdom
This is probably too long to read in full, and oddly repetitive in the endless powerplays, backstabbing, and pettiness. But give it a skim, or pick a few random spots to dive in. And then ask yourself, does this seem like profit maximizing behavior? It’s a strange inconsistency in the Old Right’s ideology, isn’t it, that government rarely works well because of the “public choice” problems that misalign officials’ incentives with the common good, but markets can be trusted because private firms are rationally allocating capital. But as much as government, a firm is composed of individuals pursuing their own agendas that may bear no resemblance to the firm’s interests, let alone the public’s. Perhaps we need a new field of “private choice” economics to remind our fundamentalist friends that their wishful thinking about corporations bears no relationship to reality.
Re: Unstable Coins… the Wall Street Journal describes The Shadow Dollar That’s Fueling the Financial Underworld
While socially valuable uses of cryptocurrency remain few and far between, “stablecoins” tied directly to U.S. dollars are doing a great job fueling illicit transactions at an incredible scale. One such coin, Tether, now has nearly as much money flowing through it as Visa, and the company running it generates more profit than BlackRock. Odd this didn’t come up when former speaker Paul Ryan was promoting “dollar-backed stablecoins[, which] follow a well-trodden path and offer clear near-term benefits.”
Re: Party Like Its 2025… Senator Marco Rubio revisits ‘Made in China 2025’ Nine Years Later
Rubio has long been at the forefront of calling attention to China’s aggressive industrial strategy. Five years after his seminal 2019 report, “Made in China 2025 and the Future of American Industry,” he is back with an updated look at China’s progress as the eponymous year approaches, finding that Beijing has achieved success in nine out of the ten industries it targeted.
BONUS LINK: Don’t want to read the full report? Read the op-ed.
Enjoy the weekend!
It is strange to me that you proffer this "because you were once a kid, you have a moral obligation to have kids" model as being collectivist and focused on our obligations to society, in contrast with the individualist tendencies of libertariansim (explicitly individualist) and... some wide gesture at the left, as though socialism isn't explicitly collectivist (and as though that's not something that conservatives seem to consistently dislike about it).
Along those same lines, you insist that this debt - the debt of our birth - must be repaid, because "(t)hat we did not choose this debt is of no moral import—it is inherent to our existence." You spare a few words to denounce the "individualism" of wokism - can't be a conservative without complaining about the Wokes - but this is the foundation of the most surface objections to "wokism" - the idea that we have obligations to others in our society, some of which stem from debts that we owe that we had no hand in creating, no choice in incurring.
It seems strange to suggest that the fact that I have ancestors creates a (in your words, self-evident) social obligation to have children, but the fact that black people were literally enslaved for hundreds of years does not create any kind of social obligation in those who live today. I'm not saying that's your position, just that what you're positing here seems a pretty hard sell to a generation of conservatives that resent socialism because using tax money to support the poor is theft, who bristle at even the lightest implication that they owe anything to anyone.
I mean, I guess what you posit allows for "I don't owe anyone anything except for my immediate family, to whom I owe only continued existence" but I can't see that having any of the positive social impact you seem to think it would have.
Fisher Ames IV Sep. 15
It's unclear, to put it mildly, why we are talking about a "conservative moral vision" when preferred leaders are devoid of such a vision. Placing our nihil obstat on leaders who fail to act in a virtuous way implies a disconnection between leaders and the larger society. Just this week we witnessed outlandish stories of Haitians eating pets that were characterized by the Republican governor of Ohio as arising from "the garbage on the Internet." Our founders may have disagreed on many matters, but none of them believed that we could have a virtuous society if our leaders were amoral. "Castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful" is unlikely to lead to anything worthwhile.