But, as John Robbins noted in his Foreword to Gordon Clark’s A Christian View of Men and Things, “the West [and limited government] is disappearing because Christianity, on which Western civilization was built, has already virtually disappeared from the West.”
If one doubts that the West is disappearing, just consider the events of the past month in America. How many monuments have been torn down or defaced this author does not pretend to know. During June, it was a nearly daily occurrence that monuments to men such as Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses Grant and Francis Scott Key have been pulled down by mobs or removed by governments at various levels. A sitting US Senator, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, when asked about the possibility of removing monuments to George Washington replied, “Let me just say that we should start off by having a national dialogue on it at some point.”
America, you have major problems. The alarm bells are going off. What are you going to do?
One of the unpleasant realities Americans, and in particular American Christians, need to face, is that there is no hope in political conservatism. The events of the past six weeks should have helped drive this point home. Republican leaders are weak and showed this by their failure to stand up and defend civilization during the George Floyd riots. See the Tucker Carlson video above for more on this. When our cities were burning and mobs of violent protestors – one of the biggest lies this author has seen in recent times is the media reporting that the George Floyd riots were “mostly peaceful” – were destroying public property and assaulting individuals who were unfortunate enough to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, of what help were the conservatives? Almost to a man, none at all. Some, such as Heritage Foundation Kay Cole James, actually piled on during the riots, agreeing with the Marxist and racist BLM and Antifa rioters that the death of George Floyd, likely caused by a drug overdose, was somehow the fault of the American people who need to be punished for their manifold sins.
With friends like this, who needs enemies?
Why were the conservatives so useless when they were needed the most? Their failure was brilliantly stated by John Robbins in his essay “Conservatism: An Autopsy,” in which he made the simple and obvious point that political conservatism is not Christian. Noted Robbins,
The trouble with conservatism is the same as the trouble with liberalism: It is not Christian. If one were to scrutinize the index of George H. Nash’s classic, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, he would be hard-pressed to find even one Christian listed there. It is safe to say that of the twenty-four contributors to an anthology of conservative thought edited by William F. Buckley, Jr., not one, including Buckley himself, is a Christian.(3)
At this point a reader might question my definition of a “Christian.” I am using “Christian” in contexts that demand either of two senses: First, in the Biblical sense of a regenerate, justified man; second, in the much broader sense of a person who is not regenerate but who does, inconsistently, accept the Biblical view of the state and politics. In neither sense do the men listed by Nash and edited by Buckley qualify as Christians.
In the recorded version of his essay “The Religious Wars of the 21st Century,” during the Q&A sessions that followed, one of the audience members brought up Pat Buchannan and lamented that he was Roman Catholic. Robbins responded with a remarkable statement that explained the reason for the failure failure of political conservatism. At the 30:15 mark he responded,
It’s very deceptive and it’s very tempting for conservatives to go along with a guy like Pat Buchanan, because he says some things that they like. But his theology and his philosophy is pure poison. So the question you have to ask yourself is am I going to – and this applies to all sorts of things in the political arena, anti-abortion for example – am I going to work together with people who deny the gospel in order to accomplish a political end. Which is more important? Is it more important to be faithful to the gospel, to be faithful to Christ, or to get a law passed regarding something desirable? Which is more important?
The religious right has made the wrong choice for decades. They said yes, we can work together with Jews, we can work together with Roman Catholics, we can work together with unbelievers of various sorts. Mormons are strong on the family, so we’ll work together with Mormons, which is a real joke if you read about Mormon theology. We can work together with them all, in order to accomplish our political ends. So they compromise on everything important, in order to accomplish something that is going to be temporary at best. They don’t realize that the free society that we have came about precisely because of the preaching of the gospel. That’s why we have this free society, what’s left of it. And if that preaching of the gospel is muted or compromised or ended altogether, there is no hope for any political action. And if you’re going to take political action that is going to compromise the gospel, then you’re sealing your own doom. Over the past fifty years, conservatives and Libertarians have spent tens of billions of dollars lobbying, trying to elect candidates, trying to organize in various ways. When I was a kid, I was out passing out literature for Barry Goldwater back in 1964. Maybe some of you did as well if you remember back that far. And what has it gained? Are we better off, to use the campaign slogan, are we better off today than we were fifty years ago, or in 1964? What have all the conservatives and Libertarians done with all those tens of billions of dollars that have shown any improvement in the political, the moral climate of the country? Now if that money had been put into the preaching of the gospel, the uncompromised, unvarnished pure gospel, perhaps there would be something completely different to show for it. But it was put into compromised political action. And there’s nothing to show for it. Absolutely nothing. Tens of billions of dollars.
When you think of all the campaigns, all the organizations, and I’ve been involved in, my degree is in political theory, political philosophy, I’ve been interested in politics all my life, and have been involved from time to time working on Capitol Hill. And I learned a very good lesson on Capitol Hill, that what happens there is of little consequence. That if one is interested in changing society, you don’t go to Capitol Hill. You preach the gospel. Now you can preach it on Capitol Hill. I’m not saying you shouldn’t preach it on Capitol Hill, they need to hear it too. But if anybody is operating under the illusion that political action is going to make a significant change in society apart from a sea change in the beliefs of the American people, then they’re condemned to futility. They will waste their lives. So to get back to Pat Buchanan and your question, he represents something that has been very attractive to conservatives, and it’s resulted in nothing good.
Robbins, “The Religious Wars of the 21st Century,” MP3 audio
Political conservatism is a total failure, and it is high time that American Christians, and Christians in other nations of the West, came to understand this.
If what Robbins says here is true, and it is, then it represents a clarion call for Christians to repent of their vain, compromised, ecumenical political activities and to seek to ground their political views, not on the pronouncements of political conservatives, but on the Scriptures which alone furnish us with knowledge, including knowledge of politics and economics.
Political conservatism is a total failure. One may be tempted to blame this on the cowardice of the conservatives. But while it appears most leading conservatives are, in fact, intellectual cowards, the real reason for their failure is not their cowardice. Were that the case, it would just be a matter of replacing the current crop of conservatives – sometimes called Republicans In Name Only (RINOs) – with stouter hearted fellows. But the real problem runs deeper. The real problem with conservatives is that their philosophy lacks the Scriptural grounding that allows them to withstand the political tumult of our day. Therefore, they cannot stand up to political thugs such as Black Lives Matter, Antifa, the Democrats and the Deep State. Just as a house built on sand cannot withstand the storm, but collapses when the wind and rain become too much, so too are conservatives ill equipped to face off against the Marxists who are actively destroying America in 2020. As Christians, let us repair, not to the anti-Christian ideas of compromised political conservatism, but to the Word of God, which is able to thoroughly equip the man of God for every good work, including the good work of politics.
Lux Lucet 
Leave a comment