Month: June 2009

I know at least one good Presbyterian pastor on the West Coast who’s jaws tighten at the thought that Reformed confessionalism and conservatism go hand in hand.  Part of the problem, of course, is conservatism.   Is it what Rush and Sean, or Roger Scruton, or George Will say it is? 

Another way to consider the relationship comes from this piece by Caleb Stegall over at Front Porch Republic, which is actually a ping back from ISI’s American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia.  This section was particularly germane for linking the sensibility of cross-bearing with conservative critiques of modernity:

Two of the most thoughtful defenses of traditional community as a conservative ordering principle were published within a year of Kirk’s Conservative Mind (1953): Nisbet’s The Quest for Community (1952) and Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics (1953).

Nisbet begins his study on the place of community in American political and social life by examining the failed promises of progress. By the postwar period, America had filled up. A sense of dread and ennui had spread through society, and the dominant tropes of psychospiritual expression were no longer found in terms like optimism, progress, change, and reason, but rather alienation, disintegration, decline, and insecurity. Americans, according to Nisbet, no longer seemed to trust or valorize the selfish Randian hero. The problem, he thought, was not technological tyranny or consumer greed or increasing secularism, but the distribution of political power. Modern man’s nervous preoccupation with finding meaning in community is a manifestation of the profound social dislocation caused by the unique power structure of the Western political state. As Western political power had become increasingly centralized, impersonal, and remote, it had atomized the individual and relegated communal interests and relationships to the realm of private personal preference. Nisbet locates the profound unrest in the American soul not so much in the disappearance of communal relationships but in the utter dissociation of those relationships from the exercise of real political and economic power. Traditional communities and the religious, familial, and local ties that bind them have not so much been lost, in Nisbet’s view, as they have become irrelevant at the deepest levels of meaning. It is here, in the unmediated exposure of the individual will to the impersonal power of the state (and to a lesser extent, the market), that Nisbet finds the root cause of man’s spiritual crisis.

Voegelin’s New Science tracks a similar course, providing conservative thought with a powerful analytical tool for understanding the spiritual dimensions of the phenomena Nisbet so clearly describes. For Voegelin, modernity could be summarized as a heretical commitment to Gnosticism, or in other words, a fundamental dissatisfaction with the uncertainties and limits of existence. Impatience for moral meaning and certainty beyond the humble limits of traditional communities leads the Gnostic thinker to imbue human existence in the here and now with the ultimate meaning reserved by traditional Christianity for the next life. By “immanentizing” the Christian eschaton, Voegelin explains, modern man took on the project of remaking existence according to the dictates of political ideology.

I was struck by Stegall’s characterization (via Voegelin) of gnosticism’s impatience with limits and uncertainty.  It reminded me of a quote over at Zrim’s Confessional Outhouse about the nature of “biblical patience.”