Political debates between conservatives and liberals are waged incessantly. In a two-party system, one party inevitably gets pigeonholed as liberal and the other as conservative. However, the sides of the debate are drawn along confusing lines (it’s not immediately obvious why “the party of personal responsibility” trusted individuals with firearms but not drugs), may shift in confusing ways (sometimes a president of the opposite party is reason enough for the party to shift their stance on some government action), and may completely realign over time (the Republican party freed the slaves in the 19th century but deliberately reached out to whites angry over the civil rights movement in the 20th; we’re now seeing a realignment of working class whites from Democrats to Republicans).
It’s more interesting and perhaps more fruitful to take a step back and talk about what we mean when we talk about conservatism or liberalism. Rather than specific policies or demographics, what are their values, their aspirations? What makes them tick?
Conservatism is gratitude. Quoting Yuval Levin: “Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it.” It’s an appreciation for what those before us have built and accomplished: Western-style democracies, cities and societies where we may live in peace, institutions of faith.
Liberalism is outrage. Yuval Levin, again: “Liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it.” It’s a righteous discontentment at the suffering that still remains, an awareness of what we can and should change: the persistent effects of racism and sexism, the exploitation of the poor by the rich, the damage that humanity has inflicted on the environment.
Conservatism is personal responsibility. Individuals are left free to reap the rewards or consequences of their actions; someone who does wrong is punished.
Liberalism is systems thinking. Individual actions matter, but individuals are embedded in networks of community, upon which they built their results and to which they owe obligation in return. Wrongdoing is a symptom of poverty, societal breakdown, or failures in education and can be fixed through social or systemic reform.
Conservatism values fairness and equality: each person gets their own chance and receives the fair reward for what they do with that chance. When conservatism goes awry, it turns this meritocracy into a license for pride and rationalizes the neglect of others, believing that those on top deserve to be on top and those on the bottom should just work harder, forgetting that time and chance happen to us all (Eccl. 9:11).
Liberalism values fairness and equality: each person getting enough to lead a fulfilled life free of want, getting a chance unconstrained by the privilege or sins of those who came before them. When it goes awry, it obsesses over the apportionment of past privileges and sins, dividing people into ever finer groups of oppressors and victims – or it turns its pursuit of equality turns into a flattening “Harrison Bergeron”-style homogeneity, where any exceptional success or merit is a privilege to be ashamed of, and those on top should be torn down because that’s easier than lifting others up.
Conservatism seeks peace and stability. Life is hard, and suffering and chaos are bound to come, so whatever peace we’re able to find is a blessing worth holding on to – even if it seems like we could do better elsewhere.
Liberalism is willing to cause “good trouble.” Change is hard, and those who benefit from the status quo may try to preserve it at the expense of others, so protest and pressure – in other words, force, at least in the broadest sense – may be necessary to help others.
Liberalism is more likely to care about the outcome. If there is injustice in the world – damage to the environment, or wrongdoers accumulating wealth and business power, or racial or class inequality – then it’s our obligation to address that by any means possible. Otherwise, it’s far too easy for those in power to exploit whatever rules or systems are in place to cement their own position.
Conservatism is more likely to care about the process. Kevin Williamson summarizes this view well: “If the rules have been followed, if nobody has been deprived unjustly of his property or his ability to work and earn and trade, if property rights and contract and the rule of law all are respected, then the distribution of wealth and income that resorts of this is just, or at least not positively unjust, even when the results are not precisely what we would like.” Because the alternative, bending or breaking the process to secure a good outcome, can far too easily result in greater harm, whether through well-intentioned extremists, abuse by malefactors, social chaos, or unintended consequences. Robert Bolt captures this dilemma in A Man for All Seasons:
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!
Conservatism is fear - or at least caution. Humanity is fallen. It’s hard to build and easy to destroy; the work of weeks or years can be lost in hours or minutes, so we need to hold on to what we have.
Liberalism is hope. Humanity is made in the image of God. We’ve progressed so far and can continue to grow, if only we have the will and put forth the effort.
Conservatism fails when it lets fear dominate: when fear of future change causes it to forget that so much of what it’s grateful for is the result of necessary change and reform in the past. Liberalism fails when it devolves to only anger: when it forgets its hope and would rather just tear things down.
Conservatism sees wisdom in the past. It’s Chesteron’s fence: “Let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’” It’s the humility to recognize that, for all the faults and frustrations of society, there are real reasons for why it does what it does. It acknowledges our own limitations and considers that for all our intellect we may not match the collective wisdom of those who’ve gone before us. Chesterton, again: “Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”
Liberalism sees the potential in the future. It sees the past as steps toward progress and growth, rather than something to be bound by. It resonates with 19th century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker (later popularized by Martin Luther King Jr.): “You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways… But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”
Within the church, conservatism knows that the Holy Spirit indwells and guides Christians, and therefore the Holy Spirit has been guiding Christians for thousands of years, and therefore the church’s traditions and doctrines at their best represent centuries of Spirit-led wisdom and growth and faithfulness and work by the great cloud of witnesses that now surrounds us (Heb. 12:2). Liberalism knows that the traditions of the past do not remain untainted by human sin and human limitation, that the church must always be reforming, that God’s mercies are new every morning (Lam. 3:22-23) and that he promises he is doing a new thing (Isa 43:19) and that we can sing a new song (Ps. 96:1).
Is conservatism or liberalism better?
I definitely lean conservative (and this piece may reflect that, despite my attempts to be balanced), but I believe both philosophies have truth and value. Edmund Burke, the 19th century father of English conservatism, is described as saying not that we shouldn’t change but that we should change carefully, that we should operate on society as carefully as we would operate on our own father.1 A healthy society has both conservative and liberal voices, some people pushing to fix what’s wrong with society while others work to preserve what’s good. As Jonathan Haidt describes it, “You need a gas pedal, looking for change, and you need a brake, saying not so fast.”
The strange thing about our contemporary political situation is just how un-conservative, as I’ve described it, the current Republican party is. MAGA expresses outrage more often than gratitude; it reveres some aspects of tradition while in other respects seeking to overturn 75 years of consensus around trade, foreign policy, and America’s place in the world (and more extreme thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin seek to overturn 250 years of consensus around liberal democracy); its leaders seem to relish chaos; it gleefully takes a chainsaw to our Chestertonian-fence government; it’s perfectly willing to cut a road through the law to get after devilish progressives and immigrants.
More broadly, if conservatism is gratitude, I fear that both sides forget just how much we have to be grateful for. It may take decades to build a city – a place where people can live and work and find homes and community – but one can be destroyed in weeks (as we tragically see in Ukraine and Gaza). You can work for decades to build trust – between neighbors, within communities, between a people and their government, between nations – then see it lost overnight through acts of betrayal, selfishness, foolishness, or aggression. Our very system of government, liberal democracy (sometimes called classical liberalism) – belief in individual liberties, codified in constitution and laws, instilled for centuries as a core value of culture, and buttressed by institutions such as courts and elections – has been wildly successful. We persuade and debate and tolerate rather than launching inquisitions or crusades against those we disagree with, and when we lose, we trust the law and await the next election instead of taking up arms. Yet its very success means that we take it for granted; both left and right declare their frustration and seek to seize governmental and societal power to coerce the other side into obedience. Scott Alexander calls liberal democracy
a technology for preventing civil war. It was forged in the fires of Hell – the horrors of the endless seventeenth century religious wars. For a hundred years, Europe tore itself apart in some of the most brutal ways imaginable – until finally, from the burning wreckage, we drew forth this amazing piece of alien machinery. A machine that, when tuned just right, let people live together peacefully without doing the “kill people for being Protestant” thing. Popular historical strategies for dealing with differences have included: brutally enforced conformity, brutally efficient genocide, and making sure to keep the alien machine tuned really really carefully.
Now, he says, people “try to smash this machinery with a sledgehammer.” I worry about where we go from here.
Is conservatism or liberalism more Biblical?
The Psalms contain both conservative gratitude (“Look! How good and how pleasant it is when brothers truly live in unity.”, “The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.”) and liberal outrage (“O Lord, how long will the wicked, how long will the wicked celebrate?… They kill the widow and the resident foreigner, and they murder the fatherless”). The Bible discusses both individual and corporate (systemic) guilt and responsibility. Jesus says that you cannot put new wine into old wineskins (Mt. 9:22), but he also praises those who are “like the owner of a house who brings out of his treasure what is new and old” (Mt 13:52). He saw no contradiction between laying down a new commandment and presenting as foremost a very old one.
We live as the body of Christ, where our varied gifts and temperaments and perspectives can minister to each other and spur each other on and cover each other’s weaknesses. This surely includes our varied liberal and conservative moods. However, in this partisan age, we’re too often tempted to say that this party or that political perspective is the one true option for Christians – as if we’d be better off “if the whole body were an eye.” As David Platt says, “without knowing it, we create a false unity in the church based on political convictions instead of true unity around Christ and his Word.” 2
It’s hard to see Jesus fitting in a conservative or a liberal bucket. He flips over tables of the religious establishment while speaking in the highest terms of his religious tradition (the Law and the prophets). He excoriates Jewish religious leaders while telling followers to walk the extra mile for the hated Roman occupiers. I would say that Jesus strikes a balance between the two poles, but “balance” suggests some 50/50% split, just the right blend of portions of each. Better to say that Jesus is the most whole, the most complete person to have ever lived, that he fully embodies gratitude for the good and outrage toward evil, past and future, preservation and reform, hope in humanity’s redemption and grief for its fallenness.
Thanks to my daughter, Hannah, for comments and discussion.
Footnotes
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As described by Jonathan Haidt in an episode of the Russell Moore Show podcast. I’ve been unable to find a reference to confirm Haidt’s paraphrase. ↩
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Before You Vote, p. 100 ↩