American Conservatism Means More Than Secular Freedom

W hen 100 young patriots gathered at the home of William F. Buckley Jr. in September 1960, the task ahead of them must have felt nearly impossible. Drafting a document that could unite the disparate factions of the fledgling conservative movement under shared principles — without falling prey to the vitriol and hatred that so often mars big-tent political movements — likely seemed a fantasy. Yet Buckley and his peers succeeded, and the Sharon Statement became a seminal document in the history of the American political Right.

“Foremost among the transcendent values,” the statement reads, “is the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force (emphasis added).” Though rhetorically pleasing, the opening claim of the Sharon Statement was nothing new. The Declaration of Independence, of course, spoke of natural rights endowed to humans “by their creator.” In echoing the Founders, the students who birthed the conservative movement announced to the world, faithful to the American political tradition, that God would be the foundation of their worldview.

Fast-forward six decades, and that sentiment is no longer taken for granted in conservative circles, much less among the broader American public. Last week, an intellectual community dubbed the “freedom conservatives” released their own statement of principles. Implicitly, the group seeks to counter the rise of “national conservatism” on the American right. But while their own statement is explicitly modeled on the one produced by Buckley and co. in 1960, it’s hard to miss one glaring incongruity when the two documents are viewed side by side: The FreeCons assert that “among Americans’ most fundamental rights is the right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force: a right that, in turn, derives from the inseparability of free will from what it means to be human.” The word “God” is nowhere to be found.

I, for one, am pleased to see a serious, convincing, and coherent rebuttal to the excesses of the national-conservative ideology. I have little taste for the movement’s overbearing pessimism and tendency towards models of strongman leadership. But while its adherents are often accused of embracing a conservatism foreign to the American tradition of freedom, the NatCons’ political theology is far more faithful to the American conservative inheritance I hold dear.

The National Conservatives’ own statement of principles, published last year, is far more explicit about God’s role in the American experiment: “No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition.” Two centuries ago, George Washington echoed the same sentiment in his farewell address:

And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

But which deity would religious Americans worship? For Washington, it was the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It was that God, thought Washington, who had willed the American project into existence. Consider the following message Washington wrote to the Jewish community of Savannah, Ga., upon his inauguration:

May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivering the Hebrews from their Egyptian Oppressors planted them in the promised land—whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation—still continue to water them with the dews of Heaven and to make the inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporal and spiritual blessings of that people whose God is Jehovah.

One might argue, though, that in today’s secular age it is prudent to remain neutral on theological matters when speaking in the public square. Why not simply refrain from mentioning God in the national political discourse and let the chips fall where they may? That, some modern conservatives claim, is the essence of the very ethic — pluralistic and open — that the American Right is tasked to inherit and impart.

The father of modern Western conservatism, however, thought very differently. “I call it atheism by establishment,” wrote Edmund Burke, “when any state, as such, shall not acknowledge the existence of God as moral governor of the world; when it shall offer to Him no religious or moral worship.”

Like Burke, Bill Buckley understood that theological notions are the basis of the good life that politics attempts to make possible. In God and Man at Yale, he declared:

I myself believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.

Today, “FreeCons” find themselves on the right side of the struggle between individualism and collectivism. But too many fail to publicly emphasize the moral vision that a politics oriented towards freedom rests upon. At best, they are but silent endorsers of the essential link between theology and politics inherent to the worldview of Washington, Burke, and Buckley. But that is no home for the bearer of a conservatism authentically American.