A Purpose Outside History

Forget it often though we do, the issue at stake between Conservatives and Liberals is that between Revelation and “Reason.” And there are two strategic errors the Conservative must not make in his continuing debate about that issue with the Liberals (I say debate not discussion because the Liberal, as a matter of settled practice, refuses to discuss).

The first is to let the Liberal substitute for the real problems as to the status of revealed truth his own question-begging restatements of them—that is, turn the debate into one about “values” or “value-judgments.” The second is to compromise his insistence that the status of those truths turns exclusively on whether or not they were revealed— directly, by the One God, to His creature man—as the Conservative does when he acquiesces in the Liberal notion that revelation is a matter of “private” “religious” conviction, and so should never be mentioned in polite company. Both errors are now habitual with most American Conservatives; both are fatal to the Conservative cause.

WK

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Willmoore Kendall

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Forget it often though we do, the issue at stake between Conservatives and Liberals is that between Revelation and “Reason.” And there are two strategic errors the Conservative must not make in his continuing debate about that issue with the Liberals (I say debate not discussion because the Liberal, as a matter of settled practice, refuses to discuss).

The first is to let the Liberal substitute for the real problems as to the status of revealed truth his own question-begging restatements of them—that is, turn the debate into one about “values” or “value-judgments.” The second is to compromise his insistence that the status of those truths turns exclusively on whether or not they were revealed— directly, by the One God, to His creature man—as the Conservative does when he acquiesces in the Liberal notion that revelation is a matter of “private” “religious” conviction, and so should never be mentioned in polite company. Both errors are now habitual with most American Conservatives; both are fatal to the Conservative cause.