Conservatism: Thick and Clear

In the collection of essays entitled God in the Dock, C. S. Lewis observes that a true religion “must be both Thick and Clear” so that it will fit “both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly.” Only Christianity, in his view, “really breaks down the middle wall of the partition. It takes a convert from central Africa and teaches him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a Mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord.”

Lewis’s words have relevance to more churches than one—particularly to that Coleridgean “church” we call conservatism. A while ago, in the pages of Modern Age, I read Russell Kirk’s reading the libertarians out, and Murray Rothbard’s reading Frank Meyer into the libertarians, with the usual mixed results—and I recalled how nonplussed I had been twenty years ago when I was first asked, “Are you a libertarian or a conservative?”—as though one could assuredly not be both. But that, pace Mr. Kirk, I do not believe. For the fact is, as I hope to demonstrate, that the traditionalists are, in Lewis’s terms, the Thick, and the libertarians the Clear, in the conservative “church.”

JL

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Jared C. Lobdell

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In the collection of essays entitled God in the Dock, C. S. Lewis observes that a true religion “must be both Thick and Clear” so that it will fit “both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly.” Only Christianity, in his view, “really breaks down the middle wall of the partition. It takes a convert from central Africa and teaches him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a Mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord.”

Lewis’s words have relevance to more churches than one—particularly to that Coleridgean “church” we call conservatism. A while ago, in the pages of Modern Age, I read Russell Kirk’s reading the libertarians out, and Murray Rothbard’s reading Frank Meyer into the libertarians, with the usual mixed results—and I recalled how nonplussed I had been twenty years ago when I was first asked, “Are you a libertarian or a conservative?”—as though one could assuredly not be both. But that, pace Mr. Kirk, I do not believe. For the fact is, as I hope to demonstrate, that the traditionalists are, in Lewis’s terms, the Thick, and the libertarians the Clear, in the conservative “church.”