God

Conservatism is not a theology, and conservative writers have included Anglicans, Catholics, Jews, Orthodox Christians, evangelical Protestants, and a small number of secular sceptics. But the tradition as a whole has held that politics cannot be understood, and a free society cannot be sustained, without reference to a moral order that transcends the political community itself. The name traditionally given to the source of that order is God.

To remove God from the picture is to remove the warrant for the moral limits that conservatism, in its central line, has insisted are binding on rulers, peoples, and majorities alike.

Key takeaways

• The conservative tradition, in its mainstream form, has been a religious tradition, and the question of God has stood at its centre rather than at its periphery.
• Russell Kirk’s first canon of conservative thought was “belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience”; without this conviction, on his account, what remains is not conservatism but a defence of inherited prejudice.¹
• The tradition distinguishes between the philosophical claim that there is a transcendent moral order — a claim accessible in principle to natural reason — and the particular theological commitments of Christianity, Judaism, and other revealed religions; conservatism has historically defended the first as politically necessary and treated the second as politically beneficial but not enforceable.

History and context

The classical foundation was laid by Aristotle, whose Metaphysics and Nicomachean Ethics posited a final cause for the universe and a moral order intrinsic to human nature, and by the Stoic and Ciceronian tradition of natural law that survived into Christian thought. Augustine’s City of God (c. 413–426) gave conservative political reflection its enduring frame: there are two cities, the earthly and the heavenly, related but not identical, and the earthly city is rightly ordered only when it acknowledges that it is not ultimate.² Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (1265–1274) synthesised Aristotle’s philosophical theology with Christian revelation and produced the natural-law tradition that has been the philosophical backbone of conservative reflection on God and politics ever since.³

The early modern conservative engagement with God ran through the Anglican settlement and the Catholic counter-reformation, but its most influential statement for the conservative tradition as such was Edmund Burke’s. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) treated religion as “the basis of civil society” and insisted that the French revolutionaries’ attempt to construct a political order on purely secular foundations would issue in tyranny, because the moral capital required for ordered liberty cannot be produced by the political order itself.⁴ The line continues through Tocqueville’s analysis of American religion as the necessary companion of American liberty, through Disraeli’s defence of the Anglican establishment, through Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891), and into the twentieth-century recovery of classical and Christian political philosophy associated with writers including T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, and Russell Kirk.⁵

The twentieth century also saw the conservative case for God developed as a response to two specifically modern challenges. The first was the rise of totalitarian ideologies — fascist, communist, and Nazi — that conservatives such as Eric Voegelin and Henri de Lubac identified as forms of political religion, secular substitutes for the transcendent faith they had displaced.⁶ The second was the rise within Western democracies of a secular liberalism that sought to confine religion to the private sphere. The conservative reply, articulated by writers including Roger Scruton, Robert P. George, and Rémi Brague, has been that the privatisation of religion is itself a substantive metaphysical claim, not a neutral arrangement among competing worldviews.

The conservative position

Three claims structure the conservative engagement with the question of God.

First, there is a transcendent moral order that the political community discovers but does not invent. This is Kirk’s first canon, and it is the load-bearing claim of the entire tradition. Whether expressed in the language of natural law, divine command, the moral order of being, or the Tao in C. S. Lewis’s sense in The Abolition of Man (1943), the conservative holds that moral truths are not products of human will, individual or collective, and that political authority is itself accountable to a higher standard.⁷

Second, religion is socially necessary, not merely socially useful. The Tocquevillean argument is often presented as a utilitarian defence of religion: religion produces good citizens, so the state should encourage it. The conservative tradition has more often made a stronger claim: a society that has lost belief in God will lose, sooner or later, the moral resources required to sustain ordered liberty. Burke’s claim that religion is the basis of civil society was not a sociological observation but a metaphysical one. A polity that pretends to do without God is, on the deep conservative view, attempting the impossible.

Third, the relationship between religion and politics is one of distinct but related authorities, not of identification. The conservative tradition has, in its main line, rejected both theocracy — the direct rule of priests or the equation of religious and civil law — and laicism — the active expulsion of religion from public life. The American settlement of disestablishment without privatisation, the British settlement of an established church without religious tests for office, and the Catholic doctrine of the distinction between the two swords are all variations on the same theme: religion and politics each have their own authority, and each is corrupted when it tries to subsume the other.

Differing positions

The integralist position, defended in recent years by writers such as Adrian Vermeule and Thomas Pink, holds that the conservative tradition’s accommodation with liberalism has gone too far and that a return to the older Catholic teaching of the subordination of the temporal to the spiritual is required. Integralists charge that the disestablishmentarian settlement was a concession to a hostile modernity that has now exhausted its usefulness.

The secular-conservative position, associated with writers including James Burnham and a strand of the post-war American intellectual right, holds that the political case for conservatism can be made on prudential, historical, and sociological grounds without commitment to any particular metaphysical or theological doctrine. On this view, religious belief is a private matter that need not be presupposed by conservative politics.

The progressive critique holds that the conservative insistence on the political relevance of God is incompatible with the pluralism of a modern democratic society, and that the appeal to transcendent moral order functions to insulate the policy preferences of religious majorities from democratic challenge. The conservative reply is that the alternative — politics without any reference to a moral order beyond the political community — is not pluralism but a particular metaphysical commitment masquerading as neutrality.

References

1. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, 7th rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1985), 8 (the six canons of conservative thought).
2. Augustine of Hippo, The City of God Against the Pagans, trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
3. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, especially I-II, qq. 90–97 (the treatise on law), available in Latin and English at https://www.newadvent.org/summa/.
4. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 142–146.
5. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1 (1835), Part II, Chapter 9; T. S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949); Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (1953; 7th ed. 1985).
6. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952); Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, trans. Edith M. Riley et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995).
7. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943).