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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Conservatism and Christianity

In his TAC review of sociologist of religion Robert Wuthnow’s new book, Red State Religion, D.G. Hart writes: What is striking about Wuthnow’s conclusion is the gap between his description and his understanding of conservatism. As readers of this magazine well know, Wuthnow’s depiction of mediating structures and local politics comes straight out of the […]

In his TAC review of sociologist of religion Robert Wuthnow’s new book, Red State Religion, D.G. Hart writes:

What is striking about Wuthnow’s conclusion is the gap between his description and his understanding of conservatism. As readers of this magazine well know, Wuthnow’s depiction of mediating structures and local politics comes straight out of the traditionalist conservative playbook. In fact, the greatest weakness of Wuthnow’s analysis is that he identifies political conservatism with the GOP and religious conservatism with evangelical Protestantism. In a two-party system, paleoconservatives and traditionalist or liturgical Christians only have so many options; they may be forced to hold their noses with one hand while pulling the GOP lever with the other. But in the history of political thought and the Christian tradition, the GOP and religious right only faintly resemble anything that can be called conservative. No real conservative would ever countenance prohibiting alcohol as a remedy for human infirmities, just as no genuine Christian would consider grape juice a suitable substitute for wine. Associating conservatism with Republicans is particularly annoying given the party’s radical origins and current ideological posture.

I wouldn’t say that “real Christians” don’t believe in grape juice. Are Protestants not real Christians? But I see what Hart’s getting at.

Anyway, it sounds like Hart points to a distinction between conservatives and traditionalists. They’re not the same thing. You get this in this remark from Wuthnow, taken from grad student Alfredo Garcia’s interview with him:

In Kansas, the church is the place people go to be good, to know how to do good, to be seen as being good. Let me offer another anecdote. There’s a wonderful documentary film called Zenith by Kristen Tretbar. In this film, which is filmed in the little town of Zenith, Kansas, there’s a scene in a wheat-growing area. The farm woman is standing on her porch looking out at this storm that comes up and starts a terrible hail storm. She knows at that moment that the wheat crop is gone. They have nothing left.

The film then flips over to the farmer’s coop where these guys in their 20s and 30s are sitting around talking about their struggles with drugs, marital issues, and so on. But they have been going to Promise Keepers and have also started attending this woman’s Sunday school class at the local Methodist church. So you can see the kind of moral climate in the community. It’s very divided between images of light and dark, images of good and bad, images of doing the right thing and the wrong thing. Part of what it means to go to the Methodist church is that you’re doing the right thing for yourself, for your family. It’s a place where you can make a difference. You can’t stop the hail from ruining your crop, but you can make a difference in these moral ways.

This is a more traditionalist understanding of the role of the church. It’s what I see going on in my own small town here in south Louisiana. My guess is that most (but not all) white people who go to church here vote Republican, and that all black people who go to church here vote Democratic. But the role of the church in the community is the same for both. In fact, church simply isn’t politicized here. The liberalism cracking the Episcopal Church and the Methodist Church at a national level isn’t really felt here, it seems to me. With regard to religion, the local folks are far more traditionalist than “conservative” or “liberal.”

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