“Modern society urgently needs true community: and true community is a world away from collectivism. Real community is governed by love and charity, not by compulsion. Through churches, voluntary associations, local governments, and a variety of institutions, conservatives strive to keep community healthy. Conservatives are not selfish, but public-spirited. They know that collectivism means the end of real community, substituting uniformity for variety and force for willing cooperation.”
“Variety and diversity are the characteristics of a high civilization. Uniformity and absolute equality are the death of all real vigor and freedom in existence. Conservatives resist with impartial strength the uniformity of a tyrant or an oligarchy, and the uniformity of what Tocqueville called “democratic despotism.”
Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability.
Two of the great watchwords of the Enlightenment were
1.) The inherent goodness of man
2.) The perfectibility of man
Both of these violate Conservative convictions and demonstrate again why only the Biblical Christian can be a consistent conservative. Even more we are beginning to see clearly that the Biblical Christian precisely because he is a Biblical Christian must be a conservative.
The Biblical Christian as conservative believes that man is fallen and because he believes that man is fallen he declaims against the Revolutionary notion of both the inherent goodness of man and the perfectibility of man. The Biblical Christian as conservative is deeply skeptical of any and all plans that hint at the Utopian. Even as a postmillennial, the Christian as conservative is suspicious of all non Kingdom of God attempts that are not organic with Kingdom of God principles to usher in some kind of social Utopia.
The last 150 years with their numerous mass graves dug by those who have believed in the perfectibility of man have given witness to the absolute folly of the pursuit of Christ-less social orders that have promised the immanentizing of the eschaton.
The Christian as conservative wants nothing to do with that.
Seventh, conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked.
The necessity of personal property is taught as one of God’s commands when He declaimed “Thou Shalt Not Steal.” Obviously, one cannot be commanded to steal if stealing were not possible due to the existence of private property.
Christians as conservatives then insist that freedom and property are intertwined. The constant attack by the Bolshevik Marxists against private property ought to be enough by itself to establish this principle.
The ownership of property allows the Conservative as Christians to be Godlike as God Himself owns the earth and all the inhabitants thereof.
Ownership/Stewardship of property allows man to be generous and merciful. Ownership/Stewardship of property teaches us to own our goods while not allowing our goods to own us. The property-less man learns nothing of these human/Christian virtues.
The man who owns no property is by definition a slave and while slavery does not automatically read someone out of the Kingdom of God, slavery has always been seen as a condition which the Christian is to aspire to rise out of.
Finally, property has always been a means of establishing and protecting the trustee family as wealth is stored up in family lines over the generations. The Revolutionary State, desiring to be God walking on the earth, hates any competition and so does all it can to ensure that generational family property is seized by the State who would own all property.
Eighth, conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism.
The voluntary community that the Christian as conservative upholds is the community that instant to the context in which the Christian lives. The voluntary community is that natural community that is inclusive of neighbor, local church, and the local polis — with its clubs, organizations, pubs, and small businesses.
The Christian as conservative finds the local voluntary community as natural akin to how a fish finds water natural. It is the contextual environment that God wherein has placed the Christian as conservative and as such it is where his loyalties first lie.
The Christian as conservative learns this principle from Scripture where over and over again we find articulated love of place and love of one’s own people. It originates first in the fifth commandment requirement to love one’s own Father and Mother and finds confirmation in Romans as Paul speaks of his deep love for his own race and again in Timothy where Paul says that if a man will not provide for his own household (extended family) he is worse than an infidel. These are all easily voluntary precisely because they represent where God has placed a person.
This is all contrasted with the Christian as conservatives unabashed hatred for the collective. The Christian as conservative hates the collective precisely because it destroys the sui generis of the local. The Christian as conservative hates involuntary collectivism because the only way it can be accomplished is by non-0rganic methods that force unique individuals and unique places, with all their variety and diversity, into a pre-cut template from which there is no escape as designed by some wicked bureaucrat in some far away clueless cubicle.
