The loudest voices in our society today tell us that "conservative" is bad and "progressive" is good and never the twain shall meet. It is evil to try to keep things the way they are. So trying to keep a higher standard of morality or better fiscal responsibility or a more robust notion of rights or whatever is bad if it's not "progressive" which, by definition, is moving away from the current settings. Conservatives, on the other hand, pride themselves on standing their ground on "what is right." "We will not be moved" might be the thought of many conservatives. While I'm confident that "Newer is better" is the constant lie of the Progressive, "We will not be moved" is the self-delusion of the Conservative. And it doesn't matter if we're talking politics or religion.
The truth is we're all on the move. Progressives do it consciously. Conservatives go along, just at a slower pace. Progressives, for instance, embrace birth control long before conservatives allowed it, but today there is only a minimal fringe group who still think it's bad. Progressives urged "marriage equality" for the LGBT while the conservatives dug in, but today the remaining folk who think that "marriage equality" means "Anyone who wants to join a man and a woman in matrimony should be allowed to do so" is a small minority. And so it goes. Yesterday's "next step" among progressives is today's position among conservatives. We say we will not be moved, but, over time, we have and we don't even notice. While we think we're conserving principles, we're simply releasing them more slowly than the progressives do.
The reason is simple. There are no standards. When "what is" is the standard by which we measure "what should be", it is inevitable that we all will shift, even if some of us shift later. Today's "radical" becomes "normal"; we don't even notice that yesterday it was radical. Having no solid basis for where to stand ... well ... we won't stand. We can't.
It begs the question. Is there someplace we should stand? Is all the foot-dragging of the conservative side just a show? If it is true that "what is" should be conserved in some way, on what basis do we say so and why does that change? Because it does, people. It always does.
The Protestant Reformation was not an attempt to "reform" the Church in the sense of making something good out of something bad. It was an attempt to return the Church to its former, biblical positions. It was an attempt at real conservatism, where the aim was to conserve Christianity in its original form. These folks believed that the Bible was trustworthy and authoritative and they didn't have the right to "go along to get along." They thought, "When God speaks, we should listen." And they thought God had spoken in His Word. Their differences of opinion were not over God's authority or the authority of His Word; they were about what exactly His Word said. Because the principle was the same throughout -- what God says we should do.
In politics or religion, progressives think they're leading the way to a better world by changing what is and conservatives think they are making the world better by keeping what is good. In Christianity in particular, we delude ourselves if we think we're making the world a better place by resisting the progressives. It's only when we align our steps -- our views, our positions, our beliefs -- to what God has said that we can be sure to stand in the right place. And we must realize that, if we're not careful, where we stand today is likely as much a product of misguided Christian conservatism that uses the movement of the Left as their standard instead of the Word of God. We need a solid foundation, and we need to stand on it at all cost.
5 comments:
I grew up having one Asian-American family on our block for about three years. In high school I had three Asian classmates. I never got to know those classmates very well. I don't know where the idea came to me in my younger days (prior to 2000, let's say) that Asian-Americans are politically middle-to-right, given my small sample size. But somehow I formed that impression.
Now with so much social media accessible, I've noticed that of the roughly 20 Asian-Americans whose social media pages get into politics that I come across with some regularity, ALL of them are left of center. Is this broadly representative of all of them, or is it skewed in that social media tends to be more of a youthful thing to get involved in, and youth tend to be further Left than they will be later in life?
Can somebody link me to a social media page of a conservative Asian-American? I just want to see what that would even look like.
Well said.
Thought you might like this comment by Mark Twain:
The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopt.
Danny, I read an item from a president of a (new) seminary who said that he didn't want to put a lot of time and money in making buildings because "I don't want to leave a bunch of nice places for the next generation of liberals to use." Similar to Twain's thought, I think.
Anon, not sure if you're the same one that keeps doing this, but you keep posting comments that are only loosely related to the topic. The political demographics of an ethnicity isn't really in view here. It's that we conservatives keep allowing liberals to keep dragging is along to "newer and better ways". While you did mention liberal and conservative, they weren't really in alignment with the topic of the post. The point is that the conservatives of old (no matter ethnicity) would be appalled at the state of conservatives today, and wonder if all their struggling was even worth it.
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