Friday, August 18, 2006
Conservatism - Rooted in Religion or Not?
One of my favourite blogs is found at corner.nationalreview.com. It is the best interchange of deep, funny, and sometimes strange thought for all things conservative. One of the best discussions of late is whether or not conservatism has to be rooted in religion.
National Review Online’s The Corner (corner.nationalreview.com) has featured this week an interesting discussion (brought up by Heather MacDonald) on whether or not conservative thought and the movement it spawns is damaging itself by being too religiously oriented. Now it must be admitted, that in America atheism and agnosticism as official categories represent only a small portion of American (less than 20%). That is however, a poor measure of how people form their political ideology and make their life decisions. Probably less than 30% of Americans use religion as the primary centre-point of their political ideology, which means that indeed if one must first become religious to a conservative that conservatism is placing a natural ceiling on its growth and its influence. The real question is, does conservatism have at its core a religious centre?
