Wednesday, May 03, 2006
Crunchy Cons – “I am one” – Great New Book and New Blog
If you read this website in any depth you will discover that I am a conservative, but not a conservative in the traditional manner. For one thing, I think Hillary Clinton was right, it does take a village (but I am not sure that village should be led by Big Uncle Sam). Also, like Jedadiah Purdy points out in his book, For Common Things, the value of things is not simply their economic value. When conservative get greedy, I always walk out of the room.
For a long time, I had noticed that more and more people I talked to thought the way Tanya and I did. They were essentially conservative people who because they saw the conservative movement as individualistic, consumerist, and aesthetically handicapped, had rejected conservatism. Many of them ended up in the Democratic Party, even though there was not one thing the Democrats stood for they could agree with in the hearts.
Hey, I am a deeply evangelical Christian, be it of a Catholic/Mainline variety (though I have my seven years in a non-denominational megachurch to validate my standing). But, that helped lead me and my wife to vegetarianism and a preference for the tastiness of organic. While we love our house and our privacy, we have an open door policy and invite as many people in the world into it as we can. While we live in a sort of mini-suburb (an older one), we chose the area because there is local grocery store, library, running trail, sidewalks and the like to help create community.
All of these are not merely “taste preferences,” as Jonah Goldberg, whose writing I enjoy over at http://www.nationalreview.com, would like you to believe. They are reflections of something deeper than party affiliation or other membership. These are in fact, a living out of the Gospel as I understand it. But, like my many friends, I felt like “we are all alone doing this.”
Then a couple of months ago I noticed a lot of talk on National Review Online about a forthcoming book, Crunchy Cons. The author, Rod Dreher, lives in Dallas (we will forgive him for that), and has “good conservative credentials.” I was more than curious, especially since he was being attacked by a few of the other NRO folks. So, as soon as the book came out I had it, and followed the blog discussion on the site (which is not longer up). While I am not a 100% “Crunchie,” I am pretty close.
Now, part of the reason I want to draw attention to Mr. Dreher’s book is that he is describing something that is very important from a theological perspective. Way back in 1947 when Carl F. Henry, one of the godfathers of modern Evangelicalism first wrote about The Uneasy Conscious of Modern Fundamentalism, he brought an important idea back into Christian thinking – The Kingdom of God. This has been a point of much interest for me ever since reading one of the five greatest books of all time – Transforming Mission, by the late missiologist David Bosch. Bosch’s book pointed out that the Gospel is the Gospel of the Kingdom, and for missions to really succeed in bringing transformation, mission theology would have to be theology about and to the Kingdom of God. That spurred me to do my master thesis on the subject of the Kingdom of God as a basis for mission theology, where I became familiar with the writings of Leslie Newbigin, the late 20th century missions theologians from England, whose writings are a must for any serious evangelical Christian, even though his implications may make a “good conservative” a bit jumpy.
In my work with The Navigators we see the current period in time as another (one of many) pivot points for American faith. The Church, both Catholic and Protestant, has done a lot of repair to its reputation (putting aside the issues of the religious Right and Left). It does stand by people in crisis. It is more accessible to people. All of which is great. But transformation, the changing of people into the likeness of Jesus Christ (or in either Jewish or Islamic circles, the living of life in perfect accord with God) has not been happening. George Barna has created a small kingdom around pointing out that Christians, even born-again Christian (skip those “liberal mainliners” for the moment), live essentially the same lives as non-Christians, except they go to church on Sunday.
Why is this? Largely because the Gospel that we have been sharing, while true, is incredibly incomplete, or as Dallas Willard calls it in his fantastic must-read, The Divine Conspiracy, reduced. “Getting to heaven” is not what Christian should be focused upon. We should be focused on the Kingdom of God. Not in the early 20th Century Social Gospel mode of “creating the Kingdom,” but of living lives, in community, that reflect the true nature of reality – the coming Kingdom. Our happiness is not in mass consumerism, the best schools, great careers, and mini-mansions, though all of these are not bad things in and of themselves, but in the truth that the Kingdom of God is now here and is soon coming (that is along discussion in and of itself…just call it, the Already and Not Yet of the Kingdom).
What Rod is writing about, I am guessing knowingly, is living life according to the Kingdom of God. It is taking enjoyment out of things other than mammon/wealth (which is not evil, but so easily turns to the love of money), but out of the deeper things in life – those things which reflect true reality. You can see this in his Crunchy Con Manifesto:
1.We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.
2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.
3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.
5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.
6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.
7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.
8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
9. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.”
10. Politics and economics won’t save us; if our culture is to be saved at all, it will be by faithfully living by the Permanent Things, conserving these ancient moral truths in the choices we make in our everyday lives.
While not a restatement of the Kingdom of God, they present a pretty good model for living life out of the reality of the Kingdom. This is not merely “preference,” but living life out of the knowledge of what really matters and what doesn’t. Now, Mr. Dreher’s goal is not to change religion, but it is, at least in part, to help those who are conservative to connect to the truths also found in religion (especially the Christian faith) with their conservatism. Lets be honest, most religious conservatives of the Christian stripe are Republicans. Yet, time and time again, we make better Libertarians than Christians when we embrace lockstep some of the conservative mantras. When I realized this in my mid-20s, it caused an identity crisis. I was not raised with deep religious faith, but I was always a conservative (I had a National Review subscription in my teens). Then I started learning the meaning of the Gospel. At first I rejected my conservatism, dabbling with liberalism. That didn’t work. Neither did voting for Nader in 2000 (can I take a mulligan on that one).
My fellow conservative oriented friends don’t want to have to split their minds, conservative on their life course, but forced to vote for liberal Democrats because they see the Republican Party as too greedy and too selfish (hint by the way, Democrats are also greedy and selfish, but sell it better). Further, for Christians seeking to live out their faith, they need guidance for the “everyday” of life. In many ways Crunchy Cons speaks to that need. While we don’t live by law (see my handouts on my recent Galatians class), if we seek transformation in our lives we have got to connect what we know to be true about God and the Kingdom of God in the rest of our non-Sunday laws. Living the Crunchy Manifesto is a nice step in that direction.
Which is why I see Mr. Dreher tapping into something that a lot of Christians, not just GenerationX and Millenials have been seeking. We want to live holistic lives that make the world better because we know what is good and true, not because we think we can make the world the kingdom of God. In The Navigators we are seeing the need to help connect those coming to faith to a life of deeper meaning and deeper living. As David Brooks has pointed out in his fantastic neo-classic, Bobos in Paradise, the monk in a monastery may not lead an “exciting life,” but he does lead a deeper life. The key for the Christian faith in America in the 21st Century is to help people lead that deeper life without going back to the monastery. Cruchy Cons connects to that need and is a heck of great start on getting there.
What is even better is that Mr. Dreher now has a blog. Writing a book is a lot of hard work and time consuming (which I now know from writing my doctoral thesis on Wolfhart Pannenberg). Mr. Dreher has a lot of great insights, not just about the things in the book, but on life in general. I look forward to getting to hear from him more regularly through his new blog, http://www.beliefnet.com/blogs/crunchycon/
I say to Mr. Dreher, the blessing of God upon you and may your tent stretch out wide! (Isaiah 54:2)
