I read Paul Gottfried’s recent reflections on the historical memory of the paleoconservative movement just after reading two recent studies of the political philosopher Eric Voegelin which devote particular attention to his critique of modern Christianity: Jeffrey Herndon’s Eric Voegelin And The Problem Of Christian Political Order and John J. Ranieri’s Disturbing Revelation: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Bible. While Voegelin never called himself a conservative, paleo or otherwise, it struck me that his understanding of western Christianity, particularly his unbridled detestation of the Protestant tradition (which Herndon and Ranieri admirably document), is a high-octane intellectualized version of a tendency which I find all too common in my limited experience with the paleoconservative movement. Voegelin’s contention that most of modernity’s problems—libertinism, totalitarianism, etc.—can be laid at the door of the Reformation and the Enlightenment (which echoes Protestantism, in his view) is not substantively different from the anti-modern worldviews of paleos with traditional Catholic or Orthodox inclinations (many of whom Voegelin taught and influenced in postwar America). Just recently a contributor to this site similarly blamed Anglo-Saxons for all the horrors of American modernity, ranging from the ugliness of shopping malls to the rhetorical excesses of Bush the Younger’s 2nd inaugural address. Another contributor a few weeks back condemned the Enlightenment for liberating modern man from the authority of nature and tradition while unleashing the desire for consumption and mastery of the planet, all of which threaten civilization as we know it.
As a Protestant Christian, I must grudgingly admit that my brothers and sisters in faith have not done their job in preserving conservative order (or what I awkwardly prefer to call “bourgeois Christian liberal democracy”). In The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard rightly observed that as early as the 1950s there were hardly any prominent Protestant leaders to be seen on the American Right. And, despite the cultural Marxist undertones in his studies of the American Protestant mind, Richard Hofstadter had a point when he long ago faulted Protestants for practicing an “anti-intellectualism” which left a void in conservatism that was later filled by noxious factions (although I profoundly disagree with Hofstadter’s paranoid dismissal of American Protestantism as fascism cloaked in red, white, and blue). The failure of Protestants to defend their traditions on viable intellectual grounds has indeed led to a spiritual void or “deformation”, to invoke the terms of James Kurth, and thereby contributed to the decline of the very order that their forefathers worked to create.
I fail to see, however, any wisdom in conservative efforts to scapegoat Protestantism as the main source of all that ails the present age. While not all paleos have been as extreme as Voegelin in claiming that Lutheran and Calvinist “gnosticism” is a dress rehearsal for Hitler and Stalin, I have yet to encounter more than a handful of paleos who believe that the Reformation was a good thing. It is far more common in my experience to find paleos who wish that the American founding had been a little more Catholic, or who support John Courtney Murray’s contention that America would be far better off if the Founders had read more Aquinas and less Locke. (For the record, I’ll take church-state separation over the ancien regime any day.) It is one thing to bash Protestants for failing to defend their own traditions; it is quite another thing to bash those traditions as unworthy of defense in the first place.
What Paul describes as a traditionalist prejudice of many paleos rings all too true in my experience:
Many of the paleos I’ve listened to show an otherworldly side, when they’re not bashing each other in geriatric rage. They glorify Catholic monastic ideals or invoke the memories of Christian crusades. They complain ceaselessly about modern life and insist that we return to scholastic precepts and medieval models of social organization. But such advice cannot possibly resonate in the current climate of debate, and it is foolish to castigate those young people who wish to have impact on the present age for not following someone else’s nostalgic reveries.
The constant decrying of Protestant modernity has been arguably very successful in driving Protestants out of the paleo camp and into the hands of neoconservatives, whose rhetoric about America’s chosenness resonates with many Protestants. What Sam Francis once described as over-the-top Catholicism among paleos is simply a gift to movement conservatives. It is also a very strange thing to call oneself a conservative if one is uncomfortable with the conservatism (that is, the older Protestantism) of one’s nation. What exactly, then, is one trying to conserve in America?
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Paleos vs. Protestants
I read Paul Gottfried’s recent reflections on the historical memory of the paleoconservative movement just after reading two recent studies of the political philosopher Eric Voegelin which devote particular attention to … [Read More]
Posted by Grant Havers on June 18, 2009
The Usual Suspects