Conservatives Without Conscience

Evangelical Christian conservatives speak of their belief in a “culture of life,” a concept drawn from the teaching of the Catholic Church that underlies the evangelicals’ opposition to abortion. But for the Catholic Church, the culture of life also means opposition to the death penalty, which evangelical Christian conservatives fully support and strongly encourage. They are untroubled by the inconsistency of their beliefs, and when this is pointed out they explain it away. The unborn are innocent while those being executed are not, yet the culture of life believes it is God’s wish to protect all life. As another example, social conservatives are deeply offended by atheists who want to remove the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, yet with great solemnity and earnestness they recite—as often as possible—that pledge and its words: “liberty and justice for all.” For all but atheists, they mean. Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited prayer in public schools, Christian conservatives have been up in arms, with the most vocal being Christians who believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. Of course, those who truly know the Bible know that Jesus said, “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you (Matthew 6:5–7; emphasis added). So illogical is much of the biblically driven political thinking of evangelical Christian conservatives, for whom faith appears to trump reason, that theologians like Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong have written books with titles like Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (1991).

Jonah Goldberg, writing for the National Review, has acknowledged the contradictions within modern conservatism. Rather than finding them a problem, though, he deems them a virtue. “The beauty of the conservative movement,” he said, “is that we all understand and accept the permanence of contradiction” in thinking. One can envision George Orwell spinning in his grave in frustration at a remark like that, for it is pure “doublethink.” Goldberg noted in passing that Jesus was not a conservative, which is certainly true, and is another fact ignored by the religious right. It does not take a particularly close reading of the New Testament, or the teachings of Jesus, to appreciate that the term “politically conservative Christian” has an oxymoronic quality. This is why conservatives have had to invent terms like “compassionate conservatism.” But for those who believe that contradiction is a thing of beauty, the concept of compassionate conservatism will not tax credulity whatsoever.

Psychological Perspectives on Conservatism

Public criticism by conservatives greeted the work of New York University professor John T. Jost and his collaborators when they published a report entitled “Political Conservatism as Motivated Cognition.”[*][64] This study examines the psychology of political conservatism, basing its findings on a mass of data: forty-four years of studies by social scientists investigating conservatism, using eighty-eight different techniques and involving over twenty-two thousand participants.[65] Because its results are founded on empirical information drawn from experiments and testing—and conservatism views itself as grounded in empirical thinking—the negative reaction seemed out of place. Indeed, conservative commentators devoted little serious attention to the study, rejecting its conclusions based on a press release.[66]