1. Does the term stewardship apply to conservatives only? Certainly, it is a concept that should be embraced, but doesn’t everyone? Mark F above asks what is being stewarded. Wouldn’t/couldn’t almost every environmental group, that I presume would be mostly labelled as “liberal” claim that they are involved in stewardship. I am certainly not saying that conservatives would not be in favor of stewardship of the environment, but neither do the reluctance to consider global warming as a threat nor the recent mantra of “Drill, baby, drill” fit neatly into that concept. Aren’t you back to saying that the means to fulfill stewardship is the distinction between liberals and conservatives.

2. How does stewardship apply practically to tax policy? It used to be that the conservative position was fiscal responsibility. That seems to have morphed into all taxes are bad. To me, stewardship would require that you pay for whatever it is you want. Smaller government would mean less to pay for, but there have been few administrations that have balanced the budget in recent memory. Theoretically, conservatives were in charge of Congress and the White House during much of the GWB administration. If stewardship is to be viable, then I would think that raising taxes as well as cutting spending would have to be on the table as an option.

So what is a conservative? Certainly, the Founding Fathers would never have envisioned what our government has become, yet were they conservatives? Breaking with your King to found a republic does not seem conservative, nor was the assertion that all men are created equal. The argument we are having is as old as the Republic…should the central government be strong and active or smaller and less intrusive?

In a talk I just gave at my church a week ago on stewardship as we approach commitment Sunday I put stewardship, reflected in the offering, this way:

“The offering is not a free market exchange process in which we exchange labor for pay and pay for goods and services. It’s an organic, ecological process of growth. We are like potted plants that the master gardener is preparing for a special and beautiful place in a new creation He is planting, and giving as an act of worship is part of the process by which God nourishes and feeds us so that we may grow into a plant ready to be taken from the pot and deeply rooted in good soil.”

That metaphor doesn’t just apply to the Sunday offering, it applies to any area of stewardship, even the stewardship of precious ideas and cultural heritage. If our goal is to stop erosion, we have to plant, tend, and nurture. If that’s reactionary then color me reactionary.

I have long hungered for a new model. Neither Left nor Right has it, currently. I don’t like to identify myself with either party or either ideology, but I am far from moderate. I hold firm beliefs, convictions and principles. Though I worship in a concrete mainstream faith community, I mostly consider myself a ‘little o’ orthodox, Protestant, Nicene Christian. Politically I would identify myself, not by party, but by influences (James Q. Wilson, Senator Moynihan, Robert Nisbet, Jacques Barzun, John Diggins and Patrick Deneen to name a few).

There are a lot like me. In fact, I think that most of the so-called religious right feel similarly. It’s not that they have a choke hold on the GOP; quite the contrary, it is the GOP who have a coke hold on them simply because many can not vote for someone who supports abortion. Like Jefferson, they tremble for their country when they reflect that God is just.

If I could draw I’d make a political cartoon. A winding road with a car in the right lane with America painted on the roof. The license plate reads Nixon. Next panel, same car, license plate reads Carter and it’s in the left lane. Next panel, back in the right with Reagan/Bush. Next, back in the left with Clinton, next back in the right with G.W. Bush. Final panel it’s back on the left with Obama on the plate. Up ahead a sign: Hell-in-a-Hand-Basket 5 miles ahead.

Progress indeed.

2) does not follow, even if the basic point about political imagination is sound. With due respect to the ordeals of good loyalists like gov. Thomas Hutchinson, and to the real bravery of the signers of the Dec., it was not that difficult in 1770s to conclude that either a British Empire that included colonies like the American ones would have to provide them a modicum of representation in Parliament, OR, independence was necessary/inevitable-at-some-point. And once British intransigence got you to admit the latter, one also had to realize that some appeal to natural political morality and legitimacy would be necessary.

I cannot say for CERTAIN, of course, what my present character and political instincts would result in given the counterfactual whereby some similar but historically plausible “I” would be a member of the Continental Congress in 1776.

But your case, here and now, is more interesting. Are you expressing a willingness to distance yourself from the Declaration’s principles today AS MUCH AS the typical American Revolutionary distanced himself from the principles of loyalty to Crown, Brittania, and Parliament? I know you don’t want to be a Jaffite, fair enough, I don’t either, but how do you propose to articulate the relation of your conservatism to the Declaration? Or to the Constitution?

But almost 99.5% of human political life is not the best case scenario. Win the culture wars, via cultural means, and we’ll have an electorate ready to vote the way Mitchell and FPR would prefer. Meantime, we have the electorate we have. We have the U.S. history we have, “tied to liberalism,” as Mitchell admits.

Does not the above column suggest that the political answer of the hour is for a conservativism to emerge that is distinguished sharply from classic liberalism, that is no longer a “shade” of liberalism? Does it not also suggest that this would mean a conservativism that did not speak very much [or at all!] of our government’s stated purpose to “secure these [largely individual] rights”? But rather one that would emphasize its also stated purpose [in the Preamble of the Const.] to ‘establish justice’ ‘promote the general Welfare” and ‘secure the Blessings of Liberty’?

What is this conservatism going to say about the Declaration? What is it going to say to the average American, right-wing or left-wing, about his average understanding of what rights are? That it’s all wrong, that it has been from the git-go? Mark, are your conservatives going to say, “We hold the truths of the Preamble to be true, but not those of the Declaration? And P.S., it’s the Distributivists who can tell you more about what ‘establishing justice’ is than the Founders can, b/c the Founders (and Lincoln too!) were at bottom…boo, hiss…LIBERALS?”

One cannot learn from you here, Mark, why a thoughtful Catholic political thinker like Christopher Wolfe, a man almost anyone would call a conservative, advocates something he calls “Natural Law Liberalism.” And there are many other thinkers like him that, while seeing beyond the philosophies of Locke, Rawls, etc., while sympathizing with the likes of you on most issues, nonetheless are willing to call themselves some sort of liberal or some sort of conservative that accepts that they have to work closely with liberalism.

And what is the evidence for your claim that the bitter rhetoric and partisanship of our time stems from the absence of your true conservatism? I mean, I can count off several different theories of why things are so mean right now…there’s Peter Wood’s theories about the legitmation of angry discourse across the spectrum due to cultural developments(A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now). Or there’s the idea of A. Solzhenitsyn and Chantal Delsol that the bitterness of our era is fundamentally linked to two centuries of progressivist over-expectations. Or there’s the simple fact of leftist bias in the MSM and higher-ed over a long period, and the push-back against it. And this is to say nothing of pretty thoughtful ideas in Madison and Plato for why republican politics is ALWAYS angry-faction empowering, ALWAYS a race against public insanity. People adopting your ideas as an alternative to “liberal” and “conservative” as presently understood is going to get past all that? The Left (to say nothing of the Right) is going to let you establish a centrist politics that says, “oh, we don’t do rights talk,” and not have some bitter and defamatory things to say about y’all if you become a political factor? It just doesn’t add up.

I might add that at the moment, I’m particularly grateful for the ire/spirit of the anti-big-gvmtn Americans, without losing my cautious instincts towards the likes of Levin and Beck. That rally in DC was wonderful given what it might help stop.

Mark, don’t pave the way for those who are tempted to develop a “Liberalism = Evil” politics/overall-explanation. I’m beginning to get seriously disturbed by the growing attraction to this sort of thinking, especially among more intellectual Christians. It’s bad political thinking, and lends itself to bad theology about politics…this is what is fundamentally bad about it, but yes, to my mind it is not incidental that in practice it tends to favor the worse of the two national parties, the Democrats.

Okay, off to a camp trip, so I won’t be able to respond if need be until Monday…happy weekend everyone.

Speaking of well known verses, as a conservative Christian I am not at all clear on how this sentiment lines up with Mark 12, as in “render unto Caesar what is his.” Caesar thought of himself as deity and had little to no regard for private property or love for the people of God, all traits of a perfectly un-born again—yet he we are commanded to be submissive and obedient to him. I see nothing that suggests that “not everyone in power deserves to be and ought to stay there.” That sounds more American (read: liberal) than Christian.

Or how about another well known text, Romans 13: “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority?”

So if our leaders need to be re-born to be trustworthy, what gives with all this scripture? And, anyway, who ever said that being re-born diminishes the immediate effects of sin and increases trustworthiness? Maybe the Pentecostals, but not the conservatives Presbyterians.