Redefining Conservatism with Peter Viereck to Find Answers for Contemporary Evangelicalism Distinct from Ideological Conservatism and Progressivism

 

Peter Viereck distinguished his understanding of conservatism from the merely political/economic conservatism of the mid-twentieth century.  This distinction is helpful at the present time of social turmoil.  It is helpful for Christians trying to negotiate the present social context in which there is again a question as to what conservatism entails (not only in the United States) and a crisis posed by a radical progressivism that intends to dismantle Western civilization.  Christians, even Evangelicals, are caught up in both challenges.  

The purpose of this essay is to travel with Viereck some distance to make the distinctions that are needed to get beyond the present failure of conservatives and avoid the allure of a progressive elite of politicians, journalists, and intellectuals.  Many Evangelicals, who are typically 'conservative' in some sense, have identified themselves with a conservatism that seems (whether legitimately or falsely) heartless in its opposition to national health care, its nationalist self-interest, and the xenophobic rhetoric of some.  Such accusations against conservatives in general seem to be mostly false, and they appear to be interpretations from an alternative worldview rather than based in fact.  Even so, this calls for clarity.  Some issues (like health care) do need solutions even if not as nationwide programmes administered by bureaucrats.  Conservatives do not approve the radical redefinition of gender, sexuality, and marriage, but they have by and large refused to fight the culture on these issues.  They have, however, been mis-labelled antiscientific (climate change, approaches to the Covid-19 virus) and anti-women (by opposing the killing of the unborn).  Following the bombastic and excessive rhetoric of President Donald Trump, they have been put on the defensive.  Viereck, however, offers a description of conservatism, based in history, that offers an alternative to how conservatism is often understood as a list of policies and an ideology.

A minority of Evangelicals, on the other hand, have willingly identified with the alternative, a postliberal progressivism that is, fundamentally, a post-Christian activism.  Progressivism is a version of liberalism that more eagerly shifts its weight towards activism.  Its activism is much less along the lines of an American than a French form of revolution.  Its theorizing is much less a matter of Lockean liberalism than Marxist socialism—communism.  In its historical development, it is not merely the political-economic version of Marxist communism but also and especially a less defined social reengineering that seeks to march through the institutions of culture (as in Critical Theory).  By following this sort of activism, these elitist Evangelicals hope not to be labelled ignorant, uncaring, and irrelevant.  What Viereck describes as liberalism also applies to this progressivism.  If so, then it is essentially anti-Christian in its anthropology (claiming that people are essentially good), history (insisting that Christian civilization must be cancelled), politics (trusting in big government, even more than in the Church), social analysis (succumbing to Marxist Critical Race Theory), and ethics (defining social justice in terms of groups, with preference given to certain groups in the interest of 'equity', not 'equality').

Conservatism, in Viereck’s view, is neither a system nor an ideology but a way of life. It must reach deep into the bedrock of civilization and pull from there what is good and enduring while opposing what has been overcome and threatens to rise again.  It is, therefore, ‘the art of listening to the way history grows.’[1]  Christianity accomplished this, he argues, but we might insist Christians can go further than this in their long obedience of a life reforming according to and conforming to the revealed truth—conceptual and ethical—of their unchanging God.  Christians do not value culture as such but civilizing culture as it is being civilized by Christian values and submission to God.  Today’s version of progressivism, by contrast, simply wants to cancel the civilization that developed through Christian influence.

To bring out the contrast between a conservative interest in the deep matters of faith, history, and civilization on the one hand and a shallow activism on the other, consider two contrasting views.  First, a fundamental conviction of Liberation Theology, as stated by Gustavo Gutierrez, insisted that commitment to charity and service come first.  Only then comes theology.  Theology does not lead from faith to pastoral activity but is rather reflection on it.[2]  Activism precedes theology.  Social justice replaces dogma.  This is also a characteristic of progressivism, which wants social justice through activism and demotes theology to a second order.

The second alternative is offered by conservatism.  Peter Viereck defines it in his Conservativism Revisited (first published in 1949) as follows:

The conservative principles par excellence are proportion and measure; self-expression through self-restraint; preservation through reform; humanism and classical balance; a fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux; and a fruitful obsession for unbroken historic continuity. These principles together create freedom, a freedom built not on the quicksand of adolescent defiance but on the bedrock of ethics and law.[3]

As Claes Ryn states, Viereck argued that conservatism entails ‘the creativity of the genuinely independent men who find their inspiration not in the fads of the day but in the traditions of humanity.’[4]  Also, it opposes collectivism, not only as we find it in both fascism and communism but also in democracy when understood in terms of a government by and for the masses—the ‘masses,’ not ‘the people.’  This distinction is important.  Viereck, advocating a ‘bedrock of ethics and law’ and an individualism of ‘self-expression through self-restraint’ would no doubt, in the turmoil of the West’s present-day ‘adolescent defiance’ mischaracterized as ‘social justice,’ say, ‘I told you so decades ago.’  In the wake of Nazism and Marxism in 1949, he wrote,

What we need, and what a humanistic, nonutilitarian education will foster, is a century of the individual man.  Such a century would no longer change persons into masses but masses into persons, each with individuality and a sense of personal responsibility, each with a sense of his ethical duties to balance his material rights.  Democracy, though slowly attained and never by revolutionary jumps, is the best government on earth when it tries to make all its citizens aristocrats.  But not when it guillotines whoever is individual, superior, or just different.[5]

The social justice warriors of today’s progressivism, we should note, advocate a utilitarian education that, like Gutierrez, has little time for theology before activism.  They have latched onto the word ‘equity’ to mean ‘equal outcomes’ in such a way that individualism is turned into an immorality.  No better metaphor presents itself for this view than the mask mandated by governments as a protection against the Covid-19 virus—masses of masked people, obedient to government mandates because personal responsibility of citizens cannot be trusted.  Equity, however, ‘guillotines whoever is individual, superior, or just different.’  The progressive, like the French Jacobin, deplores the aristocrat in its push beyond equality to equity of outcomes.  Viereck finds the aristocrat of history a relic; he redeploys the term ‘aristocrat’ to mean instead the aristocratic spirit of feeling a noble obligation towards others.  The progressive, identifying aristocrats as a class and others as victims—a victimized class—simply attacks those considered privileged (though not consistently, especially when many are the most privileged technocrats, actors, politicians, and journalists), somehow imagines that government can enforce equal outcomes on all, and believes that, once this is done, society will be just and work better.  The conservative knows that this is neither justice nor even possible and that it removes the possibility of poorer classes showing the aristocratic spirit by themselves becoming agents of good.  The equity of progressivism is Lady Justice without the blindfold, hand on the scales, taking from one group to give to another.  It struggles with a verse such as the following:

You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor (Leviticus 19.15; cf. Exodus 23.3).

Justice is not partiality to the poor but stands above both poor and great.

Social justice progressives have elevated ‘difference’ in the form of ‘diversity’ to a virtue, but only in the sense of a virtue of conformity to a new value of sameness and not in the sense of individualism.  Thus, ‘difference’ is understood in terms of social groups (‘diversity’), some more valuable than others, with ‘intersectionality’ elevating those belonging to the most cherished groups of difference to the top of a ‘hierarchy of equity’.  (Logic is not required.)  The metaphor of the mask still applies: the conservative is the unmasked man in a sea of masked persons, not a person wearing a conservative mask to identify with some conservative ideology or politics.  Through their monotonous waves breaking relentlessly upon the sands of time and tradition, progressives not only cancel the past but also deplore the individual.  People are valued or disvalued because of their group identities.  This is tribalism.  For liberals, social conformity is the cure for the ‘dark recesses in the human mind, filled with poison which may overflow and destroy the social order.’[6]  Viereck calls this ‘an ant-heap age.’[7]  For progressives, a new social conformity is the cure for the dark recesses of structural evil, filled with the poison that overflows from uncancelled social orders.

Progressives see ‘sin’ as a collective concept, as social structures.  In this, they fail to understand the depths of sin resident in ‘every intention of the thoughts of [the human] heart’ (Genesis 6.5).  They therefore contrast the sinful group and the righteous group, playing them off against one another in an endless fight for dominance.  Progressives advocate both self-expression without restraint and collective conformity.  The former is non-ethical, the latter is deeply ethical for them.

In distinguishing himself from a form of conservatism that is more authoritarian and automatically defends existing institutions, Viereck offers an example from 19^th century England.  He says,

Since the industrial revolution, conservatism is neither justifiable nor effective unless it has roots in the factories and trade unions.  It was the Tories of the 1830’s, like the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, who fought for the factory laws to improve English working conditions.  The laws were passed against the opposition of Whig industrialists and many Utilitarian liberals.  And later, Disraeli’s Conservative Party, against the bourgeois opposition of Gladstone’s laissez-faire Liberal Party, legalized and protected the long-persecuted trade unions and passed the workmen’s social laws of the 1870’s.[8]

Viereck’s version of conservatism, then, seeks reform—a reform that aims to preserve or make what is humane in society.  It pursues reform through the law, aware that the violent overthrow of a bad law is an attack on law itself.  Yet reform is, to be sure, necessary, and where conservatism is understood as a preservation of the status quo, it undermines the values of a conservatism that seeks to preserve what is ‘permanent beneath the flux.’  Moreover, the change that comes needs to emerge or be grown from shared values, not made anew after some dramatic revolution of culture and then enforced.  Viereck points out two materialist alternatives to conservatism: economic individualism (‘pseudo-conservatives’) and leftist collectivism.  The latter seeks to impose unity by means of a statist bureaucracy.[9]  Instead, he advocates, ‘Liberty depends on a substratum of fixed archetypes [that ‘grow out of the soil of history’], as opposed to the arbitrary shuffling about of laws and institutions.’[10]

Christians sometimes follow a form of conservatism that lies in the formal past rather than the substantial past—for example, the Latin mass for its aesthetic value and contribution to a continuing social structure more than for the unchanging values of Christian faith, whatever the aesthetic and social characteristics.  To be sure, we live in an age when ‘conservative Evangelicals’ most often neither appreciate the theological depth of the faith nor the aesthetic value of worship nor the social value of the Church per se.  Such people are easily blown about by every wind of doctrine and susceptible to think that a Biblical call to justice equates with the culture’s view of social justice.  They are, therefore, far from conservative in Viereck’s definition.  Historic Evangelicalism can understand social justice through its strong record in the past and does not need to take lessons from a post-Christian progressivism.  Such activism would focus on Christian community in the Church and on local and foreign missions.  Instead, Evangelicalism is in a crisis of ecclesiology and missions.  We have an increase of non-denominational ‘churches’ that are essentially one-hour worship services that are scaled back to three songs and a big idea sermon.  For such, both ‘conservative’ and progressive’ mean mostly whatever they mean in society at large, and that has come to be, as Viereck says, defined in a political and economic sense.

Another point of Viereck is that conservatism needs to be opposed to Statism, whether from the right or the left.[11]  This involves not sacrificing liberty for equality or replacing freedom for majoritarianism.  He quotes the great liberal to make this point: John Stuart Mill warned of the tyranny of the mob when the

inevitable growth of social equality and of the government of public opinion should impose on mankind an oppressive yoke of uniformity.[12]

Progressivism is a tyranny of the mob in the streets or cancelling individuals on social media for their speech because they do not conform to some politically correct notion.  It claims to be the great advocate for diversity, but its diversity is nothing more than the uniformity of which Mill speaks.  Viereck contrasts conservatism with socialism in regard to what unifies a fragmented society.  The former seeks a unity ‘that grows from traditional roots and respects the precious pluralism of the decentralized historical landmark….’  Socialism replaces

bourgeois-materialistic fragmentation not with unity but with an equally materialistic and merely mechanistic unity, coerced by a central bureaucracy and falling like a Procrustes[13] upon the individual diversity.  That precious diversity gets fulfilled rather than crushed within the conservative organic unity of voluntary shared values.[14]

Progressivism, too, offers a combination of socialism in the form of social justice and elevates diversity to one of the primary virtues.  Yet its version of diversity is Procrustean, as Viereck understood so well.  Instead of valuing individual diversity, it creates categories of acceptable and unacceptable social diversity—a Procrustean bed—and it seeks to enforce this materialistically, mechanistically, and bureaucratically.

Christians understand their unity to be in Christ and therefore are necessarily different from the culture—any culture.  Thus, they cannot value culture indiscriminately, but because they believe they can influence, even transform, culture, they cannot march around cancelling culture either. When political conservatism is defined by a political party, it should often find itself at odds with a Christian conservatism that understands itself in terms of an obedience to the permanent laws of divine justice at the bedrock of humanity (natural law) over against a society ever in flux.  Herein lies the great distinction between the American and French Revolutions: the former understood rights to be God-given, the latter as human values.  For instance, as Viereck says, ‘the ideal of the ever more liberals and progressives today—not all, certainly—is to be the kindly yet brilliant materialist, saving the world not through spirit but through economics.’[15]

A fundamental ‘spirit’ value for Viereck is what Christianity offered in its conviction that every person was infinitely precious[16]—the belief that all are created in the image of God.  This was lacking in the democracy of Athens, which accepted the necessity of slavery for the freedom and self-governance of its male citizens.  By ‘spirit,’ Viereck also seems to mean characteristics of Western society that sometimes agree and sometimes disagree.  They are a molding of four cultural contributions into something new:

the stern moral commandments and social justice of Judaism; the love for beauty and untrammeled speculation of the free Hellenic mind; the Roman Empire’s universalism and its exaltation in law; and the Aristotelianism, Thomism, and antinominalism included in the Middle Ages.[17]

Christianity, he argues, produced a synthesis of these building blocks of a civilization worth conserving.  It serves, for Viereck, as a catalyst to tame each heritage.  As such, Christian religion is not so much in view as is a Christian synthesis of the four blocks of Western society.  Just here, the Christian conservative has to go much further than Viereck who, of course, was not writing theology.  Progressivism, on the contrary, seeks to deconstruct these and proceed to something else by the sheer force of a socio-political and economic exertion of power.  Social justice so conceived is fundamentally flawed—certainly from a Christian point of view.  Yet some Christians think that progressivism is precisely the answer to going further than past social constructs and worldviews.  Confusing social justice with Biblical justice, society at large with the Church, and the Gospel with politics, they wheel the Trojan horse of progressivism, filled with un-Christian views, within the walls of the faith.

One of Viereck’s great arguments is that Nazism and Communism are developments out of Romanticism.[18]  He says,

Conservativism, which is for politics what classicism is for literature, is in turn the political secularization of the doctrine of original sin.  In contrast, radicalism is Rousseau’s [the Romanticist] ‘natural goodness of man’ collectivized into a touching political faith in ‘the masses.’[19]

The masses form a barbarism from below that, like the invading hordes of barbarians from outside, undermine civilization.  They do so by undermining ‘the standards of conduct which civilization has over eons gradually imposed upon human nature.’[20]  The connection with Romanticism lies in its replacing a conviction in the sinfulness of humanity with a conviction in the goodness of the masses.  This, in turn, leads to an affirmation of the barbarian’s character over civilization (over the four civilizing movements of Western society).  Thus, Viereck interprets the history of the West as a story of civilizing movement across the centuries over against barbarism.

Contrast today’s social justice progressives first attempting to ‘cancel’ culture—the culture of Western civilization—and then building something vaguely and tribally defined in its place.  What is built involves a twist on Romanticism: not the natural goodness of man but the goodness of certain social groups over against the culture once called ‘civilization.’  This intellectually lacking view is expressed as a cancelling of ‘whitism’ (meaning Western civilization, but with racist overtones) and is the quixotic battle of Critical Race Theorists and one of the goals of the uncivilized Black Lives Matter movement.  European culture is not appreciated for its battle against barbarism; barbarism is, instead, said to be the good of the natural man.  Civilization is the enemy.  Progressivism, too, rejects original sin.  Viereck writes, ‘Nazi radicalism equates Rousseau’s Noble Savage with the racial mass (the Volk); Marxist radicalism equates him with the economic mass (the proletariat).’[21]  And, we might add, progressivism equates him with the alleged victims of civilization.

Where Viereck ran into some distrust among conservatives was in his affirming humanitarian concerns that liberals might also affirm.  One of his examples at the time of writing was the sort of conservatism that fought against racism and slavery in Edmund Burke, John Adams, and John Quincy Adams.  (The liberal, Thomas Jefferson, never set his slaves free.)  The conservative difference comes from reaching back to the archetypal Christian view of humanity created in God’s image.[22]  Viereck found in the permanent bedrock of civilization a heart, not a rock, placed there by the Judeo-Christian worldview.  He explains the difference between his version of conservatism (a preservation of bedrock values in civilization) and more recent versions of conservative (what he calls a ‘laissez-faire Manchester liberal’[23]) by quoting Winston Churchill when he opposed the introduction of high tariffs in Parliament:

The old Conservative Party with its religious convictions and constitutional principles will disappear and a new party will arise … like perhaps the Republican Party in the United States of America … rigid, materialist and secular, whose opinions will turn on tariffs and who will cause the lobbies to be crowded with the touts of protected industries.[24]

The political and financial conservative is not Viereck’s conservative.  The real difference, then, between (his view of) conservatives and liberals lies in the liberals’ rejection of human depravity and sin and affirmation of the natural goodness of humanity, their emphasis on the masses (i.e., people considered less as individuals and more in their social group or groupings), and their belief in linear progress.[25]  (For today’s progressives, progress is mutative.)  Viereck says,

In Coleridge terms, conservatism is the concrete organic growth institutions, as if they were trees, while rationalist liberalism is an abstract mechanistic moving-around of institutions as if they were separate pieces of furniture.[26]

Viereck expands on this, contrasting the general theory and blueprints for society of liberalism with the concrete embodiment of traditions.[27]

By way of conclusion, Peter Viereck’s attempt to clarify what conservatism is and is not can be helpful in another period of change.  On the one hand, he had to contrast his view of conservatism as a nostalgia for the permanent from the ideological, political, and economic conservatism of his day.  On the other hand, he had to explain how conservatism is different from and better than liberalism.  In our day, we need to distinguish Christianity from a political/economic conservatism (mere policies of the day) in the same way that Viereck distinguished his view of conservatism from the alternative.  We need to be able to affirm the Church’s role as transforming culture while distinguishing it from the politics and economics of a conservative ideology.  Yet we need to do this by conserving the good accomplished in a civilization with various building blocks from Judaism, Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages that has been molded by Christian faith.  An elitist Evangelicalism, on the other hand, has fallen for the allure of progressivism, and has sold its birthright for the porridge of cultural conformity and the praise it brings.  Claiming the high road of social justice, it is the stooge of a post-Christian culture.

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[1] Peter Viereck, Conservatism Revisited, rev. ed. (London: Collier-Macmillan Ltd., 1962), p. 155.

[2] Gustavo Gutierrez, ‘Notes for a Theology of Liberation,’ Theological Studies 31 (1970): 245.

[3] Ibid., p. 32.

[4] Claes Ryn, ‘Peter Viereck: Traditionalist Libertarian?’ Law and Liberty (July 13, 2012); online at: https://lawliberty.org/peter-viereck-traditionalist-libertarian/ (accessed 29 July, 2021).  Ryn has in view Viereck’s 1958 book, The Unadjusted Man in this comment.  ‘Unadjusted’ means the incomplete person seeking grounding in 'a fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux.'

[5] Peter Viereck, Conservatism Revisited, p. 35.

[6] Byrum E. Carter, ‘The Conservative Mind, by Russell Kirk,’ Indiana Law Review Journal Vol. 29.2 (article 11, 1954), p. 309; available at: : https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ilj/vol29/iss2/11.  Carter’s review, coming in 1954, spoke of ‘liberals’—and did so positively—in this sentence.  I have had to extend the thought to progressivism in our day, with its similarities and differences to Liberalism.

[7] Vierick, Conservatism, p. 34.

[8] Ibid., p. 36.

[9] Ibid., p. 127.

[10] Ibid., p. 128.

[11] Ibid., p. 40.

[12] Ibid.

[13] In Greek mythology, Procrustes stretched or amputated his victims to conform to the size of a particular bed.

[14] Ibid., p. 132-133.

[15] Ibid., p. 43.

[16] Ibid., p. 46.

[17] Ibid., pp. 46-47.

[18] The full discussion of this is in his first work, his doctoral dissertation, written between 1936-1941.  See Peter Vriereck, Metapolitics (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004).

[19] Vierick, Conservatism, pp. 47-48.

[20] Ibid., p. 48.

[21] Ibid., p. 48.

[22] Ibid., pp. 140-141.

[23] A Manchester (UK) liberal argued for free trade and laissez-faire capitalism.

[24] Ibid., p. 142.  Parliamentary speech, 28 May, 1903.

[25] Ibid., p. 143.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid.