As Barstools Replace Pews: The Death Rattle Of Social Conservatism?

Shaun Kenney

4 months ago

It isn’t that social conservatives aren’t winning the war of ideas. We don’t actually believe what we say we believe (and people notice).

Just in case the speed of events has dulled us all, it is perhaps worthwhile to remember that the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump happened just three weeks ago. In that space of time:

That month long introspection seminar in the media about Democratic rhetoric after an assassination attempt? NEVER HAPPENED.
Trump is still Literally Hitler (TM).
Republicans nominated Ohio Senator J.D. Vance for vice-president after he shed his pro-life bona fides.
President Joe Biden stepped down as his party’s nominee after weeks of controversy.
Vice-President Kamala Harris went from the most unpopular VP in modern polling to secular saint in just under a week — and the honeymoon is definitely on.
The City of Richmond sold an empty school to an abortion conglomerate for the princely sum of just $10. No irony lost on why Richmond’s schools are empty and why it is splurging on its fifth abortion center.
Childless cat ladies are apparently a thing now. At least they aren’t wearing those hats anymore (because that’ll show ‘em!)
Pro-Hamas insurrectionists — that’s what we call this activity, right? — stormed several Congressional buildings and raised the Palestinian flag in front of Union Station before burning the American one.
The Paris Olympics first denied then apologized for their mockery of the Last Supper — after telling us how stupid we were to be offended.
Apparently, people with XY chromosomes can beat the heck out of people with XX chromosomes and feminists don’t seem terribly upset about that.
Biden wants to radically transform and reduce the independence of the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Nikkei stock market lost 12% of its value while defense contractors are up between 14-18% from last month’s margins.
The AI tech bubble has officially burst.
Cryptocurrency is on a nosedive.
Children are weird.
The Federal Reserve is now in a bind between maintaining interest rates where they are and risking a recession or cutting rates in an emergency session and allowing inflation to take off beyond the 40% increase on basic goods since the Biden administration took office in January 2021.
More questions than answers regarding Trump’s would-be assassin, including another runner on the roof, a woman calmly filming the near miss, photographers who have never covered a Trump rally capturing the near miss on film rarely used for such events, and a ton of questions from state and local law enforcement about being told to stand down.
Yet despite all of these provocations, precisely zero riots from conservatives have taken place over the last three weeks.

Needless to say, all of this is happening as we are on the cusp of a serious conflict in the Middle East as the proxy war between Iran and Israel is becoming more pronounced.

This on top of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. This on top of the growing seriousness of China seeking to kick off the Million Man Swim against Taiwan.

Meanwhile, we are beginning to see the impact of an electorate conditioned to want what they want and treat any disagreement as hate speech. Kamala Harris has to be the most underqualified candidate for president since Barack Obama, and certainly the most hostile to religious freedom ever selected.

Should Pennsylvania Governor Josh Schapiro be selected as her vice-presidential nod, she will be paired with the man who built his political career bankrupting the Diocese of Pittsburgh — accusing 301 priests of sexual misconduct and bringing zero to trial — not to mention suing the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Will anyone actually care? Most likely not… because it’s not as if the zeitgeist of the present-day Republican Party is leaning in the direction of social conservatives either right now.

Our issues are now material — inflation and immigration — not conscience and liberty. That should strike us all as a great loss.

So Why Are They Winning? Because Our Actions Do Not Match Our Rhetoric…

If we are to believe that political consultants are most concerned about winning than dying on your shield — and is there any substitute for victory? — then you only need to look at one graph:

Pro-lifers who want to actually end abortion?

Consist of 12% of all voters — one in eight.

Now the abortion-up-to-birth set is riding high at one-in-three Americans. Yet in that mix aren’t just your 18-25 gender studies feminists. No sir — within that framework are 18-25 bros who treat women as objects for sexual pleasure. Heck, go higher — 18 thru 55? All the same… bro-choice dudes are a good 85% of the problem, ladies and gentlemen.

Yet the wider implication remains. Just 12% of Americans are convinced that each and every human person deserves the basic right to exist.

Pick the issue that matters to social conservatives. Name the last time you saw tens of thousands of people march in defense of human life in Richmond?

Guess how many people marched in defense of their Second Amendment rights? Close to 55,000. Commonwealth for Life? Maybe a thousand?

Barstools, ladies and gentlemen.

Now I don’t have the magic wand to wave to get believers to start believing again. For as much as we may dump on the political consultants who use our votes to win yet give us nothing during the legislative session, the fact of the matter is that we have plenty of grift among our own — faith is lucrative after all. People have to get invited to the table, and if you’re not at the table you are most certainly on the menu.

Yet I cannot help but ask those of us who are individually there as believers — where is your red line? Where are we as willing to be as fearless as our enemies? No — we don’t need to burn and loot. Barbarians can imitate, but they can never create, and we are in the business of creating.

Are we willing to risk being heroes?

Are we willing to stand up and say “no further” to those who won’t have children yet desperately seek to indoctrinate our own? Are we willing to admit publicly that we are indeed Christian with as much fearlessness as our enemies announce their Marxism, socialism, progressive nature, and do so with a straight face?

Are we willing to read up a bit on the reasonableness of the Christian faith? Are we willing to fearlessly state some basic truths? That babies deserve a birthday? That young women deserve more than abortion? That marriage really is between a man and a woman? That if you would rather pick the bear over the man, that maybe that is the reason we don’t want them in bathrooms and locker rooms with our daughters?

Are we willing to fearlessly argue that for so long as faith informs conscience, no one should be asked to check their conscience in order to participate in the public square?

Or that secular religions are far more dangerous than sacred ones? Or that legislating really is a moral process where we routinely ask lawmakers to approve of moral laws, reject immoral laws, and have the character and integrity to be able to discern between the two?

Are we willing to fearlessly argue that becoming a slave to one’s passions is license and not liberty, but rather the only freedom worth having is one which cultivates who we are precisely because it is freedom rooted in truth rather than some social abstraction invented by the mob?

For too long, we have allowed ourselves to be knuckled under by those who seek to frame the argument first in such a way where the sacred must yield to the secular, as if the secular were not in and of itself held as fanatically as any other religion. Again, Jefferson draws the line in the sand:

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desireable? No more than of face and stature. Introduce the bed of Procrustes then, and as there is danger that the large men may beat the small, make us all of a size, by lopping the former and stretching the latter. Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other.

Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom may not be law per se, but it is most certainly a uniquely Virginian contribution presently forgotten in today’s public discourse.

More than this? We should remind our friends and neighbors that such a statement of religious freedom was the gift of profoundly religious men — and they gave us a republic and not a theocracy.

I don’t believe that the tech-trad-bro alliance within the Republican Party will last long, provided that social conservatives rediscover their raison d’etre for being involved in politics and gain a bit more swagger. Not the swagger of the grifters and influencers, mind you, but the confidence of the saints and martyrs willing to say that this is where they stand and we can do nothing else, so help me God — and that’s the reason why it will undoubted fail in the end, not just because they are wrong, but because their foundations are on sand and therefore require coercion to maintain it — hence the totalitarian nature of progressives and every other political religion that plagues humanity. Conservatives as an anti-ideology do not have this issue; the utopians most certainly do.

Which should be a source of courage. Rediscover the spirit of resistance? Of fidelity to the good, beautiful, and the true? Maybe the land really will heal.

Failing that? Expect to fail more.

One more thought, and it is that of the late poet T.S. Eliot describing the lost of Christian social mores in the face of modernism and the secular spirit nearly 100 years earlier:

“The world is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the world from suicide.”

— T.S. Eliot, “Thoughts After Lambeth” (1930)

Maybe the experiment will indeed fail, as Eliot says.

Yet whether there is a faithful remnant to remind anyone remains for those of us willing to defend the renewal in the face of the barbarians — in both parties. Some long-ish thoughts for unsettled times.