What Conservatism Owes to Christianity

There is a moment that comes to many of us late in our formation when we realize that the political convictions we hold are not finally political at all. For me, it came gradually—shaped at Ouachita Baptist University, deepened through encounters with the conservative intellectual tradition—Burke, Kirk, Chesterton—tested and refined at Yale Divinity School, where I would discover that my basic disagreements with progressive Christianity were not disagreements about policy, but disagreements about the nature of human dignity, the character of justice, the source of rights themselves. These are not political questions. They are theological questions. Once you see that, you cannot unsee it.

The argument of this essay is simple: conservatism is built upon theological foundations, even when modern conservatives present their arguments in secular language. Strip away the theological grounding, and what remains is not a sustained philosophy but a bare preference. It is a house built on sand. Until conservatism acknowledges what it owes to Christianity—not as nostalgia or cultural habit, but as the actual logical and moral foundation of its basic claims—it will continue to lose ground to those who at least have the intellectual honesty to admit that their vision of the world rests on beliefs about the human person that transcend material fact.

The Foundation That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Many contemporary conservatives have become nervous about making explicitly theological arguments. The secular case for ordered liberty—the argument from efficiency, from federalism, from the dangers of concentrated power—these are intellectually respectable. They do not require belief in God. They do not ask anyone to step outside the frame of rational, materialist argument.

This nervousness is a mistake. It is also a recent one. Russell Kirk, one of the most influential conservative minds of the twentieth century, never apologized for grounding conservative philosophy in transcendent truth. He wrote, in The Conservative Mind: “Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.” He said it plainly, without apology, and his work was stronger for it. In his Heritage Foundation lecture “Civilization Without Religion?”, he stated: “All culture arises out of religion. When religious faith decays, culture must decline, though often seeming to flourish for a space after the religion which has nourished it has sunk into disbelief.” These are not incidental observations in Kirk’s work. They are the foundation upon which his entire argument rests.

Kirk understood what many contemporary conservatives have forgotten: that the conservative defense of ordered liberty, of tradition, of the dignity of the individual person—these are not arguments that can be sustained on materialist grounds alone. Oh, you can make the case. You can cite efficiency, argue for the virtues of dispersed power, point out the failures of centralized authority. But you are always operating within a system of assumptions about human nature and human value that you have not justified. Those assumptions are theological. They come to you from Christianity, whether you acknowledge it or not.

Consider the vocabulary in which conservatives typically argue. We speak of “human dignity.” We argue that individuals possess “inherent rights” that government did not grant and cannot revoke. We defend “natural law”—an objective moral order that transcends custom and preference. We say that “liberty” is not a gift from the state but a right rooted in our nature as human beings. We insist that “institutions” deserve respect because they embody the accumulated wisdom of generations. Every single one of these concepts is theologically grounded. The secular language masks a structure of belief that rests entirely on a Christian anthropology—a Christian understanding of who and what a human being is.

John Adams said it with characteristic bluntness, in an 1798 letter to the officers of the Massachusetts militia: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He did not mean that you need to be Christian to be moral. He meant that the constitutional order rests on a foundation of shared moral conviction—conviction about the nature of obligation, about the source of rights, about the proper relation between person and community. Without that foundation, the Constitution becomes a mere document, and democracy becomes mob rule temporarily constrained by paper.

Adams was right, and conservatism needs to remember why he was right.

Natural Law: The Grammar of Ordered Liberty

The Catechism of the Catholic Church captures the point in §1956: “The natural law, present in the heart of each man and established by reason, is universal in its precepts and its authority extends to all men. It expresses the dignity of the person and determines the basis for his fundamental rights and duties.” Note the theological priority here. The basis for human rights—the reason we insist that certain things cannot be done to human beings—is not majority preference, not utility, not evolutionary advantage. It is the dignity of the person. And from where does that dignity arise?

From the fact that the human person is made in the image and likeness of God.

That is not a political argument. It is a theological claim, and it is the claim upon which the entire conservative edifice rests. You can build other arguments on top of it—arguments about freedom, about limited government, about the dangers of tyranny. But the foundation is theological. If you remove it, what remains will not stand.

C.S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, called this universal, objective moral order “the Tao”—his term for the belief, as he put it, “that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.” Lewis chose the Chinese term deliberately, to emphasize that the Tao appears across every civilization—Jewish, Hindu, Norse, Greek, Chinese, Roman—but he was not making an argument from consensus. He was making a far stronger claim: that objective moral truth exists, prior to and independent of human agreement about it. But Lewis knew—and admitted—that the Tao itself could not be justified on rational or empirical grounds. It had to be received, believed, held as a conviction rooted in something beyond argument. You could test its implications, work out its logic, but you could not prove it from first principles without smuggling in theological assumptions about human nature and human value.

This is why contemporary atheist conservatives are always, in a certain sense, living on borrowed capital. They can articulate conservative principles with intelligence and force. They can make powerful arguments about limited government, individual responsibility, the dangers of concentrated power. But they are working within a system of assumptions—about human dignity, about natural rights, about the proper ordering of society—that they have not fully justified, and that in the absence of theological grounding, cannot ultimately be sustained.

The moment a progressive interlocutor asks, “Why should I accept that human beings have inherent dignity?”—and the answer cannot rest on “because God made them in his image” but must instead rest on evolutionary fact, on social contract, on something the materialist can accept—in that moment, the conservative is playing on hostile ground. You can make the argument. You might even win. But you are always in the position of defending conclusions that are not properly grounded in your premises.

Natural law, properly understood, is the logical working-out of theological conviction about human nature. It is how we translate “made in the image of God” into political principle. Conservatism needs to acknowledge this debt, and to stop being embarrassed by it.

Human Dignity: The Conservative Premise

The Catechism again (§1700): “The dignity of the human person is rooted in his creation in the image and likeness of God.” This is the theological foundation. From this single claim flows everything else that matters in conservative thought.

If human dignity is rooted in creation in God’s image, then several things follow necessarily. First: human dignity is not conditional. It does not depend on the state’s recognition or the majority’s approval. It does not wax and wane with political fortune. It simply is, rooted in the nature of what a human being is. Second: human dignity is universal. It belongs to every human being, without exception, because every human being is made in God’s image. You cannot consign anyone to the status of mere instrument, mere means to another’s end. Third: human dignity grounds rights—but rights in a particular sense. Not rights as gifts from the state, but rights as recognitions of what is intrinsic to human nature.

This is what separates conservative anthropology from progressive anthropology, and it is crucial to see why. The progressive tendency—historically, repeatedly, across contexts—is to make human dignity something that depends on external conditions. You have rights if the state grants them. You deserve dignity if you meet certain standards. You are worthy of respect if you contribute to society in acceptable ways. This is not stated crudely, of course. Modern progressivism wraps itself in the language of rights and dignity. But the logic is unstable, because it has no foundation deeper than human will and preference. Rights become claims on the state, duties become functions of social utility, and human beings become valuable only insofar as they serve purposes that the powerful have decided matter.

Conservative thought resists this with the claim that human dignity is intrinsic, not instrumental. You do not become valuable by performing; you are valuable by being. This is the revolutionary insight of Christian anthropology, and it is why Christianity—properly understood—is the most radical defense of the weak, the poor, the marginalized that human civilization has ever produced. Because it says: your worth is not contingent. Your rights are not grants from the powerful. You are infinitely valuable simply because you are a human being, made in the image of God.

When conservatism argues for limited government, for individual liberty, for the protection of conscience, for the right to private property—these are not ultimately arguments about efficiency or tradition or even freedom (though they are partly about all three). They are arguments rooted in this prior conviction: that there is something in the human person that transcends the state’s authority to define or manipulate. There is a sanctuary of personhood that cannot be violated without committing a profound moral wrong. The state exists to protect this sanctuary, not to abolish it.

Without the theological grounding, this argument is vulnerable. Why should we privilege individual liberty over collective utility? Why should we defend privacy if we could accomplish more through transparency? Why should we allow people to do things that are harmful to themselves if we could prevent those things? The secular conservative can answer these questions. But the answer is always, in the final analysis, theological—it is a conviction about human dignity rooted in belief about human nature that transcends empirical justification.

Burke, Chesterton, and the Wisdom of the Dead

Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, made an argument that was political on the surface but theological at its foundation. He argued that liberty is only possible as ordered liberty—liberty within a framework of law, custom, and moral conviction. A liberty untethered from transcendent moral order is not freedom; it is chaos. And society cannot survive chaos.

What is the source of this transcendent moral order that society requires? For Burke, and for the conservative tradition he founded, it is ultimately God. The customs, the traditions, the institutions that have proven their worth through time—these are not arbitrary. They are the repository of moral wisdom, the accumulated experience of human beings trying to live together in accordance with justice. To overthrow them carelessly, in the name of reason or progress, is to assume that the current generation of revolutionaries possesses a wisdom that supersedes the moral consensus of centuries. Burke thought this assumption was not only arrogant but destructive. It led to the Terror.

G.K. Chesterton made a similar point in his own way. Tradition, he wrote in Orthodoxy, is “the democracy of the dead.” It is a recognition that your dead ancestors, your dead friends, your dead enemies—they all had a vote. They had an experience of what works and what does not, what preserves human flourishing and what destroys it. When you overturn institutions lightly, you are silencing those voices. You are insisting that the living know better than all the accumulated experience of the dead.

This is not a counsel of pure conservatism, as though nothing should ever change. Rather, it is a counsel of intellectual humility and respect. It says: before you tear something down, make sure you understand why it was built. Before you overturn a practice, consider whether the people who established it might have had reasons you have not yet discovered. This is partly prudential—you might be wrong, and the consequences of being wrong could be catastrophic. But it is also theological. It reflects a conviction that human beings are limited, fallible, prone to the errors of pride. We need the wisdom of those who came before us. We are not sufficient unto ourselves.

Again, this can be argued on purely secular grounds. The case for gradualism, for caution, for respect for tradition—these are reasonable positions even without appeal to God. But they are stronger, deeper, more persuasive when grounded in something more than mere prudence. When you say: the wisdom you seek is available to you, if you will listen to the dead, if you will respect the institutions and customs that have preserved human dignity and human freedom—you are making an argument that ultimately rests on faith. Faith that the world is ordered according to divine wisdom. Faith that human beings are not sufficient to themselves. Faith that there is something to learn from those who came before.

This is what conservatism has always known and what contemporary conservatism keeps forgetting.

The Danger of Conservatism Without Christianity

What does it look like when conservatism abandons its theological moorings? We have seen it in recent years, and the sight is not encouraging.

Without theological grounding, conservatism loses its fundamental claim to be a defense of human dignity and becomes merely a defense of preference—my way of life, my group’s interests, my vision of how things ought to be organized. At that point, it is not clear why your conservative vision deserves respect if it is merely your preference, competing against someone else’s progressive preference. Both are just assertions, neither rooted in anything deeper than will and interest.

This is precisely where contemporary populist conservatism has found itself—bereft of theological foundation, it has become primarily a politics of grievance. It speaks in the language of betrayal and resentment. It defends not principles but tribes. It argues not from conviction about human dignity and natural law but from conviction about whose dignity matters and whose does not. This is not conservatism. This is merely the left’s tactics with a different target.

Or consider the way contemporary conservatism has often abandoned its claims about ordered liberty and embraced a kind of utilitarian argument for power. The reasoning goes: if we don’t get control of the state, the progressives will use it against us. So we need to use it more aggressively ourselves. This is the loss of theological mooring in real time. It is the replacement of argument rooted in principle with argument rooted in fear and interest. It is what happens when you stop defending ordered liberty and start defending your side’s right to disorder.

The answer to this corruption is not to retreat into a defensive posture or to apologize for Christianity’s role in founding Western conservatism. The answer is to recover what Christianity offers: a vision of human dignity rooted not in political utility or tribal interest but in the conviction that every human being is made in the image of God, that this dignity transcends all other categories and loyalties, that the proper ordering of society is one that respects and protects this dignity.

This is demanding. It requires defending the dignity of enemies and opponents, not just allies. It requires resisting the temptation to use power against those we disagree with. It requires believing something that transcends immediate political calculation. But it is the only foundation on which a truly principled conservatism can be built.

The Integration of Faith and Life

One of the persistent heresies of contemporary Christianity is the idea that faith is a private matter, kept separate from public life and political conviction. This notion is particularly pernicious for Christians who hold conservative political views, because it leaves them vulnerable to the charge that they are merely using religion as a cover for self-interest. If faith does not inform politics, then why bring faith up at all?

The answer is that faith cannot be kept private. Or rather, it can be, but if it is, then it is not really faith—it is hobby, sentiment, the weekend version of yourself that you put on and take off. Real faith, Christian faith, is totalizing. It addresses the whole person, including the person who acts in the political sphere, who thinks about justice and liberty, who makes choices about how society should be ordered.

This was understood by earlier generations of conservative intellectuals. They were not embarrassed to ground their political arguments in theological conviction. They saw no contradiction between the defense of Christian truth and the defense of ordered liberty. Indeed, they saw them as intimately connected. A society that does not acknowledge the dignity of the human person rooted in creation in God’s image will eventually treat human beings as mere resources to be deployed for collective purposes. A politics that does not root itself in theological conviction about human nature will eventually lose its restraint and become tyranny.

My formation at Ouachita Baptist University was one in which these connections were made explicit. Faith was not something you practiced in chapel and then set aside when you got to political science class. It was the lens through which you understood all of reality. It shaped how you thought about justice, about obligation, about the proper relationship between person and community, about the nature of freedom and the grounds for resistance to tyranny. That formation deepened at Yale Divinity School, where I came to see with clarity that the progressive theology I encountered there rested on theological claims that were every bit as contentious, every bit as susceptible to challenge, as the conservative claims I held.

If Christianity is true—and I believe it is—then it must be true about politics as well as about prayer. It must be true about how we order our common life together, about how we treat the vulnerable, about what we owe to the stranger and the poor. The integration of faith and life is not optional. It is the only coherent position available to serious Christians.

The Conversation with Conservatism

A necessary clarification. This is not an argument that God is a political animal, or that Christianity maps neatly onto any party platform. Faithful Christians have arrived at different political conclusions in good faith for centuries, and they will continue to do so. The theological convictions I am describing—human dignity, natural law, the limits of state authority—inform political reasoning, but they do not resolve every policy dispute. Two believers can affirm the same doctrine of the imago Dei and disagree vigorously about immigration policy or the minimum wage. That disagreement is not a failure of faith; it is the normal work of applying principle to circumstance.

What I am arguing is narrower: that conservatism as a coherent intellectual tradition draws on theological premises, whether or not individual conservatives acknowledge them. This is not an argument that only Christians can be conservatives, or that conservatism must be Christian. There are atheist and agnostic conservatives who think seriously and argue forcefully for ordered liberty and limited government. They are not stupidly working from unstated theological premises, though they may be—all of us are, to some degree.

Rather, this is an argument that conservatism as a coherent political philosophy is rooted in theological convictions about human nature and human dignity. Conservative thinkers can choose not to acknowledge this debt explicitly. But it remains a debt. And the moment conservatism abandons the theological grounding—the moment it starts to define human dignity in terms of utility, national interest, group identity, or power—it has abandoned what made it conservative at all. It has become merely the assertion of will against other assertions of will, which is precisely what it accused progressivism of being.

The recovery of conservatism in our time depends on the recovery of its theological foundations. Not nostalgia for Christian civilization, though there is something to that. But rather a clear-eyed recognition that the claims conservatism makes about human dignity, about natural law, about ordered liberty—these claims are true because they are rooted in truth about human nature, and that truth is theological. It is a gift given to us by the Christian tradition, and it is not negotiable.

For those of us who hold both conservative political convictions and Christian faith, the task is to refuse the false compartmentalization that says these are separate categories, that faith is private and politics is public, that we must choose one or the other. Instead, we must say clearly: the political convictions we hold are held because we believe they are just, and we believe they are just because we believe they accord with how God has made human beings to flourish. This is not a weakness in our argument. It is its strength.

Closing

I think often about my formation—at Ouachita, where I learned to think about what it means to be made in the image of God; at the University of Arkansas School of Law, where I learned to argue about justice and rights and the proper limits of government power; at Yale Divinity School, where I learned to integrate these convictions into a coherent vision of what Christianity demands. The realization that came to me gradually in that context was that these were not separate conversations. The political convictions I held were true because they were rooted in theological truth about human dignity. The Christian convictions I held had implications for how I thought about justice and liberty and community.

This integration is not unique to me. It is the inheritance of the entire conservative tradition, from Burke to Kirk to Chesterton to the contemporary thinkers who continue this work. It is the answer to the question of why conservatism matters, of why it is worth defending even—perhaps especially—when it is unpopular. Because it is not finally about power or preference or tribal loyalty. It is about defending the dignity of the human person rooted in a conviction about human nature that comes to us from God.

Without that foundation, conservatism is nothing. It is a bare preference competing against other preferences, destined to be swept away by the next tide of opinion. With that foundation, it is a defense of something true—something that can be argued, defended, refined, but not abandoned without abandoning truth itself.

If you have found yourself torn between faith and politics, between Christian conviction and political commitment, I’d encourage you to read the essays that defend this integration—Russell Kirk’s “The Moral Imagination,” Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, or G.K. Chesterton’s essay on tradition. The conversation continues, and there is wisdom in it worth finding.

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