Conservatism

A true conservative is opposed to the government management of charity, health care and education precisely because he values them so highly. The moment a conservative abandons his core values of compassion, charity, indeed a love for his neighbor in every way, is the moment he abandons his conservative soul. The problem with the government doing any of the above, is that it turns them into an exercise in self-preservation and power consolidation, perverting them beyond recognition. As our founding fathers pointed out, it was because they were concerned with the"general welfare” of all that they strictly limited the functions of government to specifically enumerated powers, and limited the physical presence of the federal government to a postage stamp sized piece of ground known as D.C. The system that we have was built on a consistent Christian worldview or philosophy of government. Our founding fathers reformed the English system, itself a Christian Theocracy, and made it more consistent with a biblical understanding of the role of government. A theocracy weds the government of the church and state, giving the church access to the sword and the state control over the gospel. We rejected that, without rejecting the Creator.

In a Christian worldview, the state is accountable to the Creator for preserving justice consistent with the Natural Law. The church has stewardship of the gospel, accompanied with charity. And the family, itself a governing body, disciplines, instructs and nurtures the children, and much more, also to be carried out with a sacrificially high regard for others. Such a system is the only system that can be demonstrated historically to produce freedom. The French for instance had a rebellion inspired by the libertarian cry of"liberte”, but without the Common Law understanding of freedom, it produced none of it. A definition of freedom extracted from our Declaration of Independence would be as follows: freedom is being able to exercise your unalienable rights within the constraints of the natural law (or universal moral law). Freedom must be defined by the natural law, because it is, itself, a natural right that is revoked when it is exercised in a way that deprives others of their natural rights. The political philosophy that is expressed in the Declaration of Independence and which inspired the Constitution was the culmination of about a thousand years of struggle and progress in the development of the ideas of freedom beginning before the Magna Carta. I pray that we will not so quickly abandon what took so long to achieve and at such great cost.
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