I’m not denying that Christian conservatives can have secular allies. I’m not denying that we can share vast areas of common agreement and common concern, but I am saying that at the end of the day, without an ontological commitment which is grounded in theological conviction, I don’t believe there’s any lasting conservatism to be found. Actually, I am certain that without ontological commitments (grounded in theism), conservatism is just an endless negotiation with progressivism and its progeny.

Editor’s Note: This is a transcript of a speech delivered at the National Conservatism Conference on Tuesday, July 9th, 2024. It is printed here with the speaker’s permission. Video of this talk is availabe at National Conservatism’s YouTube channel.

It is an honor to be here at NatCon 2024, and we all know that we are meeting at an urgent moment and we can also see that the urgency has been made clear by some events just even over the last couple of years that have been very sobering. When last I had the opportunity to address this movement in late 2022, I spoke on the impossibility of a secular state. What I want to speak about today is the impotence of a secular conservatism. I don’t mean thereby to divide the room, but rather to speak honestly about where I think we are and what I think we should be thinking. I do speak as a Christian. I do speak as a theologian. I speak with a great deal of common concern and common cause among all of us here. 

I appreciate the invitation to address this conference, but I also want to acknowledge a bomb on our moral landscape that reshapes our consideration, and that is the 2022 Dobbs decision and its aftermath. These developments force a new awareness on us. 

I have been a part of the pro-life movement my entire adult life. I’ve had the privilege of being in rooms where major decisions have been made, strategies have been laid, and where facts and analytics have been considered. I can tell you that there are those now, and were those in the past, who were quite convinced that this is an argument we were winning. Many had convinced themselves that we were winning the argument for life, even if we were not winning that argument everywhere evenly. But the pro-life movement shared the confidence that if indeed all those years of work in conservative argument, and conservative organizing, and what became a conservative legal recovery, a constitutional recovery – if all that led to a reversal of Roe v. Wade, we would be ready for it and we would discover a pent-up, pro-life conviction on the part of the American people, certainly in key states painted red, where we would see pro-life conviction translated into pro-life legislation.

And of course, what we’ve seen is exactly the opposite. First in Kansas, but then also in my own Kentucky, suddenly the bomb went off, announcing to us that whatever commitment there was to the pro-life cause—commitment to the sanctity of human life, to the life of the unborn— was much less substantial than we had thought. It was much less convictional than we had thought. It was, most fundamentally, far less ontological than we had thought. And that leads me to the consideration for today. To be conservative is to hold allegiance to certain fixed truths and principles. 

Now, I’m old enough to remember in my own adult lifetime the argument that conservative basically means holding to a conservative temperament and a conservative commitment to timeless tradition. But the truth I want to underline today is that the tradition without a fundamental commitment to truth – and that truth being fundamentally transcendent and theological – will soon evaporate.

I would take that argument further and insist that conservatism requires fixed religious truths as well as traditions. I would underline the fact that these fixed religious truths are grounded in specific acts of divine revelation, on which we are entirely dependent. 

There are two points of urgency I want to make. Number one, conservatism is not just another form of liberalism, and then secondly, conservatism is not just liberalism or progressivism arriving later on the schedule with greater respect for the costs and challenges of what is defined as inevitable social and moral progress. Neither of these positions is genuinely conservative.

I believe the great challenge that now confronts conservatives, and I mean to include conservative Christians here, as well of course, all conservatives writ large in the United States, is the challenge of first things and fundamental truths. I do speak with a particular appeal to religious conservatives and American evangelicals. The great challenge is understanding that any worldview that does not ground itself in divine revelation, in the moral character of the self-existent, omnipotent, omniscient God – any conservative tradition that is not grounded in a prior commitment to ontology is going to evaporate. The only question is, will that evaporation happen quickly or more slowly?

One of the things we’ve witnessed in recent weeks, as a matter of fact, just in recent days, is the collapse of the Conservative Party in Great Britain. I follow that party and that Anglo-American tradition very closely, and the argument I made in an article published immediately after the election is that we should not be surprised that the so-called Conservatives lost, because the Conservative party had abandoned conservatism long ago.  I would point to an incident that had taken place now more than a decade ago, when David Cameron, then the British Prime Minister and head of the Conservative Party, just basically came out and demanded that the party abandon what had been a very longstanding commitment to social conservatism. Indeed, he called for the party, and thus the government, to abandon the definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. In his memorable words: “I don’t do this despite the fact I’m a conservative. I do this because I am a conservative.”

At that point, it was just like the entire ontological structure of Creation Order was just  denied by a party that still dared to call itself conservative. I don’t believe a party that does such a thing deserves a conservative reputation, much less conservative affirmation. This act, taken so brazenly, was a repudiation of Creation Order and the order that had made his civilization possible. 

 I’m not denying the importance of social traditions, morals, political principles, constitutional norms, and much more shared among conservatives and shared as a glad stewardship. I want to emphasize anew how important that stewardship is, but I do want to argue that if it all is a matter of constant negotiation and a process of accommodation to changing circumstances, we are losing and are destined to lose. There is no lasting conservatism that is not self-consciously grounded in revealed truth and in ontology. To be conservative is to affirm what is real. If we lose this conviction, we lose everything. 

Now, when you consider the challenges we face at this moment, it’s impossible to say the challenge is not ontological. We’re living in a society that increasingly believes a boy can be a girl and a girl can be a boy. 

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