National Conservatism One Year Later

This is a detailed and helpful write up on how the NatCon movement has evolved over the last year.

On June 15, 2022, the National Conservative movement entered into its own period of confessionalization with “National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles,” published in both The American Conservative and The European Conservative.(One of the most paradoxical features of National Conservatism is its international character.) An editor’s note preceding the statement disclosed, “The following statement was drafted by Will Chamberlain, Christopher DeMuth, Rod Dreher, Yoram Hazony, Daniel McCarthy, Joshua Mitchell, N.S. Lyons, John O’Sullivan, and R.R. Reno on behalf of the Edmund Burke Foundation.” The statement boasted a long list of signatories, including academics, a college president, journalists, a priest, a filmmaker, publishers, and think tankers the world over.

Of special interest to me, and probably others here: how NatCons view Christianity and the Bible…

The status of religion is made ambiguous by “Principle 4—God and Public Religion.” This principle privileges the Bible as “our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred,” and commends its reading as a source of “shared Western civilization,” to be studied in schools and universities by believer and unbeliever alike. The Bible as national text is a strange category, somewhat more than literature to be appreciated but a great deal less than the Word of God.

I wonder if they have any idea how far we already are from that as a culture and what it would take to create a consensus on anything close to the above. It can’t be done coersively.

Was happy to see in the report that the post-liberal integralists are not dominating the NatCon conversation. I share the article author’s view that, flawed though it is, classical liberalism is the path for America, not some kind of integralism or other flavor of post-liberalism.