Andrew T. Walker: Benefits of being a conservative

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For years, we’ve been told that faith and politics should stay in separate lanes.

WORLD Opinions managing editor Andrew Walker says it’s time to rethink this.

ANDREW WALKER: I came of age at a time in American evangelicalism where putting distance between conservative politics and Christianity was a very, very popular trend. The assumption was that an association with conservative politics would repel potential converts. The rallying call was: “God was neither a Republican nor Democrat.” Thus arose “Third Way” evangelicalism…

Enlightened Christianity stood above all earthly politics, which is true insofar as Christianity is a transcendent judge of all earthly political regimes. Advocates of this approach believed less-partisan Christianity would be more successful at evangelizing unbelievers. There was also the injection of ambiguity, the mistaken idea that left and right were equally an affront to God’s apolitical kingdom. During this era of evangelicalism, the highest aspiration for a culturally learned evangelicalism was that the well-known liberal elite would come to this depoliticized faith, thus lending to Christianity a sort of cultural legitimacy that many strove for.

There are positives to commend in this approach. There are ways that partisanship can become too much. Christian faith, after all, is not about temporal gain or power. It is fundamentally about redemption and union with Christ. But nearing age 40 as I am, I want to make peace with something that my late-twenty something faith would have tried to resist: It is really OK to be a politically conservative Christian and not be embarrassed about it. Just own it.

This permission slip came to me after the new Pew Religious Landscape Study was released last week. This study is the unofficial gold standard of American religious demography. One important data point stood out: If one identifies as a Christian, there is a far higher likelihood that one has what is considered “conservative” politics in our context. The reverse is also true: The more one identifies as politically liberal, the less likely one is to identify as Christian. A lot of further analysis could be offered, but I want to challenge one common line of critique: that it harms Christianity when Christians are too intertwined with the Republican Party. The study shows the exact opposite. In fact, one could potentially see how conservative politics may be an on-ramp to Christian belief while liberal politics may be an off-ramp to Christian belief.

There are parallel belief structures between conservatism and Christianity making them share an affinity without being synonymous. Conservative belief structures have an architecture that resembles patterns of Christian belief. Despite what critics say, this is not simply a matter of a person politicizing his or her faith. Rather, the species of conservatism and Christianity share a genus in prioritizing transcendence, objective moral law, ordered liberty, and natural institutions like family and nation. Conservatism can be a gateway into Christianity. It’s our job as Christians to open those gates and not leave them merely with the political architecture, but the fullness of the Christian faith and a relationship with God through Christ.

The Pew study suggests that our evangelistic efforts may be more fruitful when directed toward those with conservative inclinations rather than those steeped in progressive ideology. While evangelism should be occurring in both directions, the data point from Pew suggests that much of Third Way evangelicalism’s fascination with politically liberal elites has led us to miss a harvest more amenable to Christian truth claims with those on our right. This is another way of saying conservative beliefs that Christians have may be a form of pre-evangelism for those who have conservative convictions but not the Christian faith.

Maybe we should not apologize for being conservative Christians after all.

I’m Andrew Walker.

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