Published May 18, 2022
For decades now, conservatism in America has been an almost purely negative force, an exercise in saying “No.” To be sure, this is in part because there has been so much to say “No” to: abortion on demand, gender ideology, rampant pornography, same-sex marriage, and an unaccountable administrative state that stifles innovation. One wonders if so much opposition would have been needed had conservatives done a better job articulating their own positive vision. Even freedom, the value conservatives praise most often, has been framed in negative terms: freedom from interference, freedom to be left alone—the same kind of freedom, in short, that has guided the pro-abortion movement. After decades of failure, it’s worth pausing to ask whether there is anything more to conservatism than this.
One of the encouraging results of President Donald Trump’s years in office, despite his iconoclastic style, was a new willingness on the right to reconsider what it might take to conserve an American way of life worth conserving. “Getting government out of the way” might have been a plausible solution when the underlying structures of society—families, churches, communities, and businesses built on mutual loyalty—were strong and healthy. But that is no longer the case. Instead, conservatives must now recover a positive vision of what it means to build and sustain a conservative society. Many exciting initiatives, think tanks, and policy proposals have appeared for this purpose in recent years, but they have lacked a comprehensive philosophy. A big step toward the development of such a comprehensive approach may have come with the publication of Conservatism: A Rediscovery by Israeli American political theorist Yoram Hazony.
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Brad Littlejohn (Ph.D., University of Edinburgh) is the founder and president of the Davenant Institute. He also works as a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and has taught for several institutions, including Moody Bible Institute–Spokane, Bethlehem College and Seminary, and Patrick Henry College. He is recognized as a leading scholar of the English theologian Richard Hooker and has published and lectured extensively in the fields of Reformation history, Christian ethics, and political theology. He lives in Landrum, S.C., with his wife, Rachel, and four children.
Brad Littlejohn was a Fellow in EPPC’s Technology and Human Flourishing and Evangelicals in Civic Life programs from 2022-2025. His wide-ranging research and writing encompasses work on the relation of digital technology and embodiment, the appropriate limits of free speech, the nature of freedom and authority in the Christian tradition, and the retrieval of a Protestant natural law ethic.
