The meaning of ‘conservatism’ has been incrementally changed since conservative movements emerged in the early Enlightenment era to defend the old European political and religious order, a phenomenon that received the name of ‘conservatism’ from François-René de Chateaubriand’s Le Conservateur, his anti-revolutionary journal in the early-19th century. The meaning of the term was dramatically changed in the UK in the 19th century, largely on account of Prime Minister Robert Peel and his creation of a Tory-Whig hybrid party in the 1830s. It was further corrupted in the 20th century, especially by the neoliberal movement of the Thatcher-Reagan alliance which called itself ‘conservative’ towards the tail end of the Cold War. What the word ‘conservative’ actually means in the political and social context, then, can be a somewhat contentious issue.
I believe it is imperative to recover the term, to denote what it was always meant to denote, and what it still does denote among anti-modernist thinkers today, namely the counter-revolutionary, historically based cause for establishmentarian Christianity. In the face of revolutionary secularism, social atheism, materialism, amorality, and rationalistic tabula rasa political ideology, conservatives wanted to protect the Christian religion enshrined in the law of those political orders that providentially and organically emerged down the centuries. Without qualification, this is what I mean by conservatism. Consequently, I hold that ‘conservatism’ applied to groups outside historically Christian lands is, and always has been, an equivocation—perhaps a legitimate one, but an equivocation all the same.
Christendom or liberalism
The movement and loyalties of old Toryism—the traditional British species of conservatism—began during the reign of the Stuarts as a response to the Protestant dissenters. Toryism was primarily based on the conviction that the Church ought to be public and enshrined in law, rather than reduced to the sentiments of the cloistered conscience of each individual. This is a point well-developed in a sophisticated historical analysis by James J. Sack in his 1993 book From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, which I strongly recommend, and whose central thesis is that Toryism as a distinct social tradition orbited a Christian, establishmentarian political cause.
Back in the mid-17th century, the Protestant dissenter groups—who considered the established Church in England to be what they called “Romish”—banded together, utilising Parliament to establish a military coup d’état, to fight and ultimately behead the martyr-king Charles I. Soon after committing their monstrous act of regicide, they established under their leader Oliver Cromwell the first absolutist, totalitarian dictatorship that the Christian world had ever seen—calling this new regime the “Liberty of Conscience.”
Despite the manifest illiberalism of the dissenters, the old Tories intuited that subordinating religion to private conviction after the dissenter fashion, and thereby relegating it from the public form of the state to the subjective sentiments of the private conscience, would lead to the kind of relativism which would fragment society into a crowd of atomic strangers, as we have witnessed under the global regime of liberalism. This is a point that was well argued by St. John Henry Newman in his “Biglietto Speech,” delivered in 1879 on becoming a cardinal of the Catholic Church, wherein he offered an apologia for the English conception of establishmentarian Christianity, and condemned the Protestant dissenter tradition as the true enemy of Christendom. Liberalism and revolution in religion, Newman argued, was inherently bound up with liberalism and revolution in politics.
In that speech, Newman was in fact echoing the nation’s first Poet Laureate, John Dryden, who two centuries earlier, in his poem The Hind and the Panther—written soon after Dryden’s conversion to Catholicism—called for an alliance of Catholics and High Anglicans against the dissenters whom he feared would undo any shared conception of a visible Church. That is, he called for unity among those who believed in established Christianity, composed of clerical and lay orders, against those who believed in, as Dryden put it in his prologue to the poem, “faith according to conscience.” The entire Tory tradition, until the word was appropriated by its enemies, held that there were two options available: Christendom or liberalism. (As an aside, it is my belief that the Anglican Ordinariates of the Catholic Church are the true heirs of this great spiritual tradition.)
The Tories historically resembled conservative movements in other countries, especially the French royalists, the Spanish Carlists, and the Habsburg loyalists of the old Imperial lands. In each nation that has faced the forces of modernity—egalitarianism, subjectivist relativism, materialism, positivism, atheism—conservative movements have arisen based on the notion that man is inherently religious and his religiosity cannot be extinguished, that religion is public, and that true religion is the proper form of the state, by which the nation, whose political realisation is the state, may in turn be discipled.
What distinguishes true conservatism as I understand it from the neoliberalism that has adopted the name of ‘conservatism’ in the modern age, is that the latter has held as true the very lie of the dissenters which conservatism arose in the early Enlightenment era to oppose. That is, the view that religion is private and only the regulation of trade and property—what is increasingly termed ‘growth’—is of legitimate public concern. Thus, what we now call ‘conservatism’ is the very “atheism by establishment” that the crypto-Tory Edmund Burke condemned by name as the antithesis of all he stood for. The epitome of such phoney conservatism is the UK Conservative Party, which now largely exists to prevent any genuine conservative revival in the isles I call my home.
Integralism and the abstract
As I understand it, what distinguishes true conservatism from the movement that goes by the name of integralism, is that conservatism does not reduce the relationship of Church and State merely to the acknowledgement of some abstract principle—for example, that all legislation be first subordinated to the requirements of the present curia and its interpretation of the faith. Rather, conservatives take an historical view, deeming establishmentarian Christianity to denote nothing other than the historical permeation and transformation of nature by grace. It is common today to see Christianity primarily as a set of propositions to which to assent rather than as the existential transformation of nature by grace, but this is largely due to the spell of rationalism which causes the mind to privilege the abstract over the concrete, the theoretical over the historical, the absolute over the conditional, the principled over the practised, and the mechanistic over the organic.
Due to the rationalism prevalent in our age, we are far more comfortable with abstract principles than we are with stories. But God tells stories. And when the Eternal Word, having assumed our nature from the Blessed Virgin, was personally present among us in the person of Jesus Christ, he did not deliver lists of theological formulae, but instead he told stories. What above all interests conservatives is the stories of their nations and the way in which God has existentially made Himself present among those nations. Conservatives have a far higher regard for concrete history than Platonic speculations.
Thus, it is not primarily principle that is of concern to conservatives, but narrative. God reveals Himself through the story of a nation—that of the Israelites—to which He gives a territory. The mission of His incarnation reaches out into the world through the Great Commission to make disciples of all nations. And it is specifically the nations which have been redeemed that come at the eschaton to worship the Lamb enthroned, gathering in the New Jerusalem, as chapter 22 of the Book of the Apocalypse tells us. God’s revelation is the story of His assumption of political units into His divine life, and that acknowledgement is at the heart of establishmentarianism, which has itself always been the core cause of true conservatives.
Whilst I am in agreement with the integralists that life will return to our dying nations only by rekindling fidelity to Jesus Christ, I do not believe that it is by commitment to a principle that our nations will return to Him. And if it were by commitment to a principle then such a return would be ruinous to itself for it would be driven by a force that is worryingly ideological, and therefore alien to the way God makes Himself known to us down the ages. I’m sceptical of any kind of manual or set of formulae for spiritual transformation, because I do not believe that that’s how divine grace operates. As I see it, the rebuilding of Christendom, if it happens, won’t be like repairing a motorcar, but repairing a marriage.
Shared affections
If we ever recover from the curse of modernity, it will be by affection for our countrymen, our institutions, our shared history, that by such affection we may come to love again the providential God who has been the source of all our comforts as well as our strength in tribulations, whether we knew it at the time or not. Put differently, recovery will largely rely on the nostalgic impulse. For this reason, conservatives are deeply concerned with art, architecture, and every aspect of high and low cultural renewal—against the escalating encroachment of pop culture and other forms of uglification—because we think that, in Burke’s words, “to love our country, our country must be lovely.”
The regeneration of the mind—of our principles, if you like—is downstream from the regeneration of our experience. And it is the experience of shared affection, far more than any abstract principle, that drives the health of nations. If you were to ask me by what rational principle I love my mother, I could only tell you that I deem the question strange, and any reasons that I gave would be post hoc in any case, and not in reality what has always driven my filial piety. All true love, and hence all true health, is like that, including the love of one’s country and love of the God who has sought to draw one’s country into the life of discipleship.
The classical liberalism or neoliberalism of today’s so-called ‘conservatives’ is morally and ideologically bankrupt, and in any case, it is disappearing in what is being widely referred to as our emerging “values- and meaning-based public discourse,” which is rapidly framing the debate about our future on both the Left and the Right. On the other hand, the integralism of post-liberal Catholics risks reducing to an abstractionist exercise what is known by experience and cultural induction, thereby perpetuating the age of ideological squabbles which they ought to be repudiating in entirety. Apart from the traditionalist conservatism to which I have pointed in brief, I see no way out of the age of ideology, which has been so destructive since its inception.
Of course, I accept that integralism is a broad allegiance, but having spent much time studying the works of its advocates—and being greatly enriched by such study, I hasten to add—I note distinct emphases emerge, dividing conservatives like me from integralists, who nonetheless in many respects remain my allies. In general, I have suggested that this division emerges from the historically rooted approach of the conservatives as decidedly different to what I deem the overly abstractionist approach of the growing integralist movement. Put simply, whilst I believe true conservatives can offer an escape route out of the age of ideology, integralists not only risk perpetuating the age of ideology but worse, reducing true religion to but one competing ideology among others in the modernist arena of bickering rationalisms.
I will conclude here by being bold and shameless in equal measure, and recommending my book Conservatism and Grace, published earlier this year by Routledge, in which I defend the establishmentarian conservative position over the course of 300 pages.
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This commentary is adapted from a speech delivered on the 6th of September, 2023, at an event in Vienna organised by The European Conservative on the theme of “Is Integralism Conservative?”
