Liberal Band-aids

As readers of this blog know, I used to describe myself as conservative in theology and liberal in politics but now have decided to embrace my inner conservative more fully. Let me give a short answer as to why. Culture precedes politics. Is that short enough? OK, let me tell you a story.

Remember the one about the dangerous road and concerned citizens who decided to do something about the many accidents near a dangerous curve that cars kept failing to negotiate, thus going off the cliff? They took up a collection to station an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff to get the injured people to hospital faster. This is social service. But then somebody got the idea of launching a political movement to get the government to straighten out the road. This is politics. Moral: the church needs to go beyond social service into politics in order to avoid just putting bandaids on injustice. It's hard to argue with this point.

However, the problem is that, while the move into politics is a move upstream from the problem, it doesn't go far enough upstream. Politics is the expression of the shared values of a community and it is impossible to get a group of vicious people to legislate virtuously. If you really want to build a culture of life, it is necessary to have a critical mass of people who actually live in affirmation of life. Even if you have pro-life laws, if the culture of life declines the laws will be flouted and eventually altered. The laws reflect the culture. They also shape the culture; I'm far from denying the educative role of the law. That is why I said "a critical mass of people" above and not a totally pro-life culture. We don't wait for unaniminity, but we can't proceed with a tiny minority either.

Let's take the issue of unwed mothers. Conservatives like me are active in pregnancy help centers where we provide friendship, peer group interaction, information, prayer, mentoring, practical help etc. for unwed mothers. This is a admittedly a bandaid approach. But every responsible parent puts a bandaid on a child's skinned knee; bandaids are good not bad. They are just not the total answer to complex social issues.

So how do we move upstream on this issue? Liberals say increase the welfare state and let the government pay for raising the child since the father won't. Is that going far enough upstream? I think not. The real issue is sexual promiscuity and irresponsibility. Girls must be taught to say no; boys must be taught the meaning of responsible fatherhood. Increasing welfare won't address this issue and might even make the problem worse by further undermining personal responsibility. Insofar as it does help, it is still a bandaid. Surely the richest society in the world has something more to offer pregnant women than abortion and a welfare cheque. Money can't replace morality.

The folks who support Sojourners tend to despise those who support Focus on the Family. Why is that? It puzzles me to think that anyone concerned about the fact that illegitimate births are skyrocketing in our society would think that building up the family is irrelevant to social issues ranging from crime to poverty to education. Perhaps liberals perceive social conservatives as impediments to their "solve all problems through government programs" agenda. But do liberals really think that even if the problem could be solved without increasing the size and scope of government, it still would be preferable to do so through the government? It appears to me that the answer is yes. Liberal ideology simply holds that justice and peace can only come through the infinite expansion of government programs and the infinite expansion of the bureaucratic, managerial state. This is where I get off the liberal bus. (see previous post.)

One more point. Why do liberals put their faith in government to such an extreme degree? It is because they want to have a just society without becoming just people. It is an attempt to substitute a rational system of distribution for virtue. Liberals want to be personally irresponsible while being socially responsible. To be a conservative is to face up to the need to engage morality as well as politics for that is what culture is all about - morality. I think that politics only starts to get interesting when we move into issues of right and wrong, good and evil, virtue and vice. And liberalism just isn't interested in going this far upstream.