Maria and I lived for a time next to a family of recovering hippies. They mowed their lawn with an old-fashioned, non-mechanized blade lawnmower. They bought their groceries at the local “Rainbow Foods” organic superstore. And the husband’s car sported a bumper sticker, “My Other Car Is a Pair of Boots.” Every morning as I left the house, I would see that car parked next to the family’s van and yell inwardly at the hypocrisy: “No, your other car is a minivan!” Hippie chic is not appealing to me at all. There are no Birkenstocks here.
At the same time, I have never been ideologically comfortable with Rupert Murdoch-style corporate conservatism. I grew up in a southern agrarian tradition that emphasized locality, community, limited government, conservation of the natural world, and patriarchal protection of the family. Is there a conservatism for those of us who know what Joni Mitchell is talking about when she sings, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot” (even when we prefer to hear Amy Grant sing it)?
I just finished Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons while traveling this past week. It’s a book I’ve been anticipating for some time. I found myself murmuring “Amen” while highlighting and book flagging huge swatches of text. The book serves as something of a manifesto for traditionalist conservatives, who chafe at consumerism and globalization as much as we do at the moral coarsening of society. Dreher, a traditionalist Catholic from Louisiana, laments what is happening to our culture from both contraceptives and the Super Wal-Mart pharmacies they’re sold in.
What Dreher is suggesting isn’t new at all. It is rooted in the Burkean/agrarian/communitarian conservatism of Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and Robert Nisbet. What is different here is that, unlike so much of what passes for “paleoconservative” these days, Dreher actually sounds like Kirk, Weaver, or Nisbet rather than like an anti-Semitic, xenophobic, or McGovernite conspiracy theorist. He also doesn’t surrender to nostalgic utopianism. Dreher recognizes we live in a world of Target stores and iPods, and we aren’t likely to reverse all or even most of that.
What he does is to remind those of us who are conservatives that it is not just the Left that seeks to sift us like wheat. The devil watches “Fox News” too. “The undeniable fact is that free market technology-driven capitalism, for all its benefits, tends to pull families and communities apart by empowering individuals and encouraging, even mandating individualism,” Dreher writes. “And both the political left and the political right exploit that sentiment in their own ways; there is no easier way to sell a product, even if the product is a politician, than to position its acquisition as choosing ‘freedom.'”
Is there any doubt that Dreher is right about this, when an entire generation of conservative Republican children is growing up reared by nannies and daycare workers, while both parents pursue the corporate ladder? The problem here is not just Gloria Steinem.
Some fear that Dreher’s book might lead to a retrenchment of religious conservatives, a withdrawal from the public square reminiscent of early American isolationist fundamentalism. Dreher calls for no such thing. What he does remind us is that culture comes before politics. This is precisely the problem with the various incarnations of the “religious Right” in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. They were products of a parachurch evangelicalism that believed organization and a set of abstractions could change the world. What they forgot was the church.
In my book, The Kingdom of Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective, I call for evangelical political engagement that is rooted in countercultural communities, churches that live out the implications of the gospel, even as we call for the state to maintain its Romans 13 responsibility for justice. This means that we don’t need more evangelical lobbyists. We do need more intentionally counter-cultural churches, more home-schooling moms, more “soft patriarchal” dads; all of whom are focused also externally on their communities.
That’s conservative, but conservative in a different and older way than Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly. That seems to be what Dreher calls “crunchy.” If so, then sign me up. But I’m still not wearing Birkenstocks.
