Christianity is Conservative

Part of the genius of C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters is its format. Lewis’s arrangement—an imagined series of letters from an expert demon to his novice nephew—gave Lewis an imaginative outlet to insightfully critique modern culture without sounding like he was yelling at kids to stay off his lawn. Many so-called “conservatives” value tradition because they prefer what they’re used to. They refuse to consider new ideas because they presuppose that old is superior to new. Such a mindset doesn’t provide sufficient grounds for conservatism.

But Lewis’s conservatism wasn’t merely about his preferences for the past, and the clever format of imagining letters between demons allowed him to expose the destructive demonic logic of so much that gets celebrated today as progress. Lewis sharply critiqued secular humanism and scientific utopianism because he saw these movements abandoning the cultural norms and traditions that had enabled Western civilization to thrive for so long. He also believed that these movements were ahistorical in that they sought to disconnect us from all that is good, true, and beautiful from our past. Of course, ultimately, these ideas attempt to disconnect us with God.

In one prescient letter, Screwtape encourages his nephew Wormwood to inculcate in his patient “the Historical Point of View.” As an educator, Lewis had no doubt seen “the Historical Point of View” in action in the academy. Lewis writes, “Put briefly, [it] means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the ‘present state of the question.’ To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge—to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts and behavior—this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded.”

The ideologies of “progress” don’t look back for guidance, because progressivism assumes that the present is always better than the past. Humanity is constantly moving forward, beyond archaic traditions that for so long held us back. Of course, artificial intelligence will be good for us. Why wouldn’t we line up for the newest iteration of the iPhone with all its life-enriching new capabilities?

But of course, when “progress” reigns supreme, nothing is sacred. In the name of progress, we can justify discarding anything from the past that gets in the way. Gender can be determined by choice of will and then changed again later. A child’s life can be snuffed out by maternal choice on grounds of inconvenience. When we’re on the track toward “advancement,” all tradition must be thrown off the train.

Progressive education doesn’t want children thinking about the past. History becomes “social studies.” Public schools quit assigning books altogether. Who needs such an antiquated artifact when we’ve got laptops and WIFI for every student? Lewis’s demon understood the mission well: “Since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. But thanks be to Our Father and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that ‘history is bunk.’”

I’ve been struck lately by the conservative nature of Christianity. Paul tells Titus to appoint pastors in churches who “hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught” (Tit 1:9). He tells Timothy to “guard the deposit entrusted to you” (1 Tim 6:20). Jude tells the whole church to “contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). John instructs the church to “let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father” (1 John 2:24).

John Stott summarized these texts by writing, “The Church’s task is not to keep inventing new gospels, new theologies, new moralities, and new Christianities, but rather to be faithful guardian of the one and only eternal gospel.” The Christian faith is thus inherently “conservative.” We believe that ancient truth is worth holding firm to, guarding, and contending for. By implication, we must reject the progressive lie that perpetually and exclusively exalts new over old.

We don’t conserve the gospel because we prefer old things over new; we conserve the gospel because “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8). We’re conservatives because we can confidently say to our hurting neighbors who have been victimized by the lie of progress, “The ancient well of living water will never run dry. There’s enough for you, too.”

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