Conservatism Lives!

I believe that the American value system on which our country was founded is superior to that of every other nation in the world. That isn’t a very popular thing to say these days. Many of my own friends cringe at the thought of that statement. They are quick to point out our national sins and mistakes. I don’t discount those sins. They are real. Some of my friends might even call a statement like that arrogant. Some might ask what gives me the right to make that claim. Simple. I believe in absolute truth. I believe that there are certain “facts” or “truths” that exist as reality whether you believe them or not. They exist whether people who do believe in them make mistakes or not.

I recently started re-reading an old, but classic book by C.S. Lewis called The Screwtape Letters. For those of you not familiar, it is a series of letters written by a higher level demon named Screwtape to a lower level demon named Wormwood instructing him on how best to “manage” the humans to which he is “assigned” in order to keep them away from God. The first, and possibly most important lesson Screwtape attempts to impart to his trainee is that the single most effective thing they can do is to skew the humans’ idea of, or even better, their very belief in the existence of actual truth.

Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines primarily as ‘true’ or ‘false’, but as ‘academic’ or ‘practical’, ‘outworn’ or ‘contemporary’, ‘conventional’ or ‘ruthless’. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that [your philosophy] is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous-that it is the philosophy of the future.

Believe it or not, that book was published in 1942. Perhaps the world hasn’t changed as much as we think it has. Lewis was confronting the same moral battle that rages today about what is and is not true, or for that matter if truth even exists. Interestingly, our founding fathers chose to draft our Declaration of Independence with the words:

“We hold these truths to be self evident…”

They recognized the existence of absolute truth:

“…that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

They structured our government around those Rights as best they could:

“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

They chose to build our nation on the foundation of those truths even if we failed to live up to those standards before the ink was even dry (that all men are created equal, for example) or even still struggle to do so today. Have we made mistakes? Of course we have. Have we failed to live up to our own moral underpinnings? Absolutely. But that doesn’t change the simple truth, that those underpinnings are morally superior to any other in the world.

As a nation, we value life. Even when we go to war, we go to great pains to reduce the number of innocent or non-combatant lives that are lost in the process. All the while our enemies make a point of targeting civilians. We value liberty. Individual freedom is a cornerstone of our society while in much of the rest of the world, people know only the freedoms granted to them by tyrannical dictators or brutal governmental regimes. We are the land of opportunity. Our foundation upon truth, makes our value system superior. We are as Ronald Reagan said, “a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere”.