Crunchy Evangelicals?
February 22, 2006
Day two and the Crunchy debate rageth on… What immediately struck me about the bevy of bloggers at this NRO enterprise is that they’re all Catholics, except for Mr. Stegall (not your average evangelical) and FMG, who is Orthodox. I have to agree with those who have said that the “crunchy” label seems like yet another piece of identity politics that may suit too many different people to really cohere as a distinct movement, philosophy, or way of life–and that it may be largely another adjectival conservatism, like “compassionate conservatism,” designed to modify the very powerful cultural meme wherein conservative=greedy, selfish, rapacious, mass-society and mass-technology loving bogey-men. Mr. Dreher seems to feed this stereotype at times, much to the dismay of others, such as the as yet silent Jonah Goldberg. It is and is not true, but as a popular perception, “conservative” has potency as a pejorative term regardless of Mr. Dreher’s writings. I want to suggest that “crunchiness” appeals to Catholics or seems such an easy fit because it merely restates venerable old and well theorized Catholic commitments to a certain view of humanity, society, the body, sex, economics, etc. Catholics can, as some of the crunchy bloggers have done, refer to conceptions of tradition and social justice that are old hat to them. Evangelicals (and the confessional Protestantism it has been assimilating), on the other hand, lack tradition, a concept of the traditional, and established schools of thought about the issues the crunchies raise. Thus one finds today many educated, politically engaged and culturally concerned evangelicals with upward, mainstream social mobility loathe to identify themselves as “conservatives” because they can’t hitch the word to something deeper, richer, and older than the recent rise of the religious right, with which they find many faults. Some of these people seem increasingly driven in a thoroughly liberal ideological and voting direction primarily because of this identity politics. They don’t see a “conservative” identity that doesn’t embarrass them. Consequently they tend to be susceptible to (in order of mental descent) Ralph Nader, the Greens, Howard Dean, Clintonian Democrats, Jim Wallis, and Bono who all have a mainstream “cool” and acceptability. If “crunchy con” is able to stick as a relatively coherent “hip” or “progressive” spin on “conservative,” and if it helps some of these fickle and soft-minded evangelicals to deepen their thinking or merely retain their proper political loyalties, so much the better.This is Crunchy Evangelicals? in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Stegall in NRO Discussion of Crunchy Cons and the Future of Conservatism | Next: Mormon Crunchy | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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