Are You ‘Conservative’ or ‘Liberal’?
One of my great frustrations about communication in today’s world is that everything is so rushed. No one has the time—or perhaps it’s that no one makes the time—to communicate in depth. Taking the time to formulate points carefully, with appropriate nuance. Word counts are everything, it seems, not least in social media, where brevity seems to be a requirement. Unfortunately, the corner-cutting to which this gives rise can mean there is a great deal of speaking at cross-purposes—across one another, rather than to one another.
Back in 2006, Twitter had a 140-character limit, which allowed an additional 20 characters for the sender’s user name, all to fit within the standard SMS character limit of 160. In 2017, this was doubled.
Whether technology and attention span (I have in mind limited attention span) are the chicken or the egg in all this, it seems that brevity remains an overarching expectation for much online communication. How often do we see an online article subtitled with a phrase like ‘7 min read’ or ‘12 min read’?
If writers are not explaining themselves in sufficient depth, and their readers are not taking time to carefully process those explanations, then no wonder communication breaks down so easily, and—not to put too fine a point on it—we see so many online spats and keyboard warrior bad behaviour.
One symptom of this is the way that a single word or phrase gets deployed. For example, the word ‘woke’. What does that word mean, objectively? Part of the challenge is that it’s rarely used objectively! The word began life in the early 20th century as a call to Black people to “wake up!” to issues of social injustice and systemic racial prejudice. It took on a broader application in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter campaigning. Now its scope has expanded to embrace gender and LGBTQIA+ rights, and is typically used pejoratively by political and religious conservatives against those appearing to be advocating progressive or left-leaning ideologies of which they disapprove. In short, it’s a word whose meaning has become inseparable from the person using it and what they think of those to whom they're applying it. It’s signposting a package of things they dislike.
Which (eventually) brings us to our title for today. According to an online ‘Reading Time Calculator’ (yes, such things exist), this blog has been a 1 min 36 sec read to this point. In much of the communication that I find myself part of, ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ are frequently deployed terms. And I have to be honest, it’s extremely hard to avoid deploying them pejoratively. Reaching for potential synonyms doesn’t help that much: ‘traditionalist’ captures some of it, and so, too, on the other side, does ‘progressive’; but equally, they can add to the problem as much as solve it.
On the occasions I have been asked this question, I have usually sought refuge in saying I try to be ‘conservative’ in the ways that Jesus was conservative, and ‘liberal’ in the ways he was liberal. And yet, the same problem resurfaces, because from a religious conservative’s perspective, Jesus was always conservative … and perhaps from a liberal perspective the same is also true.
Within modern Christianity, however, the conservative/liberal divide acquired a more specifically doctrinal meaning. Nineteenth-century critical scholarship increasingly questioned traditional understandings of biblical teachings such as the virgin conception, bodily resurrection, six-day creation, and Old and New Testament miracle narratives, particularly where they appeared incompatible with modern scientific understandings. Theological liberals were more willing to revisit (or reject) them; conservatives sought to defend them. In the US, that resistance found particular expression in what became the ‘fundamentalist’ movement, defending—as they saw it—the ‘fundamentals’ of Christian faith.
Compressing history to a fault (we can blame word count and attention span), evangelical conservatives have since developed far more sophisticated and nuanced ways of relating the perspectives of the biblical writers to modern knowledge. Central to that has been greater attention to the art and science of biblical interpretation—‘hermeneutics’, as it’s called—and, increasingly, a greater awareness of that among ordinary Christians. No longer can the preacher simply assert, “The Bible clearly teaches…” and expect that to settle the matter. Once congregations become aware of factors such as literary genre, historical and cultural context, and the worldview of the biblical writers ‘then’, they know there may well be more to consider in discerning Scripture’s meaning ‘now’. This is self-evidently a double-edged sword for the theologically underqualified preacher! Everyone wants an informed congregation on paper, but…
Bringing the focus back to our two words, each is heard differently by the other. What one considers a strength, the other sees as a weakness.
For example, conservatives will view their perspective as guarding and promoting traditional values, principles, and morality. Words like ‘traditional’ are positive. For non-conservatives, however, these concepts can mean defending an indefensible history, replete with bigotry, injustice, and oppression hiding under a myth of ‘traditional’ values. Liberals see themselves as tolerant, fair, and compassionate; promoting justice and equality. Their critics decry them as selling out to the popular culture, and abandoning standards in an ‘anything goes’ way. Liberalism’s ‘open-mindedness’ is countered with the claim that it’s really ‘naive-mindedness’.
Rather unhelpfully, it seems as good as impossible to separate what we might call the political application of these words from their social and religious applications. Not least because religious, political and social conservatism tends to cluster together (it comes as a package)—as does its liberal counterpart. In Christian terms, both sides lay claim to the politics of Jesus (or of the Bible more widely). We need not get into the exaggerated manifestation of this in the world of MAGA and Christian nationalism in the Trump era to see the tendencies at work.
How might we pull all these thoughts together? First off, it must surely be the case that there is a caricature lurking at each end of the spectrum. Probably few of us would identify exclusively with one of those labels. “If by ‘conservative’ you mean [such-and-such] then, yes. But if you mean [such-and-such], then no!” So, too, with ‘liberal’. Which means neither term is that helpful, since they mean different things for different people. That said, of course, amongst certain groups (say, in a conservative evangelical church, which deploys those adjectives as positive descriptors—a guide for newcomers, for what to expect), there will be an expectation on the home supporters to embrace them unfussily.
The reality, I suspect, is that once we break free from the caricatures at both ends, most of us are a mixture of some conservatism and some liberalism—although, given all the baggage that the word ‘liberal’ has accumulated over the years in evangelicalism, I think ‘progressive’ is a more helpful term to use (unless we especially want to be insulting, of course!). Most of us are on a spectrum, landing at different places depending on the subject or question, which makes the old conservative/liberal binary something of an anachronism today.
I suspect that most of us would also see ourselves on something of a trajectory—a direction of travel of some kind. Perhaps towards greater conservatism, from a growing concern to preserve values we believe are essential, and we’re increasingly worried about where social and cultural change might lead. Less healthily, this trajectory can be fuelled by fear of “what’s the world coming to?”, or being “deceived by the spirit of the age”, and such like. Or perhaps our trajectory is towards greater liberalism, if we’re increasingly aware of injustice and intolerance in the world, about which traditional conservatism seems to be insufficiently concerned, if not at times also party to it.
A final word, that I think has some relevance, on the place of “worldview”. We all have a worldview, even though we’re mostly unaware of it.
‘Worldview’ is a collective term for how a person sees the world: their understanding of “the way things are” and “the way things should be”. Whenever someone says “obviously” (or “must be”, or “can’t be”), it’s a worldview speaking. Our assumptions about what’s “obviously” right (or obviously wrong) are reflecting a worldview, whether conservative or liberal.
The thing about worldview is that most of us don’t realise we even have one—and still less, where it’s coming from. It’s said that a fish doesn’t know what water is because nothing else has ever occurred to it. Our goal should be to recognise when it’s our worldview speaking (watch out for those phrases above, to give the clue!).
At the end of the day, the meaning of both ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ will depend on the speaker’s worldview, the hearer’s worldview, and the subject under discussion. Which leads to one of the big challenges in speaking of a so-called ‘Christian’ worldview; both liberals and conservatives will inevitably claim that as their own!
Perhaps, then, “Are you conservative or liberal?” isn't really the question to be asking. Better instead to ask what we want to promote, what we believe needs to change, and most importantly, in both cases, why. Might I be alone in thinking that “why” questions in Christianity are amongst the more important, yet also amongst the least asked?