#PopeFrancis vs. the Materialist Right: If you thought liberals were against religion in the public square, you ought to see the conservative reaction to the #Pope

If you thought liberals were against religion in the public square, you ought to see the conservative reaction to Pope Francis.

The conservative meltdown in response to the visit of Pope Francis has reminded me once again of the sorry state of conservative thought in America today. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and other titular leaders of modern conservatism are what I like to call the "materialist right." WHAS-AM's talk show hosts Leland Conway (getting closer to home) and Mandy Connell, as well as commentator John David Dyche, lapse into this mode frequently.

The leaders of the Materialist Right are card carrying members of what Edmund Burke, the original conservative, once called the "sophisters and calculators." They worship "The Market." They're concerned with the economic bottom line. They're all about stuff. They exemplify the modernist tendency to think that something is valuable only to the extent that it can be quantitatively measured.

These are people who seem to think that the moment the GDP has a one percentage uptick, every family in America pauses at their desks or their dish-washing or their dinner, feeling one percent better.

This why they have fortitude breakdowns when it comes to social issues. With the possible exception of Limbaugh, who has hung surprisingly tough on the marriage issue, most of these people begin to swoon when it comes to having to defend traditional conservative social positions. They are in dire need of a personal assistant to stand by whenever they are forced into a discussion about a values issue, ready to administer smelling salts.

When it comes to economic issues, they're Julius Caesar; but when comes to social issues, they're Ferdinand the Bull. If the issue is whether there should be a new government program, they're unlocking the gun case; but if the issue is traditional marriage, they're out smelling the flowers.

If I hear one more self-professed conservative talk show host ask of a caller defending traditional marriage (as Leland and Mandy have done repeatedly), "but how does it affect your family?" I think I'm going to lose my lunch.

When PBS Nightly News asked me that question in the interview before the Supreme Court rewrote the 14th Amendment last year, I just questioned the assumption behind it, which was that it's all about me. It's the idea that we have no standing to take a position on any public policy issue unless we can quantitatively demonstrate that we will sustain some concrete personal benefit or harm. And, of course, the only kind if proof that would be accepted would be some kind of financial or economic gain or loss.

You're asked why you believe in traditional marriage and you're expected to produce your bank statements. This is the state of conservative thinking in the early 21st century. What do these people do in their spiritual lives? Is that decision too made according to some kind of strict individualistic, economic calculus?

The common good is now a weed in the conservative garden that must be rooted out so the economic plants won't be threatened.

The other thing about America's high profile conservatives is that, to them, everything is political--or at least everything important. Traditionalist conservatives like Russell Kirk used to warn against "immanentizing the eschaton"--in other words, of thinking that, through political ideologies, we can have salvation in this world.

It used to be the liberals who were the utopians. But now we have conservatives who seem to think that, once we have a free market, we will have reached Nirvana.

It's fine to think that the free market is the most efficient economic system. I believe that too. But when that is made the be all and end all of your political position, when you subordinate every other political and cultural issue to that one, you make it into an ideology, which is to say, a political religion.

I'll state this bluntly (as I have before): The self-professed conservatives (particularly libertarians) who worship "The Market" are radicals--in the same sense to the same extent as the people to whom they are always applying that label.

And that's ironic, because real conservatism is anti-radical.

Because of this conservative ideology (a contradiction in terms), when the Pope speaks on something from the perspective of, say, the Christian responsibility to be good stewards or how we should treat immigrants, it is immediately seen as some kind of political policy statement, and criticized in the same manner.

And, of course, the reaction of some conservatives has been to try to draw some hard and fast line between religion and politics. It's a rather ironic statement for Republicans to make at this particular time, given the high profile of religious issues in the presidential primary, but there it is. Marco Rubio, I am sorry to say, is one of the people who has said publicly that the Pope should stick to religious and moral issues and leave other issues alone.

In other words, His Holiness can go ahead and talk about peripheral values issues, but when it comes to the important issues (economics and foreign policy), he needs to take his censer and go burn some incense somewhere and leave things in the hands of the politicians--which, come to think of it, is even more ironic given what everything else they've said this year about politicians.

Of course, Rubio grew up Catholic, became a Mormon, and now goes to both a Catholic and a Protestant church. It's a good thing he doesn't have to observe immigration restrictions in his church life--or maybe the dual citizenship he apparently possesses gets him out of those restrictions, it's hard to tell.

It's one thing to disagree with the Pope. I might disagree with him on the Global Warming thing myself, although I haven't read Laudato Si yet, so I can't really say (I have learned to refrain from comment about what any Pope says or believes until I read what he actually said). But it is thing another to say that he has no business to say it. I'd rather a pope say something false than to think that he has not standing to say anything on other important issues--particularly when the people telling him to keep quiet are the very ones most responsible for screwing things up.

Pope against gay adoption. Liberals shocked. World amused.

It is rather interesting to watch the reaction of liberals as they discover that there are people in this world who disagree with them. They were apparently unaware that this was allowed.

A journalist at the Guardian has discovered that Pope Francis is opposed to gay adoption. Just wait until he finds out that he's also in favor of God, against the Devil, and kind of partial to holy water.

That'll really shake him up.

The comments by the Pope to the Maltese Archbishop have rocked the world of those in the Politically Correct community who had convinced themselves that he was actually a Western secular liberal bent on turning the Church upside down. Damien Thompson (Hey, wasn't "Damian" the name of the Anti-Christ in the movie, "The Omen"?) criticizes Time magazine for not doing its research before naming him "Person of the Year."

I mean, if they had only known the Pope was a Catholic. What were they thinking?

Isn't there a television show we can kick him off of? On the other hand, maybe that's not such a good idea: His family is slightly larger than the Robertsons.

Rush Limbaugh criticizes Jesus for being a Marxist ... er, wait a second

A prominent conservative pundit today condemned Jesus Christ for expressing what he said were clearly Marxist sentiments in a recent statement. According to a reporter named "Matthew" (no last name was included in the byline), Jesus said "You cannot serve both God and mammon." The comment has set off a firestorm of protest from prominent conservatives.

On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh responded, "This is just pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the Savior of the world." He criticized Jesus' understanding of economics and added, "If it weren't for capitalism, I don't know where Christianity would be."

Limbaugh went on to ....

Um, wait. Let me check this again. Hmmm. I, ... er, think maybe I've got a couple things wrong here.

It wasn't actually Jesus Limbaugh was criticizing. It was actually the Pope he was taking to task ... for saying pretty much the same thing.

Never mind.

Liberal media discovers source of false reports that Pope is changing everything about the Catholic Church

The liberal media is now beginning to react to the almost universal misrepresentation of the Pope as someone bent on the wholesale change in Church dogma and practice. When he was installed as Pope, we began hearing that Francis was going to overturn all prior Catholic Church precedent that came before previously. 

In addition to changing a whole lot of things it believed in the past antecedent to the present.

So for months we have been subjected to reports that the Pope is doing things the Church has never, ever done before in the history of existence. Not even once.

Such as helping the poor. Reaching out the underprivileged and downtrodden. Empathizing with sinners.
And preaching the gospel.

The Catholic Church? Preaching the gospel? Who woulda' thunk it?

But through what must have been some pretty involved sleuthing, the liberal media has now discovered, not only that the Pope has not repudiated the Church's past beliefs—not only that the things he is saying have actually been said and done before, but it has also discovered who is responsible for the widespread belief that he has.

That's right: The liberal media has finally isolated the source of the erroneous reports about the Pope. The perpetrator of these falsehoods is ...

... Now let me just verify this here just to make sure its is accurate ... hmmm. Now this is interesting. The source of the mis-portrayal of the Pope, according to the liberal media, is ... The liberal media!

That's right.

The Atlantic Wire runs a Reuters report that takes Time Magazine to task for perpetuating the myth that the Pope is engaging in a wholesale makeover of the Church in its article naming the pontiff "Person of the Year":

Francis, a socially conservative religious leader, was chosen as the most influential person on Earth in the same year as a landmark Supreme Court decision throwing open the doors for equal marriage rights in the U.S., a right that Francis, and his church, officially oppose. In a just few short months since his election, the new Pope has transformed how many people, including the media, talk about the Church — without actually modifying what the church believes. 

... The Pope's tenure so far includes a series of highly symbolic moments and quotes that seem to challenge and sometimes rebuke Church tradition. ... The power of those symbolic moments dwells in anticipation of what the Pope might do in the coming years. His most media-friendly moments haven't translated into the reforms many on the left seem to assume are around the corner. There have very few official pronouncements from his office, and none have deviated greatly from previous Popes. And chances are, they won't. 

The report points out that Time had to issue a correction of its previous report: ""An earlier version of this post suggested that Pope Francis rejected some church dogma. He does not."

Well, I guess that's all cleared up. Now that the liberal media has discovered that Francis is actually just riffing off of what the Church has always done, they won't ever misrepresent him again. Ever.

Promise.

Reports of the Pope's death greatly exaggerated

Despite all the cultural dirt heaped upon the Catholic Church, it somehow manages to elude the perennial pronouncements that it is dead.

In my RSS Reader today I have at least three blog posts from prominent atheists bemoaning today's naming of Pope Francis by Time Magazine as "Person (we can no longer say "Man") of the Year." How can this be? asks Larry Moran: "It's hard to think of anyone who's more irrelevant to my life or the life of my friends and neighbors."

Time editors apparently neglected to consult Larry as to who is relevant to his life—and completely forgot to survey the people who live on his block.

And then there is the inimitable P. Z. Myers, in dire need of a mother to wash his mouth out with soap:

You have got to be ****ing kidding me. They’ve got this great pulpit with mass media attention to actually highlight the important events and people on the planet, and they pick the pablum-spewing head of an antique organization that demands its followers adhere to obsolete and dangerous beliefs, and this is what they say about it?

I mean, how does this guy rate anyway? Helping the poor? Championing the cause of the dispossessed? How does that add anything to the world?

If atheists want to convince people the Pope is irrelevant, then they might want to stop talking about him so much.

It's Not About the Pope: Modern conservatives need to get back in touch with their traditional economic selves

The Pope's comments in an official Vatican document yesterday are being portrayed as an indictment of free market economics by the liberal media—and the misrepresentation has been swallowed whole by many conservatives. They're wrong. In fact, it isn't the Pope who's a liberal: It's conservatives who have abandoned their own traditions and whose liberalism on economic issues is now being shown up.

Any school of philosophical thought suffers from popularity, and conservatism is no different. Ever since conservatism grew out of its remnant status about 35 or 40 years ago, it has been in a process of degradation that continues to this day. It has been victimized by its own success.

The conservatism that produced Ronald Reagan and that in large part dominated the old National Review magazine until somewhere along in the 1990s has been beset with what can only be called a liberal infection.

The conservatism of Edmund Burke has been quietly traded in by modern conservatism for the liberalism of John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke. The problem is aggravated by the fact that, due to almost universal philosophical illiteracy, most modern conservatives don't even know who these thinkers are.

Utilitarianism has replaced respect for custom and tradition. Raw libertarianism has replaced ordered liberty. Free market ideology has replaced a common sense economic liberty that once understood the difference between the empirical laws of economics and the normative obligations of a Christian culture.

The process has been helped along by conservative talk radio and now Fox News. People like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, right as they are on many issues, are now seen as the standard bearers for conservatism when, in fact, their political philosophies are at serious odds with the conservative tradition itself.

A large part of the problem with modern conservatism has to do with the fact that conservatives have forgotten their own tradition. Just look at the most popular conservative books (and weep). No movement that takes as its chief intellectual nourishment itself on people like Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Bill O'Reilly deserves to be taken seriously.

This was not the case with the old conservatism. There were no popular conservative authors back in the conservative day, so we couldn't be corrupted by them. We had to resort to Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Michael Oakeshott, and F. A. Hayek, and T. S. Eliot for our political nourishment. Even the conservative journalists were intellectuals, not former disc jockeys and beauty queens: Wilmore Kendall, Frank Burnham, Joseph Sobran, and William F. Buckley, Jr.

These were people who a) knew what they were talking about, and b) actually authored the books that they claimed to author.

Modern conservatives can see conservatism from their house.

I have a simple rule for any conservative who wants to learn better what conservatism is: Don't read any book by anyone claiming to be a conservative that purports to explain it who didn't actually write the book that bears their name.

That would eliminate just about every popular conservative author with the exception of Charles Krauthammer, a liberal-turned-conservative (what we used to call a "neoconservative") who only had to change half his political philosophy in order to fit in to the new modern "conservatism" that is only half conservative. And we'll make an exception for Ann Coulter, any of whose lapses from true conservatism are more than made up for in sheer wit.

Allan Bloom once famously divided the political public into right-wing liberals and left-wing liberals. Modern conservatism is right-wing liberalism.

And this is why so-called conservatives have a problem with Pope Francis: He has challenged the liberal element within their thinking that has developed during a 40 year-long gestational period and has now experienced a coming out like the monster in the movie "Alien."

Conservatism has traditionally fought for a proper balance between justice, order, and freedom; and a belief in an economy that is free, but still subordinate to these goals. They believed freedom was a means, not an end.

What modern conservatism has done is to subordinate every other aspect of political conservatism to one thing and one thing only: free market economics. Everything else is dispensable.

Marriage for example.

Just look at the number of "conservative" leaders who, as soon as the political winds changed, abandoned ship on conservatism's central cultural position. It's pretty sad.

You can take my culture, but don't mess with my free market economics.

Once upon a time, conservatives advocated ordered liberty—both as a political and an economic principle. They were never in favor of unrestricted market actions. Never.

What the current critics of Pope Francis who think they are conservatives need to do is take account of Russell Kirk, the author of the most influential and authoritative book on conservatism, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (the Ur text of modern conservatism), and legendary defender of the free market, who writes in another book:

Sometimes, indeed, vociferous American devotees of "American capitalism" and the "American standard of living" do more mischief and benefit to their own cause, generating more heat than light, and substituting facile slogans for first principles ... 

... We ought not to exaggerate the importance of our economic arguments or of our American economy. In many ways the free market economy of the United States is a good thing in itself; yet it is not the whole of life. No economy, however productive materially, could be a good thing if it were founded upon injustice, disorder, slavery, and dishonor. The slave-labor camps of the Soviet Union were efficient, after a fashion—but only because they took no reckoning of human lives or moral principles. Thus our American economy, though good in itself, is important not merely for its own sake: its real importance is the contribution it makes to our justice and order and freedom, our ability to live in dignity as truly human persons. Our "standard of living," though often enjoyable in itself, is not the be-all and end-all of life. Economic production is merely th e means to certain ends. One of those ends is the satisfaction of man's material wants. And there are other ends served by this means of economic production: the satisfaction of certain profound desires in human nature, such as the desire for fruitful work and sufficient leisure and hopeful competition, for one; and the maintenance of a decent society for another.

Now take this view and the read what Pope Francis said again, and ask yourself where there is any contradiction between this and what the Pope said.

Modern conservatives have made a religion of the free market in a way traditional conservatives never would have done. The free market is not the sum and summation of conservatism; it is rather one principle to be balanced with others. As C. S. Lewis once said, "Second things suffer from being put first." This is what modern conservatives have done with economics.

Conservatism is not an ideology, it is a set of political first principles in constant tension. There's a big difference.