Being David Brooks: Onward, Christian Soldiers

The defining face of social conservatism could be this: Those are the people who go into underprivileged areas and form organizations to help nurture stable families. Those are the people who build community institutions in places where they are sparse. Those are the people who can help us think about how economic joblessness and spiritual poverty reinforce each other. Those are the people who converse with us about the transcendent in everyday life.

This culture war is more Albert Schweitzer and Dorothy Day than Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham; more Salvation Army than Moral Majority. It's doing purposefully in public what social conservatives already do in private.

Schweitzer--vegetarian, (problematic) anti-colonialist, anti-nuclear weapons activist--and Day--commie Catholic Worker--as models for contemporary social conservatives? Sure, social conservatives build some community institutions "in places where they are sparse," but who built the co-ops, farmer's markets, community gardens, and independent media centers in your community? Stable families require good jobs, good schools, good health care, and good housing, also known as the end of poverty. Consider the prospects for social conservatives (who are at the same time economic conservatives), never interested in anything more deeply Christian than charity, making an end to poverty the aim of their next jihad.

Brooks calls for the withdrawal of Christian Soldiers from the failed cultural counter-insurgency while declaring a conservative Just War on the irksome social dysfunctions of poor people (especially of color). "Dysfunctions," of course, not to due to racism, redlining, deskilling, offshoring, policing, or disinvestment in their communities, but to the poor's personal failings, their "spiritual poverty." This is why Brooks identifies with Christian conservatives. Neither can live without one culture war or another on women, the poor, racial and sexual minorities, and the Left. He'd never be able to write another column. If at first you don't succeed, war, war, again.

Next Page  1  |  2  |  3

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).