by Brett Stevens on August 26, 2012

Beware prevailing wisdom because it’s rarely wisdom. The reason it is prevailing is that there’s an urgent need to make it official, because it won’t actually last.

What’s happening is that people are using it to draw attention to themselves, because it’s the trend of the moment, which makes them de facto temporary sociopaths who have put truth and the best interests of their subject secondary to their own enrichment. This is a common human failing.

The prevailing wisdom among the Republican party and the Christian faith is that “new converts” can be made by approaching the Other Side with a hybrid of its beliefs and your own.

Eternal wisdom says instead that doing so is suicide.

Think it through: the Other Side disagree with what makes you what you are. They already have what they are. If you mix the two, you offer them an additional burden (what you are) in addition to an adulterated form of what they want (what they are).

Churches incorporate rock music, drift leftward and endorse liberal issues, and try to essentially be secular and liberal instead of mystical and conservative.

But at that point, they’re dead in the water. I can get secular and liberal from McDonald’s or Obama, without the burden of having to think about morality and my soul. Pass the fries.

The more Christianity has drifted to the left in order to “stay relevant,” the more it has lost the people who are its bedrock: young middle-class families.

In the same way, the more the Republicans have drifted leftward in order to “reach the young,” the more it has lost the people who are its bedrock: 20-and-30-something families that are interested in building prosperous lives for themselves.

By appealing to the “new” audience, the Republicans and Christians signal to their faithful that they are being abandoned. In addition, the new audience will never buy it, because they already have what they want with fewer obligations.

Even more troubling is that by reversing your position, or appearing to while hiding it behind your back, is to signal that you are dishonest. It’s the equivalent of saying “just kidding” or performing a bait-and-switch sales job, and is recognizably dishonest from a distance.

A Republican party that offers gay marriage and welfare is in effect cloning the platform of the democratic party, thus makes itself irrelevant to people who vote Republican while offering nothing new to Democratic voters, who already have Democrats.

In the same way, turning a church service into a rock concert fails because it drives away those who are fleeing the madness and want something for the whole family to enjoy, while failing to attract those who’d rather just go to a rock concert — there’s no message of troubling transcendence of individualism there.

The mindset of Democracy — pandering, manipulation, deception and flattery — is anathema to any conservative. It’s easy to see through and seems ridiculous at its core. However, because they don’t understand it, Republicans and Christians bungle it.

What they need is to realize why people like them in the first place, and to unite all of those people on what they like and use that as a weapon against the masses. We don’t want to take over; we want a place for our people (think: Moses).

People like religion because it is the antithesis to valueless, material, I’m-OK-you’re-OK society. Religion says there is a reason to live a moral life and that it offers a reward of peace of soul.

People like Republicans because they offer solid functionality and a family-oriented values system. This includes facing hard truths like the fact that world peace will never exist, war and poverty will always be with us, and that the best thing to do is salvage the good and push away the bad.

These are not simplistic moral systems. For simplistic moral systems, try the “there is no truth, everything is OK, there are no consequences” of egalitarian progressivism.

However these are comprehensive worldviews. They cut through the chatter and chaos, and give people a reason to live as their instinct says they should. This is the audience to whom Republicans and Christians should appeal.

The data back up this statement, since everywhere the prevailing wisdom takes over, Republicans and Christians pander, and lose out because liberals already have everything they want in liberalism. Thus the numbers decline.

Conservatives need to accept that we are the underdogs in this fight, and to stick together on the basis of what we agree on, not what we wish we could believe in order to be popular with the deranged masses.

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.