How Conservatives Look Outside the Bubble

Woe to those who call evil good
    and good evil,
who put darkness for light
    and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
    and sweet for bitter!
Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes,
    and shrewd in their own sight!

Isaiah 5:20-21

A week or so ago I read of a thoroughly Orthodox Jew in Israel’s congress (called the “Knesset”) who was receiving a great deal of heat for opposing the LGBTQ revolution and secularization in the nation of Israel. My curiosity piqued, I read up on the man (Avi Maoz) and his political and religious history, curious as to how he’d adopted such a stalwart, courageous posture and curious about how he’d arrived this profound a level of conviction on sexuality and godlessness.

My reading led me to consider why it was that a man who is not converted to Christ, who does not have the Holy Spirit in him and does not truly know God right now, could have had these important similarities with many of us conservative Christians. I’ve considered it more than a few times over the past few years as I’ve seen similar conviction on issues of what it means to be human and the need for a transcendent grounding of morality from conservative Roman Catholics. Why are there conservative members of other traditions and religions that deny many or all elements of the true Gospel of Jesus Christ who nonetheless share our principled opposition to drag queen story hours, so-called gay “marriage,” the sexualization of children, critical race theory, and other philosophical acids and deviant fetishes of our day? Why am I no longer surprised to see a committed Roman Catholic or an Orthodox Jew stand against the normalization of homosexual behavior or the mutilation of children in “gender affirmation surgery”?

The conclusion I’ve reached is that conservative Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims all share a dedication to a fixed moral standard that is independent of modern human judgment. A “conservative” in the sense that I’m discerning out there in the world and articulating to you here is someone who holds to and wants to conserve the observation of and the obedience to an unchanging standard of what is right and true. In opposition to this, a “progressive” would be someone who wants himself and society to progress in line with the trajectory of human thought and reasoning. To put it another way: A conservative looks outside the bubble of human judgment to a source he believes is transcendent and above all humans; a progressive looks inside the bubble to observe and assess the direction of human judgment, his standard for what is right and true.

While a conservative Protestant and a conservative Catholic will disagree strongly on exactly where and what that transcendent standard independent of our current human judgment is (and certainly they would both disagree even more with a conservative Jew or a conservative Muslim on this), their agreement that there is a fixed revelation from God to which current humans are obligated to conform their thoughts and behaviors makes them similar in a very real way. Where a conservative Christian or Jew will assess the present day in light of the ancient standard he believes is binding on us all, a progressive Christian or Jew will likely assess the ancient standard in light of the present day. For the conservative, the arbiter of what is true and good is outside the bubble; for the progressive, it is inside.

One of the reasons this matters in 2023 is that we will increasingly find ourselves having cobelligerents that might have bewildered us a hundred years ago. If a Roman Catholic denies our justification by faith alone, why should I be outside an abortion clinic with him? If an Orthodox Jew is dead in his sins and trespasses having denied Jesus as Messiah, why should I benefit from his op-ed on the need for religion in the public square? The answer is that while we are not thorough allies, we are fighting against the same enemy because we share a similar brand of allegiance. In a (hopefully soon) day to come when the West is again more substantially Christian in her structures and sentiments, it would be strange to be a frequent cobelligerent with a Torah-beliving Jew or a committed Catholic. But in a generation where we believe men can get pregnant, two women can marry each other, and that belonging to a certain group of people automatically imputes to someone righteousness or guilt, a man who looks outside the bubble, especially to a standard close to the real one, is likely to identify many of the same toxins in our current atmosphere as us.

We should be prepared to take that common cause as a blessing, even as we tell them of the only wise God who is most truly outside the bubble and most willing to save them from their sins.