restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations
Conservative Jabberwocky
I have come to the point, whenever I hear the word conservative which means so much to me because of the historic significance of the term of listening carefully because I have with sorrow become more afraid of the word conservative than almost any other word in the English language. The term is unfurled as a contentless banner, and our mindless generation is invited to follow it. But there is no rational, scriptural content by which to test it, and thus the word is being used to teach the very opposite things from those which it historically stood for.
Men are now called upon to follow conservatives with great frequency, and nowhere more so than in the New Conservatism that follows the New World Order Theology. For example, it is now conservative to support pro-abortionists and pro-sodomites if thats what it takes to get a fellow Republican reelected witness President Bush campaigning for Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania. As long as you are trying to conserve your people in office you are being conservative. We have come, then, to this fearsome place where the word conservative has become the enemy of the truth. We must despise this contentless banner not because we do not love conservatism but because we do love it. We must fight this contentless banner, with its deep motivations rooted in compromise and expediency, which is being used for the purpose of radical societal reform and control. And we must teach our children to do the same.
It is Humanism with a banner called conservatism to which these Neocons can give any content they wish. This emphasizes how discerning the Christian needs to be. For example, this past weekend a prominent evangelical called on conservatives to send a contribution in support of the Bush campaign. He wrote:
For conservative people of faith, voting for principle this year means voting for the re-election of George W. Bush. The alternative, in my mind, is simply unthinkable.
To the pro-life, pro-family, pro-traditional marriage, pro-America voters in this nation, we must determine that President Bush is the man with our interests at heart. It is that simple.
Then he added:
So the vote of every conservative is imperative. However, simply voting may not be enough. I believe it is the responsibility of every political conservative, every evangelical Christian, every pro-life Catholic, every traditional Jew, every Reagan Democrat and everyone in between to get serious about re-electing President Bush.
I want you to note the use of the word conservative in reference to supporting one of the most anti-family Republican presidents America has ever had. When we make statements like this we have, in effect, abandoned propositional truth. At the very least the door is opened for people to think that the word conservative can be used in any way as long as one uses it to support his or her political philosophy.
Our urgent need today in the church of Jesus Christ is to understand the significance of the duality the dichotomy that such statements promulgate. The evangelical Christian especially needs to be very careful because some evangelicals have been asserting that what matters is not setting out to prove or disprove propositions; what matters is support of the status quo. In our day, the sphere of objective reality has been placed in the non-rational and non-logical category as opposed to the rational and logical. The New Right uses connotation words rather then denotation words words as symbols without any definition in contrast to scientific symbols that are carefully defined. Conservatism is unchallengeable because it could mean anything there is no way to discuss it in normal linguistic categories.
I cannot understand how a Christian community can ignore these evils without at least asking the questions that need to be asked and without coming to at least some rudimentary responses to these questions. Perhaps the real tragedy that a discussion of this kind reveals is not so much that evangelicals of the present generation have misused words, but that so many believers do not even know that such a problem exists. 
Josef Pieper notes in his book Abuse of Language Abuse of Power that Orwellian Newspeak is nothing new. He cites 2,400-year-old examples from Platos Dialogues concerning the Sophists abuse of the truth function of language (pp. 8-13; 18-22). Likewise, George Orwell, author of the famous book 1984, noted in his essay, Politics and the English Language, that the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between ones real and ones declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In other words: Sloppy language, sloppy thought.
So, as we consider the upcoming elections, we need to understand the linguistic jabberwocky that permeates the public square today and also understand the power of words and the need to treat them respectfully. This means that, whenever we hear the word conservative, we may just need to take it cum grano salis.
July 6, 2004
David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com. His latest book is Why I Stopped Listening to Rush: Confessions of a Recovering Neocon.