communitarianism.

For some light Christmas reading, I grappled with this post on the main site:

http://www.thenextright.com/kristen-soltis/a-party-in-the-holiday-spirit-365-days-a-year#comment-form

and decided it needed a lengthier response than the comment space could provide. The original post is very good and says some very important things about the need to broaden the ways in which we approach religious people. My big problem with it is the "devoutly Evangelical" for which the GOP is becoming a "club" already do the things Kristen is talking about. Inner city work? If it's not Catholics or African-American churches, it's Evangelicals. Loving our neighbors in the third world? Look at Warren's PEACE plan, Evangelical AIDS prevention organizations, Compassion International, World Vision or, if you're in more of a moral reform mindset, International Justice Mission, which spearheads opposition to sex trafficing almost single-handed.

The average Evangelical under thirty (and this is the set I have the most experience with) only maybe cares about one or two of the "hot-button issues"--abortion and, sometimes, gay marriage. Alongside this is a deep concern for human rights and an often nebulous and ill-defined concept of "social justice". I think that, if we fail to engage these concerns, we're not going to be a club for the devout at all because they're just as likely to vote elsewhere.

Importantly, you've got to educate these folks about economics. Most of them don't understand, for example, that wealth in the first-century context of scripture was essentially horded and not used for wealth creation/creating jobs. As a result, they have a vague feeling that wealth is by it's very nature un-Christian. If you don't have some serious fis-con thinking from a so-con perspective you run the risk of losing these guys. I think it's doable, and the Evangelicals know the non-government sector is more effective than the government, usually from personal experience, but it's up to us to help connect the dots. And like Kristen, I think that this approach will help with non-Evangelicals too.

One way to do this might be to emphsize that we are not only the party of individual empowerment but community empowerment as well. Government tends to suck up power not only from individuals, but communities as well. To get perhaps a bit unnecessarily philosophical, Robert Putnam identifies an individualistic "liberal" and communitarian "republican" tradition within democracies. We've been beating the individualist liberal drum for a long time, and this is a bit uncomfortable for believers concerned about the "autonomous self", but conservatism has room for communitarianism, and liberals and republicans both have very good reason to be wary of stateism, as does religion itself. On the other hand, we don’t want to become just another Christian Democrat party. The Christian Democrats—in virtually every nation where they exist—have failed to stop or even markedly slow the growth of the welfare state, with all the disters for both individuals and communities which this entails. Ultimately, I think this is a very necessary discussion for conservatism, let alone the GOP, to be having right now and for years to come.