Andrew Sullivan And Conservatism: A Cry For Help

I am thinking of writing at length about writer, pundit, and blogger extraordinaire Andrew Sullivan. But before I do, I was wondering what Contratimes readers thought about the man. Perhaps some of you watched the C-Span interview with him last night on Q & A. If you did see it, what do you think? I came away with something approaching confusion. How is this man a conservative? How is it that he is even considered a spokesman for conservatism?

Part of me wonders, not so much that he is some sort of charlatan, but whether he subsists solely on stereotype: he is the elegant, reasonable, open, and so-very-humble conservative much in demand these days. He is not like the many blockheads out there -- Bible-thumping and finger-wagging -- who call down brimstone on all things untoward and lynch personal privacy on the town common. His is an erudite, thoughtful conservatism; fashionable in its unfettered secularism and yet blithely tolerant of most things religious, even, I dare say, Catholic. He is gay with circumspection and restraint, but he is not politically restrained by religious precept nor is he given to radicalism. He defends gay marriage with soft-spoken ease; and he supports abortion only in the first trimester of pregnancy. In short, he is perceived as balanced; his poise makes him popular.

And he claims to be a good Catholic. I have no doubt that he is, at least in the Holy See of his own mind. He supports abortion, homosexual marriage; he believes that the Bible is fallible, errant. And yet to believe in these things he must doubt other elementary Catholic teachings as well. He must deny papal infallibility, for instance, which should be no real problem, since it is hardly an essential Catholic tenet. I can understand his jettisoning such tangential stuff, and can applaud his accepting the really important matters, like being nice to one's neighbors. What I find most curious, however, is how often people like Mr. Sullivan seem to land on the truth that the Bible and the papacy are always fallible on matters of sexuality and sexual holiness and yet are never fallible when it comes to love. After all, if the Bible and the Church are fallible, then surely we must conclude that both could be wrong about being kind, tolerant, loving, and merciful. Perhaps, for instance, we are NOT supposed to care for the poor; nor are we to be kind to our neighbors. Such teachings are mere corruptions of Christian teaching, rooted in so much ancient bias. I have never met a person who can tell me why anyone should care for the poor for purely secular reasons; and yet I do find many folks, like Mr. Sullivan, suggesting that religion has no place in politics. Mr. Sullivan abhors fundamentalism, it is clear. Yet he is apparently blind to that fundamentalism to which he holds so tenaciously: he is ignorant to the fact that everyone holds certain truths as fundamentals. Some truths, of course, are not one whit fun and are rather mental. But there is something rather fundamentally flawed in those who believe they are able to transcend religion and exist in some sort of political neutral zone, where religion does not reside. Religious faith resides everywhere. There is no escaping this fact. Any position that denies this is futile and pretentious. A man who theorizes we can fully partition the atmosphere can only exist in a vacuum: he may be a fine writer at a fashionable journal but he will be smothered should he put his theory into practice. Politics can exist independent of religious precepts about as well as nature loves a vacuum.

Well, perhaps I have already written about Mr. Sullivan; one could hardly think this post is a mere preamble, though it could be criticized, I am sure, as something of a ramble. Whether rant, ramble or preamble, I would like to know what you think, especially those of you who have a better sense of Mr. Sullivan's broad contributions to political and theological discourse.

Peace and mirth,

Bill Gnade

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