Conservatives believe in the institutions shaped by the accumulated experience of humanity.

We know we may be very small, but by standing on the shoulders of those who came before, we can reach very high. Our constitutional law heritage stretches back both to Athens and Jerusalem, our guiding stories wind their way through the history of millennia. We will not let go of the precious gifts we have been given to preserve and augment. We see through the pretense of those revolutionary poseurs who write out great checks on what generations have deposited, but deposit nothing worthwhile of their own.
The example of Bonhoeffer should energize us to risk all when that is what is needed.
But the moment may come when the institutions have become corrupted and the wisdom they preserved poisoned. The law, the government, even the stories we tell ourselves can be taken over and perverted, leaving us bereft of all except what we have internalized and made one with our soul.
To conserve the perverted institutions and the warped narrative they generate would join ourselves to their evil. It is at those times that the true conservative becomes a revolutionary.
The truest conservatism is to preserve the deepest of all things – the connection to God and the purposeful wisdom that orders all meaning and being.
These thoughts are a reflection borne of thinking again and again about Bonhoeffer, the Angel Studio’s movie that I watched on Thanksgiving. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the film’s subject, was a young German Protestant theologian. He was a man of peace and faith who became a conspirator against a monstrously corrupt state and an accomplice in the attempted assassination of a monster who usurped divinity.
Bonhoeffer came to New York to study at the famed Union Theological Seminary in 1930, when a restive Germany was beginning to respond to the siren call of Nazism. The film shows Bonhoeffer as indifferent to what he felt was Union’s musty and detached take on religious life, but alive t...