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I used to be certain.

Not just confident or comfortable, but certain in the way only a young person can be when handed a complete system and told it explains everything. I had been taught a theology that divided the world neatly into what was true and what was false. It came with answers for every question that mattered and, more importantly, it came with the assumption that those answers were final.

I didn’t question it. Why would I? It was what I had been given. It felt like truth because it felt like home.

When I listen to people argue about theology now, I often recognize something uncomfortably familiar. I hear the same tone of certainty I once had. I see people defending systems they didn’t build but have fully embraced. They assume their conclusions are objectively true and everything else is objectively wrong.

I understand that mindset because I once lived there.

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What does it mean to be a real conservative in America today? For rational people, it has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with personal values and personal choices. It has to do with the voluntary decisions of individuals and families and communities.

The things in America which are worth conserving were built on the social values that I still believe in. Personal morality. Voluntary choice. Individual responsibility. The Protestant work ethic. Trust in neighbors. Strong families. Giving and charity.

Those are not political issues. Those are personal choices that individuals, families and communities voluntarily lived out over many years as they built this country.

There were plenty of poor choices, too. There were plenty of evil and selfish people who were part of the story. But without conservative social values at the core of families and communities, the best parts of America never would have existed.

The morally powerful nation which grew on this continent from a mixture of ethnic and national origins came together in spite of politicians, not because of them. Everything that was good about America came from the bottom up — from those with conservative personal values.

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I don’t want to feel angry. I don’t want to feel hopeless about the future of my country. I don’t want to feel despair about the future of the people around me.

I’ve been trying so hard to focus on thinking and writing about the ways in which principled and decent Americans can stop their society from collapsing — on the ways in which individuals can build something that’s healthy and functional even in the face of the horrible things going on around us.

But there are times when I feel as though things have gone so far that even the people who need to hear that can’t hear, because the raging cacophony of the dysfunctional culture makes it impossible for them to hear.

This is why so many socially conservative people have unwisely turned to political power as a way to create the society they want. They see cultural forces that are destroying the traditional values which gave us things that were worth conserving. They see those forces replacing those things with ideas and ways of life which are irrational and destructive and evil.

What social conservatives don’t understand, though, is that giving in to the desire to seize political power — even in the service of stopping this destructive evil — corrupts them so badly that they end up betraying the values they originally claimed to hold.

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