Freedom Nationally, Virtue Locally: A Wake-Up Call for Conservatives

Strategically, many conservatives are agreeing to play "virtue politics" nationally, often leading the way. And despite those efforts, timeless virtues never seem to result and, in fact, appear more elusive than ever.

The fact is, virtue politics at the national level in this era  actually results in legislation and bureaucracy fostering progressive and politically-correct ideas of virtue.

So, unfortunately, even when well-intentioned, operating on the playing field of virtue politics ever-increasingly reduces the hard-won freedoms of every American. The ultimate result of the practice of virtue politics is death to the common freedom earned by our Founders for all Americans - death by a thousand cuts, no matter whether the cuts are inflicted by conservative virtues or progressive virtues.

Christians know from the New Testament that virtue is not accomplished even by Biblical law - so how much more powerless is civil law to create virtue?

No national government can achieve both freedom and virtue: neither will be accomplished - as the omnivorous government, its policy makers, and its bureaucrats eagerly and perseveringly diminish street-level freedom in the name of virtue, while of course never achieving any real virtue.

The national government must be focused on its highest assignment: freedom national sovereignty and individual freedoms of its people. That's why the Constitution is what the Constitution is - a freedom document. The Founders were wisely leaving virtue up to the people in their individual judgment and local voluntary associations. In fact, it is through the Constitution that the Founders set up protections so that individual Americans and their associations could practice virtue without government interference.

Social conservatives must adopt a new strategy in order to win the freedom battle and truly impact the virtue battle in America in 2010 and beyond.

That strategy is: "freedom nationally, virtue locally."

That strategy is Constitutional, Biblical, and strategic. 

And that strategy is the critical path to reestablish crucial commonality and shared success among social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, libertarians and all right-leaning Americans.