Podcast: Conservatives, Progressives, and the Pursuit of the Common Good (Andrew Walker and Robert George)

February 06, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

What Does It Mean to Be a Conservative?

In today's episode, Dr. Robert P. George and Dr. Andrew Walker talk together about religious liberty, the common good, and the true heart of conservatism.

Social Conservatism for the Common Good

Social Conservatism for the Common Good

Andrew T. Walker

Edited by Andrew T. Walker, these thoughtful essays from Christian evangelical scholars examine the political philosophy and ethics of influential Catholic social conservative scholar Robert P. George.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:46 - Contrasting Conservatism and Liberalism

Matt Tully
Robert and Andrew, thank you so much for joining me on The Crossway Podcast today.

Andrew Walker
Matt, it’s great to be with you.

Robert George
It’s a pleasure to be on. Thank you.

Matt Tully
Robbie, you’re widely considered to be one of this generation’s leading conservative thinkers. I don’t know how that makes you feel to hear someone articulate it like that, but I think that’s fair to say that’s a general way of thinking about you. Your list of credentials is pretty robust, and I just wanted to point out a few highlights for those who don’t know you already. You hold multiple degrees from Harvard and Oxford. You served as chairman of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, on the President’s Council for Bioethics, and on the US Commission for Civil Rights. And maybe most notably and most impressively, you are an accomplished banjo player. I’ve taken some time to watch some videos on YouTube, and you are very good! It’s quite impressive, that bluegrass. You’ve got these conservative credentials; you are a true conservative, you know what that means, and you’ve got the letters to prove it. But I wonder if you could then walk us through that. When you say that you’re a conservative, first, what do you mean by that? What does that word actually mean? What’s the essence of what it means to be a conservative? And then why is that where you would land?

Robert George
Well, the first thing I want to do, Matt, is to assure you that I came by my bluegrass banjo playing honestly. I was born and brought up in the hills of West Virginia. Both of my grandfathers were coal miners. And, of course, in Appalachia, in the heart of Appalachia where I was born, banjos are issued to little boys at birth. So I got mine, I learned to play it, I still play it, I love to play it, and I play it as often as I can. I play with different people in different groups. I love bluegrass music. It’s what I call “Appalachian classical music.” In a certain sense, it’s the soundtrack of my life. And it goes pretty well with being a conservative, although I certainly didn’t always consider myself a conservative. You’ve asked about what that means. Well, of course, these terms do not have fixed, eternal, meanings. A set of beliefs that might count you or qualify you as a conservative in some cultures, in some circumstances, at some points in history might qualify you as a liberal or reformer or something else at another time. So I’m not too hung up on the labels, but I’m happy to accept in our cultural circumstances today—these historical circumstances—the label “conservative.” But I would insist that we need to distinguish American conservatism in some important ways from European conservatism. American conservatism is not the blood and soil or throne and altar conservatism of old Europe—the Ancien Régime—and so forth. Whatever’s to be said for or against European conservatism or that type of conservatism, American conservatism is different. In a certain sense, American conservatives, like myself or like Andrew, are old-fashioned Madisonian-Tocqueville liberals. But we are regarded today, of course, as conservatives. Well, that raises an important question: If we do not build our national unity, for example, or support the idea of building our national unity around a common religion or ethnic background or history or specific culture, then what is the foundation of our unity? Around what do we integrate ourselves as a people, and what do conservatives support as the foundation and matrix of our unity? There, we American conservatives say it is the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We believe our nation should be united around that common set of principles, not blood and soil, not common ethnicity or race or heritage or language. I think it’s good to have a common language and I support the idea of everyone learning English, whatever other languages we learn, but we don’t find our national unity by integrating ourselves around those factors. Even a common religion, although we do have a deep heritage in the United States in the biblical tradition. Rather, it’s the idea that we should conserve the principles of the declaration that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and the principles of the Constitution of the United States, and the institutions that are created under that Constitution, or by that Constitution, precisely to effectuate our founding principles.

Matt Tully
So if that’s what you consider to be the essence of American conservatism, how would you contrast that to the essence of American progressivism, or American liberalism, in the newer sense of that term?

Robert George
From its very origins, progressivism, in the American sense, was hostile to the constitution. That’s not a polemical statement on my part; it’s just a description of fact. When Woodrow Wilson, one of the founding fathers of progressivism, was sitting in the chair I now occupy at Princeton—before he became governor of New Jersey and then President of the United States, when he was a political scientist and a political theorist, serving as the first McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University—he made the argument against the old 18th century Constitution and emphasized the need, as he saw it, for Constitutional revision—for a new Constitution. He regarded, as did his fellow progressives, the old Constitution—the Madisonian Constitution—as a Newtonian document that was unfit for a Darwinian age, that the new problems we face—the new challenges, the new opportunities of industrialism and the globalizing economy and so forth, all of new communications—that all of these things required us to give up the old Constitution, with its institutions that made legislating slow and deliberate and that wasn’t, in a certain sense, inherently conservative and move to something more like a European parliamentary model that would enable government to legislate quickly, remove the checks and balances and the things that got in the way of responding to changing circumstances in a very timely way. When progressives couldn’t pull it off, when they couldn’t persuade the American people to give up their old Constitution—because the Americans liked their old Constitution and they didn’t want to give it up, the progressives couldn’t sell the idea of giving it up—progressivism gradually shifted to the idea that, Well, okay, if we can’t replace the old Constitution, let’s reinterpret it. Let’s treat our Constitution as a “living, breathing document.” Here’s where the Living Constitution idea comes in. We will authorize the doing of the things we want to do, the building of the administrative state and so forth by reference to evolving constitutional principles, to the Living Constitution.

09:22 - The Common Good

Matt Tully
Andrew, this new book that you’ve edited, a book that explores Dr. George’s thinking and relevance for the conservative movement broadly, but even for evangelical Christians in particular, the book is entitled Social Conservatism for the Common Good. We’ve kind of heard a little bit about what conservatism means in this frame. What do you mean by “the common good”?

Andrew Walker
The common good is a concept that is more traditionally heard in Catholic circles, but I actually am beginning to hear it quite frequently in Protestant circles at this point. And the common good is the basic concept that the task of government is to pursue the common good. And the common good is a set of affairs where all of the varying constituencies and the component parts of civil society, that they’re effectively able to reach their full potential and they’re able to flourish. This also means that everyone can experience these goods in common without having to subtract from the goods of others as well while they’re pursuing these goods. So, my family pursuing our common good doesn’t actually harm the family of someone else in my community who is also pursuing their common good. And I should also add there’s not really just one common good; there are lots of common goods. And those relate to the various institutions within society. A family has a common good. The government has a common good. Universities have a common good. Corporations have a common good. The idea here, fundamentally, is that all of these various institutions, again, are freed up to reach their end, or reach their potential, that is consistent with what they’re there for. The reason that this concept is so central to the book—and honestly, an issue in my own teaching that I’m really trying to advance with my students—is because the notion of the common good, I think, in Christian thought, it rescues us from potential pitfalls in two directions. In one direction is what I would call quietism, or pietism, where you simply bypass all responsibility for public engagement, and you see political engagement as just a ruffian activity. Let the pagans have the pollists!, so to speak. The other error is what I would call triumphalism, the idea that Christians have to be absolutely at the center of society for society to have any chance of survival at all. I think what the common good tradition allows us to understand is when Christians do engage—and I think we’re called to engage because of these basic goods that we think that reason can grasp at some level. So, the good of family, the good of preserving one’s life, the good of having political stability—whether we call that a basic good or not, the idea of us having functioning societies that work together. And so as Christians enter the public square, we understand that it’s really not about preserving our own self-interest; it’s about preserving a space in society for all people to flourish, whether they’re Christians or not, because we all are participants in this creation order that we believe God has ordered. And because all human beings, whether they’re Christian or Muslim or atheist, they are all made in God’s image and they all possess those rational capacities for reason and deliberation and judgment that, again, we think even the fallen man with fallen reason can grasp at least some notion of this moral order for us to organize society around. And so I think this is really a huge pillar for us to recapture, maybe perhaps for the first time in a Protestant context, and apply it to our political thought.

Matt Tully
Andrew, I’m struck by how that conservative vision of the common good is so much more nuanced, so much more robust, so much more, frankly, others-focused than how conservatives are often portrayed as. We’re portrayed as capitalists who are all about ultimately serving yourself—greed for yourself. What do you think is behind that maybe misconception or mis-presentation of a conservative view towards these things?

Andrew Walker
Well, look at the silliness right now that we’re having culturally around this Christian nationalism conversation. Rightly defined, I think something like Christian nationalism does exist and it is problematic. The problem, though, right now is that I’m noticing the terminology getting more narrowed to the point where if you’re a conservative Christian and you believe in any type of normative claim that society is obligated to honor and respect, such as the dignity of the unborn—that’s a normative claim issuing, we think, from eternal law that God orders but is also written in revealed Scripture—that is now going to earn you the title of “Christian nationalist” in our culture. Again, anytime you have normativity or moral obligation enter the conversation, you’re going to be painted as some type of theocrat or Christian reconstructionist. And I think that’s why the common good paradigm is helpful because it’s saying to broader audiences, whether they hear us or not, that no, actually, the truths that we are trying to order society around and the truths that we think a law should recognize are truths that we think every single person stands to benefit from.

15:15 - Natural Law

Matt Tully
And that’s the core idea behind natural law theory, something that you, Robbie, have dedicated your career to advancing in the public square. I wonder if you could succinctly define—for those, again, who might find that term unfamiliar—what do you mean by natural law? How is that the basis, in your mind, for a just, well-functioning society oriented around the common good?

Robert George
When Martin Luther King—the great Civil Rights activist, was thrown into jail in Birmingham, Alabama in the early 1960s for parading without a permit in a circumstance where he had brought people down with him to Birmingham to demonstrate against the terrible, unjust Jim Crow system and segregation system—he felt that he had to give an account of himself. He had to give his reasons, and provide the public with the reasons for his law-breaking. He did break a law; there’s no question about it. There was a law on the books against those kinds of demonstrations. He broke the law, so he needed to explain why he broke the law to justify his law-breaking. So he wrote the letter from the Birmingham jail to, ostensibly, some religious leaders who had criticized his law-breaking. But he especially felt he needed to do that because he himself had called for obedience to law when southern states were resisting the Supreme Court’s ruling, desegregating the schools just a few years earlier in the famous case of Brown against the Board of Education. Now, King, in making the case to justify his act of civil disobedience, said we need to distinguish between two types of law: just law and unjust law. He said, I agree that just law needs to be obeyed. We have not only a legal obligation, by definition, to obey a just law, but we also have a moral obligation. He’s here noting that law can create moral obligation, even where moral obligation doesn’t exist. For example, if you have an intersection with no stoplight or no stop signs, you would have no moral obligation to stop. You would have a moral obligation to drive through carefully, but no strict moral obligation to stop. But once the law comes into play by putting a stop sign, a pair of stop signs, a four-way stop, or putting up a stoplight, now you have an obligation if the light’s red to stop. Or, if you’re coming up to the stop sign, to stop. And that’s true even if you disagree with the law, even if you think, Well, you don’t need a stoplight or stop sign here because people can drive through carefully. Or you think, Well, they put the stop signs in the wrong direction. They put them east/west rather than north/south at this intersection. You still have a moral obligation because the law, whether you like it or not, as a law, whether you think it’s expedient or prudent or valuable, it’s not unjust. It’s a just law. But, King says, Unlike just laws, unjust laws do not create moral obligation. In fact, King goes so far as to say unjust laws should be disobeyed. Now, on that, he’s right sometimes, but for complicated reasons that are articulated by lots of other thinkers, that’s not always true. Sometimes you don’t have an obligation to obey an unjust law, but we need not get into that here. The key thing is that King distinguished these two types of laws, just from unjust. Now, the question then became, King says (I’m using his language here, not mine), How do we tell the difference between the two? He says a just law is in conformity with the higher law—the moral law. His term now, the natural law. And an unjust law is out of conformity with this higher law, the natural law, and ultimately the law of God, who’s responsible for all normativity. The natural law has always historically been understood—going all the way back to the Greeks and Romans, even before Christianity emerges—as the law accessible to human reason regarding moral obligation. What is right and wrong, not as a mere matter of convention, but what is right and wrong as a matter of nature. What our natural human reason, unaided, even by revelation. The revelation can be profoundly illuminating even of the natural law, but still what can be known, even apart from Revelation, is the natural law. Saint Paul recognizes such a law. He doesn’t use the term natural law, but he recognizes precisely what Aristotle or Aquinas would understand as right by nature, or natural law. When he says that there is a law, in the letter to the Romans, that there’s a law written on the hearts even of the Gentiles who don’t have the law of Moses.
Now, how do these Gentiles know some things? Not everything, and not everything they would know if they had the law of Moses, but they know some stuff, some things about what’s right and wrong. They know that gratuitously killing somebody’s wrong. They know that lying to defraud somebody is wrong. They know that stealing another person’s wife is wrong. How do they know that? And Paul says it’s because in addition to the law of Moses—the religious law, the revealed law—there is the law written on the hearts, even of the Gentiles. And by reference to that law, they can be held accountable, even in judgment, even in God’s own judgment. So that’s what we mean by the natural law—what is right by nature and not just by convention; what we can know by our natural human reason. Which may, again, be supplemented by revelation, but can be known even apart from God’s revelation in Scripture.

Matt Tully
Andrew, in this new book, Carl Truman writes a chapter where he explores the intersection of faith and reason when it comes to some of the ideas that Robbie has just articulated here. In that chapter, he questions the effectiveness of this approach that Robbie is advocating for when it comes to reasoning in the public square about what’s good and what should be done and what shouldn’t be done. He notes that these natural law arguments that we’ve just heard articulated, they assume, let’s say, a common understanding of what it means to be a human, of what humanity is all about, what our end even is, what flourishing actually entails. And those things seem like they are increasingly debated and questioned in our culture today. What is a human? What is human flourishing? Truman concludes by writing, “The framework of public discourse in which George has operated is rapidly coming to an end, if it is not already ended.” So how would you respond to that? We might call that a rather pessimistic outlook on natural law theory being a viable way to engage the culture going forward.

Andrew Walker
It’s a very Carl Truman take, and I love Carl. I think I would say a couple things. Just because the natural law may find less purchase in our society doesn’t make the claims of the natural law any less true. In fact, I think it produces an incumbency upon us to be more fulsome in articulating these truths and the consequences of violating these truths. I think we should also clarify that when we speak of the natural law tradition, the natural law tradition is not trying to solve every last ethical dilemma under the sun. It’s referring to these, again, basic foundational truths. Particularly right now we’re thinking about perhaps what is a man and what is a woman. And interestingly enough, where you see some of the strongest objections to the transgender movement right now are from non-Christians, are from secularists. And that, to me, is actually living proof that the natural law does have purchase, because you have individuals who are recognizing, Hey, we may not be theists, perhaps, but we’re recognizing that there seems to be no end to the chaos of the transgender movement because we are subject to a givenness of our bodies. One of my favorite terms around the natural law is ineluctability. It means we are constrained by the realities of our biology and by our created-ness that we can’t transcend, and if we do, it leads to utter foolishness. One other thing I would say about a claim kind of like Carl’s is we shouldn’t think about the value of the natural law simply or only for its apologetic purposes. And it is that definitely, but it shouldn’t be just that. I’m writing a book right now on the natural law, and one of the emphasis that I’m trying to argue for is that the natural law, while it is apologetical, it’s also explanatory. And one of the reasons that Christians should gain greater facility with the natural law is that it helps us understand the structure and intelligibility of the moral order that God has posited. So it helps us understand both that external moral order, but then it also helps explain the very principles of moral action—how we grasp moral truths. And so I think if we’re going to have any outward facing apologetical future, we’re going to have to have that catechetical influence inside the church. And so I think if we’re going to have a natural law seminar at our church, don’t just couch this as, If you learn these four arguments, you’re going to convince the Harvard philosophy professor. You very well may not, because that person is as equally rejecting revelation as they are our understanding of reason. Rather, use this as an opportunity to equip the body of Christ to understand how God made us and how we are bound by those truths inescapably, whether the outside world wants to play by those rules or not. For us to remember as Christians that we have a duty to tell the truth to the world, regardless of the world listens to us or not. So we’re saying what is true regardless if it’s received as true. And oftentimes it’s received as foolishness. But again, that’s where we have to go back to Scripture and to say, We have a category for our words being received as foolishness. But it’s the power of God unto salvation to those who believe.

Matt Tully
Robbie, have you noticed, in all your teaching, any difference in how students are reacting to the natural law tradition as you articulate it?

Robert George
No. I’ve been teaching at Princeton for thirty-seven years. I came right out of graduate school, just after finishing my law degree and then my PhD. Students react today the way they reacted in the fall of 1985 when I arrived on campus. They’re surprised by these arguments and these modes of analysis because for the most part, they haven’t been exposed to them before—even those from Christian backgrounds, even those from Catholic backgrounds. Historically, the Catholic church has been the main transmitter and bearer of the natural law tradition. It predates Christianity. It goes back to antiquity—back to Cicero and Plato and Aristotle, the Greeks and the Romans.
But most students have not been exposed to these arguments, and they’re surprised by the power of the arguments and the way the arguments enable us to get a critical perspective on dogmas of contemporary secular progressivism that people by and large these days just accept without thinking and accept uncritically. And when they realize that these dogmas are extremely vulnerable to rational critique, well, this changes things altogether. This discombobulates them. This opens their minds. This gets them thinking. And that’s as true in 2022 as it was in 1985. Now, it’s probably the case that students arrive at universities today more thoroughly indoctrinated than they did in earlier generations. But all this means is that the surprise is still there, maybe even a bit greater because they’re so shocked that what they read in a New York Times editorial seems not to hold up to careful, logical scrutiny. Now what do we do?

Andrew Walker
The natural law may not ultimately persuade, moving someone from a position of disagreement to agreement, but what it can be really effective at is disarming the confidence that someone has if they’re more progressive.

Robert George
Absolutely. This is absolutely true.

Andrew Walker
I’ve noticed that. Again, you take our friend Ryan Anderson. Ryan Anderson goes on national TV and he’s debating someone who’s very stridently progressive. Ryan very calmly and rationally explains a natural law teaching around marriage, and guess what happens? The person who was very strident is kind of taken aback and they’re realizing, Oh, I might need to to step back here a little bit. And so it’s very, very successful at disarming strident, progressive opinion.

Robert George
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had the experience—or seen Ryan Anderson, Sherif Girgis, Melissa Moschella, Daniel Mark, or any of my other students—catch their interlocutors looking like deer in the headlights, not having the slightest idea how to respond because they’ve never encountered these arguments before, and suddenly, they feel their power. Especially as critical arguments, attacking and dismantling the presuppositions of liberal secularism. Most liberal secularists don’t know that they have presuppositions, and when suddenly those presuppositions are smoked out, put on the table for review, my goodness, they don’t hold up very well as presuppositions.

Matt Tully
Let’s talk about marriage—that issue that you guys have just raised. Robbie, I know you’ve been writing and speaking about marriage for many, many years. Particularly during the Obama administration, you were publishing books about marriage, trying to push back against their efforts and the broader cultural efforts to redefine marriage. And as we all know here, since 2015 and that Obergefell decision, support for gay marriage has increased in the US since that decision. I was recently looking at a gallop poll from June of 2022, and it showed that 71% of Americans support gay marriage, up from 60% in 2015 when the Supreme Court decided that case. Robbie, I have a pointed question to you: Do you think it’s fair to say that conservatives lost the argument? Not the legal argument, but the social, public consciousness argument when it comes to gay marriage?

Robert George
For now, but the defeat needn’t be permanent. Just as public opinion shifted in one direction, it can shift back in another direction. I think the data that you’re pointing to vindicates the argument, the claim, the case I made in my very first book in 1993. The book was entitled, Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality. It was published by Oxford University Press. It was arguing for then what was regarded as a radical thesis. It worked! I got tenured based on it.

Matt Tully
Radical is better when you’re seeking tenure, typically?

Robert George
When you’re seeking tenure, you say, Look, I’m going to prove to you something that you think is crazy. And you don’t even have to prove it, but you need to at least discombobulate people so they say, Gee wiz, I got to think about this some more. And if people are fair-minded, they’ll say, Okay, that’s great work. We’re going to give you tenure. Anyway, it worked for me. But the thesis was that we have to understand—as Aristotle understood, as Plato understood, as your great-grandmother understood, even if she hadn’t been to college or finished high school—law is a teacher. The idea that law, or politics, is downstream from culture is a classic half-truth. I don’t know what your mother taught you, but my mother taught me that a half-truth is a falsehood. It’s not the case. This is a concept/phrase that I hear conservatives mouthing all the time. Well, you know, law/politics is downstream from culture. We have to change culture first before we change law and politics. Actually, it largely works the other way around, because law is a teacher. Law performs what Aristotelians call a pedagogical function. It shapes understanding. So just as law is, it’s true, shaped in part by other aspects of culture, law is a part of culture, and it shapes other aspects of culture. So, it’s both directions. The stream flows, if you will, in both directions, which means that the flowing stream is a really bad metaphor here, and people should just abandon it.

Matt Tully
So, you’re saying in this case the change in the law has actually been a bad teacher for our culture, more generally, on this issue?

Robert George
Oh, sure. And that’s true with lots of things that are bad in our culture. Think about the changes of law to move from a fault to a pure no-fault divorce regime. People at the time thought, Well, that won’t actually have any impact on the quality of marital relationships or people’s desire to be no longer married or to get divorces. It’ll just make it easier for those who are in bad relationships to get out of those bad relationships. Now, any serious anthropologist, historical anthropologist, or sociologist knew, or should have known, that’s actually not true. The loss surrounding marital dissolution will shape people’s understandings of what they’re doing, what they’re getting into, what their responsibilities are, what they’re about, the quality of their commitment, and so forth in the marriage.

33:58 - Friends with a Socialist

Matt Tully
Robbie, one of the things that you’re perhaps best known for is your close friendship with Cornel West. As you call him, Brother Cornel. For those who don’t know, West is an outspoken socialist who has vocally supported many progressive policies like abortion and progressive candidates, like Bernie Sanders, for many years. I know that people ask about your relationship with him often. I watched a number of interviews that you did together, and almost always a big focus of the conversation is that relationship that you have. I wonder if you could speak to why you think it is that your relationship, your friendship, with West is such an interesting thing for so many people today.

Robert George
Well, I suppose in our deeply polarized and coarsened culture, people are surprised when people who have pretty strong disagreements and strong opinions and are active in social and political life and who disagree quite profoundly have a bond of friendship. It’s a shame that such a thing is surprising and noteworthy, but it’s the reality. It’s where we are, I guess.

Matt Tully
Do you think that friendship is as uncommon as we maybe assume it is? Or do you think there’s something—

Robert George
I sure hope not. I sure hope not. But there’s no question that society is deeply polarized, such that people on the competing sides don’t recognize those who disagree with them as reasonable people of good will, fellow citizens who disagree with them. They assume, People can’t, on reasonable grounds, disagree with me. Therefore, if they disagree with me, it's not a problem of reaching a different conclusion by thinking. It’s that they’re bad people, that they’re bigots, that they’re snobs, that they’re elitist, that they’re haters. They’re just bad guys. They’re Nazis. They’re fascists. They’re communists. There are bad guys. There are plenty of bad guys. There are plenty of people of bad will. But they’re on both sides. And there are people of good will on both sides. Cornel and I are just trying to model that. We love and admire each other, and we have a deep bond that has to do, I think, fundamentally with our shared commitment to truth-seeking scholarship and to non-indoctrinating, genuinely intellectually liberating education. We run our classrooms the same way. When we teach together, which has been a great joy and blessing in my life, he teaches the way I teach, by exposing students to the best that has been thought and said by the best thinkers on the competing sides of whatever the question is. He doesn’t see it as his mission, anymore than I see it as my mission, to make sure that the students come out thinking like I do. We want to empower them to think more deeply, more critically, and for themselves. We want to encourage our students—the young men and women placed in our charge and trusted to us—we want to encourage them to be determined truth-seekers and courageous truth-speakers. And we try to model that, too, for them. That’s the best way to teach, by modeling the attitude toward learning that we want our students to emulate.

37:10 - Irenicism or Boldness?

Matt Tully
Andrew, some conservatives might look at the approach that Dr. George is really well-known for—he’s gracious, he’s irenic to the other side, he tours with people like Cornel West and has that kind of friendship and dialogue—and they might respond to that and say, We’ve tried that. We’ve tried to be friends with the other side, and look where it got us. Moral relativism is rampant. Conservative ideas have all been but expunged from the major centers of cultural power and influence. What we need now is not irenicism, but boldness. We need to be willing to fight for these important principles. How would you respond to that kind of thinking from the conservative listening?

Andrew Walker
I know you’re not saying this, but I think that there is a mistaken kind of bifurcation in our culture that divides irenicism from boldness and from courage. I think we need to have both of those things. I think that what we need to reject is arrogance, cruelty, any type of bigotry of those types of ideas. But fundamentally, if we are Christians, we are commanded by our Lord to behave in certain ways towards outsiders. And I don’t think that’s, to use the language of Professor George, I don’t think those are just merely instrumental goods. I think that those are basic goods. I think kindness and respect, honesty in representing someone who you disagree with fairly, that’s an issue of truth. It’s an issue of reciprocity, so therefore it’s an issue of justice. Again, we aren’t called to do these things just because they’re going to be successful. I remind my students all the time there was no one more winsome or kind than Jesus himself, and Jesus still was put on a cross. So, these methods aren’t necessarily pathways to victory, but they’re pathways to obedience and they’re pathways to integrity and their pathways to truth, which is what we’re called to emulate.

39:14 - Lightning Round: The Biggest Threat to Conservatism, Has the Transgender Movement Peaked, and More

Matt Tully
Now, I wonder if we could do something of a lightning round. I’ve got a few more questions that you each could speak to really briefly, and I want to hear from both of you on each of these. First question, Robbie, is for you: Over the next five years, what will be the biggest threat to conservatism?

Robert George
There is, of course, the temptation to despair, or to use impure and improper means out of a fear that we’re about to lose everything. So, I want everyone to stay calm, stay steady, be determined, be courageous, but not sacrifice your principles in the very cause of trying to uphold and vindicate them.

Matt Tully
Andrew, what would you say?

Andrew Walker
I would say that conservative Christians, such as myself, need to understand that what can fly on the right is not always conservative. I’ve just finished reading a book by Matthew Rose called A World After Liberalism: Looking at Radical Right Thinkers. And so I am noticing an influx of some of these kind of hard right elements encroaching. And so I think we, as Christians, need to understand that we’re not Nietzscheists—we’re Christians—so that we don’t adopt blood and soil conservatism. So that we adopt a conservatism of creation order, but is also buffeted by a call to love our neighbor and to defend the dignity of the weak and the poor and the marginalized and the oppressed.

Matt Tully
Robbie, on a scale of one to ten, how bullish are you on the issue of religious liberty in America right now, with 10 being the most optimistic?

Robert George
Ten. I’m on the board and executive committee, what we call “the corporation” of the Becket Fund for Religious Freedom, and we’ve just had a wonderful string of victories over the past several years at the Supreme Court of the United States, and I see more victories in the offing. I see clear skies ahead. I also note that the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is another outstanding religious liberty public interest law firm, has won a string of victories, and they’re doing great. I think we’re getting the message out to our people finally, after some fits and starts, about what religious liberty is and about the need to respect religious liberty for everybody—not just for me, but not for thee. I think we’re getting a much sounder understanding of religious liberty—and its limits—into place among our own people. I think more broadly, in the society, I think a lot of good work is being done in the churches and in the synagogues, in the mosques to help people to understand religious liberty and its importance. So, I’m bullish on that one, I must say, Matt.

Matt Tully
How about you, Andrew? Do you feel equally optimistic?

Andrew Walker
Generally, yes. On the legal side, we definitely still have a lot of work to do at the cultural level to change hearts and minds there, but that’s hard to do when you’re not at the commanding heights of culture. And so that means we, as Christians, have to do that where we can, in our churches. And I know, for example, in almost every class that I teach, I am trying to add an element or a section of religious liberty in it. I think for a long time a lot of Christians just kind of deferred to the First Amendment as the basis for religious liberty, which is good, but to ask those bigger philosophical, theological questions of, Is this at all tied to our faith? And so I just know students are more interested in that issue today.

Matt Tully
Andrew, a decade from now, will we look back on the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade as a net positive for the conservative movement or a net negative?

Andrew Walker
Oh, goodness. I’m not a fortune teller.

Matt Tully
I’m asking you to put your prophet hat on.

Andrew Walker
It’s got to be a net positive, for the simple fact that we removed the most substantive pillar that made a culture of life impossible, which was Roe v Wade. And so that’s no longer etched into our constitutional law. We all know that doesn’t solve the problems at the state level.
We’ve got to have fifty battles now, but it took fifty years to dislodge something that was poisonous to our culture and to our law. That has to be a win.

Matt Tully
Robbie, how about you?

Robert George
Any political act, any judicial decision, anything that any of us does that promotes and advances the principle of the profound inherent and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family is a net plus—a huge net plus—no matter what else is to be said about it, no matter what other challenges it brings to center stage. It is a net plus, because that principle is at the very foundation of all ethics, out of any sound civilization. And we’re blessed in our culture to still have as our heritage the great Jewish insight that then is taken abroad and transmitted by the Christian tradition, and that is the concept of the human being as a creature created in the very image and likeness of God, in the very image and likeness of the divine Creator and ruler of all that is. If that insight is indeed an insight, if that is true, if what we’re told in Genesis 1is true, then we all are bearers of profound inherent and equal dignity. It doesn’t matter our race, ethnicity, sex, age, size, stage of development, our condition of dependency, location, culture—it doesn’t matter. We all are bearers of that dignity and deserve the respect and honor that we pay to people when we preserve and protect that dignity. So, to me it’s a huge plus.

Matt Tully
A couple more questions. Andrew, has the transgender movement peaked yet?

Andrew Walker
I think we’re getting very close to the peak. When I wrote my first edition of my book in 2017, I thought we’d be having a hundred-year conversation around this. I have a second edition of my transgender book that came out in early 2022, and I think that the pace of acceleration around the unsustainability of this issue and the patent injustices, unfairnesses, that we’re seeing result from it is leading to massive questioning. I forget the gentleman’s name, but when you had Lia Thomas win the NCAA swimming competition, and this gentleman is standing on the podium in the first place position, and then you have other females, much smaller framed, in the picture as well—truth speaks for itself. Reality speaks for itself. In fact, I heard from professor George years ago that he thinks that in the future we’re going to look back on what we have done to gender confused individuals in the same way of shock and aghast and disbelief like we did with eugenicist medicine in the early 20th century. And so I do think that we’re reaching a breaking point. Whether we’ve hit the top, I don’t know, but we are seeing the unsustainability of this project play out in real time, and it’s going to create a cast of victims that we should have great compassion and sympathy for, and where the church is going to have to do good ministry to as well.

Matt Tully
Robbie, regardless of whether or not we’ve peaked or not, are you surprised by how far that movement has gone in our culture, how much purchase it has had in our culture up until this point?

Robert George
Well, I am surprised that it unfolded as quickly as it did, but I’m not surprised that it unfolded. The logic is there. The premises were established many, many years ago. It’s in the foundations of the Sexual Revolution, the pseudoscience of Kinsey, the mainstreaming of soft-core pornography by Hugh Heffner, the ideological work done by Reich and people like that. So, you can see where the logic takes you. It was just a question of how fast the logic would take us there, and it took us there quicker—more swiftly than I would’ve guessed. But I’m not surprised at where it ends up. Now, the good news, it seems to me, is you already are seeing the signs of the collapse. The closing of the Tavistock Gender Clinic in London (Europe’s largest such clinic, I believe), the cutting back of the legal permissibility of the mutilation of children after European jurisdiction, the hungry look in the eyes of American trial lawyers, the plaintiff’s bar—all of this tells me the tower is going to come down, and it’s going to come down perhaps a little quicker than I thought it would.

Matt Tully
Andrew, Robbie, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. This was a fascinating conversation, wide-ranging over so many different important issues in our culture today. We appreciate you taking the time.

Andrew Walker
Thank you, Matt.

Robert George
Thank you. It’s a pleasure.

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