Do you ever wonder why everything progressivism touches eventually rots? While some may question the exact correlation-causation link I am making, the rearview mirror of history seems to tell us a very plain truth: The preponderance of progressive ideas and influence in society corresponds to statist and authoritarian government, decadent and perverse morality (especially sexual morality), family decline, cultural despair, crime-ridden streets, and, yes, even ugly architecture. Cultural decline and social pathologies result from the progressive vision for humanity and government.
This is not, chiefly, a reality that stems from politics alone. It stems from theological realities that spill into the political. Our political order traffics in deeply theological and moral realities that deceive us into believing that political arrangements are surface-level conflicts over tax policies. Behind every political arrangement is an organizing logic that will lead either to truth and flourishing or error and destruction. My settled conviction is that the organizing logic of progressivism leads to decay, degeneracy, and destruction.
The problem with progressivism is not simply an ephemeral set of policies. The problem is that progressivism is a worldview with a set of metaphysical assumptions. And while I would never go so far as to equate Christianity with conservatism proper, there is no metaphysical comparison between progressivism and conservatism. They possess an organizing logic of total contrasts. Conservatism champions a constrained idea of the universe, one of moral givenness and order. For this reason, it builds within the confines of limits and hands down this moral inheritance through successive generations. Progressivism, in contrast, champions a constructivist account of the universe, one of moral self-creation and endless expansion. As Robert Kagan describes this sort of moral limitlessness, it has “no teleology” and no final fulfillment. In other words, progressivism just continues to expand. The ideological left keeps marching on.
Progressivism is fundamentally materialistic (John Lennon’s “Imagine” and its “No hell below us, above us, only sky” comes to mind). There is no god outside of progressivism’s own sovereignty. It has no moral limits outside of the claims it makes for itself. All its self-ascribed omnicompetence and omnibenevolence determine what good or evil is. Its claims are, therefore, totalizing. Like a gelatinous blob, it oozes into every corner of existence to conquer it.
It assigns itself godlike abilities. But since there is no sovereign God in the progressive secular universe, the most expansive action that can be taken in God’s absence is activism through the social collective. Progressivism comes down to working through the one vehicle that relies upon the preponderance of godlike sovereignty: the state. So, in this accounting, the state takes on similar powers as if it were God. But it is not God. A not-sovereign that acts sovereign will misuse and abuse this pseudo-sovereignty.
Consider the contrast with Christianity.
The fundamental organizing principle of our existence is that God is the Lord. The fundamental organizing principle and logic of human self-understanding ought to be the Creator-creature distinction. That is what John Calvin famously said at the beginning of his Institutes: “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” At the heart of our existence ought to be the distinction between God and His creation. Rather than amass power for ourselves, we believe in a divine disaggregation. We embrace a duality of God above and man below. We cannot arrogate to ourselves a power that was never ours to begin with. Progressivism denies the Creator-creature distinction because it is a metaphysic that rejects any notion of objective creation, objective Creatorship, or objective morality, meaning that progressivism conceives of itself as its own God.
Progressivism relies upon monistic explanatory principles. It denies the duality of power distinctions between God and man. The historical arc, then, is to create principles that allow for the total consumption of all things into progressivism’s conception of itself as divine and omnicompetent. Maybe that is liberty, pleasure, or power—or the progressive belief in the ever-improving conditions of man and man’s nature. So, it plays a godlike role even if it is not God. And if it is trying to play a God-like role, it will play that God-like role falsely.
Everything that begins with a false conception of its own sovereignty leads to a false conception of truth and results in a false conception of freedom—whether personal, spiritual, or political. This is why, when you look at progressivism and its effect on beauty, goodness, and truth, and its actual outputs on society—on the effects on the human person, the effects on the human family, the effects on what civilizations look like that become progressive—they end up becoming disfigured, disordered, and frayed. If God channels us toward productive creation in the direction of truth, beauty, and goodness, false gods channel creative potency toward the antitheses of truth, goodness, and beauty.
Progressivism conceives of itself as a totalizing project. Whereas Christianity honors the Creator-creature distinction, progressivism recognizes no Creator-creature distinction and bends toward totalization. Totalization bends toward monism and creates a whole system built on falsehood and deception. No culture survives the terminal state of progressivism when built upon the lie of honoring the collective—rather than Christ—as Lord. Why? Because the only universal sovereign in the absence of a True Sovereign is that “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6).
Conservatism is not synonymous with Christianity. It has, though, been classically associated with the conservation of something real and concrete—truth. Any error that conservatism has championed is the result of conservatism’s inherent inability to perceive the world rightly on matters of general revelation and natural law alone. So even conservatism requires Biblical theism. But imperfect conservatism lends itself to a better grasp of truth than consistent progressivism.
Progressivism’s antipathy to God means its claims are comparably more anti-Christian than conservatism’s constrained understanding of the universe. Any political worldview that does not begin with acknowledging the order and truth of a sovereign God is a worldview—and political community—destined to fail.
Editor’s note: In the run-up to Election Day 2024, Andrew Walker is writing a series of columns on the big ideas underneath our politics. This is the first in that series.
