Birzer on Ideology

Brad Birzer writes an article to read over on The Imaginative Conservative, one of my favorite blogs on the web. Get to know them.

As has become particularly obvious in hindsight, ideologies had slowly and then quickly replaced traditional wisdom and religious understandings and mores throughout the world, and not just in the West. But, as has been noted several times on the Imaginative Conservative, ideologies can only mock and distort and mimic reality. No ideology can ever replace or re-create the world, the divine order, or the natural order. As the history of the last two-plus centuries so clearly demonstrates, the attempts to implement any ideology have resulted–to varying degrees–in destruction of the physical world and the marring of the souls of man.

Do not accept it when you read articles that contend that there are multiple ideologies fighting for control of society and that there is no alternative to ideology. Conservatism, the real stuff, is not an ideology and neither is Christianity.

Ideology denies the possibility of knowledge or of virtue. It begins with an absolute relativism and then denies that anybody can know the true or the just. It denies the very possibility of our obedience to Philippians 4:8 and 9.

And it controls, by habituation, the way our young people think.

We are not “fighting an ideological war” with anybody. We are witnesses to the life-creating power of the Spirit and Truth of Christ to anybody who will hear it. To the rest we are martyr-fodder.

We do not order our lives around an abstract idea, we order them to Him who is Truth. It’s personal.

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