Rediscovering the Soul of Conservatism, Part II

Such anthropocentric humanism denied what the Founders (and Tocqueville and Lincoln) readily acknowledged: that nature and God provide a standard of morality above the human will. In a speech in Lewiston, Illinois, that serves as the epigraph to Spalding’s book, Lincoln appealed to the Declaration of Independence as an obstacle to tyranny and a spirited proclamation that could help sustain “truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues.” With these facts in mind, let us not reduce our rich civic tradition to liberalism alone, or see every variant of liberalism as a materialist and atheistic humanism that helped usher in the totalitarian deformation of modernity.