In another thread there is a great deal of confusion on what the matter of spirituality has in the founding of our country and the principles upon which it stands and functions. Given that most will not read the entire article above, I'll highlight a few relevant passages that may explain the matter more fully. Excerpts follow:
In fact, on the bigger question, the relationship between liberty and tradition, Goldwater did counsel moderation. In his San Francisco acceptance speech, he declared his party's dedication to
freedom made orderly for this nation by our constitutional government, freedom under a government limited by the laws of nature and nature's God, freedom balanced so that order lacking liberty will not become the slavery of the prison cell, balanced so that liberty lacking order will not become the license of the mob and of the jungle.
This admonition to balance echoes the argument of his short 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, which became a bestseller and set the stage for his 1964 candidacy. In it, Goldwater contended that to meet "the day's overriding challenge," which was "to preserve and extend freedom," it would be necessary to restore "the delicate balance between freedom and order."
The way to achieve that delicate balance was to return to the principle of limited government embodied in the Constitution:
The legitimate functions of government are actually conducive to freedom. Maintaining internal order, keeping foreign foes at bay, administering justice, removing obstacles to the free interchange of goods -- the exercise of these powers makes it possible for men to follow their chosen pursuits with maximum freedom.
It does not follow, Goldwater stressed, that conservatives therefore have a narrow, mechanistic, or economic view of man. Indeed, true conservatism recognized that man "is a spiritual creature with spiritual needs and spiritual desires" and held that these "reflect the superior side of man's nature, and thus take precedence over his economic wants." But what takes precedence morally and spiritually must not take precedence for government. Government must be limited to its legitimate functions because its enormous powers pose a grave threat to the freedom without which man's spiritual needs and spiritual desires cannot be satisfied or developed. Keeping government within its proper limits gives families, religious communities, and voluntary associations the room they require to teach the moral virtues, and men and women the room they need to exercise them. The moral virtues both reflect man's superior side and are essential to discharging well the many responsibilities -- at home, at work, in politics -- that citizens in a free society shoulder.
The ambiguities of government, according to the authors of the Federalist, reflected the ambiguities of human nature. Born equal in natural rights but unequal in gifts of nature and fortune; endowed with passions and prejudices as well as reason; driven by narrow self-interest but through enlightened education capable of understanding private interest more broadly and appreciating its convergence, when properly understood, with the public good -- human beings can by reflection and choice, the Federalist taught, design political institutions that secure liberty while economizing on virtue.
Because choice was essential to admirable deeds, to dignity, and to happiness, virtue presupposed liberty. Conversely, liberty presupposed virtue, because maintaining the institutions of a free society was hard work that required citizens to exercise a range of excellences of character. And because religion -- or more precisely in America: Protestant Christianity -- was an indispensable teacher of virtue, liberty also presupposed faith. However, neither virtue nor religion could be the aim of politics because authorizing government to promote them would invite abuses of power and infringement of rights. Contrary to the canard, popularized by academic critics, that the classical-liberal tradition limits government's responsibility for virtue because of skeptical doubts or relativist certainties, the Constitution limits government to safeguard the sources of virtue, protecting the prerogatives not only of religious communities but also of families and citizens' association to instill it.
Indeed, success in conserving a constitutional system devoted to liberty compounds the challenge of maintaining a reasonable balance between liberty and tradition. This is because freedom disposes individuals to bristle at authority, to incline toward novelty, and to constantly demand enlargements of freedom's domain. This in turn further heightens their aversion to authority, enthusiasm for the new, and thirst for greater freedom. As a result, individuals who enjoy freedom's blessings tend to grow increasingly impatient with the order that enables free citizens to cooperate and compete, and increasingly less interested in acquiring, exercising, and transmitting the virtues required for prospering in private and public life. Thus, while conservatives' electoral fortunes may wax and wane, progress in freedom steadily increases the need for a constitutional conservatism that properly balances liberty and tradition.
In 1962, in In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo, Frank S. Meyer, a senior editor and columnist at National Review from 1957 until his death in 1972, confronted the clash between social conservatives and libertarian conservatives head on, and provided what remains today the most clear and compelling reconciliation of their competing conservatisms.1 Meyer's aim was "to vindicate the freedom of the person as the central and primary end of political society." Crucial to his vindication was showing that a politics that put freedom first was not only consistent with but inseparable from conservative assumptions about an objective, abiding, and authoritative moral order. Also crucial was his claim that the synthesis of liberty and tradition that he sought to vindicate on a theoretical plane was embodied in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the ratifying debates, and, indeed, in the common-sense opinions and attitudes of contemporary American conservatives.
In Meyer's view, both the classical-liberal tradition and traditionalist conservatism had taken wrong turns. In the nineteenth century, classical liberalism embraced utilitarianism, which made the measure of policy the greatest good for the greatest number. This, according to Meyer, undermined the idea that each human being is an end himself, an idea that was central to the liberal tradition because it grounded individual freedom. And in the 1950s, the emerging traditionalist conservatives, who rightly understood the moral and political importance of virtue and the role of family, faith, and community in inculcating it, wrongly exalted the political claims of society over the individual and foolishly ceded to government responsibility for overseeing virtue's inculcation.
By correcting these mistakes, indeed by showing that each school supplied the insight needed to set the other straight, Meyer sought to establish that partisans of freedom and partisans of traditional morality were natural moral and political allies. From the traditionalists, libertarian conservatives could learn or relearn that traditional morality provided the theoretical ground for human dignity, and that it took families and communities to form rugged, self-reliant individuals. And from the libertarians, the traditionalists could learn or relearn that to be of worth, virtue must be exercised in freedom, and that families and communities, the proper molders of morals, can only teach virtue if government is restrained from interfering and limited to its proper function: maintaining political and economic freedom and providing for the common defense.
The above drawn from here:
RealClearPolitics - Articles - Constitutional Conservatism
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