Conservative Soul: Fundamentalism, Freedom, and the Future of the Right by Andrew Sullivan

From the Publisher

What does it mean to be a conservative any more?

With the Iraq war, the rise of Christian fundamentalism, exploding government spending, soaring debt, insecure borders, and an executive branch with greater and greater power, Republicans and conservatives are debating this question with more and more urgency.

The contradictions keep mounting. Today's conservatives support the idea of limited government, but they have increased government's size, power and reach to new heights. They believe in balanced budgets, but they have boosted government spending, debt, and pork to record levels. They believe in individual liberty and the rule of law, but they have condoned torture, ignored laws passed by Congress, and been indicted for bribery. They have substituted religion for politics, and damaged both.

In The Conservative Soul, Andrew Sullivan, one of the nation's leading political commentators, makes an impassioned call to rescue conservatism from the corruption of the Republican far right, which has become the first fundamentally religious political party in America. Through an incisive look at the rise of Western fundamentalism, Sullivan argues that conservatives cannot in good conscience keep supporting a party that believes in its own God-given mission to change people's souls, instead of protecting their liberties. He carefully charts the arguments of the new conservatism, showing why they cannot work in today's America, why they fail the test of logic and pragmatism, and why they betray the conservative tradition from Edmund Burke to Ronald Reagan.

In this bold and powerful book, Andrew Sullivan criticizes our government for acting too often, too quickly, and too expensively. He champions a political philosophy based on skepticism and reason, rather than certainty and fundamentalism. He defends a Christianity that is sincere but not intolerant; and a politics that respects religion by keeping its distance. And he makes a provocative, heartfelt case for a revived conservatism at peace with the modern world, dedicated to restraining government and empowering individuals to live rich and fulfilling lives.

David Brooks

This is Sullivan at his wonderful best. The politics of principle. Not the politics of doubt.
&151; The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

As editor of the New Republic and on his blog The Daily Dish, Sullivan has been a major conservative voice in U.S. politics for 15 years. Now, he attempts "to account for what one individual person means by conservatism"-not repudiating his former political beliefs but trying to "rescue" modern U.S. political conservatism from "the current [Christian] fundamentalist supremacy" that now dominates it. Sullivan (Love Undetectable) has a breezy, readable style that allows him to address such diverse issues as religious fundamentalism's reliance on "the literal words of the Bible," the "excessive witch-hunt" surrounding Clinton, and the secular Enlightenment foundations of the Constitution. He's most approachable when he writes autobiographically through a critical lens-"Looking back I see this phase of my faith life as a temporary and neurotic reaction to a new and bewildering school environment." But that reflection is not as readily apparent when he makes sweeping pronouncements on politics ("post-modern discourse... opposed basic notions of Western freedom: of speech, of trade, of religion"). Much of the book is a meditation on his own evolving faith as a devout Catholic and will appeal most to readers interested in personal religious evolution. (Oct. 3) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

True conservatism recoils from the fundamentalist obsession with virtue and natural law, but embraces a minimalist view of government that allows a maximum of economic and lifestyle liberty. This is the argument that Sullivan has long been refining on his popular blog, The Daily Dish, and in his numerous print columns and books (Virtually Normal, 1995, etc.). In this book, he deploys an interpretation of the philosophy of Michael Oakeshott to support his continuing effort to reconcile his Catholicism and Thatcherite conservatism with the normalization of homosexuality and, most of all, with the redefinition of marriage to include homosexual couples. Sullivan notes that government must be based neither on reactionary adherence to the past, nor on Thomist theories of natural law, but on doubt: specifically, on the Hobbesian disbelief that our neighbor can be trusted not to do us an injury in the absence of a public authority. (Oddly, liberty requires that we give our neighbor "the benefit of the doubt" and therefore civil equality.) Government has no business inculcating virtue in society, the author says. Rather, good conservative government will accommodate itself to the felt needs of the time, like Disraeli's support of the democratic franchise in 19th-century Britain and, as Sullivan would have it, gay marriage in 21st-century America. In order to reach these conclusions, the author devotes about half of this work to explaining why most people who call themselves conservatives are really fundamentalists, a class that stretches from Osama bin Laden, through the editorial offices of the better neoconservative journals, and up to the fundamentalists-in-chief, George W. Bush and BenedictXVI. What all these people have in common is the belief that they know the truth with a certainty that allows them to impose their views either by force or by a definition that can compel consciences. It's difficult to imagine the audience for this philosophy: Cultural revolutionaries can turn to franker polemics, while self-described conservatives will be unnerved by Sullivan's anti-foundationalism.

What People Are Saying

"Sets a standard for depth and subtlety of argument. . . . Everyone concerned will want to read what he has to say."
---The Wall Street Journal

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Table of Contents