Some well-known conservatives, such as Christopher Buckley and Ken Adelman, have jumped on the Barack Obama bandwagon. So have some of you readers. What is the conservative case for Obama? Or, put another way, in what sense can you support Obama and still consider yourself a conservative?

If, as I suggest in the previous post and elsewhere, that the relativism of postmodernism is ending and that a new cultural and intellectual movement is emerging, what shall we call it? We have had modernism and postmodernism, so what would be a good term for post-postmodernism?

If we get in on the ground floor here, maybe we here at the Cranach blog can claim credit for a word that will define a whole era.

First Things, the magazine, has a fascinating article on conservative champion Russell Kirk, who would have turned 90 on October 19. Excerpt:

The problem Kirk faced, along with most conservatives, was that the Enlightenment, with its universalizing equality, secularism, and blinkered rationality, was already destroying traditional Western culture. How can a tradition be preserved if it is already dissolving into what theorist Zygmunt Bauman called “liquid modernity?”

Kirk’s answer was twofold. First, he uncovered (some would say, “created”) a counter-tradition, one that rested not on the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the ideological fervor of the French Revolution, or the modern vogue for limitless “rights.” Rather, it began with Edmund Burke’s defense of the lived experience of Britain as a bulwark of liberty and the protection of rights. Moreover, Kirk claimed that this tradition connected Britain and America, and included such varied figures as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Henry Newman, Orestes Brownson and Benjamin Disraeli, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, John Adams and W.H. Mallock. . . .

As early as the 1950s, he had become convinced that liberalism would exhaust itself because it could not inspire and sustain what he called the “moral imagination.” For conservatives to buy into its premises would seal their defeat. Something else would replace liberalism eventually, and Kirk offered a richly imaginative vision of conservatism that could survive liberal modernity’s collapse. One element of that vision was a revived respect for religious faith.

As early as 1982, in an essay for National Review, Kirk suggested that “the Post-Modern imagination stands ready to be captured. And the seemingly novel ideas and sentiments and modes [of postmodernism] may turn out, after all, to be received truths and institutions, well known to surviving conservatives.” He went so far as to state that he thought that it “may be the conservative imagination which is to guide the Post-Modern Age.” (One of the earliest uses of the word postmodern was by the conservative Episcopalian cleric Bernard Iddings Bell, in a book of that title published in 1926; not surprisingly, Bell was an early influence on Kirk.)

Kirk had little patience for the trendy radicalism and sometimes simply nonsensical expressions of postmodern hacks. Nonetheless, he saw in postmodernism a chance to escape the strictures of liberalism and reconnect with the older, pre-Enlightenment tradition of the West. This approach has its weaknesses–Kirk, for example, too often simply assumed the existence of historical continuity, and perhaps did not sufficiently confront the corrosive effects of liberalism on the kinds of social forces he believed could sustain tradition. Nevertheless, his work stands as a stark alternative to a much bleaker postmodern future.

This is not the same as “postmodernISM,” of course, just a different way of taking advantage of the collapse of modernism. I fear though that we are on the verge of something beyond postmodernism, a new age of aggressive certainty in a completely different direction.

I just got back from North Carolina, where I gave one of the annual Luther Lectures that several churches there organize. The topic was Vocation, and John Pless, David Adams, and Detlev Schultz were also on the docket. The latter is a professor at Concordia Theological Seminary in Ft. Wayne who is from Germany. Also coming down for the event were some seminary students from Finland, one a pastor working on his S.T.M. and another a soon-to-be pastor who will be ordained in Kenya.

Both are part of the mission initiated by Bishop Obare of Kenya designed to bring confessional Lutheranism back to Scandinavian nations plagued by an ultra-liberal state church. Dr. Schultz also said that Christianity is alive and well in Germany. (In a Bible class on Sunday, he told about some remarkable things the Ft. Wayne seminary is doing for missions, both in educating foreign students and in sending seminary professors to teach overseas to teach native pastors–work involving Latvia, Russia, Finland, Kenya, Madagascar, India, Indonesia, and Brazil.) Anyway, I came away from all of these conversations convinced that God is NOT finished with Europe.

This accords with this article that I came across, which also suggests some of the problems that evangelists must deal with. From Europeans More Religious than Assumed, Survey Suggests| Christianpost.com:

Three-fourths of all Europeans (74 percent) in the countries surveyed are religious, with one-fourth (25 percent) considered highly religious, according to German think tank Bertelsmann Stiftung’s Religion Monitor study.

Only 23 percent of Europeans are non-religious. . . .

Based on comparable data from seven European countries – Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Austria, Poland and Switzerland – religion is strongest in Italy (89 percent) and Poland (87 percent) - both heavily Roman Catholic countries - and weakest in secular France (54 percent).

The problem is, they don’t go to church much–especially Protestants–and they are highly compartmentalized:

In Europe, Roman Catholics are more likely to be devout than Protestants, with 42 percent of Catholics saying they attend church compared to only 15 percent of Protestants.

And unlike in America, Europeans say that religion has little influence over their political views and sexuality. Many Europeans expressed that they separate their conduct and attitudes in these two areas from their religious beliefs.

More than half (58 percent) of Europeans say that their religious convictions have no influence or little influence on their political views, while nearly half (48 percent) say religion does not much affect their sexuality.