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I like Glen Scrivener, and I often recommend his book The Air We Breathe to people who ask me for a good introductory book on Christianity and culture. I was just sent this video by a friend to get my opinion. It’s Scrivener’s write-up of the ARC conference just held in London.

I like a lot of what Scrivener says about the place of Christianity at the ARC conference. I differ with him on some major issues in this video though, mainly with his take on David Brooks’ speech. Scrivener thought it was the highlight of the conference, I thought it was the low point. This gives some idea of how far apart our thinking is, I suppose.

Scrivener calls himself someone who has historically been most comfortable on the left of politics, deliberately tailoring his evangelism and apologetics to the political left. Interestingly, however, Scrivener says that much of the revival of Christianity over the past five years seems to be occurring on the political right. I agree.

I’d also suggest to people like Scrivener that it’s worth thinking about why that might be the case. My own view is that the left, as a generalisation, tends to be trying to subdue and suppress a creational order, whereas the right tends more to be seeking it, albeit imperfectly apart from Christ. That’s a discussion for another time.

Wrongheaded

My main concern with Scrivener’s engaging video is that he seems to seriously miss the mark on more than a couple of things. For example, he criticises Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch for complaining about “weakness” among her tribe (25:00). She said on a number of occasions that “the problem isn’t [classical] liberalism, the problem is weakness”. Scrivener pounces on this as an aberration from a proper Christian ethic of “being on the side of the weak and marginalised”.

He seems to suggest that Badenoch’s critique of weakness is a Nietzschean praise of power. Pretty weird take! Badenoch was clearly talking about moral weakness and cowardice. Her point was simply that the Conservatives and classical liberals were too fearful of pursuing and implementing their own principles. A far cry from what Scrivener bizarrely suggests she was saying. I could go on about what Scrivener says in this part, but I’ll stop at that.

Scrivener spends most of the video praising David Brooks, a New York Times columnist. Brooks claims to be a conservative, and in some respects, he is. At the very least, he has a history of critiquing elites. He has also been outspoken about the censoriousness of the left over the years, not that that makes anyone a conservative, as opposed to having imbibed some classical liberal ideals.

I’d say Brooks’ conservative credentials are pretty flimsy, to be honest. For example, since 2004, he has argued in favour of same-sex marriage as a truly “conservative” position. That’s right, for Brooks, completely redefining marriage was a truly conservative move.

Or consider his response to the overturning of Roe v Wade, he tries to walk a middle line and just comes across as embarrassed about his own — extremely limited — pro-life sentiments. His view is that both sides have very strong arguments, we need to have a discussion, and the ideal would be some compromise in the middle. Yawn, to be honest. He literally says that although the US Constitution technically doesn’t contain the right to an abortion, women should have the right nonetheless. Some conservative! Scrivener, do you really like this guy as much as it seems you do?

Brooks’ “conservatism” is to a large extent a fairly safe conservatism that doesn’t threaten the hegemony of the left at all. Thus, he’s had a home at the leftist New York Times for decades.

This is what Scrivener doesn’t seem to understand when MAGA people — like me — respond to people like Brooks bagging out Trump and the MAGA movement. Our issue is not so much that they’re criticising Trump or MAGA. For example, many of us completely agree with the criticisms of Trump recently levelled against him by the courageous Katy Faust regarding his pro-life policies. Our issue is that people like Brooks have been weak proponents of conservatism in every way. Weak intellectually and ideologically, and weak strategically.

They have spoken for decades about the importance of family, shrinking the state, rolling back abortion, countering the LGBTQ agenda, problems in the universities, but over the last few decades, all of these things have progressively become worse. “Conservatives” like Brooks actually actively encourage some of the problems.

On the other hand, the MAGA movement takes control and starts addressing these issues immediately: Trump stacking the Supreme Court with conservatives who would soon overturn Roe v Wade is the classic example. No one over 40 believed it would be overturned in their lifetime. Trump’s 50-odd executive orders dismantling the radical leftist policies put in place during the Biden years is another. No other mainstream conservative movement would have done that. And then we are treated to Brooks criticising the very movement that has actually done something to move things in the right direction. Zero self-awareness, zero humility.

I was in America just after the recent election, and I spoke with around ten to fifteen MAGA Christians in California and Kentucky about what they thought of Trump and all of them said that there were things about him that gave them serious concerns, but that overall they thought he was much better for America than any realistic alternative.

Prideful Criticism

Most Trump supporters I know are very aware, often even worried — myself one of them — of the shortcomings of Trump and his team. His “conservative” enemies like Brooks are not only obsessed with his shortcomings, but they are obsessed with them to the extent that they can see pretty much nothing redeeming about him and his movement. What’s wrong with that? Simply that it shows a complete lack of humility.

Scrivener was impressed that Brooks started his speech with a kind of mea culpa or confession, that he was an elite and elites are responsible for a lot of bad stuff. But Scrivener should have seen through this rhetorical ruse; this very safe form of humility and self-flagellation. If Brooks really wanted to lay things bare, he would have said that he was a “conservative” elite, and over the last thirty years, his generation of “conservative” elites presided over everything getting worse in America, and people like himself actually approving of a lot of it. But had he said that, his critique of Trump would have sounded a lot more hollow, right?

For me, his critique of Trump was largely hollow because of the reasons stated above, but also because of the fact that Brooks is already prophesying evil and doom even though Trump has literally been in office for only one month. Brooks has been more excoriating of Trump when he wasn’t in office and of him after just one month than he was against Biden’s government during its whole four years.

This is why so many people respond so negatively to people like Brooks, and this is something Glenn Scrivener needs to come to grips with more as he continues to discuss the American culture wars and the nuances between the varieties of conservatism.
Do buy his book The Air We Breathe. It’s a fine book.

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Previously titled ‘Glen Scrivener on David Brooks at ARC: What’s Wrong with His Take?’.