National Conservatism is not Christian

Tariffs, industrial policy, sovereign wealth funds, the government buying shares in corporations, all aspects of National Conservatism, dominates the Republican party today. Because it champions family values and opposes homosexuality and transgenderism, many Christians see it as Christian political philosophy. But it's not. 

NatCons don't hold to a Biblical view of humanity and morality.  They believe that free markets and globalization have destroyed the morals of American, not their sin nature, and the government can improve people's morals. 

American Compass, a leading NatCon website, wrote,

With industrial atrophy, disappearing jobs, declining labor force participation, and increasing dependence on transfers has come a catastrophic increase in substance abuse and what Princeton University’s Anne Case and Angus Deaton have termed “Deaths of Despair.” Along with rising suicides and alcohol-related mortality, the opioid epidemic has sent death rates for middle-aged Americans skyrocketing, so much so that life expectancy began to fall.

Vice-President J. D. Vance wrote in his autobiography Hillbilly Elegy that free trade and globalization has caused "family decline, childhood trauma, opioid abuse, community decline, decline of the manufacturing sector and all the sense of dignity and purpose and meaning that comes along with it." 

NatCons and others claim that international trade gutted manufacturing jobs, leading to despair, family break ups, drug and alcohol abuse. But the Bible insists that people are born with a strong tendency toward evil that only Christ can change. Without Christ, morals descend into downward spiral ending in the worst evils. Paul describes it in Romans 1:26-32:

For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due...who, knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them.

Karl Marx, an alcoholic atheist, was the first to suggest that the economic system determines human nature and morality. NatCons have become suckers for microwaved Marxism. 

NatCons despise Christian economics, condemning it as market fundamentalism. Attacking two great economists, the founder of American Compass Oren Cass wrote,

The essays from Donald Boudreaux (“Feeble Forays Against Free Trade”) and Phil Magness (“The Truth About Tariffs”) are fine examples of this fundamentalism and its two hallmarks: an insistence on strict adherence to dogma with the attendant commitment to explaining away all evidence to the contrary, and a strong allegiance to an ingroup and policing of an outgroup for insufficient purity. As with any fundamentalism, arguments in this vein have their power—but only in arousing fervor among the believers. Rarely do they persuade, how could they? Fundamentalism demands faith in an inaccessible absolute, it brooks no complexity and offers no opportunity to reason.

NatCons attack the science of economics more than Marxists. But as I have shown here, Godly theologians during the Reformation invented the science. Laissez-faire capitalism was Christian economics for most of the 19th century. The science has proven for 250 years that tariffs do more harm good and impoverish nations. Industrial policies, popular with socialist countries, have a long history of failure.

Finally, NatCon policies cause the state to violate the commandment, "Thou shalt not steal."  That command sanctifies property, but property requires the owner to have control over buying, selling and use of his property. When the government takes control of those, it steals a part of his property. James Ely in his book The Guardian of Every Other Right: A Constitutional History of Property Rights thinks that is what Jefferson had in mind when he changed the right to property to the right to happiness in the Declaration of Independence. 

Many NatCons claim to be devout believers. If so, they should be aware that they are following the views of an alcoholic atheist on human nature, morality and property.  

Many Republicans and Christians will be disappointed with this view of Trump's policies, especially after Charlie Kirk endorsed them without reservations. While I voted for Trump, he isn't perfect. I must follow the Bible rather than men.