Christendom and the Church
by Ryan Setliff

M. Stanton Evans observes that "[t]he conservative believes ours is a God-centered, and therefore an ordered, universe [and] that man's purpose is to shape his life to the patterns of order proceeding from the Divine center of life." ¹ Conservative luminary Russell Kirk explains the conservative's acknowledgment of an immutable, transcendent Deity:

Christians know that there exists a supernatural power, which we can perceive only dimly with our imperfect senses: a Supreme Being, the creator of heaven and earth, all-powerful. And that Supreme Being, God, made mankind, as He made everything else; but for the human person. He has a special regard and a special mission. God created man in His own image. From time to time in history, God has revealed to man His power and His love. Slowly and painfully, an obscure desert people, the tribes of Israel, came to be aware of the nature of God; and through them, an understanding of God's majesty and intentions—so far as these things can be understood at all by mankind—was transmitted to the Christian world. To Moses on Mount Sinai, to prophets and saints, through miracles—and most important of all to the Christian, through the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, the Redeemer—God made himself and his commandments known to mankind. In orthodox Christian doctrine, God became flesh in the person of Jesus, and suffered on the cross so that mankind might understand His nature and follow in His steps. ²

Christianity remains integral to the Western tradition. Whatever grandeur and greatness may be perceived in the uniquely Western tradition can only be fathomed by reflecting upon the underlying Christian foundation. As Pat Buchanan observed,

Religion is at the root of morality; and morality is the basis of law. Many decades ago, America's intellectual elite privately uttered its non serviam to the God of Christianity. America, meanwhile, continued to live off the inherited capital of the old faith. Now, the dissent from, and disbelief in, traditional Hebrew and Christian values and proscriptions is widespread. The routine deference once accorded the traditional churches is no longer profered.

The health of civil society and the preservation and continuity of traditional structures such as the family needs the sustenance of the church. Christopher Dawson, an independent English scholar, who wrote many books on cultural history and Christendom opined:

Without Christianity, there would no doubt have been some kind of civilization in the West, but it would have been quite a different civilization from that which we knew; for it was only as Christendom—the society of Christian people—that the tribes and people and nations of the West acquired a common consciousness and sense of cultural and spiritual unity... ³