It's Tuesday, November 22, 2022.

I'm Albert Moller, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from

a Christian world view.

We are looking at the continuing question of how to define conservatism.

Now, that is not the most important question.

The most important questions are directly theological, but the Christian world view also understands

that world view gets translated into political philosophy, into politics, into history.

And thus, I have argued for a long time that the word conservatism is one of the most

important words in our political world view vocabulary.

This goes back to the point of my life when I first knew myself to be self-consciously

conservative.

And that came in the 1970s when I was a middle schooler and a high schooler.

And I was trying to understand the world around me.

And there were vast political debates going on in the 1970s.

By the 1970s in the United States, there were two different political positions, just as

there were two different political parties, and to a greater and lesser extent.

Just about every politician lined up one way or the other as conservative or as liberal

or as moderate in the middle.

Now, what we have seen in intervening decades is that both the political trajectory and

the issues have become so compressed that there really is very little of a middle left

in American politics.

Just take an issue like abortion or same-sex marriage.

...