My Close Personal Friend Gene Edward Veith posts an interesting meditation today on the differences between the ways conservatives and progressives think — and how Christians are (or should be) distinct from both.

It would follow that Christians, while tending towards conservatism, would also be sensitive to some of the evils that bother progressives.  But they would see them as violations of God’s design, rather than as an excuse to violate that design further.  Christians would have at best modest hopes for what human governments and “nation-states” can accomplish, avoiding all utopian thinking–whether of the conservative or the progressive variety–in a spirit of realism and skepticism, even while they do what they can to advance the common good.  The Christian’s hope is fixed not so much on this world, which will soon pass away, but on the world to come–on Christ who has atoned for the sins of the world and who will reign as King over the New Heaven and the New Earth.

From this perspective, Christians must sometimes be progressive, sometimes conservative, in relation to changing conditions.

I’m sure (because they keep saying it) that my progressive friends truly believe that we are on the brink of a fascist takeover. That we must all run to the port side of the boat right away, lest we tip over to starboard.

I can’t see that. We have an (imperfectly) conservative president, and one house of Congress that’s sort of conservative on a good day. Our educational system, our government bureaucracies, our news media and our entertainment media are uniformly progressive — and at the moment they’re competing with one another to prove who can be the most like Mao.

I’ll continue to sit over here on the starboard side, thanks. Wake me up when the president closes down a newspaper.