Today's conservatives support the idea of limited government, but they have increased government's size and power to new heights. They believe in balanced budgets, but they have boosted government spending, debt, and pork to record levels. They believe in national security but launched a reckless, ideological occupation in Iraq that has made us tangibly less safe. They have substituted religion for politics and damaged both.

In The Conservative Soul, one of the nation's leading political commentators makes an impassioned call to rescue conservatism from the excesses of the Republican far right, which has tried to make the GOP the first fundamentally religious party in American history. In this bold and powerful book, Andrew Sullivan makes a provocative, prescient, and heartfelt case for a revived conservatism at peace with the modern world, and dedicated to restraining government and empowering individuals to live rich and fulfilling lives.

Andrew Sullivan is one of today's most provocative social and political commentators. An essayist for Time magazine, a columnist for The Sunday Times of London, and a senior editor at The New Republic, he is also the editor of "The Daily Dish," one of the most widely read political blogs on the Web. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Conservatism is facing a crisis that won't be solved, one suspects, merely by switching presidents. To those of us far removed from Beltway philosophical battles, Andrew Sullivan -- a columnist for Time magazine, a prominent blogger and a senior editor at the New Republic -- might seem an unusual candidate to parse the problem. He's British. He's Catholic. He's gay. But Sullivan is also smart and well read, and in his new book, The Conservative Soul, he calmly and rationally attempts to deduce the malady that in barely 15 years has rendered Reagan-era conservatism all but unrecognizable.

The pathogen he identifies is Christian fundamentalism. The Conservative Soul, in fact, is one of several similar books issued this fall that collectively serve as a call to arms to American elites to put down their New York Times crossword puzzles and their glasses of Fumé Blanc and wake up to the idea that the fundamentalists most dangerous to our future are not Islamic and foreign but Christian and homegrown. Sullivan's is at once an obvious yet much-needed siren; his text calls to mind the book Mary Lefkowitz wrote several years back, Not Out of Africa, to rebut charges that the foundations of ancient Greek culture were built by black Africans. Afrocentrism was so nutty that most intellectuals couldn't be bothered to answer it. The same, I fear, is true for Christian fundamentalism. Its political tenets are so addlebrained and its leaders so difficult to take seriously that it's only now -- after the country has been run by a born-again Christian for six years -- that thinkers like Sullivan realize that it's time for reasonable people to do something about it.

The Conservative Soul, unfortunately, is not only too polite but too high-minded to galvanize anyone without a graduate degree in philosophy. This is not a bad thing, just a warning. If you belong to the Elks Club, apply catsup to your scrambled eggs or have ever read anything by Ann Coulter, this is not a book for you. It is written by a card-carrying intellectual and aimed at card-carrying intellectuals. Sullivan wades deep into the high grasses here; he is more interested in Hegel, Hobbes and Leo Strauss than anyone you've seen arguing on television, much less voted for. Further, the book doesn't really explain how conservatism lost its soul, just that it did, and it doesn't offer any real prescription for getting it back.

Instead, and this is the book's great value, Sullivan takes us back to basics -- we're talking Plato here -- to remind us of the bedrock differences in the two schools of belief that, like squabbling conjoined twins, inhabit the Republican Party's tortured body. The first half of The Conservative Soul, which explores the philosophical underpinnings of Christian fundamentalism and explains how they are anathema to a free society, made me as angry as anything I've read in months. That there are people in 21st-century America who believe the Bible is literally true, who believe the Earth was created 6,000 years ago, and who believe that our lives today should be dictated by codes of conduct written by people who lived 2,000 years before modern medicine, electricity or equal rights -- and that these same Americans have influence in national affairs -- should infuriate anyone with a functioning mind. Fundamentalism, Sullivan reminds us, is the antithesis of reason. Its adherents -- Christian, Muslim, Jewish or otherwise -- have been handed The Truth and cling to it, facts be damned. Quoting figures as varied as Pope Benedict XVI and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), Sullivan repeatedly emphasizes how fundamentalism abhors the thinking mind, insisting that an individual's conscious choices -- whether to have an abortion or what to order at Burger King -- amount to moral anarchy.

In the book's second half, Sullivan switches from anger to nostalgia, reaching back to remind us of the things that made Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher's brand of conservatism so appealing and so successful as a mode of governance. He traces the influence of fundamentalists to Bill Clinton's various personal deficiencies, which triggered a moral counterattack from Christian leaders who felt they knew something about morality. It's a good story, but Sullivan doesn't tell it with any narrative grace. Instead, he gnashes his teeth in frustration at the changes this period brought to conservatism. It's the hallmark of his book -- a fine intellectual effort that, for all Sullivan's clear thinking and clear prose, probably won't change any minds that fundamentalist beliefs haven't already ossified.

Reviewed by Bryan Burrough
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Conservative Soul

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

A Silver Age

1989-2001

"The era of big government is over."
—President Bill Clinton, January 1996

All conservatism begins with loss

If we never knew loss, we would never feel the need to conserve, which is the essence of any conservatism. Our lives, a series of unconnected moments of experience, would simply move effortlessly on, leaving the past behind with barely a look back. But being human, being self-conscious, having memory, forces us to confront what has gone and what might have been. And in those moments of confrontation with time, we are all conservatives. Sure, we all move on. In America, the future is always more imperative than the past. But the past lingers; and America, for all its restlessness, or perhaps because of its restlessness, is a deeply conservative place.

The regret you feel in your life at the kindness not done, the person unthanked, the opportunity missed, the custom unobserved, is a form of conservatism. The same goes for the lost love or the missed opportunity: these experiences teach us the fragility of the moment, and that fragility is what, in part, defines us.

When an old tree is uprooted by a storm, when a favorite room is redecorated, when an old church is razed, or an old factory turned into lofts, we all sense that something has been lost—if not the actual thing, then the attachments that people, past and present, have forged with it, the web of emotion and loyalty and fondness that makes a person's and a neighborhood's life a coherent story. Human beings live by narrative; and we get saddened when a familiar character disappears from a soap opera; or an acquaintance moves; or an institution becomes unrecognizable from what it once was. These little griefs are what build a conservative temperament. They interrupt our story; and our story is what makes sense of our lives. So we resist the interruption; and when we resist it, we are conservatives.

There is a little conservatism in everyone's soul—even those who proudly call themselves liberals. No one is untouched by loss. We all grow old. We watch ourselves age and decline; we see new generations supplant and outrun us. Every human life is a series of small and large losses—of parents, of youth, of the easy optimism of young adulthood and the uneasy hope of middle age—until you face the ultimate loss, of life itself. There is no avoiding it; and the strength and durability of the conservative temperament is that it starts with this fact, and deals with it. Life is impermanent. Loss is real. Death will come. Nothing can change that—no new dawn for humanity, no technological wonder, no theory or ideology or government. Intrinsic to human experience—what separates us from animals—is the memory of things past, and the fashioning of that memory into a self-conscious identity. So loss imprints itself on our minds and souls and forms us. It is part of what we are.

It is no big surprise, then, that the first great text of Anglo-American conservatism, Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, is all about loss. It's a desperate, eloquent, sweeping screed against the wanton destruction of an old order. When the French revolutionaries stormed the Bastille, overthrew a monarchy and a church, remade the calendar, and executed dissidents by the thousands for the sake of a new, blank slate for humanity, Burke felt—first of all—grief. His primary impulse was to mourn what was lost. He mourned it even though it wasn't his. This was not the same as actually defending the old order, which was, in many ways, indefensible, as Burke conceded. It was simply to remind his fellow humans that society is complicated, that its structure develops not by accident but by evolution, that even the most flawed bonds that tie countless individuals are not to be casually severed for the sake of an inchoate idea of perfection.

Even people and societies with deeply wounded pasts, with histories that cry out for renewal and reform, are nonetheless the products of exactly that past. They can never be wiped clean, born again, remade overnight. Even radical change requires a reckoning with the past if it is to graft successfully onto a human endeavor or life. An alcoholic who becomes sober will be unlikely to succeed without a thorough and often painful accounting of how she came to be where she is; and her future will be pivoted against her past and unimaginable without it. When those in recovery insist that they are still alcoholics, they are merely saying that they are human. They have a past. And living in the present cannot mean obliviousness to one's own history. It means living through and beyond that history.

If that is a conservative insight, it presses more powerfully than ever today. If the essence of conservatism is conserving, then our current moment is an extremely unnerving one. In the twenty-first century, the pace of change can at times seem overwhelming. Quantum leaps in technology have transformed how we communicate with one another and expanded everyone's access to an endless array of life possibilities. Jobs last months rather than decades. Travel is cheaper and easier than ever before. Mass immigration has altered settled cultures across the globe. Freer trade has upended life's certainties and customs in almost every society on earth. Assumptions we once made about who we are as a people, or as a country, or even as men and women, are now open to debate. The meaning of family, of marriage, of health, of sex, of faith, are now things we cannot simply take for granted as a shared understanding. And this pace adds a more bewildering and communal sense of loss to the more familiar, quotidian losses of human existence.

Adults face this first of all as they try to bring up their children. They look around them in the twenty-first century and they increasingly see no stable cultural . . .