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Usually when we try to explain American conservatism, it can get pretty complex as we try to explain classical liberal political philosophy, free market economics, a judeo-christian world view, a constitutional legal framework, all rolled into some kind of coherent whole.

When it really all boils down to a proper relationship between God and man, and from that, between individual human beings. If you are in proper relationship it all flows naturally from that wellspring. If you are not, if you have cut yourself off from it, no formula can hope to work in its absence.

Freedom must rest upon a moral and spiritual foundation with God at the center. Lose that and you lose the whole game. Not everyone has to get it, but you need an earnest core who do get it to sustain the whole.

What is the best thing that you or I or anyone can do for our posterity? It is to help provide the spark of spiritual and political revival ... to point the people back to God, back to the gospel of Jesus Christ, back to the Bible, back to the truth, and back to the timeless core principles that made this great free republic great in the first place.

I think you just made a very important contribution. Eternal Vigilance has enumerated generally accepted conservative positions with which most of us would have few quibbles but your contribution is to go to the root of the matter.

In my view conservatism is the result of the relationship between God and man. Another contributor to this thread has observed that the left has stolen all the English vocabulary and distorted it and that applies very much to the venerable biblical concept of the fear of God. Today, any exhortation that man should fear God is resisted vehemently as tyranny but the true meaning of the biblical concept incorporates love as well as respect.

Significant for our discussion, this "fear" of God that properly positions man in a vertical relationship in which man is subordinate and, therefore, not God. Therein lies the difference between conservatism and liberalism: liberals would be God.

Original Sin, in my view, can be defined as disobedience to God in an attempt to become God, that is to have infinite knowledge, knowledge of good and evil, and presumably the political legitimacy, therefore, to act upon that knowledge.

Conservatism concedes the fallen nature of man, his limitations and his proclivities toward evil, and his need of redemption rather than his prerogative to rule. From this distinction flow all of the checks and balances, separation of powers and decency of the conservative movement. From this understanding comes the need for limited government.

If one is a God player he has no need of limited government rather he has need of levers of power, a place to stand upon, and an opportunity to transform the earth.