We will never succeed in taking over political structures until we can convince the American people that we can be trusted to take them over, and to do that we must win the people over culturally--by defining how man ought to act, how he ought to perceive the world around him, and what it means to live the good life. Political arrangements can only be formed after these fundamental questions have been answered.Once this basic belief is accepted, our next task is to develop the means by which it can be put into practice. We must, as Mr. Weyrich has suggested, develop a network of parallel cultural institutions existing side-by-side with the dominant leftist cultural institutions. The building and promotion of these institutions will require the development of a movement that will not merely reform the existing post-war conservative movement, but will in fact be forced to supersede it--if it is to succeed at all--because it will pursue a very different strategy and be premised on a very different view of its role in society.
Our movement--which we will call the New Traditionalist movement--will not seek to immediately replace the dominant culture. A retreat will allow us to regroup and find our bearings. The overemphasis on effecting change through political activism has left us disoriented, distracted, and overly prone to accept the cultural assumptions of the Left. But this tactical retreat will ultimately lead to strategic victory.
A central mission of this movement is to advance a true traditionalist counter-culture based on virtue, excellence, and self-discipline. The New Traditionalists will not be exclusively Christians, but many of them inevitably will be.
He talks about “withdrawing” but I don’t see it that way. The work of building parallel institutions isn’t about retreating into the catacombs.
I see it happening all around me. Much of it is happening in churches. A lot of that is happening in the megachurches we like to mock. A lot of them are trying to be an overall cultural one-stop shop. Whether or not you like what a particular one is doing, somewhere in there is a goodly part of the answer. Schools, projects, missions, concerts, you name it; a lot of them are building parallel institutions themselves rather than wait for someone to do it.
The key to building parallel institutions is to withdraw from the ones that are irretrievably spoiled and soiled. That primarily means the schools and universities. Granted, they can be reformed sometime, eventually, but your kids will be grown and your grandkids too before that happens. If you wait for that you’ve already lost two generations. And they aren’t going to change until the world has changed around them, and competition forces them to re-think their purpose.
The war of ideas is fought in schools and universities, through the news and information industry, and through the entertainment industry. That is where you need to unplug, and replacing them is easier than people think. Turn them off. Tune them out. There are a hundred things to do that they can’t touch and they can’t foul. Build guitars, build boats, build cars, raise pigeons, whatever, and do it with your kids. Give the spoiled society around you no hand-hold on your family. It doesn’t take an act of congress to build new cultural institutions, it takes turning off the old ones.
You can probably tell I very much agree with Weyrich, its very much something on my mind, but I in no way see this as a form of retreat. Its not a retreat or withdrawal at all, its an all out charge.
He is right that its not something limited to Christians only, or believers only, but inevitably it is going to be the work of people who believe in eternal principles that they are willing to live for.