Meet the Crunchy Conservatives

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Four basic areas are touchstones for crunchy conservatives: religion, the natural world, beauty, and family.

For many crunchy cons, religion is the starting point from which beliefs about everything else follow. They crave an older, more demanding kind of religion, a faith with backbone that stands against the softness of bourgeois Christianity. As you talk to religious crunchy cons, you find a surprising number who are religious converts of one sort or another, many of them to traditional Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy.

“Tradition isn’t something we cling to, it’s something we consciously seek,” says Jim Christiansen, 47, a Washington lawyer and converted traditionalist Catholic. “That whiff of the past is precious these days.”

Crunchy cons, religious or not, share a belief that something has gone seriously wrong in contemporary mass society, and are grasping for “authenticity” (a word you hear often from this group) amid a raging flood of media-driven consumer culture. This is not new, of course; the 1960s counterculture got there first. Crunchy cons credit the hippies and their successors with understanding the radical nature of the problem, but strongly disagree with their solutions.

Crunchy cons take the sacramental idea of the material world as fundamentally flawed but fundamentally good seriously, which leads them to beliefs and attitudes typically associated with liberals. Take the environment. Crunchy cons tend to look at the world through the eyes of Tolkien’s Sam Gamgee, returned from the war to his beloved shire, only to find the land despoiled by industrial “progress.” While they reject the anti-scientific utopianism of hysterical mainstream environmentalism, crunchy cons are skeptical that the Republican Party can be trusted as stewards of the natural world.

“I have no love for the environmental movement as it stands today,” says Alabama Republican Paula Graves, 39. “But I think that the average conservative response to environmental concerns is a total condemnation of all things ‘green,’ whether it be personal recycling, organic food, or energy conservation, and that’s an equally illogical response. We’ve ceded the issue to the Greens and let them set the definitions, and therefore the agenda.”

These irate crunchy cons are on to something. American Enterprise Institute (AEI) pollster Karlyn Bowman says that while the environment isn’t a big political issue nationally, it is “very important at the state and local levels,” particularly in populous, environmentally conscious swing states like California and Florida. AEI’s Steven Hayward has studied these issues and says that the GOP’s bad rap on the environment is somewhat deserved.

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