March 17, 2003
'Crunchy cons' defy traditional religious & political labels
___By Douglas Todd
___Religion News Service
___VANCOUVER, British Columbia (RNS)--They're called "crunchy cons."
___That's "crunchy," as in crunchy granola. There's a whiff of the New Age movement about them.
___They eat organic food and oppose suburban sprawl. They rarely watch TV and question consumerism, value the arts and read authors like J.R.R. Tolkien, media critics like Neil Postman and eco-urban planners like James Howard Kunstler.
___But they're also "cons," as in conservative. They're religious, in an orthodox way, and oppose abortion, euthanasia and same-sex blessings.
___They're suspicious of big government. They value family and have big ones.
___To protect their kids from salacious mass culture, they tend to home-school.
___Crunchy conservatives are carving out a place for themselves as a North American subculture.
___The National Review, a leading conservative magazine, last fall published a series of articles that sparked wide discussion about crunchy cons.
___Writer Rod Dreher got the ball rolling with an essay about how he suddenly realized how tasty his neighbor's organic produce was compared to the usual supermarket fare.
___After he and his wife joined an organic food co-op, his conservative friends couldn't stand it. "Eeeww, that's so lefty," they said. Dreher had to reassess how else his family might be counter-cultural.
___"My wife, Julie, is a stay-at-home mom who is beginning to home-school our young son. We worship at an 'ethnic' Catholic church because we can't take the Wonder Bread liturgy at the Roman parish down the street.
___"We are as suspicious of big business as we are of big government. We rarely watch TV, disdain modern architecture and suburban sprawl, avoid shopping malls and spend our money on good food we prepare at home. My wife even makes her own granola."
___Crunchy cons definitely don't want to be called liberals. They don't like how liberals dismiss the lessons of the past, put down religion, fail to take seriously the reality of evil and "abandon their children to the culture."
___The touchstones for crunchy cons, Dreher said, are religion, the natural world, beauty and family.
___"For many crunchy cons, religion is the starting point from which beliefs about everything else follow," he said, noting many are converts to traditional Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy.
___"What they have in common is a craving for an older, more demanding kind of religion, a faith with backbone that stands against the softness of bourgeois Christianity," he explained, describing an emerging trait.
___Dreher and other crunchy cons, like poet-farmer Wendell Berry, draw a distinction between being conservative and being Republican or, in Canada, Alliance Party.
___He asks why so many Republicans cynically laugh at people like him, who might be vegetarian or expect cities to be planned rather than simply expanded.
___Ron Dart, professor of political science and religion at Canada's University College of the Fraser Valley, says "crunchy cons" is a catchy new title for an old movement--"classical Tories."
___Difficult to categorize as left or right, classical Tories follow a distinguished tradition linked to England's Thomas Moore (author of "Utopia"), the United States' Henry David Thoreau ("Walden") and Canada's George Grant ("Lament for a Nation").
___Dart attends a conservative Anglican church in Abbotsford, British Columbia. He's against legal abortion and is an executive member of the national Progressive Conservative Party, whose name strives to reflect sentiments from both left and right.
___Dart also has been active in Amnesty International and supported crowds of 5,000 in protesting Washington state's proposed Sumas Energy 2 Plant, which critics say will send pollution across the border into Canada.
___"There's a real hunger in Canada and the United States for a tradition that goes beyond the tribalism of the right or left," said Dart, author of "The Red Tory Tradition."
___"People are rediscovering classical Toryism. I think there's a renaissance of it going on. These are people seeking to conserve, in the old sense."
___Crunchy cons worry that the United States' Republican and Canada's Alliance parties elevate profit over the common good and may be too eager for war, including impending conflict against Iraq, Dart said.
___Yet they don't like liberals' individualism, private spirituality and anything-goes attitude.
___Classical Tories, Dart said, stress family, community, the environment and organized religion.
___The editor of B.C. Christian News, a newspaper with a strong evangelical flavor, has a crunchy con feel to him.
___Flyn Ritchie has five children, home-schooled in their early years. He loves Christian writers such as C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton and Tolkien and is conservative on abortion, euthanasia, atonement theology, family and sexual morality.
___He appreciates the Republican and Alliance parties for standing up for conservative social values, but he disagrees with them on their throw-away-the-key attitude about criminals, their unbridled enthusiasm for capitalism and their readiness to reduce foreign aid.
___Ritchie attends a Dutch Reformed Church, which sent a family to France to reclaim a fragile wetland. He doesn't want to be pigeonholed. But he laughs when he realizes that despite his evangelical loyalties, he regularly attends the local folk music festival and has been a member of organic food co-ops.
___And if there were any doubt he's a full-fledged member of the crunchy-con movement, he offers final proof: "My wife makes her own granola. It's better and cheaper."
___
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