Buckley & Reagan: Qualities of Conservative Greatness

Bruce Walker at The American Thinker has written a column about the two men who most epitomized the conservative movement in America.

Walker:

Buckley, a deeply religious man, realized that all political problems are ultimately moral problems, and all moral problems ultimately religious problems. The attempt to expunge God from politics, therefore, was the first step toward totalitarianism and the sort moldy social jelly that it Europe today.

Reagan also put God above all else. Buckley and Reagan, however, were not the sort of political-religious leaders like Huckabee. Neither man would have said a word about Romney's Mormonism. The God of Buckley and Reagan had very long arms. It was a God that Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Christians each recognized well. This God was concerned about unborn children, but just as concerned about souls trapped in the Gulag.

Walker concludes:

Buckley and Reagan were men of great gifts, but it was not their gifts alone that made them great. What made them great was certainty of moral purpose and absolute fearlessness in defending without equivocation what they knew was right. Nations always need such men. America particularly needs such men now.