“Hedonistic pleasure-seeking, the gratification of immediate desire, the simple avoidance of pain or displeasure, is not a principle that can improve when it’s implemented or unite people in productive cooperation and competition so that a society can be established.”
Such were the thought-provoking words from Jordan Peterson’s opening address at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) 2025 conference, which was attended by more than 4000 people from across the globe.
Peterson’s words capture well the goal ARC has sought to promote since its inception—a revival of good, true, and beautiful ideas that promote human flourishing, and which are needed to revive the West and prevent it from continuing on the path of decline.
This year’s conference was a wonderful event to behold.
It brought together an eclectic range of conservative speakers united by common concerns: tech-enabled social ills that hamper the intellectual and moral development of young people; victim-oppressor narratives in the academy and media which sow division; demographic decline and the existential threat it poses to humanity; and, as Peterson’s speech indicated, the generally destructive impact of hedonistic and narcissistic currents in our culture.
The conference exhibition stalls also testified to the breadth of people of goodwill ARC is bringing together.
Many faith-based pro-family organisations had display stalls in the exhibition hall—including Them Before Us, manned by children’s rights activist and natural marriage advocate Katy Faust (also a member of ARC’s advisory board).
A number of classical education organisations were also present, as was the Adam Smith Institute, alternative news outlet UnHerd, and the Free Speech Union.
Other highlights for me during my time at the conference included the prayer breakfast held on the second morning, an Oxford-style debate on the motion: “protectionism makes us poorer,” and the opportunity to network with a surprising number of pro-life attendees.
Most striking was how unashamedly ARC gave speaking platforms to prominent Christian voices. ARC is not your average conservative movement.
Os Guinness gave an address which was uncompromising in its message—because human cultures cannot help but present people with answers to questions about life’s purpose and meaning, it is imperative that Western culture gives its people the right answer: namely, Christianity.
Enlightenment liberalism, which sought to remove God from the centre of society’s foundations, has failed. In the place of Christianity, Guinness argued, new, destructive pseudo-religions have arisen.
Mike Johnson, too, sent a similar message. Drawing on the insights of America’s founding fathers, Johnson reminded the audience that democracy is a political system that only works for a nation made up of virtuous people.
Political self-government only works when people can adequately govern themselves and discipline their own desires. More particularly, as the Founding Fathers knew, the American constitution would only work for a Christian people.
Best of all was the address from Bishop Robert Barron, who contrasted the Ockhamist (and later, the classically liberal) notion of “freedom of indifference”—freedom to make any choice, free from external or internal constraint—with the Thomist notion of “freedom for excellence”—freedom to align oneself with what is objectively valuable and choose the good.
What young people need most today, Bishop Barron insisted, is to rediscover the value of freedom for excellence.
While such speakers seemed to be championing nothing less than a return to Christian civil society in which Christian principles shape law, culture, and education, other speakers seemed to be on a slightly different page. Kemi Badenoch, the UK Conservative Party Leader gave a speech in which she asserted that the answer to our civilizational crisis is, first and foremost, a revival of “liberal values.”
While, superficially, it might seem like Christianity and liberalism are uncomplicated allies, this is not so.
Classical liberalism is a philosophy that hopes to erect society’s foundations upon a spiritually thinned-out understanding of the human being.
It asserts that we can build civil society upon norms that are “neutral” on religious questions, questions about existence, and questions about what the good life is. The liberal vision of civil society supposedly allows each individual to “decide the answer to these questions for themselves” in the safety of the private sphere, so expanding that “freedom of indifference.”
If Barron and Guinness are correct in their analysis, it is not clear that more liberalism is what the world needs.
We cannot assume that if we champion the values of classical liberalism—more democracy, more free speech—that a more Christian world will emerge. We must not forget that just a few generations ago, it was the progressives, not the conservatives, who were using the rhetoric of “liberal values” to promote intrinsic evils like abortion availability and access to pornography (under the guise of “freedom of speech”).
If conservatives are serious about being a force for good in the world, we must make sure that it is freedom for excellence that we are promoting, and we must realise that this concept is, indeed, in tension with many of the assumptions of classical liberalism.
If there was one shortcoming of the conference—especially for many of the Gen-Z attendees sympathetic to this kind of postliberal critique—it was, perhaps, that the double-edged nature of liberal values was not acknowledged explicitly enough.
This is not to imply that we ought to abandon liberal values. It is only to acknowledge that they are not unmitigated goods, and that nuanced support for them, not unqualified support, is needed.
At some points during the conference, such nuance and clarity was lacking. David Brooks decried the “privatisation of morality” that America’s elites had been responsible for. But later, in the same speech, he lauded John Stuart Mill’s ideal of a society that allows for a wide variety of “experiments in living.”
Of course, anyone who has read Mill’s On Liberty closely knows that “experiments in living” is code for exactly the kind of privatisation of morality and expanded private realm of “freedom of indifference” that has wreaked such social havoc, especially on the family.
As much as I enjoyed Konstantin Kisin’s speech, he too propounded an idea inconsistent with Catholic, and more broadly Christian thought: the idea that one’s nationality, above all else, must be one’s primary source of allegiance.
On the contrary—if Christianity is truly to be the foundation of nations, then our highest allegiance must be to God. When our nation asks of us what God definitively forbids, we must obey God rather than man.
Perhaps these inconsistencies are deliberate. After all, ARC is an alliance. It is a coalition, not a creed. Perhaps part of its purpose, as an organisation, is to explore, rather than resolve, these differences between secular liberal conservatism and more authentically Christian forms of conservatism.
Whatever the case may be, ARC is a movement that Catholics, and Christians more broadly, ought to get involved with and keep showing up to—for it is not every day that Christian voices are given such influence in a movement as grand as this.
Liberal conservatives and Christian conservatives have a shared starting point in the common enemy of totalitarian progressivism, and ARC is productively exploiting this shared starting point by facilitating conversation and networking opportunities.
ARC presents one of the most promising avenues for Christian thinkers to help hone thinking within the broad conservative umbrella and perhaps, in time, this may result in clearer consensus about what the solution to our common enemy needs to be.
Emma Wood is an adjunct philosophy lecturer at Campion College, a fellowship lecturer at Lachlan Macquarie Institute, and a research fellow with Women’s Forum Australia.