It
depends on what you mean by “conservative.” In this instance
people can either mean politically conservative culturally
conservative, or theologically conservative. Since these are three
very different things, my answer has three parts.
Politically,
I definitely do not identify as conservative. I guess you could say
I'm a moderate. I think liberals are right about some things,
conservatives are right about others, and on other points both are
right or both are wrong. I think we lose out on a lot when we care
more about parties than about particular candidates and issues. But
I really hate blogging about politics so I'm going to stop there.
Culturally,
I suppose you could say I'm fairly conservative. Taking my husband's
name when I got married meant a lot to me. I would much rather be
referred to as “Mrs.” than “Ms.” because I am happily married
and I'm not ashamed of that. Even before I became a Christian, I
didn't think pre-marital sex was a smart idea, especially for
teenagers. I'm not going to go so far as to say teenagers should
never date. That being said, I'm also not going to encourage my
teenagers to date in high school, for a number of reasons. Modesty has become pretty
meaningful to me in the last couple of years. I wear long skirts
almost all the time, and I have covered my head full-time for over
two years. I don't think it's incompatible with feminism. If
anything is incompatible with feminism, it's succumbing to societal
pressures to flaunt everything you've got.
You
could also say I'm theologically conservative, although this one is a
little more complicated. I'm theologically conservative in the
sense that I believe the Bible to be the only religious text that is
fully true and free of error. (And for the record, I don't deny that
there are some issues in translating Hebrew and Greek into English.
The more I learn about those cultures and languages, the more I
realize how much we lose trying to translate it into English. But
that doesn't negate the truth of the Bible.) Every Christian has
their own definition of “theologically conservative”, so I will
have to elaborate more about my definition in a different post, but
that is the gist of it.
I love answering questions like this! If there's anything you'd like to ask please leave it in the comments section and I'll do a post about it!
