To be true to what made our religious heritage great, progressives say, is to articulate in religious form the aspirations of men today, as saints and prophets did those of earlier times. Religion thus becomes progressive politics poeticized. In contrast, conservative religion identifies the content of our religious heritage as revelation with a fixed and determinate content. The understanding, expression, and application of that content may vary somewhat over time, and a new revelation may establish a new tradition, but within a tradition the content of revelation remains unchanged. The differing religious and moral understandings lead to differing understandings of freedom.
Conservatives identify freedom with self-government in accordance with natural right.
A free government is one that protects the self-government of natural institutions such as families and local communities and of voluntary associations such as businesses. It respects private rights and property and the dispersion of power and authority among heterogeneous institutions. Progressives, who deny a natural moral order, identify freedom with the absence of obstacles to the individual will. Since particular obstacles to our wills arise most often from our immediate environment, and since a comprehensive program of removing such obstacles requires coordination, progressives in the end favor radical centralization of power. Contrary understandings of freedom lead each party to consider the other tyrannical.