Genesis 12 explodes with good news. While Abram was still living in Mesopotamia (Acts 7:2) and part of a family of idol worshipers (Josh. 24:2), God came to him and promised a sevenfold blessing (Gen. 12:1-3). Abram would be a great nation, he would have a great name, and through him, all the families of the earth would be blessed.
But no sooner do we hear of God’s promised blessing to Abram than we find the promise threatened by famine in Egypt and (even worse) by Abram’s foolishness before Pharaoh. Fearing that his life will be in danger because of the beauty of his wife, Abram instructs Sarai to lie to the Egyptian king and say that she is his sister. This leads Pharaoh to shower Abram with riches and to take Sarai into his harem as his wife. Whether Pharaoh committed adultery with Sarai or not is unclear (I think not). What is clear is that when Abram is sent away by the king he leaves Egypt a much wealthier man than we he arrived.
The point of the story is not to moralize, good or bad, on Pharaoh or Abram or Sarai. It’s not wrong to draw lessons from Old Testament history (1 Cor. 10:6), but Genesis 12:10-20 is not mainly about the patriarchs. It is first of all about the invincibility of God’s promise.
Pharaoh’s house was cursed when it looked like Pharaoh would dishonor Sarai (cf. Gen. 12:3). And meanwhile, Abram was blessed—blessed beyond his wildest expectation and certainly blessed well beyond all deserving. This is the story we see over and over again in Genesis: God’s protection and God’s provision for the sake of God’s promise.
What did Abram do to deserve to leave Egypt a richer man than when he arrived? Nothing. Actually, less than nothing! And yet, Abram left with great wealth, because God is true to his promise. The promises of God are so sure, not even God’s people can ultimately mess them up.
Looking Back
There’s a connection between the story about Abram and Sarai in Egypt in chapter 12 and the story about Adam and Eve in the Garden in chapter 3.
Both stories center around a temptation caused by food. In the garden, it’s the fruit that looks good to eat and the temptation that arises from that, and in here it’s the temptation arising from the lack of food.
In both instances, we see the disastrous results of a husband’s poor leadership involving his wife.
We also see that both stories deal with deception. The serpent deceives the couple, and here the couple deceives Pharaoh. The result of both deceptions is this language, “they saw and they took.” The woman saw the fruit, she took and she ate. Pharaoh saw the woman and took her to be his wife.
In both stories, once the deception is found out, the ruler asks questions. God comes to Adam: “What have you done?” Pharaoh comes to Abram: “Why have you done this? Why didn’t you tell me?” In both cases the man’s excuse is to point to his wife: “Well, the wife that you gave me, she gave me the fruit.” “Well, the wife that I have, she’s simply too beautiful. I had to lie.”
And what’s the result in both stories? The couple is sent out. Adam and Eve are kicked out of Eden. Abram and Sarai are sent away from Egypt.
You could even look at the next passage to follow in each instance. After leaving the Garden there is family conflict between Cain and Abel. After leaving Egypt, there is family conflict between Abram and Lot. We are meant to see this episode in chapter 12 as another kind of fall from grace. The two stories track with each other in uncanny ways.
Except for this all-important detail. In Genesis Adam and Eve are kicked out of Eden, and they leave with cursing. In Genesis 12, Abram and Sarai are kicked out of Egypt, and they leave with blessing. They deserve cursing, just like Adam and Eve did in the garden, but here the promise of God is so operative that when they deserve the same cursing, instead they get what they don’t deserve, they get more blessing.
Looking Ahead
And there’s a connection with this story, not only going back to the garden, but looking forward to the Exodus. Remember, Moses is writing this story is writing it for the people when they are wandering in the wilderness, on the cusp of entering the Promised Land. Think about the parallels they would have seen between their story this story.
Abram migrates to Egypt because of a famine. Jacob’s family, at the end of Genesis, will go down to Egypt because of a famine.
When Abram and Sarai approach the land, they plan a speech for Pharaoh so that it might go well with them. When Israel’s family journeys to Egypt at the end of the book, they plan a speech for Pharaoh so that it might go well with them.
Sarai becomes a sort of slave to Pharaoh. The Israelites will become, for many centuries, slaves to another Pharaoh.
God then afflicts that Pharaoh with plagues, just as he afflicts the Pharaoh in Genesis 12 with plagues. In both cases, the plagues result in Pharaoh sending God’s people out of Egypt.
And what happens when they leave Egypt? Both times they leave with great wealth from the Egyptians. And in both cases, the next stop is to journey in the Negev and then later arrive back in the land.
This story in Genesis 12 was meant to be a comfort to God’s people wandering in the wilderness because of their sin. Parents would have been able to say to their children, “Remember what God did for Abram? He almost blew it. But God took care of him. God rescued him. God blessed him and brought him back to Canaan, all for the sake of his promise. Surely he will do the same for us.”
Looking at Ourselves
Obviously, the lesson from Abram and Sarai in Egypt is not that we should lie our way to wealth and prosperity. Abram’s conniving is a rebuke to all of us who think God’s plan needs help from the world’s ways.
But mostly, the story is a word of hope. It’s a firm reminder that nothing and no one can fully and finally derail the promises of God. You may look at your sin and stupidity and think that you’ve forfeited all of God’s blessing for you. But you haven’t. We may corporately look at the failures of God’s people—worldly compromise, theological error, fallen leaders, hypocrisy, duplicity, sin, and scandal—and wonder how the church will ever accomplish the purposes God has for her. But don’t forget: Jesus himself promises to build his church. This is not an excuse for us to be lazy, let alone to be disobedient, but it is reason for hope.
I don’t know what God is up to in your church, your city, your denomination, or your country, but we can be absolutely certain of this: Christ will be true to his word. The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable (Rom. 11:29). Nothing can fully and finally derail or destroy the promises of God. Not the world, not the flesh, not the devil. Not even us. Jesus Christ will have his way. He will keep his promises. He will bless his people. He will build his church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, Council member of The Gospel Coalition, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary (Charlotte). He has written numerous books, including Just Do Something. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children: Ian, Jacob, Elizabeth, Paul, Mary, Benjamin, Tabitha, Andrew, and Susannah.

Conservatism, as a political and moral philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition, has a long history that is usually traced back to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Burke, the Irish-born philosopher and politician, was not against all change. He generally supported the American colonies, seeing American independence not as a revolution but as an exercise in British citizens directing their own affairs instead of being mismanaged from afar.
The French Revolution, however, was another matter. Burke thought it folly for the French to think they could start over as a people or that human nature could be made anew. Burke thought people were guided by passions and sentiments more than by reason. He feared that if you strip away everything you know, something worse and more tyrannical will take its place. For Burke, we are born into the world with a civilizational inheritance to maintain, whether we like it not, much like parents are obliged to care for their children, and children are obliged to obey their parents. Burke insisted that Britain should be grateful for the habits, institutions, and principles that gave them unrivaled freedom and prosperity, and that this cultural heritage ought to be conserved rather than violently overthrown (for more on Burke, see Yuval Levin’s excellent book The Great Debate).
This is not the place to sketch out the history of conservatism, but suffice it to say it has been, like every other earthly ism, a diverse and imperfect tradition, including (in broad strokes): politicians like Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill, and Margaret Thatcher in England and Calvin Coolidge, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan in America; authors like Whitaker Chambers, Henry Jaffa, George Santayana, Richard Weaver, and Roger Scruton; economic theorists like Frederick Hayek and Milton Friedman. In its American form, conservatism has counted groups as varied as classical liberals, early Federalists, and southern agrarians among its intellectual heroes. In its more recent form, conservatism became mainstream with the rise of William F. Buckley, Jr. and the launch of National Review in 1955.
What’s the Point?
I’m not writing about conservatism because I think the Christian religion requires a conservative political philosophy, let alone because I think the two are identical. And yet, there are good reasons for Christians to know more about conservatism than they do. 
(1) For starters, most white Christians in America think of themselves as conservatives, but I imagine few have read much, if anything, from the centuries-old conservative tradition. 
(2) It has often been assumed that Trump and conservatism are the same thing, or that Republican policies and conservatism are the same thing, or that conservatism is the same as a disdain for the elite nexus of Hollywood, the media, and the academy.
(3) Conservatism, without any definition, is often invoked as an explanation for someone’s political views. This happens from the right (“but I’m a conservative”) and from the left (“you are too beholden to your conservatism”). In both claims, the moniker “conservative” is little more than an ideological label that quickly identifies someone’s views as obviously trustworthy or obviously hijacked.
(4) While I’ve argued before that Christian pastors and ministry leaders would be wise to provide less in the way of political punditry, this does not mean Christian theology and political philosophy have nothing to do with each other. If we can talk on the level of moral philosophy and anthropological assumptions and political first principles (away from the constant clamor of the 24-hour news cycle and polarization of national elections) we may be able to have a more meaningful conversation. If nothing else, the conversation will be deeper and richer and (likely) wiser for reading and evaluating the most important thinkers in the conservative tradition of the last two centuries rather than just listening to the loudest voices who claim to speak for conservatism today.
Concise Guide to Conservatism
With that last point in mind, I thought it would be worthwhile to look at one answer to the question posed in the title of this post. If someone wants a short, straightforward, and seminal exploration of conservatism he can do no better than to read Russell Kirk’s Concise Guide to Conservatism (Regnery Gateway, 2019). Originally published in 1957 as The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Conservatism (a jab at George Bernard Shaw’s Intelligent Women’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism), the Concise Guide is much more accessible than Kirk’s larger work (a revised dissertation of all things!) The Conservative Mind (1953). 
Kirk was born in 1918 in Plymouth, Michigan (now a suburb of Detroit) and went on to earn degrees from Michigan State, Duke, and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. After teaching for several years at his alma mater, Kirk left Michigan State in 1959 and returned to his ancestral home in Mecosta, a rural community an hour north of Grand Rapids. In 1963, Kirk converted to Catholicism and married Annette Courtemanche. Together they had four children and often welcomed guests, literary figures, refugees, and vagrants to “Piety Hill” (their country home). Through his teaching, his writing, and his involvement in the leading conservative journals of the day, Kirk gained the reputation as a key theorist, moralist, historian, novelist, and philosopher of post-war conservatism. Russell Kirk, lauded by his friends as “the benevolent sage of Mecosta,” died in 1994.
In the Concise Guide, Kirk lays out ten characteristics of conservative thought.

“Men and nations are governed by moral laws; and those laws have their origin in a wisdom that is more than human—in divine justice” (2). Kirk made clear that “Christianity prescribes no especial form of politics” (9). At the same time, he believed that conservatism was built on a religious foundation and that religion in the modern world was largely defended by conservative people (9). “The conservative believes that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom” (10)
“Variety and diversity are the characteristics of a high civilization. Uniformity and absolute equality are the death of all real vigor and freedom in existence” (2-3). In rejecting absolute equality, Kirk did not mean equal treatment under the law, but an equal outcome enforced by the state.
“Justice means that every man and every woman have the right to what is their own—to the things best suited to their own nature, to the rewards of their ability and integrity, to their property, and their personality” (3). Society, said Kirk, is a partnership in which all have equal rights but not all have equal things.
“Property and freedom are inseparably connected: economic leveling is not economic progress” (3). Kirk argues that the three fundamental rights in the Anglo-American tradition have been life, liberty, and property (what Thomas Jefferson described more expansively as “the pursuit of happiness”). If there were no private property, we would not all be rich together; we would all be poor together (56-57). Private property is not only a good in itself; it is also a means to culture and freedom. The role of the state is to protect man’s property, not to allocate it. For his part, the virtuous citizen understands that property comes with duties, and by our property and possessions we ought to serve God and serve our fellow men (60).
“Power is full of danger; therefore, the good state is one in which power is checked and balanced, restricted by sound constitutions and customs” (3-4). Kirk is not anti-authority, nor even anti-government. He considers government “a necessary good” provided it is just, balanced, and restricted. Men with power cannot be trusted, so ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
“The past is a great storehouse of wisdom; as Burke said, ‘The individual is foolish, but the species is wise’” (4). The conservative knows he was not born yesterday. He is eager to listen to the “democracy of the dead.” The conservative does not idealize the past, but he believes that we will be wiser if we listen to the wise men and women of the past.
“Modern society urgently needs true community: and true community is a world away from collectivism” (4). Conservatives are public-spirited. They believe in doing one’s duty to town and country, to his business and to his church, to his school and to his union, to his civic association and to his charitable fund (44). In genuine community, decisions are made locally wherever possible, and philanthropy and neighborliness are voluntary virtues.
“In the affairs of nations, the American conservative feels that his country ought to set an example to the world, but ought not to try to remake the world in its image” (5). Kirk is less interested in a specific foreign policy than in a general inclination that urges America to be virtuous, without necessarily being interventionist.
“Men and women are not perfectible, conservatives know; and neither are political institutions. We cannot make heaven on earth, though we may make a hell” (5). Human nature is not malleable. We must deal with people as they are, not as we wish them to be. This means, as Kirk says elsewhere, “politics is the art of the possible, not the art of the ideal.”
“Change and reform, conservatives are convinced, are not identical: moral and political innovation can be destructive as well as beneficial” (5-6). The conservative does not believe in change for the sake of change. He is not eager for revolution. He does not believe in the abstract cult of progress. When in doubt, permanence should be favored over progress. Choose what is old and tried, even if it is imperfect, before what is new untried. Conservatives prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know.

Summary
Kirk was writing in the 1950s so the great enemy, as he saw it, was collectivism and totalitarianism. Like many conservatives, he did not see the injustices in his country as well as the injustices in other countries. In general, the conservative movement since World War II has been proven right on the issues of communism and socialism but has often been proven slow (or wrong) on the issue of race. Of Kirk’s ten points, I’d say 1 is undeniably Christian and 4, 5, 6, and 9 can be drawn from Christian principles, but they are certainly not the last word on moral philosophy or a Christian approach to society and politics. As I said earlier, I do not offer this summary of conservatism because I think it should become a confessional standard for Christians. Perish the thought! We have an inerrant Bible, not to mention our own dogmatic tradition. But I do believe Kirk’s definition of conservatism (or something like it) is worth our careful consideration, not least of all from those Christians who call themselves conservatives.

Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, Council member of The Gospel Coalition, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary (Charlotte). He has written numerous books, including Just Do Something. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children: Ian, Jacob, Elizabeth, Paul, Mary, Benjamin, Tabitha, Andrew, and Susannah.

We’ve heard it so many times that it’s practically part of the Christmas story itself.
The Romans celebrated their seven-day winter festival, Saturnalia, starting on December 17. It was a thoroughly pagan affair full of debauchery and the worship of the god Saturn. To mark the end of the winter solstice, the Roman emperor established December 25 as a feast to Sol Invictus (the Unconquered Sun). Wanting to make Christianity more palatable to the Romans and more popular with the people, the church co-opted these pagan festivals and put the celebration of the birth of their Savior on December 25. For whatever the Christmas holiday has become today, it started as a copycat of well-established pagan holidays. If you like Christmas, you have Saturnalia and Sol Invictus to thank.
That’s the story, and everyone from liberal Christians to conservative Christians to non-Christians seem to agree that it’s true.
Except that it isn’t.
For starters, we should distinguish between roots that suggest a rip-off and roots that suggest a rebuke. The presence of some connection between a Christian celebration and a pagan celebration could imply a synchronistic copy-cat (“Hey, let’s Christianize this popular pagan holiday so as to make our celebration more palatable”), or it could mean a deliberate rejection (“Hey, this pagan holiday is horrible, so let’s put something distinctively Christian in its place”). After the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century, Christians did sometimes adapt and Christianize pagan festivals. Whether they did so wisely and effectively is open to historical debate, but the motivation was to transform the paganism of the Roman world rather than raze it to the ground. Even if Christmas was plopped down on December 25 because of Saturnalia and Sol Invictus, that by itself does not entail that the Christian celebration of Christ’s birth really began as a pagan festival.
But in the case of Christmas, there is good evidence that December 25 was not chosen because of any pagan winter holidays. This is the argument Andrew McGowan, of Yale Divinity School, makes in his article “How December 25 Became Christmas” (first published in Bible Review in 2002). Let me try to distill McGowan’s fine historical work by addressing three questions.
When did Christians first start celebrating the birth of Jesus on December 25?
Unlike Easter, which developed as a Christian holiday much earlier, there is no mention of birth celebrations from the earliest church fathers. Christian writers like Irenaeus (130-200) and Tertullian (160-225) say nothing about a festival in honor of Christ’s birth, and Origen (165-264) even mocks Roman celebrations of birth anniversaries as pagan practices. This is a pretty good indication that Christmas was not yet on the ecclesiastical calendar (or at least not widespread), and that if it were, it would not have been tied to a similar Roman holiday.
This does not mean, however, that no one was interested in the date of Christ’s birth. By the late second century, there was considerable interest in dating the birth of Jesus, with Clement of Alexandria (150-215) noting several different proposals, none of which was December 25. The first mention of December 25 as Jesus’s birthday comes from a mid-fourth-century almanac called the Philocalian Calendar. A few decades later, around AD 400, Augustine would indicate that the Donatists kept Christmas festivals on December 25 but refused to celebrate Epiphany on January 6 because they thought the latter date was a recent invention. Since the Donatists, who arose during the persecution under Diocletian in 312, were stubbornly opposed to any compromise with their Roman oppressors, we can be quite certain they did not consider the celebration of Christmas, or the date of December 25, to be pagan in origin. McGowan concludes that there must have been an older North African tradition that the Donatists were steeped in and, therefore, the earliest celebrations of Christmas (we know about) can be dated to the second half of the third century. This is well before Constantine and during a time period when Christians were trying to steadfastly avoid any connections to pagan religion.
When was it first suggested that Christmas grew out of pagan origins?
None of the church fathers in the first centuries of the church makes any reference to a supposed connection between Christmas and Saturnalia or Sol Invictus. You might think, Well of course they didn’t. That would have been embarrassing. But if the whole point of basing your Christian birth holiday on an existing pagan birth holiday is to make your religion more popular or more understandable, surely someone would say something. Besides, as McGowan points out, it’s not like future Christian leaders shied away from making these connections. Gregory the Great, writing in 601, urged Christian missionaries to turn pagan temples into churches and to repurpose pagan festivals into feast days for Christian martyrs.
There is no suggestion that the birth of Jesus was set at the time of pagan holidays until the 12th century, when Dionysius bar-Salibi stated that Christmas was moved from January 6 to December 25 to correspond with Sol Invictus. Centuries later, post-Enlightenment scholars of comparative religions began popularizing the idea that the early Christians retrofitted winter solstice festivals for their own purposes. For the first millennium of the church’s history, no one made that connection.
Why do we celebrate Christmas on December 25?
The first answer to the question is that some Christians don’t. In the Eastern branch of the church, Christmas is celebrated on January 6, probably for the same reasons—according to a different calculation—that Christmas came to be celebrated on December 25 in the West. Although we can’t be positive, there is good reason to think that December 25 became the date for Christmas because of its connection to the (presumed) date of Jesus’s death and to the date of Jesus’s conception.
There are three dates at play in this calculation. Let’s start with the date of Jesus’s death.
Around AD 200, Tertullian of Carthage noted that Jesus died on the 14th day of Nisan, which was equivalent to March 25 in the Roman solar calendar. In the East, they made their calculation using the 14th day of the first spring month in their local Greek calendar. In the Roman calendar, this was April 6. So depending on who you asked, Jesus died on either March 25 or April 6.
In both the West and the East, there developed the same tradition that Jesus died on the same date he was conceived. An anonymous Christian treatise from fourth-century North Africa stated that March 25 was “the day of the passion of the Lord and of his conception. For on that day he was conceived on the same he suffered.” Augustine in On the Trinity mentioned that same calculation. Similarly, in the East, the fourth-century bishop Epiphanius of Salamis maintained that on April 6 Christ took away the sins of the world and on the same date was “shut up in the spotless womb of the holy virgin.” The fact that this curious tradition existed in two different parts of the world suggests it may have been rooted in more than mere speculation. If nothing else, as McGowan observes, these early Christians were borrowing from an ancient Jewish tradition that said that the most important events of creation and redemption occurred at the same time of the year.
From the date of Christ’s death, to the (same) date of his conception, we can easily see where the date of Christmas could have come from. If Jesus was conceived on March 25, then the best date to celebrate his birth must be nine months later on December 25 (or, in the East, January 6). While we can’t know for certain that this is where December 25 came from—and we certainly can’t be dogmatic about the historicity of the date—there is much better ancient evidence to suggest that our date for Christmas is tied to Christ’s death and conception than tied to the pagan celebrations of Saturnalia and Sol Invictus.

Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, Council member of The Gospel Coalition, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary (Charlotte). He has written numerous books, including Just Do Something. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children: Ian, Jacob, Elizabeth, Paul, Mary, Benjamin, Tabitha, Andrew, and Susannah.