I lit a match, threw it on the ground, and walked away. Not literally. On July 29, I made what I thought was a fairly innocent observation about divides on the political right and closed the app. Unbeknownst to me, what I said engulfed X for the remainder of the week. Only after reopening the app much later did I see that so-called “Official Washington” and the conservative commentariat were ablaze about the “common good.” So, what did I say? I screenshotted a quote from a recent New York Times Magazine piece on how controversies swirling around the Heritage Foundation and the leadership of its president, Kevin Roberts, capture the entire “fight on the right” in irreducible simplicity. As the piece observed: “According to Stern, Roberts began to talk, around the office, not about individual liberty but about the ‘common good’ — not about freedom as the right to do as you want but as you ‘ought.’” The incredulous description of Roberts talking about the “common good,” at least to me, captures the fault line in modern conservatism: whether there is such a thing as the “common good” — and, if so, what its substance and scope are, and what limits should govern its imposition. How you approach the common good tells you where you land on today’s conservative spectrum. The thicker one’s conception of the common good, the more one will migrate toward a politics that focuses less on individual autonomy and more on the intrinsic goods necessary for social flourishing — and on at least some minimal government backing of them. The “common good” quarrel on the Right hinges on a single question: does government exist chiefly to secure liberty, or to serve the common good? Put differently: are political communities meant to erect as few guardrails as possible so diverse peoples can actualize their choices? Or is the point of societies to embody a particular conception of the good life? And should, or how could, the government deploy its power to ensure those ends? Perhaps the “general Welfare,” as the expressed purpose of government named in our Constitution, deserves more of our attention — even if we ask legitimate questions about the scope of its reach in achieving it. Put more sharply, it is a contest between a thin or absent conception of the common good and a thick one. And to dial down even more: what is the common good and how is it achieved? Definitionally, the common good represents the full ensemble of conditions that allow all of the constitutive elements of society to flourish. But, the rejoinder says, what does “flourish” mean in a contest of 340 million variations of the term? On one side stands what I’ll call “drag queen conservatism” — the view that a genuinely free society will inevitably produce things many of its citizens find repugnant, and that tolerating them is the price of liberty. On this account, the state’s job is to maintain the playing field, not referee it (even though, inevitably, it does referee it because at various points, governing authorities do restrict our behaviors). Neutrality is the highest political good; government lets its citizens order their lives however they want, and any political movement that seeks to advance a substantive vision of virtue eventually migrates into authoritarianism. On the other side stands the opposite conviction, what I will call “social cohesion conservatism” — the view that government can, at some level, administer a thicker vision of human flourishing from the top down; that government exists to make possible the conditions in which the good can be achieved equally by all. Where the first camp fears the state and wants its tentacles reined in, believing it impossible for government to unite 340 million people under a shared horizon, the second is more apt to pick it up and wield it. If the good is real, the reasoning goes, then a good government should promote it. I’ll confess my sympathies run toward the thicker account (but not without reservations that keep me from adopting a full “post-liberal” version of it). To put it simply, there are moral conditions, moral goods, and thus moral limits that government must recognize, lest it create the conditions seen in “Lord of the Flies.” I do not believe society can hang together by minimal standards alone. Such practices as drag queen story hour and recreational drug use are beneath the dignity of any local community regardless of whether they are freely chosen. I don’t care if New Yorkers want legal abortion — there are some ends that governments must not allow if government is to be considered just and the public square sane. For me, when societies elect to violate God’s natural law, they not only violate moral laws, they deprive themselves of the very foundations that enable their existence and flourishing. A total libertarian “hands off” approach to political orders ventures into a form of moral anarchy. As Vincent Phillip Muñoz wrote in a recent essay in First Things on the excesses of a political liberalism that bleeds into moral license, “Liberalism so understood is both relativistic and, ultimately, nihilistic. It makes the individual’s will sovereign over reality. It denies the existence of a common good because it holds that there are no rational intrinsic goods that human beings hold in common. The essence of man, in the liberal view, is willful individual choice—asserting one’s view of oneself and of reality and then shaping one’s life in light of that posited worldview.” I agree with Muñoz. In my view, man is not made for autonomy alone, and a politics that pretends to be neutral about the human good is not neutral; it is merely smuggling in an account of the common good and disguising which good it is serving. As always, the question is not whether, but which common good will dominate. But here’s the challenge for my own side of the ledger: a thick common good is necessary, but I doubt that Washington can meaningfully administer a common good thick enough to bind 340 million people under one moral roof. Why? Because society invariably consists in the clash of wills. Conservatives are rightly hesitant about putting that kind of power into the hands of bureaucracies that meddle in our lives under what they construe as altruistic motives, only to impede liberty in the name of the good. Large-scale, top-down accounts of the common good, I think, are not merely impractical. They misunderstand where the common good is best activated and realized. The common good is real, but it is best expressed close to the ground — in families, congregations, towns, counties, and states where people already share a thick sense of what their common life is for. It is far easier to name the good in small communities than in a bureaucracy that spans thousands of miles and millions of people, because the good presupposes a shared story, and shared stories thin out as they scale upward — even while we must concede there are certain basic goods that cannot be willed out of existence in the name of pluralism. All of this is why the common good is best understood as a federalist concept — Alabamians know better than New Yorkers what Alabama should look like, and vice versa. My view of the common good is informed by “subsidiarity” — the principle that local levels of social organization know their own needs better than distant bureaucracies do. The problem, though, is that the modern Left harbors no doubts and legislates its own common good under the guise of neutrality — it is pursuing a thick common good with something close to religious fervor, remaking law, medicine, education, and the family in its image. We have laws that tear at the truth of marriage, sanction the amputation of healthy body parts, allow the murder of children, and let people kill themselves. And so, conservatives skeptical of the common good are wrong to imagine that neutrality is possible or that society can hang together by procedure alone. The public square is never empty. Someone’s vision of the good always fills it. For conservatives to answer the challenge of liberalism with proceduralism alone — with a focus on rules and neutral administration — is voluntary disarmament no matter how much one wishes to rise above the fray of culture war politics. A politics that refuses to name the good cedes the naming to whoever is willing to do it (regardless of whether they call it the common good). So, the path forward is neither a federal department of virtue nor an attenuated pluralism that pretends the good does not exist. It is one that echoes our original founding: a minimal national scaffolding joined to localism. The problem, at this late hour, is that our nation disregards federalism. Court rulings impose degradations and deprivations in the face of local protest. At the national level, we must assert what no healthy society can do without: a true account of the human person, the priority of the family, respect for human rights, and the rule of law. That is a floor, not a ceiling. Beneath that floor lies barbarism — a barbarism we now practice. With that floor, though, we can acknowledge that communities remain free to build thicker, to pursue fuller and more demanding visions of their common life without a distant authority flattening them into a single uniform shape within reasonable and moral limits. What a particular community needs is best discerned by those who live there. But we must resist two fantasies at once: that the state can perfect us, and that the state can stay neutral. That’s an uncomfortable, perhaps irresolvable, tension. The common good is not optional. It is not even avoidable. The only real question is whether conservatives will summon the nerve to name their own. The other shocking (and disappointing) response to my X post was the incredulous dismissal of the common good by otherwise Right-facing pundits. The truth is, everyone relies on some account of the common good, even those who despise the concept. If you believe in property rights, you believe in the common good. Property rights establish the conditions for responsible stewardship, economic cooperation, social stability, and human flourishing. If you believe unborn children should not be killed, you believe in the common good. You recognize that justice requires protecting innocent human life, especially when it is vulnerable and defenseless. If you believe male and female are objective categories, you believe in the common good. You recognize that society must order itself according to the truth of the human person rather than treating reality as a matter of individual preference. If you think traffic lights are valuable, you believe in the common good. You accept reasonable limits on individual freedom so that everyone may travel safely and public life may proceed in an orderly fashion. If you oppose murder, you believe in the common good. You affirm that civil society must protect human life and punish those who unjustly destroy it. If you believe contracts should be honored, you believe in the common good. Trustworthy promises make economic exchange, institutional cooperation, and ordinary social life possible. If you believe parents have duties toward their children, you believe in the common good. The family is not merely a collection of autonomous individuals but a natural community structured by obligations of love, care, and formation. If you believe children should receive an education (whether public or private), you believe in the common good. A society has an interest in preparing the next generation to pursue truth, exercise responsibility, and participate constructively in communal life. If you believe the government should defend the nation, you believe in the common good. Political authority exists, in part, to secure the conditions of peace and safety that no individual can provide alone. If you believe courts should administer justice impartially, you believe in the common good. The rule of law protects citizens from arbitrary power and preserves a just order shared by all. If you believe pollution may rightly be restricted, you believe in the common good. Individuals and corporations do not have an unlimited right to impose the costs of their conduct on their neighbors. If you believe public parks, roads, and utilities are worthwhile, you believe in the common good. Some goods are enjoyed together and require forms of cooperation that transcend individual consumption. If you believe citizens owe one another honesty, you believe in the common good. A society cannot sustain trust, deliberation, or justice when deception becomes the accepted norm. If you believe freedom should be ordered toward what is true and good, you believe in the common good. Liberty is not merely the absence of restraint but the social and moral space in which persons and communities may flourish. The real debate, then, is not whether there is a common good. Every political philosophy presupposes one. The debate is over its nature, its scope, who defines it, and what means of political authority may legitimately be employed to secure it. The claim that the common good necessarily breeds authoritarianism — or that it is nothing more than the aggregate of individual choices, thereby justifying anything from drag queen story hour to any other freely chosen social practice like abortion or euthanasia — is simply at odds with the dominant tradition of Christian moral and political thought. That critique says far more about modern assumptions than about the historical understanding of the common good. In my judgment, the common good finds its deepest and most coherent foundation within the Christian doctrine of creation and providence. Christianity understands the common good as a manifestation of God’s common grace, by which He not only brought the created order into being but continually preserves, governs, and directs it toward its appointed ends. The triune God created all things according to His sovereign wisdom and will, endowing each creature with a nature proper to it and establishing the moral and social conditions under which human beings and communities may flourish. The common good, therefore, is not merely a human convention but reflects the divinely ordered structures of creation and God’s gracious providential care for all people. A couple of proposals for moving forward: If you favor the idea of the common good, be specific on what that means and what it does not. Ensure skeptics that the common good is not simply a synonym for one’s chosen utopia delivered through government decree. If you shudder at the term, give clear limits on what you think the government can do and what culture can absorb in the name of liberty. As a Christian theologian, I see this as a theological reality as much as a political one. It is continually pressed upon me that navigating fallen political orders after Genesis 3 is a constant tension in cultivating an order that does not harden into tyranny, managed alongside a twin temptation: apportioning liberty without collapsing into license. Be clear which side of the “ordered liberty” ledger you are on: Are you more prone to the need for “order” or more concerned about preserving “liberty”? Regardless of where you fall, be ready to explain your limits in both directions. In developing an account of the common good that preserves order without extinguishing liberty — and liberty without dissolving order — two books, Robert P. George’s “Making Men Moral” and John Finnis’s “Natural Law and Natural Rights,” have been the most decisive for me. Together, they chart a middle course between libertarianism and post-liberalism: perfectionist in affirming genuine moral goods that law must protect and positively advance; principled in defending civil liberties that permit public contestation over those goods; and prudential in recognizing that counterfeit goods eventually confront a community’s authority to determine what it will tolerate, regulate, or prohibit. George and Ryan T. Anderson have a helpful essay that distills the paradigm articulated by the books above. I am happy to accept that the “common good” is a contested category — its scope, substantive ends, and the limits of its political enforcement are all rightly debated. But the common good is among the oldest concepts in both classical and Christian political thought. Its cynical demonization, its reduction to individual autonomy, or its dismissal by conservatives is an indictment of modern conservatism, not of the common good. *** Andrew T. Walker, Ph.D., is Dean of the School of Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology. He is a Fellow with The Ethics and Public Policy Center and the Managing Editor of WORLD Opinions. You can follow him on X: @AndrewTWalker.