My favorite conservative thinkers were outsiders. Edmund Burke was an Irishman with a Catholic mother. Alexander Hamilton was born a bastard. Disraeli was a Jew. Adam Smith was a Scot at a time (Has that time passed, even now?) when Englishmen regarded the Scots with amusement or contempt. In short, while these political theorists supported order, hierarchy and private property, they were never entirely accepted by the ruling classes of their day.

Given my partiality to mavericks, it’s not surprising that I’m a great fan of Andrew Sullivan. British by birth, American by adoption, Catholic by upbringing, conservative by temperament, and homosexual by nature, Andrew is in a class by himself, which is one reason why he’s one of the most original and insightful commentators on the American political scene today.

Andrew’s blog, The Daily Dish, can be accessed at http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/. But right now I want to talk about his new book, The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It; How to Get It Back (HarperCollins, 286 pp, $29.95).

As Andrew and others have noted, anti-communism was the bond that united the different strands of American conservatism. With the fall of the Soviet Union, conservatism began to unravel. To hold it together –- or at least to hold enough of it together to win elections –- the Republicans evolved a big-government conservatism that favored corporate interests, massive federal spending, and the political agenda of fundamentalist Christians.

The trouble with this brand of conservatism, says Andrew, is that it isn’t conservative at all. It’s a conservatism that pretends to have all the answers, when in fact, “The defining characteristic of the conservative is that he knows what he doesn’t know.”

True conservatism, according to Andrew, is “the conservatism of doubt.” The true conservative is innately skeptical of all utopias, dogmas and philosophical abstractions. He recognizes that human beings are fallible, and that pride goes before a fall. Accordingly, he recognizes the need to limit the power of government, lest that power be abused by people who suppose, in their arrogance, that they know everything.

Our Founding Fathers espoused life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – not the pursuit of virtue. They were willing to let people pursue even a mistaken idea of happiness, rather than trust government with the power to keep them on the straight and narrow path by force.

This is something that our Founders had in common with Edmund Burke, who is generally regarded as the father of modern conservatism. Burke once wrote that “the great inlet by which a color for oppression has entered into the world is by one man pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another, and by claiming a right to use what means he thinks proper in order to bring him to a sense of it. It is the ordinary and trite sophism of oppression.”

Narrow religious fundamentalism, therefore, is really anti-conservative. It is also unscriptural. The fundamentalists have forgotten St. Paul’s warning in First Corinthians that “we know in part, and we prophesy in part.” They have also forgotten that Jesus himself wrestled with doubts.

The Republicans abandoned a conservatism of doubt for a conservatism of arrogance -– and were duly humbled for their presumption in the last elections. In his book, Andrew Sullivan offers them a way to return to their roots. It remains to be seen whether they will take it.