It Usually Begins With Whittaker Chambers

[It's a long one boys and girls - Publius]

Amidst the general mourning of the death of William F Buckley, founding editor of National Review, there were some voices of dissent.  This was not, surprisingly, from the statists of the Left, who Buckley had spent a life time skewering with his iridescent wit.  Even Newsweek paid a respectful homage, though predicting a conservative crack-up in the near term - just as the Democratic Party was beginning its vicious civil war on class, race and gender lines.  The loudest attacks on the late man's career came from Objectivists, in particular Robert Tracinski and Harry Binswanger.  These were not polite disagreements about WFB tactics, strategy or basic beliefs, they were dramatic attacks.  Take Harry Binswanger's piece in Capitalism Magazine:

William F. Buckley, Jr. is finally dead. Buckley was the man who initiated and sustained the movement to bring religion into the conservative movement. His first book was "God and Man at Yale," which I haven't read or looked at, but which is said to have criticized Yale education for being both leftist and anti-religious.

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Buckley, more than anyone else, is responsible for subverting the "conservative movement," turning it into its current, depraved status as the anti-reason, anti-man, welfare-statist "religious right." The world is well rid of him.

Robert Tracinski, a syndicated columnist and editor of TIA Daily (an e-mail newsletter of which I am a paying subscriber), was somewhat more tactful:

Tricked by Buckley and his fusionists into outsourcing moral questions to the guardians of religious tradition, the right has never been able to properly develop the moral case for rational self-interest--which means that they never developed the moral case for the profit motive, property rights, and the free market. Many on the right are implicitly sympathetic to capitalism; they sense its virtues, but thanks to "fusionism," they are unable to articulate them. And this means that they have never been able to turn the defense of free markets into a moral crusade.

Even worse, the "fusionists" turned away the one intellectual who could have helped them do so. In the 1950s and 60s, Buckley's National Review made a special (and scurrilously dishonest) effort to purge the right of Ayn Rand and her intellectual movement, because her atheism threatened the fusionist agenda--even though she was the most powerful advocate for the morality of capitalism.

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The lesson of the 2008 primary is that intellectuals on the right need to liberate themselves from William F. Buckley's legacy. They need to devote much more time and attention to the secular moral case for liberty and capitalism--which would finally allow them to stand on their own two feet ideologically, without feeling the need to be "fused" to a religious movement that has shown itself incapable of offering a foundation for these ideals.

Are we speaking here of the same man who, upon his death a month ago, even many of his enemies conceded was an architect of the successful conclusion of the Cold War?  From whence does this Objectivist contempt flow?  Tracinski does a pretty good job summarizing Buckley's role as a public intellectual and the basic argument against NR's approach:

The idea that was supposed to hold up this conservative "big tent" was the theory of "fusionism." Buckley didn't originate fusionism (it was articulated by Frank Meyer), but the idea was vigorously promoted by National Review. Fusionism was the idea that the three wings of conservatism could not only find common cause but could cobble themselves together into a semi-integrated ideology. The theory was that the religionists would defend traditional American values, which would provide cultural support for the ideals of limited government and American patriotism.

This ideological coalition first found expression with the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, which failed to win the presidency but succeeded in launching a political movement.

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So it would be churlish to say that the fusionist agenda was a political failure or that the conservative coalition was only "temporary"; something that shapes American politics for nearly half a century is hardly temporary. Fusionism lasted because it tapped into a much longer American tradition going back to Alexis de Tocqueville in the early 19th century and arguably all the way back to the Founding Fathers, though they would not have embraced it in Buckley's traditionalist form: the idea of a connection between religious belief and the advocacy of liberty.

Fusionism is unstable because its basic premise--that the moral foundation of free markets and Americanism can be left to the religious traditionalists--is false. For five decades, under Buckley's influence, conservatives have ceded to the religious right the job of providing the moral fire to sustain their movement. But they are discovering that the religionists do not have a strong moral commitment to free markets. In fact, the religious right seems to be working on its own version of "fusion"--with the religious left.

Wednesday's Washington Post provided the latest example: a column by former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson on the shift to the left among evangelical Christians, who "respond to a message of social justice and community values, not only to a message of rugged individualism and unrestricted markets." Gerson insists that "Christianity indicts oppressive government--but also the soul-destroying excesses that sometimes come in free markets and consumerism." So much for traditional religious values serving as the basis for advocacy of capitalism.

The reason for this shift toward the religious left is that religion cannot support the real basis for capitalism and a strong American national defense: a morality of rational self-interest.

To put it all another way, how do you reconcile the morality of the Sermon on the Mount with the economics of Adam Smith? Or to borrow from Tertullion, what does Edinburgh (or Silicon Valley) have to do with Jerusalem?  As with so much of Western though we return to the scriptures, in particular the Gospel of Matthew 5:3-12.

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.

Obviously there is no single interpretation to these lines; history is replete with examples of Christianity being invoked to defend capitalism, absolute monarchy, fascism, socialism, slavery and abolitionism and countless more systems and positions.  Whatever that itinerant Jewish carpenter turned prophet really meant, or even said, is lost to history.  It was the opinion of no less a figure than Thomas Jefferson that Jesus was actually a Jewish freedom fighter and ethicist, the mystical elements of his life story being added in by later writers.  Whatever the truth, Jefferson's certainly being more plausible than the explanations confounding the laws of physics, Christianity has been since Constantine the default philosophy of the West.  Whatever else has come and passed, it has so far remained, adjusting and reforming itself to circumstances.  Since it is the one set of beliefs that virtually all Western men have been exposed to, and until comparatively recently few have seriously dissented from, it is only natural that newer movements would seek to invoke its support, however tenuous the links. 

The socio-economic system which emerged in the latter decades of the 17th century in Britain and the Netherlands, what today is called capitalism or market economics, posed a new challenge to Christian thought.  For the first time a substantial percentage of the population was engaged in commercial activities.  While peasants of previous centuries had often brought their goods to a town or village market, trade was a marginal aspect in their lives.  Unlike the bourgeoisie who lived by profit and loss, the peasant was seen as merely attempting to survive, not trying to become rich.  Late Medieval Italy and Renaissance Italy had confronted similar social changes, foreshadowing many of the proposed solutions of the Enlightenment, but the Italian project, having collapsed due to a lack of political unity, was finally destroyed by Spanish tyranny in the early sixteenth century.  As Italy did not completely recover economically or culturally until the 20th century, and Europe was shortly after the Spanish conquest divided by the Reformation, the Italian precedents did not fully carryover to her northern cousins. 

British and Dutch thinkers confronted the new phenomenon of a genuinely commercial society, where the accumulation of wealth was a central goal of daily life, with a hint from their Italian forerunners.  The Scholastics had argued that profit, rather than being a minor sin, a violation of the principle of Christian charity, was in fact just compensation for risk.  This invaluable economic insight provided a moral basis, however tenuous, for a commercial society.  The northern Protestants took this principle further arguing that the charging of interest, something which the late Medieval Italian church had increasingly tolerated despite official condemnation, was legally and morally permissible.  In both cases these were conditional on interest and profit not being "excessive."  Should they fall into, or approach, this moral gray zone then the state should intervene, setting maximum interest rates, which British and Canadian law did so until quite recently, or control prices to limit profits, an attitude which has never left us.

Much of the 18th and 19th century saw thinkers and legislators try to make their peace with capitalism; essentially with its implicit governing principle: selfishness.  As Adam Smith, capitalism's first great theorist and defender, observed:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages (Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter II).

How does one reconcile this with Matthew?  Not simply with the argument that "you cannot serve God and mammon," but more importantly with the principle of Christian charity?  How does one justify an inherently selfish system with a religion whose ethical foundation is altruism? The Victorians, ever ingenious, did in fact come up with a compromise.  The free market was the product of divine law; tariffs, wage and price controls and high taxes defied providential will.  One of the leading exponents of this market friendly approach was Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847), one of the leading evangelical thinkers of the era.  As David W Bebbington explains in his excellent work, William Ewart Gladstone: Faith & Politics in Victorian Britain:

Providence watches over human affairs, bringing good out of evil, order out of chaos.  The universe was designed by its Creator for the welfare of human beings so long as they did not abuse their trust.  Government regulation of trade constituted interference with the ways of providence.  It amounted to human laws infringing the sphere of divine laws.  The right policy was for the state to abandon as far as possible such restrictions as Corn Laws and customs duties.  Chalmers held that there should be no compulsory poor laws [welfare] either.  Charitable relief should be a voluntary affair, binding together the rich and the poor in mutual affection. The pinch of poverty would be a spur to able-bodied to work for a living.  Self-help was not only a maxim of prudence:  it was the wisdom of the Creator (pg. 93).

This view, accepted by Gladstone and many classical liberals of the era, has not become completely extinct in the century and a half since. While researching this post I came across this well written article (from 2003) at an evangelical website:

Many Christians support, on moral grounds, the prescription drug benefit for the elderly that Congress and the President are about to enact. They believe that Christ's call to help the poor and the needy extends beyond the realm of individual action to the state, and that the government has a moral imperative to provide for the poor. Some more liberal Christian groups, such as the National Council of Churches, seek to use the power of government to "end poverty." They believe that Christ's love can be expressed through government social programs, and that Christians should morally support welfare and entitlement programs that benefit the poor.

No matter how well meaning these Christians are, however, they fundamentally misunderstand the nature and purpose of Christian charity. They fail to appreciate that Christ's kingdom is not political or of this world, that good works must stem from faith and love of God, and that an important purpose of charity is a witness to non-believers. Additionally, American anti-poverty programs are based on the un-biblical notion of entitlement. Government programs do not further the kingdom of Christ, and Christians should not mistakenly believe that Jesus' call for individual acts of charity extends to the government.

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Furthermore, the bible explicitly repudiates the notion that Christians have a duty to help the poor under all circumstances. Charity is a gift, not an entitlement, and only the deserving should receive it. Those who can help themselves, but choose not to, should not receive assistance that will only allow them to indulge in their laziness. Paul expresses this clearly when he writes that

We command you, brothers, to keep away from every brother who is idle and does not live according to the teaching you received from us … we gave you this rule: "If a man will not work, he shall not eat." We hear that some among you are idle … such people we command and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to settle down and earn the bread they eat. (2 Thessalonians 3: 6-12)

Paul clearly states that Christians must work to earn their daily bread, that they should not abuse the generosity of others if they are capable of providing for themselves. Even Paul, who had every right to claim assistance from his fellow believers as he spread God's word, did not. Anyone who is capable of providing for himself ought to do so, and has no "right" to receive charitable aid from others. Bush's prescription drug benefit, for example, will be available to all seniors, regardless of their income or ability to provide for themselves. Any moral justification for providing "entitlement" payments must come from a source outside the bible, for the Christian doctrine of charity is irreconcilable with the notion of an entitlement to aid under all circumstances.

If the majority of Christians could come around to this view, as the majority of Victorian Christians did, the frontiers of the state would roll back in a few years.  Stephen Harper would be thrown out of office by the second coming of George Brown or Alexander Mackenzie, indeed Chalmers, like Brown, was a Free Kirk Presbyterian [Editor's note: why do the Scots keep creeping into these posts?].  It would seem, then, that Christianity can provide a defense of capitalism and that it can gain widespread political acceptance.  Gladstone was four times Prime Minister and easily the most influential British Prime Minister of the second half of the 19th century, his very name a byword for British liberty and prosperity.  At the height of his influence in the 1860s and 1870s he was known simply as the People's William, a hero among the working and middle classes for his tax cuts (he came close to abolishing the income tax) and meritocratic policies.  Nor was Gladstone a theocrat with a free market bent, he disestablished the Anglican Church in Ireland (i.e. separated church from state) in one of his first acts as Prime Minister.  He also supported the right of Charles Bradlaugh, an atheist, to sit in the House of Commons, support which cost Gladstone much popularity.

In this light William F Buckley seems less a witch-doctor and more the reviver of Gladstonian style classical liberalism.  It cannot be said that Buckley "initiated and sustained the movement to bring religion into the conservative movement," there was no conservative movement to speak of before him, only a handful of isolated individuals, widely dismissed as eccentrics.  Nor did WFB invent or pioneer the practice of "fusionism," the current conservative coalition of the religious, pro-free-marketers, and foreign policy hawks describes the Liberal Party Gladstone lead. 

As a matter of historical record, Gladstone was more comfortable with the pious and pro-free market elements in the party than with the hawks, who followed in the mold of Palmerston.  The possibility, held out by both Tracinski and Binswanger, of Ayn Rand becoming the intellectual leader of the American conservative is also, sadly, absurd.  There was no way that an atheist was going to be acceptable to anything like a wide intellectual base in mid-century America.  The issue in late 1950s, when NR was emerging as a potent cultural force and Atlas Shrugged climbing the best-seller lists, was not whether to have a conservative (i.e. pro-freedom) movement with religious or atheistical first principles, it was whether to have a conservative movement at all.  Had William F Buckley and Whittaker Chambers not read Ayn Rand out of the conservative movement, someone else would have.  It was simply too early for Rand's ideas to have had much of an impact.  Those who might not have read Rand, because of WFB and Chambers criticisms, were not the type of readers that she either needed or wanted. 

This does not mean that Binswanger and Tracinski's essential criticisms are incorrect, though I do believe they are misapplied in their assessment of WFB.  To most conservatives, even those who are not among the pious, the argument that allying intellectually with Christianity will lead to disaster seems ridiculous.  The career of William F Buckley Jr. seems to have put paid to that notion.  The career of William Gladstone and the century since his death, however, shows the wisdom of Tracinski's argument.  Beginning as an comparatively statist politician, opposing the free market, the separation of church and state and even the abolition of slavery, Gladstone, under the influence of intellectuals like Chalmers and his political godfather Sir Robert Peel, spent his first decade in politics moving toward freedom.  From careful study of contemporary events from his parliamentary and ministerial perches, he began to see that Christianity was indeed compatible with individual liberty, indeed a belief in Christianity seemed to even demand a belief in freedom. 

Though an Anglican, his oratorical style and energy was clearly influenced by evangelicalism.  He wrote and spoke with the technical expertise of an economist and public policy analyst, though he rose to prominence not because of his extraordinary erudition and intelligence, but because of his moral conviction.  He argued for human liberty not because it would allow men to produce more widgets, more cheaply, but because it was a moral right for men to be free.  The spirit of an Old Testament prophet in the Age of Smith and Ricardo.  Like Buckley, Gladstone was enormously successful, both intellectually and politically.  Near the end, however, he began to express doubts about the future of the Liberal Party which he lead and had helped, albeit reluctantly at first, found in the late 1850s. 

In a letter to Lord Acton, another of the period's leading liberal lights, he noted grimly that the new liberalism's "pet idea is what they call construction, that is to say, taking into the hands of the State the business of the individual man."  In the last decade of his political life, the 1890s, he saw, in the figures of Herbert Henry Asquith and David Lloyd George, two future Prime Ministers, that the new liberalism would evolve into the very antithesis of liberalism.  It was a trend the Grand Old Man could simply not understand.  Having spent most of his political life expanding the scope of human liberty, against the machinations of the statist Tories, he now found his own party going toward socialism. 

Many of the new liberals were secularists, products of the post-Darwinian era, dismissing first Genesis and then the remainder of the Bible and its teachings as myth.  Gladstone, the free market Christian statesmen, seemed anachronistic on both counts.  Yet many argued that Christianity called for socialism, that Christian charity demanded coercive action by the state for the greater good.  Individual rights were dismissed or downplayed as excuses for selfish behavior.  Woodrow Wilson, a mostly secular and American version of this trend, argued that society should be more concerned with human than with property rights.  Why weren't property rights also human rights?  If the right of property interfered with Christian charity, as they defined it, because it prevented the levying of an income tax or erecting a welfare state, it was the right of property that had to go. 

Between the old Gladstonian approach and New Liberalism, it was the latter that held the moral high ground.  Capitalism, however efficient, was based on selfishness.  Even if it did help the poor more than previous systems, it was less moral because its implicit basis was selfishness.  The word selfishness, is, of course, a muddle, perhaps what Ayn Rand would have called a package deal.  It encompasses both the pursuit of positive goals, earning a living, starting a business, raising a family and being happy, as well as negative values like theft and murder when they seemed to suit an individual's interest.  There has always been a hazy line between good and bad "selfishness," and its very ambiguity has been exploited by statists and collectivists for centuries.  It was the major loop hole that allowed the classical liberal project to fail, that brought man to the bloodiest of all human eras.

The Progressives, as they were known in North America, and their brethren in Europe the socialists, dropped most of the elements of Christianity except the altruistic portions of Christian ethics.  It was not a balance between sometimes turning the other cheek and sometimes seeking an eye for an eye, it was, by the time of the 1960s, completely meek.  The attack upon the self went only so far in the English speaking nations, where individualism was too deeply rooted to be removed by so sudden a shock.  Continental Europe, especially those nations where freedom had been stillborn, Russia and Germany, preached the fiercest forms of collectivism.  They were meet with terrifying silence.  The intellectual, political and economic appeasement of the tyrannies of the 20th century, by the English speaking peoples, came from moral cowardice.  There were simply too few men left who believed that individualism, that being selfish, was a positive value.  The Left and much of the Right spent the years between 1914 and 1991 in fear - in fear of the Gulags they pretended not to notice, in fear of being denounced as defenders of an economic and political system based on the rights of the sovereign individual, in fear of being seen as selfish.  If nothing else in her long life, Ayn Rand accomplished one enormously important task, she reminded men of that fatal ambiguity in the word "selfishness."  It was an ambiguity inherited from the Greeks but greatly exacerbated by the Christians.

Since Constantine we have been trapped in a cycle, oscillating between the better and worse elements in Christianity, between orthodox and heretic, between reason and faith.  The errors of two great men, William Gladstone and William F Buckley, blinded them to this dialectic, their faith, which seemed so powerful a tool in the defense of their values, was turned into a weapon against them.  Gladstone had his Lloyd George, Buckley lived just long enough to have, perhaps, witnessed his, Mike Huckabee.  The amiable former Governor of Arkansas is, despite his nominal Republicanism, a figure of the resurgent religious Left.  It is only political observers with a very short historical memory - blame the journalism schools for this - who imagine that Christianity can only be invoked by those on the Right.  William Jennings Bryan, today better remembered through his doppelganger Matthew Harrison Brady in Inherit the Wind, is an American precedent for the Religious Left.  Despite having been defeated by John McCain in this year's primaries, Huckabee remains a powerful force, able to command what every politician dreams of having, an enthusiastic political base, people who will walk through hellfire - if we may use that term - for their candidate.  That enthusiasm is a product both of Huckabee's folksy charm and apparent sincerity, but more importantly his piety. 

Most candidates for high office in the United States are now required to speak about their faith, even if, as in the case of the Clintons no one seriously believes they have any.  This is almost a formality, a concession that an American leader needs to have some type of moral compass and that most Americans, even many on the Left, can't imagine a morality divorced from a belief in God.  When Huckabee talks about his faith, he's either quite sincere or a very good actor.  He seems to be equally sincere about his contempt for Wall Street and the "Fat Cats."  No American politician would dare, even in the Democratic Party, to openly attack capitalism as such, they attack only its "excesses."  Most Americans, after all, are capitalists at one point in their lives, on a large or small scale.

More than half a century ago, Whittaker Chambers, a former GRU spy turned Christian writer, wrote a review of Atlas Shrugged so hostile that nearly three generations of Objectivists have held National Review, and its publisher, in contempt.  The review is typically branded in these circles as a "smear" or an "hatchet job" by a vengeful religious fanatic who didn't even bother to read book, or note the correct spelling of the main characters' names.  It was certainly hostile, it was not, however a smear.  Instead, the review was a consistently Christian reaction to the presentation of a Godless universe.  It dismisses the novel's protagonists as mere caricatures, a common complaint among readers, even those who agree with the author's political views.

Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive storyknown as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures.

Some admirers of Rand's writings dismiss these criticism as the complaints of neurotics; confronted with a projection of a heroic ideal they cringe and reject it.  Possibly, though my degree is in history, not psychology, and a more plausible explanation - are there really that many neurotics in the world? - rests on an old philosophical assumption, original sin.  Rand didn't believe in it, Whittaker Chambers, all Christians and even most secularists in some form, do believe in it.  If man is wicked from birth, always tending toward the wrong, the possibility of men who are not sinful is absurd if not outright obscene.  It should be noted, for those who have not read the novel, that Rand's heroes are scarcely omniscient or omnipotent, they often err, indeed much of the novel centers around Hank Rearden, an industrialist with a deep character flaw that allows others to exploit him. 

So much radiant energy might seem to serve a eugenic purpose. For, in this story as in Mark Twain's, "all the knights marry the princess" — though without benefit of clergy. Yet from the impromptu and surprisingly gymnastic matings of the heroine and three of the heroes, no children — it suddenly strikes you — ever result. The possibility is never entertained. And, indeed, the strenuously sterile world of Atlas Shrugged is scarcely a place for children. You speculate that, in life, children probably irk the author and may make her uneasy.

There are actually two children in the novel, though they appear briefly and are described, incidentally, as anything but pests.  There are also no children in Henry V and whole books of the Bible are also "sterile,"  were the authors of these works anti-child as well?  Neurosis again?  No, Rand shows sex for pleasure, not for procreation.  Lust is a sin.

In Atlas Shrugged, all this debased inhuman riffraff is lumped as "looters." This is a fairly inspired epithet. It enables the author to skewer on one invective word everything and everybody that she fears and hates. This spares her the playguy business of performing one service that her fiction might have performed, namely: that of examining in human depth how so feeble a lot came to exist at all, let alone be powerful enough to be worth hating and fearing. Instead, she bundles them into one undifferentiated damnation.

Rand spends about eighty pages doing exactly that, unfortunately for Chambers, the explanation she provides is "crudely materialistic."  Herein lies his real complaint:

At that point, in any materialism, the main possibilities open up to Man. 1) His tragic fate becomes, without God, more tragic and much lonelier. In general, the tragedy deepens according to the degree of pessimism or stoicism with which he conducts his "hopeless encounter between human questioning and the silent universe." Or, 2) Man's fate ceases to be tragic at all. Tragedy is bypassed by the pursuit of happiness. Tragedy is henceforth pointless. Henceforth man's fate, without God, is up to him, and to him alone. His happiness, in strict materialist terms, lies with his own workaday hands and ingenious brain. His happiness becomes, in Miss Rand's words, "the moral purpose of his fife."

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The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure, with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit. No doubt, Miss Rand has brooded upon that little rub. Hence in part, I presume, her insistence on man as a heroic being" With productive achievement as his noblest activity." For, if Man's heroism" (some will prefer to say: human dignity") no longer derives from God, or is not a function of that godless integrity which was a root of Nietzsche's anguish, then Man becomes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the condition of his happiness and its replenishment his foremost activity.

Without God, man is only an animal and will act accordingly.  A fifty year feud is based on that conception.  This is why Ayn Rand was read out of the conservative movement, why she had to be read out and why the conservative movement will probably follow in the footsteps of the classical liberals of the last century.  The long run can be a long time off, but it does come.  The problem of materialism, or man without a supernatural soul, has plagued Western thought since the earliest Greeks.  It is has replayed itself again and gain, like the battle between the reason and faith that has been waged within Christianity itself since Paul walked into the agora in Athens.

While giving a lecture in 2004, Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand's heir and the movement's elder statesman - or high priest according to his critics - made several controversial remarks regarding that year's elections.  He urged those assembled to vote for John Kerry, his rationale being that George W Bush was a theocrat and the country's liberty simply could not sustain another four years of Christian fanaticism.  For the first time in American history a President, argued Peikoff, was so religious he threatened to undermine the constitution.  More important than Peikoff's analysis, which is utterly absurd based on the current political and cultural situation, is the possible reason behind it.  In preface it must be noted that Peikoff is not a crank or a fool, he is an able and careful scholar of long experience, which is why his remarks struck many, including myself, as so bizarre.  Earlier in the lecture he remarks how when he was a student, back in the 1950s, most educated people regarded religion as a joke, the great enemy of freedom at that time being secular socialism. 

Religion was a primitive superstition that would slowly fade and die, like the paganism of the Ancients. The emergence of the Religious Right in the 1980s shocked Peikoff, and many other Objectivists.  They assumed that God was dead.  Through out the lecture, I'm running the risk here of long distance psycho-analysis, Peikoff displayed an exasperation not simply with the audience, many of whom thought him mad for his criticisms of President Bush, but with the persistence of religion.  He simply could not understand why religion hadn't died, how it had an almost vampire like ability to survive.  I suspect, though cannot confirm this by any means, that Peikoff has a relatively poor grasp not of American history but of American religious history.  The power of Christianity, its pervasiveness and fluctuating strength, is not widely taught or studied.  He quotes, with horror, the statistic that about one-quarter to one third of Americans are evangelicals and growing.  This is, however, roughly the historical average, and it also does not take into account how secular and this-wordly many of these evangelicals actually are, observe the pastor cited in this Time article from 2006.

But for a growing number of Christians like George Adams, the question is better restated, "Why not gain the whole world plus my soul?" For several decades, a philosophy has been percolating in the 10 million--strong Pentecostal wing of Christianity that seems to turn the Gospels' passage on its head: certainly, it allows, Christians should keep one eye on heaven. But the new good news is that God doesn't want us to wait. Known (or vilified) under a variety of names--Word of Faith, Health and Wealth, Name It and Claim It, Prosperity Theology--its emphasis is on God's promised generosity in this life and the ability of believers to claim it for themselves. In a nutshell, it suggests that a God who loves you does not want you to be broke. Its signature verse could be John 10: 10: "I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly." In a TIME poll, 17% of Christians surveyed said they considered themselves part of such a movement, while a full 61% believed that God wants people to be prosperous. And 31%--a far higher percentage than there are Pentecostals in America--agreed that if you give your money to God, God will bless you with more money.   

This is not a culture awaiting a theocrat, even in the form of an inarticulate Harvard MBAed Texan.  Religion has not died because it has not been replaced.  It is not a primordial fear of death, though this does play a part, that sustains religion as a cultural force, it is the need for morality and the existence of the soul.  Americans, being the most individualistic culture on earth, sense the need for individual morality deeper than any other people.  In a society where men are suppose to be self made, they need to have a standard of values from which to gage their actions.  Americans will not rely on the dictates of the state, or the intellectuals, or even their pastors (whom they shop for as they would a pair of jeans), they seek instead ideas.  This is ironic given Americans traditional anti-intellectualism, but this tradition stems more from their contempt for the crops of intellectuals we've had over the last little while.  Note how genuinely popular William F Buckley was, despite having personal mannerism resembling a Hollywood cliche of a preppy.  They saw someone who knew his stuff and offered a practical way of solving the country's problems, in other words they saw competence and responded accordingly. 

Christianity, being the West's default philosophy, was adopted and adapted by Americans to suit their needs.  It's no surprise than evangelicalism, the most entrepreneurial of sects, found a home in America so readily and so widely.  The worldliness of Americans, cited by thinkers from Tocqueville onward, would tend to undermine the sucess of any religion in America, yet it thrives, though in often very different forms.  There was never been a widely taught system of ethics that was not based on religious teachings.  Secular attempts to divorce ethics from religion have usually ended in disaster - the Sixties - or become a narrow and sterile cultural niche - utilitarianism and secular humanism. The average American thinks it impossible, confirmed by witnessing the immorality of the secular Left over the last forty years, to have a non-religious moral system.  Thinkers whose ideas did acquire popular acceptance - though their names are not widely known - such as John Locke whose political theories undergrid the American Constitution, and those of every Anglo-Saxon country, did not reject Christianity.  The whole of the Enlightenment was, in essence, an attempt to replace Christianity, it failed for the same reason John Locke did not provide an alternate ethical system, it was impossible to imagine the soul not having a supernatural cause. 

What provoked Whittaker Chambers visceral reaction to Atlas Shrugged was that same belief; without God there is no soul and so we are simply animals.  I suspect what underlies Leonard Peikoff's frustration at the survival of religion is the attitude that anyone, whatever their education or intelligence, could possible believe that the soul of man needs a mystical explanation.  This is not a quibble over esoteric details, but one of the central debates of Western history, and upon its outcome has turned much of that history.  The Victorians fell back upon religion because they could not imagine a soul without God, which is exactly the direction the enlightenment was heading in at the time of the French Revolution.  No single event in human history has done more to delay the progress of man on earth, since the Fall of Rome, than the French Revolution. 

The revolutionaries called themselves men of reason and liberty, modern men, reformers of the human condition as well as the political world.  Their barbarism so tainted those words that it took Britain nearly four decades before it bitterly engaged in some minor constitutional reforms.  As Burke noted, the French Revolutionaries where godless men, but sadly the great man went no further in his analysis. They denied the Christian God to replace it with their own, a "secular" God, a Supreme Being on Earth: the State.  The Soviets and their spin-offs would merely repeat the dark performance on a grander scale.  These were not perversions of the Enlightenment ideal, the Enlightenment scarcely existed outside of the Anglo-Dutch world.  18th century France experienced a brief period of intellectual revival and reform, but there was no real break from the collectivism and tyranny of the past.  Even Voltaire thought a benign despotism the best form of government, something no British thinker would have accepted.

The most famous line in Whittaker Chambers' review captures this view perfectly:   "From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: "To a gas chamber — go!"  In my personal experience about half of Rand's readers react in this way, the other half find it a Goethean hymn to human life.  In inclining toward latter I try to, for my own sake, understand the former. 

As an aside, after the review was published Rand was so furious with Buckley that, according to WFB, "for the rest of her life, she would walk theatrically out of any room I entered!"  Having an ex-Communist spy comparing a woman of Jewish descent, who narrowly escaped the Soviet Union with her life, and spent a lifetime denouncing statism, to a Nazi, might elicit such a response.  One also recalls that Gore Vidal, who in many ways was Buckley's evil Left wing twin, called WFB a "crypto-Nazi" on national television.  Buckley replied by threatening to punch Vidal in the face, which is a little more theatrical than walking out of a room.

If we are ever to break this vicious cycle, between faith and reason, it is a new and non-mystical understanding of the soul that we must attempt.  We must put forth the argument that in denying mysticism we do not deny our humanity, but affirm it.  From the other side, however, that those who seek to preserve a mystical conception are not, by virtue of their position, perverse or primitive, though they are in grave error.