But the effort to marginalize, even demonize, Christian conservatives is unworthy of anyone who considers himself a member of the political movement that is trying to preserve the American tradition. ~Steven Warshawsky

Mr. Warshawsky makes many smart points, some of which I’ve touched upon in my numerous posts against skeptical and secular conservatives, and he represents part of what may be the beginning of a backlash against the hyperventilating of members of what Warshawsky calls the “atheist wing” of the movement.  The hyperventilating continues here.  Of course, in terms of total numbers, it is more like an “atheist feather” than a whole wing, but it is a useful designation as any (though it will be greeted with outrage by Sullivan, Vicar of Doubt and Defender of the Quite Possibly Untrue Faith).  Consider these sentences from near the beginning of Christopher Orlet’s piece in the New English Review:

But I, for one, am not so ready to concede that atheism is “against our reason.” Historically I have had the theologians on my side.

But this is absurd.  He hasn’t had “the theologians” on his side, historically or otherwise, since the entire enterprise of theology is the use of reason to make the ways of God known to man.  If believers assumed that reason was somehow naturally inclined to atheism, theology would never have come into existence in any religion.  It is precisely because Christian believers consider our Faith to be the most rational thing and in perfect agreement with the workings of reason that Christians took over and adapted Greek ontology, metaphysics and logic for the purposes of discoursing about the nature and works of God.  Mr. Orlet cherry-picks from Luther at his most anti-intellectual and somehow thinks he has proven his blatantly false claim, while ignoring the other two thousand years of Christian theology and philosophy.  Can the “skeptical” conservatives begin to see why their religious friends do not take their complaints very seriously?

What is one going to do with an article that begins so poorly?  I suppose we must soldier on, if only to get to the more ridiculous bits that come later.  Posing the question to Edmund Burke, whose quote about the innate quality of man’s religiosity opens the article, Mr. Orlet asks:

What then would Burke have made of his spiritual and intellectual heirs who have recently and publicly emerged from the closet of skepticism, and thereby suffered the enmity of the so-called fundies and theocons?

It is hard to say what Burke would have said, since the situation would probably have seemed very strange to him, but he might have said that it is not surprising that people so egregiously ungrateful to their ancestors and disdainful of the religious inheritance these ancestors received, added to and then passed on have been met with less than warm enthusiasm among those who believe that we have obligations to the dead and those not yet born.  This is where the Burkean conservative looks at the atheist and sees an impious fool–impious not really because he rejects God, but rather because he rejects the established customs and centuries-long traditions of his ancestors and thus cuts himself off from the contract binding past, present and future.  He separates himself from the great continuity and wisdom of the tradition, even though, as Kirk said, conservatives believe that the individual is foolish and the species wise. 

From Burke’s mildly religious perspective, he would probably marvel at these people, who are neither oppressed nor actually marginalised by anyone, complaining as if they have all suffered the fate of Giordano Bruno or Mennochio, the hero of Carlo Ginsburg’s cheese book.  Let’s be specific.  Who has “suffered the enmity of the so-called fundies and theocons”?  Mr. Orlet tells us:

We’re talking about a Who’s Who of conservative writers and pundits: Stephen Chapman, Theodore Dalrymple, John Derbyshire, Heather MacDonald, Andrew Stuttaford and James Taranto.

With the exception of James Taranto, who is obnoxious for any number of other reasons, I generally like the writing and work of all of these people.  Several of them have had articles appear in a magazine, The American Conservative, to which I have also contributed, and I am proud that TAC welcomes smart commentary from so many widely varying perspectives.  Thus Ms. Mac Donald and I have both ridiculed Mr. Bush’s vacuous “freedom is God’s gift to humanity” propaganda, but from entirely different perspectives and with somewhat different arguments.  The irony is that she does not seem to care that Mr. Bush may be simply using and exploiting Christians’ beliefs when he drags God into his awful foreign policy decisions.  Nor does she seem concerned that his conception of God is so far removed from that of traditional Christianity as to make the indictment against Mr. Bush irrelevant to her criticism of religious conservatives generally. 

When these writers make smart, well-formed arguments and present copious amounts of evidence to back up their claims, as they often will, they are among the better pundits in mainstream conservatism.  Mac Donald’s work on immigration, Chapman’s columns on civil liberties and Derbyshire’s blasts against Intelligent Design are breaths of fresh air after choking on the miasma of “nation of immigrants” pablum, panegyrics for the unitary executive and muddle-headed enthusiasm for pseudo-science that fill so much conservative commentary today.  Obviously, almost all of them are at prominent conservative or at least vaguely right-leaning journals and newspapers, where they have bigger and more prominent platforms than many a religious conservative, most of whom must be satisfied to eke out a living in the “provinces” of the movement.  It is like people living at the courts in Rome and Constantinople complaining that they lack the tremendous access to power and prestige afforded the monks at St. Sava’s in Palestine.  It is ludicrous, and I am frankly tired of hearing some of them whine about how the mean theocons have made their lives unpleasant.  I should emphasise that it has only been some of these people, as far as I know, who have complained at any great length about the perverse influence of religion on modern conservatism.  What have been the consequences?  Has anyone been fired from his or her position?  Has anyone even attempted to force them into the political or professional wilderness?  The answer to both of these questions is plainly “no.”   

But it should come as no surprise that at least some of these people have earned the enmity of “so-called fundies and theocons”!  For starters, they call their religious allies things like “fundie” and “theocon,” both of which are obviously disparaging terms intended to reduce intelligent positions with which they disagree into easily dismissed caricatures.  (Mr. Orlet has already shown that he prefers to keep his argument superficial and light as well by stating right away that he thinks theism and reason have historically always been at odds.)  Next, some will attack religious conservatives, often with great vehemence, as people who have somehow done terrible violence to the content of conservatism (as if it was religion, and not galloping ideological commitments to militaristic foreign policy and expansion of government, that had distorted or changed conservatism in recent years).  This is always a charged statement to make about any other conservatives, and it had better have something behind more than the fact that the critic is an atheist and doesn’t believe all this God-talk nonsense anyway.  It is unseemly that these skeptics and atheists have suddenly discovered their voice at the very moment when everyone and his brother seems to have a book out blaming Republican political woes and conservative disarray on the role of religious conservatives in the most dishonest campaign of scapegoating I have seen in many years.  It certainly doesn’t help when there seems to be an assumption among at least a few of the “skeptical” conservatives that their position is the natural and obvious one that conservatives ought to take, and that the connection with religion, or more specifically Christianity, is bad for conservatism.  This is not the plea of the persecuted dissident for toleration, but the demand of the ideological cadre for a takeover of the entire operation at the expense (obviously) of the religious-cons whose views they loathe so. 

The only trouble is that the religious-cons are not the wicked establishment that the heroic skeptical rebels are trying to overthrow.  Far from being a great and all-powerful force ruling over the movement, religious-cons are actually much more like the Kansan fellow behind a certain curtain who could put on an impressive show.  Much like religious conservative leaders, who enjoy boasting about their access and their influence far out of proportion to what they actually achieve in policy terms, he was able to convince people who were willing to believe in the display of power that he was much more powerful and mighty than he really was.  The heroic rebels are not so much engaged in a struggle to liberate the conservative mind as they are simply engaged in conservative fratricide as a way of pushing views they dislike even farther out to the margins than they already actually are.  It annoys the skeptical conservatives that many pundits and intellectuals pay lip service to Christianity or religious “values” as things important to the conservative movement, but what they never seem to grasp is that so much of this is nothing more than lip service.  It is weird how anyone could come away from the last six years and think that conservatism had been too much pervaded by the teachings of the Lord!

Mr. Orlet then goes on to say something that is categorically untrue:

This, and MacDonald’s earlier piece for The American Conservative, led to many loud catcalls for her excommunication from the communion of conservative Republicans.

One need only go back through the NRO archives to prove this false.  Many loud catcalls?  From whom?  How many?  How loud?  Mr. Orlet doesn’t say, and no wonder.  The response to her article was so low-volume that you could hear a door hinge squeak.  NR, ever that engine of ideological purges, bent over backwards to appease, flatter and butter-up Ms. Mac Donald.  Every criticism was prefaced by a paragraph of how much the critic liked and admired Ms. Mac Donald, and how she was just the best.  Her, I’m sorry to say, rather commonplace and predictable objections to revealed religion were treated as if they were the utterances of one of the Muses herself.  You see, there are deviationists on important things, such as the Iraq war, and they must be roundly denounced in the strongest possible way (“unpatriotic,” etc.), but those who deny the existence of God are typically sporting folks from the metropole with whom one can laugh about the mad evangelicals over cocktails.  There’s no need to turn your backs on people who reject the Creator, but those who reject the empire are clearly a bunch of lunatics. 

It’s true, most of her interlocutors there and elsewhere disagreed with her claims and her atheism (no surprises there), but far from calling for her “excommunication” many of the participants in the conversation almost seemed anxious to accelerate her on the path to conservative sainthood, so great was their praise of her.  Rather than simply ignoring her, as might be done to those whom conservatives wanted to shun and drive out, all of us from the various conservative factions engaged with her arguments; I found the arguments severely wanting, but there was never really any question in my mind of declaring her persona non grata (as if I were in any position to declare anything of the kind!).  I did question how it was possible to be a conservative while being an atheist, and I think it is a legitimate question, but when even Santayana makes it into The Conservative Mind I am inclined not to harp on the question as much as I could. 

Never has a dissident received a less stinging rebuke and correction than Ms. Mac Donald did at the hands of the First Things and National Review crowd.  This kid glove treatment is striking for what it said about the participants themselves and their perceptions of what was at stake in responding to Mac Donald: while some of her respondents are religious people, they seem to have endorsed the idea that numerous conservative pundits and intellectuals are not and they concluded that they risked alienating large numbers of these folks if they savaged Mac Donald in the way that they would denounce and belittle traditional conservatives talking about agrarianism or antiwar conservatives.  For them, Mac Donald represented a large number of their current allies, while other dissidents from consensus positions within the movement about, say, corporations or interventionism were of no consequence and could be run off without a second thought.  Going against God, or tolerating those who did, was easy; going against corporations or the foreign policy establishment would have required real conviction. 

While I opened up, figuratively speaking, with both barrels against Ms. Mac Donald’s spurious claims about the nature of modern conservatism (in which there is, she says, a “crippling” reliance on religion) and also against her atheism, I do not recall urging her anathematisation.  Indeed, if pressed I suspect Mr. Orlet will have a hard time coming up with even a handful of catcalls, loud or otherwise, calling for Ms. Mac Donald to be expelled from “respectable” (or even marginal) conservative company.  She is in no danger of any expulsion, because, as she herself has said, probably half of the pundits covertly share her views, thus proving that the core of her complaint about conservatism (i.e., it is too religious) is unfortunately based on the most superficial analysis of a few rhetorical and symbolic nods to religious voters.  The martyrology of Heather Mac Donald will have to wait for another day.

Mr. Orlet says in his closing remarks: “Conservatives have, in a sense, made a deal with the diety [sic]…”  But we know this to also be untrue, since Mike Huckabee has been languishing in the polls for weeks.