If you follow The Corner you know about last week’s “dorm room” conversation (as Jpod called it) about religiosity and conservatism. Today Derb linked to a great summary by an obviously bright agnostic, Razib Khan of Gene Expression.
Mac Donald clearly believes that reason and skepticism, in concert with a healthy dose of empiricism, can serve as the grounding for a conservative & traditionalist worldview. I tend to agree, and, as an empirical fact I have met many individuals who lack a belief in God but are generally conservative. Where Heather stands apart has been her recent vocality in attacking the symbiotic relationship between American conservatism and religion over the last generation. I think Ponnuru is correct that the Republican party isn’t going to lose atheist & agnostic votes over their religiosity, we’re probably less than 5% of the population (most people with “No religion” are theists of some sort). Additionally, last I checked The Almanac of American Politics unbelievers only gave 20-30% of their votes for Republicans anyhow. Republicans worrying about losing the Jewish vote is a good analogy, Jews cast about 3 out of 4 votes in a given election for Democrats, and they are fewer than 1 out of 20 voters. But, there was a reason in the 1950s William F. Buckley expelled the anti-Semities from the conservative movement. In fact, there were two reasons:
1) The conservative movement included many Jews from the beginning. Frank Meyer, the father of fusionism being a prominent early example (Kristol and Podhoretz came on board in the 70s). Even if Jews are a trivial proportion of the “base,” they are numerous in the “braintrust.”
2) Jews are not the only group that rejects anti-Semitism, many American Christians are not particularly tolerant of this attitude. Though Jews did not form much of the base, those who would be turned off by anti-Semitism do (this was before the influx of philo-Semitic evangelicals, the conservative movement in the 1950s was a coalition of Jews, secularists and “High Church” Christians).
Includes updates and some interesting reader comments. I’m going to bookmark that site.
Update:
Derb notes
Razib wishes it known that he is an atheist, not an agnostic. Nice to know that a Madrassa education can do that.
And Heather Mac Donald has a wonderful reply to Novak about what’s what’s right and wrong with religion.