When the American Atheists organization attempted to set up a booth at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference, not even their fervent support of limited government could secure them a spot. Brent Bozzel III, whose father asserted, along with his best friend, William F. Buckley, that the nation was founded on Christian principles, summed up the reason the American Atheists were ousted from the conference. Their presence, Bozzel stated, would have signified \u201can attack on God.\u201d<\/p>\n
The differences between the two were apparent in their mission statement. The American Atheists\u2019 mission statement was as follows:<\/p>\n
\u201c{The AA} is fighting for the civil liberties of atheists and the total, absolute separation of government and religion.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n How different was the mission statement of the social conservative group American Conservative Union (of which Bozzel sits on the board of directors) in attendance: \u201cWe affirm our belief in the Declaration of Independence, in particular, that our inherent rights are endowed by the creator.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n It is apparent why these two groups are at loggerheads. Social conservatives hew to God-given rights, which, since the government \u201crecognizes\u201d and \u201cprotects\u201d these \u201crights,\u201d makes \u201cchurch\u201d strangely dependent upon \u201cstate.\u201d<\/p>\n On the other side, we have the position of the AA that church must be separated from state. To agree that rights are God-given might be taken to mean that those who don\u2019t believe in God are ineligible for such rights; and their \u201cpersecution\u201d immediately follows.<\/p>\n In a certain sense, both \u201csides\u201d promote a nightmare world about each other.<\/p>\n For many of the newly vocal social conservatives the separation of church and state goes against the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which \u201ccodifies\u201d and \u201cprotects\u201d these \u201cGod-given\u201d rights. There is a sense that if God is detached from these \u201crights,\u201d \u201chuman-made\u201d rights are created, which result in citizens being made slaves of a capricious state. In such a view, eventually the separation of church from state ushers in immorality, and like Rome, America will collapse.<\/p>\n Those who support the separation of church and state argue that merging the two would create a theocracy that would imprison and perhaps, in the model of historical precedent, even execute nonbelievers.<\/p>\n But not all conservatives subscribe to this either\/or. Some support limited government and the separation of church and state; and still see religion as attractive and sometimes a necessary component for democracy. The most interesting and intellectually rigorous of this group is George Will.<\/p>\n Will\u2019s opposite number on the social conservative side has been Pat Buchanan, who is articulate and combative. His social issue stances show his belief that there should be no separation of church and state. Buchanan demands that school prayer, supported by the government in the form of a Constitutional amendment, be brought into the public school classroom. Always the culture warrior, Buchanan in 1999 wrote:<\/p>\n \u201cA National Day of Prayer, conducted inside the classrooms of America\u2019s public schools, by Christian teachers, in open defiance of Supreme Court edicts, would send a message of political strengths the Secular City could not ignore.\u201d<\/p>\n For Buchanan, the separation of church and state is a creation of the secular left. He, like other social conservatives, states that it is not in the Constitution. To follow and obey it, he holds, would result in the end of the American experiment. If the American government did not \u201cdefend the moral order rooted in the Old and New Testament and Natural Law,\u201d then \u201cWestern Civilization would collapse.\u201d Thus, in Buchanan\u2019s world, the backbone of the conservative movement is religion.<\/p>\n But not all social conservatives have demanded that only Christian believers could be part of the conservative movement. William F. Buckley, in many ways Buchanan\u2019s intellectual guru, welcomed atheists into the conservative big tent. At first glance the fervently Catholic Buckley would have seemed the least likely to support this stance.<\/p>\n Buckley\u2019s first book, God and Man at Yale<\/em> (1951), demanded that college professors no longer be allowed to teach what Buckley called \u201ccollectivism\u201d and \u201catheism\u201d to students. Instead, in a kind of reverse political correctness, he demanded that they should instead teach \u201cfree market\u201d economics and \u201cChristianity to students.\u201d<\/p>\n Buckley saw such religious education as necessary for fighting the Cold War as the missile silos. For him, America was founded on Christian principles, and such principles had to be conflated with the military-industrial complex in order to counter the appeal of the Soviets\u2019 secular faith.<\/p>\n But had Buckley been alive in 2014, he might have been more welcoming to the inclusion of the American Atheists at CPAC; for Buckley saw no reason agnostics and even atheists could not be part of the conservative moment when he stated, \u201cA conservative need not be religious but he must not despise religion.\u201d<\/p>\n Before examining the atheistic Will, it should be noted that not all social conservatives hiss at the separation of church and state. Dinesh D\u2019Souza does not. D\u2019Souza shares with Buchanan a belief that the country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles and that natural rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution come from God. But he also states that the separation of church and state is a Christian creation. For D\u2019Souza believes that the separation of church and state did not come from John Locke or Thomas Jefferson; instead it came from Jesus:<\/p>\n \u201c{The separation of church and state is not} an Enlightenment idea or an American idea, but long before that, it was a Christian idea. . . . Christ seems to be the first one who thought of it. As we read in Matthew 22:21, Christ said, \u2018Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar\u2019s and; unto God the things that are God\u2019s.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n D\u2019Souza is not the only unusual figure concerning conservative cultural warriors. David Horowitz, although an admitted agnostic, nevertheless shares with social conservatives the same belief that there is no evidence of a separation of church and State clause in the Constitution. Horowitz believes the whole basis for this concept came from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson, the contents of which were \u201cmisinterpreted\u201d by the \u201cmalicious left\u201d to drive religion from the public square.\u201d<\/p>\n Charles Krauthammer was even more unusual. Krauthammer, who had a rigorous upbringing in Jewish religion (by high school he could pen essays in Hebrew) stated that he does not believe in God, but, paradoxically, \u201cfears him greatly.\u201d And yet he also despised atheism, calling it \u201cthe least plausible of all theologies.\u201d<\/p>\n But at the same time Krauthammer wanted religion separated from politics. He lamented that the 2008 Republican presidential primaries were \u201cknee deep in religion.\u201d He was disgusted with how readily the Republican candidates were to answer personal questions about their religious beliefs. By answering such questions, Krauthammer asserted, the candidates were enabling a \u201creligious test for office.\u201d<\/p>\n George Will, raised Presbyterian, has none of Krauthammer\u2019s inconsistency about the existence of God. In 2014 Will forthrightly stated, \u201cI\u2019m an atheist. An agnostic is someone who is not sure. I\u2019m pretty sure. I see no evidence of God. The basic question in life is not \u2018Is there a God?\u2019 but \u2018Why does anything exist?\u2019 . . . Thomas Aquinas said that there must be a first cause for everything, and we call the first cause \u2018God\u2019. Fine, but it just has no hold on me.\u201d<\/p>\n He concludes that he is an \u201camiable, low-voltage atheist.\u201d<\/p>\n And yet he is also an odd one.<\/p>\n Like Buckley, Will believes that conservative atheists (such as he) should not shun social conservatives. Will sees both groups\u2019 belief in limited government as a unifying issue. He writes that proponents of \u201climited government should be friendly to the cause of American religion, even if they are not believers themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n But Will\u2019s \u201camiability\u201d has given way to anger toward Christians at times. He mocks Christians who \u201care joining today\u2019s scramble for the status of victims.\u201d Of Buckley\u2019s beloved denomination, Catholicism, Will has been even harsher. In 1987 he castigated the \u201cresidual anti-Semitism at work in Vatican policy.\u201d In 2015 he attacked Pope Francis for standing \u201cagainst modernity, rationality, science, and ultimately the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which people and their desires are not problems but precious resources.\u201d Will concluded that Francis is more in line with the Middle Ages when the church \u201cruled the roost.\u201d<\/p>\n Will recognizes the necessity of the separation of church state when he writes of the \u201cdark and bloody ground of the relationship between religion and American public life.\u201d He cuts to the heart of social conservative beliefs by asserting that \u201crights\u201d are not God-given. Civil liberties do not require a \u201creligious foundation,\u201d and in a passage anathema to conservative Christians, Will states that the Founding Fathers shared this view. As such, he sees the American experiment as owing \u201cmuch more to John Locke than Jesus.\u201d<\/p>\n But as a whole Will believes that the Founders did not see religion as detrimental to the American government. They, according to Will, saw religion as necessary in instilling morality in citizens, without which the American experiment would not work. Will even argues that religion strengthens the Lockean concept of limited government:<\/p>\n \u201cIt is at the foremost of our civil society that religious institutions pay a crucial role in sustaining our limited government.\u201d Religion is part of a \u201cwholesome division of labor\u201d with \u201cpolitical institutions.\u201d<\/p>\n Will credits the separation of church and state for making America \u201cthe most relentlessly modern nation\u201d in history. In turn, religion, by \u201ccomfortably\u201d coexisting beside government, is itself strengthened because of its \u201cindependence of politics.\u201d<\/p>\n Will is certainly an unusual atheist. Finding value in religion he often sides with it in the culture wars against the secular left. He decries the \u201cactive hostility to the religious impulse on the part of those who preach tolerance and diversity.\u201d He recognizes that the secular faith, with its belief that human nature as malleable, has, in the form of fascism and communism, created more carnage in the twentieth century than religious groups.<\/p>\n But he also takes positions anathema to the Christian right. He supports assisted suicide, the legalization of drugs, and is against the death penalty (it must be said that of the latter, Christians can be conflicted on this issue).<\/p>\n Some could call Will himself conflicted and inconsistent and even muddled regarding his view of religion. But in an age in which some Christian conservatives hope for a kinder, gentler theocracy, and some of their opponents want religion driven from public life in order to launch their social engineering schemes, Will shows that one can be against both.<\/p>\n Editor\u2019s note: <\/strong>This magazine has always cited biblical evidence for a separation of church and state as unambiguously proclaimed by Jesus Christ. Current Christian views to the contrary depend heavily on a misunderstanding of the dynamics of the Old Testament theocracy, where God directly made His views known. Absent that dynamic, any pseudotheocracy today is bound to degenerate to that age of the Inquisition, where conscience died at the expense of those who presumed to know and be the voice of God. The U.S. First Amendment is the plaything of revisionism; but it is very easy to show that it was modeled after the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, whose author, Thomas Jefferson used the expression \u201cwall of separation\u201d to describe the statute. The reaction to the separationist intent of the amendment in large part explains the furor at Jefferson winning the presidency in 1801. He was somewhat inaccurately labeled \u201cGodless.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When the American Atheists organization attempted to set up a booth at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference, not even their fervent support of limited government could secure them a spot. Brent Bozzel III, whose father asserted, along with his best friend, William F. Buckley, that the nation was founded on Christian principles, summed up<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[332],"tags":[164],"class_list":["post-6507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-november-december-2019","tag-november-december-2019"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6507\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charming-bohr.160-238-31-172.plesk.page\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}