Ayn Rand is dead - Christian libertarianism

National Review, May 28, 1990 by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., Jeffrey A. Tucker

IB THE Old Right, cultural conservatism came as naturally as devotion to the free market or aversion to foreign wars. But when the cold war split the Right into two camps, both sides suffered. Conservatives lost their skepticism about what Clare Boothe Luce called "globaloney"; libertarians lost their moorings to what Russell Kirk called "the permanent things."

Today, both parts of the movement are harking back to their roots. More and more conservatives are coming to agree with Patrick J. Buchanan's denunciations of global messianism, and more and more libertarians cheer Murray N. Rothbard's jeremiads against "libertine libertarians."

In the 1950s, virtually everyone in the libertarian movement was a cultural conservative, and virtually everyone was a believer," says George Resch of the Center for Libertarian Studies. "The Randian movement changed that, for the worse."

When Ayn Rand-the Jackie Collins of ideological novelists-split with her "intellectual heir" and boyfriend Nathaniel Branden in 1968, most of her followers came over to the libertarian movement, but they brought with them their unfortunate Randian baggage. Miss Rand was not just an atheist, Rothbard reminds us, "she was a militant atheist. She hated God and thought that Christianity ought to be stamped out." Cathohcism in particular she called the spiritual equivalent of Communism, with the same morality "altruism"), goal ("global rale by force"), and enemy ("man's mind").

The Libertarian Party, founded in 1971, was infected from the beginning with Miss Rand's pet hatreds, albeit with some odd twists. New Ageism was welcomed, for example, and the party's Randian-hippie coalition even embraced a witch. Only one group was made to feel unwelcome: Christians. But now a burgeoning group of scholars, journalists, and activists is recapturing the libertarian-Christian connection. These libertarians agree with Lord Acton that liberty is the highest political end of man, but see Christianity as the guide to the virtuous society as well as virtuous individuals. Miss Rand asserted undying war between faith and freedom. But it is to "Christianity that we owe individual freedom and capitalism," says Rothbard. It is no coincidence that "capitalism developed in Christian Europe after the transnational church limited the state. In ancient Greece and Rome, the individual was merely part of the city state or the empire, unimportant in his own right. Christianity changed that by stressing the infinite worth of each individual soul."

Freedom for Virtue

CHRISTIAN libertarians see no inconsistency in being both. For these libertarians freedom Is important for more than economic reasons. It allows Christians to transform the culture through the church and the family. This transformation is no business of the state's. As Pius IX wrote in his Syllabus of Errors, the civil authority" must not interfere in matters relating to religion, morality, and spiritual government." The Beatitudes are not instructions to federal officials, except in their personal lives.

"Freedom is no virtue in itself", says Robert Sirico, CSP, of the Catholic Information Center. "It is a context in which virtue can be practiced."

And, say the Christian libertarians, the virtuous life cannot be brought about by government. "It is a great mistake for religious people to appeal for state support," says James Sadowsky, SJ, of Fordham University. The price of that support is subservience to the state."

The leviathan state's systematic attack on the family goes beyond the promotion of unwed motherhood through welfare programs, and secular humanism through the government schools-the welfare state cuts to the heart of the family by arrogating to itself the authority of the father as protector and provider. In view of this, David Gordon of the Ludwig von Mises Institute points out that, contrary to the common impression that libertarians are free-thinkers and libertines, "Many libertarians ... are libertarians precisely because they wish to protect traditional values and culture from the state."

The Christian libertarian's reconciliation of freedom and virtue echoes the earlier "fusionism" of Frank S. Meyer, but it also harks back to the Spanish Scholastics and their rigorous defense of liberty, the free market, sound money, and the rule of law. Typical was Pedro Fernandez Navarrete, chaplain to the king of Spain, who wrote in 1619 that "the origin of poverty is high taxes" and that the only "agreeable country is one where no man is afraid of tax collectors." May the rector of George Bush's Episcopal parish preach similar views ! Moral posturing has become inextricably linked with our politics. William Bennett says that repealing the laws against drug use is the same as approving addiction. But as James Sadowsky points out, libertarianism does not "mandate moral approval of all the behaviors that we would legalize. We accept the Actonian distinction between civil law and moral law." This position is not, as some charge, a denial of Original Sin, but rather an affirmation of its baleful importance. A man giving full rein to his sinful tendencies does far more harm as a state official than as a private individual. Illiberal