Chapter 27

This piece explores the attitudes held by some of the most famous twentieth-century libertarians concerning the role of religion and religious motivation in politics. I focus on Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard. We shall see that while all four figures had views about the role of religion in explaining political and economic events, they had almost nothing to say about the appropriate role of religion in politics. When they wrote on the matter, their contributions were seldom reflective or systematic. With the partial exception of Murray Rothbard, libertarian intellectuals simply did not think that the role of religion in politics was a central political concern that they felt compelled to address. Remarkably, other libertarians had absolutely nothing to say, such as Milton Friedman, who is excluded from this article simply because there were almost no passages worth analyzing across his entire corpus.

Before I begin, I should sketch the religion-and-politics issues we might have expected them to address. There are three such normative issues: the role of religion in democratic discourse, the role of religion with respect to freedom and free exercise, and the role of religion as a guiding principle of government, either via theocracy or weaker forms of religious establishment. As for non-normative issues, we might have expected the great twentieth-century libertarians to provide analyses of the role of religious motivation, religious thought, and religious political organization in explaining political events. We find non-normative commentary, but it is sporadic and mostly superficial. In this case, Rothbard is the exception, as he thinks that religious motivation is a major factor in driving support for the state and some opposition to it.

After reviewing what Mises, Hayek, Rand, and Rothbard had to say on some of these issues, I will speculate about why libertarians had so little to say on what is obviously an important topic. I will also outline what a generic libertarian approach to the core issues in religion in politics debates.

1MISES ON RELIGION

Mises’s views on religion are largely confined to the extent to which liberalism and Christianity are compatible and whether Christianity and socialism are compatible. Mises is of two minds on both subjects.1

Mises tended to be more critical of religion in his earlier works, arguably becoming friendlier to religion in politics over time. In Socialism (Mises 1951), one of his earliest works, Mises is critical of Christianity despite acknowledging that it does not imply socialism. In Chapter 29 of Socialism, “Christianity and Socialism,” Mises argues that religion necessarily has a social ethic, for “without social ethics religion would be dead.” Islam and Judaism are dead, Mises thinks, as they’re merely systems of ritual that offer nothing to the mind. Christianity, at least, produces great men, unlike the other two religions. Mises also endorses historical biblical criticism of the sort one would encounter in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for as Mises argues, “modern biblical research of this order is incompatible with theology” (412).

More broadly, Mises argued that Christianity is the product of social evolution and really has no core essence, which can be illustrated by Christianity’s attitude toward asceticism. Mises argues that Jesus believed that the end of the world was coming soon, which is why he deemphasized earthly goods. He also claimed that Jesus was an other-worldly obsessed ascetic: “Jesus was no social reformer. His teachings had no moral application to life on earth” (416). Jesus and the Apostles did not set up socialism, since Christian sharing consists in consumption goods alone. In fact, early Christianity didn’t care about social issues at all. Jesus’ recommendations are purely negative, specifying what one must not do, and Jesus offers nothing to replace the economic order of his day. Christianity can also be used to dissolve all existing social ties and legal systems. Jesus placed devotion to God between father and son, mother and daughter, and brother and sister. He was also indifferent to Roman and Jewish law.

This is why, in the end, Christianity is neutral toward social systems, for it is, in its essence, unconcerned with them. Christianity can therefore support or undermine capitalism, say via prohibitions on usury or by defending private property.

Mises distinguishes the teachings of Jesus and the Apostles from contemporary Christianity and Christian influences during the Reformation and afterwards. Mises argues that liberalism has tamed Christianity, as liberalism “is the flower of that rational enlightenment which dealt a death blow to the regime of the old Church and from which modern historical criticism has sprung” (423). And yet, Christianity is still dangerous, especially following the Reformation, when theology started to have more institutional consequences. The Church cannot “rest content … in a free state” but must attempt to dominate the state (427).

Mises also spends time on the doctrine of Christian socialism, which he thinks is ultimately a form of “state socialism” such that it is hard to distinguish the two in some cases. The Christian socialist, when she can be distinguished from other socialists, is often conservative, trying to use socialism to restore feudal economic relations: “the Christian socialism of today corresponds to the economic ideal of the medieval Scholastics” (255). Christian socialism also tends to be stationary, not focusing on improvements in the future. Christian socialism has the virtue of not opposing private property, but it requires a form of intervention in the economy that must invariably lead, at least in principle, to the embrace of socialism: “He must therefore progressively move from a demand for price regulation to a demand for a supreme control over production and distribution” (258). But at least Christians have often shunned openly declaring as socialism and so focus on simply correcting the excesses of capitalism and its abuses. Christian socialism also opposes Marxism; it is reformist in character.

Sometimes Christianity is compatible with any social system, but in other cases, it can resist liberalism or socialism. Its contemporary political manifestations, which only somewhat reflect the character of the early Christian church, can be compatible with liberalism or socialism, depending on emphasis and context.

In Liberalism (Mises 2000), Mises offers further commentary on the relationship between Christianity and liberalism. Liberalism is concerned only with this life, unlike religion, and liberalism tames religion by ending theocracy and barring the burning of heretics (55). Liberalism does not demand faith or devotion and there is nothing mystical about it (192). Liberals need not appeal to God or nature to ground liberalism.

In Human Action (Mises 1998), we encounter a different, friendlier attitude. Mises claims that liberalism has no bone to pick with Christianity, which Mises now understands in a somewhat Protestant fashion as belief and practice rooted in the Christian scriptures. Mises goes on to characterize the essence of religious belief in William James’s terms as a “purely personal and individual relation between man and a holy, mysterious, and awe-inspiring divine” (156). This affects human conduct but “does not assert anything with regard to the problems of social organization.” Mises even goes on to celebrate Francis of Assisi for not focusing on politics or economics (157). Liberalism does not affect this sort of religion. For Mises, liberalism is a “purely rational and scientific theory of social cooperation” and its “system of knowledge” excludes theological knowledge, but that assumption does not rule out religious belief, so long as religious belief is not manifested as theocracy. Theocracy is incompatible with liberalism, however (155–6).

Even so, liberals “welcome the support which religious teachings may give to those moral precepts of which they themselves approve” but are otherwise opposed to religious reasoning. Mises also defends the separation of church and state as creating peace between factions.

And in Theory and History (Mises 1957), in a section on revelation, Mises again repeats the idea that the essence of religion is a private practice and feeling. There are no public ways to resolve theological disputes, and Christianity has only become political because other forces have compelled it do so:

It is a myth that the political and social institutions of the ages preceding modern individualistic philosophy and modern capitalism were imbued with a genuine Christian spirit. The teachings of the Gospels did not determine the official attitude of the governments toward religion. It was, on the contrary, this-worldly concerns of the secular rulers—absolute kings and aristocratic oligarchies, but occasionally also revolting peasants and urban mobs—that transformed religion into an instrument of profane political ambitions (339).

Christian political activity is both provoked by secularism and derives many of its commitments from secular movements. Christianity can be made to burn heretics or fight Marxism. That Christianity has fallen victim to socialist thinking is a great triumph of “socialist and interventionist propaganda” (345). On the other hand, Hegel, Comte, and Marx drew on the Enlightenment idea of progress, which was an adaptation of the Christian view of salvation (171). And Mises claims that if Christians really care about the poor, they should support markets (346).

We can summarize Mises’ view as follows: Religion, as represented by Christianity, has no essential political or social implications. Instead, secular forces prod religion in the directions they please. This explains why Christians have held lots of different political positions, including liberalism and socialism. Mises also holds to the common liberal narrative that religion is largely a private matter and that liberalism tamed and dominated religion in a good way; and, like other libertarians, Mises worries about certain ascetic and other-worldly aspects of religion that lead it to fail to support general prosperity.

Mises has next to nothing to say about the normative role of religion in politics. He seems to thinks government should be so small that religious exemptions become a non-issue. He opposes, as one might expect, religious establishment, but this counts for little.

2HAYEK ON RELIGION

Hayek expressed little animosity to religion or religious belief. His criticisms are lightly peppered across his work at various points. He remarks that religious beliefs can be “seriously restrictive of liberty” and have been “universally enforced” in a way that no other system ideas have been able to do, at least over the long term (Hayek 2011: 223).

Hayek complains about the tendency of theological liberals to turn religion into a social gospel of social justice, which “substitutes a temporal for a celestial promise of justice, and who hope they can thus continue their striving to do good” (Hayek 1978: 66). The Catholic Church is especially responsible for adopting an ideal of “social justice.” Hayek also worries about the tendency of some Protestant thought to promote the false belief that economic reward in this life is due to individual merit (interview).

Hayek thinks that classical liberals, in particular those on the European continent, were mistaken to make enemies of people of faith and ecclesiastical authorities. Hayek claims that “true liberalism has no quarrel with religion, and I can only deplore the militant and essentially anti-religionism which animated so much of nineteenth-century Continental liberalism” (2011: 528). Hayek thinks this fact is illustrated by the English Whigs who were “if anything … much too closely allied with a particular religious belief.” It is also worth drawing the reader’s attention to Hayek’s celebration of Acton and the contrast Acton provides with the “hostile attitude towards religion characteristic of much of Continental liberalism” (Hayek 1992: 210). Hayek goes so far as to claim that “unless this breach between true liberal and religious convictions can be healed there is no hope for a revival of liberal forces” (244).

All the same, the liberal differs from the conservative in that the liberal “will never regard himself as entitled to impose [his religious beliefs] on others” and will refuse to confuse the spiritual and temporal spheres. Hayek even acknowledged a connection between his conception of the limits of knowledge and “the Christian tradition of the fallibility and sinfulness of man,” and he saw a tension between these related insights and the rationalist’s pursuit of human perfection in this life (2011: 120).

Hayek argues, in The Road to Serfdom, that the true individualism he wishes to defend derives from “Christianity and the philosophy of classical antiquity” (Hayek 2007: 14) Hayek also insists in Individualism and Economic Order that the classical liberal principles of government are still “implicit in most of Western or Christian political tradition but which can no longer be unambiguously described by any readily understood term” (Hayek 1948: 2). One aspect of Christianity than contributes to freedom is the idea “that man must be free to follow his conscience in moral matters if his actions are to be of any merit,” to which economists can add the argument “that he should be free to make full use of his knowledge and skill” (14).

Hayek’s main work on religion lies in the relationship between Christian natural law theory and the capacity to distinguish between law and legislation—to see legal order as issuing from something other than the state. Because Christians believe in a natural law made by God, they have grounds for treating common-law courts as gradually discovering rather than creating new law. The “discovery” mindset led Christian societies to harmonize and organize their laws around general principles that were thought to be eternal and immutable.

In the Constitution of Liberty, Hayek argues that the medieval view of law held that the state could not create law or abolish or violate it, since that would be tantamount to abolishing justice and rebelling against natural laws. Kings and other human authorities “could only declare or find the existing law, or modify abuses that had crept in, and not create law” (2011: 235). Only during the later Middle Ages “did the conception of deliberate creation of new law—legislation as we know it—come to be accepted.” Parliament went from a mainly “law-finding” body to a “law-creating” one.

Importantly, even in the eighteenth century, moral law was seen as God’s law, or at least that of Nature or Reason. To make the law “explicit and enforceable by putting it on paper, though not entirely new, was for the first time put into practice by the Revolutionary colonists” and that influenced the first federal Constitution (266). But even this degenerated into law-creating bodies because “the rejection of the accounts which religion gave of the source and grounds of validity of the traditional rules of moral and law led to the rejection of those rules themselves so far as they could not be rationally justified” (1978: 25).

If a society is to be truly free, the individuals must be prepared to “bow to forces and obey principles which we cannot hope to fully understand, yet on which the advance and even the preservation of civilization depends” (Hayek 1979: 92). This has typically been accomplished through “various religious creeds and by traditions and superstitions, which made men submit to those forces by an appeal to his emotions rather than to his reason.” Hayek complained that the forces of rationalism attempted to transform this religion into a religion of humanity; Saint-Simon is the culprit here (184).

Beyond these scattered remarks, the last chapter of The Fatal Conceit (Hayek 1991) contains the only explicit, focused analysis of the role of religious belief in preserving a free social order and the evolution of religion as a form of social evolution.2 Prior to this chapter, Hayek argues that we may owe to certain “religions the preservation—admittedly for false reasons—of practices that were more important in enabling man to survive in large numbers than most of what has been accomplished through reason” (56–7).

Reaching Chapter 9, Hayek begins by remarking that he wants to offer some “informal remarks” (which “are intended as no more than that”) “about the connection between the argument of this book and the role of religious belief” (135). Some intellectuals will hate the idea because it will suggest that, “in their own long-standing conflict with religion, they were partly mistaken—and very much lacking in appreciation” (135). Hayek then begins to tell a group selection story about the evolution of religion and the persistence of religion in transmitting cultural ideas. Hayek:

We owe it partly to mystical and religious beliefs, and, I believe, particularly to the main monotheistic ones, that beneficial traditions have been preserved and transmitted at least long enough to enable those groups following them to grow, and to have the opportunity to spread by natural or cultural selection. This means that, like it or not, we owe the persistence of certain practices, and the civilisation that resulted from them, in part to support from beliefs which are not true—or verifiable or testable—in the same sense as are scientific statements, and which are certainly not the result of rational argumentation.(136–7)

The main monotheistic religions preserved beneficial traditions and transmitted them, allowing them to evolve into a free system. Inevitably, then, the institutions of a free society passed through a religious phase that they may not have been able to avoid. Even agnostics, like Hayek himself 3, must be prepared to admit that “the premature loss of what we regard as nonfactual beliefs would have deprived mankind of a powerful support in the long development of the extended order we now enjoy” and that if we lose these beliefs, even if they are false, we will face “great difficulties.”

Hayek then sticks up for religious people, since their view that “morals were determined by processes incomprehensible to us may at any rate be truer … than the rationalist delusion that man, by exercising his intelligence, invented morals that gave him the power to achieve more than he could ever foresee.” Yet, Hayek then quickly admits that there is no “intrinsic connection” between religion and the values of property and the family, just a contingent, historical one. Importantly, though, the only religions and versions of those religions that survive and thrive are those that preserve property and the family.

Remarkably, Hayek ends The Fatal Conceit by admitting that, while he himself cannot believe in God or honestly uphold free institutions on a religious basis, he admits that the foundations of a free morality lie in foundations that are beyond his comprehension. Those foundations are not really religious, but many people may need to think that morality has religious foundations:

Yet perhaps most people can conceive of abstract tradition only as a personal Will. If so, will they not be inclined to find this will in “society” in an age in which more overt supernaturalisms are ruled out as superstitions? On that question may rest the survival of our civilization. (139)

When people lose supernatural religion, they will tend to turn to society as their God and worship the People, and this leads to the embrace of socialism. So Hayek is in the awkward position of being both agnostic and realizing that religious belief may be the most effective bulwark against socialism, as it impels the mind to embrace a non-political, transcendent basis for natural law that limits the state and its power.

3RAND ON RELIGION

Rand was an atheist. At age 29, Rand reports in one of her journals that “I want to be known as the greatest champion of reason and the greatest enemy of religion” (Rand 1999: 176). It is entirely plausible that she continued to want this until the day she died.

Before engaging Rand’s view, however, it is important to understand that Rand had a different aim in defending the market than did Mises, Hayek, or Rothbard. Rand did not, in the first instance, set out to justify markets. Her aim was to formulate a rational, life-affirming, creativity-loving comprehensive philosophy that acknowledges a mind-independent, yet thoroughly godless, reality. She named this doctrine objectivism.

While Rand denied that she was a libertarian, she had a dramatic influence on contemporary libertarians. Her attitudes about religion have proven just as influential. Most of Rand’s writing on religion is abstract; it focuses on critiquing general features of all religions, or at least all theistic religions, or religions that rest on some notion of “faith” understood (in contrast to many faith traditions) as belief in the face of counterevidence or belief with inadequate evidence.

Rand is most famous for her novels, which, while they do not explicitly endorse atheism, contain strong atheist undercurrents. Further, her main characters are typically atheists. Howard Roark, the protagonist of The Fountainhead (Rand 1943), is explicitly an atheist, as is Kira Argounova in We the Living (Rand 1959). And John Galt’s famous speech in Atlas Shrugged (Rand 1957) is not merely a statement of Rand’s philosophy but also an extended diatribe against many philosophical ideas, including religious ones. Morality, Galt insists, is not “a code of behavior imposed on you by whim, the whim of a supernatural power,” nor is the pleasure in your life an “immorality” but rather a benefit. The good is emphatically not God, which Galt insists is generally understood as “beyond man’s power to conceive,” which, by definition, “invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence.” Societies are indicted for surrendering “reason to faith” and “self-esteem to self-denial.”

Here we see the two essential features of Rand’s critique of religion—religion undermines man’s reason and man’s happiness. It undermines man’s reason by insisting that he believe in beings not only for which he has no evidence, but whose nature is to confound and humble what the power of reason. And it undermines man’s happiness through pointless and cruel asceticism, teaching people to despise good, life-affirming pleasures and to seek God’s good and not their own.

In fact, in her famous Playboy interview, when asked if religion has “ever offered anything of constructive value to human life,” Rand answers, “Qua religion, no—in the sense of blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason” (Rand 1964). She also argued in her journals that, “Religion is … the first enemy of the ability to think. … Faith is the worst curse of mankind; it is the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.” Rand claims that religion is responsible for “the ideology that opposes man’s enjoyment of his life on earth and holds sex as such to be evil—the same ideology that is the source and cause of anti-obscenity censorship” (Rand 1999). Religion is anti-reason and anti-happiness, and so it is anti-life.

Religion is also anti-life in that, by being contrary to reason, religion leads to the determination of morality by mere whim (in most cases, God’s whim) and justifies violence, since reason cannot be expected to solve central human dilemmas, only force. Further, religion focuses men on the next life and not the present one, and so it is anti-life in that sense as well.

Rand was also ferociously critical of core Christian doctrines. When asked about Christianity, Rand finds its central teaching—that God died for the sins of the world—actively malevolent in its denial of the human good by claiming that a perfectly virtuous man had to die for the vicious:

In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the nonideal, or virtue to vice.

(Rand 1964)

Rand was similarly hostile to the idea of original sin. The doctrine of original sin came from “the knowledge of good and evil,” that is, when man became “a rational being.” And the evils for which man is damned are “reason, morality, creativeness, joy—all the cardinal virtues of his existence.” And, obviously, she utterly rejected the Christian emphasis on altruistic sacrifice.

Given Rand’s hostility to religion, she believed it was best abandoned and as quickly as possible. She had little to say about religion in political issues as such. But she did claim, in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, that, “in America, religion is a private matter which cannot and must not be brought into political issues” (Rand 1967a). She also criticized conservatives for resting the case for capitalism on religious belief, since this was “to concede that reason is on the side of one’s enemies” (Rand 1967a: 219–20). Leonard Peikoff, perhaps her lead follower, expanded her remarks into a general attack on the religious right (Peikoff 1990).

Rand was most specific about the role of religion in politics in her two essays attacking the two of the most important Catholic encyclicals in her time, Humanae Vitae and Populorum Progressio, the former widely considered friendly to conservatives and the latter widely considered friendly to progressives and socialists. Humane Vitae restates traditional Catholic teaching on sex and contraception, whereas Populorum Progressio restates popular nineteenth and twentieth-century Catholic attitudes toward the redistribution of wealth, capitalism, and the dangers and injustice of wealth inequality.

Rand’s essays “Of Living Death” (Rand 1990) and “Requiem for Man” (Rand 1967b) detail her criticisms of the two encyclicals, but Rand also provides a useful summary of her criticism of Catholicism across the two encyclicals, despite the fact that each was heralded on one side of the political spectrum and criticized on the other:

The so-called conservatives (speaking in religious, not political, terms) were dismayed by the encyclical Populorum Progressio (On the Development of Peoples)—which advocated global statism—while the so-called liberals hailed it as a progressive document. Now the conservatives are hailing the encyclical Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life)—which forbids the use of contraceptives—while the liberals are dismayed by it. Both sides seem to find the two documents inconsistent. But the inconsistency is theirs, not the pontiff’s. The two encyclicals are strictly, flawlessly consistent in respect to their basic philosophy and ultimate goal: both come from the same view of man’s nature and are aimed at establishing the same conditions for his life on earth. The first of these two encyclicals forbade ambition, the second forbids enjoyment; the first enslaved man to the physical needs of others, the second enslaves him to the physical capacities of his own body; the first damned achievement, the second damns love…

The doctrine that man’s sexual capacity belongs to a lower or animal part of his nature has had a long history in the Catholic Church. It is the necessary consequence of the doctrine that man is not an integrated entity.

(Rand 1990)

According to Rand, the Catholic Church has consistently opposed the autonomous use of man’s reason, though to varying degrees (Rand was friendly to Aquinas but despised Augustine). Catholicism has opposed the development of science: “It must not be forgotten that the Catholic Church has fought the advance of science since the Renaissance” (Rand 1990). But the big, overarching issue is that Catholic social teaching, in general, is hostile to all the best things about humanity—its capacity for rationality and its capacity for happiness. Rand consistently criticized Catholics of all stripes and frequently and sharply distinguished her support for capitalism from those of the religious conservatives with which she was often associated (they frequently returned the favor).

Due to her severe critique of religion, Rand lacks a developed doctrine of the proper role of religion in politics. This is because she thinks that the answer to the questions about the appropriate place of religion in politics is simple: There is no place for religion in politics because there is no place for irrationality in the construction of social institutions that ought to favor the development and flourishing of man.

But let it not go unsaid that Rand advocated the use of politics to restrict religion; however much she disliked religion, she believed in sufficiently strong individual rights to protect people of faith from almost everything governments would do to them.

4ROTHBARD ON RELIGION

Thus far, we have found considerable variation in libertarian attitudes toward religion, and Murray Rothbard only adds to that diversity. Like Rand, Rothbard had a consistent attitude toward religion. But unlike Rand, Rothbard was consistently pro-Catholic and criticized both atheist hostility to Christianity and many forms of Protestantism, especially Lutheranism and Calvinism in Europe, during and following the Reformation (Rothbard 1972: 21–3).

Rothbard understood his normative project as broadly Thomistic (Rothbard 2003: 4) and argued that the foundation of libertarianism lies in the idea of an “objective moral order of natural laws, discoverable by man’s reason,” which ultimately led to the discovery of natural rights, including the natural right of property (Conservatism and Freedom). Catholicism has its problems, but Rothbard claimed that it ultimately upholds the idea of a rational, natural law accessible to man’s reason, unlike the often irrationalist Lutherans and Calvinists.

Rothbard even understood the history of economic thought in a Catholic-friendly fashion. He contrasts a Catholic–Austrian strand of economic thought found in the sixteenth-century Catholic Salamancan school with the Calvinist–classical strand found in Scotland and that began with David Hume and Adam Smith:

Conversely, it is no accident that the Austrian School, the major challenge to the Smith-Ricardo vision, arose in a country that was not only solidly Catholic, but whose values and attitudes were still heavily influenced by Aristotelian and Thomist thought. The German precursors of the Austrian School flourished, not in Protestant and anti-Catholic Prussia, but in those German states that were either Catholic or were politically allied to Austria rather than Prussia.

(Rothbard 1995: xiii)

So Rothbard locates the beginnings of Austrian economics in Catholic social thought and associates classical economics, which he rejects, with Calvinist Protestantism.4

Critically, the Protestants of the Reformation derailed Catholicism’s restraints on the nation-state, enabling the rise of the nation-state:

In this way, the once mighty Catholic Church, dominant power and spiritual authority during the High Middle Ages, had been brought low and made a virtual vassal of the royal plunderer of France. The decline of Church authority, then, was matched by the rise in the power of the absolute state. Not content with confiscating, plundering, taxing, crushing the fairs of Champagne, and bringing the Catholic Church under his heel, Philip the Fair also obtained revenue for his eternal wars by debasement of the coinage and thereby generated a secular inflation. (69)

The Reformation dramatically diminished the authority of the Catholic Church and, with it, church authority generally. Nation-states reigned supreme as a result.

One gets the sense from Rothbard’s writings that had the Reformation never occurred, the greatest ills of modernity might have been avoided. There would likely be no powerful nation-state and the development of economic thought could have proceeded on natural law premises, unimpeded by the regressive, Calvinist doctrines of the classical economists.

One of the notable features of Rothbard’s commentary on religion in politics is that he attempts to reclassify political movements he criticizes as secularized variants of Protestantism, particularly “postmillennial pietism,” a version of Christianity that holds that the idea of the coming millennium described in the book of Revelation is a future human era that can be brought about through political reform. The Kingdom of God, on this view, can be brought to earth via human-wrought social justice. As some Protestants moved in this direction in the early nineteenth century, they brought with them many social ills, such as prohibition and the common school movements.

These movements gave rise to the secular progressive left in the United States and to Marxism. Marx, Rothbard claimed, deliberately secularized the postmillennial pietism of his youth (Rothbard 1990); American progressives did the same, which explains the origins of the religious left, something Rothbard criticized at length late in his life (in (Rothbard 2000b; 2000d).

While Rothbard is generally pro-Catholic and anti-Protestant, he does celebrate early American Protestants like Roger Williams and Anne Hutcheson, whose dissents from American Puritanism helped to establish the “libertarianism” of many seventeenth-century American colonists and contributed to the classical liberalism of the eighteenth century in some respects. So Rothbard does not universally criticize Protestants. So long as they oppose leading Calvinist statists (such as the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay) and articulate libertarian political theologies, they can be quite good and even inspiring (Rothbard 1999: chs.21–4).

Unlike Mises, Hayek, or Rand, Rothbard also took a position on the bread-and-butter religion-in-politics issues discussed over the last 30 years. This is partly because he was much younger than the others, so that he was far from old age when the religious right began to raise these issues in the late 1970s. But he might have mirrored Friedman and stayed out of the discussion. He did not. In his article, “The Religious Right: Toward a Coalition” (Rothbard 2000c), he defends the religious right as having goals that are compatible with libertarianism. He claims that “Christian conservatives are trying to fight back against a left-liberal elite that used government to assault and virtually destroy Christian values, principles, and culture” (26). Nineteenth-century Protestant do-gooders were a problem, but the religious right is a different animal. Rothbard even goes so far as to validate religious-right opposition to gays in the military, suggesting that “open homosexuals could engage in favoritism toward loved ones, and engage in sexual exploitation and abuse of subordinates under their command,” which could bring the “destruction of morale and efficiency of combat units” (27–8). Rothbard agreed with the goal of abolishing Roe v. Wade on federalist grounds, despite being radically pro-choice. He also hoped that the religious right can “level hammer blows against the pietist and pervasive Christian left” (31). This “paleo” phase of his thought led him to argue that “the task of paleolibertarians is to break out of the sectarian libertarian hole, and to forge alliances with cultural and social, as well as politico-economic, ‘reactionaries.’” The real danger from religion in politics comes from the left, whose “hallmark and fanatical drive … for these past centuries has been in devoting tireless energy to bringing about, as rapidly as they can, their own egalitarian, collectivist version of a Kingdom of God on Earth” (284). Rothbard denies that secularism unmoored from this historical legacy would be fanatical.

Rothbard also argues, in “Hunting the Christian Right” (Rothbard 2000a), that “it does not violate the separation of church and state principle for Christians to get involved in politics, or to take political stands. Or even for Christian ministers or priests to do so.” (275). Rothbard even anticipates the point sometimes found in the religion and politics literature that restrictions on religion in politics would also lead to condemnations of the public role of religion used by Martin Luther King, Jr. and other religious leftists.

In general, Rothbard was a far more knowledgeable and sophisticated student of religious belief, and Christian belief in particular, than any other major libertarian thinker in the twentieth century. As far as I can tell, no one can hold a candle to him. While his analysis was idiosyncratic and perhaps too simplistic and overconfident, he took religion seriously as a source of intellectual thought and political influence. Rothbard was clear that one needed a rich and subtle understanding of theology to explain when religion in politics is a good thing and when it is not. As Rothbard wrote in his history of economic ideas, his research led him to the “growing conviction that leaving out religious outlook, as well as social and political philosophy, would disastrously skew any picture of the history of economic thought” (Rothbard 1995: xiii).

5WHY DID LIBERTARIANS HAVE SO LITTLE TO SAY?

I have reviewed the attitudes about religion in politics found in Mises, Hayek, Rand and Rothbard. In comparison to progressive and conservative political thought throughout the twentieth century, libertarian discussion is, by comparison, rather thin. The only substantive work of normative political theory in the area comes from Rothbard’s newsletters. Given how important the proper role of religion in politics has been for centuries, this may seem surprising. But it is perhaps less surprising given the following factors.

First, religious movements were sublimated to economic movements for much of the first half of the twentieth century, and well into its third quarter. In many ways, 1900–1975 was unique in Western history in how much more influence secular ideologies had than religious ones. And 1900–1975 spans the most productive periods of each of these figures’ lives. The great libertarians were interested in defeating socialism and vindicating various forms of capitalism (save Rand, for whom this was an important, if secondary, concern). So religion in politics did not seem to be a pressing issue.

Another factor is that Mises, Hayek, Rand, and Rothbard were either outright hostile to democracy and democratic politics or had serious reservations about it. Since democracy should be strictly limited, developing an ethics of democratic deliberation isn’t pressing, since deliberation should decide precious few important political and economic questions. Second, given that state power should be sharply limited, worries about religious exemptions shouldn’t arise at all. All or nearly all reductions in coercion are both welcomed and morally required. Finally, concerns about religious establishment in the early twentieth century were secondary to questions of secular establishment, so the issues raised by too much religion in politics were of limited concern to libertarians concerned with stopping regimes that forcibly imposed atheism on their subjects.

6A LIBERTARIAN APPROACH TO RELIGION IN POLITICS

In the twenty-first century, religion and politics issues have returned to the forefront of political life, perhaps to a level not seen in two hundred years or more. Totalitarian socialism has collapsed almost everywhere in the world, so the great enemy of libertarianism is no longer a threat. Modern liberal democracies exhibit deep disagreements but not on the order of that found in the early twentieth century. Outside of libertarians and the most radical parts of the left, most people broadly accept the democratic mixed economy state as best. Some of our fiercest disagreements are between those who favor a more limited state and those who favor a more extensive state. But we also fiercely disagree about the role of religion in public life.

Given that our political and economic disagreements have grown narrower, political Christianity and political Islam have become issues of national and global concern. And, given the growth of Christianity and Islam expected over the next century (UN projections), we can expect religion and politics issues to remain pressing, especially internationally. Libertarians may want to have something more to say than they had in the twentieth century, or at least to figure out which forms of religion in politics promote freedom and prosperity and which forms undermine it. Libertarians may also need to think more carefully about how religion in politics affects their strategic organizational capacities; should libertarians view religious citizens as threats to freedom, as Rand would have it? Or are they more like friends, as Hayek and Rothbard believed?

I recommend that libertarians pursue the following course on issues of religious discourse, religious exemptions, and religious establishment. First, libertarians should totally reject the progressive insistence that religious contributions to public discourse be restrained by moral ostracism and subordinated to secular concerns. Libertarians have no reason to ostracize or demean people of faith just because their political arguments make reference to private or sectarian reasons. The democratic theories that ground such restrictions have no appeal to libertarians, such as views that democracy must express the general will of the people and so must be constructed via the use of shared reasoning. Libertarians should favor a free, open, and chaotic public discourse.

Religious exemptions are in some ways even easier to justify, as libertarians favor liberty and probably oppose basically every law from which religious people want to be exempted. Some will complain that it is unfair for religious believers to be exempt and not secular persons. Libertarians should agree but not insist that some be coerced just because we cannot prevent the state from coercing everyone. As an analogy, libertarians should not only oppose the draft but also preserve exemptions for women even if the draft unequally coerces men. Similarly, libertarians should support exemptions from providing contraceptive coverage demanded by religious for-profit and non-profit organizations. All steps toward liberty should be embraced.

Religious establishment is more complicated. Let’s distinguish between three types of establishment—coercive, financial, and symbolic. Coercive establishment involves the use of state power to prefer one faith to another, religion over secularism, or secularism over religion. Libertarians should, of course, oppose any coercive establishment of religion. Financial establishment covers the use of government funds to promote religious goals. Libertarians should generally oppose financial establishment. However, they should not overblow the problems with financial establishment to oppose certain liberty-increasing policies like the use of school vouchers. Libertarians should generally support voucher programs to increase political choice. There is little reason to prevent parents from using their tax money, and even the taxpayer money of others, to send their children to religious schools rather than secular schools. The only feature of a voucher system that libertarians should be worried about is that taxpayer funds are being used at all, not that they’re being used at religious institutions. Symbolic establishment concerns the government’s use of religious or non-religious symbols on public property, like courthouses or fiat currency. Libertarians typically downplay the importance of political symbolism and argue that it is up to individuals to decide whether to be upset or offended by states endorsing or opposing religion in their public symbols. In general, I think this is the right attitude. However, insofar as symbolic establishment indicates the disposition of the state to coercively favor some over others, then, this might provide a ground for opposition to symbolic establishment.

Finally, libertarians have no reason to treat religious reasoning or requests for exemptions any differently than secular reasoning of secularist demands for religious exemptions. For the libertarian, religion should not be treated as special, so the liberties given to religious persons and groups should be given to secular persons and groups on equal terms.