Right Side of the Rainbow

An intellectual firefight has broken out on the American Right, with the Internet as battleground. It’s a fight between secular conservatives and religious conservatives. Heather McDonald squeezed off the opening shot here. Coverage of the counterstrike is here.

The battle widens:

The lessons of history reveal the basic requirements set by man’s nature for his survival, success, and happiness here on earth. That is the secular foundation for morality.

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The right needs to have a long, open, honest debate about the role of religion. We need it now more than ever because we are in the middle of a war with an enemy that is defined by his religious fervor and by his attempt to make his religion dominate the “public square,” to borrow a catchphrase from the religious right. If we don’t understand the real nature and value of Western, Enlightenment secularism, then we can’t fully understand what is at stake in this clash of civilizations, and in the long run, we won’t know how to win it.

Count me among the secular rightists. But I think William F. Buckley Jr. got it right long ago. You don’t have to be religious, he said, to be a conservative. In fact, you can be an atheist; you cannot, however, be hostile to religion and be a conservative. Of course, when he said that, Mr. Buckley had in mind a particular religious tradition, namely the Judeo-Christian one.

Technorati tags: Conservatism, religion