UPDATE: I confused a few readers, so let me explain that the below are from emails; they’re not my own writing. — RP

#1: [Quoting Heather MacDonald:] “Plenty of conservatives have arrived at those core values through close observation of human society and history, by plumbing the wisdom of philosophers and poets, or simply through a sound upbringing. It is just not the case that only Bible study could lead people to conservative, disciplined lives.” Hmm…human society; history; philosophers; poets; and a sound upbringing. Yeah, religion hasn’t writ large on any of those; and where those have suffered the smallest taint of religiosity, Heather and those like her have been able to completely compartmentalize that influence from the endgame.

#2: This notion that the same western morality would exist if the nation were founded exclusively by atheists is tenuous at best, as is the notion that the Enlightenment itself would have taken its form if we could strip all Christian influences leading into it from the cross forward. [It’s true] that we can’t prove that it wouldn’t have turned out that way. We can’t prove any such negatives, but I have to believe that this at least sounds a little crazy to. . . anyone who will likely read it. What I don’t get is how secularist conservatives get around multiculturalism, deconstructionism and all that. That is to say, once you take God out of the equation I think all the rages of literary criticism make a lot of sense. Something has to be fixed in place to assert something, and for religious people what is fixed is God, and what we know of him through scripture. Conversely, as the multicults say, if nothing is fixed than nothing can be asserted (not even the notion that nothing can be asserted). So if . . . one believes that all behavior boils down to subatomic particles and electrical charges and nothing else, then everything about conservatism is just fashion that happens to make us feel good. You can certainly be conservative and behave in a moral manner without being a Jew or a Christian, but at a certain point the philosophical arch just falls apart.