Derb: I’ll look up the Paul Johnson essay. I didn’t actually say that nobody in the history of man had said that religious faith was necessary to be a conservative. I asked a rhetorical question meant to suggest that few people seriously claimed that ” that only Bible study could lead people to conservative, disciplined lives”–a proposition that Mac Donald contested, surely correctly. My email, incidentally, does not bear out your supposition about it.

Mac Donald: Sorry about the misspelling of your name earlier. As I said earlier, I have no quarrel with your plea that public-policy argument should not depend on religious premises.