GEORGE WILL, a conservative pundit, bow-tie enthusiast, and eminent vocabularian, considers in the pages of National Affairs the question of whether American democracy requires a foundation of religious belief. Mr Will, a force of secularist reason on the God-sodden right, helpfully reminds us that there was nothing particularly religious about America's foundingest fathers. George Washington, who "famously would not kneel to pray" was a sort of Roman stoic. Benjamin Franklin was some manner of Deist. "It has been said", Mr Will relates, "that the Deist God is like a rich aunt in Australia: benevolent, distant, and infrequently heard from." John Adams subscribed to Unitarianism, the undemanding faith of self-hating atheists. James Madison, Mr Will says, "explained away...religion as an innate appetite." Thomas Jefferson, who took it upon himself to edit superstition out of the Gospels, wrote that "our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry." We knew that colonial America's rebellious and arrogant aristocrats would not fit in at a Promise Keepers rally, but it's good to be reminded. Though America was by no means founded on religious principles, religion has flourished in America. Indeed, the doughtiness of American religiosity defies what Mr Will calls, following Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "the liberal expectancy" of ever-advancing secularisation. "That this most modern nation offers proof against the assumptions of the liberal expectancy is not a coincidence", Mr Will maintains, and he proceeds to explain why he thinks this is so. Mr Will whisks us through a potted Leo Strauss-inflected history of modern liberalism, beginning with Machiavelli and Hobbes and arriving at the American founders, who

did not consider natural rights reasonable because religion affirmed them; rather, the founders considered religion reasonable because it secured those rights. There may, however, be a cultural contradiction in modernity. The contradiction is that, while religion can sustain liberty, liberty does not necessarily sustain religion or the other preconditions for its own security.

This is the standard line of the secular neo-conservative intellectual casting about to find some sort of dignified ideological accommodation for his conservative Christian allies. "Can our limited government and free society long endure if the work of our civil society, which so often is the work of our religious institutions, is taken up instead by the government?" Mr Will asks. Of course it can, as the histories of most of the world's free societies attest. But Mr Will is not actually interested in the conditions under which freedom and limited government prospers, so he says, "To the extent that the politics of modernity attenuates the role of religion in society, it threatens society's vitality, prosperity, and happiness".

This is nonsense. Mr Will goes on to quote Irving Kristol, the grandaddy of pop-neoconservatism, on the human need for mystification: "It is crucial to the lives of all of our citizens, as it is to all human beings at all times, that they encounter a world that possesses a transcendent meaning, a world in which the human experience makes sense." Mr Will then looks to secularising Europe, pronounces that "the results are not attractive", and ventures further that

We know from the bitter experience of the blood-soaked 20th century the political consequences of this felt meaninglessness. Our political nature abhors a vacuum, and a vacuum of meaning is filled by secular fighting faiths, such as fascism and communism. Fascism gave its adherents a meaningful life of racial destiny. Communism taught its adherents to derive meaning from their participation in the eschatological drama of History's unfolding destiny. The excruciating political paradox of modernity is that secularism advanced in part as moral revulsion against the bloody history of religious strife. But there is no precedent for bloodshed on the scale produced in the 20th century by secular--by political--faiths. Therefore, even those of us who are members of the growing cohort that the Pew survey calls "nones," even we — perhaps especially we — should wish continued vigor for the rich array of religious institutions that have leavened American life.

This line of reasoning is stupefying in its ignorance and absurdity. Who does Mr Will suppose "felt" this "meaninglessness", and why? Compared to today, Europe in the first half of the 20th century was intensely religious. The Russian peasants forced into communist re-education were intensely religious people. If meaninglessness was a problem, a paucity of religiosity in pre-communist Russia or pre-fascist Germany and Italy didn't cause it. What is he talking about?

Now, it is true that fascism was driven in part by some of the same worries Irving Kristol had: that global, industrial capitalism would turn people into rootless, hollowed-out drones without an anchoring sense of life's transcendent meaning. But the real danger is this idiotic worry. When Irving Kristol's literal and figurative heirs get hot and bothered about the spectre of nihilism that they imagine haunts America, they clamour for war. Why? So that American kids who might have languished in a half-life of Playstation and internet porn can instead kill foreigners and perhaps gloriously, honourably die themselves—or at least survive the spiritual invigoration of war to enjoy daily the transcendant meaningfulness of prosthetics and brain damage and post-traumatic stress. This sort of thinking is Fascism 101, and Mr Will ought to be ashamed of himself for dabbling in it. It's almost impossible for normal people to believe that, if not for American neoconservatives unaccountably fretful about the meaninglessness of secular liberal capitalism, many many thousands of dead Americans and Iraqis might be alive today, but it really might be true. In any case, the childish neocon horror of meaninglessness is incalculably more dangerous to human life and peace than godlessness, consumer capitalism, cosmopolitan deracination, or whatever it is one worries will extinguish meaning from life.

Mr Will finds the "widespread waning of the religious impulse" in Europe unattractive, but why? Setting aside the ex-communist countries, which are struggling still to recover from the enormities of authoritarian socialism, Europe's most secular countries—Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands—achieve some of the world's highest levels of self-reported life satisfaction. And it's worth noting that the most secular ex-communist countries—Estonia and the Czech Republic—are among the best in terms of liberal reform. Were Mr Will on the right track, Copenhagen ought to be a volatile hellhole of human misery. In reality, it is one of the pleasantest and best-governed places on Earth. And among the freest! Mr Will needs to ask himself this question: if a religious population is such a bulwark of liberal rights, why does hyper-atheistic Denmark exceed America even in the freedom of its markets? The answer is that a religious population is not needed to secure liberal rights. The evidence suggests either that greater secularisation is a boon to freedom and happiness, or that it doesn't matter. There is no good reason to believe that irreligiosity generally leads to a struggle with nihilism, or that it threatens liberal political and economic rights. America is the anomaly. It's unusual that a country so religious should be nevertheless so free. The data is plain, and it's shabby of Mr Will to pretend to know something so clearly false.

There is, however, an important truth in Mr Will's analysis. The American style of democracy, by relying so heavily on religious institutions of civil society, has helped maintain the centrality of religion in America's culture and politics. Secularisation has been exceptionally slow in America in no small part because government has not taken on all possible safety-net functions, and thus has left religious institutions something useful to do. Having something useful to do helps American churches assemble crowds to whom conservative admonitions can be addressed en masse, and that helps keep Americans relatively conservative. However, here in Texas, where the legislature just brazenly defied the settled interpretation of American constitutional rights in order to shut down most of the state's abortion clinics, or in those states where loving same-sex couples are denied the rights of heterosexual families, it can be difficult to see the robustness of religion in America as a force for the progress and security of equal liberty. Swift secularisation was never something Americans could reasonably expect, but neither is it something freedom-lovers should hesitate to cheer.

(Photo credit: AFP)