The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | Yoram Hazony on Why Religion is Necessary for Conservatism

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

Conservatism has a long and storied history. It evolved with various times and places, and adapted to fit the needs of rising generations. But one thing has remained consistent in conservatism throughout the ages, says Yoram Hazony, president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation. Conservatism and religion are inextricably linked, Hazony says. He defines conservatism as "a political standpoint that regards the national religious traditions as the key to maintaining and to strengthening a nation" and says that American conservatives need to reawaken to that reality. Hazony joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss his new book "Conservatism: A Rediscovery" and explain why religion can't be separated from conservatism.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, September 9th. And I'm Doug Blair. What is conservatism? You'll probably get a lot of answers for that, depending on if you're in America, France, the UK, Germany, wherever. There are different brands of conservatism. But one thing is for sure, according to Jerome Hazoni, religion plays a part in it. I sat down with Yerom Hizoni to talk about what role religion plays in conservatism

and if conservatism is even possible in the absence of religion. My conversation with Yerom Hizoni after this. President Lincoln once said, elections belong to the people. Here at the Heritage Foundation, we hold these words to be true. However, for elections to truly belong to the people, the people need to trust their results. That's where the election integrity scorecard comes in. We created this tool so that citizens like you can discover the rules, regulations, and overall transparency of voting in your respective state.

Find the election integrity scorecard in the Heritage Foundation's website at heritage.org slash election scorecard. My guest today is Yaram Hazzoni, president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation. He is also the author of the new book, Conservatism or Rediscovery. Yaram, welcome to the show. That's my pleasure. Thank you for having me on. Of course. Well, I want to talk about your book a little bit because the title is so interesting, a rediscovery of conservatism. But before we get into that specifically, let's start defining our terms. What to you is conservatism?

Well, conservatism is a political standpoint that regards the national religious traditions as the key to maintaining and to strengthening a nation. And in the United States, it's appropriate to talk about Anglo-American, the Anglo-American conservative tradition because, you know, different countries have different traditions of conservatism and they're not all alike. But I would say as a general matter, if you're the kind of person who thinks that politics begins with, you know, the free and equal individual and the political obligation arising from consent, If that's your worldview, then you're probably not a conservative, you're probably a liberal. If the place where you start is from the existence of a certain nation, which has traditions and, you know, like a religious tradition, a linguistic tradition, constitutional traditions that have historically bound the various parts of the nation together, If that's your starting point, then you're probably conservative. So it sounds like these traditions can almost apply in different places.

So in India, there would be a different form of conservatism, maybe based around Hinduism and a national language like Hindi, whereas in France it would be connected to Catholicism with the French language. Is that sort of an accurate take? Yeah, I think so. I mean, Marxism and liberalism are universal theories. like the Enlightenment rationalism that they spring out of, they claim to be true for all people in all times and places without regard to how they grew up or what they were taught or what they believe. And conservatives see that as being extremely unrealistic.

They begin looking at the world empirically and come to the conclusion that human beings are born into families and tribes and nations and religious traditions, and that these are not the same, that they are unlike one another. And so Anglo-American conservatism is going to be different from conservatism in India or in Arabia or in Russia or in China. So the title of your book is a rediscovery, right? Conservatism, a rediscovery. Why does it need to be rediscovered?

Americans have sort of slipped, especially after the end of the Cold War, but maybe even earlier than that, have slipped into a worldview in which conservatism just is liberalism. You hear these kinds of things in Washington and in conservative circles all the time, that we American conservatives, what we're conservating is liberalism, or that conservatism is a branch or a species of liberalism, all sorts of things whose purpose in the end is to so confusion. and this wouldn't, you know, wouldn't be more than just sort of like an intellectual curiosity except for the fact that the United States in the year 2020 has moved into a period in which

the hegemonic liberal discourse that dominated America since World War II has collapsed, not to say that there are no more liberals running around, but the dominance, the Assumption, that you could rely on when I was growing up and when you were growing up, we could rely on the Democrats and the Republicans to be some kind of liberal. and that assumption no longer holds. The moment that the New York Times started firing senior employees for being liberals, the moment that Princeton University took Woodrow Wilson's name, the great liberal icon off of the buildings of the university where Wilson had been president, America moved into a different world in which liberalism is now a,

a minority worldview. It is given way to a woke neo-Marxism, which is making its own bid for hegemony. And on the right, we see different kinds of ideas contending with one another to be sort of the champion of what the right is going to say in response to this shocking cultural revolution that we're living through. So at this point, I think it's crucial to be able to distinguish between liberalism and conservatism, because if you think that conservatism is liberalism, then you are signing onto that ideology which just collapsed. And if there's one thing that we know about liberalism at this point, is that in the two generations that liberals dominated America, they were unable to, they were completely unsuccessful in figuring out a way to transmit liberalism so that it would be conserved and transmitted from across generations. We did that experiment. It failed. It's over.

And people who see what's coming and want to know what went wrong, they need to say, well, maybe liberalism is what went wrong. And that certainly is a large part of my book on conservatism is tracing the way that liberalism sort of pushed conservatives out so that if you want to know anything about a life of conservation and transmission, either as an individual or as a family at that level or at the national level, you need to go back. You need to examine the great Anglo-American conservative tradition of thought and you need to start applying it in your own life. But this is going to

require restoration because the things we've inherited are liberal, not conservative. So if we're trying to restore an old conservative order, we're trying to restore a lot of these things that have been lost, where do we start? You mentioned that people need to start doing this in their own life. Where would be a good place for them to start? I think people can ask themselves, honestly, whether the life they are leading is a conservative life, whether it's a life of conservation and transmission. And for most people today, even if they identify with the word conservative, the answer is simply no. I think you look around your immediate surroundings and you realize that most young people today are having trouble getting married. So they keep

putting it off. They're having trouble having kids. If they're married, they're having trouble staying married. They are not particularly impressed with the importance of things like studying scripture, keeping the Sabbath. They don't think that they need to be part of a congregation in which the great inheritance is actively being handed down. So if that's the way you're leading your life, then you're a big part of the problem. because if a society does not consist of individuals who devote their time and energies to conservation and transmission, then you can't expect the nation to be able to do it. The nation just consists of the various groups of individuals within it.

So the book is definitely a call for people to examine their own contribution to the cultural revolution. if you are not focused on what do I need to do in order to make sure that the great tradition is going to be handed down to my children. If you're not focused on that, then you're not really leading a conservative life. And in the book, I offer suggestions for how to begin leading a conservative life. I want to go back to something you've talked about a lot, which is the role of religion in conservatisms. Specifically, it sounds like in the West that sort of Anglo-Judeo-Christian values that are essential to conservative dysfunction, a lot of people in America today will say that a secular society can exist, that there is a form of secular conservatism that can work. It sounds like you might disagree with that assessment. Well, like I say, I think that was tried.

I mean, America was explicitly a Christian nation, a Christian people up through World War II. What I mean by explicitly is that this was said time and again by the American Supreme Court, and American presidents regularly spoke about it. FDR and Eisenhower still were of the age and the generation where they understood America was a Christian nation, and they were some version of Christian nationalists. And for FDR, I mean, you never tired of saying that democracy grows out of Christianity, that America's worthy constitutional and traditions grow out of the religious tradition. That was a commonplace.

I mean, that was just something that was generally believed by political leaders on all sides. up until the Second World War. And after the Second World War, Americans shifted. There was a change from what you can call Christian democracy to what came to be known as liberal democracy. The term liberal democracy wasn't really in use much then, but by the 1970s, 80s, 90s, intellectuals, both Marxists and liberals

had begun to use the expression liberal democracy to give the name to the name, new secular, neutral state that was supposed to have come into existence after the Second World War. So we have a pretty clear experiment that lasted 60 or 70 years in which the religious foundations of the society, the biblical foundations, which had always been there, were banished. The most obvious indication of this was the shocking banning of God and purpose. and the study of scripture from schools across the United States. That happened in 1947, or it began in 1947, with the Supreme Court's Everson decision,

which for the first time declared a separation of church and state to be integral part of the American Constitution and opposed it on all 48 states. So we've done the experiment. We've lived in that kind of supposedly neutral state, and what we see is that when you send children every day to school in which talk about God and reading the Bible and what you're supposed to get out of the Bible and its place is the basis of our civilization. When you send kids to school every day that way, they don't come out Christians and they don't come out Jews. They come out with this tremendous vacuum. And lots of people thought that vacuum was just fine. They didn't

understand that vacuum is completely unstable. And now if you look around America, I think anybody can just open their eyes and see that that banishing of Christianity and the biblical foundations of America created a vacuum. And in that vacuum, all sorts of terrible things have grown. And America is clearly moving towards dissolution. The only question is whether people are willing to learn the lesson and move fast to turn it around. To play devil's advocate for a second, one of the things that the left will often claim about America is that we are this multicultural, I think the term now that they'll use is like a mosaic where you have all these different cultures that interact with each other.

And those people might come from various parts of the world. There could be Indians from India. There could be Chinese people from China. There could be French people from France. And they all kind of come together and form these things. from what you've been saying that there is a sort of conservative faith tradition that exists in all those countries that are pretty disparate in terms of where they would come from. So is the concept of America in the sense that it can exist in that form of, say, a mosaic just fundamentally flawed? Well, it can exist, but the thing that you're describing, a multinational entity, which has many different, many different nations and many different.

people living under a single government, but without mutual loyalty binding them to one another, that's called an empire. And we have a lot of experience with empires in recorded history. Empires are always dictatorships. There's no such thing as a democratic empire. There's no such thing as a dozen different nations, a dozen different peoples going to the ballot box in order to determine who, who is going to get to be the president for the next four years and then peaceably moving on. And in fact, I think when you look at the recent elections in the United States,

I mean, it's at least two, at least the last two presidential elections have been contested in such a way that, you know, I don't know what the numbers are, but 30, 40, 50 percent of Americans thought that each of the last two elections were, were in some way illegitimate. They were not free and fair elections, and they led to an illegitimate government. And so this is rapidly moving into the situation that you're describing, all sorts of groups of people

who aren't loyal to one another, don't recognize the traditions of the country as being particularly important. And in the end, peace, if nothing changes, that will decay into civil war and possible subversion from overseas, and it's going to end up one way or another with a dictatorship. Now, I don't think that that's inevitable at this point, but it's inevitable if

people keep pushing the idea that diversity is our strength. Diversity is your strength when it's diversity internal to a single nation bound by ties of mutual loyalty. All nations are internally diverse. So sometimes you can make it a little bit more diverse. But the question is, do the bonds of mutual loyalty that tie these different groups in society together, are they fraying? Are they exploding? Or is there active work being done to strengthen them? And my book is basically about the question of restoration, repentance and restoration, and the question of what you'd need to do if you actually wanted America to survive this. And the simple answer is that, that a national religious tradition of some kind, it can be tolerant, it can be ecumenical, but the bottom line is that there has to be something that is going to unite people. Now, I understand that at the national level, it's going to be very difficult at this moment to get lots of Americans behind this, but at the level of the states, I think the situation is very

different. There are still many states in the United States where you could get a Christian majority or a pro-Christian majority, which could consist of all sorts of people who are not, don't necessarily see themselves as Christians, but they can take a look at the woke neo-Marxist government that's coming and say, look, a biblical restoration, a Christian restoration is simply better for all of us. And so I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to lend the hand to making that happen. I think there's lots of states where that could happen, and that's the step that needs to be taken now. Aside from people at the personal level, when you get to the political level, we have to be thinking in terms of experiments at the

state level of ending the separation of church and state and creating a Christian public life, which offers a biblical moral and political framework that is powerful. powerful enough to oppose the neo-Marxism, which otherwise is just going to win. Now, as we begin to wrap up here, I'm curious, it's sort of very dire prognostication there. Are we seeing, you mentioned that there are some states that are probably willing to do this and probably willing to go to that standard. Do you believe that there are certain states that other states should be modeling themselves after? And what specifically are those states doing from a legislative perspective that the other states in the union should be emulating?

You know, there are good things happening in some of the red states, but I think that this needs to be pushed further. I think that until you have governors saying explicitly that separation of church and state is not a part of the traditional American constitution, that Everson in 1947 was wrongly decided, and therefore Bible can return to the schools, and the public life can be based on it. on a broad Christian and biblical foundation, until you're hearing that explicitly and seeing it explicitly, you have not changed the direction of the United States. So, I mean, I, you know, like other conservatives, I'm excited and happy and thrilled to see some of the governors pushing back on some of the worst excesses of woke neo-Marxism, but there's no chance that that's going to be enough. And that you can't fight something with, strictly a negative view that, no, we don't want to go that far. You can only fight an idea with an

idea. And the idea here has to be conservative democracy or Christian democracy. I've seen some of the young Christian writers in the last few weeks embracing the term Christian nationalism. All these terms, they all refer to the same basic idea, which is that there needs to be a restoration of the idea that the Bible is the basis of public life. It can be tolerant. It can be ecumenical. But what it cannot be is simply a negation of woke neo-Marxism because, you know, you can win a couple of battles that way. But in the end, there has to be something positive that gives the framework for life in the United States or in Britain or in other countries. And that's what we're waiting to see.

Well, hopefully we can move in a direction where we start to bring back a conservative mindset to this country. That was Yeram Hazzoni, president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation. He's also author of the new book, Conservatism, A Rediscovery, available now, wherever books are sold. Yeram, thank you so much for your time. Very much appreciate it. Sure. My pleasure. Thank you, Douglas.

What an interesting thought. As a Christian myself, I totally feel like my faith is important. important to my politics, but I didn't know it was that important. We're going to leave it there for today, but thank you so much for listening to The Daily Signal podcast. And if you haven't already, make sure to subscribe on your podcast listening app of choice. We have many options for you, Google Play, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever, please just subscribe where you can. And if you could, please let your friends and family know that you enjoyed it and spread the word. It really does help us get the message out. Thanks again for listening. We'll be back with you all later for

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