This article is a lot of hogwash and it causes me to wonder if these specific views of Heather Mac Donald and Razib Khan aren't driven more by a reactionary response to organized religion, or a God concept, than by a clear understanding of conservatism.
As a child, Razib Khan spent several weeks studying in a Bangladeshi madrasa. Heather Mac Donald once studied literary deconstructionism and clerked for a left-wing judge. In neither case did the education take. They are atheist conservatives — Mr. Khan an apostate to his family’s Islamic faith, Ms. Mac Donald to her left-wing education.
“A lot of religious conservatives say, ‘You can’t be conservative because you don’t believe in God,’ ” said Mr. Khan, 34, who was raised in New York and Oregon but whose grandfather was an imam in Bangladesh. “They say I am logically impossible, and I say, ‘Well I am possible because I am.’ “They assert your nonexistence, and you have to assert your existence.”
Saying one has to be a social conservative to be conservative is not the same thing as saying one must believe in God. Social conservatism is an appreciation of what will happen to the civil society in the face of a collapse of traditional institutions and values. Invariably, the society declines. We see it in single-mothers, otherwise broken families, crime and individuals unwilling to take responsibility for themselves and elsewhere.
What that does is foster government growth because something has to fill the gap given the collapse in said institutions. We need more police, we need government day care, we need, we need - more government to fill the void. Nature, not simply God, abhors a vacuum and government always shows itself as all too willing to rush in and expand its influence.
I'd liken it somewhat to the Alcoholics Anonymous experience. One doesn't have to believe in God, per se, one simply has to believe that there is something beyond the individual. In terms of politics, I see that as critical to placing one's rights above man. I don't care if you place them in something you call God, or a little being living on Venus.
By investing one's rights in something above man, one declares that no man, nor government of man, is entitled to usurp them. Why the hell do people think communists declare war on religion? They do it because they want man's rights invested in the state, not some other institution, church, or being. The NYT's columnist uses the God concept as a red herring because the Left has been so successful in making the word seem trite, or even unappealing.
No surprise there, it's the same thing communists have done all over the world. The American Left simply does it more subtlety. Social conservatism does not demand a belief in God, but in societal institutions that maintain a civil society - period. Many include organized religion in that set, but not all. However, it's impossible to argue that the Judeo-Christian ethic didn't birth most of our traditional institutions - marriage, the family, charitable efforts, etc. And, yes, they are called "traditional" because they happened to have worked very well for hundreds of years. Duh!
