Can a conservative who doesn't believe still defend the faith of the West?

Two conservatives walk out of the same town meeting. One heads to church that evening. The other heads home to read, and he does not believe a word of the creed. They agreed on every vote that night, on the school budget, on the zoning fight, and on the resolution about the flag. Are they on the same side?

I say yes, and I say the believer should be glad of it. But the question is a real one, and it has been argued by serious people on both sides. A non-believer who defends the Judeo-Christian inheritance may look inconsistent to some, and a believer may look at him with a trace of suspicion: you like the fruit, but do you care about the tree?

I want to take the question seriously, because it matters for the future of the movement. I will define the terms, lay out the case that the non-believer has strong reasons to defend this inheritance, state the believer's best objection, and give my answer. And I will do it with respect for non-believers all the way through, because the argument fails if it is conducted as a way of looking down on them.

The terms

By the faith of the West I mean the Judeo-Christian inheritance: the moral teaching of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, the institutions that carried it, and the habits of thought it produced, including the dignity of every person, the limits on power, the family as the first school, the weekly day of rest and the practice of charity.

By a non-believing conservative I mean someone who holds that inheritance to be valuable, and to be worth conserving, without holding the doctrines of its faith to be true. He may be an agnostic, an atheist, or simply someone who does not practice. The term describes a belief about God, not a belief about politics.

By defend I mean to argue for its place in the public square and in the common life, and to resist efforts to dissolve it. I do not mean to claim to share it.

A dialogue worth remembering

In January 2004, two of the most prominent European thinkers of the day sat down together at the Catholic Academy of Bavaria in Munich. One was Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher and one of the leading secular thinkers of the postwar West. The other was Joseph Ratzinger, then the cardinal in charge of the Vatican's doctrinal office, and a year later to become Pope Benedict XVI. The agreed topic was the pre-political moral foundations of a liberal state, and the two lectures they gave were published as The Dialectics of Secularization.

What makes it remarkable is the position Habermas took. He was not a believer. He argued, however, that the modern secular state cannot simply stand on its own premises and ignore the religious traditions from which its ideas came. He argued that secular reason has to learn to listen to what religious traditions have to say, and to translate their moral content into terms that all citizens can share. He had made a related point in October 2001, a month after the attacks of September 11, when he accepted the Peace Prize of the German book trade in Frankfurt, in a speech called "Faith and Knowledge," saying that religious traditions carry a moral intuition and a language that secular reason has not fully replaced.

Ratzinger, for his part, argued that reason itself can go astray, that it needs correction, and that religion can supply a check when reason grows proud. He also granted that religion can become pathological and needs the correction of reason. The two men did not agree on everything. What they agreed on was that neither the believer nor the secular citizen can do without the other.

That is the opening for my argument. A leading secular philosopher said, in public, to a future pope, that his side has something to lose if the religious inheritance disappears.

Tocqueville: why a free people needs religion

The case did not begin in 2004. It begins, for Americans, with Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who toured the United States in 1831 and 1832 and wrote Democracy in America, published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840.

Tocqueville was not a zealot. He was a thoughtful observer of free institutions and a man of uncertain personal faith. What struck him in America was that religion and liberty, which in Europe he had seen as enemies, worked together here. He wrote that religion should be regarded as the first of the nation's political institutions, because although it does not give the Americans their taste for liberty, it singularly facilitates their use of it. That is a paraphrase of a passage in the first volume, and the exact words are worth looking up.

He also made the point that despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. Again I give the sense and not a verbatim quote. His reasoning was practical. A free people has to govern itself, and a people who govern themselves need an inner discipline that no outside force provides. Religion supplied that discipline in America, and it set limits on what the majority would dare to do, even when it had the votes. Tocqueville watched Americans of different denominations agree on the same moral foundations, and he concluded that the habit of mind was what held the experiment together.

Notice that this is an argument from observation, not from the truth of any creed. A person can accept Tocqueville's claim and still doubt the doctrines. He is saying: this thing works, here is how, and you should be careful before you remove it.

Equal dignity grew from biblical soil

The second argument goes deeper, and it is one the non-believer can accept on the evidence.

Most people who think about human rights believe in the equal dignity of every person. It is a conviction at the core of modern liberal and conservative politics alike. The question of where it came from is a historical question, and the answer, on the evidence, is: from the Bible.

The idea that every human being is made in the image of God, Genesis 1:27, is the oldest and clearest statement of it. The Hebrew Bible's laws protecting the stranger, the widow and the orphan are an early expression. The Christian teaching that in Christ there is neither slave nor free, neither Jew nor Greek, as Paul puts it in Galatians 3:28, carried it into the Roman world. The medieval church's insistence on a moral law above kings built it into the culture of Europe.

The British historian Tom Holland argued in his book Dominion, published in 2019, that the moral assumptions of the modern West, including the equal worth of persons and the special concern for the weak, are Christian in origin, and that secular people hold them because they grew up in a civilization shaped by Christianity. That is the thesis of a historian writing as a historian, and he reached it by reading the sources.

If that is right, then a non-believer who cares about equal dignity has a personal stake in the tradition that produced it. It is the same as for a person who cares about the rule of law and knows that the idea came through a particular history. You do not have to believe the whole story to value the part that built the house you live in.

I made a related case in Why 'created equal' is a claim about God and not just about politics, where I argued that the Declaration's equality rests on a Creator. Here the point is narrower: a non-believer can accept the historical claim and keep his doubts about the theology.

The non-believer who came to see it

A recent public example helps. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born writer and former member of the Dutch parliament, was for many years a prominent atheist and a critic of religion. In November 2023 she published an essay explaining that she had become a Christian. Her reasons, as reported, were partly civilizational and partly personal. She pointed to pressures on Western civilization from several directions, argued that secular approaches had not given people a unifying story or a source of meaning, and said atheism had not answered her questions about life's purpose. She called herself a convert, and she is the one to say what she believes. I mention her not to claim that every non-believer should follow her path. I mention her because she shows that the argument I am making is not a trick played on skeptics. It is one that skeptics have found persuasive on their own.

Most non-believing conservatives will not make her journey, and they need not. The point is that you can start from skepticism and arrive at gratitude.

The believer's objection

Now the other side. The believer's best objection goes like this.

You say a non-believer can defend the inheritance. But borrowed values do not last. A person who keeps the morals and drops the metaphysics is living on credit. The root has been cut, and the flower will wither. Nietzsche saw this clearly in the 1880s. He wrote that the death of God would unmoor the moral order, and he mocked the English writers of his day who wanted to keep Christian morality while giving up Christian belief. They would soon discover, he said, that the morality was not independent. If the non-believing conservative defends the fruit while denying the tree, he is making a gamble that history gives little reason to trust.

It is a powerful objection. It echoes Washington's warning in the Farewell Address that we should "with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion," and that reason and experience both forbid us to expect national morality to prevail in exclusion of religious principle. A thoughtful believer is right to worry about it. I want to give it its full weight.

Here is my answer, in four numbered points.

1. The objection is a worry about the next generation, not an accusation against this one. Nobody says that the non-believing conservative is immoral. The claim is that his children and grandchildren will have a thinner foundation. That is a serious prediction, and in many ways I think it is right. But the response to it cannot be to wave away the allies who share your concern. It can only be to work with them to renew the inheritance.
2. A non-believer who sees the danger is the best witness to it. When a believer says that society needs religion, a skeptic may hear self-interest. When a non-believer says it, the argument carries a different kind of weight. Habermas and Holland and others have said things that believers could not say as credibly.
3. The test is what we do, not what we say we believe. A non-believing conservative who defends religious liberty, supports the institutions of the faith, sends his children to a good school with a moral purpose and respects the Sabbath as a family rhythm is conserving the inheritance in practice. A believer who treats the faith as a tribal badge and not a way of life is not.
4. Belief is not manufactured by argument. Nobody can order himself to believe. What a believer can do is to invite, to witness, to serve and to let the faith be seen in its fruits. A believer who responds to a non-believing ally with suspicion does the opposite of that. He pushes away the very person for whom the invitation matters most.

I will add a note on tone. The believer should not treat the non-believer as a project, and the non-believer should not treat the believer as a relic. The Founders managed this. Washington's letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport in 1790 promised full citizenship to those of every faith, and the Constitution's Article VI says that no religious test shall ever be required for any office or public trust under the United States. The republic was built to be shared by people who disagreed about God. That is one of its great achievements, and conservatives should be the first to defend it.

What non-believers can contribute

I want to say a word about what non-believing conservatives bring, because it is not only support.

They bring a habit of asking whether a claim is true and what the evidence is, which keeps the movement honest. They bring friendships and communities that extend beyond the pews, so that the case for the inheritance is heard by people who would never open a Bible. They bring a way of making arguments in terms every citizen can follow, which is what Habermas meant by translation. And they bring their own stake in the common life: families to raise, neighborhoods to keep safe, a country to love.

In practical terms, the alliance looks like this. At a school board meeting, the believer and the non-believer both argue for a curriculum that teaches the Bible as the book that shaped the West, along with the rest of the great books. At a statehouse hearing, both defend the right of a church charity to operate according to its own convictions. In a local debate about Sunday closing or about the display of a war memorial, both defend the tradition. On each of these, the question is not "Do you believe?" but "Do you value what has been handed to you, and will you pass it on?"

What the Founders would say

The Founding generation had both kinds of men. Franklin, for all his doubts about doctrine, proposed on June 28, 1787 that the Constitutional Convention open its sessions with prayer, though the delegates adjourned for the day without voting on it. Jefferson, who doubted much of orthodox Christianity, wrote that the liberties of a nation cannot be thought secure if we remove the conviction that they are the gift of God. Washington, reserved about his own doctrine, said that religion and morality are indispensable supports. Whatever each man's private belief, they agreed that the inheritance was worth defending.

That is the standard. The question is not whether a person has passed a test of belief. It is whether he sees what the inheritance holds up, and whether he is willing to stand with those who are holding it up.

Where to read more

The case for religion's place in a free republic is in Why Washington's Farewell Address called religion and morality indispensable. The two inheritances behind it are in Jerusalem and Athens, the two cities every free society still lives in. The promise of equal citizenship to those of every faith is in To bigotry no sanction, Washington's 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport. The way the culture has covered believers, and what a fair account would look like, is in why newsrooms cover believers like a tribe they have never met. And a believer's case for loving the country without worshiping it is in loving your country is not idolatry, a believer's case for patriotism. For the Founders' texts, see the founders page.

The case in brief

1. A non-believing conservative has strong reasons to defend the Judeo-Christian inheritance, because a free people depends on the habits, the dignity of the person and the moral law that it carried.
2. Habermas, a secular philosopher, argued in his 2004 dialogue with Ratzinger that a post-secular society must learn from religious traditions, and Tocqueville argued in the 1830s that religion makes the use of liberty possible.
3. The equal dignity of every person grew from the biblical idea of the image of God, which gives even a non-believer a personal stake in the tradition.
4. The believer's best objection, that borrowed values cannot last, is a serious warning about the next generation, and the answer is to work with allies to renew the inheritance, not to turn them away.
5. The republic was built so that people who disagree about God can share it, and conservatives of faith and of none should defend that achievement together.

What you can do: invite a neighbor who does not share your beliefs to a local civic meeting about schools or charity, and work on one issue side by side.