Christian right deifies an athiest — Ayn Rand
1:40 pm June 9, 2011, by ctucker
WASHINGTON — It was a cheap stunt captured on video camera, an ambush meant to embarrass a prominent Congressman, but it managed, nevertheless, to highlight an interesting subtext in the narrative of the religious right: Many of its members are enthralled by libertarian novelist Ayn Rand, a self-proclaimed “radical atheist” who mocked Christians. How is it that she has become the hero of so many social conservatives?
Last week, just after House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan finished talking to an audience of religious conservatives here, he was confronted by Bible-wielding activist James Salt, who demanded that Ryan read the Gospel of Luke. Salt, who works for the left-leaning Catholics United, was protesting the budget cuts Ryan has proposed — cuts that will disproportionately affect the poor. Ryan rushed to a waiting vehicle rather than accept Salt’s proffered Bible.
Shortly after that, a small group of liberal clerics held a press conference to protest Ryan’s fiscal plans. “This budget has more to do with the teaching of Ayn Rand than the teachings of Jesus Christ,” the Rev. Jennifer Butler said.
Ryan has cited Rand as the “reason I got involved in public service.” He encourages his staffers to read Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” a paean to a stark and self-centered individualism. (Her other books include the title, “The Virtues of Selfishness.”)
Yet, he is also a practicing Catholic who has used his relationship with Archbishop Timothy Dolan, head of the U.S. Catholic Church, to defend himself against critics who contend his budget proposals are at odds with Christian teachings. He presents his religion as a profound influence in his political life.
And he isn’t the only figure on the religious right who has professed a devotion to Rand, who said she was “against God” and dismissed religious faith “as a sign of psychological weakness.” Former Fox News host Glenn Beck, who gathered thousands here last fall to turn America “back to God,” has frequently cited Rand as an inspiration. Her books are popular reading among many tea partiers, even though many among them are religious conservatives.
In truth, the 30-year marriage of religious and fiscal conservatives has always had deep fissures, contradictions, cognitive dissonance. Despite claiming the “small government” mantle,” many Christian conservatives actually support an invasive government that wields religion as a sword. They want a government that intrudes in the bedroom, that grants its imprimatur to heterosexual marriage, that gives preferential treatment to Christian practices in pluralistic public spaces.
According to polls, self-identified religious conservatives support Social Security and Medicare, mainstays of the welfare state. Their patriotism tends to a fervent nationalism that does not hesitate to wage war. And they have interpreted the Bible, ah, liberally, finding in it a disdain for taxes that is nowhere explicit in its pages.
But nothing is more surprising and more explicitly contradictory than their reverence for Rand, whose open contempt for Christianity ought to make her anathema among religious conservatives. It’s hard to imagine any prominent progressive saying similar things about religious faith without prompting a tsunami of complaint.
“A lot of people go through an Ayn Rand phase,” said Richard Land, who heads the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. “Hopefully, they get over it.”
While praising Rand’s denunciations of “collectivism, socialism and Communism,” Land said “we certainly can’t take her uncritically. . . To acknowledge selfishness as an essential part of humanity is one thing, but to make it a virtue, is something else entirely. That’s counter to Judeo-Christian ethics.”
That didn’t seem to matter much to the religious conservatives gathered here last week under the banner of Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition. While they sprinkled their conference with religious leaders and Biblical references, they were assembled to celebrate and consolidate their political power in an effort to defeat President Barack Obama next year.
They have every right to do so — and to deify Ayn Rand if they choose. But, for heaven’s sake, don’t call that Christianity.
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