By Yoram Hazony
A Review by Dwight A. Moody
As a Christian preacher and theologian, I have spent my life seeking to conserve and interpret one of the great cultural and religious traditions of the world. In that sense, I count myself very much a conservative. But as an American citizen shaped by the struggle for racial, sexual, and gender freedom that has consumed our nation for 75 years, I count myself very much a liberal. Which is why I am fascinated by the Christian Nationalism that has risen to influence in recent years. I determined to read what they write, and so I read (and reviewed) The Case for Christian Nationalism, and now I have read and am reviewing Conservatism: A Rediscovery.
Yoram Hazony is an American Jew, now living and working in Israel. He graduated from Princeton University where his father taught physics; he earned a doctorate from Rutgers University in political science. His met and married his college sweetheart, who converted from Christianity to Judaism; together they have raised nine children. He writes a little about his intellectual journey during student days, but he gives extensive details of what he describes as the wild and worldly behavior of Princeton students, which is what pushed Hazony and his girlfriend to seek out and find (what he later calls) constrained living among orthodox Jews on campus. Hazony tells us all this in the book, and it is the most interesting part of the book.
This brief bit of biography also helps explain his sustained disinterest in freedom, especially the freedom of the individual, and his impassioned presentation of the need for religion, family, and constraint. There are many other things missing from this review of the same 75 years of our own national history: such as Martin Luther King, Jr., voting rights, wealth disparity, racism, women’s rights, Israel, Islam, and Jesus.
The Bible plays a central role in this book, especially the Hebrew Bible. One of the sustained pleas he makes is for the government to endorse, protect, and promote religion—in this case, Christianity, for the book is about the United States. But his concern is for every nation to embrace and affirm its religious history. Oddly, though, what he does not do is give us specific examples of how his prescription for national flourishing has actually worked out in practice: such as naming some place, some country where his desired nationalism has been embraced. He could have named Israel, his own country, with its increasingly powerful Orthodox Jewish influence. But then he would have had to explain why he and his American born wife abandoned the United States (which runs against the tenor of his entire book) and also why his native country denies basic human and civil rights to millions of people (Palestinians) and why his own country has values and leaders that have allowed it to pummel a weak and poor neighbor (Gaza). Yes, that war started after this book was published, but what about Israel even made this war and all its ugly mayhem feasible?
Hazony contrasts his vision, his version of religious nationalism—what he calls “the Conservative Paradigm”—with both Enlightenment Rationalism and Marxism. He demonizes the Enlightenment but fails to appreciate its pushback against both cultural superstition and religious authoritarianism; and he so mischaracterizes Marxism as to write: “We have entered the phase [of American history] in which Marxist, having conquered the universities, the media, and major corporations, will seek to apply this model to the conquest of the political arena as a whole” (328). Marxism he identifies with “the Left, Progressivism, Social Justice, Anti-Racism, Anti-Facism, Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, Identity Politics, Political Correctness, Wokeness, and more” (313).
To turn back the rising tide of Marxism (and its ideological predecessor Liberal Democracy), Hazony pushes his version of nation building, what he calls the Anglo-American conservative tradition, which consists of five core principles: Historical Empiricism, Nationalism, Religion, Limited Executive Power, and Individual Freedoms. By the first, he means political and community traditions that have developed over centuries; by the second, he asserts the nation state as the core component of human community, shaped by language, law and religion; by the third, he calls for the state to uphold and honor God and the Bible and the religious practices common to the people; by the fourth, he sees the need for a powerful chief executive but with some limits; and by the last, he affirms the right to life and property.
There is no engagement with sociological scholars during his sustained discussions of how families, communities, and states are organized and propagated. There is not a single appeal to Jesus in constructing how Christianity shapes a nation. There is no awareness of the global efforts to secure human rights for marginalized peoples, including women, gays, and religious minorities. There is not a single reference to Islam and how this version of religious nationalism might take shape in Muslim countries. There is no tip-of-the-hat to Russia and its effort to embrace precisely what Hazony proposes. But there is a warm affection for religion, for tight relations among extended families, for the role of these families (always assuming heterosexual standards) in educating children, developing businesses, and caring for aging parents, and for practicing restraint.
In short, Hazony is unhappy with modern life anywhere in the world (although he never criticizes Israel or includes it in a list of nation states gone wrong): with any feature of globalization, with immigration, with international organizations like the United Nations, with universities, or with movements for human rights or social justice (even though most of these take their inspiration from the Hebrew prophets). He seems oblivious to the harms that can and has come from religion, especially those religions that practice what he proposes—extensive rules of constraint. But that opens up more than I can treat in this review.
But here again, as I said with my review of The Case for Christian Nationalism, I read this book so you won’t have to. And you can thank me a second time!
