MIAMI — Republican politics may be about to get a lot more churchy than they already are. On Monday, the second day of the National Conservatism conference here, conference organizer Yoram Hazony, chair of the Edmund Burke Foundation, called on conservatives, repeatedly, to "repent." This chastisement was focused in large part on what Hazony — also the author of "The Virtue of Nationalism" and the recent "Conservatism: A Rediscovery" — considers excessive squeamishness on the political right to discuss what he sees as the Christian roots of the United States.
This might come as a surprise to many Americans who have watched the increasingly overt and forceful alliance between the Republican far right and Christian nationalism. But Hazony envisions something on a broader societal level: the restoration of Christianity as the "public culture" of America, meaning that Christian values and observances are assumed to reflect the will of the majority, and while non-Christians should not face active discrimination they also should not expect to see their values reflected in the public square. Hazony himself is Jewish, but has argued for the past several years that only such a restoration of public Christianity — through things like a return to Bible instruction in public schools — can stave off the threat of "woke neo-Marxism." Toward that end, he argued, Republicans need to be even more explicit than they already are.
