Blair: I want to go back to something you’ve talked about a lot, which is the role of religion in conservatism. Specifically, it sounds like, in the West, that Anglo-Judeo-Christian values that are essential to conservatives to function, a lot of people in America today will say that a secular society can exist, that there is a form of secular conservatism that can work. It sounds like you might disagree with that assessment.

Hazony: Well, like I say, I think that was tried. America was explicitly a Christian nation, a Christian people, up through World War II.

What I mean by explicitly is that this was said time and again by the American Supreme Court, and American presidents regularly spoke about it. FDR and [Dwight D.] Eisenhower still were of the age and the generation where they understood America was a Christian nation, and they were some version of Christian nationalists.

For FDR, he never tired of saying that democracy grows out of Christianity, that America’s worthy constitutional traditions grow out of the religious tradition. That was commonplace. That was just something that was generally believed by political leaders on all sides up until the Second World War.

After the Second World War, Americans shifted. There was a change from what you can call Christian democracy to what came to be known as liberal democracy. The term liberal democracy wasn’t really in use much then, but by the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s, intellectuals, both Marxists and liberals, had begun to use the expression liberal democracy to give the name to the new secular neutral state that was supposed to have come into existence after the Second World War.

We have a pretty clear experiment that lasted 60 or 70 years, in which the religious foundations of the society, the biblical foundations, which had always been there, were banished.

The most obvious indication of this was the shocking banning of God and prayer and the study of Scripture from schools across the United States. That happened in 1947, or it began in 1947, with the Supreme Court’s Everson decision, which, for the first time, declared a separation of church and state to be an integral part of the American Constitution and imposed it on all 48 states.

So we’ve done the experiment, we’ve lived in that kind of supposedly neutral state, and what we see is that when you send children every day to school, in which talk about God and reading the Bible and what you’re supposed to get out of the Bible and its place is the basis of our civilization, when you send kids to school every day that way, they don’t come out Christians and they don’t come out Jews. They come out with this tremendous vacuum.

Lots of people thought that vacuum was just fine. They didn’t understand that vacuum is completely unstable.

Now, if you look around America, I think anybody can just open their eyes and see that that banishing of Christianity and the biblical foundations of America created a vacuum, and in that vacuum, all sorts of terrible things have grown. America is clearly moving toward dissolution. The only question is whether people are willing to learn the lesson and move fast to turn it around.