Blair: Now, as we begin to wrap-up here, I’m curious—a very dire prognostication there. You mentioned that there are some states that are probably willing to do this and probably willing to go to that standard. Do you believe that there are certain states that other states should be modeling themselves after? What specifically are those states doing from a legislative perspective that the other states in the union should be emulating?
Hazony: There are good things happening in some of the red states, but I think that this needs to be pushed further. I think that
until you have governors saying explicitly that separation of church and state is not a part of the traditional American Constitution, that Everson in 1947 was wrongly decided, and therefore Bible can return to the schools and the public life can be based on a broad Christian and biblical foundation, until you’re hearing that explicitly and seeing it explicitly, you have not changed the direction of the United States.
Like other conservatives, I’m excited and happy and thrilled to see some of the governors pushing back on some of the worst excesses of woke neo-Marxism, but there’s no chance that that’s going to be enough. You can’t fight something with strictly a negative view that, “No, we don’t want to go that far.” You can only fight an idea with an idea. The idea here has to be conservative democracy or Christian democracy.
I’ve seen some of the young Christian writers in the last few weeks embracing the term Christian nationalism. All these terms, they all refer to the same basic idea, which is that there needs to be a restoration of the idea that the Bible is the basis of public life. It can be tolerant. It can be ecumenical. What it cannot be is simply a negation of woke neo-Marxism. You can win a couple of battles that way, but in the end, there has to be something positive that gives the framework for life in the United States or in Britain or in other countries. That’s what we’re waiting to see.
Blair: Well, hopefully we can move in the direction where we start to bring back a conservative mindset to this country.
That was Yoram Hazony, president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation. He’s also author of the new book “
,” available now wherever books are sold.
Yoram, thank you so much for your time. Very much appreciate it.