In the Library: Yoram Hazony

Albert Mohler:

Hello, I’m Albert Mohler and I want to welcome you to In the Library. This library is a good place for conversation, and I’m looking forward today for a very good conversation with my dear friend Dr. Hazony. I think he is one of the most important intellectuals in the world today. He’s the author of many books. We’re going to talk about some of them today. Most importantly, his book on conservatism and his book, The Virtue of Nationalism. But we’re going to talk about many other things and many other books as well. Dr. Hazony, welcome to In the Library.

Yoram Hazony:

It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Albert Mohler:

Yoram, I’ve really appreciated our two previous conversations on Thinking in Public. The first about your book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, and the second about The Virtue of Nationalism. But I’ve really looked forward to this conversation to get into a conversation with you about your larger project and more of your thinking, at least for me. Looking at the corpus of your work, a lot of it was, I think, clarified in my mind with your book, now 25 years old, The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul. How did that come about?

Yoram Hazony:

The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul, it’s at this point, 25 years old. It goes back to the days— this was the year 2000—it was not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. And the fall of the Berlin Wall released kind of a tidal wave of utopian, pacifist kind of energies. All of these projects that assumed that we were done with war. We just need to give it a little bit more push and evil would more or less be pushed to the corners of reality.

So, this is most famously associated with Francis Fukuyama’s End of History thesis. The book came out in, I think in ‘92, but politically we don’t so often stop to put together the different pieces. 1992 was also the year of the Master Treaty. It was the year that the nations of Europe agreed to give up their sovereignty and to adopt, for the first time a European Constitution whose declared aim was ever closer union, was pulling down all the borders and creating a single entity that’s Europe. And so there were other projects that were similar.

There was the bringing the Chinese into the World Trade Organization, which part of that was the giving back Hong Kong and assuming that you could just incorporate China into the global market, and everything would turn out great, they would become liberals. So that the Israeli version of this took place in 1993 with the Oslo Accords. The Oslo Accords were, on the surface, a peace treaty between Israel, the Jewish state, and the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization. Yasser Arafat, who had been probably the most prominent terrorist in the world. He pioneered the hijacking of airplanes and the assassination of Olympic athletes and all of the other horrors that the Soviet backed, Soviet trained movement of terrorists, brotherhood of terrorists had taught us about beginning in the 1970s. So it’s 1993, and all of a sudden, really out of nowhere, the Israeli public, which had never supported peace with the Palestine Liberation Organization, that was a 5% position before 1993. And all of a sudden we discovered that as Israeli leaders on the left at the time were saying, well, you don’t make peace with friends. You only make peace with enemies. So it’s completely reasonable to take this blood thirsty murderer and make a peace treaty with him because how else are you going to get rid of him? And that theory backed by this tidal wave of utopianism of thinking that the world was just moving towards peace and all the conflicts were ending, it was probably given its most astonishing expression by Shiman Perez’s book in 1995, which was called The New Middle East and The New Middle East. It was just the European Union applied to the Middle East.

Albert Mohler:

Wow.

Yoram Hazony:

There was going to be, Paris himself was one of the fathers of the Israeli nuclear program, secretly of the nuclear bomb. He was a respected figure in terms of Israeli national security and a Zionist, a Jewish nationalist left of center. But somebody, everybody took, nobody thought that he was like a fantasist. And then he put out this book in which he said, well, what’s about to happen is that all the borders are going to disappear in the Middle East. There’s going to be an alliance between enlightened liberal Jews on the one hand, and enlightened liberal Arabs on the other hand. And together liberal Jews and liberal Arabs we’re all going to fight the religious, the religious fundamentalists and loonies on both sides.

And this theory very quickly turned out to not just be a utopian theory of geopolitics. It was led, it was accompanied by a kind of wholesale uprooting of all of the nationalist and religious aspects of the state of Israel that had made it the Jewish state. They made it what most Israelis believed we were there for, what they were fighting for.

And so this was kind of a moment where I had been raised in a strongly Jewish nationalist, Zionist kind of family. I was born in Israel, but I was raised in New Jersey. You can hear that from the twang in my voice, which I can’t get rid of unfortunately. But I was raised in a family that had these sort of classical, traditional David Ben-Gurion and Theodore Herzl and the heroes of the Jewish tradition and the biblical foundations of the state of Israel. That was the way I was raised. And after college, when my wife and I moved to Israel and made our home there, we met many, many people—relatives, friends that we made political contacts, public contacts—many people who were Jewish nationalists and Zionists and religious people of that kind. But the elites centered in Tel Aviv—when I say the elites, I mean the journalists, the professors, the academics, the policy people, the Supreme Court and the judges. This, it’s a familiar pattern. There’s probably no more than two or three thousand families in Israel who are the culture makers. They’re the decision maker. You can have elections, but in the end, they’re always in charge of the universities. They’re always in charge of the media and the courts and so on.

And what I suddenly realized after 1993 was that they weren’t just interested in making peace with this blood thirsty terrorist organization. They had a much bigger project. Their project was to uproot the idea of a Jewish state, the idea of Jewish national independence and to create what they called a state of all its citizens. The state of, that’s an Israeli term, that’s a Hebrew term. But it’s an import because it’s the same liberal idea of the neutral state, which you find in America and throughout the English speaking world and all through Europe, the idea that it’s illegitimate for the state to be connected to a particular people, to a particular inheritance, to a particular religion, any kind of characteristics that give the state a direction that’s particular and rooted in something great and grand and historical. I mean the state of Israel, its founders see it going back to Scripture. And that’s the way that we were raised. That’s the way most Israelis are raised is to see it like that. And this project was a project of uprooting all of that, of creating perfect equality between Jews and non-Jews, religious Jews and secular. I mean, this liberalism is familiar.

Albert Mohler:

I was surprised by the way in the book you documented kind of a suicidal ideology that had taken a hold in those elites. And I frankly found some of the things you cited in your book to be absolutely shocking. But then you think about what’s going on in the American University campus, and you can see some very significant parallels. The Idea of national sovereignty all of a sudden now an oppressive concept,

Yoram Hazony:

Right, well, yes, the architects of this post-Zionist vision, they wanted to go deep. They didn’t just want to have no borders between Jews in the entire Arab world and have a single polity. They understood that to do that, you would have to change the whole framework of the way people thought and felt about their country. So just an obvious example is that almost all of us serve in the military and we send our children to serve in the military. To this day, I mean, at this moment, Israel’s been fighting a war for almost two years on many different fronts. And my children have served nephews, nieces, daughter-in-law, cousins, and my employees, people who work for me. It’s a reservist army. Much of it is reserves. And I served for 18 years myself. I’m now a little bit old.

But they wanted that incredible spirit of motivation serving the Jewish people, the reconstitution of the Jewish people. After 1500 years of exile, the in gathering, the biblical vision of the, in gathering of exiles, which all Israelis believe in, whether they’re scrupulously, orthodox, observant or not, they all believe in gathering of the exiles and the fight to restore the ancient Jewish commonwealth, the ancient Jewish kingdom. They wanted all of this uprooted and translated into a belief in this New Middle East in a post Jewish state, which would then melt into some of them didn’t like the idea of being part of the Middle East, so they wanted to be part of the European Union, but whether it was the New Middle East or the European Union, the vision was the same. We need to overcome our particulars, detachments to our country. We need to overcome the obsession about the land. And it seemed like almost the entire elite, all the intellectuals in the country were competing with themselves to propose the Israeli flag, which has a Jewish Star of David on it, and is designed like a prayer shawl in the colors of the Jewish prayer shawl. So they were proposing to add a cross next to the Jewish star to add a Muslim crescent next to the Jewish star. In other words, the flag should de-Judaized,

The national anthem, which has been the anthem of the Zionist movement for a century, the national anthem. It talks about the Jewish soul. So it needs to be rewritten so that it expresses universal longings. The army code of the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces would no longer be a Jewish army serving Jewish goals and purposes and protecting Jews, not just in Israel, but all over the world, but it would become a neutral army that would have no Jewish purposes. And this went on and on the, the leading newspaper of the intellectuals very, very far left, even more worse than the New York Times. And they started calling for an end to the law of return, which is what allows Jews from any country in the world to come to Israel and claim citizenship. They said, we’ve got to stop that.

Albert Mohler:

That’s astounding.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah. So the entire political establishment shifted after 1993 into this way of thinking. Now the left went much further than the right, but the right also shifted. And politicians, instead of talking about Am Israel, the Jewish people, which is what the Declaration of Independence of Israel’s concern, instead of talking about Am Israel, the Jewish people, they started talking about Am Israel, the people in Israel without any kind of religious or national identity, just those of us who happen to be here now. I felt that the country was losing its soul. It was losing its purpose and felt like I simply had to set things aside and to devote myself to fighting it.

Albert Mohler:

And you had been inside the government, you could see this on the inside, you had been an aid to Benjamin Netanyahu before he became Prime Minister.

Yoram Hazony:

He was not yet Prime minister. I worked closely with Netanyahu from 1990 to 1994 or 1995. So for four or five years right before he became Prime Minister. And that meant that I was in the Knesset, in the Israeli parliament every day for a very long time. And I got to see how it worked, and I got to meet and get to know—t’s a very small parliament, there’s only 120 members of parliament—and I got to know many of them and to watch almost all of them in close range and close meetings. And I felt like I had a very, very clear understanding of what was going on, and that what was going on was that we were, as a country being caught up in, as I said, a tidal wave of utopianism.

And it’s, it’s true that in the Likud I was a member of Likud as Netanya was and still is. It’s true that in the Likud there was wall-to-wall agreement that the deal with the PLO, to bring the Oslo Accords to bring the PLO into the land of Israel that is into the 50, 60 miles width, like this little tiny width of a country, they’re going to carve out another country there, which was going to be physically immediately adjacent, built right up to the suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. So everyone in the Likud, everyone in the opposition, the representatives of half the country, they understood that this was a catastrophe. They said it was a catastrophe. They knew, all of us knew. They knew that thousands would die, and they knew that we were now committed to a tragedy unfolding over many years, which is exactly what happened.

But the deeper abandonment of every aspect of the Jewish tradition and the Jewish national soul, which was wrapped up in this peace process, that was something that people didn’t see clearly and they didn’t understand so well. I mean, the idea that of course, Amos Oz and David Grossman, all of these famous Israeli lefty novelists, everybody knew that they were used to writing articles and appearing on television saying wild things like there’s no such thing as a Jewish state. A state can’t be Jewish anymore than a table or a chair or a bus can be Jewish. So all of these arguments privatizing everything, privatizing emotion, privatizing identity, privatizing history, turning it all into a matter of individual choices. Everybody knew that this was going on, but they needed somebody to put it to connect it all. And I and some friends we established in 1994, we established a research institute, a think tank that was called the Shalem Center. And for the next couple of decades, we established magazines in a publishing house. And this book, The Jewish State was it was the instruction manual.

Albert Mohler:

It was incredibly helpful to me in a couple of ways. As someone who’s tried to be a close observer of these things, I missed a great deal of what was going on inside Israel. The other immediate impression that came to my mind too, as a matter of fact, one is that this really offers a perspective of what’s going on the elite university campuses where the very same ideology is just taken to be the obvious right thing.

But the other aspect is I felt like, okay, now I understand Yoram in a different way, even in terms of the virtue of nationalism and of your work on conservatism. I see you as a blend of this Israeli experience and also the Anglo-American tradition. And I think that that’s come together in a very powerful way. But your enemies or Israel’s enemies in this book, they’re just really, they’re helpfully identified. And so as I have told you, I’m even looking for some of the source material here because it’s very helpful for connecting dots.

And it also explains why on the American College University campus in America, the United States of America, very different political context, friendly oceans, oceans, the east and the west. It is a completely different context, and yet it helps to explain the connections where so many people on the American college campuses, the intellectual elites, the endowments, the big foundations, they’re all working on this model of cosmopolitanism that sees the nation state as the problem.

And so your title is an argument that there is a Jewish state, and now we find ourselves in 2025 in the United States, and I think a lot of just average Americans are shocked that there are an enormous number of Americans, especially in our elites who don’t believe there should be an American state.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah. It is a universal theory. I mean this liberal revolution to make all of us, to make all the nations…

Albert Mohler:

Which turns into a leftist revolution…

Yoram Hazony:

Which collapses. I mean, it’s another crucial aspect of this is that there’s one question. One question is do we want this liberal revolution? Is it good for us? There’s a second question was, which is let’s say you do want the liberal revolution and you want everybody in your country to be good liberals, and you want your identity to become liberalism. You want the state to be neutral, and all of your identity and everything inherited to be privatized in a matter of choice. Let’s say you accept that there’s a second crucial question, which is can it possibly be stable? Is it possible for the good liberalism, the best version of it? Is it possible for that to last more than a couple of generations?

And one of the arguments that I make at length in the book on conservatism is that I actually don’t believe it can last. The problem is that if you think, as these Israeli intellectual and spiritual and political leaders thought, if you think that the price of having a neutral state of overcoming the Jewish state, overcoming the Judaism part of the state, if you think that the price of that is going to be uprooting everything that’s collective and privatizing everything so that it’s up to everybody, everybody decides everything is how long will that liberal state last? And it turns out, this is my view, is that the American version, let’s say that America became sort of this thorough going enlightenment, liberal country separation of church and state and a whole list of categories that is going to become illegal to make any distinctions between people. I mean, not just sensible things like you shouldn’t persecute blacks, but there’s not going to be any distinctions on a whole list…

Albert Mohler:

Of male and female…

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah, male and female. So let’s say that you buy this and you think it’s good, how long is it going to last? And America did this experiment. America banned God in scripture from the schools in all the schools in the country in the early 1960s. And by the year 2020, I think the summer of 2020, after the George Floyd riots, when the New York Times expelled, its liberal editors for being too tolerant…

 

Albert Mohler:

The leftists kicked out the liberal,

Yoram Hazony:

Right. The leftists, the new neo-Marxist woke generation kicked out the liberals. And then this was repeated in the summer of 2020 and the fall of 2020 in hundreds and hundreds of major institutions across the United States, also in Britain and some other places. So I think we’ve seen where it ends in the 1960s. You’ve got consensus left and right, everybody’s agreed. It’s not going to be a Christian country anymore. That’s no good. It’s going to be, it’s not going to be Christian, it’s not going to be Anglo. It’s just going to be like the neutral liberal state. That’s the plan…

Albert Mohler:

May I interrupt you for a moment? So you talked about the debate in Israel: Is it the people of Israel or the people in Israel? Well, that in parallel is exactly what’s going on in the United States right now. Is the United States a people or is it merely all the people in a place accidentally legally or illegally just in a place? So I mean, I think that’s a very helpful clarification that the debate in Israel a generation ago is being hammered out in the United States right now.

Yoram Hazony:

Yes. It’s not just a version of the same debate. Because if you were there in the 1990s to watch the campaign, the public campaign in the media and academia to claim that Israel was born in original sin, right?

Albert Mohler:

Well, welcome to the American College campus on the founding of the United States.

Yoram Hazony:

Yes. Right. So what’s interesting is that we actually saw this in Israel first because I mean, it’s been on the college campuses forever. But the question is the moment that it spills out of the college campuses and becomes the newspapers and the media are leading this charge, and they’re leading the politicians, they’re leading the courts and everybody’s following it. So that moment took place in Israel in 1993, and the campaign was Israel was created in sin. That’s like a direct translation of what the left was saying all the time. That instead of having a neutral state and bringing the Arabs to be absolutely equal, we declared it to be a Jewish state. And that’s what caused the wars, and that’s what caused the Arabs to leave and the Arabs to attack. And the whole thing from the beginning was evil. Haaretz was full- throated pushing this agenda—that’s the most important elite newspaper in the 1990s. I don’t remember what year the New York Times adopted the 1619 Project, but it’s…

Albert Mohler:

Similar…

Yoram Hazony:

It’s almost identical just, and the people at the New York Times, it’s not like they’ve never heard of Haaretz. I mean they’ve been to Israel, this’s an international left lefty Coalition…

Albert Mohler:

Absolutely.

Yoram Hazony:

I don’t buy that it’s specifically a Jewish coalition against non-Jews. I think that’s ridiculous. But there is a lefty international coalition, which plenty of liberal Jews and liberal Christians and liberals of all kinds, and I think they consciously took this model of Haaretz, the Israeli left ceasing to rebuilding the history of the country as though it was evil from its foundations. And they said, oh, we can do that in America too. There were European models that even preceded the Israeli one, but it’s the same playbook. It’s the same people.

Albert Mohler:

Well, speaking of the playbook, I think we can argue that liberals became very frustrated with the lack of progress of liberalism. And so that to me is the opportunity of the left. The left came in and said, look, liberalism is playing by an old rule book. It is never going to work. Even recent developments in the United States, the New York Mayoralty primary just happening, you have a democratic-socialist clearly making the argument that liberalism is completely discredited. It’s never going to get us where we need to go. We’re going to have to take a leftist ideology and replace liberalism with that leftist ideology. What’s already happened in the major newspapers? It’s already happened in the college campuses. But now, I mean there it is in the numbers from the New York Mayoralty nomination race. New York Democrats have chosen a democratic-socialist.

Yoram Hazony:

Liberalism collapses into leftism, liberalism collapses into Marxism.

Albert Mohler:

It can’t produce fast enough.

Yoram Hazony:

It can’t because the promise is impossible, the promise that people are going to be perfectly equal, that they’re going to be perfectly at liberty.

Albert Mohler:

Perfectly autonomous.

Yoram Hazony:

Those are quotes from John Locke that concept that what you need to know about politics is that everyone has the right to be perfectly free and perfectly equal. Now, that’s impossible. In reality, people are always going to be constrained and often much more than they’d like to be, even in the most just and decent and successful societies. And so if what you teach people is any whiff of inequality, any whiff of constraint and lack of consent and lack of freedom is a legitimate, it’s a reasonable excuse to be angry and to fight. And I grew up in the States, I was born in Israel, but I grew up in the States, and you get taught that in grade school is free to be you and me. You can be absolutely anything you want.

 

Albert Mohler:

Sesame Street…

Yoram Hazony:

No one has, one has the right to put any claim on you. That ideology, which begins as a noble and tolerant thing with time, it creates a revolution. I don’t want to say it’s inevitable because we all have free will, but it looks pretty inevitable once you start looking at it.

Albert Mohler:

It’s a social dynamic for sure. And that’s what the last decade has demonstrated, I think, to many Americans, is that the liberals are done being liberal, they’re over that. And now the leftists are clearly in control. I go back to New York, there’s an increasing realization just in the last several days, lots of leading figures in the media, for instance, at the New York Times saying, look, here’s the model for the Democrats. Kind be done with the liberals and just go with the leftists and create what they say is a genuine alternative to the Republican argument. Well, it’s a genuine alternative. I’ll give them that.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah, it is. And there’s still a lot of prominent liberals at the center of the American political spectrum.

Albert Mohler:

It’s decreasing though.

Yoram Hazony:

I think it’s decreasing. I think what’s happened is that the National Democratic Party has adopted much of the woke agenda…

Albert Mohler:

If anything, that’s an understatement.

Yoram Hazony:

And so there isn’t much liberalism left in the Democratic party. I mean here and there, you still see it, but it’s completely dominated, overwhelmingly dominated by what used to be called the left, the progressives, the woke. And on the right as well, the Trump movement, the rise of a nationalist conservatism is, it also is in many respects, a reaction against liberalism. Now, as you know, I support that.

Albert Mohler:

As do I.

Yoram Hazony:

I mean both of us, we attend the conventions and we speak at them, and there’s many wonderful things happening there. So I don’t mean this as something hostile. I actually think that national conservatism is restorationists, that its goal is to save America and the other countries in which, which it, it’s a rising force, but in many respects, national conservatism, it’s finally reaching the conclusion that no liberalism—it doesn’t have all the answers. In fact, it’s an extremely destructive force. Once it’s done, once you’re done teaching your children, you get to choose. You get to choose what kind. If you love America or if you don’t want to get married, if you don’t, if there’s a God, if there’s no God, I mean you, you’re like infinitely sovereign, and you can just choose once you’re done teaching your children that it turns out that they just don’t stay good liberals, they choose much more aggressive means…

Albert Mohler:

I think it’s increasingly a useless word. And I’ve had some conversation with conservative colleagues in the larger umbrella of conservatism. And so some would see themselves as continuing in the National Review tradition, Buckley tradition, et cetera. And you had people writing for prominent conservative establishment institutions, and they would try to say they recapturing the ideal of classical liberalism over against procedural liberalism, ideological liberalism on the left that we’re trying to recover classical liberalism. I just said recently to a colleague, just drop it, it’s dead. You can’t use that word anymore Because what you’re contending for is disappeared. And I don’t even think that’s the right way to describe what you’re trying to argue for. What you’re trying to see come to pass. Liberalism doesn’t work, and it has devolved into many different things. Conservatism is a debated concept, but liberalism is now a useless concept in my mind.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah, I think I have to agree with you. Look, look, let’s take one issue. I understand it’s a controversial issue. In 2015, the American Supreme Court decided that one requirement of perfect equality is that if you want to marry a man and you’re a man, then who could stop you? I mean, people have a right…

Albert Mohler:

Just nearly 10 years ago, even as we speak…

Yoram Hazony:

So the decision was people have a right. They shouldn’t be boxed in to some traditional, traditional constraints or biblical constraints or conservative. They shouldn’t be boxed into a life and a future that’s determined by society that they should choose. If you’re a man and you want to marry a man, then you should have the right, and the government should recognize it. Alright?

So I know many, many, many people who felt that that’s common sense and simple justice. That’s never been my view, but I know lots of people like that. Alright, so they said, what are you worried about Yoram? What are you worried about? Why are you worrying about marriage? Marriage has been around for thousands and thousands of years, so we’re just expanding. We’re being more inclusive, we’re just expanding the circle of people allowed to get married. What are you worried about?

So now then it’s 2020 and the United States Supreme Court decides that men have the right to be women, and women have the right to be men, and all of society is going to have to rearrange itself in order to recognize that. All of a sudden I have lots of liberal friends who say, oh my gosh, that’s crazy. What are you crazy? What? You’re going to have men saying that they’re women and then entering the boxing ring and beating up women? That’s nuts. You’re going to have men walking into women’s bathrooms and saying that they’re women. I mean, do you know what a male human being is? What are you talking about? You can’t have them walk into women’s bathroom. And they honestly thought that at in 2015 with gay marriage, they had reached this perfection of liberalism.

But then 20-25 years later, when all of a sudden it turns out that liberalism can’t, it can’t be controlled. Once you’re talking about perfect equality and perfect liberty, as soon as you’re doing that, you can’t control what people are going to want out of their perfect liberty.

Albert Mohler:

Yoram, it is very telling that a recent book out is making the argument an honest acknowledgement for the left. Now there is no teleology. So it’s constant unfold. This is Hagel set loose. This is just this constant unfolding same-sex marriage today. It’s the transgender revolution. Tomorrow it’s going to be something else the day after that and something else the day after that. And so that’s useful to me because it’s the first opening acknowledgement I’ve seen from an establishment figure just saying, there’s no teleology, there’s no end to this. The liberal project now devolved into a leftist project has no boundary. There’s your liberal friends who are so shocked, they can’t honestly be shocked. This is all right before them.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah, human beings, we think we’re much smarter than we are, and all of us are very, very limited, especially about consequences and seeing the future. We’re really not good at it. And these are difficult conversations to have with friends of many years who have shifted dramatically in the things that they believe 20 years ago. They don’t believe anything like that anymore. The reason that I think that it’s worth talking about conservatism, you mentioned the Buckley National Review conservatism of the 1960s…

Albert Mohler:

Fusionism.

Yoram Hazony:

And as you know in my book, I’m strongly critical of that. I mean, I definitely appreciate Buckley and his movement for the crusade against communism, which was a tremendous achievement…

Albert Mohler:

And I would say for recovering even a term which was usefully recovered in that period.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah, I agree. So I really don’t mean to take away from the achievements of Buckley and his allies of that generation, but in my book on conservatism, I do allow myself to vigorously criticize what they were calling conservatism. Because what they were really doing is what they were embracing was a private conservatism that they were saying, no, we believe in God. We believe in going to church. We believe in traditional morals, but it’s all private. The public sphere has to be liberal, it has to be based on John Locke. It has to be perfect liberty and perfect equality. And that’s been a disaster for conservatism.

Albert Mohler:

And this is where we are today. So just a few weeks ago, the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution calling for the reversal of Obergefell. And there’s some people who are saying, well, that’s 10 years too late. Well, frankly, we’ve been making the same argument all along. But this is a public declaration, and I don’t want to tell you a part of why it’s so necessary is because we want to force the issue. Because we want to make very clear that if you’re settled with Obergefell, you’re on the wrong team.

If you believe that same-sex marriage is just fine, it’s now a settled fact. The vast majority of Americans, pollsters, say, are in agreement with it and all the rest, if that’s where you are, you’re not with us. And our circles, I think is going to be very, very interesting. I think this is an argument that an awful lot of conservatives don’t want to have because they don’t want to put the editorial staff of National Review or other conservative institutions on the line about this. I think you see this a dividing line right now, AEI, for example, I think largely abandoning any normative understanding of marriage, family, sexuality, and all the rest. Let’s just understand that means you’re now for the other team. You may be for capitalism, you may be for strong national defense, but you are for the absolute collapse of civilization. And I think that needs to be called out. But That means conservatism is going to be smaller. I mean, there’s some conservatives who want to make it look big, and so they want this big tent conservatism, but that means you’ve got liberalism and leftism in the tent.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah, I think that’s true. Look, for me, as I understand it, I think the core of the entire discussion about whether we’re going to conserve anything, there’s anything worthy of conserving that entire discussion, I think in the end comes down to Scripture. I don’t expect everyone in our generation to be a believing Christian or a believing Jew. I don’t know if in any generation everyone was a believing Christian or believing Jew. I mean, that’s an excessive, that’s an ideal that you can’t have in reality.

Albert Mohler:

But it was the constraining vision.

Yoram Hazony:

But it was the constraining vision. It was the boundary vision. It was the…

Albert Mohler:

Ontological basis…

Yoram Hazony:

It was the thing that if you were confused or you didn’t know, or you had some strong doubts, you still understood that for upholding society, for upholding the inheritance, for conserving anything at all, the bedrock was going to be God and Scripture. I mean, so many people wrote about this during the centuries of enlightenment that if you let go of this, then you’ll let go of everything. And by the way, nobody said this more eloquently and piercingly than Nietzsche himself. He’s very clear. He’s, he’s an atheist and…

Albert Mohler:

It’s all or nothing.

Yoram Hazony:

And he’s saying, you’ve unchained the earth from its sun—from the source of warmth and heat and light. That’s what he describes. This revolution in which you say nothing inherited is of any value. It’s me. I alone, I decide what’s of value. You’ve unchained the earth from its son. And so I don’t think we have any choice. I think that I just, I have liberal friends, I also have gay friends, and I’ve worked closely with people in our movement. That’s their life. That’s the way they live. But we reached a crisis point with this. It was 2020, and we reached a crisis point where it became clear that people who want to conserve something, they can be very, very generous. They can be very gracious to people who don’t agree with them. I mean, I would say that the Christian, right, the nationalist that in terms of people whose private life is along homosexual lines, everybody accepts them.

Albert Mohler:

No, but that’s an issue of real tension. So I’ll be clear, I think there’s a huge problem with the public acceptance of homosexuality. I cannot say that that is admirable. I have to say that that is dishonorable. This is a huge problem. I know it’s very socially awkward, but I don’t have any choice but to say this is a horribly dishonorable thing.

Yoram Hazony:

Yes. So I’ll share with you the practical conclusion that I and the others organizing and working in the nationalist conservative sphere, the conclusion that we reached was, and it’s not an a priori principle, it’s empirical. If you ask me, do the nationalists do the ones who are all about trying to conserve something, are they willing to appear on a stage? The answer is yes, they are. Are they willing to join in political activities and in public discussion? Absolutely.

So I’ll tell you what they’re not willing to do. Okay. And here, I’m not expressing a personal opinion. I’m observing something that the moment this crosses the line from a private—this is the way you choose to lead your life. I disagree with it, but I honor you for other things that you do—the moment it crosses the line into a public campaign to force the normalization of gay marriage and adopting gay children and surrogacy, and to insist that the family unit that consists of two men who are married to one another and a number of women who contribute different things, and that family unit, that that’s a norm that’s going to be illegal and moral norm in our society. People, they can’t go there, they’re stopped.

Albert Mohler:

But in Christianity, this is a normal instinct. I think it is a normal ethical theological structure. So you could mention, again, I won’t say a name, but a prominent figure of conservative contribution who is homosexual in identity. The most important thing is that number one, conservative Christians are among the last people on earth who will not affirm the human dignity of that individual because he or she has made in the image of God. And so there’s an ontological reality. And so I don’t have any option to dehumanize such a person.

And so I will be very clear about what I believe is an absolutely normative sexuality. And there are limits. And as you say, I think you hit it exactly in terms of redefining public law so as to undermine the family that I will not support in any way, but I’ll be there on the front lines to defend the dignity of every single human being made in the image of God. And that’s what is absent on the left. There’s no image of God on the left. All there are political actors and autonomous individuals on the left. So in that sense, I think conservative LGBTQ identified persons, I hope, recognize that we have a very honest disagreement, but we also have a ground of human dignity that conservative Christians aren’t going to give up. We’re Going to fight for their human dignity when everyone else denies it. But we’re going to also fight for a normative understanding of the family.

 

 

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah, and I think what you’ve expressed, I think is accurately also represents Orthodox Judaism. When I say orthodox, I just mean those who continue to uphold the Jewish tradition. Going back to the Torah, on the one hand, every human being is created in God’s image. Just as you said, this is the Jewish teaching, is that we don’t have the right to debase and degrade and abuse human beings are made in the image of God.

Albert Mohler:

May I suggest this is one of the reasons why Israel treats its prisoners differently than Hamas taking hostages. I think right before the world right now, you can see a distinction between those who affirm the image of God and human dignity, and those who are the enemies of human dignity. Forgive me for the interruption, but I think we see that right now just in terms of the hostages Hamas is still holding, and the whole idea that the murderous attack, but the distinction in worldview becomes immediately apparent for all who have eyes to see.

Yoram Hazony:

And one of things I, one of the strangest aspects of the political and public debates across many issues that we face today is the claim that the reason for that difference between Israel and Hamas or other such examples, the reason for the difference, there are many people who think that it’s liberalism that created that, and it’s a bizarre claim that they think that it was Locke or Kant. The Americans say Locke and the Germans say Kant, but it was somebody, whatever, somebody enlightened who invented the infinite worth of the individual. And that as a consequence, anybody who wants to fight against barbarism has to be fighting for liberalism when…

Albert Mohler:

Well, that’s just dishonesty…

Yoram Hazony:

No, it’s ignorance. I mean, some are dishonest, but…

Albert Mohler:

Yeah, the intellectual elites are dishonest. They know. They know. Well, I mean, they’ve read Augustine, I mean, if nothing else, they have some idea. I agree with you that at a certain level, yes, it’s ignorance, but at another level, I think it’s much worse than that, to be honest.

Yoram Hazony:

Okay. Well,

Albert Mohler:

You’re maybe more gracious than I am. I just see these people are too smart not to know.

Yoram Hazony:

I hope on some things I’m gracious, but this isn’t, this isn’t, isn’t about grace for me. I feel like I’ve spent my life arguing with people who are blind in a way that never ceases to amaze. We began the…

Albert Mohler:

I agree with that category. Very biblical…

Yoram Hazony:

We began talking about the 1990s in Israel and how do you assimilate? How do you make sense of a professor who identifies with the political right? He sees himself as a nationalist and is accepted as such. Who’s saying? The times come, let’s put the Star of David along with the cross and the crescent moon on the Israeli flag. And he’s out there thinking, this is just a completely reasonable thing to do, is everybody’s equal, all human beings are equal. So what possible justification can there be for having a symbol of your country, which is related to the aspirations of the great majority, rather than covering every single person who…

Albert Mohler:

That’d be a very complicated flag.

Yoram Hazony:

It would be a flag that almost no one would be moved to salute. And I think there is such a thing as common sense. There is such a thing as the inherited feelings and sentiments of a large public, maybe not everybody, but of a large public that understands that that kind of a proposal is smashing the foundations, smashing and destroying the capacity of the majority to continue identifying with one another and with their national purpose, which is the only reason that people obey the law, pay their taxes and show up to fight wars when their country needs to be defended. There is something holding it together. And the minute that you institutionalize, and this is what the neo-Marxists are about, is what in Israel, they call myth smashing. But what they really mean is you transgress everything that’s holy, you trample on it, you trample on it, raise people. You go into the public with the aim of if there are constraints, violate the constraints.

Albert Mohler:

Transgress.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah. So that’s the neo-Marxist ethos. But all these liberals, just sort of like normal people in positions of some significance, just willingly saying, oh no, it doesn’t make any difference whether marriage is between a man and a woman. It doesn’t make any difference whether a scripture is allowed in schools. It doesn’t matter whether you’re allowed to talk about God. None of that makes any difference. Look, I agree with you that there’s a strong reason to think nobody can be that foolish. Nobody can, but I don’t know, empirically people are so blind.

Albert Mohler:

No, I understand the sense of what you mean that, but I was talking to a major academic in the American university system, and I was following up asking a question because I’d read a statement that a young woman made at a major state university saying there is no class on Shakespeare taught at the undergraduate level, just the missing canon’s gone. And so I didn’t want to repeat that without some affirmation because students can say crazy things. And so I communicated with an officer of the university and I said, is this true? And the answer came back, yes, it’s true. There’s no class on Shakespeare. Now, there may be some kind of class on hidden lesbianism in 18th century English literature, but there’s nothing on Shakespeare. You’re not going to read Shakespeare.

And I look at that and I say, okay, so the students, they may be somewhat ignorant because they don’t know. They didn’t make the decision to excise Shakespeare. But for decades, the left has been at work in these universities. It’s not an accident that Shakespeare’s excised from the curriculum. That was a deliberate action. And so I guess that’s what I mean.

Of course, there are some people who are somewhat innocent of what has produced this, and that’s just what they face at the university. But someone behind that has intentionality, and that intentionality is clear down with the cannon, just a part of the larger down of Western civilization.

I want to turn to ask you something else, and you said just a moment ago that the baseline here is Scriptural. So I have read your works on Scripture and found them absolutely fascinating and a bit perplexing as a Christian reading them. And so trying to understand, putting all this together, I’m thinking particularly of your book, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture. I sense, in essence, a part of this goes back to your doctoral work at Rutgers where you’re making the argument that there’s a relevance from the Hebrew scriptures for the Western political tradition. Is that right?

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah, it’s as a doctoral student at Rutgers in the political science department and the political theory program, I think I very early on, I think it must have been in the first semester that I was in graduate school, I found myself feeling very, very uncomfortable with the canon. Most such programs in America and in Europe and in Israel, I mean everywhere. If you go to India, it’s there too. Most such programs are built around a story of the history of ideas that begins with ancient Athens and then goes through Rome in some versions, some medieval Christian thinkers and others not. They skip them. And then from there to the rise of liberalism. So there’s this kind of superhighway that goes from Athens to Berlin.

Albert Mohler:

Absolutely. Berlin claimed that.

Yoram Hazony:

Right. Well, it was an invention of the German university. I mean, it appears earlier in the writing of French enlightenment thinkers, but it’s systematized.

Albert Mohler:

It’s Humboldt.

Yoram Hazony:

Right. Yeah, it’s Humboldt. And this story, if you read Hegel’s version of it, his lectures on the history of philosophy, you’ll see that he’s absolutely clear that everything of worth is born in Athens. And it doesn’t include Asia. It doesn’t include the Bible. I mean, if you’re talking about New Testament, then sometimes they find a place, the German Enlightenment, they find a place for the New Testament on that superhighway from the discovery of truth in Athens all the way to the culmination in enlightenment thought.

But in most versions, the New Testament is left out of that. And in all versions, the Old Testament is left out, meaning that the story is told as though the Jews and our Scripture are darkness. Like when they talk about the dark ages, they’re talking about this. Hagels talking about the snuffing out of the light of Athens, which then reappears when Descartes…

Albert Mohler:

Right. Let me just point out that he was slandering Christianity in that as well.

Yoram Hazony:

For sure. He was slandering Christianity.

Albert Mohler:

All revealed religion basically.

Yoram Hazony:

That’s true. But there is, with many of these enlightenment writers, especially the German ones who were so influential, there is still a degree to which they seek to honor the New Testament. They seek to honor Jesus and the Christian tradition even while undermining it and dissenting from there is something like that.

Albert Mohler:

Well, for one thing, they want to keep the morality, they want to ditch everything else, the theology proper. They just want to keep the morality.

Yoram Hazony:

Right. So Kant is a great example talking about using reason in order to determine the infinite worth, the kingdom of ends, the infinite worth of every individual without being willing to admit that no one would ever have listened to his kingdom of ends if it weren’t for the biblical.

Albert Mohler:

Not to mention the fact he wouldn’t have the university or the community or the nation in which he was doing all of this.

Yoram Hazony:

Right. And still, there’s a difference between the honor that he’s willing to give Christianity and the absolute systematic demolition of the Jews and Judaism. I mean for Kant, as for many of them there was no reason—reason is the measure of everything for him—so reason is born in Athens. Is there any reason in the Hebrew Bible? No. He says no. He says no. The Jewish people, they have reason only to the extent that they borrowed it from the Greeks. That’s Kant, and that is the enlightenment.

So the goal is for sure to overthrow Christianity, and I don’t any way mean to say it wasn’t, but the method of overthrowing Christianity was to say, look, actually, it’s the Old Testament that is corrupt in every possible way that it fetishizes the land, the particular nation, the particular family and the laws. They have a long list of complaints.

 

 

Albert Mohler:

And the German tradition also has a tradition of arguing that Christianity left its Old Testament roots behind with someone like Adolf Von Harnock, the acute Hellenization of dogma. To make your point about Athens, Christianity was Hellenized, therefore it’s acceptably European.

Yoram Hazony:

Right. Or in other versions, I mean the Velhausen version of it, the purpose of the documentary hypothesis, if you actually read Velhausen, which people don’t do anymore, but if you actually read it…

Albert Mohler:

Some do…

Yoram Hazony:

He’s completely clear what he’s trying to do. He says, look, there are later layers. Those are the Jewish layers like the priests and the Deuteronomy who corrupted the original purity. The theory doesn’t work for lots of reasons, but setting that aside, the motive is to erase Jews and Judaism as a contributing factor. And I completely agree that that’s a version of anti-Christianity. But anti-Christianity would’ve cost them. And the way they did it was to destroy the Old Testament.

Albert Mohler:

Now, I also want to concede this is a strategic intentional antisemitism. So I am not denying that. I’m just saying that there’s a hatred of all revealed religion. All they want to maintain is the structure and morality they want to ditch. As Harnock himself said, the doctrine is the husk and you just want the colonel.

Yoram Hazony:

Right. So you asked about where this project started. So I’m in graduate school and I’m studying the story, the superhighway from Athens to Berlin. And I was from my first semester there, found it very, very difficult to swallow the hermetic seal against  the Hebrew Bible as part of this tradition. And I knew the Bible reasonably well, and I thought this makes no sense because so much of the Old Testament is dealing with the same issues that political theorists find interesting. It’s not only that, but beginning with probably the first Christian, that first year long intro course, we probably, I think the first Christian thinker was probably Augustine. But from Augustine all the way to Nietzsche, you cannot understand what they’re talking about if you don’t understand that they are taking Hebrew Scripture seriously as political philosophy. All of them.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah, that’s where I got thrown off. I’ve read the material, especially in the introduction of the philosophy of Hebrew Scripture. I’ve read it more than once, and as you can see, it is pretty marked up. I’m having an ongoing conversation with you here because I am a Christian looking at this, and I believe I have an extremely high view of the Old Testament,

And I believe every word of Scripture is divinely inspired, inerrant, and fallible. I hold to a verbal plenary understanding of Scripture. And so the first time I read this, I read it as bracketing all of that, but you also say that there’s a different Jewish understanding of the text. And so you understand the Christian understanding, but there’s a different Jewish understanding. But when I read it more recently, I thought, I put this in the context with everything else Yoram’s doing, and it appears to me what he’s making here is an incredibly compelling case for the fact you can’t talk about the Western political tradition without going back to Israel and the Hebrew Scriptures and the Old Testament. And I just want to say I am affirmed that emphatically, and not only that, I have to tell you, I delighted in a lot of the exegetical material in your book.

I felt like as a Christian, I’m gaining a new understanding even about Balaam. I just taught verse by verse through Numbers recently. I wish I’d read that section first. And so I just want to tell you, I have great appreciation for it. I put this in the context of Yoram Hazony making an argument, and I guess a part of me wants to know what’s been the response to this argument. In other words, the argument that the Hebrew Scriptures must be taken of crucial importance in the development of the Western tradition. What’s been the response? I haven’t been able to find much.

Yoram Hazony:

It’s a little bit, the response is almost uniformly positive. That’s not exactly fair because the academic guild of the profession of people who are paid full-time salaries to study and teach Old Testament in universities, the response there, when the book first came out, there were some very, very positive responses, especially behind the scenes in private communications. But the book was kind of, how should I put this? It was as often happens in academia, a certain important figures, the top of the pecking order in a particular academic discipline. He pronounces that in some way or another. He says, no, we’re not going to study this. We’re not going to talk about it. So I don’t mean to say that everyone agreed because it was officially rejected by those individuals who take it as their job to make the decision as to whether something is officially rejected or not.

On the other hand, that’s not a description of what happened in all of academia. Across a lot of other disciplines outside of the people who do biblical criticism. I constantly run into people and am contacted by scholars. They could be in philosophy departments, they can be certainly in political theory departments, intellectual history programs, and even further fields. There are professors in all sorts of disciplines who simply say, this is right. I mean, I’m not saying that they agree with every interpretation or every twist in the argument, but…

Albert Mohler:

It’s very hard to argue with your evidence. I mean, seriously, you have to deny the obvious here, the well-documented.

Yoram Hazony:

So I’m not saying that the specifics of the argument that everybody buys it, but what I’m saying is that almost every audience I’ve ever spoken to at this point, the book’s been out for 13 years. In every context, knowledgeable people respond by saying, you’re right. This book should be part of the philosophy, canon or these books. I mean, treating Old Testament as a number of different works, obviously should be part of the standard curriculum, should be taught for the philosophical, moral, metaphysical, political teachings of the book. And in particular, the argument. This book, it was not written for believers. It was not written for people or committed. It was written in order.

Albert Mohler:

I came to that conclusion.

 

Yoram Hazony:

It was written in order. I have other things that I have to say. Hopefully God will give me a long enough life so that I can address all the issues that weren’t included in this. But this particular book, it has a very specific purpose, which is to say that the claim, that reason is the opposite of revelation. The claim that Hebrew Scripture is works of revelation, therefore irrational, containing no reasoning, no arguments, just demanding nothing but obedience, that that’s utterly unfair. If you use the same standards that are used to determine whether other works get to be part of the history of Western philosophy or the history of political ideas, then you have to include the Old Testament. Not just, you have to include it as one among many. You have to include it as foundational.

Albert Mohler:

Yes, ad fontes.

Yoram Hazony:

The only thing, look, you can say that Plato and Aristotle compete with it, and you can make that case, but you can’t, can’t say that you’re just another voice. You can’t understand Western political thought without the man created in God’s image without shift of the polity from relationships between men and men, to the relationship between men and woman as the cornerstone, without the acceptance of property and marriage as the cornerstone, without the acceptance of the nation as the decisive political community without the limitation of government that you find in Deuteronomy without the defensive borders, without the vision of the later days when empires will no longer aggress. I mean, you could just go on and on. I mean, there’s simply dozens of ideas that are at the heart of what it means to be British or American, Christian, European, that if you subtract the Old Testament, you do not have the political and moral teaching anymore.

Albert Mohler:

It’s a very interesting controversy just right now in the United States, and it’s over the posting of the 10 Commandments in schools. And there’s some just totally ludicrous arguments. I mean, too much can be claimed for it. I would argue as a Christian conservative, you can honor them on the wall and subvert them in every other way. But nonetheless, the liberal secular offense taken is fascinating. So some of the arguments being made are such that it is wrong to subject children. It’s just the 10 Commandments. It’s nothing more than just the 10 Commandments given you’re subjecting them to theological arguments, et cetera, that it is unfair, it’s unconstitutional and all the rest. And it gets back to the argument about how essential is this to the Western tradition. And so one of the things I’m going to talk about in responding to this is just go to the Supreme Court of the United States, just go to the building. Moses is there in several different places. The 10 Commandments are there. Moses, the law giver is acknowledged architecturally, if not the font, then at least one of the paradigmatic figures because there’s some other legal figures, Greek, Roman, and others. But Moses is at the center for a reason. And so I thought of that just in hearing you speak. You wouldn’t know that going to Harvard Law School, you wouldn’t know that going to Slippery Rock Community College. You’re not going to be told that.

Yoram Hazony:

Right. So, there is, in graduate school, all of this was in sort of embryonic form. My initial reactions are the same as my reactions decades, decades later to it That If we’re talking about the suicide of the West, the suicide of Israel or America or Britain or any other country, the instrument of that suicide is the erasing the Scriptural basis. And when you’re talking about political and moral things, that means the Old Testament. We can talk about the New Testament in the many ways that it’s shaped Christendom in the West and it’s important. But the Old Testament is the Old Testament has the political foundations that are without which you can’t understand Western history and you can’t appreciate and you can’t accept it.

Albert Mohler:

Well, you’re speaking to a Protestant of the Reformed Calvinistic tradition. And as you know, in Calvin’s understanding, as you see in the Institutes of the Christian Religion and frankly is contrasted to the Lutheran and Catholic traditions, you see an enormous appreciation for the foundational role of the Hebrew Scriptures, or as I would say, the Old Testament and the essential nature. So for instance, the decalogue takes on an entirely different, it becomes the entire framework for much of reformed thinking in a way that, well, I’ll just say it isn’t acknowledged in some other traditions. But it was criticized by some, and particularly criticized by some Germans on the 20th and 19th centuries as being too Hebraic.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah, Judaizing.

Albert Mohler:

Right.

Yoram Hazony:

Yes. So from that first encounter with political theory, that led me to write my dissertation on the book of Jeremiah in a political philosophy program. And I’m, to this day grateful to my professors at Rutgers who were willing to allow this and who supported it. I had on my dissertation committee, I had a Protestant, I had a Catholic, and I had a Jewish Communist, and they were all supportive. They all said yes. They all said, and this is what I’ve heard almost continually since then. yes, there’s a place for this. But that willingness to say there’s a place for it has not, I was saying this, carrying this message everywhere I could take it for something like 30 years. And in the end, a few years ago, I said to my wife, I’m getting old and I’ve seen a lot and I’ve been saying these things, and I’ve been getting yes from almost everybody for a generation. So why isn’t it being picked up?

Obviously, you’re one person. You should limit the degree to which you expect to revolve around the fact that you think something or say something or wrote something, obviously. But I felt like I was talking to the wall. I mean, I was talking to a, it’s a funny wall. Everybody’s nodding and saying yes, but nothing changes. And I said to my wife a few years ago to Yael, who’s been with me on this entire journey and since then, and I said, tell me what’s wrong. Tell me what is wrong. Tell me what it is that I am running into so that people who agree with me don’t change in the slightest. And she said, she completely surprised me. She said, it’s class issue. I said, what do you mean? She said, talking about the Bible is lower class. It’s something that uneducated people are thought to do when you get into the educated class, into the higher class, the elite class, when you get there, you have to stop talking about the Bible. And it’s….

Albert Mohler:

Incredibly perceptive.

 

Yoram Hazony:

It’s the price of admission. And so it doesn’t, maybe I’m not eloquent enough, maybe I don’t make the argument well enough, but she was just saying, you are up against a red line that this civilization is unwilling to cross. They’re unwilling, no matter how persuasive the arguments are, how much they agree with you, they can’t go back to their university departments and start talking about, oh, I’m, I’m going to offer a course in the Bible and the fall to teach the political philosophy. It’s just not done. It can’t be done.

Albert Mohler:

I can give you some evidence behind that too. One of the big problems in my world with theological liberalism is the fact that there’s so many professors who want to be a part of the guild. They want the respect of the guild. They want to be cited in the journals, and they want to be a part of that conversation. And so they swerve left. And all my life, I’ve seen this all my adult life, that’s been such a big part of the story of even why I’m here to undo that. But it comes in waves and you see it on the larger religious community, the larger Christian community. You see this constant attraction, the academic esteem, the academic establishment. They so want that to be a part of that. And what’s just really sad about all that is that they can forfeit the entire Christian faith. They can forfeit all claims of biblical authority and inspiration. They can bracket all that. They can accept all the rest, and they still are wretched professors of Scripture. No one care in the elite establishment, their subject matter is discredited. It is not welcome to the club. So what?

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah. Yes. I don’t mean to say…

Albert Mohler:

Harvard Divinity School at Harvard is not respected by the rest of the university. Yale Divinity School. They don’t even let Yale Divinity School offer a research doctorate because it’s not a science it. So in other words, it is institutionally now built into these things.

Yoram Hazony:

So, I don’t want to sound defeatist about this. I mean, actually after Yael persuaded me of this, I came up with a scheme and I’ve started implementing it on a small scale. Here’s my new plan. My new plan is I spent a year with three younger scholars preparing a course on the political philosophy of the first half of the Old Testament, the story that goes from Genesis to Kings.

Albert Mohler:

The Historical books.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah. So if you read it, Genesis through Kings as a work as a whole, from the creation of the world to the fall of the Kingdom of Judah, we’ve prepared a semester course, 30 lectures of material. It’s about a hundred texts in which all of us, all of the four have degrees either from philosophy departments or from political theory programs. And we said, okay, as an experiment, let’s ask professors, not Bible scholars, but professors from philosophy and political theory programs and divinity also, let’s ask them if they’d be willing to teach it. If they could take a course in it so they see how to teach it, would they be willing to do it? The reason that I came to this is because I eventually started asking people, why aren’t you doing this? Okay, you agree with me. You’ve known me for 30 years. You agree with me. Fine. Why don’t you teach Bible in your department? And they all said the same thing. They all said, I don’t know how. I just don’t know how I have a tradition for how to teach Plato or Aristotle. I don’t know how to do it. I said, so if there were a program that would just walk you through it, they all said, yes. I don’t know if they’re all going to do it, but they all said yes. So we did this last summer in Jerusalem. We had a two week course for three professors, Protestant and Catholic came to do this. And this summer we have six. And look, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I do know the course is now being taught at Baylor. It’s going to be taught at Notre Dame this fall.

Albert Mohler:

That’s a real start.

Yoram Hazony:

Look, it’s small.

Albert Mohler:

I hope it prospers.

Yoram Hazony:

Look, it’s small, but it’s so much better than where I was before.

Albert Mohler:

But I try to remind people about the power of an academic setting. I mean, you have one teacher, but there are many students, and the students come and the students come and the students come. It’s an enormous impact over time.

Yoram Hazony:

God willing.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. I want to shift the conversation a bit and ask you about national conservatism. Okay. Can you have conservatism without nationalism or without respect for a nation?

Yoram Hazony:

It’s a little bit tough to answer that question because when we talk about conservatism, we’re actually talking about a political theory that was developed in the Anglo-American tradition. I mean, it goes back to the Middle Ages, but it’s really native to England in the focus on the importance of tradition as a way of learning, as a way of knowing things, as a way for communities to find the truth through trial and error. That entire set interpretations of what humans are like, what human societies are like, and how we get from ignorance to knowledge. Almost everybody who touches intellectual history is familiar with the empiricist versus rationalist dichotomy. So there are empiricists in continental Europe, but really the home of empiricism is the British Isles.

And so when you ask, can there be conservatism in other cultures, the answer is obviously yes. Number one, Judaism, the Jewish intellectual tradition has a very well developed theory or set of theories about conservatism. And you can find parallels all over. You can find them everywhere. I mean, if you’re talking to Chinese, to Chinese scholars, scholars of Chinese philosophy, when you start talking to them about conservatism, they know what you’re talking about.

Albert Mohler:

And in a large sense, wherever modernity washes ashore, there is the opportunity and necessity of some kind of conservative response. I refuse to accept the term reactionary because these are truths that were affirmed all along. But Now they’re affirmed in the face of challenge, in the face of headwinds, in the face of those who want to revise society in a very different direction, who want to also, at least in the beginning, agree what the tradition is, but they want to reject it rather than to keep it.

Yoram Hazony:

So there is a strong connection between the theory of conservation. What do you need to do in order to transmit, inherited, inherited political, moral and metaphysical frames to transmit them from one generation to the next? So that’s one issue. And another issue is what do you need to do in order to maintain the independence of your nation? Which it’s something that’s very important to Protestants, but it’s not born with Protestantism. If you look at Fortescue, who’s still a Catholic, who’s one of the, he’s writing the fourteen-hundreds, he’s in the Middle Ages, and he’s explaining in his book, In Praise of the Laws of England, he’s explaining the difference between English law and French and German law. And what is so striking about this text, and by the way, this is another, it’s not just the Bible that’s left out of the cannon in a completely reckless and crazy fashion, but Fortescue and the common lawyers also are, it’s very strange.

Albert Mohler:

Seldon is gone.

Yoram Hazony:

Seldon is the greatest of the common lawyers. So Fortescue writing in the fourteen-hundreds understands that to keep England alive requires traditionalism. He’s still a Catholic, he isn’t Protestant, but he sees absolutely with crystal clarity that the fight to prevent England from being swept away by cultural and religious winds from France and Germany, that that fight combines a theory of tradition and transmission with a sense of national difference and independence. And that’s, so to go back to the original question you asked, do you have to be a nationalist in order to be a conservative…

Albert Mohler:

Or at least have awesome fundamental respect for the nation.

Yoram Hazony:

Right. So look, in one sense the answer is no, you don’t. You can be a German conservative or A Russian conservative or a Roman conservative and believe in empire. Even today, I occasionally run into scholars in England who are kind of offended by this idea that there’s some contradiction between being a conservative and having an empire and so on. Fine, yes, there exists in history, there is such a thing as a conservative imperialist. But in our day, in our time, in our place, Americans, Brits, who can you really be a conservative without believing in the independence of your nation, without sensing, understanding the Bible and Scripture as the foundation, the model of the independent nation, the one nation under God, independent living according to its own laws with a king that’s its own, with prophets that are its own. Can you separate those things? Not really well.

Albert Mohler:

So, yeah, just a couple of thoughts, and the one I don’t need to track very far, and that is that empire, yes, is a category, but empires are not all the same. They’re quite different. The Roman empire sought control hegemony over all the territory within it, but it did not try to make them all Roman. And the British Empire never looked at, say, the subcontinent of Asia and never looked at India as if it were going to turn India into London.

I think it would contrast that with the German imperial tradition and central Europe where there was an effort to try to do something very different. But when I’m asking this question, I’m saying, look, conservative is based upon particularity, conservatism begins with the recognition that certain fundamentals have to be in place for any workable society to exist. And so you begin with the particular, I think the tendency the left is to begin with what they claim are the universals, but we begin with the particular, and that means that for instance, time, space, and history, kin, family, community, affinity. Those things land just a particular place. One historian I read when I was in college just gave a line, and I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over it. He said, the average person in human history, if you put him on a spot in the map, you go 30 miles in one direction, 30 miles in the other, draw a circle. They’ve never been without that circle and most never got close to the edge.

And so you just think of that and you realize, okay, so place has to be very much a part of it, but place, and I don’t mean blood and soil conservatism or Kinism. I’m just saying, look, there’s particularity and that particularity has to be honored. And so in that sense, the nation, at least in my understanding, is about as large a unit as is possible, and you define it very helpfully in your book on nationalism. There’s certain things, I mean, you basically have to have a majority understanding of what the culture is. You need a common language, you need a common canon of one sense, if you use that word.

The reason I ask that is because there are people who look at conservatism, they say all these different various is fusion, there’s libertarianism, there’s free market conservatism. And I’m saying, yeah, but the only conservatism conserves is one that honors the particular, and that means you’re going to have to honor the nation. I mean, you have agrarian who may want to go smaller than the nation, but quite frankly, they’re all quaint. But in terms of real politics, I just don’t think there’s much of an alternative to national conservatism is the point I’m trying to make.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah… Look, I think that it is a tragic failure that Americans and Brits ended up thinking that libertarians or classical liberals, I mean, there’s all these different terms fusionists, the idea that they are conservative is, I actually think it’s indefensible. I mean, I think that…

Albert Mohler:

I totally agree.

Yoram Hazony:

I think that they’re two completely different starting points. One starting point, you start talking about the individual, his freedom and his rights and his equality. And another starting point is you start talking about the individual being born into a family tribe and nation being raised and tutored and growing up with extremely powerful bonds of loyalty to that which aren’t natural. And I eradicable mean it is possible for someone to get tired of his family, his nation, his tribe, his religion, and convert and immigrate to immigrate, go somewhere that’s possible. What’s not possible is where he lands. He’s still going to be part of some tribe, family and nation.

Albert Mohler:

I heard a story once called the prodigal son.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah.

Albert Mohler:

Very similar point.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah.

Albert Mohler:

He went into a far country that did not make him. He was treated as less than the citizens of that far country. Just to make your point, you can leave it, but you still at very best are hyphenated.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah. So I really should say something about the expression, blood and soil. Blood and soil is people say blood and soil nationalism, blood and soil conservatism, this, it is just a slander. Blood and soil. Blood and soil, I wish people could focus on this and understand it, blood and soil is a Nazi expression. The Nazi flag is it’s red and black and the imitators of the Nazis, they also have red and black flags.

Blood and soil, it is what the, let’s call it biological imperialism. Biological imperialism: the claim that the physical human being, his blood, his DNA and the physical soil that’s determining, that’s what it’s about. If our blood and soil is better than others, than we deserve to rule, and then we have a biological imperialism. There’s just no connection between this and the family of political theories that descend from Scripture.

In the Hebrew Bible, families, and nations—sure, they have kinship lines and they have dissent for sure. They’re also converts, and the ability to join and to convert is there from the beginning. So if it’s not all kinship, what’s included? Well in Scripture, language is considered crucial. Religion and law obviously are considered crucial. So there’s this package of religion and law and kinship, and it’s true. There is a homeland, and every nation has its homeland, but the attempt to reduce this to blood and soil is anti-Scriptural. It is anti-Scriptural, and as a consequence, it’s also it revolts against the British and American tradition, which is founded intuitively on Hebrew Bible and that inheritance.

Albert Mohler:

Absolutely. Well, I mean it’s worth having this conversation just for this part. I think. So this leads me to say, I think we have to constantly make a distinction between, in political terms, between conservatism and the right, because, and by the way, the far extremes, the right and the left coagulate in some ways and certainly blur the distinctions, but this is one of the slanders against conservatism in our time, and frankly, it’s a slander against national conservatism as a movement where people, they speak of it as if this embraces all of the right, but it doesn’t. It never has.

Yoram Hazony:

National conservatism, when this phrase was adopted, it was clear to those of us who were in that circle adopting it, that it’s actually redundant. We actually all look forward to the day when we can just say American or British conservatives, of course, they want to conserve their nation…

Albert Mohler:

That’s kind of why I asked you the question I did earlier…

Yoram Hazony:

So, it is a little bit redundant. It’s useful. The reason we use it is because it is useful in distinguishing from all the other things, all the other things that claim to be conservative. But really national conservatives are a very, very broad space with the libertarians and the liberals and the classical liberals and the fusion to the left, to the left of us, people who begin with the individual and then jump to the state that’s to the left of us, to the right of us. We have these non-conservative movements of different kinds, and some of them are pagan, some of them are just…

Albert Mohler:

Overtly…

Yoram Hazony:

They’re just overtly pagan and they think Christianity is terrible, and they think the Western tradition is terrible. And then we have the strange different kind of fusionism. There are versions of Christianity that are being developed, which are really, really close to paganism. They’re obsessing about genetics and biology, obsessing about the need to make an idol of masculinity. I’m certainly not a feminist, and I don’t in any way mean to be defending feminism. I think that it’s both impossible and really bad idea to try to make men and women perfectly equal to one another. But the…

Albert Mohler:

We’re looking for the respect for men, earned respect, but we’re not looking at the worship of men, which becomes a form of distorted paganism.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah, it is. It is. And I’m not claiming that this is a large movement. I think that if you were trying to figure out how big are these movements, I think that all the versions of liberalism at the center are rapidly shrinking. And then there’s this gigantic space of versions of nationalist conservatives…

Albert Mohler:

I think we can understand why men are leaving the other spaces.

Yoram Hazony:

Yes.

 

 

Albert Mohler:

Men are leaving the left spaces. They’re just abandoning liberal Protestant churches, try to find men in them, in other words, and are moving into overtly conservative spaces. I have a tremendous interest in helping them to move into healthy conservative spaces rather than to go into pagan rightist spaces. And that’s a continuing battle. I mean, at least it’s a battle, but it is an ongoing challenge.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah, it’s a challenge. And I really should emphasize that I think men as men really are abused at this point, which it’s kind of shocking to say it, but I think it really is true.

Albert Mohler:

Ideologically hated in so many cases.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah, ideologically hated. And there is an evaporation of a tradition of healthy male role models. I mean, part of it is the destruction, the crisis, the decay of the family and the absence of fathers. But there’s just more than that because the things that males can do so much better than women are things that are not honored if you’re not willing to give great honor to people who are warriors and fighters and policemen and people who work in heavy industry and all of these things that used to be honorable in the sense that people consistently, systematically gave them honor. Well, now they’re not. Now they’re dishonored. And so why should anybody want to do that? I think this is a terrible problem.

And if you are trying to understand what kind of sick society gives a platform to these monsters like Andrew Tate, to the abuse of women and to the preening, the reveling, the wallowing in abusing women and hating them, it’s a sick fruit of where feminism has taken us. And we have a problem because liberalism is shrinking at the center on the right. These neopagan influences, including some Christianized versions or synthesis or fusions with them, they are growing.

Albert Mohler:

I have to say you’re not surprised here. Attempted synthesis…

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah, For sure.

Albert Mohler:

I do not believe authentic biblical Christianity can be synthesized of any such thing.

Yoram Hazony:

Okay.

Albert Mohler:

I believe that there are people who would try to claim Christian identity while promulgating anti-biblical anti-gospel messages.

 

Yoram Hazony:

Right. I completely agree. And I was very proud. I have a son who is considering going to his father’s business, and he’s a graduate student in political theory. And both his father and his professors try to encourage him to not say too much online because the consequences he needs to finish his doctorate and not get into too much trouble. But there are many, many, many occasions on which I’ve been especially proud of him. He lives in this world that you and I don’t I think we just don’t really have a grasp of how difficult it is to be a young man who wants to be something heroic and wants to win a young woman and have a healthy relationship. I think it’s very, very difficult to do that these days.

And one of the many moments that I’ve been really proud of him was, it was during Hanukkah one year, the Festival of the Maccabees and other things in Jewish tradition is a celebration of martial prowess. It’s a celebration of military victory, and in that sense, very important in our calendar, especially today. And so he wrote a post about these neo pagans that he knows so well, and he has so many friends who are influenced by this, Christians and Jews. And he said, look, these guys, they don’t understand what masculine martial prowess, they don’t understand its place. Only Jews and Christians can understand its proper place. Because there’s one of the famous neo-pagans is, I am sure you’ve heard of Bronze Age Pervert. That’s something that all the young people are reading it. And Bronze Age Pervert is all about the bond between one man and another. And the two of them, two men bonded to one another going off on world conquering adventures. And what’s the goal? There’s no woman, there’s no children, there’s no family, there’s, there’s no inheritance to be passed down through education. So what’s the goal?

Albert Mohler:

There’s no civilization.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah, well, certainly not, but what’s the goal? And when you try to get to the bottom of it, what’s the goal? The goal is a beautiful death that sooner or later…

Albert Mohler:

We just return to Nietzsche…

Yoram Hazony:

Sooner or later, we all have to die. And so what do we want to leave on this earth? A beautiful death, a beautiful corpse. And my son said, no, no, that to be a real man, as they used to say to what is real masculinity. Real masculinity is fighting for your nation and your wife and your children, your children and their children. And that’s what Hanukkah is.

Albert Mohler:

I get to be surrounded every day by all these students and young men training for the Christian ministry, and they’re incredibly healthy, incredibly honorable. And there’s a part of me that likes to think that all that we just discussed is far, far away. But I’ve discussed this from time to time with some of the young men on the campus, and they are repulsed by it, but they know it’s there. And their friends are often in conversation with it. And so, I think it’s very good to press back on this and to call it out for what it is.

But again, I have to say as a Christian, it points to me the fact that there are virtually no alternatives here. If you’re not going to have Christianity as the organizing principle underlying the society, then you’re going to have some form of paganism. And I would include, of course, the Jewish people in honor with that civilization and with a common Scriptural tradition and common theism. But I think the alternative to that is some form of paganism. I just don’t believe in as a Christian theologian, I don’t believe in empty souls. I don’t believe in empty public space. It is going to be filled with something and that something is going to be harder than, it is not going to be softer than Christianity. It’s going to be harder than Christianity in terms of all the things we fear.

Yoram Hazony:

Yep, for sure.

Albert Mohler:

Young men are not going to be drawn to the cultural elite Davos stuff. They’re not attracted to that. But if they are unconstrained to use a good conservative term, if they are unconstrained, then we shouldn’t be surprised they’re going to go off in some of these very unhealthy directions.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah, and the alternative at the center is similar. I mean, if you ask what is it that Ayn Rand is selling, why do Ayn Rand’s books conquer? I mean, people can, hats off to all respect to Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek and all the other libertarian heroes. But really what’s happening is that 15 year olds, Ayn Rand, and many just get stuck there for their whole lives.

Albert Mohler:

I was just going to say 18-year-olds. It’s an adolescent philosophy.

Yoram Hazony:

It is.

Albert Mohler:

It’s an adolescent male philosophy written by a woman, by the way.

Yoram Hazony:

Right. Interesting that it’s a woman, but it’s so appealing to men and why? Because it’s hard in that Nietzschean sense that you need to make yourself hard. And that’s going on…

Albert Mohler:

And I hate to say this because I see him as one of the great enemies of civilization, but Freud would at least have a plausible answer for part of this. In other words, it’s not an accident that this is adolescence, it’s not an accident that it’s the discovery of powers. And again, it goes back to I think a basic principle from the Old Testament, and that is that if you do not have a biblical framework of honorable understanding of male sexuality, then you will worship it.

Yoram Hazony:

Yep, I agree.

 

Albert Mohler:

It is the God of the Bible or Baal.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah. So here we have a philosophy adolescent, yes. Just like Bronze Age Pervert, Ayn Rand has, there are no children anywhere, and the individual has to…

Albert Mohler:

There’s almost no constraining morality.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah. There are many, many people who’ve spent much more time than I was able to stand to put into it, trying to understand what exactly the sexual morality of conquest is that Ayn Rand is teaching about. I don’t know, and I’m not going to try to unpack that. But the similarity is astonishing, the similarity between the individual asserting himself or herself, but it is male, the like individual asserting and conquering financially, conquering sexually. And it’s the same thing again.

Albert Mohler:

But isn’t it sad because let’s just call it what it is, it’s male stuck in adolescence and frustration in their mother’s basements in their twenties and thirties who are fueling this. This is one of the most amazing things. When someone says, what is the antidote to this? I say, first of all, I believe the Bible. But secondly, the wonderful thing is I get to see young men who could be seduced by all of that, who instead, by the power of the gospel, by the influence of the church, by healthy families, they’re move into marriage. And the next thing you know, they’ve got strollers and they have children, and civilization continues and they’re drawn out of themselves, and they’re drawn out of their mother’s basements, and they’re drawn into work and they’re drawn into honor. And so I think you’ll agree with me on this. It is congregation that has so much to do with this. It’s family and congregation. And honestly, I don’t have much of an additional antidote to offer here.

Yoram Hazony:

Right. I think that we need to be… I like the fact that you brought in this term of being hard, which is something that Nietzsche likes, and I don’t think I’ve really thought of this before. I think it’s sort occurs to me that there’s no point in telling young men to be soft. There’s no point because it’s not going to bring their great strengths and virtues out of them…

Albert Mohler:

Also, it’s also, in some sense, it’s not going to happen.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah, it’s not. I mean, maybe it’ll happen with some individuals, but as a direction for society, go, forget it. They want to be tough. They want to be strong, they want to conquer, and they want to a vista for being honored, getting honor, fair and square by competing and conquering. And if it’s Ayn Rand, the claim is you can get that honor by doing things that simply are not going to perpetuate society. And if it’s Bronze Age Pervert, Bronze Age Pervert, it’s the same exact thing. You can get that honor, but it has nothing to do with perpetuating society, much less finding God.

But these two things are directly related to one another. You’ll never find God if you’re an Ayn Randian or a Bronze Age Pervert because it’s all about how strong you make yourself before you die and only the Bible. Only the Bible gives us an astonishing cast of characters whose toughness and willingness to fight and stand in the breach and to face God and face enemy nations and face building a family and tribe. All of those things are there in just such a beautiful and compelling way, except that it does need to be unlocked. And so it’s tragic that we have the greatest text that was ever given, and we have the ability to find God through it, and it’s right there, and we’re all free to do it…

Albert Mohler:

Well, as a Christian, I want to say that I think one of the most important things I can communicate to young men is eschatology. And I mean that in the broadest sense, but I mean, it is, I do believe based upon on Scriptural authority that one day all things will be made. Well, young men are to live lives of true honor. But the sad thing about the Randian vision, the libertarian or certainly the pagan vision is that, as you say, there’s nothing more than live a hard life than to do what you want, express yourself to the fullest and die a good death. That’s just make a beautiful corpse. That’s antithetical to the biblical worldview. I mean, vindication comes later.

But I believe the promise of the gospel is that that vindication will surely come. And I want to help encourage young men to live faithfully, honorably, courageously in this life, in family, in their community, in work, in the church, knowing that one day the vindication of all of this will come. And until then, what you’re doing is you’re perpetuating civilization. What you’re doing is you’re populating the earth. What you’re doing is you’re raising children to the glory of God. You’re strengthening communities, you’re building cabinets, you’re planting fields, you’re working in a factory. All of this is good and honorable and leading in congregation that’s just very honorable. And you’re not going to get the kind of Nietzschean affirmation that just falls after affirmation into nothingness.

Yoram Hazony:

And I think we can tell them that it’s hard.

Albert Mohler:

Absolutely.

Albert Mohler:

I think they’re drawn to hard things, rigorous things. Their heart is built for courage.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah. Yes. So today it’s courageous to get married. It’s courageous to stay married.

Albert Mohler:

Absolutely.

Yoram Hazony:

I mean, what’s happening all around us is that people who want to stay married can’t stay married. Why can’t they stay married? Because it’s hard. It’s a difficult thing to do. It’s not easier than bodybuilding or being a soldier or building a great corporation. It’s not. It’s hard…

Albert Mohler:

But it’s also sweeter. I don’t know if you remember this. We were on the phone one day, something came up and I just said, well, sometimes just to clear my mind to be happy, I have to look out the window of my office and see all the families there on the lawn and all the students and to see the strollers and all the babies. And I just remember, this is it. It’s not just holding to courageous ideas. It’s not just holding valiantly to truth. Sometimes it, it’s just changing a diaper and pushing a stroller, seeing the glory of God in it.

Yoram Hazony:

So of course, I agree with you and it is sweeter. I’m just not sure that the young men we’re talking about are interested in sweetness that much anymore. I mean, they feel like the emphasis, the overemphasis on sweetness has led to decay.

Albert Mohler:

Well, I think there’s a sentimentality, and I understand what you mean. I don’t mean to use the term in a superficial feminine sense. I’m just using it in the sense that I don’t know of a single father. I haven’t met a single father, doesn’t delight his children. I just haven’t. I know there’s some out there, but of course, that’s a horrible site. What I see is that when young men move into marriage, they find it better than anything they expect hard, yes. But they also find it better. I was married like three years as a young man, and all of a sudden realized, I almost don’t remember not being married. Marriage is so good that it has changed my life so fundamentally that that’s who I am. And fatherhood it is the same way, and so maybe a better word for it is satisfying. I am thrilled by seeing how many young men are moving into faithfulness and moving into fatherhood and moving into marriage and moving into calling. And that just makes me very happy. I know we’re losing many, but you know what? We’re not losing them all.

Yoram Hazony:

I didn’t mean to object. I didn’t mean to object to the sweetness. I mean, I agree that experiencing the birth of a child is experiencing the miraculous. And many, many people understand that their lives completely changed from that moment. And the teaching a child to walk, teaching a child to talk, there’s nothing. It’s not just that it’s satisfying. It’s so incredibly entertaining.

Albert Mohler:

I understand.

Yoram Hazony:

We completely agree. I’m just looking for the language with which to express to young men who are drawn to the hardship and self-discipline of these different non-Christian, non-Jewish, non-biblical visions.

Albert Mohler:

Well, it is kind of like the left, just talking the bourgeois family and all it’s artificiality and all the rest. But you know what? I love finding young men who say, I’ve been married for a couple of years. Isn’t it incredible to go home to a woman who’s glad to see you? Isn’t it wonderful to have a place that’s a home? Isn’t it wonderful not to sleep in a bed alone? There’s a wife, and isn’t it wonderful to have children? But it is courageous. I think it’s both at the same time. I think that’s very biblical. It’s just both at the same time, I think that the people who are drawn to what you’re talking about are in danger of losing everything, their souls, but also losing all the joys of life. Because I don’t think being connected on the worldwide web or whatever’s the latest technology from your mother’s basement is any way to actual happiness. And frankly, it’s not hard either. That’s the other thing. Some of these people may actually be facing adversity and doing anything, but an awful lot of the people who are online in this space are frankly, they’re not doing anything courageous.

Yoram Hazony:

Actually, they’re cowards. I mean, many, many, many of them are cowards. They’re afraid of how hard…

Albert Mohler:

They’re very courageous in an anonymous tweet, but there’s no courage in being anonymous.

Yoram Hazony:

But it turns out that courting a woman and taking those vows and building something with her over 50 years and reaching the point of having the grandchildren and teaching your own children to be parents. Today, that requires a great deal of courage. Maybe it was assumed before, but it requires a great deal of courage and finding a way to capture the heroism of what’s happening.

Albert Mohler:

You know, that’s one of the reasons why I think this is a related issue. It’s one of the reasons why, and this drives the liberals absolutely to distraction. This is why healthy masculinity does come with a certain affirmation of patriarchy. And I mean that first of all, in the biblical sense, we should aspire to be the father of a family. We should aspire to step into space where we are obligated by the demands of family and find the great joy in it. And imagine one day our grandchildren, as I know, celebrate unspeakably my grandchildren and can anticipate now great grandchildren.

The left wants to treat patriarchy as some kind of just horribly oppressive force. Patriarchy is the structure of civilization, and I think there are a lot of young men who are ready to take their life course and move into that. But what they’re not interested in is just moving into kind of a bourgeois that’s sort of a dated term, but they’re not interested in moving into some kind of just staple middle class existence. They want to move into something exhilarating. And I think Christian faithfulness, I think biblical faithfulness is exhilarating. Young men are exhilarated by it. I’m thrilled to see it.

Yoram Hazony:

Agreed.

Albert Mohler:

Yoram, I just want to ask you a blunt question. What in the world has happened to conservatism?

Yoram Hazony:

Well, look, we are living in a revolutionary age, and it’s not just that the Marxists want to smash and overthrow everything. Liberalism, which from a Marxist perspective looks tame and stayed and safe really is not it’s illusion. It’s also a revolutionary movement. And the combination of these two things mean that we are watching round, after round, after round of ever deeper destruction of our inheritance.

And it covers everything. It began with God and Scripture and family and nation and proceeded to man and woman. And as you said earlier, it will proceed to everything else.

Just to pick a seemingly unrelated topic, the fact that American government is no longer capable of financial responsibility of fiscal responsibility, it is part of the same thing. Up until the 1960s, Americans thought that you borrow and you go into debt during wartime or for other special purposes. And then the goal is to get out of it is to repay it. And the extraordinary discipline that’s required to maintain a healthy country, a healthy republic is like the extraordinary discipline that’s required for the family. If you don’t honor it, then everybody just does the easy thing. And the easy thing is to give up on everything that’s been inherited. Conservatism is very difficult to sell because as long as people think that freedom and equality are what it’s all about…

Albert Mohler:

Autonomy…

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah. autonomy. As long as they think that that’s what it’s all about, there’s not going to be any conservatism. Because conservatism is about the discipline of receiving, repairing, improving, and transmitting and all of those things, they require immense effort. And the only way people are going to be willing to do it is if they’re repaid with immense honor.

Albert Mohler:

No, that’s very well put.

Yoram Hazony:

If the people around you honor you for the hardships that you’ve endured on the way to triumph, then they will serve in the military. Then they will get married and have children, and they’ll stay married. Then they will search for God and try to understand Scripture. All these things require great honor. And the preoccupation with equality. Equality has its place just like liberty does. But the preoccupation with equality means that people are scared to honor. Right. I think you said this very well earlier when you were saying, of course it’s possible to accept people who have a different, live their private lives in a different way. It’s possible to accept them, it’s possible to be friends with them. It’s possible to honor their achievements in other areas and their contributions. But what you can’t do is say all these different choices are the same. To be a Jew or a Christian, to be a biblically guided person, and a believing person means that you have to be willing to say I honor marriage more than not getting married. I honor having children…

Albert Mohler:

You honor marriage as the union of a man and a woman in a lifelong covenant…

Yoram Hazony:

Yes, right. I honor the study of Scripture more than I honor playing video games. I honor serving in the military more than I honor…

Albert Mohler:

Surrender…

Yoram Hazony:

Surrender, for sure. It’s all about honor. It’s all about the fact that we’re all of us and including myself, we are hesitant, sometimes terrified, but at least hesitant to clearly say that one choice is better than another. And that you can’t say anymore without getting tremendous. You can’t say things like divorce is dishonorable. Everybody becomes instantly outraged. But if divorce isn’t dishonorable, then everybody will just get divorced.

Albert Mohler:

You know, something I am writing about right now and talking about it’s occasioned by some celebrity remarriages and these giant second weddings. And so the New York Times just recently ran a piece saying, second marriages are now big in second weddings. The second weddings for second marriages are now in big because you have better tastes when you’re older. You have more money when you’re older. And it was interesting that in the subhead, they’re on the deck of the article, it says now that there is no stigma… Well, that’s the fall of an entire civilization. That’s the fall of what makes civilization possible here, celebrated with people who have more money and better tastes for their second wedding than their first.

I wanted to ask you a different question in posing this. So, I’m an odd reader. I read everything. I read all the end notes. I read the acknowledgements. I read the preface. There are names in your books going back a quarter century who would not show up with you now. And so I guess what I mean is that in conservatism, I think a lot of conservatives have been shown not to be very conservative. I honor you and this conversation because I think you are genuinely conservative, but there are people we thought were conservative 25 years ago who I would not at all label as conservative now

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah, for sure.

Albert Mohler:

So as a movement, we’ve lost a lot. We’ve lost many, I’ll say.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah. But I think that it was mistaken from, it was mistaken from the outset. When I say the outset, I mean the modern conservatism, if we’re talking about the movement, yeah, the fifties, the sixties, I think it was simply mistaken from the outset. There are many pieces of the minimum, the minimum you need for a conservative society, the minimum. You need hierarchy. There has to be a hierarchy. We were born into hierarchies. Our families are hierarchical, and so our nations and our military and every corporation. You have to think and talk about hierarchy explicitly. If you don’t think and talk about it, you just sort of assume it’s part of civil society, whatever, then people won’t understand it and they’ll think, and egalitarianism will level everything, absolutely everything. You cannot have education without hierarchy, and you can’t have hierarchy without honor. The structure of every human hierarchy is the structure of how much honor is being given to the people at the top. How do we know they’re at the top because they’re the ones being honored.

So that means that everything that we try to do is through this instrumentality of bringing people together around certain things that we honor and giving greater honor to the people who we raise up. And the only way to conserve and transmit is by honoring certain things in the past and bringing them down and making sure that our children also honor those things. This is not optional. It’s not something you can choose to see the world this way or not. This is the way human beings are. And if you go back and look at the various things that are being offered as conservative, and you look at it through this lens, you look for, do they understand that human society depends on hierarchy? Do they understand that honor is the most basic tool for transmitting anything? If those things are not at the center deciding what to honor, then everything is flattened. There will be no honor for parents. There will be no honor for clergy. There will be no honor for Scripture. There will be no honor for the President, and there will be no honor for God in the end.

Albert Mohler:

Yes. And I think we see that is the very intention of the left. But again, because they are human beings, they still fall into hierarchies. They still have their own honor culture. So again, that’s a mirror image. But I want to say that I guess I’m speaking in practical terms of the fact that there were people who walked with us and they don’t walk with us anymore. And there were people who thought it was very convenient, at least to be identified as conservative, and they don’t anymore. I mean, I can think of major periodicals which we can name and institutions we can name. And let’s just say, I think the break points have come in the last several years, and I think we’re finding out, so we mentioned a ELL earlier in same-sex marriage. I think that is one of the definitional issues now. And so even in conversations that I see, and some of which I’ve been a part, thankfully outside my circles, these things are quite secure here. But you talk to people who, say 15 years ago, identified as conservative, and they’re saying, well, of course the LGBTQ revolution won. They won, get over it. But…

Yoram Hazony:

They’re saying, we’re past that. That’s the expression. We’re all past that.

Albert Mohler:

Right. It is an, they’re even trying some false conservative-ish arguments about tradition, and they’re saying the tradition has made a change and the stability of the last 10 years is the indication of that. It’s absolute nonsense. It’s a historical, it rejects any kind of objective truth. But the point I want to make is that I think Trump’s been a part of this. I think the nationalism argument has been a part of this, but I don’t think the shifting is over. I think over the course of, especially looking at the what comes after Trump question, I think we’re in for a huge battle. I am looking for all the ammunition I can get for what I think is going to be a very big battle.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah, I think Trump’s place in the history of nationalism, conservatism, Christianity and Judaism, he’s going to have a large place in it…

Albert Mohler:

He’s, by definition, unique.

Yoram Hazony:

Yes, there are many things about him that are unique or let’s say very, very rare and exceptional at the center of it is that he’s utterly fearless. He’s willing to challenge absolutely just about anything. And so the willingness to challenge the liberal establishment, by which I mean both the Democratic party and the Republican party, both the way trade is done and the way that war is waged, the way that what is considered to be an ally. I mean, he has a memory of what things were like 50 years ago. He remembers it, and it provides him with, I’m not saying everything was going right 50 years ago. But he doesn’t hesitate to say, we all used to say Merry Christmas, and now we don’t, and I’m not willing to put up with it. I’m not, we’re going to go back to it…

Albert Mohler:

The most astounding thing Donald Trump has done in my entire observation about Donald Trump and American politics, the most astounding thing to me that he has done is in his inaugural address to say that there are two and only two genders, male and female, and then stick to it in policy. I think in retrospect, later generations are going to look at that and go, either that was the last gasp of an old patriarchy or oppression, or people going to say that was finally somebody saying the emperor has no clothes.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah, so that willingness to step outside of the big heavy box that’s barreling along on its tracks, and he deserves just endless credit and gratitude for that. He doesn’t have to agree with me on everything. He doesn’t have to agree with nationalist conservatives on everything. That’s not how you judge a decisive historical…

Albert Mohler:

And no one has.

Yoram Hazony:

Right, absolutely. You can’t judge a decisive historical figure on the question of did he get it all right? And he’s not getting it all right. But he has altered, deeply altered the trajectory of not just the United States, but of the political right in all the democratic countries, and he’s not going to do it all. There’s going to be some that’s going to be less…

Albert Mohler:

And he’s going to be inconsistent.

Yoram Hazony:

And that means that there’s going to be more battles to fight. I mean, just look at, I mean, the debate that we just had, we don’t quite have perspective on it yet, but a few months that the American right spent tearing itself apart over the question of whether the United States can allow itself, should allow itself to engage in any military operation against Iran. Now, what was so shocking was, I think for both sides of this debate, I believe that Trump was astonished that many of his closest followers thought that his opposition to American Empire and…

Albert Mohler:

Endless wars.

Yoram Hazony:

Right. His disgust for endless wars and the waste of human life, the waste of money, but also the waste of attention. The fact that the government just spends its time thinking all the time about what’s going on in Afghanistan…

Albert Mohler:

And Leviathan grows…

Yoram Hazony:

Right, yeah. So his disgusted appropriately for those things, I assume that he was pretty amazed to discover that many of his closest followers interpreted this to mean, no, the United States should never use force, no matter against who. And then people start saying, no, the neoconservatives, the neoliberals they’ve want. That’s absurd. I mean…

Albert Mohler:

It is truly absurd.

Yoram Hazony:

It’s truly Absurd.

Albert Mohler:

The neoconservatives know that it’s absurd.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah. So there we have right there a great example of succeeded in articulating some principles. Lots of other people have worked hard in order to try to focus them and clarify them and apply them, and that’s just going to keep going. There’s going to be more fights like that. And more and more, that’s just history. That’s just the way it is.

Albert Mohler:

There are lines drawn now, and I go back to the statement the president made in his inaugural address about male and female. And I think that’s an incredibly clear dividing line. It’s like fluorescent orange in the middle of the ground. And so you’re on one side of that or you’re on the other. And it is interesting, I think, to notice how many people who were say in the Bush administrations who are not on the right side of that line and who think it’s gauche and regressive and oppressive for him to have said that.

I just have to say, the closer you get to creation order, the closest you get to ontological questions, the clearer things get. And I just think eventually you’re on one side of that line or you’re on the other. And I don’t mean it just on that issue. It’s never just one issue. But I’m just amazed across the board how many people who were identified with conservatism, periodicals identified with conservatism, and now they’re kind of playing for the opposing team.

Yoram Hazony:

So look, human beings are flawed, and in many ways, and one of the things that we keep seeing, repeating over and over on every issue and every context is we are herd animals. We like to run with our herd. It is incredibly difficult for people, for anyone to break with the herd that they’re in, because that means that the ecosystem, the surrounding environment that provides you the honor, that allows you to feel right with the world, to know that you’re going in the right direction to break with that and invite the 200 people who are socially closest to you to reject you and attack you and abuse you.

 

Albert Mohler:

You just nailed it, Yoram. You just nailed it.

Yoram Hazony:

How’s that?

Albert Mohler:

Close to you socially.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah.

Albert Mohler:

Because that’s the only explanation for this.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah.

Albert Mohler:

Because you have people who were writing for, were writing against periodicals they now work for, they were writing against ideas they now contend for. I think what hasn’t changed is their friends, what has changed is their principles,

Yoram Hazony:

Right. So these social groups, the natural thing is for them to drift. Nothing human stays nailed down naturally, naturally. So there are exceptions, and I admit it. I think you’re right that I am one of these strange exceptions. The way that I know that is, is that I’m about to publish with two co-authors, a lengthy law journal article, arguing for over Everson v. Board of Education from 1947, and thereby ending the reign of the principle of separation of church and state in America, which is a incredibly destructive post-war invention of the liberal elites.

Albert Mohler:

The way it’s there defined. Let’s be clear, the way it’s there defined.

Yoram Hazony:

Well, just the term, even the expression separation of church and state.

Albert Mohler:

Absolutely.

Yoram Hazony:

It becomes central to the American constitutional order in 1947.

 

Albert Mohler:

Well, and largely in context of arguments against Catholic influence.

Yoram Hazony:

Yeah. Yes.

Albert Mohler:

It was very much that it was Protestants United and then became Protestants and others, united for separation of church and state. It was intentionally to try to prevent federal tax monies from going to Catholic schools. That was the big issue.

Yoram Hazony:

So how do I know that I’m unusual in this because my first essay against Everson was I wrote when I was 19 years old, and it was published in the Princeton Tory, which was this conservative in the first issue of this conservative magazine that I founded. So there are some people who are unusually obsessively continue to hold to whatever it’s that they thought that were kids. But this is not normal. This is, I mean really honestly, and I include myself in this human loyalty groups, social groups, they drift. They will drift and they drift under pressure. And if they are not led by people who are unusually determined to identify the pressure and resist the drift and to be willing to fight fights about it over and over again, then the drift will take place. And the people that you’re talking about, they are to a large degree, they’re people who went to Ivy League schools or similar schools and they were part of a movement that was part of the elites. And the elites have drifted and they’ve drifted with the elites and those of us who choose to resist it. We are courting really big trouble.

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. At least a part of the way I read this is that what was called conservatism say in the seventies and eighties was at least partly defined by the common enemy and the unquestioned fact that the Soviet Union was an enemy. And so you had the Cold War and that created a certain kind of commonality. And so you had some major figures have been liberal. In fact, some were Trotskyists who end up being pretty conservative and not just in foreign policy. They became more conservative in social policy. And yet now there’s been a reversion, like some of the same people are now very much on the left, the Washington Post, New York Times attacking conservatives. And that’s when I think, man, I agree with you, the social drift has to be a big part of this. But I think there are also just some certain kinds of breaks that come when people say whatever that is, I’m not with that anymore. And I think a lot of them would say they’ll trace it to 2016 or something very similar. It’s a disequilibrium that comes with a cost, but it comes with an achievement too. And that achievement is clarity. So I’ll be thankful for the clarity for its own sake.

Yoram Hazony:

There’s nothing better than clarity. I think it’s just true. So I mean, some of the people who are most annoying are people who are incredibly clear on things, but is something that I, seriously, when I talk to my children to students, I do push them towards clarity. Clarity, I mean, reality is not clear. Reality is messy. But if you don’t want to be confused and drifting and manipulated and going over to the enemy, then clarity is a pretty important virtue.

 

Albert Mohler:

I think it’s a good place to end this conversation and, like all really good conversations, I consider it more of a comma than a period. I am incredibly thankful for you and for your contribution, and I’m thankful for you joining me today In the Library.

Yoram Hazony:

It’s a pleasure to be here. I hope to visit with you in Louisville again.

Albert Mohler:

We will make sure that happens. I want to thank you for joining us for this conversation. It’s a Christian responsibility. It’s a gift. It’s one of God’s blessings. And at times it’s a challenge. It’s the kind of challenge we should see as a call to adventure. And the best conversations are ones we want to replay in our minds over and over again. But with the virtue of this technology, guess what? You can actually listen or watch over and over again. It’s like reading a good book. Sometimes you’re afraid of what you missed in order to go back. In any event, I want to thank not only Dr. Yoram Hazony, I want to thank you for joining me In the Library today.