I’m an atheist. Don’t let that frighten you—I think Christians (some, anyway) will appreciate what I have to say in this essay. For years, though, admittedly, I called myself an antitheist. I wasn’t merely a non-believer (that hasn’t changed); I was an active opponent of religion. I have moderated my position over the years. Today, I will tell you that it depends on the specific religion being discussed as to whether I would actively oppose it. In other words, I am no longer an antitheist.
In the two decades between my self-identification as an antitheist and my selective opposition to religious faiths, I learned, or more accurately have admitted, to two things: (a) not all religions are equal (or are all cultures); (b) Christianity—especially Protestantism—provided the indispensable moral guardrails for the Enlightenment it helped give birth to. Reason in its product, intellectual and technological, must be constrained by those guardrails if it is to remain reasonable.
The first lesson is blunt: Christianity and Judaism are, for the most part, good; Islam is, in its totality, bad. The first two are creators and sustainers of civilizations built on liberty and individual rights. The third is civilization-destroying—an ideology of the barbarian. Centuries and our present experience testify to the truth of these claims. Yet we have not learned the lessons this history teaches us. We have let the barbarians inside the gates. If we do nothing, we will pay with our dignity and our freedom. Indeed, if Islam is allowed to become hegemonic, the West will enter a New Dark Ages. Women will become second-class subjects of a clerical fascist order, and gays will be killed or transed. Islam is not the only threat to dignity and freedom, of course, which I will come to later in this essay. But it is a useful tool for those who seek to replace late capitalism with a neo-feudalist world order.
The second lesson is this: the soil in which both Protestantism and the Enlightenment grew was capitalism—first its legal emergence eight centuries ago, as lawyers for the nascent bourgeoisie argued for property rights in medieval courts, and then its consolidation as a world system during the Long Century (roughly 1450–1620), from there spreading globally. Capitalism requires rationalism; rationalism, over time, fractured the Catholic monopoly (and eventually compelled even Catholicism to resemble Protestantism). Rationalism depends on capitalism. However, neither capitalism nor rationalism can survive without the guardrails of Christianity, since both depend on republican virtue and the centrality of the individual. The American Founders understood this and seized a moment that world history will almost certainly never repeat. They saw a path to freedom. Keeping open that path requires preserving the foundation they set down in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, its Bill of Rights, and the American System.
In the clip I share below, Dave Brat conveys the position I have come to over the last several years. He said this in dialogue with Steve Bannon on the latter’s War Room podcast. But before you get to that, some background on Brat and his perspective will help clarify his argument and the one I advance in this essay. It is his remarks that inspire my essay (sermon?) this Sunday afternoon.
Brat served as the US Representative for Virginia’s 7th congressional district from 2014 to 2019. In 2014, he gained national attention by defeating (by a large margin) House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the Republican primary—the first time a sitting House Majority Leader had ever lost a primary. Brat narrowly lost his 2018 re-election bid to Democrat Abigail Spanberger. Spanberger, readers may already know, just won the 2025 Virginia gubernatorial election this month. Brat’s close defeat to Spanberger, and her subsequent victory over Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears by a double-digit margin, testifies to the alarming political shift in the state of Virginia, the home of both James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.
Brat is a frequent guest on Bannon’s War Room, which I encourage visitors to this platform to follow. Brat is not merely a former congressman; he has a long history in academia. Brat joined the faculty of Randolph–Macon College in 1996 as an economics professor. Randolph–Macon is a private liberal arts college in Ashland, Virginia (founded in 1830, it’s the oldest Methodist-run college in continuous operation in the country). For six years, Brat chaired the College’s department of ethics and business. Since January 2019, he has served as dean of the Liberty University School of Business.
Brat’s core argument is that Adam Smith’s invisible hand theory, advanced in the latter’s magisterial The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776 (the very year American patriots declared war on the British monarchy), is properly understood in the context of Christian moral philosophy, albeit eschewing rigid Puritanism. Brat’s position is supported by Smith’s earlier work, his 1759 The Theory of Moral Sentiments, wherein Smith roots sympathy in human nature. He argues that benevolence, justice, prudence, and self-command are genuine virtues. His nature intact, man therefore praises generosity and justice even when they go against his immediate self-interest. However, the natural moral sentiments and the impartial spectator mechanism Smith describes in this work can be systematically corrupted, even disabled, by certain belief systems, social structures, and passions.
The man of system, or the man whose public spirit is supposed to be wholly engrossed by the view of some favourite plan of government, or of some favourite scheme of politics, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder. (Part VI, Section II, Chapter II, “Of the character of virtue”)
Here, Smith anticipates what we now call ideological thinking: the belief that society can and should be remade according to an abstract blueprint, regardless of the moral intuitions, sentiments, and traditions of the people in it. The ideologue overrides the organic corrections of the impartial spectator (simultaneously the source of natural market relations and social solidarity) with top-down rationalistic schemes. Thus, Smith recognizes that the innate capacity for sympathy and impartial moral judgment in man can be disordered and perverted by extreme religious doctrines that crush ordinary human sentiments; partisan faction and spirit; rationalistic ideological schemes (“the man of system”); and the cultural worship of wealth and power.
Some may hear Brat and think he is rejecting reason. This is why I spent time explaining his position; he is not rejecting reason. What he is saying is that, without moral guardrails, the centrality of individualism, a proper understanding of human nature, and the modern nation-state (and the Peace of Westphalia) that Protestantism made possible, we get corporatism and communism—both irrational, totalitarian, destroyers of virtue-guided reason. Corporatists (the transnationalist corporate project) and today’s communists (the Red-Green Alliance) see in Islam a common weapon for disordering reason guided by the ethical constraints conducive to natural moral reasoning. Protestantism’s great achievement, which, as Max Weber (and Karl Marx before him) recognized, is the realization in Christianity of practical Jewish culture. Thus, the construct of a Judeo-Christian tradition is not a propaganda tool to advance the interests of Israel, but rather recognition of the legacy of Jewish culture in modern Christian thought.
For his part, Weber mourned the broken link between freedom and reason. The great sociologist even folded Nietzsche’s “death of God” thesis into the core of his argument that, once religion ceases to underwrite Western values, morality, and purpose, society is left unmoored. Weber saw that Nietzsche grasped the tragedy that the Enlightenment and the rise of science, what Weber describes metaphorically as the unshackling of the Titan Prometheus (which I will explain in greater detail later in this essay), had effectively cancelled the Christian god, leaving no philosophical foundation for ethics or truth. Nietzsche’s prediction that this would lead to nihilism was the correct diagnosis of the problem of our age. We indeed see nihilism everywhere today. We see it in the delusion that a man can shed his gender and become its opposite—or both or neither of the two. We see it in violence directed towards those who utter unpopular opinions.
Nietzsche’s prescription, however, the Übermensch (the “Over-man”) and der Wille zur Macht (“the will to power”), in the wrong hands, would prove catastrophic. Indeed, it has, as the world’s experience with National Socialism demonstrated for all to see. The Nazi Party and the corporate state he represented are the epitome of putting mankind’s fate in the wrong hands. Nietzsche’s defenders will contend that he did not mean “will to power” as the desire to dominate other people. They insist that he meant it as the fundamental drive of all life, which he saw as the innermost essence of being. Every living thing strives not just to survive, Nietzsche argued, but to expand, express, and increase its feeling of power—to create, grow, overcome resistance, and become more than it is. To be sure, these are admirable traits in a man. At the same time, Nietzsche wanted to recover from pre-Christian cultures their affirmation of life (destruction, sensuality, and suffering) and acceptance of natural aristocracy and rank. He wanted not the reclamation of pagan gods and heroes, but rather the life-affirming values that those gods and heroes personified. He put it this way: “Roman Caesars with Christ’s soul.” (See Nietzsche’s Critique of Christianity and His Impact on Social Theory.)
This solution to our affliction follows from Nietzsche’s diagnosis, but his remedy is wrong. The answer is not a new pagan assertion of passion and strength; rather, the solution lies in the restoration of republican virtue rooted in Protestant ethics. That does not require any of us to become Christian (I won’t convert, so it cannot follow that I think others should, nor does it preclude conversion), but it does require us to preserve, even reclaim, those moral guardrails that once surrounded reason. Weber’s concept of Der entfesselte Prometheus (“Prometheus unchained”), materialized in world-historical conditions, has proved to be an irrational outcome.
Weber writes in his 1905 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:
The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage (stahlhartes Gehäuse).
Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. Today, the spirit of religious asceticism—whether finally, who knows?—has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfilment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it at all. In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.
No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development, entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the fast stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”
Although the textual source of the quote “Und der entfesselte Prometheus ist an die Stelle der alten Götter getreten,” which translates to “the unleashed Prometheus has taken the place of the old gods,” is difficult to pin down, it is commonly attributed to Weber, and it is what he intends by his argument. Readers will likely know Prometheus (Προμηθεύς) is the Titan of Greek mythology who most radically embodies rebellion against divine tyranny and selfless love for humanity. In Aeschylus’s tragedy, Prometheus Bound, Zeus seizes power and plans to destroy the weak human race; Prometheus defies him by stealing fire from heaven and giving it to mortals—bestowing upon them art, science, technology, and civilization itself. For this crime, Zeus chains the Titan to a rock in the Caucasus, where an eagle daily tears out and eats his liver, which regrows each night—an eternal torture meant to break his will. Yet Prometheus refuses to submit, foretelling that Zeus’s own downfall will one day depend on the secret knowledge Prometheus alone possesses.
This story is powerfully retold in Ridley Scott’s 2012 film Prometheus, his much-maligned prequel to his landmark science fiction film Alien (1979). There, the character Peter Weyland (magnificently performed by Guy Pierce), who prefigures the rise and spirit of entrepreneur Elon Musk, uses Aeschylus’s tale in a fictional 2023 TED Talk to condemn those who would limit his ambition with ethical guardrails. I have shared the scene above, but to highlight Weyland’s point:
We wield incredible power—the power to transform, to destroy, and to create again. The question, of course, before us is: What the hell are we supposed to do with this power? Or, more importantly, one should ask: What are we allowed to do with this power? The answer to that, my friends, is nothing. Rules, restrictions, laws, ethical guidelines—all but forbidding us from moving forward. Well, where were the ethics during the Arabian conflicts? Why are rules preventing us from feeding impoverished cultures? How is there a law which states: If we build a man from wires and metal—a man who will never grow old, a man who will never feel the heat of a star or the cold of the moon—how is the creation of such an incredible individual considered unnatural? The answer to all these questions is simple: These rules exist because the people who created them were afraid of what would happen if they didn’t. Well, I am not afraid!
Like Weyland, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1820, Prometheus Unbound, portrays the Titan’s eventual release as the triumph of human progress over tyrannical authority. This is an optimistic reading of the tale. For centuries, Prometheus has stood as the archetypal symbol of the bringer of light (much like Lucifer) who suffers for rebelling against the gods and liberating mankind, the suffering hero whose gift of fire (power, reason, technique) is both humanity’s glory and its potential doom—the exact image Weber had in mind when he described the modern rational-technical order as a once-beneficial force that has now broken its chains and turned against its creators. Percy’s wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, published the pessimistic side of the story two years earlier, in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. In her reading of the myth, Victor Frankenstein, a man who creates a monster, is a new Prometheus. Like the Titan, Victor steals the forbidden fire—the secret of life: electricity—from the gods and gives it to humanity in the form of a grotesque, unnamed creature. Frankenstein is punished horribly for this transgression, just as Prometheus was chained and tortured for his.
Frankenstein is thus the dark counterpart to Prometheus Unbound—the same Promethean act of bringing fire and life, but ending in isolation, vengeance, and mutual destruction.
The horror depicted by Mary Shelley is the likely endpoint of reason without guardrails. We already see its manifestation creeping everywhere. Indeed, this is how we have come to be ruled by technology and its attendant technocratic apparatus. This is why democracy is giving way to administrative rule and stifling bureaucracy. With these developments, we can see the approaching death of democracy and liberty. Atheists should, therefore, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Christians to rebuild the American republic according to its founding vision. That begins with patriotism and the recognition that we face enemies on three fronts, each embodying tyrannical irrationalisms: the sophistication of corporatism and communism, both born of modernity, and the pre-modern barbarism of Islam. This is not a call for atavistic solutions, but for the reclamation of republican virtue. Weber’s pessimistic take that “the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs” is not yet entirely manifest. The spark that animated the Founders has not gone out. Our task as free men is to rekindle their flame and mind it carefully.
freedom and reason 