Is Rand Paul misleading the electorate about his religion? Sure. But he’s not running on a religious platform. It’s Conway who’s making religion an issue. I think an atheist, which is what I’m petty sure Paul is, ought to be able to run for office without having his belief system publicly interrogated.
Perhaps Jonathan Chait has some inside information, but it seems that all he’s going on is Paul’s admiration of Ayn Rand, whose Objectivist philosophy is necessarily atheist. The problem is that Rand Paul is not an Objectivist, and his father is not an Objectivist. The Paul family variant of radical libertarianism probably owes more substantively to Murray Rothbard than Ayn Rand. Like Rand Rothbard was a secular Jew, but, unlike Rand he exhibited a philo-religious attitude. In particular toward Roman Catholicism, the faith of his wife. The broader paleolibertarian movement which is strongly associated with Rothbard’s followers, in particular Lew Rockwell, is not atheistic. On the contrary many paleolibertarians are religious, often Roman Catholic such as Rockwell himself. Paleolibertarianism explicitly supports and values “bourgeois virtues,” of which religion is one, as necessary preconditions for a free market order.
Jason Zengerle has a more informed take:
What it says is that, unlike so many politicians who cast themselves as outsiders, Paul is the real deal. Time and again throughout his life—first as a student at Baylor; then as a renegade ophthalmologist who tried to secede from the specialty’s leading professional organization in protest of its membership rules; and finally as a Senate candidate who ran against the state’s Republican establishment in the GOP primary—Paul has demonstrated a profound lack of respect for authority and institutions. In this, he’s very different from the typical Republican senator. And if Paul makes it to Washington, it stands to reason that he’ll display a similar attitude toward the powers that be in the Senate Republican caucus, occasionally making Mitch McConnell look like Dean Wormer.
Note: I am aware that Rockwell disavowed the term paleolibertarian in 2007. But it is still a pointer to a real phenomenon of populist right-libertarianism.
I always assumed he was a Protestant, like his dad, and I’ve not really heard much to dissuade me from that idea.
Trying to portray him as insufficiently Christian is basically a marker as to how retardedly Christian his Democratic opponent perceives his state to be.
The story of how Murray Rothbard left the Ayn Rand group is priceless! It is roll on the floor hilarious!
It was in the September 1989 issue of Liberty magazine. Unfortunately, it is not available online.
http://www.libertyunbound.com/search/contents.php?m=13
Jerome Tucille’s book “It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand” has a hilarious, if not historically accurate, account of Rothbard’s parting with the Randians.
It is indeed true that Rothbard’s wife was a practicing Catholic and that he was totally cool with it. The Randians tried everything under the sun to convert her to atheism, to no avail. This one of the reasons (but not the only one) why he left the Randians.
He referred to the Objectivists as the “Ayn Rand Cult” from that point on.
I found it!
http://mises.org/journals/liberty/Liberty_Magazine_September_1989.pdf
Scroll down to page 27.
“My break with Branden and the Rand Cult” by Murray Rothbard.
Ron Paul is a well-known opponent of abortion. His religious convictions aren’t exactly a state secret. We don’t care. There is no reason to think that his son Rand would have those that are any different. I don’t care one way or the other if Rand is religious. What I care about are economic issues. His Rand can help to reduce government, reduce regulation, and lower taxes; I’m all for him.
I would vote for Huckabee if he were as much of an economic “conservative” as Ron or Rand Paul.
Well, the most famous libertarian Catholic was Lord Acton. people are usually use to catholics being big government conservatives or big government liberals but there are some exceptions. Being the evangelical Right, there was the classical liberal left of people like Lord Acton and William Gladstone but I believe that Gladstone finally got rid of tariffs so much that he pushed for an income tax and expanded state education, no libertarian is perfect.
Gladstone was protestant.
Gladstone was a High Church Anglican.