Occasionally we get emails like this:
Up until now I thought I was the rarest of all ducks. A conservative atheist. I read Heather MacDonald’s piece in the Wall Street Journal today and was pleased to find I am not alone. I would love to know more about the organization.
Yours truly,
[name omitted]
One of the reasons that I participate in Secular Right is to simply explicitly demonstrate that Leftism or even libertarianism is not a necessary consequence of irreligiosity. Many people’s views emerge out of socialization and their peer groups, not through a consistent set of inferences from axioms.
When Secular Right first started some emails from individuals active in atheist organizations trickled in, the main question being how to make these organizations more politically inclusive. My main advice was simply not to assume that those who lack religion are uniform in their political views. As a matter of practicality most of the irreligious in Western nations have Leftish politics, and so self-consciously secular organizations or movements will reflect that. That is realistic. A secular conservative is conditioned to being in a minority. There’s no need for special treatment, simply an acknowledgement of existence and validity of the viewpoint. On the one hand we have to deal with religious conservatives who assert that by definition conservatism is connected with religion, while on the other hand there are secular liberals who simply can not understand how those without god might adhere to a conservative position. One might refute our existence through logic, but the empirical realities of the world tend to produce people who lay outside of the clean systems produced by theoreticians. That fact is one of the primary reasons that I am on the Right and not the Left, though I will admit to being troubled by a trend toward a lack of realism in politics in general of late.