Murray N. Rothbard, “The Religious Right: Toward a Coalition” (1993)

This file is a single-author polemical strategy essay. Written in February 1993, it argues that paleolibertarians should seek alliance with the Christian Right after the Cold War and amid the rise of political correctness. Rothbard’s immediate occasion is Jerry Falwell’s possible revival of the Moral Majority, which he welcomes against libertarian and media caricatures of Christian conservatives as would-be theocrats.

Nothing could be further from the truth: Christian conservatives are trying to fight back against a left-liberal elite that used government to assault and virtually destroy Christian values, principles, and culture.

The essay’s first move is historical: Rothbard distinguishes nineteenth-century Protestant moral legislation from the contemporary Christian Right. He concedes that older pietist Protestantism pursued prohibitionist and sexual regulation, but insists that this impulse is politically obsolete. The real issue, he says, is not bedroom policing but state-enforced egalitarianism through anti-discrimination law. His core libertarian translation of the culture war is that disputes over sexuality, employment, schooling, and religion are fundamentally disputes over property, association, and federal power.

In sum: anti-discrimination laws of any sort are evil, aggress against the genuine rights of person and property, and are uneconomic since they cripple efficient business decisions.

Rothbard then applies this logic to the Clinton-era controversy over gays in the military, treating the military as an organization whose rules should be governed by institutional function rather than abstract egalitarian claims. The argument is controversial and explicitly anti-integrationist, extending also to women in combat roles, but conceptually it serves his broader claim: libertarians should not let the rhetoric of public-sector “rights” redefine liberty away from property and voluntary association.

The military should be considered like any other business, organization, or service; its decisions should be based on what’s best for the military, and “rights” have nothing to do with such decisions.

The abortion section is the essay’s most explicit coalition-building exercise. Rothbard remains pro-choice, but argues that pro-choice libertarians and pro-life Christians can cooperate against taxpayer funding, compelled participation by physicians, and federal judicial centralization. Rather than resolve abortion morally, he proposes radical decentralization as a political method for lowering conflict and escaping Supreme Court rule.

Far more important is getting rid of federal judicial tyranny altogether, and to decentralize our polity radically—to return to the forgotten Tenth Amendment.

On religion, Rothbard narrows the meaning of establishment to state funding of churches and clergy, rejecting the modern jurisprudence that excludes prayer, creches, and religious teaching from public institutions. Here again, his conceptual move is to redescribe secular liberalism not as neutrality but as a competing worldview empowered by the state.

Establishing a religion has a specific meaning: paying for ministers and churches out of taxpayer funds.

This leads to his attack on public education. Rothbard sees the school system less as a failed instructional bureaucracy than as a successful ideological apparatus, and therefore urges unregulated private, religious, secular, and home schooling as the real answer.

Public schools are expensive and massive centers for cultural and ideological brainwashing, at which they are unfortunately far more effective than in teaching the 3R’s or in keeping simple order within the schools.

The closing section turns from libertarians to Christians, urging the Religious Right to reject both the Christian left’s egalitarian socialism and dispensationalist withdrawal from politics. The final thesis is strategic: libertarianism should cease imagining itself as above left and right and instead recognize its place in a broader anti-statist, anti-egalitarian Right.

In sum, the task of paleolibertarians is to break out of the sectarian libertarian hole, and to forge alliances with cultural and social, as well as politico-economic, “reactionaries.”

The essay’s relevance lies in its frank formulation of a paleolibertarian culture-war coalition: property rights against civil-rights egalitarianism, decentralization against federal courts, religious and educational pluralism against secular public institutions, and right-wing alliance politics against libertarian isolation.