Rothbard’s essay is a compact August 1994 polemic on media alarm over Christian conservative organizing inside the Republican Party. Its immediate targets are reports about “stealth” candidates and party “takeovers” in Virginia, Texas, and Minnesota; its larger claim is that liberal and establishment Republican denunciations translate ordinary democratic mobilization into conspiracy language. The opening inversion is characteristic: those who once condemned anti-Communist witch hunts now conduct a hunt against Christians as public actors.
But now the left-liberals in the media and among the Democrats are off on a new and bigger witch-hunt of their own: a Christian hunt!
The essay’s first major move is to deny that the Christian right is merely a single-issue religious bloc. Rothbard acknowledges abortion and schooling as catalysts, but he insists that activists have learned to identify the state, liberal culture, taxation, and public education as connected fronts of the same struggle. This lets him collapse the media distinction between acceptable economic conservatism and unacceptable social conservatism.
The Christian right might well have been inspired into activism by abortion or by the horrible state of the public schools, but by this time the nature of the Enemy is clear, and they have become “conservatives” on all issues, anti-tax and pro-free market as well as cultural rightists.
His treatment of church and state follows from that fusion. Rothbard does not defend clerical government; he argues that “neutral” public institutions already carry moral and quasi-religious commitments, especially in schools. In his account, liberal secularism is not evenhanded exclusion of religion from politics, but selective exclusion of Christianity while multicultural, therapeutic, or New Age premises are normalized.
It is pretty clear that the only separation of religion from the public schools that left-liberals are interested in is from Christianity, not from religion in general.
From there, Rothbard attacks the ADL, Republican moderates, and media commentators for implying that conservative Christians uniquely lack the right to organize politically from moral premises. His reductio is the accepted legitimacy of clergy-led liberal politics: Martin Luther King Jr., Catholic bishops, and left religious coalitions are not treated as threats to constitutional order. The rule he wants is symmetrical participation, not privatized Christianity.
I'll say it only once more: it does not violate the separation of church and state principle for Christians to get involved in politics, or to take political stands.
The strategic core is party control. Rothbard redefines the Republican “big tent” procedurally: factions may struggle for nominations and platforms, and afterward support the party nominee against Democrats. What he rejects is the establishment version of unity, in which conservatives provide votes while moderates retain control and demand silence on first principles.
In short, we battle to control the party and its platform, as much as possible to mold that party into the vehicle of counterrevolution, of returning to the Old Republic; but we support whoever wins against the Democrats.
The state case studies embody that strategy. In Virginia, Oliver North’s nomination signifies activist victory over Bob Dole, John Warner, and the Republican establishment; Mike Farris and home schooling allow Rothbard to frame a “social issue” as resistance to coercive public education. In Texas, Tom Pauken’s rise is presented not as theocracy but as a populist coalition of Catholics, evangelicals, gun-rights supporters, libertarians, and paleoconservatives against country-club Republicanism. In Minnesota, Rothbard turns eyewitness: Allen Quist’s convention success over Arne Carlson becomes evidence that younger activists want rollback, not managerial accommodation to liberal programs.
The conclusion converts defense into identity. Rothbard urges Christians and their allies not to let opponents define moderation, religion, or legitimate speech. The essay’s historical interest lies in its paleolibertarian synthesis: Christian conservatism, market populism, home schooling, anti-tax politics, party insurgency, and moral absolutism are treated as one counterrevolutionary project against the liberal state.
This work was divided into 6 sections when it entered the library's research corpus—an apparatus for search and citation, not necessarily the author's own table of contents. Each title opens its summary.
Put a question to this work; the Librarian answers from its 6 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian