Yoram Hazony, president of Israel’s Herzl Institute and a major philosophical proponent of the “national conservatism” movement, says that Christians need to rediscover, and weaponize, the Old Testament.
Hazony delivered that advice while speaking at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, Colorado, earlier this month. An accomplished Jewish Biblical scholar and political philosopher, Hazony began by arguing that the upheavals of 2020 were a “cultural revolution” — not just in the streets of America’s cities, but in almost every major American institution. And liberalism, he said, could not stand up to “woke neo-Marxism.”
By “liberalism,” Hazony said, he meant the tendency on both the political center-left and the center-right to emphasize individual liberty, choice, and freedom. That was all well and good, but it could not withstand an attack by a philosophy that questioned the very foundations of that choice, that declared the institutions of freedom to be guilty of bigotry, and that proposed the end of all distinctions — even gender — as the cure.
Hazony traced the origins of the 2020 revolution to 1947, when the U.S. Supreme Court in Everson v. Board of Education (1947) imposed a more rigid definition of the separation of church and state than that which was contemplated by the original Framers of the Constitution. That precedent led to driving the Bible, and God, out of public schools — which produced two successive generations of Americans ignorant of basic Scriptures.
It was insufficient, Hazony argued, to teach the Gospels, because while they offered a path to individual joy and salvation, they did not deal with the kind of real-world moral and political problems that the Old Testament — “the most politically incorrect book ever published” — faces head-on. Moreover, he said, the very idea of the United States of America was based on the Old Testament’s political model of a society in covenant with God.
Precisely because Christianity is the only force that can defeat radical leftism, Hazony argued, it is necessary for Christians to read the Old Testament, and to restore it, together with the New Testament, in America’s schools.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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