The secular right.

So there's a hot new blog out there called “Secular Right.” Here's their mission statement:

“We believe that conservative principles and policies need not be grounded in a specific set of supernatural claims. Rather, conservatism serves the ends of ‘Human Flourishing,’ what the Greeks termed Eudaimonia. Secular conservatism takes the empirical world for what it is, and accepts that the making of it the best that it can be is only possible through our faculties of reason.”

Daniel Larison's take:

“If the point is to say that non-believers and secular people can be conservatives, too, that seems to be something in no need of demonstration or argument. . . . If the point of the project is to say that modern conservatism has become too religious, or too wedded to Christianity, and therefore a specifically secular conservative resistance to this trend is necessary, I will have to laugh, because here our secular friends will have then embraced a popular myth that does not have much in the way of evidence to support it. If it is simply to argue for inclusion among other conservatives, I haven’t seen many efforts to cast them or keep them out.”

There's some good stuff in the comments of Larison's post, and in the comments section of the SR post that links to it. (There's also some dreck from people who are too convinced that they know the deep essence of what it means to be conservative.) But let's take Larison's guesses about the purpose of the SR blog one at a time:

1.) “Non-believers and secular people can be conservatives too.”

Larison's absolutely right: this should be obvious. Conservatism as a political movement is fundamentally about a set of policy goals. SR contributor Heather Mac Donald, in particular, has made her career by being very, very good at constructing social-science based arguments for conservative policies. Take vouchers, for example. You can want them because you think they'll get kids into Christian schools and thereby save their little souls, but you can also want them because you think the empirical evidence shows that more choice leads to better education. (Or you can go the other way. Doesn't matter to me.)

What about conservatism as a political philosophy? This one's harder, because conservatism isn't a single political philosophy; it's a bunch of variations on a theme—but the theme only exists in its variations! And, yes, I do think you can easily transpose deep skepticism about human potential, disdain for faddish multiculturalism, opposition to big government, original-intent constitutional interpretation, etc., into a non-religious key. It's not even hard to find examples of this. Just look at the SR contributors' pen names. Strike that; look at the contributors themselves. Derbyshire, Mac Donald, and Olson have conservative bona fides I couldn't dream of. (And Razib's on his way to the top.)

2.) “Modern conservatism has become too religious, or too wedded to Christianity, and therefore a specifically secular conservative resistance to this trend is necessary.”

Now we have to look at landscape of American conservatism. John Derbyshire is firmly embedded at National Review, and Heather Mac Donald and Walter Olson seem to get plenty of space in City Journal. So there's plenty of space for secularists at the top, where the policies are put together.

On the other hand, John Derbyshire gives away the game by mentioning Damon Linker's book on “theo-conservatism,” which is basically supposed to be Catholic neo-conservatism à la First Things. So that's the faction that SR is jostling against. It's not the movement as a whole that they want to resist, but rather a particular faction that they want to counter-balance. And if there really is going to be soul-searching in the conservative movement, this faction at least deserves a blog, since most other factions have their own journals and glossy magazines.

3.) “To argue for inclusion among other conservatives.”

Maybe if you're good enough to write for City Journal, nobody's going to kick you out, but I imagine it's kind of tough to be a secular conservative in certain parts of the country (just as it's tough to be a certain kind of religious conservative in others). Think of how much attention the stupid “Holiday Wars” seem to get every year, and how frustrating it would be to be seen as on the same team as Christmas Warriors if you're not even religious. I mean, I'm a Christian, and these controversies drive me crazy when I pay attention to them.

I imagine that SR is going to have a faithful contingent of readers that are just glad to find a place where they can read smart secular conservatives who are not primarily libertarians. So maybe a function of the blog is to provide secular conservatives in less secular regions with a haven. Maybe this isn't a huge group of people, but, hey! It's the Internet! And they certainly get more comments than I do…

EDIT: But are they right? What does WILLIAM think about non-religiosity? Just wait for the big Hitchens report that I want to write after exams are done…