Argentinian president Javier Milei has called the late Pope Francis an “imbecile,” a “filthy leftist,” an “embarrassing communist,” a “piece of shit,” and “the representative of malignance on Earth,” delivering that last remark during his successful presidential campaign in 2023. Why the hatred? Milei is a devoted advocate of exactly the neoliberal order that Francis was criticizing when he declared in 2013 that “money must serve, not rule!” Among Milei’s heroes are the Austrian school of economists—Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard. In 1922, Mises warned that “a living Christianity cannot exist side by side with, and within, Capitalism.” Jesus was too much of a socialist. “No art of interpretation,” Mises huffed, “can find a single passage in the New Testament that could be read as upholding private property,” and “the Redeemer’s words” against the rich had done more harm than “the persecution of heretics and the burning of witches.” Mises also argued that the Catholic Church in particular was incompatible with nationalism. The West was faced with a choice: capitalism and nationalism or retrograde Christian compassion. 

This view of the world has roots on both sides of the Atlantic. In the first decade of the twentieth century, an Episcopal minister named Albert Jay Nock abandoned his wife, children, and church for what became a decades-long career in libertarian journalism. He was an uncompromising opponent of the federal government. State intervention, “good or bad,” he wrote in 1924, “reduces the scope of individual responsibility, and thus retards and cripples the education which can be a product of nothing but the free exercise of moral judgment.” Virtue could arise only through natural selection, which required that individuals face the consequences of their mistakes without a public safety net. In this analysis, Nock took his cues from the Victorian anarcho-capitalist Herbert Spencer, the man who coined the phrases “survival of the fittest” and “there is no alternative.” 

In Europe, pioneers of the Austrian school were making similar arguments. The key element of Friedrich Hayek’s thought was his hostility to the “consciously directed” in favor of “spontaneous order.” Take prices, for example: instead of some authority deciding how valuable something should be, market competition resolves individuals’ demands into a price “not determined by the conscious will of anybody.” Hayek called this lack of control freedom: to be free was to be bound only by the market, never by another human being’s will. Hayek viewed market society as a kind of fractal—a beautiful symmetry emerging from underlying rules rather than from individual or collective intention. He viewed the human mind similarly. Instead of the old model of reason governing the appetites, he believed that consciousness was subordinate to subconscious impulses. Far from the state being able to govern citizens, the individual citizen could not even govern herself, but was instead blindly impelled by spontaneous impulses. 

Pope Francis’s belief in the primacy of the human person over the market was anathema to Hayek’s ideological descendants. The Austrian school called their enemy “planning”; we might call it intention. If the road to hell was paved with good intentions, we could keep ourselves from arriving there simply by excising intention from economic life altogether. Any effort to direct the economy by means of collective deliberation—that is, any attempt to subordinate capitalism to democracy—was unjust and harmful. No state, however sophisticated, could manage the spontaneous order of the market; it could only get in the way. Reason, intention, and deliberation could not even be trusted to govern individuals, let alone whole societies. 

Mises identified top-down governance with the Catholic Church. His pronouncement that Christianity and capitalism were mutually exclusive came as part of a conspiratorial critique of the Church that would not have been out of place in eighteenth-century British broadsides against popery. For Mises, the Protestant Reformation was a victory of rationality and individualism over control—but not a “complete victory,” for “the enemy” (the Church) remained. The early twentieth century was a dangerous crossroads. “Papacy and Catholicism now face problems incomparably more difficult than all those they have had to solve for over a thousand years,” Mises warned. Socialism echoed Christian economic principles without Christian metaphysics or ethics, while nationalism’s division of the world into competing sovereignties repudiated the very concept of the catholic, or the universal. Mises anticipated that scheming Jesuits would respond to this predicament by trying to trick their way back into power. The Society of Jesus had for a time ruled Paraguay, and Mises believed that the Church as a whole aimed at “repeating the Paraguayan achievement everywhere”: one-world government under the “beneficent government of the Church.” 

This analysis was ridiculous as a description of the actual Church’s power and ambitions in this era. But Mises accurately identified a conflict between Christian universalism and capitalist amorality. To believe in any collective goal or program was to oppose Mises’s idea of liberalism. To believe in mercy and compassion was to undermine the relentless logic of capitalism. The foundation of capitalism’s stochastic order is apathy: the grocer’s insistence that he cannot sell below the market price, the minimal state’s insistence that it cannot reach into the market and pull the starving or the freezing into shelter, the individual’s inability to conceive of a better world. Salvation was neither possible nor desirable. 

This worldview was unpopular at the time. While the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s were difficult decades for the Catholic Church, they were even more difficult for classical liberals. Mises, Hayek, and Nock watched helplessly as two decades of leftists and liberals demolished the old right’s laissez-faire economics. Even Mises’s unlikely alliance with dreadful Rome via the “Austrofascist” chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss did not succeed. There was a doomed, elegiac quality to the work of these thinkers—a fawning biography of Mises calls him the “last knight of liberalism,” while Nock mournfully titled his autobiography Memoirs of a Superfluous Man. 

But they did not give up. Mises, Hayek, and other right-wing economists formed the Mont Pelerin Society in 1946 and dedicated themselves with renewed zeal to the preservation of what came to be known as “neoliberal” economic policy, which favored spontaneous order over Keynesian “planning.” Turning the United States into a model of libertarianism would be a coup for freedom and a blow to Soviet Communism, and in this project the Austrian theorists had natural allies in the business world. But if capitalism and Christianity were completely incompatible, as Mises believed, this scheme required overcoming or redirecting America’s deep religiosity. To Mises’s chagrin, many champions of the American free market were also devout Christians. For them, reconciling Christianity with capitalism was not merely a political project but also a personal one.

Among those inspired by Albert Jay Nock and the Austrians’ crusades were William F. Buckley Jr., whose childhood home Nock had frequently visited, and Frank Meyer, both founding editors of the conservative magazine National Review. Their periodical, founded in 1955, worked hard to unite the postwar right’s different camps—religious conservatives, the old right of Nock, and Cold War hawks—into a “fusionist” conservatism acceptable to all of them. Christianity was a sticking point for a number of reasons, but perhaps the most important problem was Christian compassion for the poor and the “other.” Compassion for the poor could lead to welfare programs that violated libertarian precepts and alienated business, while compassion for the other seemed to point toward full equality for minority groups and internationalism, which were at odds with the right’s racism and Cold War paranoia. There was no chance the American right would or could abandon religion outright. Instead, it neutralized it, gradually removing the elements most hostile to conservative politics. 

Austrian-school libertarianism offered one useful set of arguments against compassion in politics. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom made numerous converts to the conservative movement, including Meyer, whose 1962 book, In Defense of Freedom, insisted that freedom was a fundamental condition for conservative politics. Like Nock, Meyer also argued that freedom was a necessary condition of virtue: virtue was not virtuous, he believed, unless it was freely cultivated. What was the good of feeding children if you were forced to do it? Voluntary charity had long been a conservative alternative to welfare programs. Now Meyer could promote that alternative within a broader libertarian moral framework. Feeding children might seem like an unobjectionable act of virtue, but Meyer railed against the “totalitarian implications of the federal school lunch program.” Citizens who were coerced by the state into supporting welfare programs with their tax dollars were serfs, not saints.

Religious conservative critics of fusionism took issue with its libertarian bent. They agreed that freedom was important, but that it did not deserve to be the “foremost among the transcendent values,” as the fusionist 1960 founding statement of the Young Americans for Freedom put it. The conservative intellectual Russell Kirk called individualism “social atomism” and insisted true conservatives must believe in community. Kirk still believed in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”—in fact, given his general hostility to state intervention, he believed in it more than Smith did—but he insisted that it only made sense within a Christian moral order. “Economic individualism,” Kirk asserted in his 1953 The Conservative Mind, was “founded upon faith in Providence, which works its mysterious ways through individual energies.” By abandoning God, classical liberals and their intellectual progeny abandoned the central justification for their own economic program. 

Despite these theoretical disagreements, Kirk and the classical liberals agreed in their practical opposition to state intervention in the economy. And anyway, who said providence had to be divine? Herbert Spencer had effectively reinvented providence within his own thought as a “far-seeing benevolence”—an impersonal force that created good in the world by brutally weeding out the unfit: widows, orphans, the disabled, inferior races. One of Spencer’s followers, the British explorer and writer William Winwood Reade, argued on these grounds that Christianity had to be destroyed precisely so that the providence of evolution could proceed unimpeded by compassion. Twentieth-century laissez faire was based on the nineteenth-century triumph of an invisible hand cut off from the God to which it had once belonged.

Whether grounded in faith in the market or faith in God, the right-wing allergy to collective deliberation and action barred any attempt to improve the world through public policy. For Kirk as for Spencer, Nock, and the Austrians, laissez faire was not only an economic principle: in The Conservative Mind, Kirk praised nineteenth-century thinkers who rejected federal intervention against slavery for wisely understanding that “with the passage of time servitude would pass away without need for interference from the federal government.” The fact that this meant preserving racial inequality, at least temporarily, was a selling point for the many Americans who were ambivalent about libertarianism but committed to racism. 

Conservatives’ commitment to white supremacy was part of a second impulse that worked alongside their antistatism: the denial of compassion to particular out-groups. The right understood decolonization and the movement for civil rights at home as an interconnected global struggle—white nationalism was also white internationalism. In a 1957 editorial, Buckley insisted that Black Americans did not yet deserve the right to vote: whites were “the advanced race,” and Black voting would plunge the South into uncivilized barbarity. National Review’s publisher William Rusher collaborated with embattled colonial powers to defend their interests in Africa. Kirk’s favorite economist was another Mises associate, the German ordoliberal economist Wilhelm Röpke, who broke with Hayek and company over apartheid. Röpke believed Black Africans were “of an utterly different race,” “a completely different type and level of civilization.” It was Kirk who came up with the title for the English-language edition of Röpke’s book, A Humane Economy, and Kirk echoed Röpke’s arguments against Black liberation in Africa. 

Another religious conservative critic of fusionism, L. Brent Bozell Jr., offered a more trenchant critique of libertarianism. In a 1962 response to an article by Meyer, Bozell insisted on a different view of virtue and freedom. If the libertarians were right and real virtue depended on total freedom, Bozell joked, then rather than using law or custom to promote and facilitate virtue, we should be making virtue as difficult as possible; only then will the truly virtuous man have an opportunity to demonstrate that he is acting freely rather than making a virtue of necessity. This might mean, for example, advertising cut-rate housing to “dissatisfied spouses” to make it easier to get divorced—and thus more virtuous to stay married.

Bozell argued that a return to the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century would doom the right to irrelevance. It was, he pointed out, nineteenth-century economics that produced the twentieth century that conservatives lamented. If sinful man “is to have any hope of conforming with his nature, he needs all of the help he can get,” including that of “his institutions, his customs, his laws—the ones that have been inspired by his better angel.” Unfortunately, Bozell took this to mean that we should adopt a Catholic theocracy. A committed defender of Francisco Franco’s autocratic regime, Bozell moved his whole family to Spain in 1965 and started a magazine called Triumph, which openly celebrated authoritarianism. Here in the United States, Bozell’s brand of reactionary integralism lost out to Meyer’s fusionism. By the end of the 1960s, America’s growing conservative movement had relegated Christian compassion to the private sphere.

Libertarian economic thought attracted the active interest of American business elites, for whom Christianity without compassion was a profitable innovation. The William Volker Fund, built from a Kansas City furniture fortune, offered career and publishing support to Hayek, Mises, Milton Friedman, and other neoliberal economists. F. A. “Baldy” Harper, a conservative economist who spearheaded those efforts, also recruited anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard—a Mises acolyte who viewed the state as a “criminal band” and would later become an inspiration for Milei. The Argentinian president even named one of his cloned dogs after Rothbard. 

As the conservative movement grew, so did its funding networks. Many of the movement’s leading figures counted on the support of the Foundation for Economic Education, which had ties to General Motors chairman Alfred Sloan and his foundation. Oil money was particularly important. When the Volker Fund pivoted away from libertarianism toward Christian nationalism and overt racism, Harper turned to the oil baron Charles Koch for funding. More money came in from the Olin and Scaife foundations, which also funded a remarkably successful education program meant to train judges in right-wing economics.

All this came with a radically simplified Christianity. In 1971, Harper wrote an article assessing the ethics of the “Welfare State” in religious terms. He began with the Golden Rule, which he found…lacking. After all, a thief could claim that he was only doing unto others as he would have done unto him if he were in their position: “If he were a bank harboring all those ‘ill-gotten gains,’ he would consider himself the proper object of robbery.” Clearly more rules were necessary. Harper moved on to the Ten Commandments, above all “thou shalt not steal.” Those commandments could not be “subject to compromise,” he insisted. That was it; no more had to be said, really. The essay did not mention the gospels, or any Christian ethical tradition founded on them, or the vast corpus of Jewish interpretation of the Ten Commandments. His other writings used religion in much the same way, when they mentioned it at all. 

For Harper, Christianity was a cultural marker rather than the basis of an ethical system. Among those conservatives for whom Christianity was still a moral foundation, it was increasingly a set of condemnations rather than precepts. Christianity was against godless communism. It was against thieving welfare. It was against desegregation. It was against feminism and civil rights and internationalism and liberalism and foreign aid and regulation and mainline Protestant liberals, whose compassion made them dupes or traitors. This was the Christianity of the car dealer and the oil baron—and it defined the conservative coalition as it came to power. 

When Democrats embraced austerity in the 1970s, Republicans hit on a political strategy that would carry them for decades. The Carter administration had handed the Federal Reserve over to Paul Volcker, who deliberately engineered a recession to tackle inflation by crushing demand. Conservatives could not answer austerity with social spending, nor did they want to. Rather, they leveraged the one kind of stimulus that libertarian quietism would allow: tax cuts. The only difference between a check from the government marked “stimulus” and a larger paycheck is that tax cuts tend to favor those who are paying more in taxes. 

But in the right-wing moral universe, this difference was everything: taxes were money stolen from hardworking Americans to pay greedy teachers and “welfare queens.” In the right’s new gospel, wrath against the undeserving poor was righteous, and greed was good. Conservatives had arrived at an inverted soteriology: humanity must be saved not from sin, but by it. Providence worked through blind individual selfishness to create the best of all possible worlds, and no one needed to understand this process for it to work. In fact, our ignorance protected us from dangerous presumption. In an essay later made famous by Friedman, Leonard Read, a founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, once rhapsodized about the unintentional character of mass production. Writing about a pencil, he marveled that not one of the countless individuals involved in its production either knows how to make a whole pencil or has any desire to do so. Enrich us, father, for we know not what we do. 

It would be easy to see all this as the triumph of the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity over the Catholic notion of the common good, but much of the debate took place between Catholics. Buckley was raised Catholic, Bozell converted as a young adult, Kirk converted in 1963, and Meyer did the same shortly before dying in 1972. Hayek was a Catholic as well.

Mises claimed that the Catholic Church’s premodern origins made it a natural ally of anyone who was against the current order. This conclusion was grounded in his suspicion of Catholicism, but it accurately identified the countercultural possibilities of the Church in a secularizing liberal world. Not surprisingly, there are also non-neoliberal currents within the American right, and here as well Catholicism looms large. Self-described “postliberals” and national conservatives (“natcons”) embrace tariffs—anathema to neoliberals—and claim to support a kind of neo-Fordist welfare state. Many are Catholic converts, and some of them, like Vice President J. D. Vance, have explicitly cited their faith as a reason for their break with neoliberal orthodoxy. But it remains to be seen whether—apart from tariffs, an idea Trump supports for his own reasons—postliberals and “natcons” will have much influence on economic policy or whether their influence will actually counteract neoliberalism. It is notable, and sadly predictable, that few postliberals and natcons publicly opposed Trump’s budget bill, which starved the welfare state to pay for massive tax cuts for the rich.

And it is hard to believe that any postliberal or natcon influence would actually represent a move toward a more compassionate right. Postliberals’ political activity seems less defined by concern for the poor and the working class than by hostility toward “outsiders”—immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and transgender people. Somewhat paradoxically, the Silicon Valley figures whose ideas owe something to the work of Meyer are often the allies of ideologues who follow in the tradition of Bozell: Vance, for example, is a protégé of libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel. And though Elon Musk himself has fallen out with the Trump administration, his crusade against federal agencies continues through the efforts of Russell Vought, the powerful director of the Office of Management and Budget. Musk is hostile to the “woke mind virus” not only as it pertains to business and government, but to any other field of endeavor. Neoliberalism’s opposition to any collective intervention motivated by compassion seems like its most durable contribution to the right, one capable of surviving in a post-neoliberal authoritarian age. 

Peter Thiel recently complained that Christianity “always takes the side of the victim,” and characterized “wokeness” as an “ultra-Christianity” extended from this compassion. He may not foam at the mouth over the “woke mind virus” the way Elon Musk does, but he and the right more broadly agree that it has to be destroyed “for us to go back to a society that’s progressing.” The Silicon Valley right has invented its own gospel and even its own idea of the soul: Hayek’s conception of the mind was incongruous with human psychology but describes well the tech right’s vision for AI. Behold. From the industry that brought you libertarianism without civil liberties and currencies without value come minds without will and a Gospel without mercy.