p. 14 The Conservative Foundation of the Liberal Order, Mahoney

Tocqueville's critique of his asst, Gobineau (and a fine critique of Nietsche's position), who believed in pure scientism:

No, I will not believe that this human species, which is at the head of visible creation, should become the debased flock that you tell us it is and that there is nothing more to do than to deliver it without future and without recourse to a small number of shepherds who, after all, are not better animals than we are and are often worse. You will permit me to have less confidence in you than in the bounty and justice of God.

Another way of putting this conservative foundation is this: God created man, God made man the head of all his creation, man is loved by God personally, and THEREFORE man can never be self-sovereign. Tocqueville attacks Gobineau for removing God from the picture thus allowing him to set himself up as the self-sovereign ruler of man.

Contrast this with clip below where Donahue complains that capitalism doesn't reward virtue, meaning that material rewards should follow from virtue. This is the opposite message of Christ, who foresaw not mundane rewards but earthly suffering for the virtuous. For Christ, following Him equated to virtue. There's little chance this is what Donahue meant by virtue, as evidenced by his belief that virtue should be rewarded with material gain. Tocqueville wasn't particularly Christian, but recognized the danger of material gain becoming the goal of democracy.

Friedman is brilliant in his answer to Donahue, and yet Friedman isn't as close to Tocqueville as he sounds. Donahue complains that capitalism doesn't reward virtue. Friedman rightly points out that no system or person does reward virtue, and no one should be trusted with doing so. But Tocqueville doesn't attack Gobineau just because he wants to be the entrusted ruler, but because Gobineau ignores the hierarchy of man's relationship with God. Friedman, God bless him, disregarded that hierarchy as well.

p. 294 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

How is the hierarchy of man's relationships to God and to other men fundamental to the idea that the "powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed"?

Witness by Whittaker Chambers, from the foreward

The crisis of Communism exists to the degree in which it has failed to free the peoples that it rules from God...The crisis of the Western World exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God.

p. 92-93 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

How did the line between pietism/triumphantism and atheism begin to fade?

Relevant Passages:

Calhoun accepted Hegel's belief that history is the unfolding of the mind of God. Belief in progress thereby came to be the essence of piety. For Calhoun, as for most of his contemporaries, the conquest of nature by modern science, making the laws of the material world subservient to human use, became the supreme manifestation of God's goodness. It became the heart of their Christianity, or of revealed religion generally. But the same facts that were the ground of Calhoun's piety were the ground of Karl Marx's atheism.30 The "high intellectual faculties" with which God had endowed man, according to Calhoun, and with which he was accomplishing the conquest of nature were the very reason why, according to Marx, God had become superfluous.

Harry Jaffa. A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (Kindle Locations 1538-1542). Kindle Edition.

More...

While Calhoun would thank God for the ever increasing benefits resulting from the application of scientific methods to human needs, Marx would point out that men's prayers were being answered by relying on the use of their own unassisted human reason. Science could then be seen either as God's means of answering men's prayers or as the true reality that the idea of God had only obscured. As the nineteenth century progressed, as the prestige of science grew and scientific discoveries seemed more and more to he the answers to men's prayers, the presence of God seemed to become ever more identical with the presence of Science.

pp. 10-13 Suspicion & Faith, Westphal

Why should we learn not to refute the atheism of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud? Relate to Mark 8:27-9:1. What is the difference between these three atheists and the atheism of Bertrand Russell? What is the difference between skepticism and suspicion?