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A ROUND UNIVERSE 139
after hours of conversation: “I was giving up, and murmured something
about creativeness being obvious everywhere; and she struck me down
by responding triumphantly, obviously feeling that she destroyed my
whole position in one stroke, with the childish: ‘then who created God?’
I saw then that I had wholly misjudged her mental capacity. We parted
amiably and I haven’t seen her since.” In Lane’s recollection she was
alienated both by Rand’s statement and her manner; Rand spoke “with
the utmost arrogant triumph,” giving Lane a “ ‘that squelches you’ look”
as she delivered her fi nal question. 15 The incident confi rmed Lane’s
doubts about Rand’s ultra-individualistic position and laid bare the differences
between them. Rand clearly felt that she had outgunned Lane.
The following day Lane sent a lengthy letter further clarifying her position,
which Rand covered with critical scribbles. She never responded to
the letter and they had no further contact.
Rand’s break with Lane foreshadowed the growing importance of
religion on the political right. In the years since The Fountainhead, religion
had moved to the forefront of American political discourse. Rand
remembered the transition clearly. Until the mid- to late 1940s she “did
not take the issue of religion in politics very seriously, because there
was no such threat. The conservatives did not tie their side to God. . . .
There was no serious attempt to proclaim that if you wanted to be conservative
or to support capitalism, you had to base your case on faith.”
By 1950 all this was changing. As the Cold War closed in, Communism
became always and everywhere Godless, and capitalism became linked
to Christianity. William F. Buckley’s best-selling debut, God and Man at
Yale, famously recast Rand and Hayek’s secular “individualism vs. collectivism”
as an essentially religious struggle, arguing that it replicated
on another level “the duel between Christianity and atheism.” Two years
later, in his iconic autobiography Witness, Whittaker Chambers defi ned
Communism as “man without God,” a substitute faith that fl ourished
in the absence of traditional religion. Russell Kirk kicked off a vogue
for “New Conservatism” with his 1953 book, The Conservative Mind,
which asserted the importance of religious traditionalism. Even on the
left, intellectuals gravitated toward the neo-Orthodox theology of the
former socialist Reinhold Niebuhr. 16
In turn Rand became an ever more devoted atheist. At a cocktail party
she met the young Buckley, already a celebrated fi gure on the right. She
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