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RADICALS FOR CAPITALISM 203
activists who would infl uence the country’s political future. Buckley’s
new intellectuals, however, would swear allegiance to God and country,
rather than reason and capitalism. Although Buckley intended the new
organization to refl ect the fusionist consensus of National Review, not
all members of YAF were willing to go along. The organization’s fi rst
student head, Robert Schuchman, a Yale Law student, had written Rand
a gushing fan letter a year earlier, telling her, “Atlas Shrugged was a fulfi
llment of a literary promise I only began to see in The Fountainhead:
the promise of a logical view of existence, based on experience, a view
which I had always held but had never been able to verbalize.” 35 Now he
and a few others fought to make Rand’s secular libertarianism a prominent
part of YAF. In a dispute over the proposed organization’s name,
they prevailed against the suggested “Young Conservatives” and ensured
that the Sharon Statement had a libertarian cast. For Schuchman and
other secular libertarians, Rand’s pro-capitalist philosophy was exciting
and her atheism unremarkable.
Another prominent young conservative, Karl Hess, was attracted to
Rand specifi cally by her atheism. Formerly a practicing Catholic, his faith
began to waver after he started reading Rand. He remembered, “My previous
armor of ritual and mystery were insuffi cient to the blows dealt it by
an increasing interest in science and by the unshakeable arguments of Ayn
Rand.” Similarly Tibor Machan, a young Hungarian refugee who would
become a libertarian philosopher, found Rand while he was in the throes
of a religious crisis. Machan struggled against the ethical imperatives of
Christianity, which fi lled him with guilt, shame, and confusion. Reading
The Fountainhead convinced him to abandon religion altogether in favor
of Rand’s rational morality. A year later he told Rand, “The change in me
has been so drastic that only one who himself has gone through it could
fully understand.” He enclosed a letter he had written to his priest, drawing
a thoughtful and encouraging response from Rand.
Although Objectivism appeared a way to escape religion, it was
more often a substitute, offering a similar regimentation and moralism
without the sense of conformity. Rand’s ideas allowed students to
reject traditional religion without feeling lost in a nihilistic, meaningless
universe. But from the inside Objectivists threw off the shackles
of family and propriety by defi ning themselves anew as atheists. “Last
spring I discarded my religion, and this past Fall I took the Principles
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