I disappointed that you published Christopher Adamo’s uninformed rant (see “Howard Dean’s Convenient Religion”). It’s fine that he’s a fundamentalist Christian. He has that right. But facts are facts and his claim that secularism has undergirded every great tryanny is just absurd. It’s made by ignoring religious tyranny where it has existed.
Some of the great advocates of free market limited government have been purely secular in nature. Let me note Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, FA Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, HL Mencken, Thomas Szasz, Lysander Spooner, as clear examples. And many others who defended freedom did so from a secular viewpoint but held a vague belief in a God along deist lines (one who does not concern himself in life, does not answer prayers, does not reveal himself, etc.) That would include people like Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith.
Some tyrannys were undergirded by religious beliefs: Inquistional Spain, apartheid South Africa and the bloody Christian communist dictatorship created in M