Racist Murderer Benjamin N. Smith's guru preached that the races were struggling for the same good things, of life -- employment, schooling, housing, governmental assistance and the rest. "It is a zero sum game" World Church of the Creator founder Matthew F. Hale informed National Public Radio: What blacks or other minorities get comes at the expense of whites, Why should those who seize what they did not earn from the common pie not be treated as enemies? The government helps minorities; should not someone stand up for the majority? He did not want to harm minorities, he moralized, just to avoid them and to mingle with and assist only whites, just as blacks do at officially sponsored Black Student Union's, for example.

"My parents taught me to think for myself," Mr. Hale explained to the liberal interviewer when asked what in his background led him to his point of view. He revealed more than he knew before an interviewer who apparently shared many of his assumptions. They apparently agreed that life was a zero sum game, for it is a major tenant of the left, one that justifies using a powerful welfare state to take from the rich to give to the poor. Likewise, both supported government affirmative actions to give a bit of extra help to one race or another. And the reporter certainly did not question Mr. Hale's ultimate liberal trump for proclaiming even bizarre views: He was thinking for himself. These axioms are frighteningly close to those of the secular liberal intellectual establishment, even if they differ greatly on what race should be advantaged.

A few days later, The Washington Post was confused that the murdering Williams brothers admired both the Church of the Creator and an equally far-out "Christian Identity" group. G.K. Chesterton solved the riddle many years ago: "When a man stops believing in God, he does not believe in nothing; he believes in anything." That is the problem with Mr. Smith and Mr. Hale and their "world church" and all of those other "rational" inventions of nuts who "think for themselves," without any link to a deeply-rooted tradition.

As Nobel-award philosopher F.A. Hayek noted, rationalism released from a link to tradition looses any connection to reality and usually leads to disaster. That was the "fatal conceit" of socialism, that its creators and supporters thought they could invent a new reality to end life's hard knocks. What they created instead were the greatest human tragedies in history-- communism, national socialism, Jonestown, World Churches and the rest of the free-thinker nirvanas, Hayek, who did not himself believe in God, recognized that even religion was probably necessary as the basis for grounding a tradition. At least history shows no examples of a free society without a supporting religious culture.

The founders of socialism specifically rejected religion and tradition as the root of the whole social problem. They made the zero sum game the center of society and justified violence to redress the balance from the oppressors to the oppressed. Karl Marx was a proud atheist, an anti-Semite, and a horrible person to his friends and family. The person who took Marx's theory to final practice, Josef Stalin, directly rejected his early monastic training, turning from it to the "universal reason" of communism, and -- finally—butchery. Beyond socialism narrowly defined, Adolf Hitler also turned from religious training to his own view of reason, and ended in a killing Holocaust. Even earlier, the first explicit rationalists invented an "age of reason" that ended in the French Revolution and the guillotine. At the very beginning, Plato was a leading member of a conspiracy to topple the Athenian democracy, The details of each of these rejections of tradition in favor of unfettered reason were all very different, but they all preached that universal reason could trump tradition, culture and nature. And they all ended in violence, death and disaster.

Benjamin Smith was an interesting example of today's rationalist. He grew up in the affluent suburbs of Chicago, in Wilmette and Northfield, with his father a doctor and his mother a former town trustee, As early as his high school yearbook, he damned tyranny, in Latin no less. At the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbanna, he studied in the trendy liberal-elite Allen Hall, which the New York Times described as a "living and learning "community known for its "progressive program;' It was here that Mr. Smith was encouraged to think for himself and researched Mr. Hale, to become a disciple. He lashed out at a girlfriend and fought other students and was "punished" by the liberal authorities with community service, counseling and -- of course -- an ethics class. It need not be questioned that the school authorities did not require traditional religious instruction. Switching to Indiana University, he began to distribute tracts to students attacking the government and "suicidal religion," predominantly Christianity and Judaism. Bloomington residents organized a counter demonstration against Smith's pamphleteering and he claimed his life was being threatened. Finally, he flipped and went on his killing spree.

The progressive intellectual hubris has been and remains that they know what needs to be done and only lack the power to do it. Yet, when given the power, somehow, they kill, imprison or fine. That is why Lord Acton believed that the American Founders created a better form of government-- because they divided power so many ways. To the liberal, divided power is an obstruction to doing good. To the Founders, it was a way to block coercive laws and leave choices to individuals and freely organized associations outside government. As long as they did not coerce their neighbor, the citizens would be restrained by tradition to keep order and promote good. This Western tradition did not exclude reason but incorporated it into its tradition, allowing reason to modify tradition -- as A.N. Whitehead put it -- but not to reject it willy nilly, as did the rationalists who rejected it whole- sale. That philosophy of reason and tradition in reinforcing tension remains alive today, such as in Pope John Paul II's new, majestic "Faith and Reason."

Liberalism, of course, rejects the violence of the radical left. But it retains the same disdain for tradition and a faith in government experts wielding power for the common good. Fortunately, this liberal creed is on the wane. Every recent poll shows distrust of additional national governmental intervention in social life and a yearning for traditional values, which both political parties now claim to promote. It may be a coincidence, but reported church attendance for young people and Parents' attitudes toward teaching them values is way up, and social pathology for the young is down. The recently released federal report on well- being, of American youth found, after peaking at 52 juvenile crimes per 1,000 youths in 1993, the teen violent crime rate is down to 31 per 1,000. Births to girls aged 15 to 17 went down from 38.7 per 1,000 in 1991 to 32.1 in 1997. Something is happening, and it is not from government programs.

As William Rusher noted in his influential Heritage Foundation lecture, Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1978 was the first to call openly and authoritatively for the rejection of "rationalistic humanism" and the reintegration of the Judeo-Christian tradition into the culture of the West. It may be happening just the way Christianity itself began, below the vision of the elites and their progressive governments, in peoples' private lives.

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Donald Devine, former director Of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, is a columnist and a Washington-based policy consultant and a Vice Chairman for the American Conservative Union.