In this interview, Dennis Prager asks Yoram Hazony why, after World War II, American elites began to suppress the nation’s biblical roots despite the country’s founding being more religious than Enlightenment‑based. Hazony argues that the trauma and exhaustion of the war led Americans, who had entered the conflict believing they fought for God and freedom, to become disillusioned and abandon both religious conviction and the commitment to liberty. This disillusionment fostered a hostile attitude toward America’s religious traditions, pushing them underground, and coincided with a broader cultural shift that also eroded the concept of freedom. The conversation frames the post‑war cultural turn as a reaction to wartime experience rather than a purely intellectual Enlightenment development.
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All right, Yoram Azonyi gives the latest video on the Enlightenment, and we were talking about how America is founded much more biblically than Enlightenment, even though obviously there was an effect of the Enlightenment. And you were talking about how post-World War II, the elites just decided this— the biblical origins and the importance of the Bible to America just has to be eradicated. Do you have a theory as to why that happened?
Well, I, I, it has something to do with the trauma of World War II. It's something like, um, Americans came out of the trauma of the war. I mean, the war was fought, right? FDR said that it was fought by God-fearing democracies against the atheistic totalitarian states. So they went into the war The Americans thinking that they were fighting for, for God and for freedom. And they, they came out of it not wanting to fight anymore, which is— it's strange, but it's like a kind of an exhaustion.
That's what happened to Europe after World War I.
So it seems like it's very similar that people came out of World War II instead of saying, we, we know what we're fighting for. They kind of came out of it saying, it's just not worth fighting. Let's, let's just give up on any kind of truth, you know, and, and, and values, and just let everybody do whatever they want. And this is— from this was born a very serious hostility to the religious roots and founding and traditions of America, which, you know, by this point have been, you know, almost driven underground.
You know, you said that— you said we Americans had fought for God and freedom, and, you know, they just decided to drop the God. But the irony— or I don't— well, actually, it's not an irony. The interesting fact is that while God has been dropped, so has freedom.
