Neoliberalism has pursued ongoing intellectual accommodation with religious conservatives despite deep contradictions.

Evidence

Other MPS figures such as Buchanan entertained the notion that a certain specific type of moral order would support a neoliberal state, or that morals could reduce the costs of rent-seeking losers throwing monkey wrenches into government. It took a lot of effort, and a fair bit of pussyfooting around the danger of alienating the partisans of one denomination (often in some other part of the world) by coquetting with different denominations or versions of religion, but the project of intellectual accommodation with the religious right and the theocons within the neoliberal framework has been an ongoing project at the MPS, although one fraught with contradictions that have dogged the liberal project since the Enlightenment. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 184

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Buchanan’s public choice theory and the MPS as described earlier in the book, plus the broader ‘thought collective’ thesis the reader is actively tracing. — connects to: Neoliberalism holds together several unresolved internal contradictions by asserting both sides at once — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 2142; Neoliberalism operates through systematic contradiction and disavowal of its own practices — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 81; Neoliberals treated individual freedom as a moral principle yet sought reconciliation with religion — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 2135 (+1 more)
• SEED: An essay angle: the religious right’s entanglement with libertarian/neoliberal economics as a marriage of convenience — how theocons and MPS figures papered over irreconcilable moral epistemologies.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberals treated individual freedom as a moral principle yet sought reconciliation with religion #expands (0.90) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2135
• Neoliberalism holds together several unresolved internal contradictions by asserting both sides at once #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2142
• Neoliberalism operates through systematic contradiction and disavowal of its own practices #expands (0.82) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 81
• Liberal tolerance of religion extends only to religions accepting liberal discursive assumptions #exemplifies (0.75) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 893