Evangelical Christian and former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, who left his job at the White House, writes in today’s Washington Post that Rudy Giuliani is more of a Nixonian conservative than a religious one:

In his elections, Nixon appealed to conservatives and the country as a culture warrior who was not a moral or religious conservative. “Permissiveness,” he told key aides, “is the key theme,” and Nixon pressed that theme against hippie protesters, tenured radicals and liberals who bad-mouthed America. This kind of secular, tough-on-crime, tough-on-communism conservatism gathered a “silent majority” that loved Nixon for the enemies he made.

By this standard, Giuliani is a Nixon Republican. He is perhaps the most publicly secular major candidate of either party — his conflicts with Roman Catholic teaching make him more reticent on religion than either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. But as a prosecutor and mayor of New York, he won conservative respect for making all the right enemies: the ACLU, advocates of blasphemous art, purveyors of racial politics, Islamist mass murderers, mob bosses and the New York Times editorial page.

Gerson goes on to point out that Giuliani is nevertheless at odds with his Church and its “consistent ethic of life” on nearly all issues:

Giuliani is not only pro-choice. He has supported embryonic stem cell research and public funding for abortion. He supports the death penalty. He supports “waterboarding” of terror suspects and seems convinced that the conduct of the war on terrorism has been too constrained. Individually, these issues are debatable. Taken together, they are the exact opposite of Catholic teaching, which calls for a “consistent ethic of life” rather than its consistent devaluation. No one inspired by the social priorities of Pope John Paul II can be encouraged by the political views of Rudy Giuliani.

What I think is interesting and significant here is the prying apart of Nixon-style social conservatism from a more religiously-inspired moral traditionalism. The former emphasizes law and order, patriotism, and a strong foreign policy, whereas the latter is more concerned with transcendent moral issues surrounding the dignity of the human person (Gerson might have added that the Vatican has frowned on preventive war too). These two types of “conservatism” have been contingently linked in the broader conservative coalition and blurred together under the rubric of “cultural conservatism,” but there’s no necessary connection between them, and I think Gerson’s right that in Giuliani we see how they can actually be at odds.