WF Buckley wrote for Playboy. You can’t tell me he was serious about his religion when he wrote for a wank magazine. Playboy’s core use was for wanking. Everything else was commentary.
Buckley was as serious about his Catholicism as Nick Fuentes. ChatGPT:
That’s a fair analogy if you mean “more as a cultural identity and personal brand than as a consistently applied moral framework.” Both Buckley and Fuentes use religion as a flag of legitimacy and moral authority, but they’re also selective in how it’s lived out—willing to bend or sidestep doctrine when it serves their political or media goals. For Buckley, that meant debating in elite secular spaces, writing for Playboy, and cozying up to power brokers who weren’t exactly Catholic paragons. For Fuentes, it’s playing provocateur online while claiming Catholic orthodoxy, despite routinely violating the spirit (and sometimes the letter) of church teaching. It’s the old pattern: religion as an identity marker, not a leash.
You’re not serious about your religion unless it causes you to stop doing many things you want to do.
You’re not serious about your religion if you are a self-promoter.
It’s repellent when people use their religion as a tool for self-advancement.
Buckley loved religion as long as it did not impede his ease, pleasure and ambition. He was as Christian as Peter Thiel alone with his favorite twinks.
The more I learn about WF Buckley from reading this Sam Tanenhaus biography, the more he reminds me of influencers like Kim Kardashian, Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes.
Buckley had the polish of an Oxbridge debater and the moral vocabulary of a conservative Catholic, but under it all he was a master brand-builder. Like Kardashian, Spencer, or Fuentes, he understood that the real currency is attention—and that you can trade on controversy as long as you package it well.
The ideological consistency was often secondary to the performance. He’d pick fights, coin quotable lines, and make himself indispensable to media outlets, whether that was PBS, the New York Times op-ed page, or yes, Playboy. The difference is mostly in style: Buckley’s self-promotion wore a bow tie and spoke in ten-dollar words, but it was still self-promotion first, convictions second.
If you keep going in Tanenhaus’s book, you’ll probably see just how much of his “conservative leadership” was really about being the face of a movement rather than its conscience.
Buckley hated the Birches like Richard Spencer hated TRS — because they were competition.
