Yet he had not the faintest impulse to rebel. On the contrary, he continued with Hebrew school for a few months after his bar mitzvah, although his parents neither required nor encouraged him to do so. After his mother's death, when he was 16, he rose at dawn every day for six months to go to the synagogue, unaccompanied by his father, to recite the memorial prayer for the dead. "There was something in me," he later observed, "that made it impossible to become antireligious, or even nonreligious." This was so even in his later years, in spite of the other, political "neos" that might be expected to have moved him in a different direction. "I was born theotropic," he concludes.

"Theotropic." It was not Judaism itself but a "basic predisposition" toward faith that first stimulated Kristol's intellectual interest in religion, for which he had always had a "vague, positive feeling". Having read the Bible as a child in Hebrew school and the King James Version in college, he had always assumed that "the Book of Genesis was, in some nonliteral sense, true." In the heady intellectual atmosphere of college, his theotropic instinct, expressed in his fondness for such poets as John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T.S. Eliot, was further whetted by his reading of the theologians Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Jacques Maritain — at the same time, he ironically notes, that he was reading Trotsky, Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg. Why Christian and not Jewish theologians? Because, he explains, there were no serious Jewish theologians available in English at the time; it was only after World War II that the German-Jewish theologians Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, and the great Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem, began to be translated.

In an earlier memoir Kristol had credited Niebuhr and the literary and cultural critic Lionel Trilling as "the two intellectual godfathers of my neo-ism." He had read Trilling's reflections on Eliot's "Idea of a Christian Society" in Partisan Review in 1940, and the first volume of Niebuhr's Nature and Destiny of Man the following year. It was Niebuhr's book that provided him with the "intellectual vocabulary" and "intellectual grammar" that elevated what had been a "vague, positive feeling" to a level of belief capable of competing with the reigning creed of secular liberalism:

It was Niebuhr who introduced me to the idea of "the human condition" as something permanent, inevitable, transcultural, transhistorical, a transcendent finitude. To entertain seriously such a vision is already to have disengaged oneself from a crucial progressive-liberal piety. It also enables one to read the Book of Genesis with an appreciation that approaches awe. After Niebuhr, I plunged into theological literature with an ecumenical interest.

Religion and theology figure prominently in Kristol's articles in Enquiry, a modest, pamphlet-sized journal that he and his ex-Trotskyite comrades founded in 1942. These were not obvious subjects for "A Journal of Independent Radical Thought," as Enquiry's subtitle had it. Of his five contributions to that short-lived magazine (it did not long survive his induction into the army), three are on literary subjects, and, in all three, religion figures as well.