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The heirs of Rothbard are far more friendly to religion than are the heirs of Rand. Several of the paleolibertarians like Lew Rockwell, Joseph Sobran, and Thomas Woods are Catholics, and traditionalist leaning at that. The only Protestant I am aware of who writes for Lew Rockwell frequently is the economist Gary North, who is a Reconstructionist, a far cry from a libertarian, although North subscribes to Austrian economic theory. Rothbard was a secular humanist, whose free market beliefs were grounded, like those of his mentor, Ludwig von Mises, in a belief that the free market economy is the basis of human civilization. However, Rothbard was more in agreement with Catholic economic theorists and their natural law based viewpoint and subjective theories of value than the labor based theories of value favored by economists in the British Protestant world, like Adam Smith. However, Rothbard himself apparently never professed any religious belief, and was raised in an ethnically Jewish but secular home. However, he appears not to have been an enemy of Christianity in general or Catholicism in particular, at least relative to the espousal of altruism.

19th Century Catholic economic and social teaching, as expressed in several Papal encyclicals, criticized free market absolutism. The criticism was aimed at both the Social Darwinism in the Anglo-Protestant nations and the natural law based libertarianism of Catholic authors like Frederick Bastiat and Lord Action. Chris Ferrara, a New Jersey attorney and traditionalist Catholic leader, publicly split with Thomas Woods, a fellow traditionalist Catholic and an historian, over what he considered the latter's free market absolutism and adherence to the secularist theories of von Mises and Rothbard.

Ayn Rand was far more hostile to religion, describing religious believers as mystics of the mind. The only noteworthy exception to this hostility was her admiration for the medieval Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas, due to his adherence to Aristotleian philosophy and his attempt (unsuccessful in her opinion) to synthesize empiricism with revealed religion. In her later years, Ayn Rand was very critical of the early Christian Right and was uncomfortable with Ronald Reagan's embrace of that movement's leaders. Her hostility was passed onto and probably intensified by Peikoff. As regretable as is their hostility to the Christian faith, Objectivists have been more realistic on foreign policy in both the Cold War era and the present than are the heirs to Rothbard.