I have read some Ayn Rand, though I have yet to read any of her novels. Somehow I feel less inclined to after hearing this from the brilliant Flannery O’ Connor:
“I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re: fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”
I must say that I have a personal policy of cutting of contact for at least a year with people who read Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead for the first time — her ideology makes them worse than young Calvinists for at least that long.
I am an orthodox and Reformed Christian, so Ayn Rand would have despised me. However, I have read her major novels, The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and We the Living, and found them of great profit. One doesn’t have to accept everything she said. wholesale. But I found her defense of laissez-faire capitalism to be a helpful reinforcement of my own beliefs.
Unfortunately, her defense of laissez-faire capitalism goes hand-in-hand (as it must) with the attitude that it is immoral to show mercy or compassion, which makes it, in my opinion, quite poisonous to a Christian.
Have you read her books? She believed no such thing. What she believed was the altruism contrary to one’s values was immoral. She was in favor of kindness and mutual support that applied one’s values.