Christian Anti-Liberals

A Review of Jerome E. Copulsky’s American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order (Yale University Press, 2024)

A professed respect for the American Constitution is one of the few things that unites Americans on both the left and the right in these polarized times. Indeed, it has been an article of faith throughout the nation’s history.

But Jerome Copulsky’s American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order focuses on the Americans who dared to dissent from this creed because of their Christian convictions. The Constitution was “godless,” they thought. Instead of creating a Christian nation, it had created a political regime that was opposed to Christian principles. They wanted to reframe the nation’s government along unapologetically Christian lines – to make Jesus Christ the Lord of America.

Invariably, the ideal political system that they envisioned was not only explicitly Christian but also anti-liberal and anti-democratic. They disliked the pluralist, liberal order that the United States has historically represented, because they believed that it undermined Christianity and made it more difficult for Christian virtue to flourish.

When we think of contemporary representatives of this point of view, we might envision Catholic post-liberals such as Patrick Deneen. Or, we might think of Christian Reconstructionists from Reformed Protestant groups – that is, people such as the late twentieth-century Rousas J. Rushdoony or the early twenty-first-century ultraconservative Reformed pastor Doug Wilson.

But Christian Reconstructionists and Catholic post-liberals are only the most recent manifestations of a two-hundred-year long trend of conservative Christian groups rejecting the liberal order. Such Christians were always a minority in their society, but nevertheless, they represented an important movement that has been understudied: the movement of conservative Christians who were determined to overhaul the nation’s democracy.

While histories of Christian Reconstructionism and other Christian anti-liberal movements exist, Jerome Copulsky’s American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order is the first book to connect the dots between all of the different Christian anti-liberal movements that have arisen and provide a comprehensive narrative history of these movements from the late eighteenth century to the present.

As a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, Copulsky is a strong believer in a pluralist liberal order, and he believes that the Christian anti-liberals were wrong to think that the American political framework undermined Christianity. Nevertheless, the claim that it does has been a persistent minority view throughout the entire history of the American republic, so Copulsky thinks it is worth examining – especially since it has gained such wide credence today.

Throughout the nineteenth century, for instance, a small splinter group of Presbyterians maintained that the Constitution was in error because it prohibited religious tests for office and did not acknowledge the lordship of Jesus Christ. Some who maintained these views lobbied for a “Christian” constitutional amendment that would rectify these supposed errors, but others refused to vote or participate in any political action, choosing instead to lambaste the American government as analogous to the apostate northern kingdom of Israel under the evil king Jeroboam. The government’s tolerance for Sabbath-breaking, immoral officeholders, and slave-trading were proof that the country’s founding value was religious apostasy, not true Christianity. Even George Washington, they charged, was an “infidel.”

Such denunciations of America’s first president marked these Presbyterians as a radical, marginalized groups, since if there was one thing that united most nineteenth-century Americans across all political and regional factions, it was veneration for Washington. Perhaps that is why on most points, these Presbyterians had little influence.

But the Christian amendment movement had surprising longevity, with serious attempts made to pass the amendment occurring at regular intervals into the second half of the twentieth century. Even some mainstream evangelicals outside of Presbyterian circles championed the idea, since they believed that it would reframe the Constitution as an explicitly Christian document and finally make America the Christian nation that they wished it had been from the beginning.

In the late twentieth century, another group of ultraconservative Presbyterians – the Christian Reconstructionists (or “theonomists”) likewise influenced a wide swathe of evangelical Protestants with a radical political message: the idea that American law needed to be brought into harmony with Old Testament biblical law. Rousas J. Rushdoony’s fusion of libertarian economics and moral authoritarianism was based on the assumption that the Mosaic law represented God’s unchanging blueprint for civil law – and that these precepts should therefore be imported into American law.

But Protestants were not the only group of Christians to decide that an apostate America might need a completely different political framework in order to get right with God. In the late 1960s and 1970s, L. Brent Bozell and other conservative Catholics began arguing for the restoration of Christendom, which would feature a much closer union of church, states, and society than currently existed in the United States. Legal abortion, they thought, was a sign of how far American society had gone in its rebellion against God and its embrace of moral relativism. For decades, American Catholic politicians had answered Protestant suspicions of Catholic political power by insisting that American Catholics were full religious pluralists who championed church-state separation, but Bozell and his conservative Catholic allies rejected that line of reasoning and instead argued that Catholics should make no apology for arguing for an explicitly Christian, natural law framework for American civil law.

In the early twenty-first century, Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule and Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen shaped this line of reasoning into a larger critique of “liberalism,” by which they meant not simply the post-New Deal Democratic party ideology that Reagan Republicans and other conservatives had long denounced but rather the entire Western individualist tradition from John Locke to the present. That included the constitutional order, the new post-liberals charged. Instead of promoting individualism, the post-liberals argued, the state needed to protect the local community institutions that fostered virtue. Some, including Vermeule, suggested that post-liberalism really amounted to a restoration of a Catholic Christendom.

What unites all of these Christian attacks on the liberal order, Copulsky suggests, is a suspicion of religious liberty and pluralism, and a belief that virtue can be best maintained not through freedom but through political coercion. Too much state-sanctioned moral licentiousness will lead to a loss of societal virtue and, in turn, to the persecution of true Christians by an immoral majority. If we want to preserve and promote Christianity, therefore, we must have an explicitly Christian state.

But while Copulsky is sympathetic to the desire of these anti-liberal Christians to promote societal virtue, he urges them to reflect on the reasons why liberalism emerged in the first place in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Liberalism, Copulsky argues, was created as the only viable alternative to religious warfare in a religiously divided Western world. Unless we want to return to the use of violence to coerce religious belief, we will have to learn to live with religious differences that are mediated by a liberal political order.

For that reason, it is vitally important to preserve America’s secular, pluralistic, liberal political framework. This also means that we will have to accept an uncomfortable fact: there will never be a “moral consensus or clear-cut spiritual foundations” in an American democracy, and we will therefore have to learn with “profound and intractable differences” among our fellow Americans.

To his credit, Copulsky believes that this tolerance should even extend to the anti-liberals themselves. We may not like their rejection of American constitutional norms and their willingness to dissent from key points of the American creed, but we can learn something from their concern for moral virtue – even if we believe that they have chosen the wrong way to ensure it.

For those who doubt that Christian-based moral virtue can gain a fair hearing in such an environment – or who really wonder whether we can remain a pluralistic, liberal society that encompasses both advocates of a democratic secular order and proponents of a post-liberal Christendom – Copulsky’s concluding exhortation may seem naïve. For those skeptics of American liberalism, the temptation to jettison democratic norms for a Christian-based moral order may be strong.

But I think that those skeptics of American liberal pluralism might do well to revisit the arguments of Roger Williams, America’s first Baptist minister and also the first advocate of religious liberty. If Christianity grew in its first two centuries without the benefit of state support, he argued, why should we believe that Christianity now needs the government’s support to thrive?

Not everyone at the time was convinced by Williams’s argument, just as not everyone is today. But the American liberal political experiment has survived for so long precisely because millions of American Christians were willing to take a risk on the possibility that Williams’s argument was correct and that Christianity could grow and flourish even in a state that did not give the church any political advantages.

So far, that gamble has paid off, despite the ongoing criticisms of many “American heretics” who have repeatedly questioned whether it will really work. And as Copulsky reminds us, if we want to continue this experiment and avoid the interreligious violence that predated the rise of Western liberalism, we have to remind ourselves of why we need religious pluralism, even as we contemplate the arguments of those who firmly believe we do not.