Publishers often promote books as being “timely,” even when the book in question just seems like the latest on a picked-over topic. Eerdmans, the publisher of John D. Wilsey’s excellent Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, uses the word “timely” to market Wilsey’s book, too. But in this case, it’s not just a slogan. Wilsey’s book is a thoughtful conservative response to Christian nationalism, one of the most surprising and viral religious movements of the past decade.
“Christian nationalism,” in popular parlance, is an ill-defined label, one applied to any Christian who thinks Christianity has public relevance. For example, pro-abortionists might call a Christian pro-lifer a “Christian nationalist.” When applied thus, the term is so vague as to be useless.
But there are also Christian nationalists, such as the Reformed pastor Douglas Wilson, who not only embrace the term but also apply a specific and coherent meaning to it. To honest-to-goodness Christian nationalists, contemporary America has come under the sway of a pagan and anti-Christian nationalism. It is time, Christian nationalists argue, to fight fire with fire.
Christians, they say, should assert a counter-nationalist program in every way possible, variously including electing Christian rulers, instituting tests of Christian faith for officeholders, placing limitations on non-Christians immigrating to the U.S., and granting full religious liberty only to Christians. A fully functioning Christian state should not allow Muslims, Buddhists, or Hindus to conduct public worship because those religions are false. Jews may or may not be afforded religious liberty in such a system; Christian nationalists’ opinions of Jews vary.
The secular media casually labels Christian nationalism as “conservative.” And in an ethical sense, Christian nationalists are conservative, in that they would make such moral novelties as abortion, gay marriage, and gender transition surgeries illegal. But Wilsey argues that the Christian nationalists’ political program, and their view of the state’s authority over religion, is radical and reactionary, not conservative.
Wilsey is in a strong position to make a conservative argument for religious liberty. He teaches at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, one of America’s foremost Christian educational institutions. Wilsey is a conservative himself, both politically and theologically, and he is also an expert on the history of Anglo-American conservative thought. Religious Liberty draws on an exceptionally wide range of conservative thinkers, from titans such as Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Russell Kirk to lesser-known figures such as Peter Viereck.
Some Christian nationalists might protest that Wilsey isn’t “really” a conservative because he won’t advocate the hard measures necessary to take America back to its Christian roots. But it’s implausible to view someone like Wilsey as a mealy mouthed “squish” when he knows and models conservatism so well. “Conservative” means something to Wilsey; it’s not a vague political label. He contends that the conservative tradition in Anglo-American history affords a generous scope for religious liberty.
Liberty and religion, in Wilsey’s analysis, have been America’s two animating spirits. The two spirits are not separate; they complement and foster each other. Religion gives liberty its moral grounding, while true religion flourishes under liberty, when people’s devotion is not mandated by the state. Secular liberals today have lost any sense of liberty’s moral purposefulness, seeming to believe that true freedom mainly entails amoral self-expression. Thus, the epitome of “liberty” in today’s secular West is a man acting upon the deranged notion that he is, in fact, a woman.
Christian nationalists and other post-liberals, conversely, have given up hope in liberty and put confidence (like their counterparts on the radical left) in coercive state power to accomplish their aims. But for Wilsey, classical conservatives are in the “best position to articulate and defend the best of the American character by receiving, venerating, applying, and handing down the tradition of harmony between the spirits of liberty and religion.”
Following Russell Kirk, Wilsey notes that conservatives have always been suspicious of radical claims about remaking society according to a preset ideological or theological program. Prudent people are always open to incremental reforms, but top-down, government-driven schemes for framing an ideal society are always doomed to autocratic corruption. The dismal outcomes of Communist revolutions in Russia and China, and of theocratic revolutions in Iran and elsewhere in the Muslim world, have proved this point repeatedly.
Conservatives are rightly suspicious of programs that tout the idyllic transformations that will result “if only” the right people commandeer authority and dictate a people’s beliefs and practices. Prudential conservatives revere both the eternal moral law (revealed in Scripture) and the traditions of one’s nation. They protect practices and habits that have stood the test of time among “real people living in real places under real circumstances.” The more idealistic and unprecedented a political program is, the more suspicious a true conservative becomes, whether the agenda emerges from the right or the left.
Following the historian and poet Peter Viereck (a strangely neglected figure in the history of American conservatism), Wilsey explains that not all those who venerate tradition are true conservatives. Viereck contrasted the thought of Edmund Burke with that of the French thinker Joseph de Maistre, both of whom recoiled at the revolutionary madness of the French Revolution in the 1790s. Burke is well known for his defense of ordered liberty in the face of the bloodthirsty French Jacobins.
The less well-known Maistre, however, argued for a counterrevolutionary Catholic state. Viereck described Maistre’s program as “Ottantott,” a term derived from the Italian term for “eighty-eight.” If Catholic strongmen could simply return European states to the ostensible paradise that existed in 1788, the year before the French Revolution started, Maistre posited that all would be well. Both Ottantotts and Burkeans are traditionalists, but Ottantotts are reactionary and autocratically inclined, while Burkeans are conservatives and protectors of liberty. Burkeans accept the reality of change and adaptation; they do not operate under “epistemic nostalgia” that generates utopian dreams of a coerced return to an imagined earlier time.
What does all this have to do with religious liberty and Christian nationalism? Some readers may find that Religious Liberty: A Conservative Primer is more of a primer on Anglo-American conservatism than a defense of religious liberty or a direct response to Christian nationalists. (Douglas Wilson’s name does not appear in the index, for example.) But Wilsey does respond fully and generously to Stephen Wolfe, whose The Case for Christian Nationalism (2022) has framed much of the debate about Christian nationalism among conservative Protestants. Wilsey commends Wolfe’s “coherent” argument and concurs substantially with Wolfe’s theological and moral assumptions.
Where Wilsey departs from Wolfe is on the solution to America’s tyranny of secular “woke” ideology in academia, business, law, and politics. Wilsey’s disagreement with Wolfe illustrates the difference between Burkean and Ottantott traditionalism. Both the secular left and the Christian nationalist right tout government-centered solutions to the problems they discern in American culture. Burkean conservatives are much more worried than are Ottantotts that idealistic schemes and authoritarian governments will spawn corruption and deprive people of liberty.
Wolfe asserts that “Christian nationalism is a totality of national action” and that Christian civil law “commands public action for the common good of civil communities.” Wilsey commends Wolfe for such specificity about the aims of Christian nationalism. But he disagrees with Wolfe’s agenda because it is “contra-American” and “closer to Hegelian state theory than the American constitutional tradition of federalism and ordered liberty.” Hegel’s thought is notoriously complex, but in effect Hegel “thought of the state as the actualization of the good, which is the final end of human existence.” An agenda that wants the state or a prince to actualize the ultimate good might still be traditionalist, but it’s not conservative.
Although Wolfe and other Christian nationalists hold a traditionally Christian view of original sin, they place great confidence in the right sort of Christian leaders to manifest God’s will via the state apparatus of a Christian nation. Wilsey simply does not share Wolfe’s faith in such a state. He is much more concerned with protecting people’s liberty from any coercive state, no matter how noble the ideals it espouses. “The Fall of man is a lot more profound than we know,” Wilsey says. “Merely waving off the terrible potentialities for abuse of power” does not suffice when laying out such a novel and reactionary program as Wolfe’s, Wilsey concludes.
Religion’s vitality in the conservative American tradition depends on its detachment from the state. The nation desperately needs Christianity to condition its “mores,” as Tocqueville put it. But true religion cannot be coerced by the state. In other words, the state cannot produce sincere religion, even though it desperately needs such religion (specifically Christianity) for the flourishing of families, communities, and culture.
To be fair, Edmund Burke admired the dissenting Congregationalists leading the charge for liberty in Massachusetts in 1775 and ’76, but as an Anglo-Irish politician, Burke remained an establishmentarian Anglican at heart. Burke and American conservatives such as John Adams did believe that liberty was compatible with a state-backed Christian denomination. But drawing on Tocqueville, Wilsey insists that vital Christian commitment requires the functional separation of church and state. Such separation hardly means state hostility toward religion. Instead, it means that the state values and protects the free exercise of religion for all.
Given Wilsey’s institutional location, it is surprising that he says little about Baptist contributions to the American tradition of religious liberty. Perhaps he didn’t do so because he wanted the book to reach as many different types of Christians and conservatives as possible. Principled advocates of Christian nationalism tend not to be Baptists, so perhaps appeals to that tradition would fall flat. Still, since 1776 Baptists have been the paradigmatic evangelicals who support religious freedom. This is because Baptists suffered terrible persecution from state-backed churches in places such as Massachusetts and Virginia. The experience taught them to be suspicious of any intertwining of church and state as naturally abusive and corrupt. Baptists rejoiced when the Constitution banned religious test oaths for officeholders and when the First Amendment declined to institute a national church (an “establishment of religion”). Thus, while the Anglo-American conservative tradition has some pockets of support for a state church, the Baptist tradition does not.
Given that the Southern Baptist Convention remains by far the largest Protestant denomination in America, there should be plenty of Bible-believing Christian resistance left in America against state-regulated Christianity. Historically Baptists have argued that the state should not restrict the lawful religious practices of non-Christians either. Wilsey doesn’t say much about how the state should relate to adherents of non-Christian religions, a problem that has become especially acute in Britain, France, and other European nations that seem unable to assimilate their teeming masses of Muslim immigrants.
But most Baptists have simply wanted the state to stay out of the business of religion and not discriminate against any denomination or religion, Christian or not. Any kind of state involvement with churches, Baptists have contended, inevitably corrupted them. (Witness the utter fecklessness of the Church of England in its home country, for example.) This Baptist conviction complements the conservative belief that government should be as limited as reasonably possible. When government meddles in areas outside its essential purview, such as in education, business, or religion, it typically introduces corruption and bureaucracy, and it deprives citizens of liberty.
Wilsey’s timely book may represent only a proverbial “voice crying in the wilderness.” Traditional conservatism, at least in terms of limited government, seems an all-but-forgotten option on today’s partisan landscape. Politicians win by promising more government intrusion in the economy, healthcare, education, and more. On this score, the differences between the major parties seem limited to which spheres they want to intrude upon. Conservatives always support common-sense, limited reforms because change is inevitable and government regularly needs to correct its course. But conservatives balk when ideologues of any stripe tell us how wonderful America will be if only the right sort of rulers assume more power over citizens’ lives, including over their devotion to God.
