A Conservative Case For Religious Freedom

Eighty percent of Americans believe religion is losing its influence in public life. In the past, John Wilsey might have found a silver lining in that news. When he was writing on American civil religion in his 2015 book, American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion, Wilsey worried that Christian conservatives were idolizing their nation.

Given the amount of ink spilled promoting and opposing Christian nationalism over the last decade, one might expect those fears to have grown. But now, in Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, Wilsey, professor of church history at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, argues that “there has been a massive overcorrection among Americans on both the left and the right.” Chest-thumping nationalistic fervor has been displaced by self-repudiation, disillusionment, or a “thoughtless and thankless apathy” (111).

Religious Freedom spans centuries and continents, faithfully bound together by a strand of golden thread, which is “the tradition of the harmony between the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion,” or, as Wilsey often calls them, “America’s two spirits” (22). As Alexis de Tocqueville observes, these spirits elsewhere “have often been at war with one another.” In America, however, they obtained a rare and “marvelous combination.”

Religious Liberty

Given its title, Religious Freedom might sound like a niche book on the First Amendment or a formal consideration of the separation of church and state. Instead, it’s about religious freedom in a far more capacious sense: the freedom that religion makes possible.

Wilsey offers an extended paean to the insights of Tocqueville, the greatest chronicler of American exceptionalism. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville writes that “liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.” In this sense, then, all freedom is religious freedom, because without religion it can’t be sustained.

All freedom is religious freedom, because without religion it can’t be sustained.

The case for Christian nationalism or even a more modest state-established religion might look good on paper. But its fruits are bitter and small. Far from being some voguish “post-war consensus,” the need to keep the church and state separate was already evident to Tocqueville in the 19th century.

Sociological research bears this out. “Competition creates energetic churches,” Rodney Stark argues. “But,” he says, “the lazy colonial monopolies did not survive in the United States, being replaced by a religious free market.”

If the Church of England is anything to go by, a nationally established faith is no bulwark against capitulation to the culturally normed sexual ethic. By contrast, the United States outperforms the United Kingdom, Hungary, and other countries preferred by the Christian nationalists and postliberal pundits, exceeding them in “weekly church attendance, views on the importance of God, and belief in life after death” (190).

The Way History Grows

Wilsey’s vocation as historian is made manifest throughout Religious Freedom. Telling stories about Tocqueville’s family weeping over a long-dead king, spinning parables out of a Habsburg king in Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Wilsey brings the past to life with vivid effect. History clearly is “more than an irrelevant litany of dates, names, and obscure places on a map” (122).

Perspective, not nostalgia, is the purpose of historical inquiry. Drawing on Peter Viereck’s work, Wilsey argues that “conservatism is the art of listening to the way history grows,” rather than returning to some lost utopian past. Burkeans, or “aspirational conservatives,” as Wilsey sometimes calls them, “see change as inevitable, and that it must be managed by honest deliberation based on constitutional procedure, tradition, and prudence” (48).

In contrast, reactionaries who refuse to reckon with legitimate historical shifts often end up aping the revolutionary left’s disruptive tactics. Wilsey, following Viereck, calls them “Ottantotts” (88ers), referring to the counterrevolutionary right in 19th-century France who thought all the world’s problems could be solved by winding the clock back before the French Revolution of 1789.

According to Wilsey, “American conservatism since 1990 has demonstrated a turn toward Ottantottism, especially in its rising populist appeal” (49). It’s this doomed attempt to turn back time that leads James Davison Hunter to conclude that Americans lack the cultural resources for democratic solidarity. Wilsey’s complementary effort looks to steer conservatives toward the future-facing dynamism of the Tocquevillean synthesis and away from Ottantottism in all its exhausted forms.

National Idea

Wilsey makes a compelling case that faithful Americans can uphold our nation’s historical ties to a Christian culture without devolving into Ottantottist Christian nationalism. In fact, he demonstrates how America’s various national identities across time have always traded on at least a measure of Christian doctrine, some more coherently than others.

Wilsey demonstrates how America’s various national identities across time have always traded on at least some Christian doctrine.

While acknowledging that Christian nationalism’s critics usually have “the Christian America thesis” in mind (popularized by Tim LaHaye, Jerry Falwell, and David Barton), Wilsey argues that Stephen Wolfe offers a far clearer and more concerning account of Christian nationalism. In The Case for Christian Nationalism, Wolfe calls for a “theocratic Caesarism” under a “Christian prince” who “directly command[s] action as civil law.” Wilsey rightly concludes that this “departs from the American tradition of republicanism in crucial ways pertinent to religion and ordered liberty” (105).

Wilsey elaborates, “The logic that Wolfe uses can only lead in the same direction as Hegel’s did for Marx and Heidegger—the totalizing of the state and the degradation of the Christian faith that Wolfe holds dear” (140–41). Drawing the book’s thesis together, Wilsey demonstrates how “[Wolfe’s] argument for a magisterial Christian state emanates from, and resonates with, the contemporary Ottantottist Right,” rather than an authentic synthesis of America’s two spirits (125).

The United States is fast approaching the semiquincentennial of its independence. Scripture promises the church that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18), but it offers no such assurances to the nation. Whether we’ll survive the coming centuries will depend on our continued commitment to the combination of the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion. In Religious Freedom, Wilsey provides Christians a needed roadmap to the pressing political challenges of our time.