Divine Madness

Jerome Copulsky’s “American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order” is an engaging historical survey of Christian theocratic opponents of American liberalism, from the American Revolution to the present. Copulsky shows that the ideas of the most extreme elements of the contemporary religious right have deep historical antecedents. The movement, he shows, has had some notable successes, but even these have revealed the inadequacy of its aspirations. Christians, more than anyone else, should be grateful for the failure of these zealots to make the United States a formally Christian nation.

Ever since the founding, some Americans have demanded official recognition of Christianity as the only true religion. “American Heretics” is primarily their story—a story that, so far as I know, has not previously been the object of sustained attention by historians. Two chapters, however, address movements with different hopes: the loyalist clergy who resisted the American Revolution and the proslavery theologians before the Civil War. What all these movements had in common was the belief that “democratic values were not an expression of Christian teaching but were rather false and dangerous; that religion should not be separated from the state but ought to guide political life; and that the protection, indeed celebration, of religious liberty was a violation of divine dictates.” The persistence of these groups, Copulsky claims, “demonstrated that America hadn’t solved the church-state problem.” 

It is a fascinating story, but that isn’t what it demonstrates. It simply shows a more mundane fact, that you can’t please everybody. And in a free society, “everybody” is going to include some pretty strange variants. “Under the political and social conditions secured by the basic rights and liberties of free institutions,” John Rawls famously observed, “a diversity of conflicting and irreconcilable—and, what’s more, reasonable—comprehensive doctrines will come about and persist if such diversity does not already obtain.” And unreasonable ones: A free society will generate cranks. Whether those cranks are in turn dangerous to the free society is a contingent matter.

Copulsky’s narrative begins with the loyalist churchmen, who thought the American Revolution was “a rebellion against God and his established order.” Their protest did not have lasting effects. When God turned out to be on the side of the rebels, the former Church of England reorganized, and the Episcopalians became just another denomination.

The idea of divinely sanctioned political power did, however, persist in the Reformed Presbyterian Covenanters’ protest against the new Constitution, which neither mentioned Christ nor required that officials be Christian. One of these writers denounced religious freedom because it would “sanction every blasphemy, which a depraved heard [sic] may believe to be true.” The Covenanters were also early denouncers of slavery: In 1800, a slaveholder was deemed unfit for communion with the church. Eventually, some members of the church became reconciled to the legitimacy of the Constitution, but this produced a schism, with some remaining resistant. The framers were not much troubled by this issue: When Alexander Hamilton was asked why the document had not mentioned Christianity, he is said to have replied, “I declare we forgot it.” 

The more potent religious antiliberals were the proslavery theologians. The Confederate Constitution remedied the great omission of 1789 by expressly “invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God.” God had been involved for years. As Copulsky explains, “Perhaps no institution did more to provide moral and intellectual legitimation for slavery, readied the slave states for secession, and sustained its white population through the long war that followed than the Southern church.” Of these, the “most famous and formidable voice” was James Henley Thornwell, who thought that, if the master looked after the slave’s soul by Christianizing him, slavery would be “a free service—a service which God accepts as the loyal homage of the soul.” According to Thornwell, though some slaves were treated badly, these evils “were not essential but contingent and did not detract from the benevolence of the institution itself.” Understanding that the statement in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” was a powerful tool of the abolitionists, some proslavery clerics denounced it as a grave theological error tantamount to atheism.

During the Civil War, the Covenanters renewed their efforts to Christianize the Constitution, even meeting with Lincoln, who wasn’t interested. The movement received new vigor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from the emerging challenges to Protestant dominance: the growing number of Catholics, Chinese workers in the West, Mormon theocracy and polygamy, Darwinism, and secularism. The movement ironically provoked a countermovement, attempted to be led by the short-lived National Liberal League, advocating a radical separation of religion and government. Neither movement accomplished any significant constitutional change.

The antisecularists scored a real victory in 1954, when Congress added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. There were other, similar developments. In 1952, Congress declared that each year the country would mark a National Day of Prayer. In 1955, it mandated that the words “In God We Trust” appear on all currency. (It had previously appeared only on certain coins.) In 1956, Congress made these words the national motto of the United States.

What, exactly, did all these conservative Christian efforts during the 1950s accomplish?

Will Herberg observed that this religiosity was in context pretty uncontroversial: He cited a 1955 Gallup poll showing that 96.9 percent of Americans identified themselves as belonging to one of the three denominations. But he thought that the attempt to insert God into government-sanctioned activities and speech accomplished nothing good: “the authentic character of Jewish-Christian faith is falsified,” he argued, by its “incurably idolatrous” Americanization. “Civic religion is a religion which validates culture and society, without in any sense bringing them under judgment.”

The Supreme Court had already begun to apply the Establishment Clause to the states, eventually invalidating prayer and Bible readings in public schools. While the “under God” bill was progressing through Congress, a “Christian amendment” recognizing “the authority and law of Jesus Christ” died in committee, after the testimony of some of its supporters relied on antisemitic conspiracy theories. 

In the 1960s, theologian John Courtney Murray and President Kennedy each, in their own way, reconceptualized Catholicism to make it more consistent with liberal democracy than it had been. This spurred a reaction from a group of Catholic traditionalists, led by Brent Bozell, speechwriter for Sen. Joseph McCarthy, ghostwriter for Sen. Barry Goldwater, and brother-in-law of William F. Buckley Jr. After Goldwater’s defeat, Bozell concluded that the fundamental flaw in America’s constitution was its dedication to liberty. “The urge to freedom for its own sake is, in the last analysis, a rebellion against nature,” he wrote; “it is the urge to be free from God.” He admired Spain under Franco. For a few years, he edited a reactionary Catholic journal, Triumph, elaborating his antiliberal vision. The journal never acquired much of a following, and its writers, Copulsky observes, “had a difficult time describing what their hoped-for confessional sacramental state would actually look like and how it might come to be.” 

More potent was the Protestant religious right of the 1980s, led by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Its intellectual leaders disagreed about whether the Constitution codified Calvinism or was the product of a secularist conspiracy. But they united against feminism, pornography, abortion, and gay rights, and in that unity became a formidable voting bloc.

The significance of Copulsky’s historical survey becomes clear in the last chapter, when he shows that he has unveiled the deep historical roots of contemporary postliberalism and national conservatism. Nostalgists for medieval Christendom such as Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, it becomes clear, are continuing an effort to Christianize America that dates back to the founding. The National Conservatism movement, an offshoot of the Edmund Burke Foundation, resists modern cosmopolitanism in the name of traditional American cultural identity. The movement proposes that “public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision.” It aims, Copulsky observes, “to impose upon the country from above a religious and cultural uniformity that it never possessed.” The group’s “Statement of Principles” elides numerous operational difficulties, beginning with the question of which Bible is to be read in the public schools and how it is to be interpreted. The Constitution-worship of some conservatives would collide with others’ loathing for the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. A Christian nation would have to figure out who counts as a Christian. (As I’ve argued in my book “Defending American Religious Neutrality,” American law has sometimes given religion especially favorable treatment but has avoided taking a position on any live theological issue. Copulsky’s narrative suggests that this has been a good idea.)

The American heretics have always had trouble imagining how to achieve the new unity that was to replace the diversity of the actual American population. The clearest answers were those of the royalists and the proslavery theologians, who frankly relied on brute force. Today’s proponents of a Christianized politics, Copulsky writes, ignore the diversity among themselves. They no longer share Reformed Presbyterianism. On the contrary, they have “very different and incompatible visions of what a redeemed nation would look like and what policies it would put into effect.” Their victory, Copulsky contends, “would not bring about a well-ordered state but rather usher in a terrible era of division and violence.” 

National unity is swell, but there are plenty of paths to it other than religious homogeneity. Lincoln was mighty effective, if not strictly speaking accurate, when he described the United States (whose Constitution at that time still protected slavery) as “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Biden declared in his inaugural: “Many centuries ago, Saint Augustine, a saint of my church, wrote that a people was a multitude defined by the common objects of their love. What are the common objects we love that define us as Americans? I think I know. Opportunity. Security. Liberty. Dignity. Respect. Honor. And, yes, the truth.”

The religious adversaries of liberalism are willing to sacrifice unity for the sake of Christianity. But would their political hopes really be good news for Christianity? A recurrent phenomenon, which Copulsky documents well, is the desire of some of the Christianizers to claim that the Constitution is already Christian and that nefarious secularists have been trying to suppress this truth. The First Amendment’s prohibition of establishment of religion is an inconvenience for this argument. It was put there largely for religious reasons.

One of the classic arguments for disestablishment of religion, one that moved the framers, is the idea that religion can be degraded by state sponsorship. James Madison thought that religious establishments had only ever produced “More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.” Thomas Jefferson wrote that establishment tends “to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it.” They were right. If the state gets to declare God’s will, we will shortly learn that what God wants more than anything else is the reelection of the incumbent administration. (For voluminous other examples, see my article “Corruption of Religion and the Establishment Clause.”) The Christianizers never seem to have thought much about this problem.

Unfortunately buried in Copulsky’s endnotes is William F. Buckley’s skeptical response to Bozell’s proposal for a Christianized America, which needs to be more widely known and which I therefore quote at length:

[T]he great constitutions larded with religious sycophancy have failed in and of themselves to promulgate a free society, let alone a noble society. If we can have bad popes and corrupt Vaticans, surely we can have bad civil societies even if God is cited in their constitutions. There are no ties to God that any constitution-makers can establish which last an instant longer than the hold that God has upon the people and their governors. ... I for one prefer the profanation of our Founding Fathers to the (inevitable) profanation of God, which would have resulted if our ancestors had swaggered about Philadelphia prompting a God-ordained America which, weeks later, would, as other societies have, be racked with the conventional, secular anxieties. 

On this issue, perhaps God is on Buckley’s side.