Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer
By John D. Wilsey.
W.B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2025.
Hardcover, 288 pages, $28.99.
Reviewed by David G. Bonagura, Jr.
Adjectives that shape “conservatism” are not in short supply. Two early ones, casting conservatism into warring camps, functioned as prefixes: “neo” and “paleo.” Others drew lines in the culture wars: traditional, religious, social. Others proffer a political orientation: compassionate, national, crunchy. Still others adapt names of major thinkers: Burkean, Kirkean, Straussian.
To the lexicon John D. Wilsey offers a compelling addition: “aspirational conservatism,” a pre-political disposition “that aims for a higher moral destiny for human persons and societies, guided by the light of permanent things, tradition, and just order, while reckoning with the human condition marked by great dignity, but also limitation, imperfection, and change.” Wilsey’s conservatism is “humanistic” in seeking “to bring the true, the good, and the beautiful to real people, sinful and flawed, born into a world of inevitable change yet possessed by an irrepressible yearning for…‘the permanent beneath the flux.’”
Developing an expansive vision of aspirational conservatism is the chief theme of Wilsey’s Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer. It’s a curious choice for a title: religious freedom is the book’s ancillary, not primary, consideration. For Wilsey, following Tocqueville, America’s genius lies in harmonizing “the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion.” In this way, religious freedom is not an end in itself, as the title implies, but a means to ensure that liberty itself can thrive without being smothered by two kinds of tyranny: government overreach and individual libertinism.
Wilsey presents the facets of aspirational conservatism over six chapters, each with a particular theme: the relationship between permanence and change; the role of imagination; the exercise of nationality in contrast to nationalism; the nature of liberty ordered by justice; the purpose of history and the manner of historical thinking; religion as a good for individuals and for the state. True to his definition, in each chapter he identifies how Americans can grow in their pursuits and how they have fallen short. Critically, unlike historians on today’s left, Wilsey refuses to reduce America to the sum of her failures. American patriotism, for example, “is morally aspirational, self-corrective, and self-correcting. Patriots recognize their flaws and sins and resolve to learn from those sins.” Wilsey provides multiple examples of moral growth in American history, including the rejection of slavery as contrary to our nation’s founding, the posthumous honoring of Henry Johnson, an African American hero during World War I, and the development of Black church traditions.
In fact, Wilsey’s frank address of race relations and American history, a subject that typically unnerves conservatives, is one of the book’s greatest strengths. He does so readily, without fear, equivocation, embarrassment, or left-wing vocabulary. Uniquely, he spends several pages exploring the nature of Black conservatism, which emerged not from the experiences of the American Revolution, as White conservatism, but “from experiences with slavery and race prejudice.” With four distinct schools of thought, Black conservatism “is the most aspirational of all traditions on the right.” Past and current racism, Wilsey writes, “is foreign to the American ideal of liberty and opportunity.” He urges Black and White conservatives to build a “durable and genuine racial trust based on prudence, religion, and a shared American identity rooted in history, tradition, and custom.”
In forging aspirational conservatism, Wilsey identifies and corrects excesses of both the contemporary left and right. Following Paul Nagel, he distinguishes nationality from nationalism. Though related, the former concerns citizenship, self-understanding, and patriotism; the latter conveys notions of prestige and superiority. “The process of creating American nationality occurs in every generation” based on historical circumstances. Wilsey identifies six examples of nationality in American history to illustrate its complexity and to show that “patriotism does not have to be scary.” When conceptions of nationality exhibit “closed American exceptionalism,” a disordered nationalism that is exclusivist and imperialistic prevails; when they exhibit “open American exceptionalism,” America exudes a patriotism and “a celebration of American ideals and institutions that contribute broadly to human liberty and flourishing from local to national community.”
“Christian nationalism,” as articulated by its leading evangelist, Stephen Wolfe, receives scrutiny—and rejection. Throughout the book, Wilsey affirms the intricately religious character of American national identity. Christian nationalism, he points out, principally concerns the role of the state in human flourishing. “Is the purpose of the state to secure, through civil law, the highest good of citizens? Or is the purpose of the state to secure citizens’ rights, namely, the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?” Wilsey firmly stands in the latter camp: citizens, “through their institutions like churches and synagogues, which are disestablished, define the highest good and not the state.”
Leaning heavily on Tocqueville, Wilsey devotes his final two chapters to demonstrating how disestablished religion blesses both the state and individual citizens. Religion channels human beings’ natural impulse for God by lifting them above their quotidian concerns and by generating concern for the moral life. In these ways, religion “contributed to ordered liberty by restraining political passions.” For Tocqueville and Wilsey, separation of church and state meant “a separation between worldly and otherworldly concerns.” This relationship allowed religion to thrive in America: by not being able to nitpick through political concerns and by competing for adherents, congregations had to give compelling visions of the divine and of fraternal charity to survive. The American public spirit and local patriotism incorporated religion as an important element. Hence, religion “was simultaneously a product and creator of free institutions and behaviors in America.”
By focusing on core humanistic concerns, Wilsey’s aspirational conservatism presents an attractive vision for Americans overwhelmed by technology’s relentless pressures that have put lives and livelihoods in flux. His aspirational conservatism is also refreshing: by omitting any discussion of economics and social policy, Wilsey reminds readers that conservatism is not about markets and statistics, obsession over which tends to cripple the imagination, but human beings for whom liberty serves as a means to their flourishing. “The moral profit and ordered liberty of the human person is the primary consideration of the conservative disposition.” All other adjectives describing conservatism should include this foundational point if they wish to be true to the noun they are describing.
David G. Bonagura, Jr. is religion editor of The University Bookman. He is the author, most recently, of 100 Tough Questions for Catholics.
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