American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order
By Jerome E. Copulsky.
Yale University Press, 2024.
Hardcover, 384 pages, $40.
Reviewed by Miles Smith IV.
For the past few years—more specifically since Donald Trump made it very clear he was happy to pursue openly and unambiguously transactional politics with conservative Christians—academics, journalists, and religious scholars have debated and discussed various forms of religious illiberalism. Roman Catholic integralism and the more Protestant-flavored Christian nationalism have elicited passionate denunciation by most scholars and perhaps even more passionate debate among the laity.
For all this fiery conversation, there have been very few books that have approached religious illiberalism seriously. Book after book denouncing religious illiberalism have turned out to be little more than anecdote and ad hominem-filled digressions on politics rather than meaningful engagement with the substance—good or bad—of religious illiberalism. Even fewer works have offered any accurate or comprehensive history of the subject. It is the good fortune of the historian, the cleric, and the layman that Jerome Copulsky has offered to the public American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order. Copulsky’s work can only be described as the definitive history of religious illiberalism to the American order.
From the outset, Copulsky makes it clear he is interested in the how and why of religious opposition to the liberal order, rather than litigating the respective piety of liberalism’s religious challengers. This is refreshing because Copulsky is not a religious sectarian whose faith needs American liberalism, nor is he a man of the political right fighting the various battles that have split the Republican party since the rise of Donald Trump. Instead, Copulsky is a man who accepts the broad liberal interpretation of the American political order and shows how and why religious opposition to the liberal order arose. Copulsky does not rely on tropes or innuendo in his analysis. He acknowledges in his introduction that few, if any, of the illiberal divines he writes about can be considered theocrats in the term’s classical sense.
The first—and perhaps most obvious—opponents of the United States’ liberal constitutional order were none other than the Tories, who maintained their allegiance to the British crown during the American Revolution. Copulsky elevates the intellectual conversation on the American Revolution by including these first opponents of the liberal constitutional order by showing how very real religious commitments intersected the politics of loyalty in late Eighteenth Century British North America. Anglicans and Presbyterians saw their allegiance to the king as both a political and a religious commitment that could only be abrogated by specific theopolitical markers. “No taxation without representation” was not, for America’s Tories, evidence that King George III or the British parliament was acting in an unnatural or truly tyrannical way. Copulsky gives comprehensive space to loyalist ministers like Jonathan Boucher and Myles Cooper, who admonished colonial North Americans that rebellion against God would bring about the censure of the divine.
For laymen, the most eye-opening chapter of the book might be Copulsky’s treatment of the Reformed Presbyterians, better known to history as the Covenanters. They departed from the mainstream of Presbyterian thought in the middle of the 17th Century by their insistence on adherence to the National Covenant foisted on Charles I in 1638 in his capacity as king of Scotland. The National Covenant was remarkably theocratic in an era when state-established churches were the norm. The Covenanters believed that the state owed specific duties to God and that the National Covenant was therefore binding in specific political and theological ways. When their theological descendants made their way to North America in the latter half of the 18th Century, they kept certain hallmarks in political theology, particularly the belief that the state—to be morally and religiously valid in such a way as to demand allegiance of its citizenry—must affirm the mediatory kingship of Jesus Christ.
This did not mean that Covenanters in the United States were establishmentarians. They rejected the idea of state churches as an inappropriate union of civil and religious power. Covenanters conscientiously objected to participating in elections because of two original sins in the United States Constitution; the first was the aforementioned failure of the United States Constitution to affirm the kingship of Jesus Christ; the second was the Constitution’s toleration of human bondage. Covenanters regarded slavery as a political evil so wicked it annihilated the state’s ability to demand full allegiance from its citizenry. American Covenanter theocrats were also its most committed abolitionists. Southern slaveholders figure in the book as well, largely represented by Presbyterian minister and South Carolina College president James Henley Thornwell. Thornwell and other slaveholding divines departed from the Covenanters in that they rejected the necessity of political affirmation of Christ’s mediatorial kingship and remained ferociously committed to disestablishmentarianism.
However, they still proposed that law and society should be subordinated to Christianity largely via social and cultural pursuit. Copulsky includes slaveholder divines in his analysis as illiberal, and this is the only part of the book in which I found myself in (relatively narrow) disagreement. With James Oakes, I’m convinced that the slaveholding South could still be rendered as a liberal society, especially given that their commitment to white manhood suffrage and economic liberty in most southern states, with the exception of perhaps South Carolina, mirrored free states of the mid-19th Century that pass easily as liberal. I’m not convinced Thornwell was particularly representative.
Twentieth-century religious illiberalism was in many ways more obvious and received more attention from scholars. What makes Copulsky’s book helpful is his ability to clearly articulate the position of religious, particularly Christian, and more particularly Protestant illiberalism. Unlike other commentators, Copulsky does not have a stake in the game, so he handles figures even-handedly. This is particularly helpful in tracing the development of religious illiberalism in figures like Francis Schaeffer and R. J. Rushdoony. Born to Armenian Orthodox immigrants in New York City and raised in the Central Valley of California as a largely Americanized Presbyterian, Rushdoony’s intellectual and political impact was felt outside his own small Presbyterian tribe. Rushdoony’s Theonomy proposed that the Christian dispensation had not annihilated biblical laws—Israel’s sometimes draconian Mosaic included—and that states and societies had to publicly affirm Christ’s lordship. Rushdoony’s theonomy went one step further than Early Republic Covenanters, who rejected the idea that the Mosaic laws of Israel were still in force. Rushdoony’s commitment to the so-called entirety of biblical law, Copulsky notes, led him to articulate unabashedly the most sensationalistic aspects of Israel’s law, including the death penalty for adultery, homosexuality, and other sins deemed capital crimes in the Old Testament.
Rushdoony’s influence among American Evangelicals was such that many conservative Christians looked to his ideas even as they did not know or understand them. Rushdoony attracted the attention of Moral Majority types—low church and generally Baptistic Evangelicals like Jerry Falwell—because his theonomy provided a more sophisticated, systematic, and in some ways more highbrow foundation for Christian seizure of American politics. The paradox of theonomy is that Rushdoony was a committed libertarian who had a very low view of the state in general. The church, rather than the state, was the central lawgiving institution of human society. Copulsky helpfully infers the paradox of conservative Christians using the ideas of a thinker who despised the modern state to formulate a program for the state.
Religious illiberalism lay dormant throughout much of the 1990s and early 2000s, and only recently has been resurrected on the political right in the United States. The Supreme Court’s 2015 decision to legalize gay marriage figures, accurately, as a prominent instigation of a renewed illiberal right. The Obergefell decision, in many ways, however, fractured rather than unified the illiberal religious right. While some religious illiberals, the Moral Majority types, maintained their commitment to changing the United States back into what they believed was a historically Christian republic—other figures questioned if the United States was ever meaningfully Christian. Roman Catholic and Orthodox writers especially—Copulsky lists bloggers Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher—proposed leaving American society altogether. Dreher’s 2017 The Benedict Option encouraged Christians to move to small communities where they could exert more substantive and total Christian moral and social influence. Copulsky notes that despite the combative title of Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, his answer was not particularly sensational but a more articulate and highbrow admonition to local life.
American Heretics is a timely and thankfully sober-minded look at the long stream of religious illiberalism that has typified political and religious life in the American republic. Kopulsky makes it clear that he is a committed liberal, but never slides into sensationalism or doomsday predictions in his analysis. In this regard, he’s a better guide to religious illiberalism than religious illiberals, or their loudest opponents.
Miles Smith is Assistant Professor of History at Hillsdale College. His research focuses on the American South and the Atlantic World in the 19th Century. He is the author of Religion and Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War and a forthcoming book on Early Republic bishops of the Episcopal Church.
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