American Heretics and Liberal Neutrality

Wisdom of Crowds

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The Declaration of Independence affirms that all human beings are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Yet the Declaration is silent about who this Creator is. Is it the Jewish deity or the Christian God? Or is it the god of the philosophers — the blind watchmaker of the Enlightenment? The Constitution, on the other hand, doesn’t mention the divine at all, except for the phrase, “Year of Our Lord.”

Mainstream liberals and conservatives, whatever they may think of the silence regarding God in our founding documents, believe in the American experiment. But as Jerome E. Copulsky writes in his new book, American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order, throughout American history there have been those who do not, radical groups who opposed the American project, root and branch, for being liberal, as opposed to Christian. In his book, Copulsky, professor at Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs, writes about the Loyalist churchmen who opposed the American revolution, the proslavery theologians of the 19th century, the “Theonomist” theocrats of the 20th century, and the “Integralists” of our own time.

Jerome joins Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic to discuss his book, but as often happens in Wisdom of Crowds, the conversation takes an unexpected turn. Early on, Shadi presses Jerome to specify exactly what a secular liberal Founding really means for religious practice in the public sphere. Then Shadi submits his own interpretation of the modern state as an inherently secularizing force.

Damir brings the question of the secularity of the American project to bear upon current events. To what extent was the American liberal state ever “neutral”? Or is technocratic liberalism the default, unspoken “religion” of the American state? Or was it, until Donald Trump came along? And is Trump, by filling his cabinet with representatives from various American ideologies, violating liberal neutrality, or simply exposing it for the fiction that it always was?

In our bonus content for paid subscribers, Jerome discusses the National Conservative movement, as exemplified by intellectuals like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, and its influence on Vice President-elect J.D. Vance. In the second Trump term this movement will have unprecedented access to power and, Jerome argues, pose a serious challenge to — and even a “betrayal” of — the American system.

Required Reading

* American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order by Jerome E. Copulsky (Amazon)

* The Declaration of Independence (National Archives).

* The Constitution of the United States (National Archives).

* Everson v. Board of Education (FindLaw).

* George Washington’s Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island (National Archives).

* We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition by John Courtney Murray, S.J. (Amazon).

* Common Good Constitutionalism by Adrian Vermeule (Amazon).

* Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future by Patrick Deneen (Amazon).

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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