The Christian Right’s 250-Year Fight Against America

It kept going: Roughly two weeks later, Trump proposed that the country ​“forget about” the separation of church and state while announcing the creation of a new commission on religious liberty populated almost entirely by MAGA-allied Christian Right figures. The next day, he posted an AI-generated image of himself dressed as the pope, in full papal regalia, wearing a gold cross and seated on a golden throne.

Whatever else you might call all this, you can call it Christian nationalism. But you might also call it heresy, following the definition of religion scholar Jerome Copulsky in his recent book American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order.

Copulsky, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, has focused his attention on the various movements, over the last 250 years, that have rejected the principles of pluralist liberal democracy and a commitment to equal rights on religious grounds. Seeing them as ​“religious dissenters” from that ​“constitutional order,” Copulsky calls them ​“American heretics.”

Today, those heresies are most evident in the suite of related ​“post-liberal” movements that retconned an ideology for Trumpism. But as American Heretics illustrates, these modern groups have a lineage as old as the country itself, as movement upon movement arose to declare that the United States was founded wrong. Beginning in the late 18^th century, ​“Covenanters” considered the Constitution flawed for its failure to acknowledge God; the Confederacy’s pro-slavery theologians saw the Declaration of Independence’s rhetoric about human equality as an affront to a God-ordained racial hierarchy; in the mid-20^th century, Christian Reconstructionists saw nearly the entire U.S. legal system as antithetical to Old Testament law. Today, contemporary post-liberals are convinced that only abandoning the pretense of a religiously neutral government can save the country from decadent ​“cultural Marxism.”

“When I started the book, I knew I wanted to write about groups that opposed the American project,” Copulsky says. ​“But it took a while for the through-line to emerge: that what all these people really opposed is that the United States was not founded to be a Christian nation, in the way they imagined a Christian nation should be.”

Copulsky spoke with In These Times recently. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What does it mean to be a heretic to liberalism and the American project?

Jerome Copulsky: The liberalism I mean refers to the modern American constitutional order based on individual rights and civic equality, limited constitutional government and the rule of law, the separation of church and state, religious liberty and so forth.

I was interested in figuring out how a number of different illiberal religious groups, from the 1770s to the present, understood the American project and what they regarded as its fundamental flaws. And I use this notion of ​“American heretics” to describe them as religious dissenters from that constitutional order.

For example, I look at the Reformed Presbyterians — better known as the Covenanters — who, during the early Republic, took a stance of conscientious objection to the federal government. Their complaint was that the Constitution failed to acknowledge God and the rulership of Christ, and that, by not having a religious test, it allows for unbelievers or ​“infidels” to hold federal office and even rise to the position of president.

They regarded the First Amendment as problematic. The establishment clause forbidding Congress from setting up a state religion meant to them that civil government was not fulfilling its duty to support the church. And the free exercise clause meant that the government was permitting and licensing infidelity. 

So, for all these reasons — and also for the Constitution’s tacit acceptance of slavery, which Covenanters regarded as sinful — they thought that the Constitution and the government it created were illegitimate. So they refused to participate in it as far as they could, including by not running for or accepting government offices and by not voting, until the nation repented from this original sin and established a truly Christian constitution. 

Many of the movements you write about are pretty historically obscure, but some of their modern counterparts are more recognizable, like today’s ​“post-liberals,” including Catholic ​“integralists,” who seek to reorganize the legal system according to a Catholic Right vision of the ​“common good.” How do these movements, which are now well-represented in Trump’s government, follow from this tradition? 

J.C.: When I began thinking about this book in late 2017 and early 2018, it was right around the time when a couple of influential ​“post-liberal” books came out: Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation and Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed. 

Dreher and Deneen both argued that the United States was born as liberal regime in an intentional break from Christian tradition and that what they lamented as the contemporary secular, decadent America was not a deviation from but the inevitable working out of its original idea. In this, they differed from the earlier iteration of the religious Right, which claimed the founders were really pious Christians and America was established as a Christian nation. 

In their books, Dreher and Deneen essentially counseled waiting out the storm: that religious traditionalists ought to turn inward and cultivate intentional communities that maintain a distance from the corrupting dominant culture — something Dreher called the ​“Benedict option.” That is, essentially circling the wagons to preserve the integrity of their communities and traditions from the corrosive forces of liberal modernity, which they believe is doomed to collapse. So they weren’t calling for a restoration of a better, purer, more religious America. Rather, they maintained that the country had a bad founding and we are now experiencing its bitter fruits.

In a way, each of these books was ​“untimely.” They were conceived of and written during the Obama administration. They suggested that liberalism had won, that their side in the culture war had been defeated (for the time being). And their prescription for action was basically defensive. But by the time they were published, the political landscape had changed dramatically. Hillary Clinton had been vanquished. Donald Trump was in office. And there began to be what we might call a ​“vibe shift,” with the sense that the new administration provided an opportunity not only to halt the advance of liberalism but maybe build something new. 

Then, in an influential review, Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule [a leading proponent of integralism] presented an alternate conclusion to Why Liberalism Failed. Maybe, he suggested, instead of giving up the fight and withdrawing into secular monasteries, conservatives ought to go on the offense. Vermeule proposed what he called ​“Integration from Within,” by re-staffing the administrative state with committed and like-minded functionaries — using these positions and levers of power to nudge the citizenry to their ​“proper end.” 

Reading your book also made me think about the prevalence on today’s right-wing of language like ​“counterrevolution” or ​“new founding.” Does that also follow from this tradition? 

J.C.: Indeed. The book traces the varied attempts of illiberal Christian thinkers not only to critique but to replace the American political order with a regime in accord with their theological beliefs. Some of them believed that all that was really required was a bit of constitutional tinkering — an amendment that would explicitly announce the United States as a Christian polity. But others argued for a more whole-scale transformation of the nation into a Catholic confessional state or a Calvinist theocratic republic. 

But in general, it’s a hard sell to say the founding was bad, that men like Washington, Jefferson and Madison set the country on the wrong track. It’s a lot easier to say, and more comfortable to hear, that the nation’s founding was good but then over time it got corrupted and all we need to do is restore it to its original state. That is, it’s easier to say you want to ​“make America great again” than that it was bad from the beginning.

So, if we take Vermeule’s idea of ​“common good constitutionalism,” his point isn’t that we need to rewrite or jettison the Constitution, but that we need to reinterpret it according to a different ideological framework. Of course, he argues that he is only retrieving an older tradition of constitutional thinking, so he’s calling for a restoration rather than a revolution.

I think Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony is doing something similar with his project of National Conservatism. With regard to religion, Hazony claims that America’s founders were committed to the idea of public religion, an alliance of religion and state. However, he argues that they made a mistake with ​“lasting consequences” by failing to formally recognize the role of religion in the republic, that is, to properly constitutionalize Protestant Christianity. And that mistake was later exploited in the mid-20^th century by liberals to secularize the nation and undermine public institutions and the family. And he argues that that mistake ought now be corrected by the encouragement of public religion (that is, Anglo-American Protestantism), and the (mere) toleration of what he considers ​“authentic” religious minorities.

Do these examples boil down to Christian nationalism, or is that too simplistic?

J.C.: I don’t use the term Christian nationalism much in this book; I think religious illiberalism more accurately captures the shared characteristics I’m describing. I want to be very specific about what each of these groups believes theologically about the relationship of civil and spiritual authority. They all have different conceptions of what the theologically legitimate polity would look like. So we have Church of England Loyalists, who wanted not only to uphold the monarchy but to extend the establishment of the ​“true church” in the American colonies; traditionalist Catholics hoping for a confessional state which supports the Roman Catholic Church; Christian Reconstructionists imagining a theocratic republic under biblical law, and so forth. With some exceptions, these were not really nationalist projects.

But let me answer that from another angle. When people talk about Christian nationalism, they are usually talking about those people who believe that America was and ought to be a Christian nation. In the 1970s, we had the emergence of what we call the religious Right, which argued that theirs was a project of restoration: that America was founded as a Christian nation, the founders were Christian, the society was broadly Christian; even the notion of religious liberty was really the notion that Christians could choose what denomination to belong to. So, they argued, the United States was pretty much a Protestant Christian nation until the 1940s and ​’50s, when the Supreme Court came in and developed this new doctrine of the separation of church and state. And from there, you have the list of disasters that they describe: the decisions against state-sponsored school prayer and Bible reading, the social movements of the ​’60s, the breakdown of the family, epidemics of drugs, crime, pornography, and so on. All of this because the nation was cut loose of its spiritual moorings.

But when we look at what people like [Reconstructionist leaders] R.J. Rushdoony and Gary North were saying, these guys weren’t Christian nationalists, because at the end of the day, they weren’t interested in restoring a Christian America. They were interested in building up a biblical society, which might happen in America first, but this wouldn’t be simply restoration of what the founders put in place. It would be something very, very different. It would be a nation that the government would not really be legislating because the legislation is already there — the law God gave to Moses — and the government’s task was to execute that law. So their understanding of what America would become was different than what [Jerry] Falwell and [Francis] Schaeffer and the like were thinking.

If we turn to our contemporary religious illiberals, some might rightly be understood as Christian nationalists. But I don’t think that label would accurately describe the projects of people like Deneen or Vermeule.

In the last few chapters of the book, you move into relatively modern conservative movements: L. Brent Bozell Jr. and his admiration for Francisco Franco’s Spain; R.J. Rushdoony’s idea of establishing a kind of theocratic state governed by Old Testament law; and the contemporary post-liberal movement, including the NatCons and the integralists. Now Bozell’s son is nominated to be an ambassador; Pete Hegseth is part of a church connected to Rushdoony’s legacy; and JD Vance is personal friends with leading integralists. What do you make of this? Have the heretics won?

J.C.: I don’t think they’ve won, yet, but a number of these men are now operating within the corridors of power and have the ear of major players such as JD Vance.

Many of the people I talk about in the book did have some access to power in one way or another; they weren’t lonely voices baying in the wilderness. The Church of England Loyalists were literally the establishment of colonial America; the pro-slavery theologians essentially crafted the religious rationale for the Confederacy. The Reformed Presbyterians were, of course, a tiny denomination, but their Christian Amendment movement was comprised of people from across the evangelical denominations and many of its non-clergy members were men of high standing, such as college and university presidents.

Now, if this book had come out a couple of years earlier or if the 2024 election turned out differently, we obviously would be having a very different conversation. But now we have to contend with the reality that religious illiberals are not only influential but have important positions within the current administration.

At the same time, I’d note that while they all have a common enemy in liberal democracy, the post-liberals, NatCons, people coming from [Rushdoony-influenced] churches, people involved in the New Apostolic Reformation movement — they all have a very different understanding of what a Christian America would be, what role the government should have in relationship to the churches, what policies would be put into effect to promote the common good. They can work together as cobelligerents for a while, but at some point, the fissures will begin to show. Whether today’s American heretics continue to make advances and alter the character of the country and its institutions, that remains to be seen.

What is important for readers to understand about today’s ​“heretics”?

J.C.: What I do in this book is essentially three things:

First, I want to show that this contemporary discontent with the liberal democratic order, pluralism and the notions of equality and religious liberty is nothing new. It’s not something we’re facing just because of what happened in 2016 or 2024. This is baked into our history as a country.

Second, I try to describe fairly and accurately what these people believe and why. They may have, I think, problematic and troubling ideas and a distorted understanding of what liberal democracy is, but they’re not ignorant or crazy, and their ideas and their deep critiques of liberalism are worth understanding and contending with. Most of the people I’m talking about feared their power was being taken away by political ideas and forces they thought were destabilizing a providentially ordained order. But it was an order they were often conveniently close to the very top of.

Finally, I try to explain that there’s a reason why our constitutional church-state settlement emerged in the first place. It recognizes the reality of deep pluralism and is based on the idea that the purpose of the government is to protect your rights, not to tell you how you find your ultimate happiness or direct you towards what some believed to be your highest good. And that allows us to live together despite fundamental disagreements. And that’s a tremendously significant achievement.