Historically grounded assessments of the American republic’s relationship with religion require nuanced thinking and an appreciation for ambiguity. Unfortunately, those qualities don’t sell. So American history is replete with attempts to construct a simple narrative of a Christian nation or a wholly secular liberalism. Jerome Copulsky and Mark Noll join James Patterson to discuss Copulsky’s book, American Heretics, which examines certain strands of religious thinking that, in one way or another, have sought to overcome the fact of American religious pluralism. 

Related Links

American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order

“Challenging the American Creed” – Mark Noll

Transcript

James Patterson:

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty, and this podcast, are published by Liberty Fund. 

Today we will be speaking to Jerome Copulsky and Mark Noll. The subject will be Jerome’s most recent book, American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order, published last October.

And a review that Mark published for us at Law & Liberty last November of the same book. We figured this would be a wonderful conversation about a really remarkable book, so I’ll just introduce our guests. First is Jerome Copulsky, scholar in residence at the Department of Philosophy and Religion, as well as a research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs. Mark Noll is Professor Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and has written numerous books on the same subject as today’s discussion, perhaps from different valences. So, gentlemen, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Mark Noll:

Thank you.

Jerome Copulsky:

Thank you, James.

James Patterson:

So I’ll open by asking Jerome to give us the elevator pitch, or the summary of the book, and then maybe have Mark explain what the sort of mainline of his review was. So Jerome, why don’t you go ahead and lead off.

Jerome Copulsky:

Great, thanks James. And again, it’s really delightful to be here with you and with Mark, to discuss the book and sort of the general set of issues about religion and politics in America. I guess the best way of framing it is, the book really attempts to provide a new way of thinking about perennial conversations or debates, about the relationship of religion and politics, through church and state, in the United States of America. And there’ve been two, broadly speaking, camps in this debate. One camp, we might call them believers in the idea of a Christian nation. They argue, in some way, that America was founded to be a Christian nation, that the founders were pious Christians, that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1787, were meant to establish a Christian order. Maybe not explicitly, but at least implicitly. And that was generally accepted until the mid-twentieth century when that began to be eroded into a secular, humanist order. It is sometimes described that way.

On the other hand, there are people who argue that the founders envisioned a secular republic, that one of the most important things about the United States of America was this break from church-state traditions that prevailed in Europe, and this notion of the separation of church and state enshrined in the First Amendment, as well as the regime of religious liberty. Which extended not only to Protestant Christians but to all religions, right? So, these two conflicting views of what the founding was, what the founders intended, and what kind of nation we ought to become. American Heretics looks at, I’ll call it a third tradition.

These were people, they were religious leaders, they were politicians, they were intellectuals who agreed with the secular story to a certain extent. They believed that the United States was not founded as an explicitly Christian republic but that it ought to have been. That somehow, the founders failed in either properly constitutionalizing religion or the very political ideas that had animated the American project were not truly Christian. So I begin at the time of the revolution with Church of England loyalists, and as I work my way up to contemporary post-liberals and national conservatives, to describe the ways in which these figures dissented from what I call an American orthodoxy.

James Patterson:

So Mark, this book covers a lot of ground. When you reviewed the book, what were your takeaways?

Mark Noll:

I thought that the project was very well executed. I tend to be someone who favors larger synthetic works myself, if they are well grounded in a wide range of primary sources and expert secondary sources, which is the case with this book. So they range from, as Jerome said, the loyalists in the 1770s, who rejected the American Revolution through a kind of miscellaneous crew in the nineteenth century, who wanted to see either what they thought was implied in the American founding made explicit or actually thought that the American founding had not had a kind of religious or Christian framework that it needed. And then right up into the twentieth century, and particularly after World War II, where we get actually quite a long list of people who either, like John Courtney Murray, the Catholic theorist in the 1950s and 60s, who said, “Well, if we just interpret Catholic theology correctly, we’ll see that it supports, in a kind of theistic way, the American founding.”

And then to a long list that Jerome expertly pulls together. Some of these people I’d not heard of, but I thought expertly showed why they rejected the liberal tradition and thought that the American polity, American society, and American nation needed, in all of the cases that he cited, a firm Christian grounding. So, the synthesis ranged widely. And obviously, with such an extensive range of protagonists, there are questions that could be raised about some of them in minor ways, but I thought the book was entirely successful in showing a continuous tradition of Christian-oriented thinkers who felt that either what was implicit in the American founding needed to be made explicit, or who felt that the American founding lacked entirely what it needed by way of a Christian framework, a Christian foundation. So yeah, to me, it was a really good book.

James Patterson:

Jerome, first of all, getting that kind of praise from Mark Noll makes me very envious. Second of all, what holds this tradition together? What Mark just described as one, I think you did too. But what’s weird is that you’re looking first at Anglicans. Is it that many Anglicans actually regarded the republic that the patriot cause wanted was Presbyterian, and then the Presbyterians don’t like the republic once they get it. And then the Catholics, I noticed there’s one funny line from L. Brent Bozell, about a Calvinist interpretation. And so these very different religious denominations, very different sense of political theology, how is it that they hold together so well?

Jerome Copulsky:

Yeah, I think that came out in the research, and a lot of the connections, the root structure of the book, developed organically. So I knew certain people I wanted to talk about, or certain traditions I wanted to talk about when I started the book. There are a lot that I discovered along the way. But I started with Church of England loyalists. It seemed like an obvious place to begin, at the beginning. And the argument of the loyalists, on the one hand, they saw the revolutionaries as essentially the next iteration, so to speak, of the revolutionaries of the English Civil War. So sometimes told, right? The Presbyterian Rebellion. And a lot of the loyalist Church of England propaganda against the patriot movement and the war was that, this was kind of essentially hardwired into the Presbyterian dislike of monarchy. But at the same time, they had to actually look at the ideas that were being enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, that were broader than the ideas coming out of Presbyterian or Congregational New England.

The ideas that are articulated in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, which is where I start, where human beings are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that governments are instituted to protect those rights. So this Lockean social contract theory, which, from the point of view of the loyalists, undermined their understanding of the cosmic order, with the king as God’s sort of vice-regent on earth. So they were both critical of the New England Congregationalist establishments, but they were also deeply critical of the revolutionary ideas that were being articulated. Now, when we turn the chapter to the early republic, and we look at some of the Scottish Presbyterians or the Covenanters, who supported the war, but were then disappointed with the Constitution that came out in 1787, the reason that they were disappointed was not because of the republican structure of the Constitution, not because of the architecture of checks and balances.

Their argument was that the Constitution failed to acknowledge God and failed to acknowledge Jesus as Prince of Nations. They believed that the article six, section three, the prohibition of a religious test oath on federal officers, meant that a federal magistrate, including the president, could be an infidel. And that the First Amendment separated church and state, but also protected religious liberty, which to them, was a protection of religious infidelity, of false worship, of false religion. Right? So for these reasons, and for another reason, they believed that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document, and they were early abolitionists.

So for all of these reasons, they essentially decided to become conscientious objectors to the United States of America. In fact, this was what defined the reform Presbyterians as a denomination, alongside other Presbyterian denominations. So they wouldn’t run for office, they wouldn’t vote, they wouldn’t serve on juries, they avoided the militia. They would pay taxes, but they believed they had no other choice. And they hoped that American citizens would come to their senses and change the Constitution by means of amendment, but they would not participate in that amendment process because they would not participate politically, at least until The Civil War.

James Patterson:

So Mark, when talking about the book, you actually pose a question about the nature of heresy, as stipulated in the book’s title, and its sort of operative term for the book’s argument. You say, “What does it say about the categories of heresy and orthodoxy, to observe that reformed, Presbyterian heretics on the separation of church and state, were among the very few white Americans who today would be considered Orthodox, and insisting that all Black, as well as white, were created equal?” What is it about this question in the nineteenth century, that makes the covenanters such an odd case?

Mark Noll:

Yes, I did in my review, draw attention to the covenanters, partly actually, as a way of affirming the strength of the book to roam in different places, in and indirect way, but then more direct at the end, makes a challenge to those who wanted to see a Christian framework. Well, what kind of Christian framework? Who would be allowed to set it? Would, for example, the Covenant Review of the necessity of honoring Christ as king have allowed Catholics to function in the societies? One of the interesting things about the Covenanters, which I’ll get to in just a moment, is that they were not only from the period probably 1800 to 1830, the nation’s most ardent, clearly spoken, theologically and ideologically rooted opponents of slavery, but they were also among the most vicious anti-Catholics in the United States. So you have a group that … I mean, actually, Jerome did a nice job in the book, in just a limited time, to sketch these people. But they’re really, really complicated.

He quotes in the book from Alexander MacLeod, who is one of the individuals who articulated the position Jerome has just mentioned, “If Christ is not honored as King, and deference is not paid to him in the Constitution, then we can have no part in this nation.” And in 1802, MacLeod published an extensive attack on slavery, biblical, philosophical, republican, that for the period, with just one or two other instances, was the most ardent defense of the full humanity, the full civil potential of Black Americans. So the heresy label does fit for Covenanters’ opposition to the liberal Lockean regime established by the Constitution. But from the standpoint of 2025, these covenanters look like the Orthodox party, because they are affirming the full humanity, the full civic potential of people who, in the early nineteenth century, very few other Americans did. So this is really not a criticism of the book per se, but it was to say that, the very sound tracing of a single theme does leave some complexities that remain to be discussed.

Jerome Copulsky:

Yeah, and I’d like to underscore that. When the Covenanters actually decide to get involved politically during The Civil War, they set up a number of meetings in Washington. And shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation is released, they send some ministers to meet with the president, to meet with Lincoln, to congratulate him on this and to push him forward, to make sure that the government follows through on the promises of the Emancipation Proclamation. So when they looked at The Civil War, they understood The Civil War through theological terms, as a punishment by God for the nation’s sins, for the sin of the Godless constitution on the one hand, but also for the sin of American slavery.

Mark Noll:

Mentioning Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation does lead me to a question for Jerome. And that is, the incident that he mentions, Lincoln handled characteristically. He was friendly, he engaged in some discussion, he indicated a kind of indirect approval for what the people were doing, but when they left, he left their document on the desk and did nothing about it. But the question is, do you think that Lincoln was as far from these Covenanters, in the sense of being Orthodox and they were heretical … When you read particularly the Lincoln documents from the mid-part of The Civil War onward, there’s an awfully strong theistic, if not exactly Christian, there’s awfully strong theistic background to what he wants to say about the future of the United States.

So someone who would want, in our day, a much more secular day, someone who’d want to say, “Well, Lincoln dismissed the Covenanters and therefore, is not heretical, in Jerome’s sense.” But boy, he sure looks, if not heretical, he looks like he’s pushing the boundaries of what a public official in the United States wants to say about the rule of God over the nations, and including the rule over the United States. So what I’m asking for, Jerome, is a little bit of Lincoln exegesis for us.

Jerome Copulsky:

Well, I would say that one of the things we can do is, we can look back. The Covenanters had a report of this first meeting with Lincoln, where they kind of reported back, they got into a kind of theological exchange. And the Covenanters were very sure of their position and very sure that they understood God’s providential working in this particular context. Lincoln himself was a bit more, I don’t want to say skeptical, but he wasn’t as willing to say as emphatically his position, or as his understanding of his position as the Covenanters were. And I think this goes back … If you reread the Second Inaugural, which is probably the most important theological, political document in American history, it’s not an Orthodox … It would not be a position that would necessarily bring joy to Covenanter ears. It certainly is not one that would bring joy to contemporary Christian nationalist ears. This notion that, well, God is here, but God’s purposes are not necessarily the purposes of either side of this conflict, and they may not be ever completely understood, or adequately understood by American citizens.

Mark Noll:

Yes, the way I put it toward Lincoln, in a couple of different places, I guess if you think you have a good idea, to repeat it, is Lincoln’s theism stands really closely aligned to the kind of providentialism that Jerome describes the Covenanters. But his sense of human capacities to understand the ways of God are very different from the Covenanters. And actually, for almost everybody else who was speaking publicly with great confidence about how they knew the Lord was determining American as … Lincoln is one of the very few people of his time who said, “No, I just can’t do that.” Jerome’s entirely correct that, on that score, he is very different from the Covenanters.

James Patterson:

In fact, Jerome’s book actually points to this very problem because one of the chapters is on the pro-slavery divines. And so when Lincoln refers to both, “Read the same Bible and pray to the same God,” he’s making a very clear statement about what’s going on, not just a rhetorical flourish. Who are these people, Jerome? Why is it the Presbyterians again?

Jerome Copulsky:

And here, it’s the group that becomes the Southern Presbyterians. And here I should say right off about how dedicated I’ve been to Mark’s scholarship, both in the amazing, enormous book, America’s God. And also in the smaller book on The Civil War as a theological crisis. So I focus on mostly Southern Presbyterian divines. The most influential one was John Henley Thornwell, South Carolina, but also Benjamin Morgan Palmer and Frederick Ross, and their understanding of what a Christian republic would look like. And I begin by, when the Confederate government comes together and drafts a constitution, one of the key differences between the Confederate constitution and the Constitution of the United States of America, is the fact that the Confederate constitution both directly acknowledges God, and also directly acknowledges the institution of slavery. And for Thornwell, this was a good thing, but he felt that the Confederate constitution didn’t go far enough, that the acknowledgement of God was not enough to ground the Confederacy as a true Christian nation.

And so he submitted a proposal to the Southern Presbyterians in 1861, that they tweak it a bit, to make it more fully Christian. And what’s interesting about that is he does make pains to express that this would not undermine the religious liberty of other white people living in the Confederacy, and that even a Jew could possibly rise to become chief magistrate. Now whether he fully believed that or whether that was an acknowledgement of the important role that Judah Benjamin was playing in the government, I don’t know. But the other issue that I look at with the pro-slavery theologians, was their argument that in a sense, the American Republic was set off on the wrong foot because it was animated by false theological ideas.

Those false ideas about the nature of human beings and the nature of civil government that were articulated in the Declaration of Independence. So in a work, entitled Slavery Ordained of God, by Frederick Ross, who’s arguing against Albert Barnes, who’s a prominent northern abolitionist, Ross argues that the claims made by Jefferson, which were now being used by abolitionists against the safeholding south, those claims were in fact unbiblical, were infidel arguments. And that in a way, the republic, a truly Christian republic would have to be set on biblical notions of natural hierarchy or providential hierarchy.

Mark Noll:

Just one footnote to expand upon what Jerome said is that, the Albert Barnes that Ross was arguing against was the Northern Presbyterian’s most ardent attacker, most ardent abolitionist, who did so with the full confidence that he was reading the scriptures correctly in supporting his abolitionism.

James Patterson:

Yeah. This ends up sort of justifying Lincoln’s whole reticence to make distinct claims, right? It’s when you have entirely antagonistic ideas proposed as God’s word, it starts to look like one of these people has to be wrong, and maybe the whole venture is mistaken. And the years that follow The Civil War, there’s an important transformation where, instead of there being an attempt to instate in the Constitution a sort of existing reality, which is a kind of Christian people, right? There’s a broadly Protestant America. There emerges a kind of newly secular institution. So this is the National Liberal League, a man named Abbott helps put together, and essentially tells the story that a lot of twentieth century, post-liberals believe was the real story, as you said earlier, Jerome. So why don’t you give us a sense of who they were?

Jerome Copulsky:

Yeah. So Abbott, Francis E. Abbott and the Liberal League, were essentially conjured up by this movement for religious amendment, which begins during The Civil War in the north, but then is reignited in the early 1870s. And it’s reignited because of major demographic and cultural changes that are happening in the United States, particularly the rising power of Catholics in cities, immigration of Jews, the rise of Mormonism, and the revelation of Mormon polygamy in Utah. And all of these things were challenging this de facto Protestantism that you described. And Covenanters then became the vanguard of a bigger tent movement of Protestants, and a fairly wide tent. It included not only Presbyterians, but Methodists, Baptists, I think there were even Unitarians involved in this movement. That were decided that a religious amendment was necessary, in order to protect and preserve this Protestant Christian heritage of the United States. And a heritage that was playing out in institutions, like Sabbath laws, the fact that there were chaplains for Congress, and the military and so forth.

So there was this fear that American Protestantism was going to be undermined. And the cause of that was not only these demographic changes, but also that non-Protestants were able to exploit the achilles heel in the Constitution, which was the First Amendment. So the fact that the country, that the nation could not establish a religion and protected free exercise, became a weapon for those who would try to, either on the one hand, assert their own religious rights, but also undermine or push out this longstanding, cultural Protestantism. So they form a movement which becomes known as the National Reform Association, the first NRA, to lobby Congress and the states to change the preamble of the Constitution to explicitly mention God, Jesus as a ruler of nations, and the Bible as the source of law. And from this, comes a counter movement, which is Abbott’s Liberal League. And the literary organ of that was something called The Index. And Abbott’s argument, and those who were affiliated, the leadership of the Liberty League, was that the founders had actually established a secular republic.

And the separation of church and state was one of the foundational things that they did, and he meant it in a very strong way. And so he looked at things that we just mentioned, prayers at the inauguration, for example, Sabbath laws, the chaplains at the Congress and what have you. And he saw these as abuses, that these were not innocent traditions, but they were actually abuses of the system that the founders had set up and that they needed to be suppressed, in order to preserve the legitimacy of the republic as they understood it. And so they promoted their own amendment, the religious freedom amendment. And what the religious freedom amendment would’ve done, would’ve taken the establishment clause in the First Amendment and applied them to the states as well. So it would not be, “Congress shall make no law,” but, “No state could make a law respecting establishment of religion or restricting the free exercise.”

But really, when it came down to it, Abbott believed that Christianity itself was a political problem, because Christianity promoted or imagined a political view that was at odds with the idea of the republic. The idea that, if God is king or if Christ is king, your citizens are naturally going to incline towards monarchy and away from republicanism. And so in some sense, what Abbott really wanted was not the removal of Christianity from the civic space, but something much more radical.

James Patterson:

Mark, what’s going on with Protestants during that same period? It’s just for the purposes of listeners. Because I know Jerome can’t address all of that and the book at the same time. Protestantism actually does a fair amount of pluralism in order to counteract this, which is something ironic, given Jerome describing that as kind of the orthodoxy that these heretics are revolting against.

Mark Noll:

The period between The Civil War and say the new deal, it is a trying time for American Protestants. The kind of reaction to Catholics, immigrants, Jews, that would lead to the formation of the American Protective Association, lead to Nathan Strong’s book, Our Country, 1880 something, shows a kind of nervousness, of fear that what had once been a securely Protestant place was not much of a Protestant place anymore. And internally, I think I trace it back to The Civil War, others trace it to the coming in of European biblical criticism and other things. Internally, Protestants are fragmented. So even though there’s a stronger movement to try to Christianize the public space, internally, Protestants are beginning to divide in the ways that they continue to be divided until now. So that maybe lobbying was becoming more effective for those who wanted a Christian amendment, but the resources in the Protestant world were actually being diminished.

James Patterson:

So we have a post-war environment in which American conservatism emerges as a response to the new deal, and then to radical social change in the case of racial, and then later, sex and gender politics. We get, during that period, one of my favorite heretics in the book, and this is my Catholic bias coming out. And this is L. Brent Bozell and the people behind Triumph. And in an important way, Jerome, they actually articulate what our contemporary post-liberals say about this country. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about these curious offshoots of National Review, and their sojourn in Spain? Franco’s Spain.

Jerome Copulsky:

Yeah. So Bozell … L. Brent Bozell Jr. was William F. Buckley Jr.’s debating partner at Yale. He then marries William F. Buckley Jr.’s sister. With Buckley, he writes a book defending McCarthy. He writes some articles for the National Review when it’s launched in 1955. He is tapped to be the ghostwriter for Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative. He’s really one of the leading conservatives, new conservatives in America. And as he’s doing this, he is prepping a book on the Warren Court, critical book on the Warren Court. And I think his brother-in-law suggests that, “You want to live cheap and live well while you’re researching this book. I got the place for you to go. Go hang out in Spain for a while.” And he does. He takes that advice. And while he’s there-

James Patterson:

A faithful mistake.

Jerome Copulsky:

Buckley would certainly say this was probably a mistake. While he’s there, he falls in love. And what does he fall in love with? He falls in love with the Catholic thing and Franco’s regime. And he comes back to the United States. And this is during the time that Buckley and Frank Meyer are stage managing this fusionism at the National Review and in the American conservative movement, trying to find a way, both practically and philosophically, to bring libertarians, cold waterists, traditionalists together, in a united front against American liberalism. And Bozell begins to see that as a failing project. And it’s a failing project because, on the one hand, he thinks that the traditionalists are really serving just as fig leaves for this other project. But more deeply, that American conservatism, as it was coming to be, was really just a right-wing liberalism, that the founding project of the United States, as articulated in the Declaration of Independence, and then in the Constitution, in the Federalist Papers, this was not a continuation of Christian Europe in another key, but it was a break.

It was a radical break. And that radical break, the fact that the United States was founded on liberal principles, was the reason for its contemporary woes. And so by the mid-sixties, he breaks from the American conservative movement. He starts this magazine called Triumph. And by the late-sixties, Triumph takes a kind of radical turn against American regime as such. And he begins to publish a number of articles arguing for this position that the United States was founded, not as a continuation of the Christian tradition, but as a rejection of the Christian tradition. And if you go and you look at those articles which he’s publishing in 1967, 1968, and you compare them to Patrick Deneen’s, Why Liberalism Failed, you can see very clearly the idea is being reflected in this later, post-liberal work. The idea that the liberal ideas and the liberal regime that it sets in motion, is based on a false anthropology, based on a rejection of tradition. And that false anthropology sets in motion a regime which will then undermine itself and lead to contemporary decadence.

James Patterson:

Hey, Mark, what’s going on here? The Catholics get it in the teeth all the nineteenth century, they’re let in the door, and next thing you know, they hate the place. Why was this happening?

Mark Noll:

Well, post-war history is not where I feel really comfortable at home, except to say that there is a very interesting Protestant parallel to Bozell and Triumph, with the group spearheaded by a Rshtuni named Gary … His son-in-law, Gary Nash called Theonomy-

Jerome Copulsky:

Gary North.

Mark Noll:

Which is a fairly strong Protestant way of rejecting the liberal tradition altogether, and arguing parallel to Bozell, that the nation to preserve American freedom needs to be established on a reinvigorated reading of the Old Testament as a legal device. Now, interestingly, and maybe this would be parallel, I’m interested in what Jerome would think, at the same time, there are other Protestants, and I’m thinking particularly of Francis Schaeffer, who also appears in the book, who wants to assert a very strong Christian founding for the United States. But does that saying, “Well, the founding really was Christian, but it wasn’t acknowledged as such.” So Schaeffer wants to go back to the Reformation as the secret for the American success, with John Locke and companies as a very minor, secondary figure.

Now, since the sixties and seventies, I think it’s been the Schaeffer Protestant approach that has gained publicity, pointing toward the Christian America, Christian nation movements of our day, rather than the Rshtuni, which is to say that the American founding needs to be replaced by something directly Judeo-Christian. And I think we maybe see that with Catholics. I’d be interested in what Jerome says. And those who are willing to say that the American system as we have it today, simply needs to be strengthened by recognition of divine authority, as opposed to being replaced by something acknowledging a different kind of divine authority.

Jerome Copulsky:

So the story of the Reconstructionists is fascinating. And the link … One of the things I found in the course of the research was that Rshtuni actually published an article in Triumph.

James Patterson:

Yeah, there’s that crossover that my former student, Max Bodak, discovered. I couldn’t believe it.

Jerome Copulsky:

So there was that. And Rshtuni and North claimed, and I think there’s good evidence to this, that a lot of Schaeffer’s ideas, political ideas, were coming out of Rshtuni’s work. And there was a lot of grumbling on the side of Rshtuni that this was not acknowledged in his book, The Christian Manifesto. And North and Gary DeMar, in a response to that book by Schaeffer, essentially attack him for failing to follow through with his understanding of Reformation theology. That Schaeffer kind of ends up saying, “Well, I want the first amendment. I want the separation of church and state. I just want to halt the advance of secular humanism.” And for North, this is a failure of nerve. Now, this is where, I mentioned earlier my reliance on Mark’s scholarship in the chapter on the pro-slavery theologians.

And at this moment in the book, I think, Mark, you make a brief cameo. Because of your own work, your own sort of intervention in this debate, in 1983, where I think you, in that book, A Search for Christian America, you see how these political ideas are entering into the Protestant world at that time. Now called the New Religious Right. And the book is a kind of warning that A, there’s some bad history going on here and there’s some problematic theology going on here. That this desire for a Christian nation is not only historically problematic, but maybe doesn’t allow for the way in which Christians ought to engage in the political system that’s there. And so maybe I can sort of pitch this back to you for a moment.

Mark Noll:

Yes, that book which I did with a couple of colleagues was an effort to say, well, if you’re going to claim some kind of Christian origin for the US, you need to do it responsibly. And my own sense then and now is that, it’s very easy to find Christian elements in the founding of the United States, and that those who want to say we have a godless constitution or something entirely secular, just are overstating their case.

Yet, overstatement also pertains on the other side, to take a few random comments or a few statements made in the heat of the revolutionary struggles, as if they proved a distinctively Christian founding for the United States, just does not hold up to even preliminary historical inquiry. I must say, however, as a check to any kind of egoism and pride as an author, that our book did sell a few thousand copies, not like the few million that have been sold, however, by authors who want to find a very strong, explicit Christian founding the United States. So I live in relative comfort, but not in the kind of wealth that has come to people who make the much stronger argument.

James Patterson:

And that’s because it’s hard to resolve that ambiguity. You either want the certainty that the particular religious faith you have is in charge, or that it can never be in charge, and therefore, we must replace the regime where you will be in charge. And that seems to be a big problem that all of them are dealing with. And that’s kind of how you can go from Anglicans to Presbyterians, to Catholics. There’s this desire to allow people to be in charge atop a hierarchy. And in the absence of that, there’s this real fear that people are just going to go crazy. So what holds all these together? Is that right, Jerome?

Jerome Copulsky:

Well, first, I think on the question of ambiguity, it reminds me of some analysis in Mark’s book on The Civil War, on the theological crisis leading to The Civil War, which you had a pro-slavery reading of the Bible, you had an abolitionist reading of the Bible, and then you had, I think the Covenanters were in this space, a very careful, nuanced, contextual reading of the Bible. Which probably had the strongest arguments but was hardest to hear. Given the desire for absolutes, the contextual, careful reading of the slavery issue in the Bible was not heard. And I think that the careful, contextual reading of the religious influences and on the American founding, is something that is harder to hear in a particular environment where you want absolutes, where parties want absolutes. It was a Christian founding, it was a Merger-Dale Christian founding, or a secular founding. And to kind of get in there and to look at the different layers of the story, is harder to do.

Mark Noll:

That push for complexity, I think we referred to Abraham Lincoln’s very complex vision. It does make it hard to make those, I would say, genuine historical conclusions, a foundation for action, particularly in an internet world where something snappy, quick, uncomplicated is what seems to be driving public discussion. And on this question, driving it toward wanting to assert something very Christian. And on the other side, wanting to assert something very, very secular. And I think much of the history Jerome shows is that the debates were never that way of that kind of all or nothing. But were often debates as to what would be the best strategy to preserve what is good in the American founding. And the best strategy, some people said, “More explicit Christianity.” Some people said, “No.” But the nuanced positions were the ones that were easy to set on the table and forget about.

Jerome Copulsky:

On this note, it’s kind of ironic that the words, “Under God,” that get put into the Declaration of Independence in 1954, as part of a way of asserting America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and affirming that in the context of the Cold War, that’s taken from the Gettysburg Address. The Gettysburg Address is a much more nuanced claim. And the Second Inaugural is a much more nuanced understanding of America’s political theology than, “One nation under God indivisible, with justice for all.” So even Lincoln as a model, there’s the temptation to reduce it to something more palatable by the public.

James Patterson:

So we shouldn’t be surprised, given this analysis, that there is a resumption of this question in contemporary politics. We’ve seen this in the much published about Christian nationalism and Catholic integralism. So do you see these as just part of the same pattern, with the same kind of explanations? And what do you make of them, Jerome?

Jerome Copulsky:

Well, as I indicated earlier, I think that the post-liberals are, in a way, a contemporary iteration of the positions held by L. Brent Bozell and people around Triumph. I think that you can hear some of the echoes of Church of England loyalists, I think, and some of the arguments of the national conservatives and their desire for public-

James Patterson:

Just to interrupt, all the discussion of magisterial relations to the church, are straight out of some of the more erudite Christian nationalists, and their talk about magisterial Protestantism. I forgot to include that in the question, but that’s a great connection.

Jerome Copulsky:

And if we’re continuing to write the book today, I would turn to this relatively recent phenomenon of neo-reform, Protestant thinkers. I think it shows a continued frustration with not only a secular regime. I think that’s part of it. We’ve been talking a lot about secular versus religious. But I think on a deeper level, a frustration and a hostility to religious pluralism. So what the Reconstructionists wanted, what Catholic integralists want, what the Reformed Presbyterians really wanted, was not a kind of a broadly Judeo-Christian, religious society. They wanted something which they believed to be much more authentic.

They wanted a kind of religious monopoly. And to give an example of this, with the Christian amendment movement, on the one hand, some people who participated in that movement saw this as really a defensive measure. This would just shore up those long-standing practices. But the Covenanters believe that it would do something more radical, right? So if you have an explicitly Christian … Not only Christian but kind of Covenanter theology, in the preamble of the Constitution, when you make an oath to that constitution, you are making a religious oath, if you take it seriously. If you’re making an oath to the Constitution, it is now a religious test. So article six, section three, whether it is explicitly taken out or not, is rendered inoperative by that, I think. And I think that that’s what they wanted.

They wanted America to become a Christian republic through and through. And to be a Christian republican through and through, as they understood it, meant to suppress non-Christian religions, suppress infidelity. And if you go and you watch some of these theo bros on TwitterX, right? But you look at their postings, that’s what they want. They don’t simply want to be able to pray in schools or at football games. They want to create a thorough going, Christian nation and a thorough going, Christian society. And that’s a rejection not only of secularism, that’s a rejection of the very fact of pluralism that this country was founded upon.

James Patterson:

A friend of mine likes to say, “It’s liberalism when they do it to us, and the common good when we do it to you.” Mark, any last thoughts you want to give us about maybe either the question that, or the issues that Jerome has put forward? Or maybe the state, the discipline of studied American religion? You’re a person on whose opinions I rely very heavily, so I’d like to know.

Mark Noll:

Well, I did raise in the review, the very last paragraph in Jerome’s book, which is an interesting one. The first sentence of the last paragraph is, “If it is to endure, Americans’ liberal democracy will have to be sustained in the absence of a moral consensus or a clear cut, spiritual foundations.” I actually agree with the clear cut, spiritual foundations. More or less in line of what he’s just said, that the aspirations often foreseeing a Christian foundation are not really a kind of loose desire to have space to do what I think needs to be done, but actually a stronger sense that everyone should be doing what …

But then the absence of a moral consensus, I think that’s a harder bridge to cross because of how deeply ingrained, and you can find it in different ways in George Washington, and even in Madison and Jefferson, Joseph’s story, Abraham Lincoln, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King Jr., right up to the present, the sense that the United States project does have a transcendent, moral backing. However, it’s wrong to over-particularize it. And I think if the desire to not over-particularize moves to saying, “Well, we can get along without a transcendent, moral canopy of some kind,” I just don’t think that’s right. I don’t necessarily believe that. So I’ll let Jerome have the chance to defend the last paragraph, or at least one part of one sentence in the last paragraph of his book.

Jerome Copulsky:

Yeah, I wasn’t writing a book that was defending a particular kind of non-foundational liberalism. I think that that statement is meant as a descriptive rather than a normative statement. I think that, for better or for worse, we live in a country that … We have 320+ million citizens and non-citizens, who don’t agree. And if we are to continue as a functioning liberal democracy, we’re going to have to find ways of agreeing without those metaphysical agreements. And I hope we are able to do it. What the book shows is that there’s been that strain of disagreement from the very beginning. This is nothing new.

It just may feel more widespread now. And I think I would go back and reaffirm what we were talking about with Lincoln, who in a way, maybe provides a model of the civic language, the civic, moral language that we should consider taking very seriously, maybe returning to. Which is a kind of civic humility, a belief in the project of liberal democracy, as we call it now, but a civic humility in the exercise of that project. So I guess that’s how I would come back and try to defend where I land at the end of the book.

Mark Noll:

Jerome, would it be possible, do you think, to write a comparable book, American Heretics: Progressive Adversaries of Liberal Order?

Jerome Copulsky:

Absolutely. And I think one of … I didn’t say this explicitly in this conversation, but I think it should have come out in the writing, that Abbott himself is a heretic. The reason why I spent so much time outlining Abbott’s argument against the National Reform Association wasn’t because I think he was right, but I think he was also, in his way, attacking the foundations of the American Republic. Now, again, he felt that the amendment was needed to protect his understanding of the republic, as did some of the people in the National Reform Association Coalition. But at the end of the day, they were both interested in taking out that plank of pluralism, whether it is pluralism that allows for people to live secular lives, or pluralism that allows people to live lives within their own religious communities.

James Patterson:

Is that the next book, Jerome?

Jerome Copulsky:

I don’t think it’s the next book. But the book focuses on political theology. We could write a book that focuses on secular ideology, against liberalism.

James Patterson:

Outstanding. The book is American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of the Liberal Order. Jerome Copulsky, Mark Noll, thank you so much for appearing on the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Mark Noll:

My privilege. Thank you.

Jerome Copulsky:

Thank you so much. It was great.

James Patterson:

Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.