The American Right seems intent on proving John Stuart Mill’s infamous remark that “conservatives are the stupid party.” Not only is the populist movement in Washington foundering because of infighting and general boorishness, its intellectual equivalent in the so-called “postliberal” movement also seems to be descending into anger and what Lionel Trilling once called “irritable mental gestures.” Neither force seems to be the engine of cultural renewal that they promised to be.
John Wilsey’s new book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, offers a beautiful alternative: a vision to which conservatives might genuinely aspire. At the very outset of the short treatise, he turns to the wisdom of Alexis de Tocqueville. And rightly so—with the possible exceptions of Publius and Abraham Lincoln, no other political thinker has more fully understood the deepest meaning of America. Wilsey highlights especially his contention that our civilization is the result of a productive tension between two spirits: the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty.
At present, both of these spirits are at great risk of vanishing altogether. Religion has been in decline for quite some time, and what Robert Nisbet called the “omnicompetent state” continues to grow unabated. Wilsey’s book, however, is useful precisely because it can help us understand the civilizational resources we still possess. In this slim volume, he teaches us that we cannot conserve Permanent Things such as religion or liberty by seizing power or imposing our will on either our friends or our enemies—rather, their preservation depends above all on love.
Wilsey’s treatment of Tocqueville’s “two spirits” put me in mind of something similar that the Frenchman’s great mentor, Edmund Burke, once wrote. In the Reflections on the Revolution in France, the Irishman too claimed that “all the good things which are connected with manners, and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.” To his conservative mind, it was the gentleman who could defend liberty by embodying everything that was best about his society.
For Burke, the gentleman enjoys a kind of “exalted freedom” through the cultivation of the moral imagination. The Western literary and philosophic tradition furnishes his mind and heart with certain chivalric concepts, perhaps most poetically described as the “unbought grace of life,” according to which he can govern himself. The French Revolution was dangerous insofar as it sought to banish this chivalry from public life and extinguish the glory of Europe. Burke hoped instead that the rule of the best men could be united with an elevation of sentiment which could prevent abuses of power.
Although to American ears this defense of the gentleman may sound hopelessly aristocratic, there was in fact something deeply democratic about Burke’s vision. “Without force, or opposition,” Burke wrote, the spirit of chivalry “subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a domination vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by manners.” The generous aristocracy Burke and his followers prized was founded, as a matter of fact, on the Christian doctrine of universal equality before God.
Wilsey’s own term for this way of life is “aspirational conservatism.” He holds—rightly—that this kind of vision can “defend the best of the American character” because it can help us see the fundamental harmony between religion and liberty. But it is unfortunately manifest that there is very little aspirational about the entity we call the “conservative movement” today. Despite their leaders’ endless claims that we are on the precipice of a “new golden age,” the dominant factions have proved time and time again that they are incapable of conserving anything at all. As Wilsey puts it, “The rightism of contemporary times is populist, obsessed with politics, and fueled by social-media-inspired outrage in a similar style as their leftist counterparts.” Reactionary rage is no substitute for genuine cultural renewal.
Secular ideologues have sought to degrade our perception of the divine, but the structure of American freedom itself revolts against their efforts.
Wilsey’s finest explication of this problem with contemporary rightism is his critique of Stephen Wolfe’s Case for Christian Nationalism. Although he concedes Wolfe and other Christian nationalists are right to perceive growing forces of tyranny and immortality, he also explains that their attempt to construct an ideology to fight it is misguided at best. Whereas aspirational conservatives seek to preserve and enjoy the Western heritage, Christian nationalists and other right-wing ideologues instrumentalize and weaponize it.
At one point, Wilsey quotes Wolfe’s precise definition of Christian nationalism: “a totality of national action, consisting of civil laws and social customs, conducted by a Christian nation as a Christian nation, in order to procure for itself both earthly and heavenly good in Christ.” These kinds of hyper-logical systems emerging right-wing ideologues construct tend to reduce religion into a mere weapon to beat back modernity. Theirs is a deeply rationalistic approach to politics, which undermines sentiments at the heart of the institutions they claim to be defending.
And that is precisely why Wilsey criticizes it. Rather than upholding the aspirational conservatism at the heart of American civilization, Wolfe and others attempting to create a rightist ideology embrace the same kind of totalitarian impulses that our country stood against in the twentieth century. They may profess to love “the nation” as an abstract category, but they are hardly patriots who love our republic’s particular history or principles—that kind of love is too complicated to withstand their totalizing vision. Christian nationalists have far more in common with philodoxers and ideologues such as Hegel and Marx than statesmen and philosophers such as Lincoln or Plato. As Wilsey writes, “There is not much daylight between Wolfe’s counterrevolutionary method of statecraft and leftist revolutionary models.”
The errors of ideology also explain why the contemporary right has become so vulgar and ungentlemanly. Content to play in the realm of what Richard Weaver called “god-terms and devil-terms,” they utterly lack the virtue of humility Burke saw as essential to civilized life. Their demagoguery may, on occasion, secure them a little temporary power in elections—but it does not inspire the genuine conversion of the heart needed to turn enemies into friends for the sake of the common good. Hyper-rationalized moralism cannot maintain what Lincoln described as “our bonds of affection” or restore “the better angels of our nature” he spoke about so eloquently—nor revive a sense of our common nationhood. Look no further than the faction’s behavior on social media; rather than persuading anyone of the goodness of their vision, they spend their time typing away at insults and ephemeral arguments no one can win. In short, the ideologues of the right have destined themselves to play the role of not-so-beautiful losers in American politics.
What is most necessary in this hour of decline, then, is a conservatism that can help citizens aspire to be gentlemen again. At its best, the twentieth-century movement achieved this. William F. Buckley Jr.’s courtly social graces on Firing Line captivated audiences and inspired imitators. Russell Kirk’s romanticism cast a spell over the minds and hearts across Middle America—including Ronald Reagan’s. The genuine renewal these figures promoted is possible again, and it is to Wilsey’s great credit that his book draws our attention back to this prospect.
In good Burkean fashion, imagination is the heart of Wilsey’s conservative project. Citing the example of George Washington—America’s finest gentleman-statesman—he argues that we need to find better ways of “catechizing” citizens and statesmen alike. The General was able to achieve all he did because he was “formed by books” of the Western canon that taught him something about “the relationship of the eternal to the temporal.” He came to inwardly possess a series of images that informed the sense of the Good Life that guided his political action. Aspirational conservatism seeks to remind the people of these “internal philosophical foundations,” rather than promote “an external pragmatism” which values power above all else.
Throughout the book, Wilsey looks to the oft-neglected Peter Viereck as an exemplar of this aspirational conservatism. Unlike the activists who would largely determine the direction of the postwar Republican party, Viereck was a historian and poet—a man of letters first and foremost. He wrote to move his readers’ hearts. Aspiring to be a gentleman in the Burkean sense of the term, Viereck understood his own conservatism not as a tool to win elections but rather as a way of life. In this sense, we might encourage young people to look to thinkers like Viereck as models to imitate.
Viereck was also, admittedly, an eccentric. He rarely showed up to teach his classes on time, wore a scarf year-round, and could be prickly in ways that made him difficult to work with. But Wilsey sees this strangeness as an important aspect of aspirational conservatism:
[Viereck’s] eccentricities, bizarre as they were, reflected the emphasis he placed on the individual personality over mindless conformity, which is deeply important to the conservative disposition. In our own culture, which is too often obsessed with mindless conformity, a professor like Viereck probably would just be fired, and that would be that. Our times are blander and our skies greyer in the absence of such eccentric geniuses, people of personality. Alas we are the poorer.
Aspirational conservatism, then, aims at redeeming personality from the prevailing culture of dehumanization. Its goals are bigger than politics, even a politics of freedom. In Reflections, for example, Burke acknowledged that “liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind,” but he also warned that he could not judge it a good if it were “stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.” We must, therefore, place the first emphasis on preserving a culture of elevation.
That is not to say, however, that Viereck entirely avoided politics in his own day, or that aspirational conservatives should avoid it altogether now. Wilsey explains that his political engagement was largely a “fight for a private life.” He wanted to contend against the choking consumerism of a godless culture and the despotism of the total state, to create a space in which human beings had the liberty to flourish according to their created purpose. For the aspirational conservative, politics is not merely a contest for power but rather a contest for dignity.
Religious Freedom is a serious work of scholarship from a true gentleman—something our movement sorely needs in such desiccated times.
The Southern agrarian M. E. Bradford once articulated this well in an essay of his own on the Duke of Wellington as “The Last Great Englishman.” Like Washington, the Anglo-Irish soldier consciously shaped his life according to a gentleman’s perception of the Permanent Things. “Indeed, because he was an antique Englishman, because Napoleon and imperialism hidden under rhetoric offended his inmost self,” Bradford wrote, “Wellington was able to recognize his campaigns as ‘war to the knife’ and therefore, with grace and quietude, to communicate his own inflexible view of their desperate significance to the men who marched beneath his banner.” When freedom is at stake and dignity is on the line, the gentleman is willing to fight.
This is perhaps why conservatives have seen the most success in recent years fighting for religious liberty. Secular liberalism poses genuine threats to our natural right to worship freely—the most overt recent example, of course, being the government-mandated shutdown of churches during the coronavirus pandemic. The good news, of course, is that the foundations of the American political tradition are strong enough to resist those threats. As Wilsey puts it, “We support the separation of church and state, not because we want to empower the state against the church or redefine religious liberty as a tame and lifeless ‘freedom of worship,’ but for the sake of free religious exercise resulting in the security of liberty for all.” In recent years, at least, the Supreme Court has consistently upheld Americans’ First Amendment rights against the most aggressive abuses, and public opinion generally opposes them as well. Even the pandemic-era restrictions were widely opposed and eventually rolled back. Whatever extremisms lurk in the background of American politics, the foundational principle of religious liberty remains strong.
To put it another way, recent victories on these issues prove that aspirational conservatism just works. Unlike the brittle electoral wins and media bluster of populism, these are concrete successes conservatives can fully celebrate. This realistic politics of freedom—not the rationalistic politics of authoritarianism that too many on the right now embrace—provides the space aspirational conservatives need to go about the business of cultural renewal. It enables us to reform institutions that are straying from their missions or build new ones altogether.
But in a larger sense, as I believe Wilsey would acknowledge, conservative victories against secularism in these religious liberty issues have a metaphysical import. As he puts it towards the end of the book, “the consciousness of God is vital to human nature.” Secular ideologues have sought to degrade our perception of the divine, but the structure of American freedom itself revolts against their efforts. “In a democracy where equality of conditions is the norm, religion is necessary to liberty because it reminds citizens that they are not laws unto themselves,” Wilsey writes, summarizing the central insight of Democracy in America. “Put simply, Tocqueville found that the consciousness of God and the recognition of human fallibility and limitations contributed to ordered liberty by restraining political passions.”
As conservatives continue the fight for religious liberty, and for the life of the republic, we would do well to look to John Wilsey and Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer as a model. This is a serious work of scholarship from a true gentleman—something our movement sorely needs in such desiccated times.
This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at a panel on the book during the 2025 meeting of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters.
