In Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor John Wilsey calls for harmony between religion and (political) liberty in America. “Harmony” implies the possibility of dissonance, a clashing relationship he assigns to religious postliberalism. If we are to infer a connection in Wilsey’s subtitle, however, what then is the relationship of religious liberty to conservatism? Since freedom for freedom’s sake is not the aim of conservatism, what is being conserved, and to what end? If, as Wilsey asserts, “Protestantism was essential to the ideas of the Founding” then must Protestantism in America be conserved? What else must be conserved?
Wilsey’s introduction has its own religious quality. It is a stirring jeremiad about “Americanness” illustrated by intentional and optimistic purpose in the character of Booker T. Washington, Rosa Parks, and Clare Boothe Luce, for example. Wilsey defends what he calls “evolutionary, dispositional, humanistic, and aspirational conservatism” against identity politics, right or left, and hyperindividualism. Wilsey summons us to save young people filled with anxiety and despair by revitalizing American values and inoculating them against the pessimism of postliberalism. We can, he says, use conservatism to preserve classical liberalism.
Wilsey then moves to his main argument with a short and sometimes playful introduction of conservatism. His argument centers on his experience beginning in the 1960s, when conservatism was a respectable intellectual and political movement. For Wilsey, conservatism is Russell Kirk, Barry Goldwater, or Ronald Reagan. For his students, it is “conspiracy theories, defeatism, MAGA, the MyPillow guy, covfefe, Jerry Fallwell Jr., or kitschy Christian nationalism[,] … trivial, doleful, desperate, weak, and lacking intellectual rigor, imaginative clarity, or depth of character.” Conservativism should be “inspiring, animating, and life-giving.” What is needed, he argues, is a new conservative ethos inspiring us to “reach far beyond our own temporal existence.” This new conservatism is what he calls “aspirational conservatism,” a pre-political temperament, attitude, and way of life. It aims at a higher moral destiny guided by permanent things, tradition, and just order while reckoning with a sinful human condition. The first exemplar of Wilsey’s aspirational postwar conservatism is Russell Kirk.
While Kirk is likely familiar to most readers, Wilsey’s second exemplar is probably not: Peter Viereck, a poet and historian who taught at Mt. Holyoke College. Wilsey laments that Viereck “has largely been forgotten by many conservative scholars.” Viereck abandoned them first, however. He identified as a conservative in the 1950s but soon disassociated from the movement.
Unfortunately, Wilsey’s summary of Viereck’s dissatisfaction with other conservatives—Kirk, Frank Meyer, or William F. Buckley, for example—is too simple. For example, to say that Viereck’s “negative review” of Buckley’s God and Man at Yale “won him exactly zero points with Buckley” or that Meyer valued “dogmatic purity,” provides no real insight. Given that Wilsey’s project includes criticizing contemporary conservatism, what can we learn from Viereck’s critique of his own contemporaries?
Wilsey wants his aspirational conservatism to reach a younger audience needing to break free of MyPillowguy and MAGA, but he should address that audience’s concerns more directly while holding up his appreciation for tradition and transcendence.
Though Wilsey doesn’t mention it, Viereck accused his contemporaries of playing favorites. One of those favorites, Viereck lamented, was Manchester liberalism (i.e., free trade), so one wonders if he would approve of Wilsey’s defense of classical liberalism or a marketplace of religions. Viereck is certainly a safer fit for Wilsey insofar as Viereck opposed nationalism, but Wilsey does not marshal Viereck’s arguments against it so much as his opposition to “Ottantotts,” which Viereck characterized as reactionary utopians relying on obscurantist nostalgia. Ottantottism, Wilsey believes, now characterizes much of contemporary conservative thought and action.
Wilsey’s third exemplar isn’t a person but what he calls the “Black conservative tradition,” exemplified by Thomas Sowell, Robert Woodson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Star Parker, for example. Though white and black conservatism “grew from different fields and soils,” Wilsey argues, “and should be considered distinct one from another,” there remains essential agreement and compatibility between them. What distinguishes black conservatism is that it was born resisting the unjust political status of blacks and therefore had to focus on reclaiming lost freedoms and directing individual achievement away from government redress. Central to this effort, Wilsey says, is the black church encouraging educational and economic community and opportunity. This discussion of black conservatism is worthy, albeit missing a nod to Shelby and Eli Steele. One wonders, however, whether in the spirit of religious liberty, Wilsey considers the Nation of Islam equally capable as the black church to empower.
Successive chapters on aspirational conservatism’s use of imagination, nationality, ordered liberty, history, and religious liberty are a combination of polemic, admonishment, encouragement, and biography. Wilsey argues that conservatism has traded both the “interior life” and pure religion for power politics. To counter this, Wilsey calls the reader to solutions including Great Books, stories of great Americans, and knowledge of transcendence. He argues that imagination and history are necessary not only for a correct conscience but also for both nationality and ordered liberty.
Imagination and history join to create nationality, which he says must be “re-created” every generation through ritual, symbolic practices, and civil religion rather than relying on presumed “facts” of nationality—the worst case being appeals to blood and soil. The latter refers to the worst impulses of postliberals. Fine enough, but what to do with (for example) Kirk’s argument that without British culture (including laws, faith, and institutions) America would have no culture at all? Kirk didn’t consider that culture a re-creation but a patrimony. It would be silly to assert, as some postliberals might, that only British people (whatever that means) may preserve British culture. But neither can it be re-created at will. Two centuries of British colonial rule in India barely eked out an establishment of British cultural institutions there. The Anglo-Afghan wars and our own War on Terror did nothing to create nationality. Culture includes abstractions and organic particulars. It can’t be bred into perpetuity, as postliberals would have it, but neither is it simply re-created. Both solutions are too simple.
Wilsey’s discussion of religion is likewise too simple. For example, he argues that one need not be a Christian to be an aspirational conservative—but it helps. Imagination is, as Wilsey defines it, not the creation of fictions but the perception of truth. God, he argues, is the compass for such a pursuit. But his argument suggests that this is so because God enables a transcendent consciousness not unlike being out in nature. So long as we acknowledge transcendent truth, then, do we even need existing religious traditions? After all, Wilsey says, “None of us can escape the consciousness of God—even atheists.” Why not then passively possess it as an atheist might, so long as one acknowledges a world beyond our senses?
Wilsey certainly encourages religion as a route to the natural (and moral) law. He also prefers that religion not be distracted by politics. These are not easily disentangled, however. In America, which Wilsey says had its identity and purpose shaped by Protestantism, was the deeply religious character of the struggle for American independence, abolition, or the civil rights and pro-life movements, then the co-opting of purer religion? Or were they a reflection of religion’s moral law, rightly working itself out in politics? As popular movements, did they appeal to consciences formed by a specific religious tradition? Or by walks in the woods? Was the reference to God in these appeals simply a foundation for transcendent truth, or did the mention of God summon hearers to personal moral accountability to a Divine Person who will judge them for moral lapses?
Wilsey also argues that religious liberty promotes religiosity through competition, but did the longstanding Christian America that Wilsey compliments as helpful for national identity and purpose exist because it simply beat out all competitors on its merits? Or is it more correct to say that it encultured millions of Americans because it enjoyed a monopoly on public institutions that were anything but secular, neutral, or remotely “competitive” until relatively recently? To argue that (Protestant) Christianity succeeded in America for centuries thanks to a truly free marketplace of religious ideas is akin to claiming that Americans chose cars, especially with combustion engines, because they are so obviously superior to bikes, public transit, or electric cars—ignoring the advantage gained from infrastructure and geography.
What may conservatism hope to be for those not educated to finely discern the true, the good, and the beautiful?
A few other blind spots and ambiguities are evident in Wilsey’s discussion of religious liberty. Like many others, his picture of America’s religiosity (because of its religious freedom) is juxtaposed against a relatively irreligious Europe. The argument here is not unlike juxtaposing bright capitalist South Korea alongside dark communist North Korea. There must be an explanation for these otherwise similar places being so dissimilar, right? Wilsey, like others, asserts that it is religious liberty. However, while it is true that Europe does have a few taxpayer-funded religious establishments, these establishments are almost entirely superficial and exist alongside extensive religious freedom, not unlike America’s. In short, neither religious freedom nor religious establishment is a believable explanatory variable.
Furthermore, how irreligious is Europe in fact? If religiosity is defined by belief in a higher being (the essential aid to truth, Wilsey argues) or identification with a religious tradition, Europe is surprisingly pious. Finally, if religious liberty is so important for deep religiosity, why is it that religiosity in America has decreased while religious freedom has increased over the last half-century? Why isn’t this more extensive religious freedom bolstering religiosity? Can it be instead that the relatively high religiosity of recent memory, the experience of Silents, Boomers, or Gen X, is owed not so much to religious freedom but to a more pronounced and discernible generational public piety fading ever since SCOTUS encouraged greater neutrality and secularity? See, for example, Aaron Renn’s thesis about a growing “negative world” for Christianity in America.
Finally, Wilsey’s arguments are tidier if one stays in a Western context. India and Lebanon have no established religion. Both are more pluralistic and religious than America, but they are also more syncretistic and given to religious violence. Why? Indonesia has a state religion, which should make them irreligious according to Wilsey’s reasoning, but its people are deeply religious. Furthermore, would all the faiths practiced in these countries sustain the ethos and institutions Wilsey appreciates in America? In the American case, Wilsey is presuming upon a particular kind of religious freedom, birthed under particular cultural (and theological) circumstances, in a certain organic and historical context—a context much richer than simply having God in one’s consciousness.
Wilsey wants his aspirational conservatism to reach a younger audience needing to break free of MyPillowguy and MAGA, but he should address that audience’s concerns more directly while holding up his appreciation for tradition and transcendence. Wilsey is concerned with America’s declining role in the world, the rise of populism, a loss of support for American ideals and institutions, the decline of popular media, and the rise of social media. His students would identify problems like economic disruption, a widening wealth gap, and the perceived failure of American ideals and institutions. They would praise the variety of popular and social media.
Wilsey says that he does not intend the book to be a “Get off my lawn” moment, but are the younger generation’s concerns owed simply to an impoverished inner life and populist inclinations? Can conservatism adapt to these more emotional and alienated times? Is it as rational as Wilsey suggests? Or can it be more dispositional, as Michael Oakeshott suggested? For example, Wilsey dismisses epic poetry to make sense of the past because it is not “verifiable through evidence.” But his examples of the earliest historical research, Herodotus and Thucydides, did not presume to provide just evidence. They reflected sentiment. Even our contemporary Great Books movement, including classical education, assigns Homer next to Herodotus without hesitation because both reveal permanent things.
And even more to the point, what may conservatism hope to be for those not educated to finely discern the true, the good, and the beautiful? John Adams, for example, had a rich inner life, but his vision was enabled by men and women who were arguably populists in their time. If conservatism aspires to be more than a vision, especially in a marketplace of visions, these challenges must be taken seriously.
