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 th