Jerome Copulsky’s thoughtful, carefully researched, and timely American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order examines movements that, out of a higher loyalty to Christian or theistic convictions, have challenged “American liberalism, democracy, pluralism, secularism, or some combination thereof.” He is not considering the Amish, Orthodox Jewish communities, or others who have constructed their own self-guided alternative communities. Neither does the book treat the Mormons who have accepted, even sacralized, freedom, democracy, and the Constitution while standing athwart certain iterations of “liberalism.”

Instead, the book’s subjects are individuals and groups that have championed explicitly religious grounding for, or explicitly religious alternatives to, “the ‘liberal’ principles of the Declaration of Independence—equality, natural rights, consent of the governed.” Copulsky’s dramatis personae are the Loyalists who rejected the American Revolution, proponents at different periods of a Christian Amendment to the Constitution, southern white theologians in the Civil War era, several varieties of Catholic integralists after World War II, Reformed Protestant advocates of Theonomy, and in the recent past, white evangelical supporters of Donald Trump along with political-theological traditionalists styling themselves “National Conservatives.” 

Questions must be asked about the book’s interpretive framework and a historical record that complicates its sharp distinction between the “heretics” and those who upheld “liberal order.” But its unusually clear account of the heretics and their arguments is the place to begin.

Copulsky’s heretics have maintained, with varied intensity, that “religion was a concern of the state and politics was fundamentally theological.” As a consequence, most have held that “the only legitimate government would be one that acknowledged the true faith, was governed by the righteous, protected the church, cultivated morality, and directed its subjects to their common—and the highest—good.”

The first to advance these claims were present at the creation. When in the 1770s the thirteen colonies broke from Britain, several Anglican clergymen forcefully spelled out their Christian reasons for rejecting the new American experiment. A sermon preached by Myles Cooper at Oxford in December 1776 spoke for many Loyalists. Cooper, who had served as president of New York City’s King’s College (later Columbia), expressed his indictment with biblical phrases: “When they suppose those Powers to be derived solely from the People, which are ‘ordained of God,’ and their heads are filled with ideas of Original Compacts which never existed … they will naturally proceed to ‘despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities,’ and to open a door for Anarchy, ‘Confusion, and ever evil work.’”

Unlike the Loyalists, nineteenth-century heretics, along with some who followed their path in the years after World War II, did not repudiate republican ideals or question the Constitution as far as it went. Instead, they insisted that the Christian foundation for American political ideals, which in their view the Founders had unnecessarily obscured, should be unabashedly acknowledged.

Southern white theologians who first defended slavery and then the Confederacy for protecting slavery constituted a special class. Among the Presbyterian clergymen who expressed this position most aggressively, South Carolina’s James Henley Thornwell praised the American Constitution for its robust checks and balances. But he also chastised the Founders for not acknowledging that “all just government is the ordinance of God.” Others went further to repudiate the Declaration of Independence’s affirmation of human equality, endowed rights, and government arising from the consent of the governed. The crux was dismay at how run-away democracy had metastasized into abolitionism, which meant infidelity because of how clearly, in their view, the Bible supported slavery. With the Confederate Constitution “invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God,” the result, again in Thornwell’s words, was “a truly Christian Republic.”

A more enduring heresy arose from a different breed of Presbyterians who accepted the principles of the Declaration as well as the wisdom of the Constitution, but who sought to confirm the Christian character of those documents. Their remedy was an Amendment that specified, as one variation put it: “We, the people of the United States, recognizing the being and attributes of Almighty God, the Divine Authority of the Holy Scriptures, the law of God as the paramount rule, and Jesus, the Messiah, the Savior and Lord of All, do ordain.”

Reformed Presbyterians (Covenanters), heirs of the Scots who had sworn a National Covenant (1638) and a Solemn League and Covenant (1643) during the era of Oliver Cromwell, led the push. Those covenants had articulated a view of civic life in which governments acknowledged the lordship of Christ and supported the church as it taught the faithful what that lordship required. In 1803, an early advocate of the Amendment who had been born in Northern Ireland and schooled in Glasgow explained that Reformed Presbyterians “cannot yield obedience, for conscience sake, to the present civil authority in North America” because it does not acknowledge Christ and establish a Christian government.

Efforts to put God, Christ, and the Bible into the Constitution ebbed and flowed for more than 150 years—intense in the early nineteenth century, revived in the decades after the Civil War with backing from non-Covenanters like the Congregational theologian Horace Bushnell and Senator Charles Sumner, and then with a last-ditch effort during the height of the Cold War. The Amendment, in several variations, never came close to approval by Congress, much less ratification by the states.

Copulsky, however, may not sufficiently credit the logic of this position. If, the Covenanters and their friends reasoned, the government appoints chaplains for the military and the Congress, if the Bible was once routinely read in almost all public schools, if federal and state laws long protected the observance of Sunday, and if presidents invoke the Deity when proclaiming days of Thanksgiving, why not formalize what such activities informally recognize?

These heretics also asked why generation after generation of respected American leaders had acknowledged the theistic or Christian grounding of American political values but did not want that grounding recognized in law. Copulsky himself cites a considerable list of such leaders, from George Washington, whose Farewell Address in 1796 famously described the future of the republic as dependent upon morality and morality as dependent upon religion, to near-contemporary voices like Will Herberg, who felt that American democracy could be preserved from either totalitarianism or self-indulgent solipsism only by “God centered … prophetic faith.”

If such voices deserve more attention as sharing at least some sentiments with the Reformed Presbyterians, so also does a striking fact of Covenanter history. As it happens, the Americans who called loudest for a Christian Amendment during the first two generations of the nation’s existence were also the white Americans who most comprehensively denounced slavery.

The career of Alexander McLeod, a Scottish emigrant who pastored churches in New York, was unusual for the Covenanters only because of his prominence. In 1806 McLeod authored his denomination’s Declaration and Testimony that spelled out the “moral evils essential to the constitution of the United States, which render it necessary to refuse allegiance to the whole system.” Four years earlier McLeod had published Negro Slavery Unjustifiable, the fullest American attack on the institution since the works of the Quaker Anthony Benezet from before the Revolution. Both expressions depended unreservedly on McLeod’s devotion to Scripture.

So a question: 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 (in insisting that all, black as well as white, were created equal)? The bearing of this question is also patent for later history. Leaders of the American civil rights movement by no means shared the Covenanters’ disdain for the nation’s founding documents. But as many have recognized, even as they honored those documents, they shared a similar reliance on moral absolutes as had inspired the Reformed Presbyterians.

The book’s final and most timely chapters showcase heretics since the Second World War. Copulsky briefly treats proponents of a Christian Amendment in the 1950s who failed miserably in securing their amendment but who did help those who put God-language in the Pledge of Allegiance and on the nation’s coins and currency.

The main post-war story features Catholics and Protestants who have challenged the American liberal order more comprehensively than any groups since the eighteenth-century Loyalists. During the 1950s, a faction of the conservative coalition that rallied around Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley Jr. broke away in order to crusade for a self-consciously “confessional state.” Led by Buckley’s brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell Jr., these confessionalists opposed the better-known attempt of John Courtney Murray, S.J. to describe a deep compatibility between natural-law Catholicism and the nation’s republican democracy (We Hold These Truths, 1960).

By contrast, Bozell and other contributors to the journal Thought looked back to the Middle Ages for a model of church-state union and to nineteenth-century popes for charting their course. Leo XIII was a particular inspiration with his counsel that the faithful could tolerate a contingent “hypothesis” (Catholics getting along in any regime that provided freedom for worship and mission) even as they hoped for an ideal “thesis” (Catholicism receiving official support and preference from government).

A parallel Protestant movement in the same years looked not to papal history but to the Christian Old Testament as a sure guide for a godly nation. Rousas Rushdoony, author of The Institutes of Biblical Law, and Gary North, author of Political Polytheism, eventually became sharp antagonists even as they continued to agree that economic, social, and political guidance from Moses could reverse the nation’s downward path.

Copulsky’s heretics in the very recent past once again include Protestants and Catholics. The popular apologetics of Francis Schaeffer, who depicted the Reformation as the source of endangered American freedoms, prepared the way for the white evangelicals who have supported Donald Trump as a Cyrus rescuing “the chosen people” from their enemies. Trump’s backers also include charismatic and Pentecostal spokespersons for whom prophetic words about Trump as “chosen” mean more than Constitutional niceties.

More intellectually ambitious are the new conservatives who share disdain for traditional American verities as they invoke traditional Christian—or Roman Catholic or Judeo-Christian—values that could rescue the nation from collapse. Patrick Deneen is best known for spelling out the critique in his books Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change (2023). Adrian Vermeule has articulated a traditional, pre-Vatican II Catholic alternative. Yoram Hazony in his Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022) writes as a practicing Jew who advocates explicit guidance from Christian values and both biblical testaments. The authors of “National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles” (2022) drew together themes from these and other heretics to assert that “Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.”

As Copulsky considers these last heretics, the book’s general tone of neutrality breaks down: they refuse “to accept the nation’s thoroughgoing pluralism”; they fail to recognize that “religions, even ‘traditional’ ones change over time”; their confidence “in the ability of public officials to promote religion” is baseless; and they disregard “the corrupting influence of politics on religion.”

Although American Heretics features straightforward documentation more than Copulsky’s opinions, his denunciation of “National Conservatism” brings to a head his scattered, but still telling, reasons for not taking seriously any of the “heretical” proposals. If, he asks, the Bible is to guide public life, whose Bible or whose interpretation of the Bible? If God or divinely ordained natural law must be recognized as the guarantor of American rights and freedoms, will it be the God honored by sophisticated admirers of nineteenth-century popes or the God-inspiring populist evangelical acolytes of Donald Trump? If the nation officially recognized Christianity as the source of its fundamental values, could non-Christians—or even Christians of a different flavor than those in charge—possibly enjoy religious freedom or participate fully in public life? Copulsky, in other words, reprises to good effect the reasoning of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison who wanted to keep the religious-tinged bloodshed of European Christendom as far away from the new nation as possible.

Yet showing the impossibility of reinstituting Christendom in a pluralistic nation is not the same as justifying Copulsky’s understanding of American civic life. That understanding he eventually sets out, but only in the book’s last paragraph: “If it is to endure, America’s liberal democracy will have to be sustained in the absence of a moral consensus or clear-cut spiritual foundations.”

This stance, as he must surely realize, puts him at odds with most of the nation’s history. In the not-too-distant past, the politically orthodox agreed with the heretics that “the separation of church and state” meant the prohibition of an official Christian establishment—not, as with prominent voices now, the removal of any religious influence from public life. Once, both groups held that “secularism” meant church-state separation—not, as with prominent voices now, state-guaranteed freedom for individuals to choose whatever they want for themselves. The difference lay in the orthodox conviction that agreed-upon grounding for national political ideals could be assumed rather than specified.

If Copulsky now holds that no agreed-upon grounding exists, that concession undermines his book’s account of its subjects as fanciful “heretics.” At least for much of the nation’s past, say to Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg or Martin Luther King Jr. on the Washington Mall, it would have been “heretical” to claim that American liberal democracy lacked moral consensus or a transcendent basis for it. Jerome Copulsky, tu es l’homme.

American Heretics succeeds admirably in describing the heresies that have questioned the liberal order and is mostly convincing in framing them as quixotic. It is less convincing when Copulsky suggests that American liberalism can be secured without the specific grounding that heretics desired or the amorphous kind the orthodox long took for granted.