Most historians agree that the separation of church and state is what allowed a flourishing of religious pluralism in the United States. Without a state religion, Americans are largely free to pursue their own practices and beliefs free of government interference. The good sense of this approach has also become a de facto doctrine of American liberalism. And yet this belief has never won anything like total assent. Since our founding, some have argued that a godless Constitution is a grave error. In our own day, a new generation of Christian nationalists is eager to tear down the “wall of separation,” as Jefferson called it.
Jerome Copulsky, a research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, refers to this latter camp as the “American heretics”—heretical not for their religious beliefs, but for their hostility to a secular government founded on Enlightenment ideals.
Copulsky’s recent book, American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order (Yale University Press, 2024), presents the history of this idea in its various forms, from the eighteenth century to today. I spoke with Copulsky about his book and the ideas that inform it. The conversation, which took place via phone and email, has been edited for length and clarity.
Gordon Haber: What led you to this material?
Jerome Copulsky: I started thinking about this project a few months into the first Trump administration. At the time, there was much talk, you may recall, about the so-called “alt-right.” This was an illiberalism driven by a fierce anger towards the current moment of Western liberal modernity. Steve Bannon, who was CEO of Trump’s 2016 campaign and was for a while a senior counsel to President Trump, was a vocal proponent of this view. But there were many others as well. Around the same time, two books came out which became influential: Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation [2017] and Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed [2018]. Both regarded the U.S. as a fundamentally liberal project and a social, political, and moral failure. And both authors recommended a “strategic withdrawal” from liberal society in order to preserve orthodox religious traditions through the current dark age. Both could be fairly labeled as reactionary in character.
So there was this rising illiberal mood that I was interested in trying to understand and address. But I wanted to do so by looking back to the past, at other expressions of specifically religious hostility to American democracy, to try to tell a spiritual counter-history of the country, if you will. And the book, and its focus on attitudes towards the American founding, developed organically from there.
GH: So let’s start at the founding. Your book describes how the Loyalists were among the earliest critics of a revolution informed by Enlightenment ideals.
JC: The opposition by Church of England clergymen in the colonies to the American Revolution seemed to be a natural place to begin. Some of the most important and articulate propagandists of the British cause during this time were conservative “High Church” clergy such as Samuel Seabury Jr., Jonathan Boucher, Charles Inglis, and Thomas Bradbury Chandler. They all believed in the fundamental connection between the church and civil government and in religious establishment, meaning that the church sanctified the political order, and the government supported and protected the church. And they believed in a grand social hierarchy in which all were set providentially in their place and the monarch served as God’s vice-regent on earth.
They also believed that the Church of England had been insufficiently established in America, as it enjoyed that status only in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. There were no formal religious establishments in the middle colonies, aside from a few counties in New York. With the exception of Rhode Island, Congregationalism was the official religion in New England. Furthermore, there was no resident bishop in the colonies, which meant that would-be clergy had to travel to England for ordination.
So these clergymen regarded the American patriots’ endeavor and the ideas upon which it was animated—the claims of natural equality and natural rights, that human beings come together to form a social contract to set up a government to protect these rights—as a rejection, not only of King George III, but of the cosmic order. By rebelling against the king and declaring their independence from the British Empire, the American revolutionaries were not inaugurating a new order of the ages but unleashing chaos.
Their sermons from the time stress the religious arguments for obedience—that men do not have a right to resistance against instituted authority but are bound by duty to submit to it. Over and over, they appeal to biblical verses making this claim, such as Peter’s command to “fear God, honor the King” (I Peter 2:17). And they were appealing not only to Anglican laypersons, but also to Church of England clergy who they believed were perversely supporting the patriot cause—infected by the “licentious principles of the times,” as an English clergyman put it.
Many of these men fled to England during the war. Interestingly, Samuel Seabury stayed, and as it turned out, became the first bishop in the newly organized Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States. But unlike the Church of England, the Episcopal Church was not to enjoy an establishment but to take its place as just one of the many religious denominations in the United States.
Now, after the Revolution, when it came down to designing a national constitution, an established church was out of the question. But the framers went further, prohibiting a religious test for national office and protecting the free exercise of religion.
GH: One group, the Covenanters, had a novel response to that church-state settlement.
JC: Yes, one interesting group was the Reformed Presbyterians, or Covenanters. They were descendants of seventeenth-century dissenters from the Church of Scotland who settled in the American colonies. They supported the Revolution, but they were unhappy with the constitution that came out of Philadelphia in 1787, because the document did not acknowledge God and Christ as Prince of Nations.
They regarded Article VI, Section 3 of the Constitution—the language prohibiting a religious test for office—as allowing for the possibility of an infidel, a Catholic or Jew or Muslim or pagan to become chief executive. They didn’t like the First Amendment, because they felt the state had certain obligations to the church, and the freedom of religion the amendment protected meant the government was protecting the freedom of false religion. Also they were staunch abolitionists and regarded the Constitution as an instrument that protected the sinful institution of slavery. In short, the Constitution failed to set up a truly Christian republic.
For these reasons, they decided to become, we might say, conscientious objectors to the government. They called this their “religious testimony of political dissent,” and it was what distinguished them as a denomination on the American religious landscape. Reformed Presbyterians wouldn’t stand for office, they wouldn’t vote, they wouldn’t serve in the military.
Now, they were lawful, they would pay their taxes, but they would keep themselves apart from the government as much as possible, until their fellow citizens came to their senses and fixed the problem by amending the Constitution to make the United States an explicitly Christian nation.
GH: The Covenanters were anti-slavery, but pro-slavery theologians also believed that a “godless” constitution was a serious flaw.
JC: Southern pro-slavery theologians, such as the Presbyterian James Henley Thornwell and his student Benjamin Morgan Palmer, were also critical of the framers’ failure to acknowledge divine sovereignty. Leading up to the Civil War, they believed this omission was actually a cause of the growing tension between North and South. Many in their ranks applauded when the Confederate Constitution corrected this error and constitutionalized slavery and the slave system in a stronger way than had been in the federal Constitution. But Thornwell didn’t think the acknowledgement went far enough; he wanted the Confederacy to announce itself as a specifically Christian state.
These pro-slavery theologians also argued against that other founding document, the Declaration of Independence. They argued that if the Declaration proclaimed that all men are created equal and are endowed with certain unalienable rights, then it was an infidel document. Those men expended a lot of intellectual energy trying to make the case that the Bible and the Christian religion sanctioned slavery and that the opponents of the system had rejected the plain meaning of Scripture on account of their humanitarian delusions.
There was this rising illiberal mood that I was interested in trying to understand and address. But I wanted to do so by looking back to the past.
GH: One thread in the book, and in American history, is the effort for a Constitutional amendment with overt references to Christianity.
JC: Yes, one specific movement originated with the Covenanters during the Civil War. As I mentioned, they believed that the war was divine punishment for the nation’s original sin of a “godless” constitution. They decided to turn to political action, working with other Protestant ministers and laypeople who felt that the Union needed to dedicate itself to God by correcting the Constitution. In 1864, the supporters of the amendment actually managed to get an audience with President Lincoln, who greeted them with his characteristic tact but didn’t move on the proposal.
Following the war, the Reformed Presbyterians stood at the forefront of a big tent movement which became known as the National Reform Association, the original NRA. The rationale for the amendment shifted. What was earlier regarded as an act of atonement was now presented as a necessary measure to protect what they regarded as the de facto Christian nation from Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and secularists, who they believed were exploiting the Constitution to undermine the country’s traditional practices. The amended preamble, which included overt acknowledgements of God as the source of authority, Christ as Ruler of the nations, and the Bible as fundamental law, would not be a mere cosmetic change, but would have real repressive effects on the nation’s religious minorities.
The big push was in the 1870s, in the context of struggles over reading the Bible in public schools, but, as I suggested, their anxieties were broader. The association sent their proposal to Congress, bolstered by thousands of petitions they had collected from across the nation. But the House Judiciary Committee rejected the measure as contrary to the framers’ intentions.
The NRA did spur a rival organization, the Liberal League, to promote an amendment of its own, to expand the provisions of the religion clauses of the First Amendment to the states, in the hopes of removing the very “abuses” of religion that the NRA sought to preserve. That measure failed as well.
GH: But that wasn’t the end of the fight for a Christian amendment?
JC: No, they kept their dream alive. There was another attempt worth mentioning during the 1950s, which is an interesting moment in American church-state history. On the one hand, there was a deepening secularization of the American public sphere, based on the recognition that America had become more religiously pluralistic. In a series of decisions, the Supreme Court deepened the idea of the separation of church and state, claiming that the original purpose of the establishment of the religion clauses was to essentially protect religious minorities.
On the other hand, this was also high time for what I call “civil religion” in America. So for example, in 1954, Congress put the phrase “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance. A year later, they made “In God We Trust” the national motto and mandated that it be inscribed on the currency. They deemed these measures necessary in order to illuminate America’s difference from its godless communist adversaries. So on the one hand, the Court is going in one direction, and Congress and President Eisenhower in another.
Anyway, at the same time the legislation about the Pledge of Allegiance is moving through the legislature, the supporters of the Christian Amendment gain a hearing in the Senate to make their case that what America really needs to face the Soviet challenge is to constitutionally rededicate the nation to Christ. And in opposition to the amendment came representatives from the Jewish American community, including Leo Pfeffer, a prominent litigator on church-state issues. And their argument, in brief, was that the founders had wisely and intentionally established a secular government—the separation of church and state served to protect the religious freedom of all.
Now, this hearing wasn’t well attended. Only one senator bothered to show up. But a small group of “patriotic women” from California came to Washington to testify on the proposal’s behalf. They argued that a Christian Amendment was necessary to protect Christian America from “anti-Christians.” They meant communists, of course, but they also specifically accused American Jews, proffering a conspiracy theory that Jewish organizations, by promoting interfaith activities and recommending the removal of inaccuracies about Judaism from textbooks, were trying to undermine Christianity.
To their credit, the professional supporters of the Christian Amendment in attendance were clearly embarrassed by the presence of those “patriotic women” and took pains to say that they themselves weren’t antisemitic and that the measure would actually be good for the Jews. But the dustup exposed something about the way in which this project was being used, and how it would ultimately make the nation less amenable to religious minorities.
GH: That radical strain of anti-secularism gained momentum in the second half of the twentieth century.
JC: Yes, and the Christian Reconstructionist movement is a good example of this. The movement was founded by Rousas J. Rushdoony, who believed that biblical law ought to be applied to modern society. In short, he hoped—he believed—that America would eventually transition from a liberal democracy into what he called a theocracy.
Rushdoony argued that the Constitution was meant to perpetuate a pre-existing Christian order but that over time the nation had been cut off from its original Christian moorings. His contemporaries, like Jerry Falwell and Francis A. Schaeffer IV, blamed the Supreme Court and secular humanists. But Rushdoony saw America’s decline beginning much earlier, with the rise of Unitarianism in New England and with the Second Great Awakening.
Gary North is another interesting figure. He was Rushdoony’s disciple but broke with him to form a rival movement. While Rushdoony had said that the Constitution was meant to perpetuate a Christian society, North contended—in a tome called Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism [1989]—that the Constitution itself was the result of an anti-Christian Masonic conspiracy, and he pointed to Article VI, Section 3 as evidence of its anti-Christian nature. In short, the nation had an infidel founding that ought to be corrected with a Christian amendment. He did concede that this would only be a start—transforming the nation into a theocracy was a process that would take centuries. By the way, North dedicated Political Polytheism to the Reformed Presbyterians.
In their vision of a coming theocracy, the Reconstructionists were quite different from most members of the New Religious Right, who wanted to restore an earlier Christian America of their imagining. Indeed, they often complained that other conservative Christians, while relying on their material, weren’t radical enough, or weren’t really authentic Christians, on account of their unwillingness to strive towards a fully biblical society.
GH: So where are we today? How influential is this idea?
JC: The Reconstructionists were always a small group, but they were influential way beyond their numbers, and their ideas are still circulating among other movements. They have shaped the thought of influential pastors such as Doug Wilson in Moscow, Idaho. And you hear their language of dominionism in the Seven Mountains Mandate, the claim that Christians need to conquer and occupy all the heights of social influence: family, religion, government, arts and entertainment, business, education, and media.
In recent years, the illiberal mood that I noted earlier has gained strength. When I began this book, people like Dreher and Deneen were talking about withdrawing, circling their wagons and waiting out the dark age of liberal modernity. But with Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016, they sensed an opportunity to assert themselves politically, and over the years they’ve amassed significant influence and power. Nowadays, they are looking to restructure society along “postliberal” lines. On the American scene there are all sorts of proponents of Christian political supremacism: Catholic Integralists who believe that the temporal realm should be guided by their religious values, Seven Mountains Mandate enthusiasts, Reformed Protestant nationalists, and so forth. They are no longer laboring at the margins but are now in the very corridors of American power, perhaps even in the office of the vice president.
But, you know, it’s worth remarking that in the end, their various visions of a Christian American are not really compatible. At the moment, they have a common enemy in liberal democracy. But Catholic Integralists who look back to the encyclicals of nineteenth-century popes have a different understanding of what that Christian order would look like than, say, the self-proclaimed prophets of the New Apostolic Reformation. And in my view, none of the groups provide a compelling theory of change for a country of over 330 million citizens.
America’s constitutional church-state settlement ought to render moot all such hopes. The framers refused to establish an American church or restrict the people’s free exercise of religion. So really, for all of these religious opponents of liberalism, the heretics of my book, the Constitution and the stubborn reality of pluralism was and remains a fundamental challenge. I hope that, by describing this long counter-tradition, my book reveals that such complaints against liberal order are nothing new. And I hope it suggests that the framers’ rejection of establishment, and vision of religious liberty, is worth defending and preserving.