March 27, 2025
By Julian G. Waller
American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order, by Jerome Copulsky. Yale University Press, 384 pp., $40.00.
Liberalism, postliberalism, illiberalism, anti-liberalism. Christian nationalism, American nationalism, protectionism, national-conservatism, integralism, accelerationism, neoreaction, fascism. Far right, hard right, tech right, trad right, New Right. MAGA, MAHA, Musk. The current era of discontented ideological flux in America is replete with ‘isms’ and broad labels taken from academia, introduced by entrepreneurial thinkers themselves, or emerging from the bubbling churn of borderline schizophrenic online discourse. Sometimes these labels are assigned carefully by thoughtful interlocutors, but just as often tossed around with frustratingly free-wheeling abandon. Every month a new longform article or even book-length treatment on yet another ideological flavor of discontent with the sociopolitical status quo surfaces.
Yet for all the ever-expanding descriptive vastness of tantalizing (and scandalizing) summaries of strange new ideas, one is often left with a perverse sense of unfulfillment. What exactly are we talking about, and why? What lies at the core of this discontent? How can we understand it? How new – or old – is it really? And how exactly should we think about any one of the many, many projects – these scary or previously unfamiliar ‘isms’ – seeking to overturn the current social orders that a surprisingly large number of Americans today seem so impassioned against?
In his wonderfully erudite and happily atheoretical new monograph, American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order, Jerome Copulsky provides an important contribution to these swirling meta-debates and contextualizes contemporary ideational currents in a unique and pleasingly balanced way. In doing so, he manages to (mostly) avoid wading directly into these discussions directly. The words that introduced this review are largely absent from this text – Copulsky is much richer in approach than that.
Rather, he weaves a deeply-sourced and wide-ranging tale of persistent and repeated challenges to the mainstream status quo of America’s social and political orders across the nation’s entire lifespan. In doing so, he finds a sustained pattern in which the motivations for discontent, the nature of critique, and the tenor of radicalism share important resemblances over the years, even as the substance and details have changed remarkably across several centuries of shared, and sometimes tenuous, republican life. And for all this, while his focus is squarely on religion in America, his historical pattern-matching bleeds into a far more thoroughgoing account of contest over state and nation, political and social order, and evolving dynamics therein.
The Heretical American
Copulsky’s book is framed narrowly as an intervention into long-running debates about religion in America. Specifically, whether the American founding was one of secular rationalism or religiously-inspired and perhaps even divinely-countenanced intention, and what that has meant for American politics since. The project of the book is to explore one element of that question: the religiously discontented who have challenged or rejected mainstream interpretations of America’s church-state relationship as it existed at different points in our history. In essence, his subjects are those who engage in active intellectual and political resistance, seeking to revise the generally agreed upon status and reception of religion in American social and political order as it existed in their respective times. These are ultimately “heresies” against the broad, and slowly evolving, political-religious settlement that has grounded the country for over two hundred years.
His eponymous “American Heretics” are therefore thinkers, politicians, activists, and social movements that aligned themselves against the received wisdom of America’s self-understood ordering principles. In many cases, they sought to change – or even reject – the constitutional order of the Founders. In others, to revive and rejuvenate social order along explicitly religious lines, seeking to shift off a perceived path taken by the American state away from the good. He considers these to be challenges to a broad “liberal order.”
There is merit to frontloading the liberal component (not least because so many of these figures inveighed against their own era’s contextually understood “liberalism”). But in many ways, we can better understand these heresies rather as religiously-inflected challengers to a given era’s dominant schema of national identity, to the concept of American nationhood itself, and to the evolving matrix of established social and political order that defines the developing American nation-state. That something like liberalism is itself a constituent piece of the national settlement is in fact both a common through-line within the heretics’ own views (seen negatively) and a common assumption of liberals themselves today (here, positively).
Nowhere is the issue simply a fight over a particular point of theology or denominationalism, but always how religion (and the values, virtues, traditions, and teleological orientations toward the public good it entails) interacts with the evolution, maturation, or degeneration of the American nation and its deep interaction with the state, social order, and regime itself. These aren’t simply, or even primarily, theological heretics – but national heretics.
By highlighting sharp religious critics who weigh in on the state of politics and society, Copulsky ultimately provides an image of a changing nation, defined in part by contests over how religious imperatives interact with the ‘who are we and how should we live’ question. A fundamental issue that is as old as the Revolution and its immediate aftermath, transformed as it was tested in sectional, civil, and ethnocultural strife in the 19th century, and continued evolving over the nominally secularizing 20th century and into the unfolding era of doubt, decay, and reaction that characterizes the early 21st.
In his method of historical inquiry into this grand narrative of discontent with American nationhood as it exists and has existed, Copulsky selects a set of key cases of national heresy across three centuries and explores their motivations, their activities, their factions, and their arguments in great detail. He gives special, if not overriding, attention to their own words – indeed, much of what is so instructive about this book is his insistence in letting his national heretics and influential heresiarchs to speak themselves, while helpfully contextualizing and synthesizing throughout.
The monograph is therefore not only useful as a narrative of a particularly American – and incredibly diverse – tradition of sociopolitical discontent for interested readers. It is perhaps one of the most valuable texts for the current era’s rising cadres of the discontented themselves, as it provides a clearer-eyed survey of the arguments, critical frameworks, and proposed solutions by enterprising heretics to the American Question than nearly anything else in print largely in their own words. They will find similarities and differences that resonate across the ages, and in some ways clearly reemerge in today’s own ideological patterns.
Copulsky is both a fair documenter and very obviously a ‘liberal’ critic of his objects of study, but he has produced an invaluable reference work for those on the other side as well. American Heretics is at the same time a piece of careful academic history, a critical account of the failures and limitations of discontented agitators and mobilizers against the American social and political orders, and a potential tool of ‘postliberal’ ressourcement itself – if they are bold and intellectually interested enough to take up the challenge.
An Array of National Heresies
Copulsky organizes his book through seven distinct groups (and their respective eras) of national heresy. Running from the 1770s to the 2020s, we read chapters on “the loyalist churchmen,” “the covenanters,” “the proslavery theologians,” “the religious amendment movements,” “the confessional tribe,” “the theonomists,” and “postliberals and national conservatives.” Each of these groups did not simply express discontent with the dominant politics of their era from a religious perspective, although they certainly did that.
But they also took to heart the idea that religion, the state, and ultimately the nation were all inextricably bound together in ways dishonored or even betrayed by the given constitutional and social order of the day. Uniting his cases, Copulsky notes that, “for all, religion was a concern of the state and politics fundamentally theological; only the legitimate government would be one that acknowledged the true faith, was governed by the righteous, protected the church, cultivated morality, and directed subjects to their common – and the highest – good” (p.6).
Across all accounts surveyed in the book is a strong implication that every American heretic was united by the clear sense that one could not hold strong religious conviction and assert true neutrality vis-à-vis the state as a stable outcome. In its more hyperbolic mode, the tenor of apocalypticism is unmistakable for many of these groups. In more thoughtful episodes, simply a recognition that the Founders had not quite “built better than they knew,” but rather bequeathed an insufficient institutional and sociocultural legacy to maintain the virtues of what a faithful American republic needed to be.
Throughout, it is clear however that the collected heretics are not merely critiquing liberalism, or a kind of pluralist settlement – although they certainly are. They are challenging the background default of what makes the American nation coherent, virtuous, just, and worth maintaining. It is a question of the nation itself that many of the greatest heresiarchs are most particularly energized by – and by which they seem to gain the most traction in society. It is not coincidental that the religious amendment types of the 19th century (and the ecumenical, anti-communist ‘in-God-we-trust’ variant of the 1950s) or the nationalist oriented theonomists had particularly great success in popularization, while the more purely religious (such as the covenanters) have faded into curiosity.
One reason for the conflation of state and nation, which besets most of the groups here, is the unique American inheritance of a New World-style, settlement-expansionist civic nationalism that was yet tied explicitly to the ‘liberal’ Enlightenment legacy of English-speaking Whigs. For some, “The Declaration of Independence was right, but the Constitution of the United States was wrong.” (p. 54). Indeed, in one accounting “representative democracy is an ordinance of God” (p. 67). For others, the “duty of obedience” which “flowed from one’s fear of God and respect for his commandments,” (p. 36-37) obfuscated clear action.
Copulsky identifies diverse traditions of thought in exploring this inheritance, most of which valued in some way a sense of hierarchy, deference, and right worship as necessary for a undoubtedly experimental commonwealth like the United States. And many of his subjects did essentially claim that the American government and its constitutional format was a kind of infidel regime so long as it did not take on a more forthright defense of religion and its mapping onto the national social and political order.
Much of the narrative poses a challenge to a ‘Whig History’ sort of appraisal of American national development, or the sloughing off of religious tradition into a secularized republic. Critics of American political order predate America itself and are a common thread across well over two hundred years of history. Similarly, while there are repeated failures of these heretical critics to make the institutional changes they seek, the context of their actions throws away any serious claim of a kind of stable liberal-secular-progressive order as core to the republic. Rather, contestation is the norm, and the ‘liberal order’ of many eras would have been consigned to the dirtiest accusations of Christian nationalism today – from Abraham Lincoln to the temperance and suffrage reforms to the Progressive Era and beyond.
Furthermore, the heretics made important gains during the religious amendment era, which kept the issue at the front and found significant popular appeal. It is not surprising that this period would culminate in the anti-communist performative godliness of the 1950s, nor that it would align with the era of immigration restriction, very specifically designed to contour the nation into appropriately patriotic channels of devotion generically, if less explicitly religiously, along the Anglo-Protestant tradition, as Samuel Huntington noted decades ago. Copulsky’s book is a very effective tool at providing insight across divergent elements to the American experience.
Reminders for Liberals & Lessons for Postliberals
The greatest failing of the book comes at its close, as the narrative encroaches on current ideological dynamics and assesses the cohorts of postliberals and national-conservatives that have emerged on the scene in intellectual force since 2016. Here, Copulsky is the least neutral and frankly least charitable across the entire breadth of his book (plausibly even less even-keeled than he is with the morally besmirched “pro-slavery theologians”). His bones to pick magnify, understandably so, but this tonal change mars an otherwise helpfully neutral account of America’s regular discontents with the mainstream.
In this final chapter, the gloves come off. Copulsky scores plenty of punches (Yoram Hazony’s national-conservatism project and his own intellectual output are targets of particularly effective critique) but reminds the non-liberal reader why the majority of the book was such a fresh breath of air. It did not do what every other book on illiberal political thought does when written by a self-understood liberal. Which was what makes it a valuable contribution in the first place. The last chapter undercuts that particular selling point and will unfortunately make it more difficult to make a case to the non-liberal reader.
This is a shame, as Copulsky has produced a monograph well worthy of serious study by all sides in the swirling ideological divides of 2020s America. Far from simply another tired entry in the genre of ‘was America a Christian nation or not,’ he has identified a unique, patterned strain in American intellectual production over the last two hundred years. A diverse, divergent, and distinct crop of substantive critics against the American project, deriving motivation, means, and method from religious belief, and raising discomforting questions about the legitimacy of the constitutional order, the justness of the political order, and the viability of the social and moral order.
In doing so, he has raised the voices of the critics far and away above simple summary and framing. Indeed, it is unlikely the average reader has heard such a pell-mell collection of very different ways to critique the same political settlement spanning over two centuries. To modern-day illiberals, he lays bare some very intriguing connections between past iterations of the same critique. Some of these will be quite uncomfortable, while others may be clarifying or even motivating.
To modern liberals, he reminds them that they inherit a privileged position of being part of the (very successful) national mainstream since the Founding as a general trajectory, but one that has always been contested, always had naysayers, and plays an increasingly dangerous game as it abandons the idea of the nation itself – which that tradition did so much to mold for so long. It is not simply ‘liberal order’ that was being defended against heresies, and it is not simply the abstraction of ‘liberal order’ against which its opponents find motivation.
American Heretics is a fabulous work of targeted narrative intellectual history, designed to engage with modern conversations on religion and society, the place and content of the American nation, and the challenges to a mainstream status quo both proponents and opponents often term ‘liberal.’ Illiberal thinkers and the otherwise discontented should take the book seriously, as there is much to consider across its nearly two-hundred-and-fifty-year span. And liberals would do well to integrate lessons from this book into their own mental maps – the American experience is far more interesting and contested than a 21st century left-progressive ‘Whig History’ allows.
Julian G. Waller is a Professorial Lecturer in Political Science at George Washington University and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Illiberalism Studies Program. All opinions are his own and do not reflect his employers or affiliated organizations.