Month: August 2025

The American Right seems intent on proving John Stuart Mill’s infamous remark that “conservatives are the stupid party.” Not only is the populist movement in Washington foundering because of infighting and general boorishness, its intellectual equivalent in the so-called “postliberal” movement also seems to be descending into anger and what Lionel Trilling once called “irritable mental gestures.” Neither force seems to be the engine of cultural renewal that they promised to be.

John Wilsey’s new book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, offers a beautiful alternative: a vision to which conservatives might genuinely aspire. At the very outset of the short treatise, he turns to the wisdom of Alexis de Tocqueville. And rightly so—with the possible exceptions of Publius and Abraham Lincoln, no other political thinker has more fully understood the deepest meaning of America. Wilsey highlights especially his contention that our civilization is the result of a productive tension between two spirits: the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty.

At present, both of these spirits are at great risk of vanishing altogether. Religion has been in decline for quite some time, and what Robert Nisbet called the “omnicompetent state” continues to grow unabated. Wilsey’s book, however, is useful precisely because it can help us understand the civilizational resources we still possess. In this slim volume, he teaches us that we cannot conserve Permanent Things such as religion or liberty by seizing power or imposing our will on either our friends or our enemies—rather, their preservation depends above all on love.

Wilsey’s treatment of Tocqueville’s “two spirits” put me in mind of something similar that the Frenchman’s great mentor, Edmund Burke, once wrote. In the Reflections on the Revolution in France, the Irishman too claimed that “all the good things which are connected with manners, and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.” To his conservative mind, it was the gentleman who could defend liberty by embodying everything that was best about his society.

For Burke, the gentleman enjoys a kind of “exalted freedom” through the cultivation of the moral imagination. The Western literary and philosophic tradition furnishes his mind and heart with certain chivalric concepts, perhaps most poetically described as the “unbought grace of life,” according to which he can govern himself. The French Revolution was dangerous insofar as it sought to banish this chivalry from public life and extinguish the glory of Europe. Burke hoped instead that the rule of the best men could be united with an elevation of sentiment which could prevent abuses of power.

Although to American ears this defense of the gentleman may sound hopelessly aristocratic, there was in fact something deeply democratic about Burke’s vision. “Without force, or opposition,” Burke wrote, the spirit of chivalry “subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a domination vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by manners.” The generous aristocracy Burke and his followers prized was founded, as a matter of fact, on the Christian doctrine of universal equality before God.

Wilsey’s own term for this way of life is “aspirational conservatism.” He holds—rightly—that this kind of vision can “defend the best of the American character” because it can help us see the fundamental harmony between religion and liberty. But it is unfortunately manifest that there is very little aspirational about the entity we call the “conservative movement” today. Despite their leaders’ endless claims that we are on the precipice of a “new golden age,” the dominant factions have proved time and time again that they are incapable of conserving anything at all. As Wilsey puts it, “The rightism of contemporary times is populist, obsessed with politics, and fueled by social-media-inspired outrage in a similar style as their leftist counterparts.” Reactionary rage is no substitute for genuine cultural renewal.

Wilsey’s finest explication of this problem with contemporary rightism is his critique of Stephen Wolfe’s Case for Christian Nationalism. Although he concedes Wolfe and other Christian nationalists are right to perceive growing forces of tyranny and immortality, he also explains that their attempt to construct an ideology to fight it is misguided at best. Whereas aspirational conservatives seek to preserve and enjoy the Western heritage, Christian nationalists and other right-wing ideologues instrumentalize and weaponize it.

At one point, Wilsey quotes Wolfe’s precise definition of Christian nationalism: “a totality of national action, consisting of civil laws and social customs, conducted by a Christian nation as a Christian nation, in order to procure for itself both earthly and heavenly good in Christ.” These kinds of hyper-logical systems emerging right-wing ideologues construct tend to reduce religion into a mere weapon to beat back modernity. Theirs is a deeply rationalistic approach to politics, which undermines sentiments at the heart of the institutions they claim to be defending.

And that is precisely why Wilsey criticizes it. Rather than upholding the aspirational conservatism at the heart of American civilization, Wolfe and others attempting to create a rightist ideology embrace the same kind of totalitarian impulses that our country stood against in the twentieth century. They may profess to love “the nation” as an abstract category, but they are hardly patriots who love our republic’s particular history or principles—that kind of love is too complicated to withstand their totalizing vision. Christian nationalists have far more in common with philodoxers and ideologues such as Hegel and Marx than statesmen and philosophers such as Lincoln or Plato. As Wilsey writes, “There is not much daylight between Wolfe’s counterrevolutionary method of statecraft and leftist revolutionary models.”

The errors of ideology also explain why the contemporary right has become so vulgar and ungentlemanly. Content to play in the realm of what Richard Weaver called “god-terms and devil-terms,” they utterly lack the virtue of humility Burke saw as essential to civilized life. Their demagoguery may, on occasion, secure them a little temporary power in elections—but it does not inspire the genuine conversion of the heart needed to turn enemies into friends for the sake of the common good. Hyper-rationalized moralism cannot maintain what Lincoln described as “our bonds of affection” or restore “the better angels of our nature” he spoke about so eloquently—nor revive a sense of our common nationhood. Look no further than the faction’s behavior on social media; rather than persuading anyone of the goodness of their vision, they spend their time typing away at insults and ephemeral arguments no one can win. In short, the ideologues of the right have destined themselves to play the role of not-so-beautiful losers in American politics.

What is most necessary in this hour of decline, then, is a conservatism that can help citizens aspire to be gentlemen again. At its best, the twentieth-century movement achieved this. William F. Buckley Jr.’s courtly social graces on Firing Line captivated audiences and inspired imitators. Russell Kirk’s romanticism cast a spell over the minds and hearts across Middle America—including Ronald Reagan’s. The genuine renewal these figures promoted is possible again, and it is to Wilsey’s great credit that his book draws our attention back to this prospect.

In good Burkean fashion, imagination is the heart of Wilsey’s conservative project. Citing the example of George Washington—America’s finest gentleman-statesman—he argues that we need to find better ways of “catechizing” citizens and statesmen alike. The General was able to achieve all he did because he was “formed by books” of the Western canon that taught him something about “the relationship of the eternal to the temporal.” He came to inwardly possess a series of images that informed the sense of the Good Life that guided his political action. Aspirational conservatism seeks to remind the people of these “internal philosophical foundations,” rather than promote “an external pragmatism” which values power above all else.

Throughout the book, Wilsey looks to the oft-neglected Peter Viereck as an exemplar of this aspirational conservatism. Unlike the activists who would largely determine the direction of the postwar Republican party, Viereck was a historian and poet—a man of letters first and foremost. He wrote to move his readers’ hearts. Aspiring to be a gentleman in the Burkean sense of the term, Viereck understood his own conservatism not as a tool to win elections but rather as a way of life. In this sense, we might encourage young people to look to thinkers like Viereck as models to imitate.

Viereck was also, admittedly, an eccentric. He rarely showed up to teach his classes on time, wore a scarf year-round, and could be prickly in ways that made him difficult to work with. But Wilsey sees this strangeness as an important aspect of aspirational conservatism:

[Viereck’s] eccentricities, bizarre as they were, reflected the emphasis he placed on the individual personality over mindless conformity, which is deeply important to the conservative disposition. In our own culture, which is too often obsessed with mindless conformity, a professor like Viereck probably would just be fired, and that would be that. Our times are blander and our skies greyer in the absence of such eccentric geniuses, people of personality. Alas we are the poorer.

Aspirational conservatism, then, aims at redeeming personality from the prevailing culture of dehumanization. Its goals are bigger than politics, even a politics of freedom. In Reflections, for example, Burke acknowledged that “liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind,” but he also warned that he could not judge it a good if it were “stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.” We must, therefore, place the first emphasis on preserving a culture of elevation.

That is not to say, however, that Viereck entirely avoided politics in his own day, or that aspirational conservatives should avoid it altogether now. Wilsey explains that his political engagement was largely a “fight for a private life.” He wanted to contend against the choking consumerism of a godless culture and the despotism of the total state, to create a space in which human beings had the liberty to flourish according to their created purpose. For the aspirational conservative, politics is not merely a contest for power but rather a contest for dignity.

The Southern agrarian M. E. Bradford once articulated this well in an essay of his own on the Duke of Wellington as “The Last Great Englishman.” Like Washington, the Anglo-Irish soldier consciously shaped his life according to a gentleman’s perception of the Permanent Things. “Indeed, because he was an antique Englishman, because Napoleon and imperialism hidden under rhetoric offended his inmost self,” Bradford wrote, “Wellington was able to recognize his campaigns as ‘war to the knife’ and therefore, with grace and quietude, to communicate his own inflexible view of their desperate significance to the men who marched beneath his banner.” When freedom is at stake and dignity is on the line, the gentleman is willing to fight.

This is perhaps why conservatives have seen the most success in recent years fighting for religious liberty. Secular liberalism poses genuine threats to our natural right to worship freely—the most overt recent example, of course, being the government-mandated shutdown of churches during the coronavirus pandemic. The good news, of course, is that the foundations of the American political tradition are strong enough to resist those threats. As Wilsey puts it, “We support the separation of church and state, not because we want to empower the state against the church or redefine religious liberty as a tame and lifeless ‘freedom of worship,’ but for the sake of free religious exercise resulting in the security of liberty for all.” In recent years, at least, the Supreme Court has consistently upheld Americans’ First Amendment rights against the most aggressive abuses, and public opinion generally opposes them as well. Even the pandemic-era restrictions were widely opposed and eventually rolled back. Whatever extremisms lurk in the background of American politics, the foundational principle of religious liberty remains strong.

To put it another way, recent victories on these issues prove that aspirational conservatism just works. Unlike the brittle electoral wins and media bluster of populism, these are concrete successes conservatives can fully celebrate. This realistic politics of freedom—not the rationalistic politics of authoritarianism that too many on the right now embrace—provides the space aspirational conservatives need to go about the business of cultural renewal. It enables us to reform institutions that are straying from their missions or build new ones altogether.

But in a larger sense, as I believe Wilsey would acknowledge, conservative victories against secularism in these religious liberty issues have a metaphysical import. As he puts it towards the end of the book, “the consciousness of God is vital to human nature.” Secular ideologues have sought to degrade our perception of the divine, but the structure of American freedom itself revolts against their efforts. “In a democracy where equality of conditions is the norm, religion is necessary to liberty because it reminds citizens that they are not laws unto themselves,” Wilsey writes, summarizing the central insight of Democracy in America. “Put simply, Tocqueville found that the consciousness of God and the recognition of human fallibility and limitations contributed to ordered liberty by restraining political passions.”

As conservatives continue the fight for religious liberty, and for the life of the republic, we would do well to look to John Wilsey and Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer as a model. This is a serious work of scholarship from a true gentleman—something our movement sorely needs in such desiccated times.

This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at a panel on the book during the 2025 meeting of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters.

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?

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.

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.