Review of John D Wilsey’s Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer

Alexis de Tocqueville, during his 1831-1832 tour of America, observed a distinctive balance in American life — the tension between liberty and religion. Such a tension serves as the foundation of John D. Wilsey’s latest work, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, where the author argues in favor of this distinctively American dynamic rooted in the conservative tradition. 

Wilsey bookends this work with introductory and concluding chapters surveying in detail the tension between religion and liberty while the intervening chapters discuss how the two relate to a properly ordered sense of imagination, nationality, liberty, history, and religion. All the while, the author lays out the path of “aspirational conservatism,” defined in contradistinction to the reactionary tides of our day. 

Wilsey regularly invokes famed conservative voices such as Peter Viereck, an often overlooked contemporary of Russell Kirk. Indeed, it is Viereck’s definition of conservatism that Wilsey works from throughout this volume: 

The conservative principles par excellence are proportion and measure; self-expression through self-restraint; preservation through reform; humanism and classical balance; a fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux; and a fruitful obsession for unbroken historical continuity. These principles together create freedom, a freedom built not on the quicksand of adolescent defiance but on the bedrock of ethics and law.

This sense of balance, restraint, reform, and particularly the “permanent beneath the flux,” Wilsey suggests, is the very essence of aspirational conservatism. Conservatives are not those who, despite Buckley’s aphorism, “Stand athwart history yelling stop.” Rather, they are those who accept inevitable changes as they come, though with a skeptical and prudential sensibility towards the novel and untried. 

To illustrate the idea of reactionary conservatism, Viereck tells the story of the king of Piedmont-Sardinia in the early 19^th century who devolves into madness, incessantly muttering the Italian word for 88,  “ottantott,” over and over. The king believed his problems would vanish if he could simply go back to 1788, just before the French Revolution. It is this kind of reactionary ottantott conservatism that Wilsey contends against in this work. 

There is a bit of an ottantott in all of us, nostalgically wishing to return somewhere better. Yet, this is not the disposition of an Edmund Burke or Russell Kirk. While Wilsey acknowledges the merits of postliberalism, as defined by opposition to classical liberalism and political thought post-John Locke generally, he argues that such a movement is ultimately futile. The bulk of Wilsey’s critique is focused on “Magisterial Christian Nationalism” as articulated in Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism. Though the weaknesses of classical liberalism are “real,” Wilsey argues that Christian nationalism goes too far in its correctives. In their ottantottism, Christian nationalism destroys the delicate American balance of religion and liberty described by Tocqueville in Democracy in America. Like a good Southern Baptist, Wilsey closes chapter four with an exhortation: “The only thing standing between us and despotism is a citizenry that is committed to the conservation of the best of Western and American civilization.” 

As Tocqueville argues and Wilsey reiterates, it is America’s religious consciousness as distinct from any law-making body that has sustained our democracy, allowing neither a slide towards a tyrannical single ruler nor a despotism of the majority. Wilsey even argues that no civilization can endure without “acknowledging [God] and understanding his ways.” However, conservatism is an experiment in ordered liberty. Thus, we must rightly order our affections for God and country. Patriotism — love of country — is a truly good thing. However, essential to this rightly ordered love is the distinction found in Augustine’s City of God, where the City of God represents those who love and serve God above all, guided by faith, hope, and charity, while the City of Man is marked by self-love and the pursuit of earthly power.

For Wilsey, Magisterial Christian Nationalism fails to rightly order the City of God and the City of Man. In fact, it is more consistent with G.W.F. Hegel’s political philosophy, which argues the state is “the actualization of the good [and] the final end of human existence.” Though Hegel’s notion of the transcendent differs from that of the Christian nationalists, their reasoning is the same. Thus, “Wolfe’s model bears the substance of Hegelian statism, even though he refracted it through a Reformed Protestant lens.” Conservatism, acknowledging the fallenness of man, realizes that the concentration of power in Wolfe’s “Christian Prince” is a recipe for “authoritarianism at best, and totalitarianism at worst.”

Though Wolfe is right to critique the failures of liberalism, Wilsey argues that Christian nationalism is not the answer. Rather, the conservative approach is to strike a balance between religion and liberty, holding such ideals in tension. This balance is a distinctly American concept, having allowed for political liberty in conjunction with some of the greatest spiritual revivals in history. Tocqueville saw that America’s strength is its ability to harmonize the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty. Thus, the response of the true Christian conservative today is not to destroy this balance by saving religion from liberty via top down enforcement. Rather, it is to order our lives as aspirational conservatives by living out our prepolitical ideals, rightly ordering our affections, and standing fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free, being not entangled again with the yoke of bondage (Galatians 5:1). In doing so, we preserve that delicate harmony between the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty that has long defined the American experiment.