In his recent book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, John Wilsey looks back to the writing of Peter Viereck and other great conservative minds to understand what it means to live a worthy life in a culture gone mad. On the Law & Liberty Podcast, he joins James Patterson to discuss the difference between that kind of conservatism and a more reactionary extremism, as well as the centrality of free exercise to the American constitutional tradition.

Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer by John Wilsey

James Patterson (00:06):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund. Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson, associate professor of public affairs at the Institute of American Civics here at the University of Tennessee and contributing editor to Law & Liberty. My guest today is John D. Wilsey, professor of church history and philosophy, as well as chair of the Department of Church History and Historical Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Dr. Wilsey has a lengthy bio in which he has many, many accolades and many different books published, but we’re going to be talking about the most important one, which is the most recent, the one that we’re trying to sell today, namely Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer.

(01:33):

John, welcome to the podcast.

John Wilsey (01:36):

Well, thank you so much, James. It’s great to be with you, man.

James Patterson (01:40):

So what is important about religious freedom and why do we need a conservative primer?

John Wilsey (01:45):

Well, religious freedom is a longstanding American tradition. Religious freedom goes back a long way in the American tradition. It goes back to the colonial period. It’s a central conviction of our founding, our national founding, I should say, our constitutional founding. And it has been consistently a core tenet of American constitutionalism and the American concept of rights and liberties for the entire life of our nation. Have Americans always thought about it rightly? No. Have we always applied it rightly? No. But it’s always been a key American tradition. So it’s important from that perspective. It’s also important because it’s true. The state has no jurisdiction over the religious conscience of its citizens.

(02:57):

As the very first English Baptist, Thomas Helwys said to King James I in 1607, I believe, in his treatise that he addressed to James. And I’m paraphrasing here. “You’re the king in matters of the state. In temporal matters, you are my sovereign. But with regard to our standing before God, you and I stand on even ground and you have no jurisdiction over me.” That’s an American tradition and it’s also the truth. So it’s important for those two reasons, at least. We could probably talk about a lot of other important reasons why religious freedom is a necessary conviction in American constitutional and civic tradition. And why we need a conservative primer is because, well, there are a couple reasons for that too. I guess we’re going to spend the whole time talking about that, but in short, conservatives conserve. We get the question as conservatives often, what are you conserving?

(04:03):

We conserve tradition and religious freedom is a core tradition. And we have the blessing of enjoying religious freedom as citizens today. And thus we also have the responsibility to steward that tradition and guard it and hand it down unsullied to the younger generations.

James Patterson (04:26):

What is it about alternative forms of conservatism that make it so hostile to religious freedom? We have a kind of resurgence of a more continental European vision in which the state operates as a kind of guarantor of the church, and as a result, imposes that church in some way on the public. We see this as in your book with reference to Peter Viereck’s “ottentots.” So maybe move us through that concept to explain how that’s not what we’re conserving in this book and why Americans would regard this not as a conservation, but of a kind of revolutionary act.

John Wilsey (05:13):

Yeah. Yeah. In the book, I spend a lot of time talking about Peter Viereck and I did a podcast with John Grove on Peter Viereck several months ago. I’m very interested in him. He had a distinction that he made, a very helpful distinction between the Burkean tradition of conservativism and as you said, the European tradition of conservativism. The European tradition he referred to follows Joseph de Maistre, a counter-revolutionary, counter-French revolutionary thinker, ultraroyalist tendency, a reactionary impulse, and also an authoritarian impulse that’s on the right, but not really conservative, but reactionary. Reactionary would be a better description. Conservatism seeks to conserve. It seeks to guard and protect and steward. Reactionary refers to pursuing a rightist political agenda because you’re mad at something, you’re reacting against something. And that’s what I see now.

(06:26):

That’s what I see from those on the right who are anti-Semitic, who are authoritarian, who want to see establishment, an established church in America and so forth. They’re reacting against revolutionary Marxist and radical leftist agendas and thinking. And to be clear, James, I mean, I think I can speak for you too. I get it. I understand this displeasure at revolutionary leftism. I hate it. I hate it thoroughly. And I’m a dad, and so I want to teach my children how to think critically about a leftist cultural agenda. I get it. But my argument would be that the way to address revolutionary leftism is not to just be aggrieved, to not seek some sort of counter-revolution to overthrow, to not be authoritarian, to not be anti-Semitic, because all those things are right out of the playbook of the left. If we want to fight the left and if we want to come against the left and oppose the left, then why would we want to take a page out of their playbook?

(07:52):

And that’s exactly what the hard right wants to do. So it seems that the answer forward is to retrieve federalism, retrieve tradition, reinvigorate what it means to be an American, what it’s historically meant to be an American. And that’s the project of the book.

James Patterson (08:13):

You might get, let’s say, a good faith response from magisterial Protestants or forms of Catholic postliberals that’ll say, “Well, we used to have established religions in the colonies and for a time after the revolution in places like Connecticut and Massachusetts. How are these not as traditional as religious freedom?”

John Wilsey (08:39):

Yeah. Well, that’s an interesting observation about conservatism. Conservative ideas and positions on various things all started out as being new at some point. So you’re my Catholic friend. In my Protestant and Baptist tradition, we’ve departed from the hymnal and we’ve turned to more contemporary styles. And my joke is to my friends is that I’m not in favor of singing anything in church that is newer than the First Great Awakening.

James Patterson (09:25):

So if it’s from the- The reformation breaks away from Rome. It always seems to creep back. So you guys dumped the censor with the incense, but you brought it back in the smoke machine.

John Wilsey (09:42):

That’s a good one. I hadn’t thought of that one. So people always respond to me by saying, “Well, even old hymns were new at some point.” That’s actually the point I’m getting at.

(09:53):

Capitalism was new at one point and religious freedom or disestablishment, I should say. Religious freedom is not necessarily a new idea. You can trace it all the way back to the New Testament. But disestablishment was new at one point. And just because something is new at one point doesn’t make it not conservative. At this point, it’s old. And the point about tradition is not that it’s eternal, that its sources are an eternity past. The point about tradition is that you have practices and perspectives and mores that have been around long enough to be tested by a whole range of different challenges, and they have emerged stronger than before. And that’s the point. So the last state church to be disestablished was in Massachusetts, in 1832. And for you kids out there, that’s almost 200 years ago. So I think that disestablishment has proven itself and stood the test of time.

(11:00):

Now, that’s going to be a red flag in the face of those who favor establishment, but we can talk about that at that point. But the point that I’m making here is that tradition doesn’t have to emerge from the dawn of creation in order for it to be real tradition to be conserved.

James Patterson (11:19):

Yeah. You start to look at those periods at the end of establishments occurred during the early Republic. And it’s a funny thing where the establishment in Massachusetts broke down because most of the officials that were enshrined in major religious centers in Massachusetts, the congregationalists, had all become Unitarians. And the joke was the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man-hood of man and the neighborhood of Cambridge, right? That’s all the religion belonged to. And so in a way, Madison’s vindicated, his Memorial Remonstrance, that the only thing that establishment did was ensure heterodoxy would emerge by sponsoring one institution over others within one denomination, in this case, Harvard.

John Wilsey (12:23):

Well, we’ve also always struggled with the challenge of religious diversity in America’s career, both as colonies and as a nation, which is another thing that the far right reacts against. Well, they say, “Oh, well, we need to have a homogenous nation. We need to have a homogenous culture and go back to that. ” And that’s where a lot of the “kinism” and things like that come through. But what they miss is that Americans have always had a very diverse civic life going all the way back. So in the revolutionary period, the 13 states represented that the most culturally diverse, or excuse me, the most religiously diverse polity, if you will, in the West, by far. Now one could say that, well, that diversity was all Christian, and for the most part that would be true. But how did Presbyterians look at Episcopalians and Baptists and Quakers?

(13:34):

How did they look at Catholics? They saw them as not … I mean, they saw them, they didn’t see them in the same way that Presbyterians see them now. I can have this conversation with you. I’m a Baptist, you’re a Catholic. We wouldn’t be able to sit and have a civil conversation if this were the eighteenth century, James.

James Patterson (13:52):

No, no. I’d be running for my life, and so would you.

John Wilsey (13:57):

That’s right. Yeah. If we were in Massachusetts, you’d be running for your life. And if we were in France, I’d be running for my life. So we have to think historically about that period of time, the way that they saw each other was as different faiths. One was right and one was wrong. And so Americans have always dealt with diversity and have always dealt with pluralism in some form, in some sense. It’s true, of course, they didn’t have the diversity and pluralism we have now, but their perspective on pluralism was unique in the West. So this is not something new since 1965. This is something that we’ve always dealt with as Americans.

James Patterson (14:49):

One of the most notorious Catholic forces in American history was Tammany Hall in New York City, and at its peak was Boss Tweed, who was a descendant of Scottish Quakers and had an Episcopalian funeral.

(15:10):

So that’s actually something about the “Ottentot” persuasion, which is that what they’re trying to conserve is not a tradition, but a kind of imaginary. Even in the earliest days of colonization, you had Native Americans, of course you had the importation of enslaved Africans, but you also, like in places like New York, you had the Dutch that were already here. There was never really a period of a universal, I guess for some of these people, kind of like Southern English pastoral. And the concern over foreigners not being integrated actually once applied to the Germans, right? Franklin’s nervous that they’re not going to be sufficiently republican in their habits.

John Wilsey (16:02):

Yeah. That lasted all the way well into the twentieth century, suspicion against the Germans. So yeah, all those things are right.

James Patterson (16:13):

So the thing about religious freedom is that it’s also very hard. It’s an element of the United States that Tocqueville comes and observes with astonishment that it’s a complimentary institution both in the constitution, but also in the habits of Americans notices that regardless of religious sector denomination, people adhere to it and that this also facilitates greater political liberty. So how does religious freedom and political freedom work together?

John Wilsey (16:54):

Yeah. Tocqueville has that famous statement where he … I’m going to have to paraphrase it again. You probably have it memorized, but where religion is the first of all political principles in America, that’s not what he said, but I’m talking about that line that he has. He acknowledges the reality of disestablishment and of religious freedom free exercise. But despite that, religion is the first political principle or the first political institution or whatever term that he is. I have to look it up. And from there, he makes the argument that a free people can’t maintain their freedom without religion and without especially the free expression of religion. It’s impossible to do it. And it’s all part of his critique of egalitarianism, the omnipotence of the majority and so forth. All these things that threaten liberty. One of the things that threatens liberty, all forms of liberty in a society is a turn of one’s attention to selfish pursuits, turning away from a civic-mindedness or a care for your neighbors, a care for your locality, your township, and a turn towards just your own personal circle, that is your family or your closest friends.

(18:36):

You become completely obsessed with your material desires and your own personal pleasure and your own personal agendas, and you don’t care about anybody else. That’s a great threat to liberty because you let go of concern or problems of your town. You let go of concern of what stands in the way of the flourishing of your neighbors, which means that you’re more than happy for the government to come in and take over those things, and that’s how tyranny unfolds. And religion does the same thing. Religion takes your mind off of things that are bigger than you, things that are bigger than your own self and your own interests and your own perspective, things that outlast you. Religion points us to the world to which we are going. Religion reminds us that we’re accountable for our conduct and what we say and what we believe. We’re accountable for those things.

(19:42):

Those things don’t just concern us. They concern things bigger than us. Religion reminds us of all those things. And so when we have a more eternal perspective and we look to things that are greater than ourselves, then it causes us to think about other people. It sets us on a trajectory towards the true, the good, and the beautiful, the great transcendentals when we’re thinking about that, which is greater than our own concern. And those things contribute to freedom, but materialism, selfishness, turning away from one’s fellows, those things are short-term gains, but long-term losses. So the necessity for religion to freedom is all part of what Tocqueville is saying about problems with equality. Equality has some good things about it, but equality when set against liberty, equality is always going to lose and liberty is always … Or excuse me, equality is always going to win, and liberty’s always going to lose in that battle.

James Patterson (20:50):

Yeah. It’s an acquired taste, liberty, whereas equality is something that it’s like every child loves sugar. They rush to it. And the idea of the two spirits, the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion being friends in the United States, we often are aware of how the spirit of liberty, that’s what we would consider the left-wing republican, not the party, but the sort of French revolutionary republicans. And we often overlook that the spirit of religion that opposes liberty is that “Ottentot” opposition. And so when a person who’s maybe younger or more populist in inflection reads this book, they might be like, oh, this guy probably is like a boomer with these high-flying ideas when he doesn’t know what it’s like out there for the rest of us. Is it just more of a personal experience or motivation? Is it an emotional problem where this kind of argument doesn’t land with people of maybe a certain generation or a certain affect?

(22:03):

Yeah,

John Wilsey (22:04):

I’ve thought a lot about that. And I’m going to say something controversial again.

James Patterson (22:10):

Yes. But in this pastoral tone, and so it’s hard to know-

John Wilsey (22:17):

I’m going to try to be very pastoral. Yes. I’m going to try to be very pastoral and try to be very sensitive. A criticism like that is simply an ad hominem critique. I’m just going to write you off because I don’t like you and I’m going to find something about you that I don’t like because I don’t like what you’re saying. I’ve already have my mind made up that I don’t like what you’re going to say, so I’m going to write you off because I’m going to find something about you I don’t like. And so they’re going to say, this charge would be, okay, you don’t know what time it is. I don’t know how many times I’ve been told this that I don’t know what time it is. It’s funny that people say that to me because I have two daughters. One is in college and one’s going to go to college next year or two years from now because she’s a junior.

(23:02):

I’m very concerned about their life

(23:06):

And the world that they’re going to. I am not experiencing it. I already did that. I already transitioned from college to a career, but I have two children that I have a first order interest in that transition that they’re going to make, and I’m going to be actively engaged and involved in their transition to help them along. And that’s going to require time. It’s also going to require financial resources. It’s going to require work on my part. So to say that I know nothing about that, if someone were to say that to me is simply just ad hominem. And ad hominem arguments in general are easy to make because they stem from an immaturity, a childishness, the wrong assumption that if I throw a rock at you, that I have the upper hand, that I actually have the better part of the argument if I can throw a rock at you because you’re not worthy to even be an interlocutor, to even be a discussant. You’re a subhuman.

(24:31):

You’re an idiot. You don’t even know what you’re talking about. We shouldn’t even have this discussion with you because you’re a cretin. That just stems from immaturity. And our culture as a whole is an immature culture. The culture is an adolescent culture. It’s a culture that values feelings and experience above reason, evidence, and patient deliberation. It’s a culture that values instant gratification over long-term, hardware gains that you might not even see in your own lifetime, but you don’t do it for yourself. You don’t struggle and strive for good things for yourself. You do so for your children and your grandchildren, knowing that you may not even see the promise fulfilled. And one other thing about our culture is that our culture is an aggrieved culture, both on the left and on the right. Grievances and obsession with grievances is something that stems from self-hatred. We don’t like ourselves, so we’re going to try to find a way to make everybody miserable along with ourselves instead of seeking to deal with whatever it is that ails us, whatever the problem is that standing in our way.

(25:59):

So critiques like that, I have no use. They’re useless critiques. I have no use for a critique like that. And as soon as a person makes the critique that I don’t know what time it is or someone doesn’t know what time it is, well, the conversation now is over. I can’t have a conversation with a person like that.

James Patterson (26:13):

There’s a peculiarity to that line that you’re describing where the sense of grievance is often linked to a sense of powerlessness that liberalism is doing this to us and we cannot stop it. We have to wait for it to collapse on its own contradictions and then we’ll be able to create a kind of post-liberal or a Christian nationalist kind of-

John Wilsey (26:41):

That’s when our time has come.

James Patterson (26:43):

Yeah, that’s right.

John Wilsey (26:44):

And they want that. They hope for that. They hope that that will happen.

James Patterson (26:48):

But it doesn’t, and so they just do nothing.

John Wilsey (26:51):

Yeah, except throw rocks at everybody.

James Patterson (26:54):

Yeah. And so they don’t get policy outcomes that they want because they’ve abdicated their role in participating in politics because they talk themselves into abdicating such a position. And it’s very strange because you’ll get a lot of discussion on this Ottentot position about limiting the rights of women. You mentioned kinism, this sort of softer version of racialism that often is hiding a harder one. And there’s not a lot of talk about what used to be the preoccupation of churches when they were more confident, politically participating institutions like opposition to gambling, which is like proliferated, right?

John Wilsey (27:47):

Yeah, right.

James Patterson (27:49):

What happened in church opposition to gambling?

John Wilsey (27:51):

Getting back to Peter Viereck.

(27:55):

He wrote a book in 1956. It’s called Unadjusted Man in the Age of Overadjustment. And I talked about this in the book, and I remember talking with John Grove about this in my interview with him. He talked about overadjustment to the culture as opposed to being unadjusted to the culture. He begins the book by quoting Henry David Thoreau. Henry David Thoreau said, “We don’t ride on the railroad. The railroad rides on us.” And the point of that was, of course, this inordinate confidence that we’ve placed on technology and on technological wonders to solve all our problems, and that’s overadjustment to the culture. That’s an example, I should say, of overadjustment to the culture. It takes many different forms. Veireck is advocating for an unadjustment to the culture. Christians might call it counterculturalism to be counter to the culture. And when we place inordinate confidence in politics to solve all our problems, we’re being overadjusted to the culture.

(29:11):

When we place all our confidence in AI or in the wonders of modern technology to solve our problems, what we’re doing is we’re placing all the value on efficiency. Efficiency is the end goal of all of life. And is that really true or is pursuing a virtuous life, is that maybe a better goal than the pursuit of efficiency, for example, or the pursuit of political power? Is there anything more worthy for us to pursue than political power? What if we don’t ever have political power? Is that the end of life for us? Is there nothing left for us if we don’t have political power or cultural power? I’m sure there’s something else out there and surely there’s examples in the past that we can look to of people that didn’t have political or cultural power, but still had a wonderful life and still had a life that was worth living.

(30:11):

Surely there’s some example out there, but when we place that inordinate confidence in those things, we’re overadjusted to the culture and the church is most certainly as a rule, as a general statement. There are exceptions to this, but the church is definitely, I think, overadjusted to the culture.

James Patterson (30:30):

The overadjustment you’re describing here does make sense of maybe the adoption of a kind of weird version of identity politics, right? A kind of Protestant or Catholic identity politics almost to emulate what they see the left doing. You were earlier describing just a minute ago you were describing the counterculture. In this case, it’s more of an echo than a choice. I mean, how do you combat this? It’s almost as if so much of this is the result of a kind of social media-based approach. Do you escape social media or do you try to baptize it?

John Wilsey (31:13):

I think it would help. I think social media is not a completely bad thing, but social media does have the tendency to cause us to be overadjusted to the culture. Social media is not real life. And when we consider it to be real life, we are now overadjusted to the culture. If we can recognize that social media is not real, then I think it can be useful. But if we think that it’s real, and in other words, that is to say that when I make a statement on social media to my followers, I’m assuming a number of things. One, that everyone of my followers is reading what I’m saying, which they are not. That number two, that every one of my followers cares about what I’m saying, which that’s not true. That number three, that what I’m saying is going to make a difference in the lives of my hundred followers, that they’re all going to do what I tell them to do.

(32:21):

And lastly, that what I say on social media is going to attract more followers and build a platform. All those are wrong assumptions. And when we assume all those things, we assume that social media is real. But actually, here’s what’s really the case. When you post something on social media, first of all, nobody cares. Nobody’s reading it. Remember when social media first came on the pike? Did you have a MySpace account?

James Patterson (32:50):

I tried and could not. I didn’t adopt a social media. Somebody tried to give me a Friendster account once too, and I was like, oh wow. Wow. That really makes me. I don’t remember Friendster, but I only fully achieved-

John Wilsey (33:01):

You must be like 150 years old …

James Patterson (33:09):

You’re older than me! Oh my gosh. No, I started on Facebook.

John Wilsey (33:12):

Yeah. I started on Facebook too because my eighth graders that I was teaching at the time set up a Facebook account for me, and I didn’t even know I had it until two years after they had done it. And what was it? Remember what it was for? It was for fun. It was just for fun. You put together a little profile, you put some silly pictures up there, you tag your friends. You remember poking your friends? I mean, it was all for fun. And it’s turned into this thing that is now real, and it’s not real. So we could start with that to recognize this isn’t real. Now it can become real when you get fired from your job because you said something on X. It’s pretty real at that point. But even that, how many people’s lives have been destroyed because of a moment of weakness or an indiscreet moment?

(34:10):

I mean, we all have that. We all have indiscretions from time to time in what we say. And then social media amplifies those things and will destroy your life. That’s not how real life works. If I say something indiscreet in a public setting, people might gasp and be shocked, but I’m not going to lose my job necessarily because of it. I say the same thing on Twitter, and I really am getting fired, and I’m really getting canceled all over the country because things have a tendency to work their way through the cycles of social media. So social media is a terrible thing for our country. It’s a terrible thing for our civic life because it’s not real and people acknowledge it as being real and it’s not.

(35:01):

Another thing too is that we just need to learn how to listen to people and to have dialogue. These people on the far right, they’re not just abstract like Stephen Wolfe. I mean, I’ll bring his name up. I personally like him. He’s always been very kind to me. I was at a roundtable conference with him a couple years ago. It was four days. I got to know him. He’s a nice guy. I like him and I think he likes me. I’ve seen him. I’ve run into him since at various things. We always have friendly conversations. We’ve never had a cross word between us. He’s a really nice guy. Some of those guys at American Reformer are like Timon Cline. I would consider Timon a friend, but Timon and I don’t see eye to eye on everything. But the thing about with Timon, Timon and I can disagree and do so recognizing that at the end of the day, we’re going to be friends.

(36:00):

We’re committed to a friendship here, even though we disagree. And instead of just throwing ad hominem arguments at each other. And it’s often said that civility is a lost art and civility is a sign of weakness and you’re a beta male if all you do is talk about civility. But the Bible describes … I mean, the Lord Jesus describes … I mean, He has a word for that: “Blessed are the meek,” where your strength, your intellectual and even physical power are under control. The Greeks had a word for that. Cicero had a word for that. Decorum, temperance. A little exercise of virtue goes a long way, James. And we just don’t have that ability when we’re overadjusted to the culture.

James Patterson (36:46):

On a personal podcast I do with Tom Howes, we had a woman who does a lot of engagement with the Catholic postliberals, and she made sure her name’s Victoria Holmes. She’s at The Dispatch. And she said something that’s always stuck in my head, which is that it’s not just an ideology, it’s a content strategy. And in a way, like sitting with your book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer from Eerdmans. It’s a contemplative act, right? It requires … You have a really lovely chapter that opens with the discussion of Dante. So it requires thinking about those things as well, these kinds of eternal poetic issues and content strategy on social media is designed to capture attention. And the best way to do that is to adopt increasingly extreme positions that exceed what we’re supposed to believe if we’re serious about being good American Republicans with little art.

(37:58):

Right. Well, the book is Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer. The author is Dr. John Wilsey. Thank you so much for coming on the Law & Liberty Podcast.

John Wilsey (38:12):

Thank you, James. I sure am honored to be with you today.

James Patterson (38:16):

Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.