No Love Lost for Heretics

Brad East reviews Jerome E. Copulsky’s “American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order.”

By Brad EastJuly 30, 2025

• Politics

• Religion

CHRISTIANITY HAS NEVER been certain of its place in the United States. True, from the beginning, it has been more or less acknowledged as the state religion. In fact, the nation’s frontier spirit seized the faith and multiplied it a hundredfold: in the time between George Washington and Abraham Lincoln alone, the former colonies sprung forth Methodists, Mormons, Adventists, and Stone-Campbellites. The US is infamous for its energetic, fissiparous, and entrepreneurial religiosity, a religiosity essentially Protestant in style, if not always in substance.

At the same time, the Constitution is conspicuous in its failure to mention Christ, scripture, or even a generic deity. The government is said to derive its powers from the consent of the governed, not from any transcendent source. The voice of the people supersedes, or perhaps constitutes, the mandate of heaven. Lacking formal establishment or official preeminence, therefore, American Christians have had to rely on the ambient culture, social activism, voting, and sheer numbers to maintain a dominant presence in public affairs. Anxiety about the decline of that presence is itself a long-running measure of Christian involvement in, acceptance of, and alienation from the American project.

It is this third category, the politically alienated, that forms the subject of Jerome E. Copulsky’s recent book American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order (2024). Specifically, Copulsky considers seven groups of Christians who have dissented from the American consensus, in part or in whole. Some rejected democracy; others, disestablished religion; still others, liberal modesty with respect to human nature and the common good. All of them marshaled arguments and movements to reform, repair, renew, or replace the given constitutional order. Copulsky calls his book a “heresiography” of the individuals, ideas, and institutions dedicated to these aims, since they understood themselves to be “theological-political adversaries of the American order” and, thus, “American heretics.” Having departed from political orthodoxy, they stood under liberal anathema. They stand there still.

Copulsky has a few reasons for giving these figures attention. The first is that “heretical” Christian politics have been resurgent in the last decade. In response, this book offers a rough genealogy or taxonomy of similarly illiberal and religious interventions going back to the nation’s founding. The second reason is that understanding this history might aid in “the dispute between those who insist that America was founded as a ‘Christian nation’ and those who maintain that the Founders intended the country to be a ‘secular republic.’” Insofar as the American mainstream comprises these two poles, Copulsky wants opposed factions to see how much they have in common—not least a pious reverence for the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the ideas and intentions that animate them.

In effect, Copulsky wants to redraw the boundaries so that if you affirm these things, then it follows as a matter of course that you are orthodox (the American dogma lives loudly in you). Beyond these borders, by contrast, are the unorthodox, whose faith in the founding documents is incomplete or dubious. Such people are heretics. And in every age, orthodoxy has known just what to do with those who espouse heresy.

The third reason for the book, unstated by Copulsky but clear to this reader, is to see “heresy” not as marginal to American politics but as part and parcel of it. In other words, American heretics are no less mainstream than true believers. It’s been a mess from the start. The argument didn’t conclude in 1776 or 1789—that’s when it began. And ever since, heretics have been at the center of the fractious disputation that is our politics, preaching their doctrines and hawking their wares without interruption.

Some of these heretics may be familiar to you: English loyalists and proslavery Confederates, Catholic reactionaries and postliberal nationalists. Others may not, such as the Scottish Covenanters who loved their adoptive country, refused to swear an oath of loyalty to it, abhorred the institution of slavery, and agitated for an amendment to the Constitution declaring the government subordinate to the supreme authority of the risen Christ.

Copulsky is at his best in the first four chapters, which bring the narrative up to Dwight Eisenhower. Here he leads readers by the hand through bitter disputes, theological subtleties, and political agitations either forgotten or overlooked by popular accounts. I appreciated in particular his representation of both sides of two different arguments: one between loyalists and patriots, the other between strict Covenanters and New Lights, who deemed American government “good enough.” Copulsky makes clear to contemporary readers why the American founding would have been bewildering to Christians of all sorts living at the time; its rupture with traditional doctrines of political order was profound, and in the face of radical change, devout clergymen sought earnestly to keep faith with God, scripture, tradition, and king—if not always in that order.

As for the Covenanters, Copulsky is right to argue that we should hold them in memory as the nation’s first conscientious objectors. On pain of conscience, they could not swear allegiance to the nation, but their gratitude for religious freedom and their moral passion against injustice were second to none. Copulsky notes, “In 1800, the Reformed Presbytery disallowed a slaveholder from being in communion with the church.” Three years later, a pastor from this church named Samuel B. Wylie penned a book that castigated the US government for being (in Copulsky’s words) “an infidel regime,” even as it indicted the country for being “strangely inconsistent” in declaring all men free while “doom[ing] a certain portion of them to hopeless bondage, and subject[ing] them to the wanton barbarity of savage and inhuman masters, who, in many instances, treat their brutes with more tenderness.” If Wylie was a heretic, so much the worse for orthodoxy.

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American Heretics brought to mind two quotes as potential epigraphs, each of which sheds light on the problems that beset the book’s final three chapters. The first is an aphorism written by the German scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg in the waning years of Washington’s final term as president: “Would it not be a good thing if in say the year 1800 we were to assume that theology is concluded and forbid theologians to make any further discoveries?” Copulsky, for one, would be grateful.

The second quote comes much later and runs a bit longer. A little under 20 years ago, Mark Lilla opened his book The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West with the following words:

We are disturbed and confused. We find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men, stirring up messianic passions that leave societies in ruin. We assumed that this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong. […]

The ambition of [modern] philosophy was to develop habits of thinking and talking about politics exclusively in human terms, without appeal to divine revelation or cosmological speculation. The hope was to wean Western societies from all political theology and cross to the other shore. What began as a thought-experiment thus became an experiment in living that we inherited. Now the long tradition of Christian political theology is forgotten, and with it memory of the age-old human quest to bring the whole of human life under God’s authority.

The first question to ask of this passage is Who? Who is disturbed and confused? Who had hoped to rid politics of God? And who has forgotten Christian political theology? Theologian Stanley Hauerwas once remarked about this passage: “I am more than happy to be identified with the ‘fanatics’ because by being so identified I may at least be able to avoid the arrogance of Lilla’s ‘we.’”

Unfortunately, Copulsky follows this pronominal tic without irony or apology. To offer just one example: “Our engagement with [America’s] theological-political heretics has the salutary effect of challenging us to reflect on the origins and limitations of our own commitments. Interpreting their dreams of order may help us more profoundly appreciate our own.” Nowhere, however, does Copulsky delineate the orthodox presuppositions that inform his perspective (or, apparently, his imagined readers). Moreover, he inadvertently reinforces the very distinction—outside and inside, heresy and dogma, marginal and mainstream—that his book successfully deconstructs. It turns out that the orthodox are right in virtue of being insiders just as the heretics are wrong in virtue of being outsiders: a perfect petitio principii.

Yet far more than an intellectual designation, “heretic” is a function and tool of social hygiene, a way of pronouncing who belongs and who does not. Once pronounced, the reasons no longer matter. The guilty lie under the ban. “Anathema” does not mean wrong. It means accursed.

The chief problem with American Heretics, then, is that it is one long exercise in begging the question. Readers will look in vain for arguments defending or establishing Copulsky’s views. He leaves them mostly unspoken, and only occasionally, through insinuations and ingratiating asides, makes them known. The result is of a piece with recent approaches to political and intellectual history that consist entirely of quotation and paraphrase, the bulk of it introduced with a smirk and capped by a sneer. Call it the passive-aggressive style in Trump-era historiography. The author conspires with readers to ogle and gawk at the strange wrong-thinkers on display without ever finding it within themselves to strike up a conversation or ask an honest question. The one thing they know in advance is that they have nothing to learn from the encounter.

Without question, the low point of the book is when Copulsky purports to find in Israeli American political philosopher Yoram Hazony’s work “clear parallels to the arguments of the proslavery theologians.” This, because Hazony wrote that the Bible “says nothing about our being by nature perfectly free and equal.” Copulsky goes on: “One wonders how Hazony would manage the problem that the same Bible that teaches all people are created in the image of God and celebrates the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian servitude also countenances and regulates the institution of human bondage.” One does wonder, doesn’t one?

The book wears its lack of charity like a badge of honor. For this reason, I found myself wishing I were in better hands, including Lilla’s. Lilla may presume an “us” and a “them,” but his virtues as an interpreter far outweigh this minor vice. His readings, for example, of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault—intellectual foes all—are generous, patient, and eager to discover why someone might find their ideas attractive. The same goes for Albert Murray on James Baldwin, Matthew Rose on Oswald Spengler, Christopher Hitchens on Allan Bloom, Clive James on Evelyn Waugh, Roger Scruton on Theodor Adorno, George Scialabba on Ivan Illich, Tony Judt on Leszek Kołakowski, or Christopher Caldwell on Wolfgang Streeck. These are men of the Left and of the Right treating their ideological foes with care and respect, giving their ideas serious consideration. Why? For one, because they know that by doing so, they may happen upon insights they would otherwise lack. For another, because one cannot win a fight without sizing up one’s opponent. It is regrettable that Copulsky did not follow their lead.

In the end, my objection is not to Copulsky’s liberalism, much less to his legitimate concerns about integralism and dominion theology and a host of other issues. My objection is that readers who share his political commitments will close his book utterly confirmed in every one of their priors, not once challenged to reconsider why they believe what they do, and above all, never tweaked, never piqued, never wooed, if only for a moment, to wonder whether any of these heretics might have a point.

A polemic would have been preferable. Polemics are a pleasure to read: they make no bones about their views, and they clarify in pugilistic prose exactly why their enemies are fools to be spurned and mocked. As it is, this book falls between two stools.