Postliberal Christian Academics Want a Religious Coup to Replace America's Constitutional Liberalism

They see Trump as a Constantine-like figure who can help them take over America

Printed below is an excerpt from American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order by Jerome E. Copulsky, research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs and from 2016 to 2017 senior advisor at the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs. Copulsky’s American Heretics is a rich yet highly readable account of the religious critics of American liberal democracy from the revolutionary period to today.

“The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,” announced Justice Anthony Kennedy at the opening of his majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), recognizing the constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry with “equal dignity in the eyes of the law” and receive the legal and material benefits that flow from government recognition of the relationship. ...

The nation’s pivot to support for same-sex marriage was swift and, for religious conservatives, jarring. With Obergefell, some feared that their decades-long culture war might be a lost cause. In their eyes, the decision did not merely announce an expansion of rights to gays and lesbians (providing legal sanction to a lifestyle they deemed sinful) but amounted to the remaking—or destruction—of the very institution of marriage, premised on a novel understanding of human nature and the purpose of the family. The legal protection of homosexual marriage, aside from its increased social acceptance and widespread cultural celebration, effectively announced the United States as a post-Christian, even anti-Christian, order and portended the persecution of the faithful. The expected election of Hillary Clinton in 2016 would solidify that liberal triumph and ensure civilizational collapse. ...

The Benedict Option

[T]he conservative editor and commentator Rod Dreher suggested that “the common culture—insofar as we have one—is so far gone into decadence and individualism that the only sensible thing for us to do is to strategically retreat from the mainstream to strengthen our Christian commitments, and our church communities.” ... For Dreher, same-sex marriage was the decisive battle in the culture war, and the Supreme Court’s landmark Obergefell decision became “the Waterloo of religious conservatism.” He thus pronounced the American culture war concluded, with “hostile secular nihilism” the victorious and “traditional, historical Christianity” the defeated. ...

Dreher made his case at length in his bestselling 2017 book, The Benedict Option. ... The problem wasn’t simply the overreach of the courts but something much deeper and more ingrained. The United States was indeed a secular, liberal, Enlightenment polity, and it was founded on the false and dangerous Enlightenment program—the attempt to rely on reason alone to “create a secular morality,” “impose man’s natural will upon nature,” and unleash “the freely choosing individual.” ... The “end point of modernity,” in Dreher’s recounting, was already announced by Justice Anthony Kennedy in his 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Dreher acidly observed that the pronouncement was a celebration of “the autonomous, freely choosing individual, finding meaning in no one but himself.” Such was the fundamental maxim of our decadent post-Christian era. It heralded the arrival of a new dark age. Decisions like Obergefell were not betrayals of the founding ideas but really the logical outworking of them. There could be no way to reconcile a truly authentic Christian life with liberal modernity. ...

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We Need to Restore a Healthy Protestantism to Save American Liberalism

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And so Dreher proposed a postliberal project ... whereby the truly faithful might ... engage in “a strategic withdrawal.” ... Dreher dubbed this “the Benedict Option,” elaborating on something the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote at the end of his influential book After Virtue. Lamenting the loss of a moral consensus, MacIntyre suggested that those who endeavored to live serious and ordered lives might choose to establish “local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.” MacIntyre famously closed his meditation with the pronouncement “We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.” That historical Benedict had instituted a monastic “rule,” the practical instructions to keep Christian learning and virtues alive as Rome declined. Some three and a half decades following the initial publication of After Virtue, Dreher had come forth as that new Benedict with his own rule—bestowing instructions on how to build such arks in which to wait out the floodwaters that “liquid modernity” unleashed. American Christians were not to retreat to monasteries, of course, but to establish intentional communities, rooted in theological orthodoxy and shared moral values, ideally situated in remote rural parts of the country, far from the turbulence and temptations of the secular city and the public school system. There they would reside in internal exile in a post-Christian world, prepared for the possibility of marginalization, poverty, and even martyrdom, as they awaited the dawn of a new Christendom.

Deneen’s Dreams

The political theorist Patrick J. Deneen arrived at a similar conclusion in his 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed. Deneen charted the course of “liberalism”—an abstraction granted almost sinister agency—from its emergence in the seventeenth century to its fruition in contemporary Western society, a story of success that culminated in moral, social, environmental, and spiritual disaster. ... “The foundations of liberalism,” he claimed, “were laid by a series of thinkers whose central aim was to disassemble what they concluded were irrational religious and social norms in the pursuit of civil peace that might in turn foster stability and prosperity, and eventually individual liberty of conscience and action.” ... Liberals (and pre-liberals such as Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes) set out to remake the world according to a new—and false—anthropology. They conceived of human beings as “rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life.” But they really aspired to free the individual from authority, culture, and tradition—even human nature itself. Liberalism undermined all the bonds of human solidarity that had been forged over time by the family, the church, and the whole range of social associations and institutions embedded in localities. In the place of all that, liberalism has produced an increasingly centralized and tyrannical state to “protect” the radically unencumbered individual’s enjoyment of rights, property, and pursuit of consumption. ...

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The Postliberal Delusion that Trump will Restore Gods Allegedly Destroyed by the Open Society

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Deneen did not foresee a happy future for the nation, at least in the short term. ... [M]ounting frustrations and discontent may at some point bring about the collapse of the liberal order and its replacement by another type of regime. “Some form of populist nationalist authoritarianism or military autocracy seems altogether plausible as an answer to the anger and fear of a postliberal citizenry,” Deneen presaged.

Deneen hoped some “humane alternative” might yet emerge from our confusion but cautioned against seeking political redemption from the degradations of liberalism in some new or repurposed ideology. We must resist the temptation of concocting a political theory that might replace liberalism; instead, we must gird ourselves to pass through liberalism as a damaging but necessary stage of human history and try to build on its accomplishments even as we learn from its failures. In the meantime, we might find solace in “the remnants of orthodox religious traditions” and in the founding, not of a new political regime, but of “alternative communities and new cultures that will live outside the gathering wreckage of liberalism’s twilight years.” ... Deneen understood that America was founded as a liberal regime—by and for a broadly Protestant people; it was, he remarked elsewhere, “essentially the first Protestant nation.” Yet he appeared reluctant to acknowledge that liberalism—the secular regime it imagines, its commitments to human dignity and freedom, and its unceasing project of progress—is in some way an outgrowth of Christian ideals. Nor did he appear to grant that liberals, too, have families and friendships, join religious organizations and civil associations, forge deep bonds of solidarity, and participate in all sorts of projects aimed at some conception of a common good. ...

‘Common-Good Constitutionalism’

In an influential review of Why Liberalism Failed, Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule praised Deneen’s diagnosis of the problem but suggested his proposed remedy was inadequate. ... Vermeule was ... dissatisfied with Deneen’s advocacy of a tactical retreat to a “vague communitarian localism.” ... An expert in administrative law whose own spiritual journey had brought him to Rome, Vermeule pitched ... a more audacious proposal that he believed to be “more consistent with Deneen’s own argument”: a quiet coup against the liberal “imperium.” He suggested that motivated and well-trained postliberal elites, rather than retreat from the world or try to build democratic majorities to reshape policy, ought to “strategically locate themselves within liberal institutions and work to undo the liberalism of the state from within,” and then use the machinery of the administrative state to impose upon the country their “substantive comprehensive theory of the good.” ... Vermeule’s point ... was that there was no need to withdraw to enclaves or dream of building a new order from scratch when they could deploy the administrative state and bureaucracy that liberalism had constructed as “the great instrument with which to restore a substantive politics of the good.” ...

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Liberalism and Catholicism: Friends Not Foes

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A few years later, in a provocative essay appearing in The Atlantic (soon expanded into a short book), postliberalism’s leading legal mind articulated a constitutional doctrine to legitimate such a future takeover of the American state. ... What Vermeule was proposing was closer to the progressive notion of a “living” constitution, its meaning ever evolving as judges adapt its fundamental principles in light of new problems and changing attitudes. But progressives, he observed, were aiming at the wrong end—namely, “the relentless expansion of individual autonomy.” A “substantive moral conservatism,” or “illiberal legalism”—not “enslaved to the original meaning of the Constitution” and “liberated from the left-liberals’ overarching sacramental narrative”—by contrast, would “be based on the principles that government helps direct persons, associations, and society generally toward the common good, and that strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate.” ...

Rather than advise anti-liberal traditionalists to take flight from the battle and withdraw into an impotent localism, Vermeule proposed they use the force of the law, enthused and well-placed bureaucrats of the administrative state, and a powerful executive to orient the polis toward his conception of the common good. ... This counter-liberal proposal was, in short, a call for an American ralliement, to infiltrate and transform the liberal regime over time into a fully Catholic one, taking over the state bureaucracy (and sidestepping democratically elected representatives) so that it might rightly reorient its citizens. ...

Not long after Why Liberalism Failed came out, Deneen realized that the collapse of the liberal order he believed to be inevitable was happening more quickly than he had previously envisaged. ... To overcome the disintegration brought about by liberalism, Deneen called for a restoration of Christendom. ...

The Savior and the Strongman

As they prophesize the advent of some postmodern, postliberal Christendom, a restoration of “the ordered community of tradition” that will rescue us from an unbounded yet ultimately unfree liberal order, and as they labor from their professorates to inspire and forge a virtuous new elite to go out and capture the institutions of cultural and political power, America’s integralists not only reject liberalism but dream to overcome the situation of religious pluralism that liberalism tries to manage. ...

“Today’s widespread yearning for a strong leader, one with the will to take back popular control over liberalism’s forms of bureaucratized government and globalized economy,” Professor Deneen mused near the beginning of Why Liberalism Failed, “comes after decades of liberal dismantling of cultural norms and political habits essential to self-governance.” Toward the end of the book, he warned that “liberalism itself seems likely to generate demotic demands for an illiberal autocrat who promises to protect the people against the vagaries of liberalism itself.” Those who struggle to resist its onslaught will clamor for a strongman who would wrest control of the regime, drain the swamp, vindicate their values, and safeguard their way of life. Or, at the least, would “own the libs,” as they say. Liberalism, he darkly prophesied, will in the end be demolished by authoritarian backlash to its success.

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MAGA Evangelicals' Un-Christian Quest for Political Power: A Conversation with Russell Moore

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As it turned out, it would be Donald J. Trump—whose very “brand” had for years been gold-plated decadence—who emerged as the avatar of populist resentments and conservative Christian hopes. ... Already a celebrity businessman, Trump achieved political notice and notoriety as a purveyor of the racially charged “birther” conspiracy theory, and on the campaign trail he demonstrated an uncanny ability to tap into deep veins of populist anger and distrust (of “elites,” “experts,” “the deep state,” and so forth), and secure the devotion and loyalty of millions of heretofore “values voters.” His political rallies were likened to old-time revival meetings; he spoke to his supporters like a televangelist to his network flock. The slogan he chose for his movement, his political raison d'être, “Make America Great Again,” is a restorationist sentiment; it was complemented by his vow to put “America First!” ... The long-aggrieved would have their hopes fulfilled and fearful Christians their rights protected by the edicts of a charismatic strongman. “Christianity will have power,” the candidate told an audience in 2016. “If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power, you don’t need anybody else.” ... Instructed to regard the tussle of politics as spiritual warfare, a contest between the supernatural forces of good and evil, Christian Trumpists saw the election as a “miracle,” the unlikely president a providentially given instrument to shatter their enemies and restore an imagined Christian America. ...

[T]hose books advocating a strategic withdrawal ... now seemed untimely. The advent of Trump (and the enduring spirit of MAGA) suggested that reconquest was possible. Why build arks when you can command battleships? Why endure the liberal American order when you can found a better one? Perhaps we await not a new St. Benedict but another—doubtless very different—Emperor Constantine?

Perhaps it should not be surprising that those who had soured on liberal democracy found themselves favorably disposed to political leaders willing to champion traditional Christian values and impose policies reflecting them through illiberal means if need be.

This excerpt is from American Heretics, written by Jerome E. Copulsky, which was released in October by Yale University Press. It is reprinted here with their permission.

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