A Conversation with Jerome E. Copulsky and Jonathan Rauch
We’ve brought together Jerome E. Copulsky and Jonathan Rauch for a conversation on the role of religion in public life and the failure of religion to uphold the constitutional order.
Jerome E. Copulsky’s book, American Heretics, provides a penetrating account of the religious critics of American liberalism, while Jonathan Rauch explores why the crisis of Christianity has become a crisis for democracy.
This conversation has been abbreviated and edited for clarity. Watch the full conversation here.
JR: Why American heretics? Why do you call these folks heretics?
JC: American heretics, I use that term in a cheeky fashion, but with a serious intent. The point is that all these thinkers that I’m looking at, from the Church of England loyalists to the post liberals and national conservatives today, in a fundamental way, dissent from what they consider to be sort of the founding ideas and the animating ideas of the American republic. Whether it’s liberalism, religious pluralism, the idea of equality, these religious thinkers think that these are the wrong ideas. And so within the context of the American project, we can see them as heretical.
JR: Why were they not more influential in their day? This is one of the things I think your book establishes that’s so interesting is these are not bit players in their time. These are some major figures in their day. We haven’t heard of them today, because, of course, they lost the fight. But why were they ineffective in their time, in promoting the kind of Christian Republic that they thought the U.S. should be?
JC: They were ineffective for different reasons. The Church of England loyalists were ineffective because they were on the wrong side of the war, right? They lost. But also, their idea of an established church was losing sort of credence at that point as well. The idea a nation needed a particular church, and that all people who were citizens needed to be part of that church in order to be fully part of that society, could never fully work in the colonies. It could not fully work in the United States and the federal government because the reality of religious pluralism that pertained in the colonies and then in the states. If we look at a group like the Covenanters, the reformed Presbyterians in the early republic, they supported the revolution because they opposed the Church of England establishment. They rejected the Constitution because they believe that the Constitution, and the federal government which it set up, failed to properly recognize God and Christ as rule of nations. They felt that what the United States had essentially done was established itself as an infidel country, and so they refused it. . . .But the Constitution also forbade, prohibited a religious test for federal office, and also by not establishing religion and not allowing Congress to intervene in the free exercise of religion, it allowed for what the Covenanters believed to be the protection of infidelity.
JR: One of the things that’s so interesting about your book Jerome, is when you place it all in this context, these early decisions, you realize that this early group of dissenters, or heretics, as you call them, they’re gone, but they’re not forgotten. They lose that battle, but they never completely go away. We neglect them when we tell our story in America, but they’re always there.
JC: I think we should care about them a lot. One of the reasons that we should care about them is because they’re pretty close to power. Adrian Vermeule is a Harvard law professor. Patrick Deneen is a professor of political theory at Notre Dame. Yoram [Hazony] runs something called the Edmund Burke Foundation, which essentially is the platform for national conservative conferences in the United States, but also in Europe as well. And they have a lot of important people who are academics, who are policy makers, who are politicians. Who are in these circles, who are attending these conferences, reading these books, and having the ear of people like JD Vance.
JR: This is where you get this historical continuity that goes right back to the very earliest heretics in in your book. These folks, as you also point out, they’ve got a lot of tension within the ranks. There’s some nationalists who want a kind of national rule to prevail, and then you’ve got people who believe in the sovereignty of God. They’re on very different pages, but currently, they’re aligned, and they have in common this view that liberalism is not this sort of neutral, generic, open process of pluralism in which all can thrive. They believe that liberalism has become an all-conquering, imperialistic juggernaut that mows down any obstacles that stand in its in its way toward a society of essentially individualism and anarchy, a society that destroys faith and family, community, tradition, religion and everything else.
JC: I thought maybe we could start by that sort of moment of how the post liberals figure in the architecture of your book, how they emerge. They emerge as a reaction to something, but in a way, they’re the wrong reaction. And your book sort of promises a way forward that’s much truer to the Christian religion, religious tradition as you understand it.
JR: The thesis of my book is that America is becoming ungovernable in significant part because Christianity is failing at the job that the founders expected it to do. It is no longer providing a unifying narrative, a transcendent narrative, the kind of sense of values and purpose that the founders expected. Instead, it’s going in a very different direction. It’s adopting culture wars. It’s hunkering down, becoming involved. Power, the places that when it goes historically, it messes up. Now we get a kind of blame shifting contest between me and the post liberals. The post liberals have performed this hat trick, this magic trick, sleight of hand of saying, “Yeah, Christianity is in trouble, and faith and family are in trouble, and you know whose fault that is? That’s Jonathan Rauch’s fault. That’s liberalism’s fault.” I’m turning that around, and I’m saying, no we have been telling you now for three or 400 years that you guys have a job to do. You have forsaken that job. I believe that Christianity has in America, in the context, specifically of white Protestant Christianity, evangelicalism, has made tragic and catastrophic choices to exchange the teachings of Jesus Christ for the teachings of politics, and for a kind of partisanship to a degree that we haven’t seen before. That’s not consistent with the transcendent things and the three fundamentals Christianity.
JC: One of the ways in which you describe your account of Christianity and religion is this notion of distinctiveness, distinctive from the larger culture, the larger society. What you call later on in the book a kind of an exilic situation or stance, when you turn to a Christianity that you think is actually operating in the way that a religious tradition ought to with relation to liberalism. What you call a thick Christianity, your model of a contemporary thick Christian churches, the Church of Jesus Christ, of Latter Day Saints, the Mormons. You begin this account by the way in which the church Leadership dealt with which was, for them, the challenge of same sex marriage. . . .So can we talk a little bit about the way in which you see the LDS providing a way forward for American Christians, Americans of other religious traditions, and for secular Americans as well?
JR: Jerome, this was the big surprise that actually launched this book in 2015. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints surprised everyone with what was called the Utah compromise, which was a bill that they supported the past in Utah that combined new protections for LGBT people from discrimination with some targeted exemptions for the Church and others. It was a big step forward in terms of protecting LGBT people, both legally, and a step forward in in creating a welcoming environment in Utah.
So what the church needs to develop, and maybe is starting to develop, is a civic theology, which says, okay, so how would Jesus Christ want us to engage our fellow citizens in the public sphere, in the civic sphere. That’s what the Church of Jesus Christ, of Latter Day Saints, is working on right now. I am not saying that white evangelical Protestants should emulate the specific doctrines of the LDS church. That’s not the point. What I am saying is we know it can be done because a major church in the United States is doing it.
JC: But you also have a message for secular liberals as well, how secular liberals ought to understand the relationship of Christianity or religion in general, religion to the Democratic project. Maybe we could say a bit about that.
JR: Maybe it is true that the American version of liberalism in 2025 is too hostile to Christianity, or at least marginalized. Is it? Maybe it is true that individualism goes a bit too far in some cases, and I think the answer is yes. Now again, I would never go as far as the post liberals do, and I don’t reject liberalism. And in fact, I think the liberal tradition as handed down by the founders, was one that’s very friendly to religion. There are two sides to this coin, and while I want to see Christianity elevate the Madisonian elements of its own teaching, I also think a lot of us secular liberals took Christianity for granted to for way too long. We became too aggressive in many cases, in pursuing a sometimes neurotically rigid separation of church and state. For example, I don’t think I say this as a gay American, someone who’s married and someone who believes in anti-discrimination law. But I don’t think it’s necessary to require every single cake baker in the country to bake wedding cakes for same sex unions. It’s possible and desirable to negotiate compromises on issues like that and to take up, for example, the offer that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, is making, which is, let’s expand these protections, but let’s also create a little space in them for conscientious objectors. I don’t think it would hurt secular liberals like me to, you know, accompany their friends who are religious to church.
JC: What about non-Christians and not secular non-Christians, but sort of people who are of other religious traditions?
JR: I focus this book and address it specifically to Christians. In fact, white Protestant Christians, because that, as you discuss in your book, is America’s founding faith. That remains the predominant tradition in America that’s determining Christianity’s relationship with government. Everything that I just said applies to all religions. Of course, as a Jew and someone who has seen the reaction to October 7 and was horrified by some of it, as so many were, I think all the same things about all religion, plural. About religious pluralism generally. Yet the reason I want to focus everyone’s attention on Christianity as Christianity, not just as a religion or a concept, but the teachings of Jesus Christ, is because the crisis of governability that we’re experiencing in America right now is very largely the doing of the failure of Christianity and Protestantism.
Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the governance studies program at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. Jerome E. Copulsky is a research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University.
