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American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order
A penetrating account of the religious critics of American liberalism, pluralism, and democracy—from the Revolution until today
“A chilling consideration of persistent mutations of American thought still threatening our pluralist democracy.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
The conversation about the proper role of religion in American public life often revolves around what kind of polity the Founders of the United States envisioned. Advocates of a “Christian America” claim that the Framers intended a nation whose political values and institutions were shaped by Christianity; secularists argue that they designed an enlightened republic where church and state were kept separate. Both sides appeal to the Founding to justify their beliefs about the kind of nation the United States was meant to be or should become.
In this book, Jerome E. Copulsky complicates this ongoing public argument by examining a collection of thinkers who, on religious grounds, considered the nation’s political ideas illegitimate, its institutions flawed, and its church‑state arrangement defective. Beholden to visions of cosmic order and social hierarchy, rejecting the increasing pluralism and secularism of American society, they predicted the collapse of an unrighteous nation and the emergence of a new Christian commonwealth in its stead. By engaging their challenges and interpreting their visions we can better appreciate the perennial temptations of religious illiberalism—as well as the virtues and fragilities of America’s liberal democracy.
“A chilling consideration of persistent mutations of American thought still threatening our pluralist democracy.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
The conversation about the proper role of religion in American public life often revolves around what kind of polity the Founders of the United States envisioned. Advocates of a “Christian America” claim that the Framers intended a nation whose political values and institutions were shaped by Christianity; secularists argue that they designed an enlightened republic where church and state were kept separate. Both sides appeal to the Founding to justify their beliefs about the kind of nation the United States was meant to be or should become.
In this book, Jerome E. Copulsky complicates this ongoing public argument by examining a collection of thinkers who, on religious grounds, considered the nation’s political ideas illegitimate, its institutions flawed, and its church‑state arrangement defective. Beholden to visions of cosmic order and social hierarchy, rejecting the increasing pluralism and secularism of American society, they predicted the collapse of an unrighteous nation and the emergence of a new Christian commonwealth in its stead. By engaging their challenges and interpreting their visions we can better appreciate the perennial temptations of religious illiberalism—as well as the virtues and fragilities of America’s liberal democracy.
384 pages, Hardcover
Published October 1, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 29, 2025
This is a detail-heavy account of the American fight to connect church and state. It started with the Brits calling the colonists heathens, continued through the god fearing confederates and their new constitution with bible approved human trafficking and here we are today. Kudos on the research involved in this, however it got a bit clunky and dry.
June 4, 2026
In the tempestuous teapot of political social media, an abiding flashpoint is whether Ronald Reagan was the first incarnation of Donald Trump or whether the latter-day Republican Party is the cathedral of a new god. It’s not hard to predict who takes which side. Progressives, Marxists, and MAGA see a straight-line identity, either between villains or heroes; centrist Democrats, disgruntled Republicans, and Never Trump conservatives see a great gulf fixed between the two. The answer to the question, of course, is obvious: it’s the one that means you were right all along.
Discovering you were right all along is the trap well worth avoiding in Jerome E. Copulsky’s excellent study of “American Heretics.” By this he means those Christians who from the inception of these United States have dissented from this Enlightenment experiment in favor of realizing a more or less explicitly Christian nation. This framing, of course, begs the question of whether the country was founded as a secular or religious polity. It assumes both that the “godless” Constitution reflects an orthodoxy established by the Framers and that efforts to baptize the works of their hands is a heterodox reaction.
To the extent Copulsky thinks himself writing from within the tradition of America’s civil orthodoxy, he discovers he was, indeed, right all along. Take his description of American evangelicals as pinning their hopes on Ronald Reagan, a man who “though divorced, formerly pro-choice, and religiously heterodox, was speaking their language.” Whether considering Francis Schaeffer’s premillennial activism or R. J. Rushdoony’s postmillennial theonomy, Copulsky turns a phrase when he says that 20th-century Christian political theorists probed whether “more drastic, possibly revolutionary action would be required to make America holy again.” Ten bucks says I know how he’s been voting.
Copulsky’s cards are pretty well on the table by the time he draws these blunt-force parallels between 1980 and 2016 in the closing chapters. In the two centuries since ratification of the Constitution, as he sees it, the firefight between We the People and Christ the King has flared and smoldered but never flickered out. Modern Reconstructionists, who make no secret of their intention to refound America with the Old Testament as its law code, are just the latest and most muscular combatants in this holy war. Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, in this telling, are nothing but useful battering rams to breach the wall of separation between church and state that stands as the original sin of our fallen Eden.
You might think from this that I find Copulsky combative and polemical, but I do not — except in his withering engagement with Yoram Hazony’s illiberal National Conservatism. So exercised is Copulsky that I suspect Hazony’s 2022 book on the subject was the inciting incident for this long-form investigation of NatCon’s roots. Otherwise, Copulsky makes no effort to refute the past in detail. His is less a missionary or apologetic endeavor than it is recon to return accurate intel to those defending the wall of separation. He describes the discontent of various Christian factions with fairness and clarity, quoting their own words at length and letting them speak for themselves. If anything, I could see opponents of Reconstructionist projects worrying that such a bare presentation of views might encourage some American Christians to think, “You know, now that you mention it…”
Most American Christians, of course, have always had something of a “now that you mention it” relationship to America’s constitutional system, but only rarely have they wanted to see it upended. Copulsky spends no time tracing this majoritarian complacency. He doesn’t study the Virginia Baptists who found sanctuary in Thomas Jefferson’s statute for religious freedom. He doesn’t mention Methodist circuit rider Peter Cartwright, who ran for Illinois state office against Abraham Lincoln partly on rhetoric that Lincoln was an infidel and thus unfit to legislate. I import these examples to illustrate what I see as the mainstream of Christian political thought in America — that God’s ways should undergird law but that a pluralistic society is too important a defense for conscientious worshippers to sacrifice.
Copulsky’s interest lies instead in the forerunners of today’s prophets of a new Christendom: those small but agile sects unwilling to accept a body politic that omits recognition of Trinitarian authority. These voices have often arisen from Reformed Presbyterian circles, so much so that the book might as well be subtitled “The Presbyterian Plot Against America.” Indeed, their drive to enthrone King Jesus on their own terms was so well-known that (and this was new information to me) King George III labeled the American Revolution a “Presbyterian war” to overthrow the authority of the Church of England.
What will interest many is the evolution of the terms of dissent. In the 18th and 19th centuries, religious critics ranging from Loyalists to Covenanters saw the new nation in a harshly Babylonian light. Madison, Adams, Hamilton, and the rest had followed Jefferson’s lead in unseating God in favor of Reason; and their Constitution was written rebellion against the Almighty. Such thinking reached its zenith in the pro-slavery theology that supported the Confederacy’s break with the apostates up north. This chapter, which would be a wonderful companion to Jon Meacham’s 2022 biography of Abraham Lincoln, is a fine survey of antebellum Southern theology and my favorite part of the book.
Fast-forward to 20th-century critics, and (with some notable and vocal exceptions) the ground shifts. The Constitution is no longer a satanic deception, but is rather sanctified by Judeo-Christian values and grounded on Christian principles. The accelerating secularism of the 1960s and beyond is not a natural outworking of a secular document, but an aberrational break with our Christian heritage that should be slowed, stopped, and reversed. Copulsky’s record of this shift in first principles is an opportunity for American Christians to confront the fallacious thinking common to humans; namely, that what I believe today is what all right-thinking people have always believed.
You need not ask what I myself have learned. Naturally, I’ve learned that I was right all along. Long ago, I shed the belief that America was founded as a Christian nation or even on unalloyed Christian principles. I don’t go so far as those who excise faith from the Founding altogether; in my view, the political philosophy that spawned the Revolution and the Constitution was neither fully Christian nor fully Enlightened. The two were so interpenetrated that neither tradition can legitimately claim that it alone is responsible for the American order. Nothing I read changed my opinion on that, and much confirmed it.
However, despite learning nothing and confirming all my priors, I found Copulsky’s work stimulating and timely. I recommend it to American Christians if only to provide background for the concepts and jargon on the rise in theologically conservative circles. Everything has a beginning, and everything that has a beginning has an end. Both defenders and critics of America’s liberal order would agree on that, but their presuppositions lead them to foresee different ends of these beginnings. Challenging your own presuppositions is never a wasted endeavor, and Copulsky provides an incisive way to do just that.
Discovering you were right all along is the trap well worth avoiding in Jerome E. Copulsky’s excellent study of “American Heretics.” By this he means those Christians who from the inception of these United States have dissented from this Enlightenment experiment in favor of realizing a more or less explicitly Christian nation. This framing, of course, begs the question of whether the country was founded as a secular or religious polity. It assumes both that the “godless” Constitution reflects an orthodoxy established by the Framers and that efforts to baptize the works of their hands is a heterodox reaction.
To the extent Copulsky thinks himself writing from within the tradition of America’s civil orthodoxy, he discovers he was, indeed, right all along. Take his description of American evangelicals as pinning their hopes on Ronald Reagan, a man who “though divorced, formerly pro-choice, and religiously heterodox, was speaking their language.” Whether considering Francis Schaeffer’s premillennial activism or R. J. Rushdoony’s postmillennial theonomy, Copulsky turns a phrase when he says that 20th-century Christian political theorists probed whether “more drastic, possibly revolutionary action would be required to make America holy again.” Ten bucks says I know how he’s been voting.
Copulsky’s cards are pretty well on the table by the time he draws these blunt-force parallels between 1980 and 2016 in the closing chapters. In the two centuries since ratification of the Constitution, as he sees it, the firefight between We the People and Christ the King has flared and smoldered but never flickered out. Modern Reconstructionists, who make no secret of their intention to refound America with the Old Testament as its law code, are just the latest and most muscular combatants in this holy war. Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, in this telling, are nothing but useful battering rams to breach the wall of separation between church and state that stands as the original sin of our fallen Eden.
You might think from this that I find Copulsky combative and polemical, but I do not — except in his withering engagement with Yoram Hazony’s illiberal National Conservatism. So exercised is Copulsky that I suspect Hazony’s 2022 book on the subject was the inciting incident for this long-form investigation of NatCon’s roots. Otherwise, Copulsky makes no effort to refute the past in detail. His is less a missionary or apologetic endeavor than it is recon to return accurate intel to those defending the wall of separation. He describes the discontent of various Christian factions with fairness and clarity, quoting their own words at length and letting them speak for themselves. If anything, I could see opponents of Reconstructionist projects worrying that such a bare presentation of views might encourage some American Christians to think, “You know, now that you mention it…”
Most American Christians, of course, have always had something of a “now that you mention it” relationship to America’s constitutional system, but only rarely have they wanted to see it upended. Copulsky spends no time tracing this majoritarian complacency. He doesn’t study the Virginia Baptists who found sanctuary in Thomas Jefferson’s statute for religious freedom. He doesn’t mention Methodist circuit rider Peter Cartwright, who ran for Illinois state office against Abraham Lincoln partly on rhetoric that Lincoln was an infidel and thus unfit to legislate. I import these examples to illustrate what I see as the mainstream of Christian political thought in America — that God’s ways should undergird law but that a pluralistic society is too important a defense for conscientious worshippers to sacrifice.
Copulsky’s interest lies instead in the forerunners of today’s prophets of a new Christendom: those small but agile sects unwilling to accept a body politic that omits recognition of Trinitarian authority. These voices have often arisen from Reformed Presbyterian circles, so much so that the book might as well be subtitled “The Presbyterian Plot Against America.” Indeed, their drive to enthrone King Jesus on their own terms was so well-known that (and this was new information to me) King George III labeled the American Revolution a “Presbyterian war” to overthrow the authority of the Church of England.
What will interest many is the evolution of the terms of dissent. In the 18th and 19th centuries, religious critics ranging from Loyalists to Covenanters saw the new nation in a harshly Babylonian light. Madison, Adams, Hamilton, and the rest had followed Jefferson’s lead in unseating God in favor of Reason; and their Constitution was written rebellion against the Almighty. Such thinking reached its zenith in the pro-slavery theology that supported the Confederacy’s break with the apostates up north. This chapter, which would be a wonderful companion to Jon Meacham’s 2022 biography of Abraham Lincoln, is a fine survey of antebellum Southern theology and my favorite part of the book.
Fast-forward to 20th-century critics, and (with some notable and vocal exceptions) the ground shifts. The Constitution is no longer a satanic deception, but is rather sanctified by Judeo-Christian values and grounded on Christian principles. The accelerating secularism of the 1960s and beyond is not a natural outworking of a secular document, but an aberrational break with our Christian heritage that should be slowed, stopped, and reversed. Copulsky’s record of this shift in first principles is an opportunity for American Christians to confront the fallacious thinking common to humans; namely, that what I believe today is what all right-thinking people have always believed.
You need not ask what I myself have learned. Naturally, I’ve learned that I was right all along. Long ago, I shed the belief that America was founded as a Christian nation or even on unalloyed Christian principles. I don’t go so far as those who excise faith from the Founding altogether; in my view, the political philosophy that spawned the Revolution and the Constitution was neither fully Christian nor fully Enlightened. The two were so interpenetrated that neither tradition can legitimately claim that it alone is responsible for the American order. Nothing I read changed my opinion on that, and much confirmed it.
However, despite learning nothing and confirming all my priors, I found Copulsky’s work stimulating and timely. I recommend it to American Christians if only to provide background for the concepts and jargon on the rise in theologically conservative circles. Everything has a beginning, and everything that has a beginning has an end. Both defenders and critics of America’s liberal order would agree on that, but their presuppositions lead them to foresee different ends of these beginnings. Challenging your own presuppositions is never a wasted endeavor, and Copulsky provides an incisive way to do just that.
December 30, 2025
Somewhat irritated with myself that I gave even more of my attention to the viewpoints and arguments of reactionaries and religious authoritarians than what I’m already daily confronted with by U.S. mainstream media, politics, and culture.
August 10, 2025
It's dense and detailed, like a textbook, and gives a close look at some of the christian nationalist religionists through USA history. They've been there since white people began taking control of these lands, and the lives of Black people, and their god was always on their side.
Copulsky gives us trees, not much forest. One core criticism is that he treats the theological positions as though they are authentic, sincerely held independently-arrived-at philosophies, rather than stances that lead to desired political outcomes (just as conservatives claim constitutional 'originalism' as long as it helps them justify and get their objectives).
Copulsky gives us trees, not much forest. One core criticism is that he treats the theological positions as though they are authentic, sincerely held independently-arrived-at philosophies, rather than stances that lead to desired political outcomes (just as conservatives claim constitutional 'originalism' as long as it helps them justify and get their objectives).
April 7, 2025
Lots of new-to-me information but dry. Took me awhile as s result.
September 20, 2025
The farther into the book the author gets, the more apparent his biases become. Up to the history in the late twentieth century, it's excellent; I'm docking a star for the terrible conclusion.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews