American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order

What does religion have to do with politics? The church with the state? Christianity with the American constitutional order?

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.

But what if the Founding itself was the problem?

In this book, Jerome E. Copulsky complicates this ongoing public argument by engaging 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 hoped for a new Christian commonwealth in its stead that would orient its subjects to their highest good. 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.