John D. Wilsey Archives

Cover image of "Religious Freedom" by John D. Wilsey

Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, John D. Wilsey. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (ISBN: 9780802881908) 2025.

Summary: A conservative case, arguing the spirit of religion and liberty are mutually necessary and best defended by conservatism.

One of the sad spectacles of our current American politics is the weaponization of religious liberty. One political party uses fears over erosion of religious liberty to mobilize the religious, especially Christian, portion of its base. Others, fearful of the hegemony of a particular religious outlook, advance ideas of confining religious liberty to worship and personal devotion, creating a public square devoid of, and in some cases hostile to religious conviction. Sadly, the one thing all this has in common is fear, which has become a powerful driver of political rhetoric at the expense of harmony in our body politic.

John D. Wilsey argues in Religious Freedom that two spirits have shaped our national life from the nation’s beginnings. One is a spirit of religion. The other is a spirit of liberty. He believes both are necessary for our national life. Furthermore he contends that classic, Burkean conservatism offers the best prospect for sustaining the harmony between these two spirits.

He begins his argument by seeking to define what is conservatism. He acknowledges the contention between those who would claim this label. There are those who emphasize the permanent, sometimes inflexibly so, and others, who recognize the inevitability, of and even need for, change. However, Wilsey contends that a Burkean conservatism holds both the permanent and the evolving in a tension that moves with caution that is neither reactionary nor Utopian.

Wilsey then proceeds to unpack this conservatism under the categories of imagination, nation, ordered liberty, history, and religion. Imagination supports human dignity. In addition, it enables the forming of conscience through the embrace of the good, the true and the beautiful. Then, Wilsey considers the idea of nation, and how love of one’s nation, a proper patriotism, differs from an aggressive, ideological nationalism.

But how are order and liberty related? In chapter four, Wilsey proposes that order, particularly our constitutional order, precedes liberty. Specifically, order creates the conditions for our private and public life, including our religious life, to flourish. In turn, our religious life, ideally, points people to the highest goods. Therefore, liberty is guarded from turning into license and order into authoritarianism.

Likewise, history and tradition play a vital role in conserving the twin spirits of religion and liberty from generation to generation. They guard us from a rootlessness, seeing society, as Burke did, as a contract between the dead, the living, and the yet to be born. They offer wisdom, helping us understand when a tradition has outlived its time while guarding us from amnesia.

Finally, religion plays a crucial role in navigating the tension between permanence and change. It does so by defining the permanent things. the morality common to all people, everywhere through time. Religion helps us know where we may compromise and where we must stand.

In concluding, Wilsey asserts his thesis that true conservatism is best positioned to preserve the spirit’s of religion and liberty in our country. He reminds us that this goes deeper than politics:

“The aspirational conservative is prepolitical. The one possessing a conservative disposition aims for a higher moral destiny for persons and societies, guided by the light of permanent things, tradition, and just order. He also understands human fallibility and the real world. He reckons with the human condition marked as it is by limitation, imperfection, and change. the moral profit and ordered liberty of the human person is the primary disposition of the conservative disposition” (pp. 219-220).

Wilsey argues that this kind of conservatism may best build on our foundations of religion and liberty without losing the rich inheritance we have received.

I would love for those who embrace the label of “conservative” to read this “primer.” Likewise, religious leaders may find value both in Wilsey’s apologetic for the importance of religion in our national life, and its proper boundaries. Wilsey sets a high standard for both the religious and the political among us. However, I would like to see more exploration of situations where order conflicts with liberty. Sadly, “order” and “permanent things” have been used to subjugate significant portions of our population. It has upheld, rather than resisted, despotism.

Lastly, I affirm Wilsey’s effort as an evangelical Christian, to articulate a thoughtful and rigorous work of political philosophy. Sadly, as Mark Noll argued in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, evangelicals have been noted far more for activism than for thought. That helps explain some of the instances of our misbegotten activism. It is to be hoped that pastors, politicians, and concerned citizens will read this work. Ideally, they will act more thoughtfully to conserve and extend our traditions of religious freedom and civil liberty.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion, John D. Wilsey. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2015.

Summary: Explores the history of American exceptionalism, distinguishing two kinds of exceptionalism and considers them under five theological themes.

Most discussions of American exceptionalism that I’ve seen either embrace this idea more or less uncritically, arguing that America is God’s “city on a hill,” or they utterly reject the idea as a form of egregious cultural imperialism and a Christian heresy. John D. Wilsey offers us a history of this idea, and suggests a more nuanced view that allows a place for a certain kind of American exceptionalism while rejecting other forms of it.

Specifically, Wilsey proposes that there are two kinds of American exceptionalism. In an interview with the publisher, he differentiated these as follows:

“As a civil religious concept, exceptionalism has historically been articulated in one of two ways: One form of exceptionalism is imperialistic, exclusivist and justified in theological terms. Another is informed by the liberal ideals of natural rights, individual freedom, and human dignity and equality. I call the former closed exceptionalism and the latter open exceptionalism. Open exceptionalism forms the basis for faithful and biblical citizenship.” (IVP Academic Press Kit)

In the first two chapters, Wilsey traces the history of American exceptionalism, beginning in the first chapter with our national origins and then in the second with our national expansion, including the challenge of slavery. We learn that the ideas came from our English antecedents and that the term was probably coined first by de Tocqueville. He considers what would be closed expressions of exceptionalism in the expansion of slavery and the idea of “manifest destiny” in contrasts with Lincoln’s emancipating vision of extending American ideals of equality and justice under the providence of God to all peoples, black and white.

The next five chapters consider five theological themes of “closed” exceptionalism:

Chosen nation: That America has been divinely chosen or elected by God in a special way as a kind of new Israel (excluding Native peoples and Blacks) even though the scriptures speak of the kingdom of God as comprised of the inclusion of peoples of many nations with none preferred.
Divine Commission: That America has been uniquely commissioned to “save the world.” Wilsey looks in detail at the tenure of John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State and America’s role in saving the world from communism.
Innocence: The articulation of America as a pure and upright nation. The chapter focuses on the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan. This innocence ignores past and present injustices or takes an “America right or wrong approach.”
Sacred Land: A Chosen Nation occupies a Promised Land. Wilsey surveys the history of this idea from the Puritans through America’s landscape artists, and the struggle between those who would conserve the nation’s resources and beauty and those believing it was given for dominion.
Glory: The author examines this idea through the lens of the three most popular homeschooling history texts used over the last twenty years. All three emphasize Christian origins, downplay slavery, and portray America as divinely privileged vis à vis other nations. They argue contemporary America is in serious decline from these origins.

Wilsey would see these ideas as an appropriation of theological ideas into an idolatrous civil religion, often endorsed by wide segments of the American church.

Unlike some, he makes the case for an alternative, open form of exceptionalism that may serve as the basis of Christian civic engagement and he addresses this in his final chapter. He argues that America’s liberal ideals at their best are indeed worth cultivating, preserving, and commending: liberty, democracy, world peace, and cultural tolerance. Open exceptionalism seeks these for all of our own people and believes they are worthy ideals for the world, cultural riches to be added to the riches of other nations. He commends two unusual models of engagement: Justin Martyr and W.E.B. DuBois.

What I appreciate in this treatment is the articulation of a form of patriotism that is appropriate to a person whose first loyalties are to the kingdom of God, as well as a clear repudiation as idolatry of closed forms of exceptionalism. It is not a claim to chosenness as a nation or hypocritical innocence that ignores the times we have failed to live up to our own ideals.Rather, open exceptionalism is a love of country that that faces and addresses injustices and seeks to preserve and freely include others in the cultural goods of liberty, justice, and democracy we have enjoyed. It lovingly cares for and carefully stewards our land, not as some special sacred ground, but as part of God’s global creation for us and our children’s children.

I do wrestle however with the embrace in any form of the term “exceptionalism,” other than to acknowledge the history of this idea in our national history. It is one thing to recognize some of the particular gifts that have been part of the American experience, and to want to include others in the goods we have enjoyed. But the very term “exceptional” may quickly morph into forms of national superiority that smack of arrogance and hubris, or may still be culturally imperialistic, even if not idolatrous or ill-intentioned. I’m not certain what to replace the term with except for some form of “generous care” for the institutions, the values, and even the place, that have defined us at our best. I think of the generous care that rebuilt much of Europe and Japan after World War II under the Marshall Plan that allowed for the establishing or re-establishing of democratic institutions. Rather than “exceptional” or “great,” I long for an America that is just and generous, both at home and abroad. That would be good enough.