Religious Freedom: A Conversation on the Conservative Tradition with John D. Wilsey

Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to Madison's Notes. the official podcast of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. This week, we will be speaking with Professor Wilsey on his upcoming book, Religious Freedom. a conservative primer coming out in April of 2025. Professor Wilsey is professor of church history and philosophy at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and he has been writing, thinking, and publishing on religion.

freedom ever since his dissertation. In this particular conversation he argues that religious practice is foundational to liberty and that America's unique freedoms are deeply connected to its Christian heritage. We discuss how his book describes Tocqueville's understanding of American character through two spirits.

We discuss the history and basis for religious freedom in the United States and the uniqueness that it plays within world politics. We'll also discuss the role of religious freedom in American Today. He goes into more detail about what he means when he says conservatism. and what traditions he's pulling from and wants to invoke support for in the ongoing political economy.

All right, Professor Wilsey, welcome on to Madison's Notes. I'm really looking forward to this conversation about your upcoming soon-to-be-published book, Religious Freedom. a conservative primer. I'm excited to give you some questions, but welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Laura. It's great to be with you. I'd love to share with our viewers and for myself also to get a perspective on the context that brought you to writing this book and what were some of the

experiences that you've been having recently that led you to publishing this book in this moment? Well, thank you for that question. And just thank you so much, Laura, for having me on. It's a great honor to be on Madison's Notes. It's great fun. I've followed the podcast for a long time, and it's great to be with you. The book has been in my mind for a long time. I've been interested in religious freedom for a long time.

Ever since I wrote my dissertation 15 years ago or so, religious freedom was a central idea in my doctoral work, and I've been interested in it. It's been sort of a theme that I've followed along. in my research over the years alongside of American national identity and the impact and influence that Christian theology has had on it. I wanted to... Shortly after I finished my PhD work, I wanted to put together a reader of primary source documents.

in the history of religious freedom in the English-speaking world, going back to Thomas Helwes, who wrote the first treatise on full religious freedom in English. This was back in 1607, 1608, coming all the way up to the man. Manhattan Declaration. And that project is sitting...

On the floor in my office. I went through, I did a lot of work collecting a bunch of resources, writing introductions to all of those readings. There were, I don't know, 30 or 35 readings in it. And I could not find a publisher. Nobody wanted to publish. anthology of readings. So when I finished my Dulles biography, which I did the research when I spent my year at Princeton in 2017 and 18, when I finished that project, I approached my editor at Urban's to see if he'd be interested in...

you know, producing that. He said, no. But why don't you just write a study of religious freedom? So I said, that's a genius idea. I should have thought, I didn't think that myself. And so...

That's in short, that's kind of where the project came from. Well, and religious freedom can be quite a broad topic. It can mean a number of things to various people. Tell us a little bit more about the core message and what you hope readers will take away. Yes, that's a good question. So I have directed this book to a very specific audience. You know, when publishers want to read your book proposal, they always want to know what your audience is.

The usual suspects are scholars, you know, students, LA-informed audience, those kinds of things. And I told my editor I didn't really have any of those people in mind when I wrote this book. The audience I have in mind is young people. The generation that my children are in, Gen Z. My students, my undergraduate students, and high school students, and just young people.

because young people have the most to gain from the tradition of religious freedom in America and the most to lose if it's lost. And because that generation is my children's generation and it's my students' generation, I care very deeply about them and I care very deeply about this core American tradition for them.

So that's who I have the book written to. And so when I wrote it, I had my children in mind. I had my students in mind. I had my nephews and nieces and niece in mind. Those are the people I was thinking of. And when I think about religious freedom, broadly speaking, I think. about it in terms of what the Constitution tells us it is. It entails in the First Amendment, disestablishment and free exercise. And of course, I develop a...

more full definition of religious freedom from the perspective of a conservative in the book. Hence the title of the book, which I love the title. I didn't really come up with that title, but the title is very descriptive of what the book is about. Well, and tell us a little bit more about...

Why you found it important to take it from a conservative's perspective? Does it have to be from a conservative's perspective in order to defend religious freedoms? And how do you see the conservatism that you describe, which you do go into in the book, to be more specific since it is quite a broad... term, but what is it about the conservatism that you describe in the book that necessitates religious freedom and the defense of it? I take a traditionalist understanding of

American conservatism in the book. So when I say that this is a conservative primer on religious freedom, I take that traditionalist understanding. So it's not a libertarian approach. It's an approach that's deeply rooted in tradition, American tradition. And it is, as I just said, it is

from the American tradition, Western certainly more broadly, but specifically the American tradition. And I hope that the book doesn't, I hope that the title of the book doesn't put people off from opening up and giving. giving it a chance, those especially who might not be conservative. Because conservative is a term today, I think, that is deeply misunderstood by people on the left and on the right.

people who claim to be conservatives. It's so laden with politically charged content and baggage. But that's not what I mean by conservative or conservatism. I think... that most Americans, left and right, and when we say left and right, we might say center left and center right. I think most Americans are center left and center right. Respect and revere tradition and respect and revere American tradition in particular. I think most... Americans, regardless of age or race or...

ethnic background or any of those demographic considerations, love America, care deeply about America and care about American tradition. So even if, you know, you've never voted for a Republican in your life. I still think that this book is for you. I'll just say, too, that conservatism emphasizes the concrete over the abstract. And I'm a lifelong conservative.

I try to sort of follow that. And I think I like to think that I do as just as a matter of course. So, for example, when I wrote a book, I mentioned a minute ago that I wrote it with my children in mind and my students in mind. That's a concrete approach. I didn't. Just write it to an idea of an audience in the ether somewhere. And I also wrote it with my mother and my father in mind and my stepfather in mind, who are definitely on the left.

Very much so. I don't know that my father has ever voted for... I think he voted for Nixon in 72. And much to his regret, I think. But my father is distinctly on the left. My mother is distinctly on the left. My stepfather is distinctly on the left. And I had them in mind as well when I wrote. And my father... read several of the chapters in manuscript form, and I really wanted him to read it because I wanted him to respond to what I was saying as a liberal, as a progressive. So...

Your question is about what does really conservatism have to do with religious freedom? All that, everything that I've said gets me to this point. Religious freedom is an American tradition. I think most Americans, whether they're left or right, revere tradition, love America. And I think also most Americans believe in God or believe in some...

transcendent order, and that's necessary for a conservative. That's the first of the six conservative canons that Russell Kirk described in Conservative Mind, and I agree with that wholeheartedly. You don't have to be a Christian. You don't have to be a Jew. You don't have to be subscribed to a particular faith system to be a conservative. But you do have to believe in a transcendent order because tradition is going to be rooted in a transcendent order. And I think most Americans...

believe that. And historically, Americans have always held very dearly to those things, because America is a nation founded on transcendent ideas. And so religion is really going to be central to any question about American identity or the American founding as our understanding of ourselves progresses. So that's a long response to your question. I mean the book to be a broad net for people, no matter what their political ideology is, because...

conservatism is really first, it's more about humanistic concerns than it is about political ideological concerns. Yeah. Well, and just before we get into more of the content of the book, I want to make sure that our listeners and us have a mutual understanding.

of what you mean when you say conservative and conservatism. So can you go into a little bit more depth about what you associate conservatism with and what you don't associate conservatism with when you're mentioning this? In answering the question. What is conservatism? I want to read a quote by Peter Burick, who was a very prominent post-war conservative.

in the 50s. He wrote two books on conservatism, one in 1949 and one in 1956. And Virich was a poet and a historian and a very prominent conservative.

in the early days after World War II. This is how he defined conservatism. He said the conservative principles par excellence are proportion and measure, self-expression through self-restraint, preservation through reform, humanism, and classical... balance a fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux and a fruitful obsession for unbroken historical continuity he said these principles together create freedom a freedom built

not on the quicksand of adolescent defiance, but on the bedrock of ethics and law. I think that's one of the most, if not the most, eloquent and lucid definitions for conservatism that I've ever read. than I've ever seen. Virick was a conservative in the Burkean and Adamsian tradition, John Adams, John Quincy Adams. He was a traditionalist conservative and he has a...

Fascinating biography. I wish we had a little bit more time to talk about him, but I'll talk about him in the book. But I love what he says that it's a nostalgia, a fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the plucks. A lot of people associate conservatism with people who don't like. change and resist change and want things to stay the same. You know, the old adage of Buckley that a conservative is someone who stands to thwart history and crying out, stop.

I don't think that Buckley really believed that. I don't think that conservatives, traditionalist conservatives really believe that. I think probably some schools of thought and conservatism believe that. But I don't think that that. Burkean or Adamsian conservatism, traditionalist conservatism, what we might say is sort of the predominant American conservatism, is an expression of that. Conservatives are realistic about the world.

And being realistic about the world, conservatives recognize that change is inevitable. The problem is not change for a conservative. The problem is how to manage change. Do we manage change through the rule of law, just law, through deliberation, through procedure? Do we look to tradition as guardrails for change? Those are the things that conservatives want to answer appropriately.

because for a conservative, order is necessary for liberty. Just order is necessary for liberty. So religious freedom... It's not license. We don't get to sacrifice cats and call that religion. We don't get to have eight wives and call that religion. That's a licentious type of a take on religious freedom. A conservative understanding of religious freedom would always have the guardrails of tradition.

and just order and just law. So religious freedom would start with the idea that the government does not have any claim on our conscience, on the individual conscience. in terms of what we believe and how we want to express our beliefs in public and in private. Not just the four walls of a church. This is not freedom of worship as Barack Obama described it while he was president. This is religious freedom.

We have the freedom to express and live out the principles of our deepest beliefs in our conscience in the public square as defined by just order and by American tradition. In your book, you talk about America having...

this two-spirited dynamic. Tell us more about what these two spirits are and how they interplay and are they at odds with each other? And what does that mean for your argument in religious freedom? I'm glad you asked. That's sort of the framework of the book. America has two spirits. And I wish I could say, Laura, that was my idea.

But it's not. It's Tocqueville's idea. Tocqueville, of course, wrote Democracy in America, written first volume in 1835, volume two in 1840, came to America in 1831 through. February of 1832. And in Democracy in America, he makes the observation in two different places in the two-volume war. He observes that... In America, the Americans have managed to harmonize what he called the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty in a way that his native Frenchmen have...

had not been able to do, particularly during the years of the revolution and the decades subsequent to the revolution. That in France, the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty were at odds with one another, but not in America. In America, they had reconciled and harmonized the two. And I think that's one of the key traditions in America, in American history, that you and I have received. that we've been the beneficiaries of. Even if you're not particularly religious,

Even if you're an atheist, all of us in America have benefited from that tradition of harmony between religion and liberty. If those two things are not in harmony with one another, then you can't have social cohesion. And again, this is not just an abstract idea. I want to point to history to demonstrate that, to bear that out.

a concrete reality, if you will. When Tocqueville wrote his book on the revolution, the Enchant Régime, he talked about it and he sort of described the results of the revolution, the destruction. of the revolution, the wanton. casting off the revolutionaries engaged in, casting off of tradition. And the terrible consequences that followed as a result, casting off tradition. And one of those traditions was a harmonization of liberty and religion. Now, this was, of course, in a feudal...

system and liberty would have been understood in a much different way. But order in... in society was maintained through tradition in France. And that was thrown aside. We can debate and we can dialogue about the value of that social cohesion before the revolution. But chaos ensued. And this is... one of the major arguments of Tocqueville's other book, On the Revolution.

So he sees in America that there's been a revolution take place, and yet there's been no casting off of tradition. In fact, there's been embrace of tradition in America. So that's where I get that. that framework from is Tocqueville. The book is heavily informed by Tocqueville's Democracy in America, especially in the first chapter and the last chapter. And one other thing, if you'll permit me to say about this framework.

the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty. And that is that I think that Tocqueville provides us, even though he's writing in the past and he's writing about a world and an America that's long gone, Tocqueville provides us. with a framework for how to go forward, in that he argues that religion is necessary to freedom, that you can't really have freedom without religion. So in the book, I'm trying to make a case for religious freedom.

But I'm also trying to make a case that without religion, we can't have freedom. Yeah, I'm curious. So in the quote that you read on conservatism.

It included historical continuity. I can't remember the exact word, but it was defendable historical continuity. I would love to know your perspective of what that looks like in today's age in regards to religious freedom. particularly in the current cultural moment that we're in that is seeing so much social unrest. It is a conservative principle to see both change and continuity in human life and in human existence. I'm a historian, so...

As a historian, I look at change, change over time. I teach my students that in good historical thinking, you have to follow change over time. It doesn't really do us any good, for example, to ask, what would Tocqueville think about Trump? Well, you know, he's dead. He lived in a different world. We don't have a time machine to bring it back. So I tell my students that all the time. However, continuity is very important in historical thinking also. And in terms of thinking about our policy.

and our society and just how we get along in our own families. Historical continuity is a deeply important concern, very significant for us. Continuity is something that helps us to make sense of the past. Because historical continuities are benchmarks to help us recognize things that... are important to us now. We're important to the people who live before us. Our great-grandparents, they wanted to see their families flourish. They wanted to see their country flourish.

They wanted to see their children grow up and have successful and moral and virtuous lives, just like us. So human nature is one of those historical contemporaries. When Virich talks about a fruitful obsession... for unbroken historical continuity. He's really underscoring the importance of tradition, the guardrails that Virich describes, guardrails that keep society moving in a... direction towards the future that sets the conditions for the flourishing of each.

successive generations. That sounds progressive, and if it does, that's fine, because conservatives are not so obsessed with the past that they don't have any idea for the future. I think that's a common mis... misconception also on both the left and the right. Conservatives care deeply about the future, just like all people do. So unbroken historical continuity, you could talk about that in terms of what tradition is.

Think about it in your own family, Laura. You and I have our families and we have family traditions. And those traditions make us who we are. They created us. They have... have the effect on us is to shape our whole worldview, big things and small things. I'm sure that in your family, you have holiday traditions and birthday traditions and traditions about where you go on vacation.

traditional ways that you talk to one another, maybe nicknames and things like that. We all have those things in our families. And that's an example in a small sort of a... a small kind of a world, the family, the home of the significance of unbroken historical continuity. They shape who we are, those traditions. They define how we think and how we see the world outside of our own existence. And those are very important to a conservative. In your view, as we look at...

religious freedom going forward and playing out, what do you identify as the main threats to religious freedom and how your defense of it respond to those concerns? Yeah. So I guess we probably need about three more hours to talk. No, in the book, the guts of the book, if you will, really do get into that. I talk about the imagination. I talk about our views of just order and ordered liberty. I talk about...

by the nation and nationality and patriotism. And these are the solutions to the threats against. Yeah. I mean, they're sort of the frames of reference for thinking about threats. So, for example, I mean, to get specific. The rise of the nuns might be the most obvious threat to religious freedom.

Clarification here. Professor Wilsey, when he says nuns, means to signify individuals who do not currently practice a religion or grew up without religious tradition. I think, I don't think this is true for everybody, but I think it's...

It's most dangerous for people who don't have a religious tradition that they call their own to think that religion is not all that important. Since it doesn't touch them, since it's not important to them, then it must not be important to anybody else. That's a great danger. It's a great danger. things that Tocqueville talked about when he described the necessity of religion to liberty.

was that religion gives us a sense beyond ourselves. It causes us to think about other people. It gives us a vision of reality that's far beyond even our own existence. For example, we all know we're going to die. Someday we're all going to die.

If our core central belief about death is that we just go to the grave and we don't exist anymore, we just have eternal sleep or something like that, no accountability for the way that we lived our lives, no accountability for the way that we treated others, then... That's a nihilistic way of thinking about our life and our death.

It's meaningless. It's pointless. So if you do great evil, if you're a Stalin or a Pol Pot or a Mao or a Hitler, well, they just don't exist anymore and there's no accountability for them. Or if you're a Mother Teresa or if you're a John Paul II or if you're a Billy Graham.

It doesn't matter what you did in life, the good things that you did, the people that you helped, how you changed the world. None of that matters. It's totally nihilistic. It seems kind of comforting to just sort of think about yourself just going to sleep for all eternity. But if that's really the way we...

think our lives are are framed in in a larger sense then that's going to lead to license and anarchy and chaos and ultimately to tyranny because out of chaos is the mother of tyranny so if we have if we have a society that

doesn't deem religion to be important and significant. And it defines life in those nihilistic terms. We can't be free. We can't have religious freedom. We can't have political freedom. We can't have economic freedom. We are really nothing more than intelligent animals that have to be, that have to be terrified.

Chris, how do you see the relationship between church and state evolving in the context of our modern culture and political challenges, but also with regard to these conservative traditional? values of religious freedom well the founders of course everybody knows the founders

thought that religion was very important. They didn't want a federally established church, that they didn't think that politics should not be informed by religious beliefs and religious people. Nobody thought that. Not even Jefferson thought that. Everybody thought that religion was important and that religion was absolutely important.

of inesimal value for the cultivation of virtue and a virtuous citizenry in a republic. When Tocqueville came to America, he didn't think that Americans were all that virtuous. But he did think that they lived by the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood. So they weren't virtuous in the sense that they engaged in acts of self-sacrifice for the sake of self-sacrifice.

didn't do that if when they did engage in self-sacrifice they did so in very small ordinary ways that were easily sort of forgettable and they did so when they saw that it benefited them but the effect of that was to as uh as wilford mcclay says

It channels vice into virtue, into virtuous directions. It takes vice and makes it a servant to virtue. So the selfishness that we want to... get what we can get from a good deed makes us do the good deed and the good deed then has beneficial effects on all society. Tocqueville describes self-interest, rightly understood, is one thing that strikes a balance between private interest and public interest in...

a democracy. And when that balance is struck, then a society can truly flourish. It's when those two things are out of balance that you have disorder, but an orderly democratic society. uh emerges when those when those uh interests are balanced out so that's a tradition that's gonna you know there have been obviously in the history of church and state there have been lots of different uh

competing beliefs and realities. We had established state churches until the early 1830s in the United States. There have been proposed amendments to the Constitution, declaring that America was a Christian nation and so forth. And we can talk about that.

about those things and debate about those things those are all um interesting issues historically and you know having contemporary relevance today many of those things too um but in the way that church and state um relate to each other now and i if you'll permit me to call in toqueville one other time Something that he observed about Americans and their passion for religious liberty was, he said that, you know, the...

clergymen don't mix politics with their preaching. They don't take political views of the day and cast them in religious or theological terms. So he's, of course, writing in the period while Jackson was president. He came to America at the end of Jackson's first term, and the second volume of Democracy in America came out in Martin Van Buren's term. Of course, Martin Van Buren was a committed...

Jacksonian. So it's the age of Jackson. And so what he observed is the clergymen do not politicize their religion. They don't politicize religion. They don't politicize their preaching. And the effect of that was that everybody in the country revered religion. They revered Christianity. Of course, Christianity was the dominant faith back then. Not everybody was a Christian. Not everybody was subscribed to the faith, but everybody revered the...

institution of the church, because it was transcendent above politics and political squabbling. And that transcendent nature and that transcendent sort of reverence that people had for religion was something that preserved liberty and preserved the mores. the customs, the habits of the heart that he talked about, that were the source of the laws and all of the culture of America. And he said that if...

If in America or in any democratic society, religion becomes politicized, then people will lose their reverence for religion and will regard religion as nothing more than another political party and religious issues as nothing more than... political questions of the day. So that's something I think that we are seeing and we've been seeing it. It's not...

This is not to lay the blame on any particular political party or person. I think we see it on both sides, and it's something that's been going on for a long time, at least since the 60s and 70s. But I do think that religion has been more politicized, and I also think that... One of the results of that is that people regard Christianity, Judaism, traditional religion, as being so politicized that it's undermined their respect and their regard for it. I think that's a threat.

to religious freedom as well. Yeah, I think it's fair to say that you see the establishment of the church in America, not necessarily Catholic or Protestant, but in general, a reverence of Christian faith in America as losing its reverence. as losing its transcendence. Tell me more about how that happened. And does that inform how you might want to structure returning the church or returning a reverence of Christian faith to American citizens?

sure do ask big questions uh you tell me that we only have an hour okay so i'll try to just summarize it um that is a huge question and um It is, yeah. I think there's a lot of ways we can answer it. Historically, I think the Civil War is a major influence in that, in the undermining of... of americans faith in religion and in christianity you know revealed religion as a whole specifically their view of providence um the civil war

introduced a really distressing question of theodicy. How could God allow these things to happen? It shook the confidence that people had in religion. I think that's one thing. Can you give an example of the question citizens were having where, you know, how... could God let this country go to war against itself? How could God let us enslave people for so long? Like which part of the civil war was?

degradating on this reverence. Yeah. Well, two authors that I can point to for more on this, Mark Knoll, The Civil War is a Theological Crisis. And Alan Gelso, our very own Alan Gelso. Alan Gelso, the James Madison program. In his religious biography of Lincoln, Redeemer President, and his History of the Civil War, Reconstruction, Faithful Lightning, he talks a lot about them.

those issues too. One thing that Gelso talks about is that the violence of the Civil War, people had always had death, you know, people lived very close to death in the 19th century. But death came in such random ways, in such violent and horrible ways in the Civil War. You could have somebody enlist in the...

in the Union or the Confederate Army at the outbreak of war. Go through every single major battle in the campaigns and come out without a scratch. And then you could have a person enlist. Yeah. And then you have somebody enlist and go to one battle and... they're missing they're gone um just Gone. So it's such a sort of it has a seemingly capricious nature to it. Death did. So many people died. Gelso talks about sort of the statistics of.

of the casualty figures in the North and the South. So many people died. particularly in the South. I'm from Georgia, and the Civil War always cast a very long shadow over the South for so long. When I grew up, I didn't know that anybody liked Lincoln until I... got to college it wasn't until then that I realized oh was it not just about state rights

So that's the world that I grew up in. I think that people who grew up in the North had much, you know, just thought of the Civil War as something that happened a long time ago. But in the South, it was something that sort of ever present with us. Was not forgotten. No, not at all. Um, Noel in his book.

talks about the Civil War as a theological crisis, his whole thesis of his book was that you have two countries, the Confederacy and the United States, who both thought they were Christian nations, and the war was going to be about what kind of a Christian nation would prevail. Whose definition of a Christian nation would prevail? So it's a religious war. And in addition to being, you know...

war to end slavery, a war to save the Union, all those things. It's also a religious war. It's interesting looking at the Civil War particular lens of it's a religious war. which one could inference the outcome of the war tells you, you know, which army had the correct religious association. But we still see higher numbers of individuals who attend and...

and keep a Christian faith in the South rather than the North. I think we see more secular cultures in the North. That's very interesting. Is there something in that? I know that's kind of off the beaten path of where we were planning on going, and is that...

what you see as well. And what does that tell us about the nature of the Civil War and how America's early understanding of religious freedom was playing into this cultural shaping? I think that the denomination, Protestant denominations in the North were much more effective. by the fundamentalist modernist controversy of the early 20th century from about 1910 to about 1930.

And they didn't, those debates did not have the kind of effect in the South that they did in the North. There were liberal, for example, liberal Southern Baptists, but liberalism, theological liberalism, did not take hold in the South as much as it did in the North. There are a lot of reasons for that as well. It's the post-war world. The Gilded Age is going to enrich the North. It's not going to do, it's not going to enrich the South.

that will have a religious effect or an effect on religious life in the South. And let's not forget that African-American culture during this time, deeply, deeply Christian, deeply religious, you know, and you have the great... migration started in about 1915. And so that's one of the ways that Christianity is planted in the north or reinvigorated in the north. But it takes many generations for that to play out. So it's a big, you know, you ask big questions. They're good questions. But...

I do think that that's one thing. And there's other things too. The rise of secularization is a major, major influence in America. It's something that... If you're a religious person, you regret in American history. And even if you're not a particularly religious person, you might still find cause to regret that. It's an old thing. It's not something new. A lot of people think that secularization is something kind of new. You know, it came out.

60s or something like the sexual revolution and that kind of stuff. But secularism is something that goes back, I think it goes back to the Civil War. and that undermining of people's confidence in real simple doctrines like providence. It's a long and slow and hardly noticeable process for a long time. The 60s does accelerate secularization. And it does polarize people and it politicizes secularization, I think, in a unique way in American history, starting in the 70s with Roe versus Wade.

with the founding of the moral majority in 1978, with Reagan's election in 1980, and we're off to the races with regard to those things. But secularization is an interesting dynamic. I have to say this because I've been thinking a lot about this particular dynamic in American religion, the effect of the idea of cool in American religion.

Thomas Bergler's book, The Juvelization of American Christianity, traces the effect of youth culture on religion and on church life in America, in American history, the 20th century especially. And cool is a... a philosophical term as well as a cultural term. There are origins of cool in... in jazz and existentialism in the post-war world that I think deeply affect religious life in America and in the culture as a whole. And I do think that that is a contributor to secularism.

Because if you can be cool without religion, then why do you even have it then? Why get up in the morning to go to church if you can just be cool on your own? Or you want to be cool in order to attract a... certain demographic into your church, people who are unchurched. And sometimes unchurched culture or secular culture can shape the culture of the church in deleterious ways, which...

undermine the power of religious tradition in a congregation or in a denomination? I do think that that is a larger question that maybe we can talk about another time. But those things, let's say those two things, the Civil War and secularization, that have served as... as something of a threat to religious freedom up into our own day with the rise of the nuns. And nuns being those people who, yeah, don't subscribe to any particular religion because they just don't have...

They don't see a value to religion in their own lives. And I hope to persuade people that it's important. Religion is important, even if you're not religious. It's important. Religion is a very important dynamic for social cohesion. Now, I would hope that everybody becomes religious. I would hope that everybody became a Christian. I'm an evangelical Christian, so I want everybody to...

to come to know the Lord Jesus as Savior and Lord. But the point of the book is really to hold up religious freedom as a principal American tradition. If we love America and we want to maintain American tradition for the benefit of our children and our grandchildren and succeeding generations, then religion is a good thing and religious freedom is something we must. assiduously work to maintain. You're going to love this. I have two questions, but I don't really have time to ask one.

I'm gonna ask both of them in a conglomerate so two big questions becomes one massive one and we'll see what happens as we look forward your book comes out later in April of this year readers are going to be able to find that

and read through the arguments and the meat of your discussion more concretely than this discussion here on the podcast. But until then, I... I see a large trend within some secular movements, not all of them though, saying that the American tradition isn't all that we've been told. It includes a lot more violence than we were maybe educated to believe in regards to slavery or the treatment of Native Americans.

when arguments for traditional quote traditional american values it it seems like somewhat of a of a farce it's like believe in something that hasn't even that hasn't really ever existed and and as a last question i'd love to ask what is your response to that or if the response is is quite lengthy how can individuals who are thinking through these problems

address that question, whether they are the ones asking it or the ones responding to it. Because I think that's a really big question in our cultural moment as well. You're right, Laura. It certainly is. My students ask those questions all the time. How can we love our country when the country is so unlovely in so many ways in its history?

Burke is famous for having said that to love my country, my country must first be lovely. And I think that's right. I think Burke is right about that. And the way I would respond to that is that the concerns about hypocrisy, moral hypocrisy, you know.

The concerns that you talk about, American ideals being farcical, those are real concerns. They're valid concerns. However, I would respond by saying that American traditions that are in the founding documents, that are in... that are in Judeo-Christian religions, denominations that are found there. Traditions of freedom defined by just order in American history have all served to increase freedom, to increase our recognition of human dignity in ways that we did not.

in past years and past generations and that because of American tradition We are a much more life-loving and freedom-loving and human, I should say, humanistic society now than perhaps we were in 1870 or 1940 or even 1970. There is, over time in American history, there are concrete benchmarks that we can look to see the progress of freedom and human dignity over the generations. My grandfather, my grandparents.

Grew up in segregation and they were committed segregationists till the day they died. And I was educated by African-American teachers. They taught me, my teachers in high school taught me English and math and literature. History. My grandparents didn't have black teachers. I had black teachers in high school and in college, and I'll never forget them.

And that's just a concrete marker I can point to in my own experience as an individual. And all of us can do that. We go on and on about that, but that's how I respond. And it can't be a farce if there are measures. There's measurable progress in human liberty over the course of time in a nation and society.

It can't be a forest. It has to be real. It has to be real. It also has to be real if you have thousands and thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, white Catholics. African Americans, Native Americans of all different tribes, immigrants from all parts of the world, laid down their lives for the American nation on battlefields all over the world and in every ocean on earth. It can't be a farce. It can't be a farce.

be a farce if you have that kind of willingness to sacrifice for something. I think of Pat Morita. I think he won the Congressional Medal of Honor in World War II. A child of a Japanese immigrant family. His family were in incarcerated in internment camps during World War II. And despite that, he went and fought for America and won the Congressional Medal of Honor and fought his own countrymen doing so. Stories like that abound.

It's not possible for it to be a farce. If we're going to be honest about American history, we have to look at the bad record. We have to look at the harmful record, the murder. The bloodshed, the theft, all of those things, the slavery. We have to be honest about those things. We have to bring those things out into the light. And we have to talk about those stories and tell those stories. But we also have to look at the positive side of the legend.

sheet. And when we balance out, I think when we balance out the ledger sheet between the assets and the demerits of the American witness in the world over the last 250 years, I think that the record is strongly in favor. of the thesis that America is the greatest, most freedom-loving country in the world and in human history. Well, Professor Wilsey, thank you very much for this conversation and for fielding my small questions. They were wonderful. I loved it.

I'm so grateful for you to have me on, Laura, and it's wonderful to have this conversation with you and to meet you. Thank you for tuning in on this episode of Madison's Notes. If you liked what you heard, make sure to subscribe and follow so you'll get notifications every week when we release new episodes. Professor Wilsey's upcoming book, Religious Freedom, is available for pre-order on Amazon and available wherever books are available.

are sold in late April of 2025. Thank you for tuning in on this episode of Madison's Notes.