October 24, 2025 • 46 mins
On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Dr. John Wilsey, professor of church history and philosophy and chair of the Department of Church History and Historical Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, joins Federalist Senior Elections Correspondent Matt Kittle to outline how America's Christian founding and the nation's history of protecting religious freedom should inform the culture wars of today.
You can find Wilsey's book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, here.
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You can find Wilsey's book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, here.
If you care about combating the corrupt media that continue to inflict devastating damage, please give a gift to help The Federalist do the real journalism America needs.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:19):
And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle's senior elections correspondent at The
Federalist and your experienced Shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge.
As always, you can email the show at radio at
the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at fbr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and
(00:42):
of course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is John Wilsey John D. Wilsey, Professor
of Church History and Philosophy and chair of the Church
History Department at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He also
serves a senior fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture
(01:02):
and Democracy, an initiative at the First Liberty Institute. Today
we've discussed John's new book, Religious Freedom, a Conservative Primer.
This is very timely and very historical at the same time,
and I love it when the Twain meet. John. Thank
you so much for joining us in this of the
(01:23):
Federalist Radio Hour.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
I'm thrilled to be here with you, Matt, Thanks so much.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
It's a fascinating book and a fascinating look over the
history of this country and so very relevant today. This
is shocking reading in your book, but maybe it's not
all that surprising. In the times in which we live.
Patriotism and religion have sharply declined since nineteen ninety eight,
(01:47):
when seventy percent of Americans considered patriotism to be very important.
In twenty twenty three, just thirty eight percent believed the same.
In nineteen ninety eight, sixty two percent of Americans consider
religion to be important. That number dropped to just thirty
nine percent in twenty twenty three. How did we get here?
Speaker 2 (02:09):
John?
Speaker 1 (02:09):
How did we get here?
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Yeah, we only have a little bit of time, so
I don't think I have time to explain.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Sure, this could be a multi part podcast, that's for sure,
But I think.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
I can help to answer the question and help to
get our minds around that issue by referring to the
definition of conservatism that Peter Vierick, who was a longtime
history professor at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, wrote some
(02:49):
of the earliest book lengths works on conservatism from about
nineteen forty nine until about nineteen fifty six. And this
is how he defines it. And we can think about
this definition in contrast to our culture today, and I
think it can help us think about causes and how
(03:11):
we got to where we were. Let me read this
if you don't mind. His definition of a of conservatism.
He said, the conservative principles par excellence are proportion and measure,
self expression through self restraint, preservation through reform, humanism, and
(03:33):
classical balance, a fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux,
and a fruitful obsession for unbroken historical continuity. These principles
create liberty, a liberty built not on the quicksand of
adolescent defiance, but on the bedrock of ethics and law.
(03:58):
And I love that definition of conservatism.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
I think, I think it. Uh, we've we've lost that
unfortunately in so many circles.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
I totally agree and and and where where he starts
in contrasting a uh sort of a leftist from a
conservative viewpoint. If you, if you have the instinct to
follow Thomas Paine and Jean Jacques Rousseau, you know, in
(04:32):
the eighteenth century thinkers uh brussa of course romantic thinker,
and Pain a Enlightenment thinker. Both of them agreed that
human nature was basically good and that it was the
human uh ideal and goal to achieve one's own personal
(04:58):
potential and there by over overcoming all limits. So they
define freedom as as as as overcoming limits, uh, where
whereas in the Burkeyan tradition, freedom is always understood through
the lens of limits, through just law and a just order.
(05:20):
And in the Burkean tradition, limits are not limits should
not be seen as a bad thing. They're they're liberating.
Uh So if you're if your disposition is to look
at limits as something bad or something to overcome or
something to do away with, you might be a liberal.
But if you're someone who who looks at limits as
(05:42):
being you know, this is actually liberating to to because
within those limits I have of just of just order
and just law. Then I have the condition set for
me to uh to have human flourishing and to grow
and to and to truly pursue happiness in the in
the sense that it was originally intended to mean in
(06:02):
the Declaration independence. So when we think about how do
we get to this point, I think that one of
the answers to that is probably a lot of answers
to that. I think one of the answers to that
is that we have sought to, we have sought to
throw off limits, and we've sought to We've believed a
(06:22):
lot that individuals can become anything they want to be,
and you can't be anything you want to be. You can't.
That's part of the natural order of things, and limits
are part of that.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Yes, biological limits and limits placed on us by a
creator which was so instrumental that idea at the founding
of this country. You know, I enjoy the notion of
just thinking about you might be a liberal if it
sounds like Jeff Foxworthy a bit in there, but that's right,
(07:03):
I mean. And you know, some of these great thinkers,
great thinkers of liberty, by the way, the Thomas Pains
of the world often you know, withdrew from the idea
or absolutely withdrew from the idea that first there is
God and through God comes liberties, not governments. That's something
(07:30):
that the all founders agreed on, no matter what their
faith was, whether they were dis the idea of God
is a clockmaker, that sort of thing Thomas Jefferson, or
if they were full you know, Christian faith founders like
John Adams. But you write in your book about the Tookeville,
(07:53):
and how you know he saw America in the early
days of America, the early eighteen hundreds. He said, this
Anglo American civilization is the product of two perfectly distinct
elements that elsewhere have often made war with each other,
(08:15):
but which in America they have succeeded in incorporating, somehow
into one another and combining marvelously. I mean to speak
of the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom.
And that concept that the Topeville got was central to
(08:35):
the creation of this extraordinary nation, was it not.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Yes, absolutely, When when he came to America in eighteen
thirty one, he was here from May eighteen thirty one
until February of eighteen thirty two, not a long time,
and he was only twenty six years old, which is
unbelievable to me. He was so yeah, and so incredibly insightful,
(09:02):
but he did. He made that statement twice in his
two volume work Democracy in America, which every American should
should read, at least in a bridge edition, if not
the whole thing. Contrasting his native France, that it had
a very destructive conflict between religion and freedom because in
(09:28):
the revolution, you know, they sought to throw off restraint,
the restraining, the enstraining influence, I should say, of religion.
They sought to throw it off, and in doing that
they threw off not only religion, they threw off all
tradition and all prescription, and sought to literally turn their
back on history by renaming the calendar and re orienting
(09:51):
the calendar to ignore the past altogether. He wrote about
that and his history of the French Revolution, which also,
especially today, very relevant book. But in America he found
that that wasn't true at all. Had we'd had a revolution,
and whereas in France they'd had a revolution and political
(10:13):
instability resulted in ultimately the dictatorship of Napoleon, but here
in America we had a revolution that in many ways
just as radical changed life, changed life, and social and
political and religious ways in terms of relationships in society
to rearrange you radically. But in America there was political stability,
(10:36):
not anarchy, not dictatorship and tyranny. And he attributed the
very high view of religion among Americans and the influence
of religion on the culture what he called the customs
of the morase of culture. The basic assumptions that people
lived by were influenced and were shaped fundamentally by the
(10:59):
care by Christian morality. So you know, when we think
about how we got here today, there's a contrast with
our culture now with the culture back then. And I mean,
we're not trying to get back to the eighteen thirties.
The eighteen thirties had their own problems that are eating
to their times. But that's to say that if you
(11:22):
want to have liberty, true freedom, that is humanistic, and
when I use the term humanistic, I want to do
so in the same way that Vierick did in the
interest of human flourishing, both as individuals and as a society.
In order to have true freedom, you have to have
(11:42):
you have to have a basis in the transcendent. You
have to have a belief and a basis of law
and order in God. Now I'm a Christian, and so
I believe that the Bible is true, and I believe
that the biblical uh picture that the Bible gives us
(12:02):
of who God is is the correct one. But Russell
Kirk and his conservative mind, which of course is the
classic work and in conservativism, he just says, you know,
a belief in the transcendent is what is is the
first of the of the six canons for conservativism, and
not just belief in the in the transcendent, but but
(12:25):
an ordering of one's life around that belief. And so
belief in God and ordering one's life around God is
UH is necessary to freedom. That's that's one of the
things that tofil said, and I think that's also born
out in in UH in the conservative tradition in America
(12:46):
since since the Founding.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
I believe moving away from that idea has proved to
be costly and will continue to be costly for this
exceptional nation. You know, America was founded as a Christian nation.
As you know, that's not a controversial statement. It shouldn't be.
(13:09):
But why has that truth become in so many quarters
such a controversial statement.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
I think there's been an overreaction over the last forty
or fifty years. There's been a there's always been an
American history, a tension between Christian influence on the founding,
on the Revolution, on the founding, and on the American
culture over the last two and a half one hundred years,
(13:42):
and the influence of the Enlightenment and Enlightenment thought. And
so some will say, oh, it wasn't the Enlightenment. The
Enlightenment had nothing to do with the Founding. It was
all it was all Christianity. And then on the left
you have people who say, no, it was a godless constitution,
and that his famous book, that is it, Kramnik wrote
Cornell professor Beckham twenty years or so ago, this is
(14:05):
a godless constitution and we have a godless secular republic.
And Christianity had nothing to do with the founding. So
both both on the right and on the left you've
had these over corrections. But one thing I think it's
lost in that is that, for really, really from the
Founding all the way through into the late sixties and
(14:27):
the early seventies, that tension between Enlightenment and thought and
Christian thought had always been sort of resolved. But by
the fact that the Enlightenment tradition that influences the Founding
is not the French or continental Enlightenment, and not the
German Enlightenment was caught. It's the English and Scottish Enlightenment
(14:50):
that contributes to the American bank. And that stream of
the Enlightenment is is not necessarily not at the very
heart uh mutually exclusive to Christianity. So there is a
tension between the two, but the tensions always sort of
resolved in what tofo identified as the mores, that you
(15:13):
have this balance and an order between the needs and
the desires of the individual citizen, as that system, you know,
seeks to pursue and cultivate talents and gifts and to
and to pursue self improvement and better better his life
(15:35):
and better his family's life with that of the society.
Society has needs and the society has ambitions as well.
And when those two are in balance, which is an
Enlightenment view and a Christian view, they're not in conflict
one another, then you have the conditions for freedom and flourishing.
(15:57):
So America is a does have a Christian founding, There's
no doubt about that. That's a great I'll put a
plug out from my friend Mark David Hall's book, Did
America Have a Christian Founding? Which is a fantastic book.
I highly recommend it. America did have a Christian founding
for sure. And when we when we try to overcorrect
and say no, it was secular, it just emphasize the secutor.
(16:20):
That's that's another problem, because who wants to who wants
to love a country that's just secular, I mean, because
that's just a that's just a disposable kind of a system.
You can just replace it with something else. But you know,
you know, all you do is read the Declaration of Independence.
All you gotta do is read the pream of the Constitution.
That America was founded on transcendent ideas, and so religion
(16:43):
is always going to be at the very heart of
who we are. It's unavoidable. Even if you're an atheist,
you're a secularist, you have to really do some gymnastics
to try to deny that, to transcend it in the
in the not only the founding, but in the whole
American culture. Over the course of the last one hundred and fifty.
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Speaker 1 (17:37):
Well, I think that's it. I mean, it's the intellectual,
if you will, gymnastics that have gone on, particularly over
the past few decades, a few generations, excuse me, in
this country. Yeah, have been interesting, to say the least.
But there is no doubt that the Enlightenment had a
(17:58):
great deal of influence on this constitution and this republic.
It was created, you know, during the Enlightenment. These are
these are folks who were you know, very very much
into those political philosophers of the time through the Enlightenment.
But it is it is just insane to me to
(18:21):
think that someone would would say, you know, that this
is a constitution without God. As you mentioned, read the
Declaration of Independence, read the Preamble to the Constitution, and
again everything in it. The root of it is that
our inalienable rights are ours because of a God, not
(18:46):
because of the government. That is what is fundamentally so
important about this constitution. Why have we gotten so far
away from that concept?
Speaker 2 (18:57):
I think that the rises secularism has had you know,
has had such a great deal to do with that,
and it sounds like a kind of an easy and
easy sort of an explanation. It's very complex the history
of that, and it doesn't just go back to the sixties.
I mean, I think you can trace the rise of
secularism back to the period of the Civil War. The
(19:20):
Civil War once the war is over in sixty five
and you have reconstruction until eighteen seventy seven or something
like that. Good historians have argued this is sort of
laying the groundwork for secularism. My friend Alan Galzo and
(19:40):
Mark Knoll are two good historians that have put their
finger on that. Gelzo talks about it in terms of
what when the war was over with, because the war
was so destructive and so it seemed that death was
so capricious. I mean, if people live with death, you know,
for for forever. But death came. People were used to death,
(20:05):
having come for the for the old, for for young
babies and young children. You get killed in an accident,
you get sick and have a disease. But but in
the war, death was capricious, and death took the lives
of men in there in the flower of their youth
and its destruction caused a doubt that had emerged as
(20:32):
a result of the war, a doubt in in providence
and a doubt in in, you know, God's fundamental goodness
towards us. And that doubt was one of the things
that birthed or at least it opened the door to
to an emerging secularism. So, like Gelza will say, this
(20:52):
is when you have the beginning of faculties and higher
education that were not clergymen at Harvard and Yale and
the Ivy leagues. But also you have the founding of JOHNS.
Hopkins University, which is built upon a German research model
which is entirely secular. And then that process of secularism
(21:14):
just works its way through the culture, and it has
fits and starts. It's accelerated especially during the during the
New Years of the world wars, the Depression, and so forth.
So by the time you get to the sixties and
the liberation movements of the sixties, secularisms victory and American
culture is really complete.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Yes, yes, to the detriment of the culture and society,
I would argue, yeah, yeah. Our guest today, John D. Wilsey,
Professor of Church History, and Philosophy and chair of the
Church History Department of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He
is also serving as Senior Fellow at the Center for Religion,
(21:55):
Culture and Democracy, an initiative of the First Liberty Institude.
We're talking about John's new book, Fascinating Religious Freedom, a
conservative primer, and that is an interesting point that you
raise about where this secularization, this secular movement really took root.
(22:19):
And I guess I can understand the faith shaking of
the Civil War, you know, just the devastation, and then
I think you follow over the years there have always
been wars, but wars wars of mass destruction. You know,
when we think about World War One, the new methods
(22:43):
of killing men, killing people wholesale, World War Two into
Korea and Vietnam, and I can see where the human
mind is shaken, faith is shaken. Do do you think
those subsequent wars also played a large role, because obviously
(23:07):
we see what happened during Vietnam and you know, the
absolute secular movement going on on campuses. That was one
of the big issues, you know, the Vietnam War and
all of that of course had you know, its strains
of abandoning God.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Absolutely, because in the nineteenth and twentieth century, at the
beginning of industrial warfare, the whole state is oriented towards
the destruction of its enemies. In the nineteenth century, I
think that gets us back to It gets us back
(23:48):
to You can trace that back to Napoleon and his
army reforms. Once he becomes Emperor of France in eighteen
eighteen oh four. The way that he reorganized his armies
was to build it on a reserve system. So he
would deploy in a battle, he would deploy his troops
(24:11):
along the line to test his enemies weaknesses, and when
he found them, he would pulverize them with artillery, and
then he would send a reserve in and his enemies
would have already committed all of their forces, which was
the traditional eighteenth century way of fighting, so Napoleon couldn't lose,
(24:32):
and that was extended. That reserve system was extended not
just to active campaigning and battlefield tactics, it was extended
to include the entire nation. So when Napoleon defeats Prussia,
he insisted that Prussia could only have a forty two
thousand man army, and Prussia could abide by those rules,
(24:55):
they could have a forty two thousand man active army,
but then they could have a couple of hundred thous
of men in reserve. And so that reserve army that
was held that you know, you would you would join
the army, you would be you would be trained, you
would serve for a short time, and then you would
you you would go back to your original career and
(25:15):
you'd be called up. There was an evert emergency, so
that theory was extended to to the whole nation. So
by the time you get to the end of the
nineteenth century beginning of the twentieth, the European armies were
numbered in the millions for the first time, very different
from the eighteenth century where the armies were small. Then,
(25:38):
once you get into the twentieth century and the scientific
developments of flight and strategic bombing which would come from flight,
of course, and then nuclear technology and biochemical technology. Think
about Agent Orange and Vietnam. What do all these things.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Do for us?
Speaker 2 (25:57):
What did all these things do to Western civilization? Western culture?
What is Western civilization valued for over the course the
past two thousand years, One of the things is valued
is the imagination and the imagination being the key to
(26:17):
what kind of a person individuals aspire to be and
what a society aspires to be. And I have a
chapter on the conservativism and the imagination in the book
because I want to say that conservativism doesn't start with politics.
It's conservative is a word that it's almost exclusively associated
(26:40):
with politics in our culture today. But I want to
say that conservativism is far extream of politics. It does
involve politics, but it involves politics as logical entailments. If
you have a conservative disposition on life, then that means
that you are you are aspiring to something You're you're
(27:02):
aspiring to the best of Western tradition and the interest
of improving yourself and becoming more virtuous as a as
an individual, and by extension, the society becomes more virtuous
as a society as it pursues virtue. And it starts
with the imagination. It starts with who you are, starts
(27:23):
with your private life, and extends outward from there. It
means that that dispositional conservatives in our own culture see
ourselves more and more as people without a country in
some ways, but that doesn't mean we withdraw from society
(27:43):
withdraw from the world. It means that we have a
much keener awareness of our responsibility to the world, and
not necessarily for our own enjoyment, but for the enjoyment
and security and freedom of our children and our grand children.
We're really working for them, not so much for ourselves.
(28:05):
You and I are old men. We've seen we've seen
our lives, We've seen things come and go, we've seen
the decades pass by. But we think about our children,
and we think about our grandchildren who are going to
inherit the world that we give them, and we have
a strong desire for them to be free and then
(28:28):
them to have an order to society that's predicated on
good things, on eternal things, on things that make life
worth living. And we can do it. That's what a
conservative is dedicates himself or herself too, and that's what
we need to get after it and get to be about.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Yeah, it really is about conserving the best, best ideals
that have made this republic again such an exceptional nation,
constitutional republic, you know, and I particularly think about that,
and I'm sure a number of our listeners do we
all go through this effectively. It's my wife and I
(29:12):
get ready to send our oldest off to college. Those
are exactly the things that I am thinking about these days.
And as I wanted to ask you, because you have
you say this in your book, and I think this
ties into what we have seen over the past several generations.
You know, as you talk about the secularism of the
(29:34):
American culture society, if you will, that victory being complete,
you write, people have become inordinately preoccupied with racial diversity,
valuing it over competency, and have become obsessed with trivialities
and absurdities like the use of artificially contrived, per usual pronouns.
(30:01):
We have had that battle in America, that cultural battle
for the last several years. But I mean all of
that is the creation of these new concepts in you know,
far left ideologies. And I think about the sixteen nineteen project,
and you, as a historian, must you know, definitely scratch
(30:24):
your head about to some of these things that in
critical race theory and so called anti racism, we have
we have really entered a brave new world, a far
left thought that is getting farther and farther away from
a creator, from a you know, a transcendent view of liberty.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Yes, yes, absolutely, And I do ascribe those things to
a purely secular outlook, an outlook it's it's not secular
by default, but an intentional turning away and rejection of God.
(31:13):
And the book is that's that's one of the most
relevant things about the book. That's one of the things
that I try to address in the book, almost more
than anything else. As a as a Christian, we we
we we we see God as the ground of all
things that that are the basis for everything that exists.
(31:38):
And where does this come from? Well, it comes from,
of course the Bible, but it comes from a whole
tradition of Christian writing that goes back, that goes back
at We could just say to Augustine as an example.
Augustine is very Pauline in the way that he conceives
of of you know, his his interpretation of the way
the world is, his interpretation of reality. If God is
(32:02):
the ground of all being, then trying to live a
life and trying to establish a society on a basis
that's not based upon God and who he is and
what his will is as he's revealed it to us,
is total folly and it can only result in anarchy
(32:22):
and then tyranny and going back to Topville, the value
of Topville and thinking about religion and conservativism in a
society is topfield. Points are points are our perspective straight
to his world. The French Revolution. What does the French
Revolution bring about? It's a desire to have freedom from limits.
(32:48):
And by the way, remember in the twenty twenty four campaign,
the Democrats, it would have us believe that they were
the party of freedom. Remember that was their big that
was their big thing was freedom, freedom, freedom.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Freedom, freedom and the defense of democracy. Yeah, yeah, freedom, freedom,
but freedom from what? Freedom from limits? So freedom to
kill your own babies, freedom to define what what gender
you were, freedom to you know, completely throw off all restraint,
all natural restraint, constraint and restraint, restraint. That was there
(33:24):
a definition of freedom and that was the definition of
freedom by the Jacobins in the seventeen nineties. That resulted
in the killing of the king publicly, the.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
Slaughter of tens of thousands of people in the streets
of Paris, throwing off of the Catholic Church, reorienting the calendar.
And what does it all result in? It results in
anarchy and then from there the tyranny of Napoleon. Absolutely
is that what we want? Is that? Is that the
kind of country we want, and are those of the
(33:52):
kind of people we want to be? No? Absolutely not so.
The critical race theory and and an and an anti
human ethic that not only accepts abortion as a necessary
evil doesn't do that at all. It thinks of it
(34:14):
as a as a positive moral good. By the way,
that sounds a lot like the way slavery was received
back in the Founding Founding generation accepted slavery as a
moral as a necessary moral evil. But but but a
generation later they thought of it as a positive moral
good and defended it and fought a whole war over it. Well,
that's exactly what the left has done with abortion. And
(34:35):
they're doing the same thing with with gender reorientation and
all this other nonsense and hogwash. And then it's even
more it's even more alarming when we see the rise
of democratic socialism in America with in New York, and
I mean, some people welcome that and think that's the
(34:57):
demise of the democratic part as we know it. We'll
have supermajorities among Republicans for the next fifty years because
of that. I'm not so sure you know, in a
secular society, those kind of things that desire for instant
gratification that comes with absolute equality. That's what Toakeville said
Americans would sacrifice their freedom for. They would rather have
(35:20):
equality because it's short term gain, rather than liberty because
that involves a longer term investment and you don't always
see you don't always see the results of it in
your lifetime. So you're always going to go with what's
going to give you instant gratification. Topville is very very
insightful and very relevant for today and people need to
(35:41):
read them.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Yeah, I mean he saw what was was taking shape
at that time and what would ultimately take shape in
this country if it's citizens were not careful, and that's
where we are. I mean, it goes back to what
we talked about earlier in our conversation. Those dire statistics.
You know, you go back just twenty five years and
(36:03):
you see seventy percent of Americans believed patriotism was very
important to them. It's thirty eight percent just a couple
of years ago. Sixty two percent in nineteen ninety eight
value religion to be considered to be important, very important.
That number has dropped thirty nine percent. Is it no
wonder that we are here. But here let's delve into
(36:28):
perhaps some of the positives that the left is bringing
us unwittingly, and some of that is, you know, this
what proved to be a massive invasion of this country
of illegal immigrants and obviously the problems and dangers therein.
At the same time, they did bring in a lot
(36:53):
millions of people who come from countries and cultures that
highly value you got then highly value faith and religion.
Do you think some of these things will come back
to bite the left?
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Well, I certainly hope so, and I think so. I
think we can see it in recent trends of the
way people have voted. Of course, Trump capturing a greater
percentage of Hispanic and African American votes in the last
selection than any Republican in recent memory is a good sign.
(37:35):
And I think people do when they vote, they cast
not just their a representation of what their policy opinions are,
such as they are. But I think mostly they vote
for their values, and I think that that is a
reflection of what they value. They value they want to
have a culture that's not hurtling headlong into anti humanist
(37:58):
philosophies and practices. They want to have a country that's
built upon some kind of belief in the transcendent and
the influence of transcendent ideas. I think, generally speaking, I
think we can come away from what we saw in
the twenty twenty four election with that, but we have
to sustain and build upon that with a conservative by
(38:20):
cultivating a conservative disposition. Because conservatism, as I said earlier,
it's not just a political.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
It's not how you vote.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
It's not just how you vote, I should say, it's
a it's a way of viewing reality. How ultimately, what
kind of a person do I want to be? What
kind of people do I want my children to be?
And what kind of people do I want to inspire
others to be? By my own word and my own
(38:52):
presept about my own lie, a person who pursues virtue,
and virtue is not just for virtue's sake. It's not
just an empty slogan like the left views. It's like,
be kind, be compassionate. What does that mean? Well, it
just means agree with me, That's what It's what they say.
When we say virtue, we're talking about, you know, the
theological virtues faith, hope, and love and the and the
(39:15):
uh the classical virtues of of temperance and injustice and
courage and uh uh you know. So these these, these
the virtues are what we aspire to. And those virtues
are all built upon a religious tradition that's been handed
down for thousands of years. It's not just it's not
(39:40):
just sentimentality, and it takes work and it takes discipline,
it takes order and ordered life in order to cultivate
those virtues. Those are the that's the fountain head of conservativism.
That's where conservativism, conservativism begins. And like like, Viric says
(40:01):
that fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux. What
he's talking about is that there's always change in human life.
You just talked about. You're sending your oldest to college.
You're experiencing a change right now. Your family's going through
a change, and your oldest is going through a change.
Change is part of life, and conservatives understand that. But
(40:27):
change has to be managed and directed. And one of
the ways that you direct change is through being informed
by a good The best of our traditions as a
Western culture and as an American culture, and if we
throw away all our tradition, if we commit intellectual suicide
(40:50):
by forgetting who we are as a people, by rearranging
the curricula in our schools around the sixteen nineteen project,
that's anti American, by tearing down statues and and redefining
the past along the lines of political ideology, no matter
(41:11):
what it is. And what we're doing is we're throwing
a right tradition and we can no longer be informed
by it, and we can't be we can't be conservatives.
We're going to do that.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
So, John, with all of that said, my final question
for you is that what we're talking about here from
the modern left is in many ways a war on reality.
How can a republic survive a war on reality that
is ongoing and getting more and more intense as the
(41:46):
days pass.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
Well, In short, it can't survive a war in reality.
And so what are we to do as conservatives it
It begins the effort to rescue civilization, which is abstract,
and conservatives value to concrete over the abstract. We value
(42:13):
life as it is, reality as it is, and we
see ourselves in twenty five in a particular state of
affairs Step one is to look in the mirror. What
kind of a person do I aspire to be? Step
(42:34):
one is ordering our own life and our own family
according to virtuous principles informed by the best of tradition.
And I'm a Christian. I recognize that everybody's a Christian.
But if you're a Westerner and if you're an American,
Christian morality is at the very center of tradition for
(42:55):
all of us. And you don't have to be a
Christian and to to you know, to pursue UH temperance
and injustice and courage and UH and wisdom and faith,
hope and love. You don't have to be a Christian
to want to pursue this thing. So the first step
(43:16):
is to look in the mirror and to focus on ourselves,
to focus on our own cultivation of virtue and be
an inspiration to our those who who live around us.
And that is that action will spread out in concentric circles.
We also have to be realistic and recognize that we
(43:36):
might not win this battle for civilization in our lifetimes.
We might. We might not. You and I we're about
the same age, and we might you know, we might
not see the promised land like like Moses. But our
prayer is that our children and our grandchildren will that
(43:57):
they will, that they will even inherit something that we
fought for, even though we might not see it in
our lifetimes. When you think about the people that went
before you, Matt, your parents, your grandparents, they handed they
handed something down to you and mine did to me.
(44:19):
And they're not here anymore. They're gone. But society, as
Edwin Burke said, is a contract between the dead and
the living and the yet to be born. If we
see society as as as encompassing all all three of
those groups, then we can take the long view of
(44:40):
culture and the long view of effort and know that
our efforts do do redown to something good. They do
have consequences that are good, and we can be we
can have inculcate patience and see it as a long
term investment. And that's what I hope to do for myself.
(45:00):
And that's what I hope that people will take away
from the book.
Speaker 1 (45:04):
What you're ultimately talking about here, in my humble estimation,
is the road to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
and that road as a foundation. It is not something
just dangling in the air that can be shattered by
the wind. Built on tradition, built on Christian values, built
(45:31):
on the hope for our children, our grandchildren, our grandchildren's children.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
It is.
Speaker 1 (45:40):
It is a very very good and powerful look at
where we've been and where it suggests we're all going.
Thanks to my guest today, John D. Wilson, author of
Religious Freedom, a conservative primer, you've been listening to another
edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, Senior
(46:01):
Elections correspondent at the Federalist. We'll be back soon with more.
Until then, stay lovers of freedom and anxious for the frame.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
Heard the fame, voice the reason, and then it faded away.
And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle's senior elections correspondent at The
Federalist and your experienced Shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge.
As always, you can email the show at radio at
the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at fbr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and
(00:42):
of course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is John Wilsey John D. Wilsey, Professor
of Church History and Philosophy and chair of the Church
History Department at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He also
serves a senior fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture
(01:02):
and Democracy, an initiative at the First Liberty Institute. Today
we've discussed John's new book, Religious Freedom, a Conservative Primer.
This is very timely and very historical at the same time,
and I love it when the Twain meet. John. Thank
you so much for joining us in this of the
(01:23):
Federalist Radio Hour.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
I'm thrilled to be here with you, Matt, Thanks so much.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
It's a fascinating book and a fascinating look over the
history of this country and so very relevant today. This
is shocking reading in your book, but maybe it's not
all that surprising. In the times in which we live.
Patriotism and religion have sharply declined since nineteen ninety eight,
(01:47):
when seventy percent of Americans considered patriotism to be very important.
In twenty twenty three, just thirty eight percent believed the same.
In nineteen ninety eight, sixty two percent of Americans consider
religion to be important. That number dropped to just thirty
nine percent in twenty twenty three. How did we get here?
Speaker 2 (02:09):
John?
Speaker 1 (02:09):
How did we get here?
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Yeah, we only have a little bit of time, so
I don't think I have time to explain.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Sure, this could be a multi part podcast, that's for sure,
But I think.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
I can help to answer the question and help to
get our minds around that issue by referring to the
definition of conservatism that Peter Vierick, who was a longtime
history professor at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, wrote some
(02:49):
of the earliest book lengths works on conservatism from about
nineteen forty nine until about nineteen fifty six. And this
is how he defines it. And we can think about
this definition in contrast to our culture today, and I
think it can help us think about causes and how
(03:11):
we got to where we were. Let me read this
if you don't mind. His definition of a of conservatism.
He said, the conservative principles par excellence are proportion and measure,
self expression through self restraint, preservation through reform, humanism, and
(03:33):
classical balance, a fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux,
and a fruitful obsession for unbroken historical continuity. These principles
create liberty, a liberty built not on the quicksand of
adolescent defiance, but on the bedrock of ethics and law.
(03:58):
And I love that definition of conservatism.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
I think, I think it. Uh, we've we've lost that
unfortunately in so many circles.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
I totally agree and and and where where he starts
in contrasting a uh sort of a leftist from a
conservative viewpoint. If you, if you have the instinct to
follow Thomas Paine and Jean Jacques Rousseau, you know, in
(04:32):
the eighteenth century thinkers uh brussa of course romantic thinker,
and Pain a Enlightenment thinker. Both of them agreed that
human nature was basically good and that it was the
human uh ideal and goal to achieve one's own personal
(04:58):
potential and there by over overcoming all limits. So they
define freedom as as as as overcoming limits, uh, where
whereas in the Burkeyan tradition, freedom is always understood through
the lens of limits, through just law and a just order.
(05:20):
And in the Burkean tradition, limits are not limits should
not be seen as a bad thing. They're they're liberating.
Uh So if you're if your disposition is to look
at limits as something bad or something to overcome or
something to do away with, you might be a liberal.
But if you're someone who who looks at limits as
(05:42):
being you know, this is actually liberating to to because
within those limits I have of just of just order
and just law. Then I have the condition set for
me to uh to have human flourishing and to grow
and to and to truly pursue happiness in the in
the sense that it was originally intended to mean in
(06:02):
the Declaration independence. So when we think about how do
we get to this point, I think that one of
the answers to that is probably a lot of answers
to that. I think one of the answers to that
is that we have sought to, we have sought to
throw off limits, and we've sought to We've believed a
(06:22):
lot that individuals can become anything they want to be,
and you can't be anything you want to be. You can't.
That's part of the natural order of things, and limits
are part of that.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Yes, biological limits and limits placed on us by a
creator which was so instrumental that idea at the founding
of this country. You know, I enjoy the notion of
just thinking about you might be a liberal if it
sounds like Jeff Foxworthy a bit in there, but that's right,
(07:03):
I mean. And you know, some of these great thinkers,
great thinkers of liberty, by the way, the Thomas Pains
of the world often you know, withdrew from the idea
or absolutely withdrew from the idea that first there is
God and through God comes liberties, not governments. That's something
(07:30):
that the all founders agreed on, no matter what their
faith was, whether they were dis the idea of God
is a clockmaker, that sort of thing Thomas Jefferson, or
if they were full you know, Christian faith founders like
John Adams. But you write in your book about the Tookeville,
(07:53):
and how you know he saw America in the early
days of America, the early eighteen hundreds. He said, this
Anglo American civilization is the product of two perfectly distinct
elements that elsewhere have often made war with each other,
(08:15):
but which in America they have succeeded in incorporating, somehow
into one another and combining marvelously. I mean to speak
of the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom.
And that concept that the Topeville got was central to
(08:35):
the creation of this extraordinary nation, was it not.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Yes, absolutely, When when he came to America in eighteen
thirty one, he was here from May eighteen thirty one
until February of eighteen thirty two, not a long time,
and he was only twenty six years old, which is
unbelievable to me. He was so yeah, and so incredibly insightful,
(09:02):
but he did. He made that statement twice in his
two volume work Democracy in America, which every American should
should read, at least in a bridge edition, if not
the whole thing. Contrasting his native France, that it had
a very destructive conflict between religion and freedom because in
(09:28):
the revolution, you know, they sought to throw off restraint,
the restraining, the enstraining influence, I should say, of religion.
They sought to throw it off, and in doing that
they threw off not only religion, they threw off all
tradition and all prescription, and sought to literally turn their
back on history by renaming the calendar and re orienting
(09:51):
the calendar to ignore the past altogether. He wrote about
that and his history of the French Revolution, which also,
especially today, very relevant book. But in America he found
that that wasn't true at all. Had we'd had a revolution,
and whereas in France they'd had a revolution and political
(10:13):
instability resulted in ultimately the dictatorship of Napoleon, but here
in America we had a revolution that in many ways
just as radical changed life, changed life, and social and
political and religious ways in terms of relationships in society
to rearrange you radically. But in America there was political stability,
(10:36):
not anarchy, not dictatorship and tyranny. And he attributed the
very high view of religion among Americans and the influence
of religion on the culture what he called the customs
of the morase of culture. The basic assumptions that people
lived by were influenced and were shaped fundamentally by the
(10:59):
care by Christian morality. So you know, when we think
about how we got here today, there's a contrast with
our culture now with the culture back then. And I mean,
we're not trying to get back to the eighteen thirties.
The eighteen thirties had their own problems that are eating
to their times. But that's to say that if you
(11:22):
want to have liberty, true freedom, that is humanistic, and
when I use the term humanistic, I want to do
so in the same way that Vierick did in the
interest of human flourishing, both as individuals and as a society.
In order to have true freedom, you have to have
(11:42):
you have to have a basis in the transcendent. You
have to have a belief and a basis of law
and order in God. Now I'm a Christian, and so
I believe that the Bible is true, and I believe
that the biblical uh picture that the Bible gives us
(12:02):
of who God is is the correct one. But Russell
Kirk and his conservative mind, which of course is the
classic work and in conservativism, he just says, you know,
a belief in the transcendent is what is is the
first of the of the six canons for conservativism, and
not just belief in the in the transcendent, but but
(12:25):
an ordering of one's life around that belief. And so
belief in God and ordering one's life around God is
UH is necessary to freedom. That's that's one of the
things that tofil said, and I think that's also born
out in in UH in the conservative tradition in America
(12:46):
since since the Founding.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
I believe moving away from that idea has proved to
be costly and will continue to be costly for this
exceptional nation. You know, America was founded as a Christian nation.
As you know, that's not a controversial statement. It shouldn't be.
(13:09):
But why has that truth become in so many quarters
such a controversial statement.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
I think there's been an overreaction over the last forty
or fifty years. There's been a there's always been an
American history, a tension between Christian influence on the founding,
on the Revolution, on the founding, and on the American
culture over the last two and a half one hundred years,
(13:42):
and the influence of the Enlightenment and Enlightenment thought. And
so some will say, oh, it wasn't the Enlightenment. The
Enlightenment had nothing to do with the Founding. It was
all it was all Christianity. And then on the left
you have people who say, no, it was a godless constitution,
and that his famous book, that is it, Kramnik wrote
Cornell professor Beckham twenty years or so ago, this is
(14:05):
a godless constitution and we have a godless secular republic.
And Christianity had nothing to do with the founding. So
both both on the right and on the left you've
had these over corrections. But one thing I think it's
lost in that is that, for really, really from the
Founding all the way through into the late sixties and
(14:27):
the early seventies, that tension between Enlightenment and thought and
Christian thought had always been sort of resolved. But by
the fact that the Enlightenment tradition that influences the Founding
is not the French or continental Enlightenment, and not the
German Enlightenment was caught. It's the English and Scottish Enlightenment
(14:50):
that contributes to the American bank. And that stream of
the Enlightenment is is not necessarily not at the very
heart uh mutually exclusive to Christianity. So there is a
tension between the two, but the tensions always sort of
resolved in what tofo identified as the mores, that you
(15:13):
have this balance and an order between the needs and
the desires of the individual citizen, as that system, you know,
seeks to pursue and cultivate talents and gifts and to
and to pursue self improvement and better better his life
(15:35):
and better his family's life with that of the society.
Society has needs and the society has ambitions as well.
And when those two are in balance, which is an
Enlightenment view and a Christian view, they're not in conflict
one another, then you have the conditions for freedom and flourishing.
(15:57):
So America is a does have a Christian founding, There's
no doubt about that. That's a great I'll put a
plug out from my friend Mark David Hall's book, Did
America Have a Christian Founding? Which is a fantastic book.
I highly recommend it. America did have a Christian founding
for sure. And when we when we try to overcorrect
and say no, it was secular, it just emphasize the secutor.
(16:20):
That's that's another problem, because who wants to who wants
to love a country that's just secular, I mean, because
that's just a that's just a disposable kind of a system.
You can just replace it with something else. But you know,
you know, all you do is read the Declaration of Independence.
All you gotta do is read the pream of the Constitution.
That America was founded on transcendent ideas, and so religion
(16:43):
is always going to be at the very heart of
who we are. It's unavoidable. Even if you're an atheist,
you're a secularist, you have to really do some gymnastics
to try to deny that, to transcend it in the
in the not only the founding, but in the whole
American culture. Over the course of the last one hundred and fifty.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
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(17:21):
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Speaker 2 (17:28):
Be informed.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
Check out the Watchdot on Wall Street podcast with Chris
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Speaker 1 (17:37):
Well, I think that's it. I mean, it's the intellectual,
if you will, gymnastics that have gone on, particularly over
the past few decades, a few generations, excuse me, in
this country. Yeah, have been interesting, to say the least.
But there is no doubt that the Enlightenment had a
(17:58):
great deal of influence on this constitution and this republic.
It was created, you know, during the Enlightenment. These are
these are folks who were you know, very very much
into those political philosophers of the time through the Enlightenment.
But it is it is just insane to me to
(18:21):
think that someone would would say, you know, that this
is a constitution without God. As you mentioned, read the
Declaration of Independence, read the Preamble to the Constitution, and
again everything in it. The root of it is that
our inalienable rights are ours because of a God, not
(18:46):
because of the government. That is what is fundamentally so
important about this constitution. Why have we gotten so far
away from that concept?
Speaker 2 (18:57):
I think that the rises secularism has had you know,
has had such a great deal to do with that,
and it sounds like a kind of an easy and
easy sort of an explanation. It's very complex the history
of that, and it doesn't just go back to the sixties.
I mean, I think you can trace the rise of
secularism back to the period of the Civil War. The
(19:20):
Civil War once the war is over in sixty five
and you have reconstruction until eighteen seventy seven or something
like that. Good historians have argued this is sort of
laying the groundwork for secularism. My friend Alan Galzo and
(19:40):
Mark Knoll are two good historians that have put their
finger on that. Gelzo talks about it in terms of
what when the war was over with, because the war
was so destructive and so it seemed that death was
so capricious. I mean, if people live with death, you know,
for for forever. But death came. People were used to death,
(20:05):
having come for the for the old, for for young
babies and young children. You get killed in an accident,
you get sick and have a disease. But but in
the war, death was capricious, and death took the lives
of men in there in the flower of their youth
and its destruction caused a doubt that had emerged as
(20:32):
a result of the war, a doubt in in providence
and a doubt in in, you know, God's fundamental goodness
towards us. And that doubt was one of the things
that birthed or at least it opened the door to
to an emerging secularism. So, like Gelza will say, this
(20:52):
is when you have the beginning of faculties and higher
education that were not clergymen at Harvard and Yale and
the Ivy leagues. But also you have the founding of JOHNS.
Hopkins University, which is built upon a German research model
which is entirely secular. And then that process of secularism
(21:14):
just works its way through the culture, and it has
fits and starts. It's accelerated especially during the during the
New Years of the world wars, the Depression, and so forth.
So by the time you get to the sixties and
the liberation movements of the sixties, secularisms victory and American
culture is really complete.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Yes, yes, to the detriment of the culture and society,
I would argue, yeah, yeah. Our guest today, John D. Wilsey,
Professor of Church History, and Philosophy and chair of the
Church History Department of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He
is also serving as Senior Fellow at the Center for Religion,
(21:55):
Culture and Democracy, an initiative of the First Liberty Institude.
We're talking about John's new book, Fascinating Religious Freedom, a
conservative primer, and that is an interesting point that you
raise about where this secularization, this secular movement really took root.
(22:19):
And I guess I can understand the faith shaking of
the Civil War, you know, just the devastation, and then
I think you follow over the years there have always
been wars, but wars wars of mass destruction. You know,
when we think about World War One, the new methods
(22:43):
of killing men, killing people wholesale, World War Two into
Korea and Vietnam, and I can see where the human
mind is shaken, faith is shaken. Do do you think
those subsequent wars also played a large role, because obviously
(23:07):
we see what happened during Vietnam and you know, the
absolute secular movement going on on campuses. That was one
of the big issues, you know, the Vietnam War and
all of that of course had you know, its strains
of abandoning God.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Absolutely, because in the nineteenth and twentieth century, at the
beginning of industrial warfare, the whole state is oriented towards
the destruction of its enemies. In the nineteenth century, I
think that gets us back to It gets us back
(23:48):
to You can trace that back to Napoleon and his
army reforms. Once he becomes Emperor of France in eighteen
eighteen oh four. The way that he reorganized his armies
was to build it on a reserve system. So he
would deploy in a battle, he would deploy his troops
(24:11):
along the line to test his enemies weaknesses, and when
he found them, he would pulverize them with artillery, and
then he would send a reserve in and his enemies
would have already committed all of their forces, which was
the traditional eighteenth century way of fighting, so Napoleon couldn't lose,
(24:32):
and that was extended. That reserve system was extended not
just to active campaigning and battlefield tactics, it was extended
to include the entire nation. So when Napoleon defeats Prussia,
he insisted that Prussia could only have a forty two
thousand man army, and Prussia could abide by those rules,
(24:55):
they could have a forty two thousand man active army,
but then they could have a couple of hundred thous
of men in reserve. And so that reserve army that
was held that you know, you would you would join
the army, you would be you would be trained, you
would serve for a short time, and then you would
you you would go back to your original career and
(25:15):
you'd be called up. There was an evert emergency, so
that theory was extended to to the whole nation. So
by the time you get to the end of the
nineteenth century beginning of the twentieth, the European armies were
numbered in the millions for the first time, very different
from the eighteenth century where the armies were small. Then,
(25:38):
once you get into the twentieth century and the scientific
developments of flight and strategic bombing which would come from flight,
of course, and then nuclear technology and biochemical technology. Think
about Agent Orange and Vietnam. What do all these things.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Do for us?
Speaker 2 (25:57):
What did all these things do to Western civilization? Western culture?
What is Western civilization valued for over the course the
past two thousand years, One of the things is valued
is the imagination and the imagination being the key to
(26:17):
what kind of a person individuals aspire to be and
what a society aspires to be. And I have a
chapter on the conservativism and the imagination in the book
because I want to say that conservativism doesn't start with politics.
It's conservative is a word that it's almost exclusively associated
(26:40):
with politics in our culture today. But I want to
say that conservativism is far extream of politics. It does
involve politics, but it involves politics as logical entailments. If
you have a conservative disposition on life, then that means
that you are you are aspiring to something You're you're
(27:02):
aspiring to the best of Western tradition and the interest
of improving yourself and becoming more virtuous as a as
an individual, and by extension, the society becomes more virtuous
as a society as it pursues virtue. And it starts
with the imagination. It starts with who you are, starts
(27:23):
with your private life, and extends outward from there. It
means that that dispositional conservatives in our own culture see
ourselves more and more as people without a country in
some ways, but that doesn't mean we withdraw from society
(27:43):
withdraw from the world. It means that we have a
much keener awareness of our responsibility to the world, and
not necessarily for our own enjoyment, but for the enjoyment
and security and freedom of our children and our grand children.
We're really working for them, not so much for ourselves.
(28:05):
You and I are old men. We've seen we've seen
our lives, We've seen things come and go, we've seen
the decades pass by. But we think about our children,
and we think about our grandchildren who are going to
inherit the world that we give them, and we have
a strong desire for them to be free and then
(28:28):
them to have an order to society that's predicated on
good things, on eternal things, on things that make life
worth living. And we can do it. That's what a
conservative is dedicates himself or herself too, and that's what
we need to get after it and get to be about.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Yeah, it really is about conserving the best, best ideals
that have made this republic again such an exceptional nation,
constitutional republic, you know, and I particularly think about that,
and I'm sure a number of our listeners do we
all go through this effectively. It's my wife and I
(29:12):
get ready to send our oldest off to college. Those
are exactly the things that I am thinking about these days.
And as I wanted to ask you, because you have
you say this in your book, and I think this
ties into what we have seen over the past several generations.
You know, as you talk about the secularism of the
(29:34):
American culture society, if you will, that victory being complete,
you write, people have become inordinately preoccupied with racial diversity,
valuing it over competency, and have become obsessed with trivialities
and absurdities like the use of artificially contrived, per usual pronouns.
(30:01):
We have had that battle in America, that cultural battle
for the last several years. But I mean all of
that is the creation of these new concepts in you know,
far left ideologies. And I think about the sixteen nineteen project,
and you, as a historian, must you know, definitely scratch
(30:24):
your head about to some of these things that in
critical race theory and so called anti racism, we have
we have really entered a brave new world, a far
left thought that is getting farther and farther away from
a creator, from a you know, a transcendent view of liberty.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Yes, yes, absolutely, And I do ascribe those things to
a purely secular outlook, an outlook it's it's not secular
by default, but an intentional turning away and rejection of God.
(31:13):
And the book is that's that's one of the most
relevant things about the book. That's one of the things
that I try to address in the book, almost more
than anything else. As a as a Christian, we we
we we we see God as the ground of all
things that that are the basis for everything that exists.
(31:38):
And where does this come from? Well, it comes from,
of course the Bible, but it comes from a whole
tradition of Christian writing that goes back, that goes back
at We could just say to Augustine as an example.
Augustine is very Pauline in the way that he conceives
of of you know, his his interpretation of the way
the world is, his interpretation of reality. If God is
(32:02):
the ground of all being, then trying to live a
life and trying to establish a society on a basis
that's not based upon God and who he is and
what his will is as he's revealed it to us,
is total folly and it can only result in anarchy
(32:22):
and then tyranny and going back to Topville, the value
of Topville and thinking about religion and conservativism in a
society is topfield. Points are points are our perspective straight
to his world. The French Revolution. What does the French
Revolution bring about? It's a desire to have freedom from limits.
(32:48):
And by the way, remember in the twenty twenty four campaign,
the Democrats, it would have us believe that they were
the party of freedom. Remember that was their big that
was their big thing was freedom, freedom, freedom.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Freedom, freedom and the defense of democracy. Yeah, yeah, freedom, freedom,
but freedom from what? Freedom from limits? So freedom to
kill your own babies, freedom to define what what gender
you were, freedom to you know, completely throw off all restraint,
all natural restraint, constraint and restraint, restraint. That was there
(33:24):
a definition of freedom and that was the definition of
freedom by the Jacobins in the seventeen nineties. That resulted
in the killing of the king publicly, the.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
Slaughter of tens of thousands of people in the streets
of Paris, throwing off of the Catholic Church, reorienting the calendar.
And what does it all result in? It results in
anarchy and then from there the tyranny of Napoleon. Absolutely
is that what we want? Is that? Is that the
kind of country we want, and are those of the
(33:52):
kind of people we want to be? No? Absolutely not so.
The critical race theory and and an and an anti
human ethic that not only accepts abortion as a necessary
evil doesn't do that at all. It thinks of it
(34:14):
as a as a positive moral good. By the way,
that sounds a lot like the way slavery was received
back in the Founding Founding generation accepted slavery as a
moral as a necessary moral evil. But but but a
generation later they thought of it as a positive moral
good and defended it and fought a whole war over it. Well,
that's exactly what the left has done with abortion. And
(34:35):
they're doing the same thing with with gender reorientation and
all this other nonsense and hogwash. And then it's even
more it's even more alarming when we see the rise
of democratic socialism in America with in New York, and
I mean, some people welcome that and think that's the
(34:57):
demise of the democratic part as we know it. We'll
have supermajorities among Republicans for the next fifty years because
of that. I'm not so sure you know, in a
secular society, those kind of things that desire for instant
gratification that comes with absolute equality. That's what Toakeville said
Americans would sacrifice their freedom for. They would rather have
(35:20):
equality because it's short term gain, rather than liberty because
that involves a longer term investment and you don't always
see you don't always see the results of it in
your lifetime. So you're always going to go with what's
going to give you instant gratification. Topville is very very
insightful and very relevant for today and people need to
(35:41):
read them.
Speaker 1 (35:42):
Yeah, I mean he saw what was was taking shape
at that time and what would ultimately take shape in
this country if it's citizens were not careful, and that's
where we are. I mean, it goes back to what
we talked about earlier in our conversation. Those dire statistics.
You know, you go back just twenty five years and
(36:03):
you see seventy percent of Americans believed patriotism was very
important to them. It's thirty eight percent just a couple
of years ago. Sixty two percent in nineteen ninety eight
value religion to be considered to be important, very important.
That number has dropped thirty nine percent. Is it no
wonder that we are here. But here let's delve into
(36:28):
perhaps some of the positives that the left is bringing
us unwittingly, and some of that is, you know, this
what proved to be a massive invasion of this country
of illegal immigrants and obviously the problems and dangers therein.
At the same time, they did bring in a lot
(36:53):
millions of people who come from countries and cultures that
highly value you got then highly value faith and religion.
Do you think some of these things will come back
to bite the left?
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Well, I certainly hope so, and I think so. I
think we can see it in recent trends of the
way people have voted. Of course, Trump capturing a greater
percentage of Hispanic and African American votes in the last
selection than any Republican in recent memory is a good sign.
(37:35):
And I think people do when they vote, they cast
not just their a representation of what their policy opinions are,
such as they are. But I think mostly they vote
for their values, and I think that that is a
reflection of what they value. They value they want to
have a culture that's not hurtling headlong into anti humanist
(37:58):
philosophies and practices. They want to have a country that's
built upon some kind of belief in the transcendent and
the influence of transcendent ideas. I think, generally speaking, I
think we can come away from what we saw in
the twenty twenty four election with that, but we have
to sustain and build upon that with a conservative by
(38:20):
cultivating a conservative disposition. Because conservatism, as I said earlier,
it's not just a political.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
It's not how you vote.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
It's not just how you vote, I should say, it's
a it's a way of viewing reality. How ultimately, what
kind of a person do I want to be? What
kind of people do I want my children to be?
And what kind of people do I want to inspire
others to be? By my own word and my own
(38:52):
presept about my own lie, a person who pursues virtue,
and virtue is not just for virtue's sake. It's not
just an empty slogan like the left views. It's like,
be kind, be compassionate. What does that mean? Well, it
just means agree with me, That's what It's what they say.
When we say virtue, we're talking about, you know, the
theological virtues faith, hope, and love and the and the
(39:15):
uh the classical virtues of of temperance and injustice and
courage and uh uh you know. So these these, these
the virtues are what we aspire to. And those virtues
are all built upon a religious tradition that's been handed
down for thousands of years. It's not just it's not
(39:40):
just sentimentality, and it takes work and it takes discipline,
it takes order and ordered life in order to cultivate
those virtues. Those are the that's the fountain head of conservativism.
That's where conservativism, conservativism begins. And like like, Viric says
(40:01):
that fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux. What
he's talking about is that there's always change in human life.
You just talked about. You're sending your oldest to college.
You're experiencing a change right now. Your family's going through
a change, and your oldest is going through a change.
Change is part of life, and conservatives understand that. But
(40:27):
change has to be managed and directed. And one of
the ways that you direct change is through being informed
by a good The best of our traditions as a
Western culture and as an American culture, and if we
throw away all our tradition, if we commit intellectual suicide
(40:50):
by forgetting who we are as a people, by rearranging
the curricula in our schools around the sixteen nineteen project,
that's anti American, by tearing down statues and and redefining
the past along the lines of political ideology, no matter
(41:11):
what it is. And what we're doing is we're throwing
a right tradition and we can no longer be informed
by it, and we can't be we can't be conservatives.
We're going to do that.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
So, John, with all of that said, my final question
for you is that what we're talking about here from
the modern left is in many ways a war on reality.
How can a republic survive a war on reality that
is ongoing and getting more and more intense as the
(41:46):
days pass.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
Well, In short, it can't survive a war in reality.
And so what are we to do as conservatives it
It begins the effort to rescue civilization, which is abstract,
and conservatives value to concrete over the abstract. We value
(42:13):
life as it is, reality as it is, and we
see ourselves in twenty five in a particular state of
affairs Step one is to look in the mirror. What
kind of a person do I aspire to be? Step
(42:34):
one is ordering our own life and our own family
according to virtuous principles informed by the best of tradition.
And I'm a Christian. I recognize that everybody's a Christian.
But if you're a Westerner and if you're an American,
Christian morality is at the very center of tradition for
(42:55):
all of us. And you don't have to be a
Christian and to to you know, to pursue UH temperance
and injustice and courage and UH and wisdom and faith,
hope and love. You don't have to be a Christian
to want to pursue this thing. So the first step
(43:16):
is to look in the mirror and to focus on ourselves,
to focus on our own cultivation of virtue and be
an inspiration to our those who who live around us.
And that is that action will spread out in concentric circles.
We also have to be realistic and recognize that we
(43:36):
might not win this battle for civilization in our lifetimes.
We might. We might not. You and I we're about
the same age, and we might you know, we might
not see the promised land like like Moses. But our
prayer is that our children and our grandchildren will that
(43:57):
they will, that they will even inherit something that we
fought for, even though we might not see it in
our lifetimes. When you think about the people that went
before you, Matt, your parents, your grandparents, they handed they
handed something down to you and mine did to me.
(44:19):
And they're not here anymore. They're gone. But society, as
Edwin Burke said, is a contract between the dead and
the living and the yet to be born. If we
see society as as as encompassing all all three of
those groups, then we can take the long view of
(44:40):
culture and the long view of effort and know that
our efforts do do redown to something good. They do
have consequences that are good, and we can be we
can have inculcate patience and see it as a long
term investment. And that's what I hope to do for myself.
(45:00):
And that's what I hope that people will take away
from the book.
Speaker 1 (45:04):
What you're ultimately talking about here, in my humble estimation,
is the road to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
and that road as a foundation. It is not something
just dangling in the air that can be shattered by
the wind. Built on tradition, built on Christian values, built
(45:31):
on the hope for our children, our grandchildren, our grandchildren's children.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
It is.
Speaker 1 (45:40):
It is a very very good and powerful look at
where we've been and where it suggests we're all going.
Thanks to my guest today, John D. Wilson, author of
Religious Freedom, a conservative primer, you've been listening to another
edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, Senior
(46:01):
Elections correspondent at the Federalist. We'll be back soon with more.
Until then, stay lovers of freedom and anxious for the frame.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
Heard the fame, voice the reason, and then it faded away.
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