The Gentlemanly Heart of American Liberty
The American Right seems intent on proving John Stuart Mill’s infamous remark that “conservatives are the stupid party.” Not only is the populist movement in Washington foundering because of infighting and general boorishness, its intellectual equivalent in the so-called “postliberal” movement also seems to be descending into anger and what Lionel Trilling once called “irritable mental gestures.” Neither force seems to be the engine of cultural renewal that they promised to be.
John Wilsey’s new book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, offers a beautiful alternative: a vision to which conservatives might genuinely aspire. At the very outset of the short treatise, he turns to the wisdom of Alexis de Tocqueville. And rightly so—with the possible exceptions of Publius and Abraham Lincoln, no other political thinker has more fully understood the deepest meaning of America. Wilsey highlights especially his contention that our civilization is the result of a productive tension between two spirits: the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty.
At present, both of these spirits are at great risk of vanishing altogether. Religion has been in decline for quite some time, and what Robert Nisbet called the “omnicompetent state” continues to grow unabated. Wilsey’s book, however, is useful precisely because it can help us understand the civilizational resources we still possess. In this slim volume, he teaches us that we cannot conserve Permanent Things such as religion or liberty by seizing power or imposing our will on either our friends or our enemies—rather, their preservation depends above all on love.
Wilsey’s treatment of Tocqueville’s “two spirits” put me in mind of something similar that the Frenchman’s great mentor, Edmund Burke, once wrote. In the Reflections on the Revolution in France, the Irishman too claimed that “all the good things which are connected with manners, and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.” To his conservative mind, it was the gentleman who could defend liberty by embodying everything that was best about his society.
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