American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order

A Book Launch Event

Painting of the United States framers during the signing of the Declaration on Independence

Wednesday, March 12, 2025
6:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. EDT
Location: Healy Hall Riggs Library Map

Our perpetual conversation about the proper role of religion in American public life often revolves around what kind of polity the founders of the United States envisioned. Advocates of a “Christian America” claim that they intended a nation whose political values and institutions were shaped by Christianity; secularists argue that they designed an enlightened republic where church and state were kept separate. Both sides appeal to the Constitution to justify their beliefs. But what if the Constitution itself was the problem?

Berkley Center Research Fellow Jerome E. Copulsky’s original, deeply-researched, and timely new book American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order (2024) reframes this ongoing public argument by presenting a collection of religious thinkers who considered the nation’s founding fundamentally defective—indeed, faithless—for its failure to properly constitutionalize religion. These religious opponents of the American liberal order provided different accounts of the origins of the nation's error, but all were beholden to a vision of cosmic order and social hierarchy, hostile to the modern principles of liberty and equality, and opposed to the religious pluralism that was and continues to be the hallmark of the American project. In this conversation with Berkley Center Senior Research Fellow E.J. Dionne, Copulsky will discuss how the book exposes the deep historical roots of some of today’s critics of American democracy, challenging readers to rethink established narratives about the relationship of religion and politics in the United States.

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Featured Participants

Jerome Copulsky Toggle

About Jerome Copulsky

Jerome Copulsky, a Berkley Center research fellow, specializes in modern Western religious thought, political theory, and church/state issues. He co-directed Uncivil Religion: January 6, 2021, a digital resource created through a collaboration of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History and the University of Alabama's Department of Religious Studies. From 2016 to 2017, he was the American Academy of Religion/Luce Fellow and senior advisor at the U.S. Department of State's Office of Religion and Global Affairs. He is the author of American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order (Yale University Press, 2024). His scholarly work has been published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Religion, Political Theology, and Perspectives on Political Science, with essays in Political Theology for a Plural Age (2013) and Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theology (2013). His writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, Christian Science Monitor, Washingtonian, Jerusalem Post, Jewish Review of Books, and Religion Dispatches. Copulsky earned a B.A from Wesleyan University, an M.F.A. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Jerome Copulsky's Profile

Other Participants

E.J. Dionne, Jr. Toggle

About E.J. Dionne, Jr.

E.J. Dionne is a senior research fellow at the Berkley Center, University Professor in the Foundations of Democracy and Culture teaching in Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy and Government Department, and a leading scholar and commentator on religion in U.S. politics. In addition, since fall 2017 he has been William H. Bloomberg Visiting Professor at Harvard Divinity School and the Harvard Kennedy School. The W. Averell Harriman Chair and senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution, Dionne writes a column for the Washington Post that is syndicated in over 200 outlets nationally and abroad. His books include One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported (2017, with Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann); Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism: From Goldwater to Trump and Beyond (2016); Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent (2012); Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right (2008); Stand Up Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge (2004); They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate The Next Political Era (1996); and Why Americans Hate Politics (1991), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a National Book Award nominee.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.'s Profile

Michael Kessler Toggle

About Michael Kessler

Michael Kessler is executive director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, a professor of the practice of moral and political theory in the Department of Government, and an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown Law. Kessler’s research and writing focus on theology, philosophical and religious ethics, and social, political, and legal theory. He is interested in problems of law and religion, both globally and in the U.S. constitutional context. Kessler is the author of several edited volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Political Theology, co-edited with Shaun Casey (Oxford University Press, forthcoming); Political Theology for a Plural Age (Oxford University Press, 2013); and Mystics: Presence and Aporia, co-edited with Christian Sheppard (University of Chicago Press, 2003). He also wrote “Engaging Religion in U.S. Foreign Affairs,” a chapter in the Companion to Religion and Politics in the United States (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). Kessler is a member of the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

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Related Publication

Book October 1, 2024

American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order

This book examines a collection of thinkers who, on religious grounds, considered the nation’s political ideas illegitimate, its institutions flawed, and its church‑state arrangement defective.