Research Fellow
January 1, 2026
In a Liberty Fund essay, Berkley Center Research Fellow Jerome Copulsky reflects on what the founding document left open once independence was declared, arguing that the declaration offers guiding ideals, but the work of turning those principles into reality falls to each generation.
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, an M.A. in Divinity from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
