This is Thinking In Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.
I’m Albert Mohler, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
Dr. John Wilsey is professor of church history and philosophy. He also serves as chair of the Department of Church History and Historical Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Professor Wilsey earned his Master of Divinity and PhD from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Prior to his tenure at Southern Seminary, he was the William E. Simon visiting fellow in religion and public life for the James Madison Program and American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. Professor Wilsey is the author of dozens of articles and several academic books, including One Nation Under God: An Evangelical Critique of Christian America, American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of An Idea, and God’s Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles.
That was a topic of a previous episode of Thinking In Public. It’s his two most recent books, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, and God and Country: Upholding Faith, History, and National Identity that are the topic of our conversation today.
Professor John Wilsey, welcome to Thinking In Public.
You have a very important project going on here, especially in your two latest books, and I want us to talk about the two books, but I want to start by talking about the project. What is it?
The project is a civilizational project. The books, especially Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, this book is dedicated to the generation that my daughters are part of, Gen Z. The generation from say 20 to about 40, because they grew up in their formative years as teenagers in high school and in their young adulthood, the culture that they have inherited is much different than the culture that I had coming up, the culture that you had coming up. And so this book is meant to be an articulation of Western civilization, how to think about the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom and their harmony in a conservative way. And then the God and Country book is a book about rightly ordered patriotism, that it’s Christians. We have a historical faith, and we think about revelation in terms of space and time and matter that God made.
And so in order to be a good patriot with a rightly ordered patriotism, a love for country, you have to be a good historical thinker. So that’s what this book is about. So both of these are civilizational in that they are meant to conserve something in Western civilization that is good, religious freedom and patriotism.
In terms of the two books, the first one, of course, is what you subtitle as a conservative primer. And so you’re really trying to introduce foundational arguments about what it is to be a conservative and to affirm conservatism. So, where do you start that kind of project?
Yes. Well, in the beginning, I have a definition for conservativism that I love. And it’s a definition that was written by Peter Viereck. Peter Viereck was a longtime history professor at Mount Holyoke College. He taught there for about 50 years.
More influential in the conservative mind than most conservatives know.
That’s right. A lot of people have never heard of Peter Viereck, and those that have, don’t know very much about him. He wrote a book called Conservativism Revisited in 1949. He wrote another book called Conservativism from John Adams to Churchill in 1956. And then he also wrote a book called Unadjusted Man in An Age of Overadjustment, which was a conservative cultural analysis and critique. And this is Viereck’s definition of conservatism. He says, “The conservative principles, par excellence, are proportion and measure, self-expression through self-restraint, preservation through reform,” very Burkean, “humanism and classical balance,” and this is the part that I love, “A fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux, and a fruitful obsession for unbroken historical continuity.” He says, “These principles together create liberty, a liberty built not on the quick sand of adolescent defiance, but on the bedrock of ethics and law. “
I agree with you that I love that. But every part of that’s got to be-
Absolutely. Well, I titled this chapter on conservativism, The Permanent Beneath the Flux, taking right from Viereck’s definition. And the basis for the whole project, a conservative way to think about religious freedom is on Viereck’s work and on Russell Kirk, the author of the great book, The Conservative Mind.
So let’s talk about that for a moment. Let’s talk about historical placement. And so the modern conservative movement, as we know it, which by the way, is hauntingly, chronologically parallel to the modern Protestant evangelical movement as we know it. Both of them have roots in the period between the two world wars, but really exploded into national consciousness after the Second World War. And both of them, for good reason. It was a repudiation and an intentional course correction of progressivism out of control.
And so you don’t have to talk about conserving things until someone else is subverting them, and now you have to preserve what everyone had taken for granted. And so there was a consensus in the United States, I would argue, largely shaped by biblical Christianity, by the tradition of the Anglosphere, the English speaking tradition, the English speaking peoples, as Winston Churchill would say, just channeled through in terms of constitutionalism and order. When all of that is subverted, you have the development of conservativism as a movement and a set of ideas that says, as William F. Buckley said, “To stand a thwart history and cry, halt, stop.”
Yes. Yes. And it goes back. I mean, what you’re describing goes all the way back to the beginning of the conservative movement with Edmund Burke. Edmund Burke is reacting to the French religion.
Yes. So the conservative project is always needed whenever progressivism runs a mock.
And the forces of disorder are in the saddle, you have to argue for order.
And by the way, one of my main issues in terms of my life project is to make very clear that the establishment of any kind of order, the maintenance of order, doesn’t matter if that order isn’t ontologically secured.
And that means in biblical theism. So those who accuse me of trying to, I’ll say, or accuse conservatives, Christian conservatives of trying to be quiet about the Christian part, I’m not quiet. I think what we need to talk about, at least in part, is the fact that a secular conservatism unmoored from any kind of ontological grounding, Christian grounding, it doesn’t last. But you mentioned Russell Kirk.
In my own personal experience, Russell Kirk was just massively important and at two different times. So, Russell Kirk is this figure who really comes … Well, he goes to study in Scotland, University of St. Andrews. And he seems to be a very hungry mind trying to find rooting, and he finds it there. As a matter of fact, he writes this massive two-volume history, the University of St. Andrews, which is one of the medieval universities, one of the ancient universities, as they are called. And he finds this grounding. He finds a conversation. He finds a political argument and the unfolding of an historical tradition and a constitutional pattern. He sees all of this. And he understands that conserving this is a life passion. And then he really kind of brands the conservative movement, at least in the mainstream mind, long before we met Buckley Jr.
Because in his book on the conservative mind and even his anthology of just conservative writings, I mean, no one had done that before. It’s astounding to me.
And going back to your point about an ontological basis, his canons of conservativism, what’s the first one?
Belief in the transcendent and ordering of all things.
I just want to be careful to name the transcendent.
That’s true. You have to do that. You have to do that. But that is another way-
The one true and living God who’s revealed himself in the holy Scriptures and consummately in Jesus Christ.
I totally agree. But when you say, like when you said just a second ago about basing or beginning our worldview on an ontological basis, he says it in the way, to believe in the transcendent. So those two things do need to be defined.
No, and even it’s interesting. Even when Russell Kirk wrote that in the 50s, everybody knew what he meant.
Everybody knew what they … And that’s why it’s so important that the necessity to define those things. It didn’t exist before and now it does.
Yes. No, I’ve argued for years that there’s a tension between what can be assumed and what must be articulated. And you now want to go back to Russell Kirk and say, just say theism or biblical theism. The transcendent can sound poetic to people today. He didn’t mean it poetically. He meant it ontologically.
He meant this is the most basic reality. This is the realist of real.
And even someone like Viereck who was not a Christian-
Deeply shaped by Christianity. And the two of them both, with Kirk and Roots of American Order, looking at the cities that are the sources-
Every one of those words in the title and argument.
The roots of American order. But he is great about defining all those things at the beginning.
It’s an astounding conservative argument in just a title.
Yeah. Anyway, I forget my train of thought now, but I was going to say that both Kirk and Viereck, Kirk being a Catholic, Viereck probably being more of an agnostic, but both deeply formed by Christianity and a Christian worldview.
Right. And my argument about Kirk, and I mean, I think he very clearly was a very sincere Catholic, but I think he got to that through medievalism.
And of course, that’s the only option in the medieval period, but that’s where he grounds so much of his argument.
Yes. So proceeding forward, after defining conservativism, after basing the argument of the book, which the argument of the book is that conservatives are in the best position to conserve the harmony between the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom, which is a phrase I get from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
Those two spirits. So conservativism first and foremost is a disposition, which is a Kirkian expression, but I also want to say that it is an aspiration because American conservative in particular, Americans have always been aspirational. Abraham Lincoln, I think, is maybe the greatest example of this.
Always been consummate borrowers and improvers, kind of like the Romans. Because conservatism is defined that way, it is far upstream of politics. Conservativism is a worldview, and in order to begin a worldview, you must begin with the ontological. So I use St. Augustine as my model for this in the very beginning of the book.
St. Augustine, not as the ontological basis, but as the-
Absolutely. Absolutely. Beginning with God is the grounding of all reality.
Right. You cannot understand the city of man until you understand the city of God.
Yes. If God is at the heart of reality, that has immense consequences for the way we think.
You define conservatism early in that book. You use Peter Viereck’s definition and the stability in a time of flux, that’s close at least to his wording. It’s an amazing thing. At the time of flux is what requires the argument, right?
Yes. Oh, totally. Absolutely. Because change, change is inevitable. Is it not? We can look in the mirror and see that change is inevitable. Some
So what is the appropriate response to change? Do we see change as an inherent good in itself? So I think about Barack Obama’s 2008 run. His whole basis for his run was change. Change we can believe in. Remember that?
But conservatives do not necessarily just resist all change, but conservatives seek to manage change through deliberation, procedure, just law and tradition.
It’s just not enough. It’s just not enough. This is where I press back.
All right. So we began with ontology. What you just said doesn’t affirm ontology at all. I know you do. So in other words, it’s a friendly conversation. But what I’m saying is, I think there are too many conservatives who do think it’s just what you just said. So when you’re talking about what can change and what can’t change, well, that’s where ontology comes in. God himself says, I don’t change.
And there are truths that God has revealed that also do not change. And so conservatives are in a predicament because we are surrounded by a progressivist age and frankly, the spirit of Hegel, which is right down to Barack Obama’s speech. It’s the spirit of Hegel. Everything’s unfolding. The history is moving in an arc or a direction and unfolding and synthesis and antithesis and, excuse me, thesis and antithesis and then synthesis, just this unfolding inevitability. And conservatives are the people who say, and by the way, that’s based in a metaphysics, based in an ontology of change.
And so it’s the direct refutation of the conservative commitment.
But isn’t there, don’t you acknowledge that there is a tension that exists between the imminent and the transcendent. Those things that are transcendent do not change, but we live in an imminent reality that is, it is defined by change.
Theologically, I can’t make so clean a distinction.
So when you look in the mirror, Dr. Mohler, do you ever see any change?
You know I do. You know I do. But I also know why it is.
We know why it is. We certainly know. But see, that’s what I’m saying.
Right. What I’m saying is that the imminent frame also requires an affirmation of the permanent things or it becomes-
Well, it becomes in Paul Johnson’s in a description, it becomes a murderous form of anti-humanism.
Inevitably. In his book, Modern Times, he just makes the argument that’s exactly what happens. If you deny the theistic basis of society, you make human beings merely things, then you know what? You kill things by the hundreds of millions in the 20th century.
Okay. Well, let’s have this as a basis for our disagreement.
How about City of God? Augustine’s great work. In Augustine’s great work, don’t you think that he is dealing with the tension between the city of man, which is always in flux and the city of God, which is predicated on permanent things.
Right. But there are things in the city of man, which he says you must treasure and protect because they are evidence of the city of God.
So in other words, I’m saying I just can’t make an absolutely clean break between the eminent and the transcendent and a conservative biblical worldview.
Yes. I think I can agree with that. But nevertheless, we as conservatives don’t just resist all change. We want to manage change.
No, but that’s the big question, isn’t it? What can change and what can’t change?
So hairstyles can change, but marriage can’t change.
I mean, technology is the big driver in the minds of, I think, so many people alive today is the evidence of the fact that everything’s going to change. But you know what? A part of what I was looking at just in recent days was how many parents are concerned about the impact of social media, all these digital platforms and smartphones and all the rest of their children. I’m thinking, well, you know what? The very fact that this makes the front page of the New York Times, parents concerned about their children indicates that something fundamental is continuing, which the prophets of change in the beginning of the 20th century said would disappear, parents and children in the context of a parental concern for their children. Guess what? That’s creation order. And the Bolsheviks couldn’t wipe it away, nor Pol Pot or Mao.
Yeah. And Veric has a great deal to say about that. It’s in his book, Unadjusted Man and an Age of Over Adjustment. He begins that book-
Oh, I know. But in that book, he starts off with an epigram from Walt Whit … No, excuse me. He starts an epigram from Henry David Thoreau. Referencing the railroad and this great technological wonder that it was. We don’t ride on the railroad. The railroad rides on us. As if to say, all this confidence we put in technology is dehumanizing. And it’s a utopian pipe dream. The idea that we can buy technology, make life perfect, but you can’t.
No, but you can make yourself busy and distracted.
And getting back to your book, you deal with a lot of really interesting people. You mentioned Russell Kirk, and you called him the sage of Mucosta. I mean, he walks around in a cape. He does. And by the way- At 3:00 in the morning. Writes murder mysteries as well. It’s a phenomenal and interesting, a real life. It’s another thing. We’re talking about real life human beings here. Every single one of them. And he had a very happy marriage. His family honors him. You see those verities, those things that he treasured, they continue. Some of these other conservative figures, they don’t fare so well. Why?
Yeah. I think I assigned it all to exactly what you just said. These people are human beings. They’re fallen. They’re sinners. They don’t get it right every time, especially relationally. Peter Verick was a great thinker. I think I would’ve liked him very much.
Yeah. Certainly enjoyed being in his classroom.
To a certain extent, yeah. He was eccentric. He wasn’t-
Most great professors are, to some degree.
To some degree. Yeah. I mean, I’m a very eccentric person, Dr. Mohler. I’m a strange person. But because of his eccentricities, he was off-putting to people like Buckley, people like Kirk in some ways.
Right. Well, he also … So what I was kind of going at there is first of all, that if you try to have a modern conservatism based on non-theistic assumptions, it just doesn’t work. No. And eventually it just all falls away. And there’s so many figures who basically have just fallen away. The other thing is, is that if you try to have conservative political theory and your private life is a mess, that really doesn’t work either.
No, no, it doesn’t. So I think about Wilmore Kindle as an example of that. A great thinker, great conservative thinker. But his private life was a little bit of a mess.
It was a lot of a mess. Yeah. The fact that you’re talking about it decades later, indicates, it was a lot of a mess.
Yeah. Again, you look at this and that also raises the fact that if you take William F. Buckley Jr. In the 1950s, who kind of singularly creates this conservative synthesis, he had the ability to incorporate a lotof people in that orbit that I mean, frankly, I wouldn’t have been able to work with.
Someone like a Frank Meyer really didn’t like Peter Verick. Thought that Peter Verick was a fake desert.
Who really didn’t like Russell Kirk and Russell Kirk didn’t like them.
Because political ideas were so important. It’s not just a personality conflict, and especially in the context of the Cold War and all those pressures in the 1950s. These were real life arguments. These weren’t just classroom debates. These were live arguments about the shape of the American experiment and the response to the Soviet Union and whether or not there is a Western civilization to be treasured.
Yes. Yes. And because of that, so to the extent that your worldview is predicated on God as the grounding of all reality, as you say, as you pointed out a second ago, I think that that’s part of the answer to how some of these figures in the conservative movement were less successful than others, don’t you think?
Yeah. I also think their horizon was in many ways just too short. And so I think if you could go back to some of these figures and say, look, in 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States is going to rule that it is unconstitutional for a state to define marriage as the union of a man or a woman. I think they would consider you a science fiction author. And so they had witnessed massive change. But the interesting thing is that on the other side of the reset after World War II, World War II was a great moral clarification. And so my reading of American and world history at that time is that with the Allied victory, particularly in Europe and the defeat of Hitler and Germany, there really was this massive reset. And it was tremendously aided by the rise of the Soviet Union in all of its ambitions in the 20th century, in which it represented a clear threat, not just to the political arguments of the United States and Western civilization, but to its most basic ontological arguments. And so it was a horrifying challenge, but it was clarifying in a way that … I mean, the 60s, I think, were a repudiation of the clarity from the left, not from the right, but the left said: “We actually want to repudiate the very thing that Western civilization’s trying to continue.”
And the ironic thing was that it was the left. They were the ones that were so insistent upon this being a Christian nation for so long.
They were when it was convenient. So the arguments made by prominent Democrats, and it wasn’t just Democrats. It was the political establishment. But the Democrats were at the center of it, and they were arguing for the essentially theistic character of the American experiment, as opposed to the atheistic Soviet experiment. And so they put the words under God in the pledge of allegiance. They changed national language. And some of the arguments, some of the proposals went far beyond anything imaginable today, but the left made a break with that. And so honestly, it’s one of the most interesting things is that just as you say, John, if you list out all these quotations, the most ardent Christian nationalism just in its classic form is going to come from democratic figures, democratic senators, et cetera.
Yeah. And theological liberals too, like John Pastor Foster Dulles.
Absolutely. Saw it as a necessary bulwark against communism. Yeah.
Well, and the National Council of Churches.
Fascinating story, because there you have the elite, and it’s a liberal elite, but it’s not a Marxist elite until the ’60s and ’70s. Everything changes. And so their children ate them. It’s one of the most amazing things about the theological and political liberals of the 1950s and ’60s. They thought they were on the left and then their children come along and repudiate them. And then by the way, their grandchildren repudiate the children. And so it’s just like the predicament right now, you have someone who was a tenured radical from the 1960s and ’70s, they’re now being opposed by the young radicals on their campuses. So this is where you get the trans exclusionary feminists. It was no fun being a feminist unless you knew who a woman was. The transgender revolution just seeks to explode all of that.
Yeah. So can you imagine growing up as a child and as a teenager coming through high school in all of this, witches brew of horrible demonic ideas? Now. So when you were growing up, when I was growing up, you and I, even though we’re sort of different generations, your experience and my experience actually gently said, where our experience was much more similar, but my children.
Let me say, my experience was in the height of the Cold War. I was born in 1959.
You grew up a little bit, just a little bit more before me, but I grew up. Reagan was president. I was introduced to William F. Buckley as a high school student watching Fire Line with my grandfather. I was telling my daughter this the other day, the things that my elders told me as a teenager, and I didn’t grow up in a Christian home, but what I heard all the time, the big three to avoid, don’t have sex, don’t get drunk, don’t do drugs. Pretty easy to figure out as a kid. Now, there’s about a dozen things that you need to legitimately avoid.
So I lived in a very solid society, sociologically what’s described as intact, and it was an intact community. And so there were wild ideas, but they were far, far away. And so Democrats and Republicans just look at the 1960 platforms of those two parties, you can’t tell them apart. There’s not a basic moral issue that separates them.
But all that changes during that decade. By the time you get to the end of the 1960s, or just go two years further, the 1972 platforms of the Republican and the Democratic parties, they’re radically at odds.
And one is in continuity. That’s the amazing thing, is that the Republican platform is really in continuity. It’s the Democratic platform that veers way off, and it’s because they’ve been captured by an ideological class that you have generational replacement. So that’s a part of what is in the background to your book, right?
There’s this generational replacement on the left, and you end up going from FDR to George McGovern, to Bill Clinton, to AOC.
It’s the most amazing thing. In other words, if you take the Republican position on abortion, traditionally since Reagan, that, well, that was the position that everybody had in the 1960s. No one could have brought a contrary position. It’s the conservative predicament, isn’t it? What we believe was obvious to everyone at one time in Western civilization.
Yeah. Who do you think when you were in high school would have been taken seriously if they suggested to you that the American Project from its beginning was an experiment in degeneracy?
Yeah. Well, let’s put it this way. That person would no longer be teaching school. Or having contact with young people. Yeah, no, it’s a completely different age. And I think a part of what gets into not only your first book we’re talking about here, but the second is that most Americans these days, especially younger Americans, have no notion of a proper patriotism.
Yeah. They think if you’re a patriot, you’re either just a simpleton who just thinks my country right or wrong, or they think that you’re worshiping the nation, you’re an idolater. And of course, neither one of those options is open to us. So is it right for a Christian to be a patriot? And that’s what I’m trying to get at. And this book, this book is in many ways sort of centered around the life of my grandfather who I wish that he were alive that you two could have met. I think you would have liked him very, very much
And he was the most important person in my life. In terms of a worldview coming up, I became a Christian when I was 19. He died just a couple of years after I got saved. But as a child and as a teenager growing up and just having long conversations with him and his basement study, I was able to formulate the building blocks of a conservative worldview.
By the way, biblically, that’s as conservative as it gets, John.
So your grandfather, whom you knew because your family structure was intact and my two grandfathers had a massive influence on my life. My father more so. Wonderful Christian father, but my grandfathers very present in my life, massive influence. I think about my father’s father almost every day, one way or another. But that’s just an evidence. That’s creation order, right? The Christian needs to say, okay, there’s something fundamentally right about the world. When a man who is … I’ll just say you’re 56, I’m assuming, somewhere close?
Okay. Were you already there? All right. I was going to air on the young side. Okay?
So the fact that here we are in 2026, talking about your grandfather who’s been dead for decades and the influence he had on your life. In a civilizational inheritance, there’s something just marvelous about that.
Amen. Amen. And I’m so grateful to the Lord for it.
I hope parents hear this and grandparents hear this and understand this is how it works. And if it doesn’t happen, we’re in big trouble.
We’re in big trouble. I have a picture of my grandfather in this book when he was in the army.
In uniform. And as you said, you think about your father-in-law, correct?
Paternal grandfather. You think about him every day.
Nearly, because I think of something, and it’s just in a frame of reference. And, I’m kind of surrounded by things that make me think of him and my Father.
Same here. In my office at home, I have mementos and pictures, possessions of his that I inherited all over the place. And I’m constantly reminded he’s in sort of an ever presence in my life through these things handed down.
And sometimes, by the way, this is very conservative. I think very biblical. So I have two items in my study that belong to my great-grandfather. And I really never met him. He wrote me letters. Precious letters when I was a baby and a toddler. But he lived far away and my parents didn’t have the means to make a long trip. And so to my great regret, I never met him. I don’t have a picture of him holding me or anything. I have these wonderful letters from him, but I have a piece of him, two pieces actually just in my study. And I don’t think it’s eccentricity to feel drawn to him. Even through those items that were so important to him.
Absolutely. Yeah. What a precious treasure to hold onto those things. But there was a conversation that you and I were having a few weeks ago about what patriotism could sense of. Love for the nation and what is a nation.
But not just correct you, but it really starts with love of father.
And our fathers. And I don’t mean this at the expense of mothers.
It’s all included in this great affirmation of the fact that there were people who came before us, to whom we belong, who define reality for us before we can define reality for ourselves.
With Burke’s statement, society is indeed a contract between the dead, the living, and the yet to be born.
Right. Everything that you just said fits neatly into that.
Right. Yeah. It’s very hard to talk about these things in a society in which the new social category is velocity. The change is coming so quickly. You take an issue such as artificial intelligence just to take one technological issue reshaping society and nobody can stay up on it. So you just don’t know what the headline will be tomorrow. And that creates a disequilibrium which is unhealthy for everybody.
Yeah. So what permanent things must we conserve?
And conservativism and conservative thought is grounded in those permanent things.
Yeah. Which is of course a quote from Russell Kirk.
Well, it is a quote from Russell Kirk. It is interesting how you can kind of track how he got it because permanence is one of the great conservative affirmations through the history of thought.
Well, and you could also say even in classical thought, those who most believed in permanence are separated from those who most believed in change, even in the school of Athens with the Aristotle and Plato.
So I think about the transcendentals, the good, the true, and the beautiful. Those things are unchanging because those things are real. Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder.
And I would add classically the fourth transcendentals, which is the real. So you have the good, the beautiful, the true, and the real, because they are in God all united. They’re only separated because of our finitude. And so when you look at God and worship the one true and living God, he is the infinite, good, true, beautiful, real. And the reason why I kind of want to throw that fourth transcendental in there is because it was in even classical medieval thought, it was there, but it was so obvious it didn’t have to be said. Now I think we have to say it, that our understanding of the good, and the truthful, the true and the beautiful is grounded in the real. We don’t believe it’s just an opinion and aesthetics.
Speaking of that, in the conservative Primer book, one of the figures I talk about is Richard Weaver, who I know you’re a big fan of.
Well, and all these people, I’d say he’s very formative in my thinking, but with all these figures, you appropriate some parts and not others. But Weaver, he was very helpful to me, especially when I was a young man trying to find some grounding. He was very helpful.
Yeah. Yeah. I talk about him in the chapter I wrote, conservatism in history and how to think historically. And Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, of course. Everybody knows about that book.
It’s one of the books that actually does fall from the title.
And his editor came up with that title. He wanted a different title, :The Great Dissent” or something like that.
Right. Yeah. It’s an astounding thing. When I first heard of the book, I got it thinking that it would be kind of a primer and epistemology. And instead it was a breakthrough into a whole new world of understanding how first principles determine all that follows. Ideas Have consequences. And of course, he’s writing that over against the tremendous challenge coming from Marxist ideas primarily and the other toxic, horrifying, genocidal ideas of the 20th-century have consequences.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. In this world, well, one thing I try to do is help people to have sort of a rubric for how to think historically like a Christian thing, to value history, to see history, not just as something, oh, as entertainment or as something that’s a diversion or something that’s politically useful.
I found a comment the other day that I find very useful. And that is that the book buying public that buys history leans right. Okay. That makes a lot of sense.
And I think it’s because we really value what has taken place before us and we really have a hunger to understand it.
Conservatives revere tradition as a category. We revere the past.
That means history. Yeah. At least academically, the discipline of history.
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s ironic, isn’t it? That the field of American history is dominated by leftists in so many ways.
Certainly in the academy, but not in the bookstore.
It’s the amazing thing. That’s why this source came up because it was to the frustration of people in the academy. And this has kind of always been true. So if you go back a generation, it’s not most professors of history who are writing bestsellers as Stephen Ambrose.
And one of the frustrations to a lot of people in the academy right now is that they’ve been bested by someone like Victor Davis Hansen, who not only is just absolutely buttoned up in a scholarship, but he can write and he writes about things that matter.
The thrill of ancient battles and what this means for civilization. And so it is really interesting that. . . And conservative magazines turn out to be pretty much the same thing. So if you go to the local bookstore, and there still is one, thankfully, and you go to the magazine section, and again, if there is one, and I hope so, then one of the most interesting things is that these liberal companies have to have conservative magazines because it’s the conservatives who are buying.
It’s kind of always been a part of conservative culture, hasn’t it?
All the way back to Edinburgh and London and then national review in the United States.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So both books have a strong element of historical thinking in them because I teach history and I’m an historian and I try to inculcate these things in my students and in my children’s lives as well. And one of my children goes to Boyce college, so that’s even better.
So John, with all that in mind, do conservatives, Christian conservatives, do we valorize everything in the tradition? In other words, how do we make judgments about what to continue and what not to continue?
The way I put it is that we as conservatives venerate tradition as a category, but there are particular traditions that we have to think critically about. We have to think critically about every particular tradition.
Yeah. I’ll give an example in the conservative primer book about raising horses, husbanding of horses. On my dad’s side of the family, the Wilsey side, they’re all-
I have no idea where you’re going with this.
Well, they’re horse people on the side of the Wilsey family. My cousin raises horses and she loves horses and she’s always been a horse person. Horse people, by the way, are different than you and me. They’re a different breed of people. And why does she breed horses? She loves them, but she doesn’t depend on them for transportation. She has a truck, she has a car, she gets around that way. We don’t depend on horses and on animals to transport our goods and to carious places anymore.
We did for hundreds of years. Well, this is an example of…. Stay with me. Stay with me. So this is an example of a tradition that is no longer pragmatic.
It’s no longer pragmatic. Now we still have a tradition. It’s changed a lot. It’s never going to be the same. Right. Now there are other traditions that lasted for century after century after century that were not moral, like chattel slavery, immoral tradition. So that tradition is something that we’ve put aside also. We had that tradition at our founding. We no longer have it today. And there’s a long story about why that is, but the short story is that is a tradition that we thought critically about, deemed it immoral and we no longer have it.
Right. So this is where conservatives have the burden of being really honest and straightforward. We do recognize that some things do change, other things cannot change. And what does change had better change in alignment with the permanent things rather than the expense of them.
Yeah. So whenever we receive a tradition-
We do believe that in a society marked by sin, then there are things that need to change.
Including some things that are perhaps culturally invisible until someone makes them visible.
That’s right. That’s right. And see, that’s a rubric we need to think critically about with technology. Technology itself is not a bad thing or a good thing. It’s amoral. But our use of technology is a moral consideration. And so that’s why when Viereck wrote his Unadjusted Man in the Age of Overadjustment and had that reference to Thoreau and the railroad writing on us, he was making a moral judgment about that technology and about the use of that technology. And we have to do the same things.
And he’s making a moral judgment about the blind, instinctive approval of every technology in every context.
Right. And so the way that we think about tradition as conservatives, we take tradition as a universal to use a realist category, and we revere it. But as a particular, we think critically about each one and our critical thinking has to be guided by our ontological commitments.
Conservatism is an affirmation that we must conserve for the sake of faithfulness, for the sake of obedience to God, for the sake of human flourishing, for the sake of human society, for the sake of our own children and our grandchildren, our children’s, children’s, children. We need to protect and preserve and honor the things that are permanent. We do recognize that not all social change is wrong. Some of it does present, however, some fundamental questions.
And so when looking back at it, John, the trains did change things. But as some historians have pointed out, I think it was William Manchester that up until … And some economists have really come up, Robert Gordon in particular, the economists come up with some really interesting historical analysis that until a certain period early in the 20th century, very few young mem, who would grow old, had ever gone beyond say 20 miles from their point of birth. Trains changed that. Trains changed that. And then other things changed that.
And of course, and eventually the automobile changed that. This is a part of the conservative predicament, isn’t it? Because you end up with technology forcing changes, and now you can have family members living all over the place. You can have people spending so much time outside the house. You can get in a car, you can drive hundreds of miles, you can get on a plane and fly thousands of miles. That’s why conservative principles appear to be in the defensive.
The conservative disposition is to be on the defensive. We are defending-
Well, that’s true, yes, in a broad sense.
Right. Reactionary thought is generally opposed to all change, but I mean, there has to be a reaction to it, but reactionary means you say in theory, no to everything.
Right. Yeah. I mean, even when Burke writes his reflections of the revolution in France, he is reacting to something, but in reacting, he is defending permanent things. He’s defending order. He’s defending Christ.
Well, this is the predicament of the right. We’re always put in the position of having to respond to a challenge coming from the left.
And there’s something that I wanted to say, and I’ve forgotten about it. I’m glad I just thought of it. Something that I’ve heard you say a lot is that we as conservatives always lose the argument. We always lose the arguments. And Peter Vierick said the same thing.
And you know, I mean that in a time horizon.
Yeah. In a time horizon in an Augustinian sense.
Yes. Now ultimately we win the arguments. We win the argument ultimately.
Ultimately, I also think we win arguments in ways that aren’t sometimes recognized in the culture by planting seeds that are true and that just expand in their importance and in their understanding. So for instance, I’m old enough to remember when there was no gay rights movement, not to mention transgender rights movement. And there were arguments made in terms of certainly coming from the left, intentional arguments from what was first called the gay rights movement, the homosexual rights movement. Just on equal protection and equal rights.
And because of the secularization of the culture, I think confusion over these issues and especially a progressivist understanding of the constitution and the law that was in place, it seemed to be the next unfolding thing. Okay. So you just go LGBT. So the T is in a sequence of unfolding things, but you know what? It just hasn’t unfolded the way the left was confident what happened. And I think it’s because of ontology. It goes back to the fact the left wants to deny ontology, but the average American who doesn’t know what the word means, does understand that you can cut things off, but you can’t change a boy into a girl. And that’s kind of a wakeup call.
That doesn’t mean that there’s a conservative recovery. And this is where I want to say to a lot of conservatives, just having the LGBTQ movement trip up on T doesn’t mean that we’re winning. It does mean that reality has a way of insisting upon its priority. So I think we’re in a very interesting spot. I think on the political right, we have a lot of people who are responding to the left, but they’re not to anything of enduring principles. And so I think there are a lot of people who consider themselves conservative today who are not on the left, that’s their point, but they really don’t have a clue that there’s a substantial body of argument on the right. Does that not ring true with you?
Yes. I think that we are used to, all of us in our culture, are used to instant gratification, quick answers, quick easy solutions. And that’s what we want in our political dialogue and all the other things. But a conservative impulse is to take the long view of things, to realize that we may not get this right in our generation. You and I, and this is a Hebrews 11 principle, we may not see the good things. As you said, the seeds planted. We might see the growth of that tree. We may not see the promise fulfilled in Hebrews 11 terms, but that’s not the point. We don’t do this for ourselves. We do it for our children or for our grandchildren. We want them to live in a world in which the traditions that are good and true and beautiful, they can enjoy those things as we did.
You go to Europe, as I love to do, and I’m such a . . . I’m so deeply committed to Western civilization. Just love taking people to Europe, teaching tours, going to the place, looking at. . .
Oh, well, we need to go. To stand at Charter’s Cathedral or to go to Westminster Abbey, some of these places of Wittenburg and just say, Geneva, this is what happened here, and this is where this epic achievement was reached. But we are in a position in which in the United States, everything is made fast.
So for instance, just last night, I happened to be following an argument that had nothing to do with political theory and everything to do with American architectural history. But you know what? I could draw the lesson pretty quickly. And so you have the Pierre L’Enfant design for Washington D.C. and a palace for Congress and a home for the President of the United States, what became the White House. And L’Enfant himself, interesting figure, he gets sidelined, but his plan really persists right down to today to make Washington D.C. this grand city on a European scale.
But what was so interesting to me, and I just thought about this, this conservative commitment. So there’s a design for the US Capitol, and it takes so long for that to happen. So very few … It’s like we know about the cathedrals. It took generations, and they just saw a little bit more done, and a little bit more done, and a little bit more done. We walk into them now and think they’ve always been like this. No, this is a millennium of work represented here, gets faster in the United States.
The U.S. Capitol, the Dome was basically completed by the period of the Civil War and the end of the Civil War, but that’s a matter of decades, almost a century of American experience. So all I’m saying is in that is that there’s stories embedded in all of this, but we are living in a time . . . So in the United States, architectural history of Western civilization kind of happens within a century rather than a millennium or two. Now we’re living in a time of social velocity in which these things are happening so fast, and it appears that nothing is fastened down.
Yeah. Yeah. So Vierick’s formula of conservativism, the permanent beneath the flux. He doesn’t talk about it like this, but I imagine it kind of like a channel of a river. The water is flowing. Heraclites is a premise illustration. You don’t put your hand in the same river twice. That’s the change.
But the bedrock is, the channel does not change. And we must, as the task of conservatives, is to identify the permanent things. What are those permanent things? And so your question about tradition. And honor them, right. So your question earlier about tradition and how do we receive tradition, that’s the trick, isn’t it, for conservatives? And this is where we keep going back to you begin your worldview with God as the ground of all being. You begin your world view with ontology. That’s why it’s so necessary for us to be able to do that, that ontology from ontology follows from that, our epistemology and from that are ethic. When you start to disorder these categories, if you start, for example, with epistemology like they did in the Enlightenment, where you start with ethics, like the theological liberals, like postmodernists starting with politics. I mean, everything gets disordered then.
A conservative is always going to start with ontology and following through and having a rightly ordered worldview.
True conservatism. Yeah. I mean, there’s false conservatism.
Yeah. There’s the right and there’s conservatism.
Well, let’s talk about that. It’s a distinction I have to make all the time. So make it.
Well, this book, A Conservative Primer on Religious Freedom is a traditionalist conservative articulation. It’s not a right wing libertarian. It is not taught position, which is what Burik called the ultra-royalist, counter revolutionary, reactionary right that he has in mind, Joseph DeMystro.
It’s not the recovery of ancient paganism.
Which is openly celebrated in some circles on the right.
Yeah, absolutely. I’m thinking about Nazism.
Well, I’m thinking about certain things very contemporary to us.
Yeah. So it’s not that- Neopaganism. It’s not that. It’s also not sort of an Americanized right wing pragmatic approach. It is principle based. It’s based in being. It’s based in God. So that’s what I would say.
One of the things that I think we have to make clear is that it really doesn’t work long term, long term. It really doesn’t work for you to articulate, for an individual to articulate conservative principles and live a life in profound contradiction to those principles. It just doesn’t work. And even if you have a leader or a populist figure who does break those rules, the people who follow him can’t.
Yeah. Populism. I just finished reading, I’m sure you’ve read it. David Hackett Fisher’s classic work, The Revolution in American Conservatism, and his first chapter about the Old Federalists, people like John Jay, people like John Adams, who were what we would say would be elitists, but their view was not. . .
Yeah. Yeah. But their views of elitism, we might say, I think are translatable today in the language of expertise and populists, especially on the right, denigrate that sort of value of expertise. . .
They want it when they need heart surgery.
Absolutely they do. And even when they make their political arguments, they still fall back on it. And a conservative in the traditionalist mindset would unapologetically embrace at least a particular aspect of that, the way that John Adams talked about, a natural aristocracy, not a hereditary one, but a natural one where virtue is. . .
Virtue and talent are the core of it, but not to exclude virtue. Virtue is absolutely necessary, which is something I talked about in the God and country book, the necessity of virtue and historical thinking.
Yeah. And of course that gets really encapsulated in the singular figure of George Washington, both the truth and the fiction, which is to say he really did see himself having to live an exemplary life simply because he had been thrust by providence, which he himself recognized. Onto a world stage in which people watched everything he did and every word he said. And I just admire him so much for believing, “Okay, that’s a huge responsibility. I have to carry this noble all the way to death.”
Patriotism. The subject of your most recent book God and Country, I mean, this is all contested, right? You are entering an argument even with that title, upholding faith, history, and national identity. You’re tying all those together unapologetically.
To have a rightly ordered patriotism, you have to start with love for God.
Again, you have to build a worldview upon God as the ground of all being. But following that, you have to have good historical thinking. And good historical thinking has to be an intellectual exercise, but it also has to be a moral exercise.
But I just want to stop for a minute. The average American . . . I guess I want to make the point that you’re not saying that in order to be a good American citizen and a patriot, people have to think through all these issues.
Because, the vast majority of people get them by model and osmosis. But there have to be leaders who clearly have this knowledge and commitment.
No doubt. No doubt. But in order to be a good patriot, you have to have a historical consciousness and cultivate a historical conscious. You don’t have to be a historian. You don’t have to be a history teacher.
But as you just said a few minutes ago, who are the people buying books, conservatives? And the ones buying history.
Men, by the way. Men. One of the big publishing realities that I find very interesting is that men have just really fallen off as buyers of fiction, partly because the fictions become so feminized. And so if it’s a good spy novel or something like that, men will read it. But you just have a changed world. But these folks. . . Well, let’s put it this way. The future of our constitutional republic depends upon the vast majority of men and women in this society, knowing why the society exists and on what first principles.
And how it flows in the larger context and sits in world history and why it’s important that they perpetuate this for their grandchildren.
Yeah. I am troubled by how patriotism is understood by this culture. As I said, either an idolatrous sort of iteration of it or an absurd one. Kind of like a joke. All the memes and different things on the internet about loving your country. It means you have to wave a flag in the middle of a hurricane and that kind of stuff. I mean, that’s just absurdity. Or the association of patriotism with just trivial things like barbecues and things. I love a good barbecue. I love a good hotdog on the 4th of July. Patriotism is . . . It’s part of who we are. We wouldn’t be who we are without love for country.
We want our grandchildren to know the same blessings of liberty.
And to even enjoy it in an even more pronounced way than we did. That’s what I hope for my children and my grandchildren.
Well, when these things are probably almost assuredly even more under attack on the world scene.
Yeah. And it’s just amazing. It’s just incredible that these things are under attack from the left and the right.
Yeah, differently. I think from the right, a lot of it is based upon a time horizon that’s just too short.
That’s right. We don’t take a long view of things.
Well, we should. Your point is we should.
We should. That is a conservative virtue. We understand that we need to plant crops that our grandchildren will benefit from rather than ourselves. And when we look at toxic things in the culture, we want them corrected. But quite frankly, they didn’t get here in the short term. Absolutely. And they’re not going to be eradicated in the short term. It’s going to take a long, long, sustained argument.
It’s like losing weight. You didn’t put the weight on overnight. It’s going to take a long time to get rid of it.
Well, the reality is that in history, conservatives are those who do understand that time is both the friend and the enemy.
So it is the enemy in terms of a biblical notion of decay. Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away.
At the same time, the fact that God and his mercy gives us the time and gives us children and grandchildren and great grandchildren. We’re at this and we’re going to be at it with you. The other big thing we haven’t talked about is that it’s a good place for us to end, is that a conservative disposition is not compatible with utopianism.
I mean, the left is utopian. The right’s not utopian. It’s based in a Christian, Augustinian, New Testament understanding of what it means for sinful humanity to exist. And we hope and flourish until Jesus comes.
That’s right. That’s right. I think about the memento mori. The aesthetic motif that you find on so many medieval works of art, statuary, poetry.
Death. The reality of death. The dead say to us, “As you are now, I once was, and as I am, you one day will be.” That is on the one hand, if you look at it just on its face, it’s arresting, but seen through the lens of the atonement of Christ, it is liberating. It is liberating. And we do. . .
Absolutely. Liberating. Yeah. Okay. I see where you’re going.
Otherwise, the gates of hell will prevail.
Liberating is a loaded term. Let me put it to you this way. It is true. And the truth will set you free.
And rightly ordered patriotism, a conservative disposition and a conservative aspiration on first principles and on our traditions. These things are meaningful because we have limitations and those limitations are part of the created order and they are resolved. So all things are resolved in the atonement of Christ.
A combination of God’s intention in creation and then God’s judgment on human sin. So our finitude started out in the garden that we’re the creature rather than the creator. But given the reality of sin, we also now have to deal with weeds.
Ideological weeds as well as physical weeds. We have a big task and you really helped us with these two books, John. I want to thank you for them.
My next project is I’m working on a volume for the political writings of American Statesman series that Cambridge has, edited by Bradford Wilson and Carson Holloway. Wow. That volume is on John Quincy Adams.
I look forward to it. Yeah. I look forward to having a conversation about it.
That’ll be fun. So I’m doing that with Michael Gonzalez and-
Wow. A man who was president of the United States and then went back into service as a member of the House of Representatives and had stood at Bunker Hill with his father.
And then tutored Abraham Lincoln in congressional rules.
What an astounding life. Man, you chose the right one to work on.
Yes. He is a fascinating man. I describe him as the most significant consequential political figure in American history that you’ve never heard of.
Or you just hear him on a list of presidents. I was telling someone just, I don’t know, some time ago, that there are few lives in history you can look at and say, “Here’s a bridge from this to that. ” But with John Quincy Adams, you have a bridge from Bunker Hill until the middle to Abraham Lincoln.
I look forward to that book. Thanks for this conversation, John.
Appreciate you joining me for thinking in public.
Many thanks to my guest, Professor John Wilsey for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you can find more than 200 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab, Thinking in Public. For more information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to spts.edu. For information on Boyce College, go to boycecollege.com. Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public, and until next time, keep thinking.