What Christians Hold in Common with ‘Aspirational’ Conservatives - Christianity Today (2025)

There are few terms more prone to misinterpretation today than religious freedom and conservative. Religious freedom could mean constitutional safeguards for practicing sincerely held religious beliefs, or it might mean a veiled justification for discriminating against those with whom you disagree. Similarly, conservative might refer to a centuries-long political project rooted in limited government, individual rights, and free markets, or it could be whatever the current president of the United States declares on his social media platform this morning.

Historian John Wilsey’s latest book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, is important for a couple of reasons. In close to 250 pages, Wilsey clarifies the meaning of both terms as we encounter them in today’s contested political environment. But more than this, Wilsey convincingly argues that the conservative tradition—one that predates today’s political debates and partisan squabbles—is best suited to sustain and support a robust conception of religious freedom.

Despite what the book’s title might suggest, this is not a book primarily about religious freedom. Instead, Wilsey spends the bulk of his time outlining and arguing in favor of conservatism. Religious freedom looms large over Wilsey’s book, however, mainly because he believes it best captures the fundamentals of the American experiment. On a popular level, the concept encompasses individual rights and practice. But more importantly, Wilsey argues, religious freedom is the end result of recognizing what he calls “America’s two spirits”—liberty and religion.

Following an introduction, Wilsey’s book is organized into three parts. The first, comprised of just one chapter, is a sweeping attempt to define and characterize conservatism. Wilsey is largely successful in this, setting the contours for the remainder of his book while also introducing characters central to his reading of this American political tradition. He usefully highlights diverse elements of the conservative tradition, ranging from libertarianism and Southern conservativism to fusionism (which stresses the compatibility of market liberties and traditional morals) and paleoconservatism (which promotes nationalism as a brake on global trade and foreign intervention). He also distinguishes between measured and extreme conservatism, the arguing that the latter is mainly responsible for motivating today’s Republican Party.

But instead of getting bogged down evaluating these different factions, Wilsey instead quickly outs himself as an aspirational conservative, committed to “conserving the harmony between the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion for the long haul.” Aspirational conservatism is in line with measured conservatism, with its emphasis on “the true, the good, and the beautiful.” As Wilsey sees it, this mindset is driving “a new conservative inspiration among Americans, and especially young Americans.”

The second part of Religious Freedom is the most expansive, arguing for a robust conservatism rooted in various elements. Wilsey implores today’s conservatives to cultivate a “rousing imagination”—one that rejects the temporal pull of politics in favor of a larger and lasting framework. He calls conservatives to cultivate a love of nation over a strident nationalism, retaining an affection for American ideals even as the demographic composition of America changes. America’s two spirits can only coexist, he writes, “in a nation that is, first, at peace with itself, and second, grateful for the trust handed down to it by earlier generations.”

Wilsey ties conservatism to the concept of ordered liberty, which keeps individual rights within guardrails to keep people from the excesses of our sinful nature. Unfettered liberty leads to licentiousness, he writes, which breeds confusion about what the American story truly is. He also reflects on the relationships between conservatism and both history and religion. “Conservatives conserve tradition,” he reminds readers, and aspirational conservatives can look to history for beliefs and practices worth conserving. Moreover, drawing on the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville, Wilsey credits religion with informing and binding together the values—including those grounded in the conservative tradition—of the American people.

In the third and final part of Religious Freedom—which, like the first part, is just one chapter—Wilsey encourages readers to (re)discover the will to safeguard America’s two spirits. It is religion, he writes, that “serve[s] as democracy’s greatest advantage” because of its tendency to reorient people’s attention away from themselves and toward the lasting, the transcendent. Conservatives, Wilsey concludes, are positioned to do this well, given their belief that “we turn our backs on the past and on tradition at our peril.”

Wilsey is an effective messenger for this subject. Avoiding a polemic tone, he approaches his work with evenness and charity. It would have been easy for Wilsey to use this book as a cudgel against progressivism and its misunderstanding of the American story. Just as easily, he could have used it to attack the recent right-wing habit of embracing a conservative-flavored identity politics. And while Wilsey critiques these frameworks, he does so only to offer something better. His book seeks to build, not tear down.

Several key actors in the conservative tradition are integral to the case Wilsey builds for defending it. Not surprisingly, we get appearances from Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke, and Tocqueville, three men whose contributions to modern conservativism are well documented. But we also get appearances from lesser-known figures like Peter Viereck, portrayed in the book as a counterpoint to leading postwar figures like Kirk. Wilsey’s goal is twofold: introducing readers to a wide collection of conservative thinkers and then demonstrating the breadth and diversity this framework has to offer.

Wilsey is also an excellent writer, and this book will appeal widely to students, scholars, and ordinary readers. For me, his talent shines brightest when telling stories. His story of the death and multiple burials of Confederate officer A. P. Hill, told over just a few pages, is captivating. His account of the deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence emphasizes their influence on the past, present, and future of the American story. For Wilsey, today’s Americans are the inheritors of a grand experiment, which obliges its stewards to respectfully consider their history (without being stifled by it).

Still, Religious Freedom is not without its flaws. Most obviously, the book’s title is, at best, misleading. The book is not about religious freedom, per se. It does not make a positive argument for religious freedom in the manner of Andrew Walker in Liberty for All or Luke Goodrich in Free to Believe.Instead, Religious Freedom is an introduction to—and a vision for—conservatism, arguing that this tradition is best equipped to sustain the legacy and promise of America. Readers hoping for something else, therefore, could be disappointed.

Additionally, though Wilsey is a wordsmith, his penchant for storytelling sometimes takes readers down unexpected pathways. The book is more than a quarter complete before Wilsey moves beyond introductory content. One of his chapters spends far too many pages connecting the work of contemporary Christian nationalist Stephen Wolfe to the 19th-century German literary critic Georg Hegel. This book is at its best when explaining and defending the merits of the conservative tradition, which makes its occasional shifts in focus even more noticeable.

Wilsey is a conservative, but he is also (indeed, first) a Christian. It should come as no surprise that his defense of conservatism is therefore grounded—subtly at times and explicitly at others—in the Christian faith. Christians, Wilsey argues, are well suited to act in defense of the conservative tradition, due in large part to a shared commitment to the God-given dignity of every human being. Moreover, just as conservatives are prone to worry about the excesses of state power, Christians are called to resist putting our trust “in princes, in human beings, who cannot save” (Ps. 146:3). They respect the government but fear only God (1 Pet. 2:17).

Because of how Wilsey defines conservatism, he does not argue that Christians must defend today’s Republican Party to advance the broader conservative project. Indeed, readers might sense that Wilsey wrote this book precisely to protest how the GOP has co-opted and abused conservatism in recent years. Christians, he might say, have a chance to defend the conservative tradition from the impulses of the secular left—but also from the excesses of the post-Christian right.

Defending the conservative tradition does not make one a Christian. But for Wilsey, one of the most important things today’s Christians can do—outside of boldly claiming the gospel, of course—is to “stand athwart history” in support of a robust and rooted framework for our political and social lives. Christian faith, though adaptable to different cultures and social challenges, is grounded in tradition. Our doctrines, customs, and worship practices rest atop nearly two millennia of shared experience. Conservatism, as Wilsey defines it, is not the only framework through which Christians should see the world, but its reverence for the past runs parallel with basic Christian intuitions.

The conservative project in today’s America is at an important crossroads. The traits typically aligned with historical conservativism—traits Wilsey highlights—are not always greatly valued in our current political and cultural environment. Wilsey’s book is a call for readers to remember and rejuvenate a conservative tradition transcending and reforming contemporary politics.

Indeed, as Wilsey frames it, this tradition is prepolitical. In other words, it describes a temperament that stands outside any allegiance to this or that party or program. For Christians of any political stripe, it reminds us that what is worth conserving is not always popular, and what is popular is not always worth conserving. Our principal work, after all, is not of this world.

Daniel Bennett is a professor of political science at John Brown University, where he also directs the Center for Faith and Flourishing. He is the author of Uneasy Citizenship: Embracing the Tension in Faith and Politics.