The Christians Who Want to Scrap the Constitution to Crown a King

R.J. Rushdoony [Audio Clip]: "And Paul refers to the church in Galatians 6:16 as the Israel of God. Well, this means that we have a duty. We have to occupy the whole world. The Great Commission is to make disciples of all nations, to bring them all into the fold together with all their peoples, because Christ is the ordained King of all creation."

Brad Onishi: If you've been listening to this show for the last few months, you know I've taken a certain position on where we are in terms of Christian nationalism in the United States. There are, I've maintained, a plethora of voices who have moved past the idea of a Christian nation. The call now is for an American Christendom, and that means crowning a king to reign over this land.

The clip you just heard is from R.J. Rushdoony, the father of Reformed Reconstructionism, talking about how Christ is king and how he has called the church to occupy the whole world. Rushdoony has counterparts in the Catholic world, those who would call for the church to reign as a theocracy, to integrate the church and the kingdom into one as it was in the medieval ages.

Today, I speak to Dr. Jerome Copulsky, a Berkeley Center Research Fellow who has written a great new book called American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order. In the book, Jerome traces American movements that have been illiberal and anti-democratic on the basis of their Christianity. He starts in the colonial period and moves forward all the way to the contemporary moment.

We focus on the 1960s forward with a discussion of Rushdoony's Reconstructionism and the ways it influences Reformed thinkers and leaders like Doug Wilson today. We also discuss little-known Catholic figures who maintained that the integration of the church and the state was the only way to approach building God's kingdom on earth. Those figures are having a profound effect on American politics in the 21st century. One has to look only to the Vice President-elect JD Vance and his good friend Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation to see the refraction of their ideas into this time.

I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.

Brad: Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. As I just said, I'm joined today by somebody who's written just a fantastic book, and that is Dr. Jerome Copulsky. And the book is American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order. Jerome, you've never been here. Thanks for coming.

Dr. Jerome Copulsky: First time guest, long time listener. Thanks for having me.

Brad: We've met twice. One was at a conference at Yale on Christian nationalism, and another time you graciously invited me out to give a talk that ended up being at Georgetown and was part of a whole set of events. And so every time we've spoken, I've learned a lot from you. And I don't know you well enough to know the answer definitively, but my guess is—I'm holding your book. The book is, let me just get this right. The book is 370 pages with the index. My guess is you gave the editor like 900 pages, and then the editor was like, "Hey, this is a lot. Let's get this down." Am I right? Do I know you well enough? Or am I wrong?

Dr. Jerome Copulsky: You know me. Another podcast, we can talk about the 100 pages, the 100-page chapter on the Mormons and the Kingdom of God that I think I cut down to maybe two footnotes. But yeah, there was a lot. There was a lot also that had to be culled. There's a lot of material out there, both historically and in our contemporary times, and kind of being able to condense it into something that the University Press is willing to publish was an interesting experience.

Brad: Well, I'm glad we have the book we have, but I'm sure there's more material in your hard drive that we could discuss. Let's start with the thesis of the book, which is something—if folks have been listening to this show, you know I've been on a kick. I've been talking about radical Catholicism, reactionary Catholicism. I've been talking about various Christians in the United States who are really not talking about a Christian nation, like you might imagine, "Hey, let's make this a Christian nation again. I want to say Merry Christmas." A lot of the folks are openly saying, "Well, I actually want a Christian kingdom."

And, you know, if you've listened, you've hopefully believed me when I've given you the data to back that up. But Jerome, your book is basically a history of illiberalism in the United States, but more specifically, it's a history of those religious folks who really believe that their religious worldview is not compatible with American democracy as it has been articulated in the Constitution and so on.

Let me embarrass you. I'm going to read a little bit of page three, and then you tell us what else we need to know about the thesis of your book: "From the outset, the American project was contested by religious voices who believed that democratic values were not an expression of Christian teaching, but were rather false and dangerous."

So democratic values, not, you know, God-inspired the Constitution, not, "Hey, if we just got back to a Christian faith, we'd have the right kind of democracy." Instead, we have something way more startling: Christian teaching is not compatible with democratic values. That's the thesis of the book. What else should we know as we just kind of start to dig in?

Dr. Jerome Copulsky: Well, I think that this story goes back to really the very beginning of the project of the United States of America, because I began talking about Church of England loyalists during the Revolutionary War, and their argument that the Patriot project of separation, of independency, was not only a rebellion against King George III, but a rebellion against the entire cosmic order. And they would read the Declaration of Independence, or they would read the social contract theory that lay behind it as irreligious, as essentially a challenge to the teaching of the church.

So this is something that was happening at the very beginning of America as a political project. And then what the book does is it traces various iterations throughout the 19th, 20th and now 21st century that are making a similar argument, maybe in different keys as we go along.

Brad: I loved reading that chapter about the loyalists, because it really set up something that I think has been stuck in my mind since the summertime, which is: I can't think of something less American than calling for a king. But yet, right at the outset of the Revolutionary War and during those decades, there is this sense of not only that we should remain loyal to the king, but by remaining loyal to the king, you are remaining loyal to the cosmic order as it's set forth by Christ.

And in ways that I really don't like, we are starting to hear that kind of sentiment in our current moment. We don't have time today to go through the entire history you lay out, which is expansive. I mean, as you say, you begin in the colonial period, and you move through so much of American history.

I want to start in a place that is incredibly relevant and right at the heart of this show, and that is in Reagan's '80s, and maybe a little bit before, a little bit after. And the chapter that addresses this, chapter six, starts in a way that a lot of folks reading might be like, "Oh, I know that stuff. Jerry Falwell, yeah, he wanted a Christian nation, Moral Majority. I know all about it. I've read the books, I listen to Straight White American Jesus."

But you take us to a place about five or six pages into that chapter where you introduce us to those who said those folks are idolaters. They think the Constitution is going to save us, and it's not. And it leads us to Francis Schaeffer, who we could talk about if you'd like, but it really leads us past Francis Schaeffer to the Reconstructionists.

Now, a lot of people listening, perhaps more than any show I can think of, are going to be familiar with some of these people—R.J. Rushdoony, Gary North and so on. But would you just help us understand, before we even jump into those particular figures, what was the dissent from the Moral Majority and the kind of Falwell-Graham-Robertson coalition working with Paul Weyrich? Why did they think they had not gone far enough? What was the thing that they actually wanted, if it was not the Christian nation where everybody was holding a flag in one hand and kneeling at the cross in the other?

Dr. Jerome Copulsky: I could sum it up in one word for you, Brad. You know what that one word was? Theocracy. And I think the place where you see the challenge is in the response by Gary North and Gary DeMar to Francis Schaeffer's very popular Christian Manifesto. And Francis Schaeffer is presenting in that book—I think it came out in 1982, at the very beginning of the Reagan administration—a vision of what we call restoration.

The new religious right in the late '70s and '80s, the language that they were speaking was the language of restoration. They believed that America had been set up as a Christian nation. One of the things that's interesting is, you look at Jerry Falwell's Listen, America, and he confuses the language of the Declaration of Independence with its appeal to the Deity with the Constitution. And they want to restore this what they believed was a widely understood conception of America as a Protestant Christian nation that had been lost in the second half of the 20th century, been lost since 1947 and the Everson v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. They had issues with the Constitution, the separation of church and state.

So what they really want to do is they want to kind of go back to a kind of idealized, perhaps imaginary past. What North complained about this was that they weren't fulfilling the Christian vision of what a political society should be like, and that was not just this kind of soft, unofficial pan-Protestant establishment that allowed for a separation of religious authority from political authority, even if they pushed back against the language of separation of church and state, but a theocracy—that is to say, rule by God, or in the case of the Reconstructionists, rule by means of divine law, the divine law that is presented in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament.

So they felt that most American Christians, even conservative Protestants, weren't properly Christian, because they did not submit themselves to the yoke of divine law, biblical law. So that was, I think, the key distinction between the Reconstructionist project and the project of the new religious right. The new religious right wanted to restore something. The Reconstructionists wanted to actually build something very different.

Brad: Well, this brings us—you mentioned Gary North. Gary North's father-in-law was R.J. Rushdoony, and for those listening who are familiar with him, they may know where the story is going. But Rushdoony is what Julie Ingersoll calls that crazy uncle that people often refer to when they think of the religious right or Christian nationalism, or whatever term you might want to use from the 1980s and those decades. But he's overwhelmingly influential in ways that we'll get to here in a second, even in our current moment. What was Rushdoony's idea of reconstruction? What was the idea behind his theocracy?

Dr. Jerome Copulsky: So the idea is that Christians are not to await an immediate second coming of Christ, which would then radically transform the world, but rather that he had—technically speaking—a postmillennial vision that Christians were charged with actual control of the creation now, after the first appearance of Christ. So this dominant—what came to be called dominion theology—that human beings are meant to take dominion over the world, as described in the charge to the first human beings in Genesis 1 through 3.

And the project of Reconstruction is essentially a roadmap to doing that and sort of seeing the Christian life occurring in different spheres of existence—the sphere of the family, the sphere of the church, the sphere of government, of civil society—and living in accordance to the rules that had been set forth, they would say, through Moses for the operation of those spheres.

So the idea in this Christian vision is really interesting and really radical. They weren't interested in taking over the government and sort of having, you know, establishing theocracy in the way that we might think about it, because Christianity's authority is relational. The law is there, the law is being served, not to rule politically, but to live out those laws. And this was a very different vision than the vision of most Christians, most Protestants, most Catholics, that didn't sort of see the biblical laws still pertaining to their religious lives or their political lives.

Brad: Rushdoony is an interesting figure because here we have Jerry Falwell coming from the South, and a lot of times, I think we think of the Moral Majority and the religious right as kind of a Southern-based movement. Rushdoony grows up in Northern California. He attends Berkeley. He's Armenian by heritage. And he just seems to have a kind of a different lens than that Southern, in some ways, Baptist kind of approach—the three-piece suit wearing Falwells, or the made-for-TV Pat Robertson, or the end-times writing Tim LaHaye. He's a different character.

Gary North, his son-in-law, eventually says, "We don't want to go back to the time when this was a Christian nation, because it never has been. We want a new founding. We want to found this country for the first time on a proper kind of foundation.”

And I want to read a particularly startling line from page 218 of your book: "They employed a presuppositionalist epistemology." And I want to ask if you can explain that, because, as you say, that kind of epistemology eschewed any and all appeals to human reason, custom, tradition or experience. Jerusalem had absolutely nothing at all to do with Athens. So what does a presuppositionalist epistemology have to do with Reconstruction? And why would they eschew any and all appeals to human reason, which sounds quite frankly insane?

Dr. Jerome Copulsky: So, you know, Rushdoony and North didn't come up with this idea of presuppositionalism. Rushdoony gets it from Cornelius Van Til, who was a professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary, which broke away from Princeton Theological Seminary because Princeton had become too liberal, too modernist. And the idea was that there's no neutral ground, there's no kind of neutral way of knowing things. You know things through being within a particular perspective. The perspective that God's revelation provides is the lens through which you understand the world. So if there's no other way to access knowledge other than through what is revealed—and what this meant was, this was a rejection of the attempt to balance reason and revelation.

Athens and Jerusalem—that reverberates through Christian history, and maybe, you know, finds one of its high points in the synthesis of Thomas Aquinas, that human reason, unassisted human reason, can understand the world. And Rushdoony and those following this Van Til method are like, "No, we understand the world through the lens of the Bible. That is our only way in which we can have true knowledge."

So in this way, they're standing apart from traditional Catholic teaching, which would make appeals to natural law—that there's an access to knowledge, that even if you don't have access to revelation, you as a rational agent can grasp. But it's also more radical. It means that there's no—experience, there are no other channels of proper human knowledge, other than through Scripture. Now of course, that raises all sorts of problems that should be evident. How do you read Scripture? But that's where, that's their starting point. And this means that other avenues of knowing things are really cut out and also seen as dangerous or subversive to trust in faith.

Brad: Well, and it seems to lead to some of the more, I think, well-known aspects of Rushdoony's theology that scare people. If Scripture is your only source of authority, if there's no appeal to experience, no appeal to general revelation, if there's no appeal to tradition or church tradition or church teaching, then you really have a kind of strict reading of Scripture, and that leads to reconstructing the world according to laws, perhaps in Leviticus or Deuteronomy that talk about stoning people or talk about putting certain people to death for certain sins.

And one of the things that I think often gets discussed with Rushdoony is he doesn't believe that egalitarianism, as he calls it—the equality of all people—is something taught by Scripture. So I'll just read a little bit from page 225: "Egalitarianism is a modern political, religious concept. It did not exist in the biblical world, and it cannot, with any honesty, be forced onto biblical law." That's a direct quote from Rushdoony. What did that kind of belief—what kind of conclusions did that kind of belief lead him to?

Dr. Jerome Copulsky: Well, first, I should say he is a bit more—there are ways of accepting church tradition. So he does accept the early creeds of the church as being authoritative, and one of the driving ideas of his thought is the political theology that's expressed in those creeds, particularly the Creed of Chalcedon. So he sees—there's a lot of work that he does about how the understanding of the nature of Christ and the relation of the Trinity points to certain political outcomes.

Brad: Can I just say, though, like, I love this. I love it when people are like, "Hey, only biblical law, except for a creed that was put together in 451, about four or more centuries after the life of Christ. That's totally authoritative, but most everything else—just too modern and completely woke. And we can't let that. But the Creed of Chalcedon, they were really onto something, even though that was 400 years after Jesus was no longer supposedly on this earth." Anyway...

Dr. Jerome Copulsky: Being within the larger interpretive paradigm of Calvinism. So yeah, totally. So when we get to democracy, the very basic building blocks of modern American liberal democracy are seen by Rushdoony and his followers as a rebellion against Christian teaching. And he actually—I should actually go even further—it's not just liberalism or liberal democracy, but most of Christianity in America, Rushdoony would claim is a false form or debased form of Christianity, something that he calls the religion of humanity.

And what's interesting about comparing Rushdoony's account of American decline to someone like Falwell's account of American decline is, with Falwell and the new religious right, it happened somewhere in the mid-20th century—with the secularization of America, with this notion of the separation of church and state, with taking prayer and Bible reading out of the public schools. That's the beginning of the problem.

For Rushdoony, the beginning of the problem actually is back in the late 18th and early 19th century. It's the rise of Unitarianism. But not only Unitarianism, but the Second Great Awakening, and all forms of Christian piety and experience that pull the believer away from his understanding of strict biblical law. So it's democracy, it's secularism, but it's even the Southern Baptist Convention.

Brad: Yeah, it's—we don't need to go back to the 1950s, we should try to get back to the 1650s if we want to course correct. Okay, so this leads us. I mean, I honestly, Jerome, I could sit here and talk to you all day about this, because I think Rushdoony and Gary North, DeMar, there's so much here that informs aspects of Christian nationalism, Christian implementation in this country that often doesn't get discussed enough. One of them is homeschooling. Like a lot of the homeschooling networks in this country are heavily influenced by Reconstructionist ideas.

I'll just name a few that are in our contemporary political moment, so people can kind of see the refractions into the 21st century of a teaching like Rushdoony's Reconstructionism. One of them is in the work and ministry of someone like Doug Wilson, who is immensely popular, has an incredible influence, is somebody who reaches millions of people on a weekly basis, and who has really taken quite a bit of theology from someone like Rushdoony. They don't agree on everything, and there's always quibbles, and there's always inner squabbles and other things.

And I'll just mention one more—the current nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, whose mom is calling senators as we speak to tell them he would be a good boy if they allow him through, is somebody who attends a church that is part of the denomination that was started, in essence, by Doug Wilson. So there's a direct line here—direct maybe too strong a word, but there are lines that lead us from Rushdoony all the way to current Cabinet nominees in the Trump administration. Correct me if I'm wrong. Elaborate.

Dr. Jerome Copulsky: Yeah. And I think this line of influence from what Rushdoony was doing in the 1960s and '70s and '80s to where we are today has been traced really well by Julie Ingersoll in her work, and Michael McVicar. And one of the things that the Reconstructionists were proud of and actually complained a lot about back in the 1980s was that their ideas were being taken up into the broader landscape of American Protestantism, but they were neither acknowledged fully or adequately, nor were they followed through to the conclusions that the Reconstructionists brought up.

So you mentioned people like Doug Wilson and Moscow, Idaho and St. Andrews and those projects. But there's also a way in which these Reconstructionist ideas, Dominionist ideas, have been taken up into the charismatic movement. The notion of the Seven Mountains Mandate—I think you had Taylor on the show to discuss those projects in a lot of detail. But a lot of those ideas of dominion, those ideas of a political Christianity, of Christianity taking on social, economic, political themes were generated by people like Rushdoony and Gary North and their followers.

Brad: Well, and we also have the growing popularity among Reformed theo-bros like Stephen Wolfe and Joel Webbon and others of: "Hey, why do women get to vote? When my wife votes, she's stealing a vote. She's stealing half of mine." The idea of those who have an abortion should get the death penalty. The fact that there are people in the United States whose religions are polytheist means that the country is under judgment from God, and we should do everything we can to expel them from this country.

I mean to me, when I hear those kinds of folks on podcasts and at conferences, I just hear the echoes of Rushdoony and North and others who really, I think, laid the groundwork for those kinds of ideas in Reformed circles to make their way to the 21st century.

Dr. Jerome Copulsky: And one of the things that I tried to do in this book is to show that, in fact, Rushdoony and North aren't new or unique in American history. So Gary North writes a book, Political Polytheism, comes out in the late '80s, and it's his argument that America was never fully, never adequately established as the Christian nation. And even the evangelicals of his time, like Francis Schaeffer, weren't doing enough in envisioning what that Christian society would look like, what that Christian civilization would look like.

And he dedicated the book to the Reformed Presbyterians, or the Covenanters—a group of very conservative, radical Calvinists who descended from Presbyterians in Scotland and in Ulster and rejected the Constitution that came out of Philadelphia in 1787 because it was not Christian enough, because it did not mention God, Jesus, the Bible, what have you. And because of its acceptance of the reality of religious pluralism, even non-Christian pluralism—Article VI of the Constitution, which says there can be no religious test. This they saw as raising the possibility of an infidel being president. The First Amendment, the free exercise of religion allowed for the government protecting false worship.

So in a way, what Gary North was saying, what Rushdoony was saying was that America was never properly founded, and it would not be properly founded until such a time that there was a constitution that legitimated their understanding of Christianity across the board.

Brad: Yeah, all right, let's take a break and come back. And when we do, we're going to switch from Protestant to Catholic, because, unfortunately, this strain of radicalism exists in various Catholic lineages, going back far further than we're going to talk about today, but going back to the mid-20th century. Be right back.

All right. Jerome, this was my favorite chapter of the book, chapter five. I really couldn't put it down, and I loved how you began the chapter with Robert Bellah. But you really take us to the mid-20th century, and you take us to the '50s and '60s, to the beginning of what many people know as the new right.

And we meet someone that I think a lot of folks listening will be familiar with, and that's William F. Buckley, who is kind of understood to be one of the architects, intellectually, of a kind of new conservatism in the United States in the mid-20th century. He starts the National Review. However, you introduce us to a character that I'm positive 99.9% of folks listening have never heard of, and whose biography is just so fascinating to me. And this is Buckley's brother-in-law, who does many things in his life. I mean, he has one of these lives that you're like, "What? Now?"

So I don't want to spoil it, but Goldwater is there. Franco's Spain is there. Would you just introduce us to this man who—he met Buckley at Yale. He has one of the most Yale names I've ever heard: L. Brent Bozell Jr. You have to go to Yale if that's your name. It's just sort of written into your life's destiny. But please introduce us to him and then I want to just outline why he's such an important figure in this story of radical, reactionary Catholicism.

Dr. Jerome Copulsky: Yeah. L. Brent Bozell Jr. was an Episcopalian born and raised in Nebraska. And he comes to Yale and he meets William F. Buckley Jr. He becomes his debating partner. Later, he becomes his brother-in-law. Under maybe the influence of Buckley, maybe the influence of his Yale professor Willmoore Kendall, he converts to Catholicism.

He and Buckley are really the two wunderkind of the mid-century American conservative movement. They co-write a book defending Joe McCarthy. Bozell ends up being the ghostwriter for Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative, which is a key text of the modern conservative movement. He's there on the masthead of National Review.

Brad: Can we just stop there? So these two—there are people listening who don't know any of this. These two—Buckley starts National Review, and Bozell, his brother-in-law, write a book defending Joe McCarthy, defending him. Like, "Oh, you know what, that was—he was right. We needed that." And then Bozell is like, "Next gig, I'm gonna go ahead and ghostwrite the 100% instant classic, perennially read Goldwater book," like the Conscience of a Conservative that is a huge part of Goldwater's whole national profile, his running to be the radical extremist and end the middle-of-the-road conservatism of Eisenhower and the Rockefellers. What kind of biography? I mean, how old is he at this point?

Dr. Jerome Copulsky: Yeah, a young man. And he also obtains a law degree from Yale during his time. But he doesn't want to be a lawyer. He wants to be a writer, and he starts working on a book about the Warren Court, essentially why the Warren Court is bad. He doesn't have a lot of money to write it. Buckley gives him some advice. "You want to write this book. You want to raise your family. You want to be able to drink some nice wine and eat some good food. How about you go to Spain for a while and get that done?"

So he goes to Spain in the early '60s. And while he's in Spain, he falls in love. And he falls in love with this Catholic thing that's happening under the Franco regime, this public Catholicism, this virtuous society. And he comes back to the United States, and what Buckley was trying to do at National Review, as the organ of this new right, was to bring into a big tent a number of disparate conservative elements. So there were traditionalists, Catholic traditionalists, but also Southern agrarians. There were libertarians who wanted the state out of economic life. There were Cold Warriors, there were former communists.

All of these people had something in common. They didn't like communism and they didn't really like the New Deal, the burgeoning New Deal state that was continuing under Eisenhower. And this attempt to hold these different factions together allowed the conservative movement to really take off. But it also was maybe internally incoherent. What do Catholic traditionalists have in common with libertarians who want to take doubt out of everything?

And Bozell comes back, and he really sees that this is an unstable mixture. And he sees also that at the end of the day, it's the libertarian side, the pro-business side, the liberal side—the right liberal side—that's winning, and that the traditionalists are essentially giving a kind of cover, a fig leaf to this other project that's really carrying the day.

So he gets into an interesting literary debate with Frank Meyer, who is also at National Review, with a very famous, influential essay, "Freedom or Virtue?" But by the mid-'60s, he's realizing that this is just not going to hold, and he decides to start his own magazine, which he calls Triumph, which was originally kind of focusing on conservative Catholic issues and skepticism of the modernizing Catholic Church, and skepticism of the Americanization of Catholicism that was being promoted by people like Father John Courtney Murray.

But by 1967, this magazine, which some had thought would just be kind of like the Catholic supplement to National Review, makes a radical turn and argues that, in fact, America is a failed project. It's collapsing, and it's a failed project because of this fundamentally bad founding. It's founded as a liberal project. And he's no longer trying to squint and see the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution as documents which emerge from the Christian political tradition. He sees them as a radical break, and therefore there's nothing to conserve in America.

Brad: It's a conclusion eerily similar to the one we spoke about in terms of Rushdoony, the Reconstructionists and so on, coming, of course, from a Catholic perspective, rather than a Reformed Protestant one. I just want to stop quickly and make sure not to miss the Catholic thing in Spain, because it's like one paragraph, if I'm not mistaken, in the chapter. But here I am reading about a sojourn in Spain in the '60s. It almost feels like something the Lost Generation would do, like, "Oh, here's Hemingway in his Spain years," eating charcuterie and writing his book as an underfunded young 30-something.

Instead, though, he becomes absolutely enamored with the pageantry of Franco's Catholic Spain. But these are also the years where, like, Opus Dei is doing everything it can to transform Spain into a Christian civilization. Lest we forget, Franco himself—a dictator, an authoritarian. I mean, we can use various titles, and I'm happy to debate how to label Franco, but certainly not a democratic leader.

And so I was so struck by that part of his life that it's almost like a Rod Dreher situation, the Benedict Option, the "go to Orbán's Hungary and come back like a kid who studied abroad and is just eating a baguette, thinking that Europe is the greatest thing." But instead of sitting in a Parisian café, you've come back thinking democracy is the worst, and we need a Christian civilization. It's just a fascinating thing.

Let me read a bit and then let you continue on the ideas that were put forth by Bozell in Triumph and his cohorts. He talks about that the commonwealth should be arranged so as to follow the instruction of the gospel. He talks at length about the goal is the resurrection of Christian civilization, the triumph of God's Church, the future Christ Himself. There really is no room here for those who would exist as non-Christians, as non-Catholics.

I'll read one more bit from page 183 and then let you take it away here: "The problem wasn't the liberal departure from the American idea, it was the American idea itself." And this, of course, leads into reflection in the 1960s on race and the civil rights movement and so on. So tell us more about Bozell's radicalism and the radicalism of Triumph. And then how did that refract into the Civil Rights Movement, which, of course, was taking its path through the United States?

Dr. Jerome Copulsky: So Bozell and the co-editors at Triumph looked at—they're now in the moment of the civil rights movement turning violent, that the moment of the marches on Washington under Martin Luther King Jr. have passed. Now in the late '60s, the frustration is now overflowing in urban areas, and it seems that the liberal order is no longer able to contain or no longer sort of make do on its promises.

And Bozell looks at this, and he says, "This really illuminates a failure of liberalism." The fact that the liberal order has kind of given up. And aside from what was happening in Newark and Watts, he's also looking at the Vietnam War and student protests to Vietnam. He's looking at the rise of a drug culture. He's looking at the legalization, growing acceptance and legalization of abortion.

And so he looks at a society which he thinks is collapsing. It's really falling apart, it seems. And the reason for that is because of a political order that is based on the individual and a false anthropology of that individual, a false understanding of what the human being is. So they create an entire social political order based on the wrong subject and a misunderstanding of what that subject is.

So the solution to that isn't a return to the Constitution. It isn't a restoration vision. It has to be something radically new to replace this order that's no longer sustainable. So he's actually looking at America in the late 1960s and saying, "This is collapsing. What I want to do, what my cohorts want to do at Triumph, is to build a new vanguard that will be ready to essentially take the reins of the society when the current regime falls."

That is the project of Triumph, but also it's the project of setting up summer schools in Spain to take intelligent young men to see what it's like to live in this Christian civilization, but also to train them intellectually for this. And I should say that one of the things that they did was to participate, or to set up and participate in the first major anti-abortion protest in Washington, DC, at the George Washington University Hospital. And they did so dressed in the style of Spanish Carlists—in khakis and berets and chanting "Viva Cristo Rey." So they really—they weren't even that interested in trying to change with the uniform and the chants for their American audience. They were that enamored by what they saw over there.

Brad: Amazing, absolutely amazing. There was no grand triumph for Triumph in those decades, whether the '60s or '70s. There was a break with Buckley. Buckley calls Triumph anti-American. He calls it militantly Catholic, in a way that was difavorable. And so one might conclude it's kind of a dead end, whether intellectually or religiously. But that's not true. And there's a lot of steps in between, but it leads us to your last chapter, which is all about what I would call Catholic post-liberalism.

I've talked about this lots on this show, talked about it in relationship to JD Vance and his own conversion to Catholicism. I don't know what it is, Jerome, about Yale Law School and people converting to Catholicism, but there's a trend, and it leads us to contemporary Catholic post-liberals like Patrick Deneen, the Notre Dame professor, and the Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, among others.

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