In this episode of the UpWords Podcast, Dan Hummel interviews John Wilsey, a professor and author, about his book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer. They explore the broader themes of conservatism, emphasizing its historical roots, the importance of tradition, and the concept of aspirational conservatism. The conversation delves into key figures in conservative thought, the role of the conservative imagination, and the significance of religious freedom in contemporary society.

John D. Wilsey is professor of church history and chair of the Department of Church History and Historical Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He is also a research fellow with the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy. His publications include American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of an Idea, God’s Cold Warrior: The Life and Faith of John Foster Dulles, and Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer.

Chapters

00:00 Exploring Conservatism Beyond Politics

05:07 The Role of Tradition in Conservatism

11:18 Aspirational Conservatism Explained

19:24 Key Figures in Conservative Thought

39:27 The Conservative Imagination and Inner Life

46:26 Religious Freedom and Its Importance

Takeaways

• Conservatism is more than just politics; it's a worldview.
• Tradition plays a crucial role in understanding conservatism.
• Aspirational conservatism seeks to align with transcendent values.
• Key figures like Burke, Kirk, and Virick shape conservative thought.
• The conservative imagination informs our inner life and values.
• Religious freedom is essential for a flourishing society.
• Conservatives should advocate for the rights of all, including minorities.
• History is a vital aspect of the Christian faith and conservatism.
• Conservatives must manage change rather than resist it.
• The relationship between freedom and responsibility is fundamental.

to the Upwards podcast. I'm Dan, one of your hosts. And today I'm getting to talk to my friend, John Wilsey, a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary about his new book, Religious Freedom, a Conservative Primer. And this is a wide ranging conversation, but we really get into how the idea of conservatism is much bigger and deeper than the politics that we talk about often when we talk about conservatism. We get into ideas or concepts like

the conservative imagination and the conservative view on history. And we ultimately talk about some of the key figures in the history of conservatism and end talking about the idea of religious freedom and how that fits in to both a Christian and a conservative view of the world. Excited to share this conversation with John Wilsey.

Welcome to the Upwards Podcast, where we discuss the intersection of Christian faith in the academy, church, and marketplace to illuminate the good work happening with individuals, institutions, and in our communities. I'm Dan, one of your hosts, and I'm here today with John Wilsey, a historian and author of the recent book, Religious Freedom, a Conservative Primer. Hi, John.

Dan, how are you?

I'm doing well, and I'm really looking forward to the conversation about this book. Before we get into that, I'll give just a little formal intro of John. John Willesey is Professor of Church History and Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Church History and Historical Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. And he's the author of many books, and the most recent one being the one I mentioned, Religious Freedom with Erdmans. And it just came out in recent weeks.

John, I was happy to read this book before it came out. I thought it was a really interesting take on both sort of what is at the heart of conservatism as a way of seeing the world and on the topic of religious freedom, which is in the title. So I thought we could start by me asking you, one of the unique things I think about the book is that you're gearing it toward young Americans, as you say. And I wondered why, what was the thinking behind that and

how did that perspective come about to write the book to younger Americans?

Well, that's great, Dan. And first of all, just thank you very much for having me on the podcast. It's an honor to be with you and I really appreciate the invitation. Yeah, there are a few reasons why I had young people in mind for this book. First and foremost is that my children are, you know, they're Gen Z and they're my oldest is a sophomore in college and my youngest is a sophomore in high school. So I really had have them in mind as I wrote the book.

My oldest daughter read all my chapters and my drafts when I was writing them, giving me pointers. And it was all really great to kind of have her as a partner. My kids have always been real little when I was writing my other books. And so it was a lot of fun to get her feedback on this one. Another reason is because early in the project, it sort of dawned on me that my own students, the students that I teach, they don't

remember September 11th. know, and they don't remember to say nothing of Reagan or the Reagan revolution. They don't remember a new Gingrich, you know, the Republican revolution, the contract with America and all that stuff. And as I thought about that, they don't really have the same heroes that I had when I was their age. Of course, my heroes were I loved Reagan. I loved Thatcher. I love John Paul II. We were just talking a second ago. I loved

Brian Mulroney in Canada. had conservative heroes when I was in my teens and twenties. And early in the project, I thought, who is worthy of emulation and looking up to as a conservative leader in America today? And just trying to think about who they have to really look up to. And there aren't very many people. There's some thought leaders and there's some maybe some journalists and people like that. But in terms of political figures in the world.

There aren't very many. So I wanted to give young people a vision for what true conservatism can look like. say in the book that I don't think it's possible to be a true conservative. I think conservatism is an aspiration to aim for. I aspire to be a consistent and a true conservative, but I don't think that I will ever attain that in my life.

Because the conservative aspiration, think, is one to align your life and your worldview with the transcendentals, the true, good, and the beautiful.

You're sitting there at Southern Seminary, obviously deeply committed to your Christian faith. How did that intersect with thinking about writing this book? Sort of, how does your faith, how does your Christian commitments inform why you want to write a book about conservatism now?

Yeah, I'll just say as a Christian and as a history teacher, I tell my students a lot that, well, let me just back up. When I teach my history classes at Southern, the first thing I say to them on the first day of class is how many of you don't like history? And most of the students are a little shy. They don't want to first on the first day out themselves.

Right.

But I used to teach in a maximum security prison. used to teach history in a maximum security prison for six years, and they were not shy. So whenever I asked that question, I would have probably a third of the class raise their hand and asking questions about why. They always had the same kind of answers, know, that, we had a bad teacher, or they just think it's boring, or they didn't do well in their classes, or they didn't see it was relevant, you know, on and on.

And what I usually tell students is that if you're a Christian, it's not really open to you to not like history because our whole faith is historical. And as a historical faith, that means that we're interested in tradition and the role of tradition, and we revere tradition in some way. And that is a conservative impulse. So that's where I see the real link between Christianity as a faith, as a walk with God, our creator.

and what the conservative impulse is to revere and pass down steward tradition.

Do you see younger Americans having a harder time making that connection? Or is that something every generation of Americans is having to sort of rediscover?

Yeah, that's a great question. think that young people, just in general, I'm not a young person, so I can't speak for young people, but I used to be a young person. remember what it was like to be a young person. And I think in general, young people don't think about receiving tradition or passing it down. I think that's something that when you get older, you start to think about that more. yeah, I'm in my fifties. And when I crossed over into my fifties, maybe a little bit earlier,

I did start to think about those things more. And so as an older person, someone that's reached beyond the midpoint probably of my life, I do think about that more. And so I think it's sort of a duty of mine as an older person and as a father to at least expose young people to that concept, to prepare them to at least think about it.

I don't think that young people, I don't really expect young people to think about tradition that way yet when they're in their 20s, but certainly maybe prepare them for it for later in life, especially when they have children of their own.

And so that did prompt a sort of historical imagination or at least a historical curiosity that I ended up following more than most into my adulthood. Do you get a sense, I think maybe the answer for like a Gen Z type historical event might be COVID or something. I'm not exactly sure what the historical resonance, but do you get a sense at all? there, the students you teach, is there a moment in the last decade or a sort of

theme or something about how they do think about the past or what in their experience would get them to be interested in the past. I guess is another way of saying it.

Yeah, I think probably COVID is the closest thing because it was the thing that was most all consuming for our lives during that year or two years of going through that. I would have to say that that would be it.

But beyond that, I'm just sort of just speculating because students don't really tell me, you know, this is something they don't really talk about. Like, well, where were you when you found out the school was going to go fully online and things like that? I think that, you know, for September 11th, I remember the Challenger disaster when I was in, I think I was in 10th grade when that happened. Maybe most famous for our parents and grandparents were the Kennedy assassination.

Those are dramatic events that happened like on one time in one day. And COVID was this, you remember, I mean, it was this sort of death by a thousand cuts type thing. So I don't know if there is a parallel event for them. I kind of hope for their sake that there isn't one. They're pretty traumatic, they're pretty awful. So I don't know, that's interesting. But those kind of moments are helpful to kind of place us and define our times.

for our generation as we're coming through.

Yeah. And I just think here at at at upper house, we have a multi-generational team. And actually, as you were listing those historical events, I can recall conversation with people on our staff about the Kennedy assassination, about the Challenger explosion, about September 11. So there's also some some real wisdom to be gained by speaking across generations like you are in the book, recognizing that there is a lot to learn from those older from us. Yeah.

That takes us to, think, I mean, you mentioned one of the key terms in your book, aspirational conservatism. So unpack that a little more. What do you mean by aspirational conservatism? And maybe how does it not reflect what many people might associate with if you just said, I'm a conservative or what conservatism means in our culture right now?

Yeah, think what it means now is that you voted for Trump, that you're a MAGA person. And if it's any deeper than that, it sort of marks you as being kind of on one side of the fence on very specific issues, whether it be social issues or economic or foreign policy, things like that. In short, I think that most people think of a conservative in specifically political

terms. But following traditionalist conservatives like Russell Kirk, like Richard Weaver, like Peter Vierich, who I talked about in the book, they all agreed that conservativism is a disposition. And they get that, I think, really from Edmund Burke in the late 18th century. And by disposition, they meant something that began with a view of reality, a view of the world, a view of change.

and our position in time. So a pre-political foundation for an entire way of looking at the world. And so I took their dispositional conservativism and I adapted the term a little bit to aspirational to reflect a more American kind of a sense of conservativism because Americans have historically been people that have looked to the future.

even as they are being informed by their history and informed by their traditions. So I think conservatives often are looked at by both people on the left and by some people who are self-identify as conservatives, that they don't like change, that they resist change. There's that famous statement by William F. Buckley that, stand to thwart history and yell stop. And that's a quotable.

charming phrase, but I don't even think Buckley really believed that. Conservatives are realists, and all realists know that change is inevitable. You can look in the mirror and see change. mean, change is everywhere. So conservatives, it's not that conservatives resist change or hate change. Conservatives seek to manage change through deliberation, through procedure, through just law and just order.

because conservatives believe that human beings are flawed and they sometimes reach for power and they're sinful and so forth. And Americans have always been optimistic about the future they've aspired to something. All the way back to our founding documents, those early aspirations in the founding documents are laid out in the Declaration of Independence. They're laid out in the preamble to the Constitution. Americans have always been an aspirational people, reaching forward, looking ahead, optimistic.

able to laugh at themselves. Sometimes that optimism has gotten them into trouble. But nevertheless, Americans are aspirational and conservatism is also aspirational. Conservatism is humanistic in the sense that true conservatism is after the flourishment of humanity, both the individual and the community. And so that's what I'm trying to get across in the book that conservatives aren't, they're not to be self

centered. They're not to be just looking out for their own interests and just to heck with everybody else. Concerners are interested in civilization and all of civilization and for human benefit. And that's why I use that term.

Yeah. I wonder if for some of our listeners who aren't as familiar with the way some of these terms are used, particularly among scholars and others who write about it, talk to us about the relationship between what you're calling aspirational conservatism and what we might call classic liberalism. And those terms in our politics, know, liberals on one side, conservatives on the other, but there also seems to be an overlap between some of the values that an aspirational conservative would have in your view.

and some of the, at least some of the concerns that a classic liberal would have about, even about something like religious freedom, which is what your book's title is. How do you see the relationship between those two sort of traditions or bodies of thought?

When you talk about classical liberalism, you just mean like Locke and...

Right, right. yeah, sort of a tradition of coming out of the Enlightenment, I guess you could say, is where classical liberalism comes from. There is, of course, like an economic component to classical liberalism, but there's a deeper sense of the individual, the rights of the individual, the limited powers that any type of overarching institution should have on the individual, things like that.

Yeah, good. I think there's a lot of overlap because and the reason why is because the American order has has been informed so deeply by Lockean liberalism. Right. So there's going to be a great deal of overlap. But there are some distinctions, too. I'm not a libertarian and a libertarian perspective. There's sort of a rightist and a leftist libertarian perspective on life. But I think

Libertarians would generally not call themselves conservatives. And I think one of the reasons why is because libertarians stress the individual as the basic unit of society. And as a traditionalist conservative in the school of Russell Kirk or Edmund Burke, think the unit of society would be the family. Because in the family, this is something that Richard Weaver talks about.

The family is where you learn your place in a society for the first time. I was the youngest brother. I had an older brother. And it didn't take long for me to learn that, you know, where things stood, you know, where I was on the pecking order. And that was just between us, between the kids. But I also knew early, early on that, you know, I don't get to correct my parents when I think they've done something wrong.

But they get to correct me because I'm the child. So you learn early on a hierarchical order. You learn that you have to follow the rules. You don't get to make the rules. In other words, in the family, you're in your childhood. You're prepared to live as a responsible citizen. You learn citizenship. You have to learn selflessness when you're in a family. And

If the individual is the basic unit of society, well, how do you learn any of those things? Well, you can't. You can't learn those things in isolation. On the other hand, the stress, the emphasis on individual rights, the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, for example, the rights of the individual citizen balanced with the rights of the society or the community. Those are also conservative.

concerns and we do have that in common with our libertarian brethren. We also have in common a desire to limit government and limit the scope of government, the power of government, because government tends to fill every vacuum left behind by citizens who are no longer interested in dealing with a particular problem in a community. as soon as citizens in a local community are no longer willing to deal with a particular problem, government is more than happy to step in and...

and deal with it. Tocqueville writes about that impulse in a democracy, that voluntary societies in local communities, generally in America, take care of local problems. when citizens turn inward and they turn into their selfish interests, then government steps in and that's how government grows. And that's how majoritarian tyranny ends up sucking all the oxygen out of the room. So it's something in particular that Americans must

guard against. That's a little bit of a long answer to the question, but I hope that helps.

Yeah, that does. You've mentioned a few people here that are really important to the conservative intellectual tradition, Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Tocqueville, Peter Virick. Why don't you help us get acquainted with a few of them? Let's start with Burke. think for anyone who reads a book on the history of conservative thought, Edmund Burke's probably the person that's mentioned as sort of the originator in some sense of the tradition.

Give us a thumbnail sketch of Edmund Burke. Who was he? When did he live? Why do we always reference him when we talk about the origins of conservative thought?

So one of the most famous things that he did in that work was to define society contrasted with a Rousseauian understanding of the social contract. For Rousseau, society was a contract that just involved the living. Burke famously says in Reflections on the Revolution in France, says, society is indeed a contract.

It's a contract between the living, the dead, and the yet to be born. So he sees society as an organic whole. The dead, they're the ones that we received tradition from. They are the ones that we received our stewardship from. And the dead still speak to us in important ways, even though they're not walking around among us. And then we're stewarding tradition and preparing it for a generation that's yet to come.

To see society in terms of the living only is the height of a communal selfishness. And that was one of the fatal problems of Rousseau's political philosophy. But that's Burke in a nutshell.

Yeah. And even that formulation of a society has sort of an obligation to the dead, the living, and the yet to be born. I think for a lot of Americans, you mentioned before the sort of forward-looking, future-looking sense, I think a lot of Americans, whether they're conservative or not, feel some obligation to the yet to be born, at least some of them. know, we talk a lot about the environment and other things, and we talk about, our kids, and that's a traditional American view, you you always want your kids to have a better life than you do.

I think the obligation to the dead is a less intuitive one to many Americans. Maybe part of that is a pretty strong sense of progress or least assumption of progress that in some ways we know better than our ancestors. And so, you know, we actually have a duty to sort of surpass them or something. And maybe for some of quite critical view of the American history that sees a lot of American history as a lot of mistakes or sins that need to be

redeemed in the future or in the present. How much of this attentiveness to the past, particularly to the dead, to the people that came before us? I know Burke had that. Talk about a bit more, how does that inform what you call the conservative imagination or the aspirational conservatism that you're talking about?

Yeah. I have a whole chapter on conservatism and history where I talk about this as well. And in that chapter, I try to advocate for a method of history that's informed by virtue that doing history is actually an ethical practice. And what I mean by that in short, in a nutshell, is that everything that we are, everything that we believe, our personalities, our fundamental values and the way we see the world,

We didn't just get this from nowhere. We received these things from people who have gone before us, many of whom are dead. We remember the dead at various points on the calendar. We're about to have Memorial Day in a few weeks. What do we do at Memorial Day? Well, we memorialize those who died in the wars that were fought on our behalf. That's just one aspect.

And sort of to quote a biblical illusion from Hebrews 11, the dead still speak in important ways. So that means that we have a duty to the dead, a duty to be charitable to them. That doesn't mean that we excuse their sins. To be charitable to the dead is not a way to ignore or whitewash their sins. It is to tell the truth about them. way that we love the dead is to tell the truth about them.

So I use that term not in a sentimental sense, but in a way that we're gonna treat them with justice. So we tell the truth about them, good things, bad things, and anything in between that's relevant. When we tell the truth about the dead, it informs us, it informs our own way of life. And there's a couple of people that I've really enjoyed reading on this subject. Beth Barton Schweiger is one, and John Lewis Gaddis is another one.

In John Lewis Gaddis' book, The Landscape of History, he says that history is like looking at a map, or it's like standing on top of a mountain and looking out over the view. You have a particular perspective on the past and on the people of the past who are no longer living. And your perspective is a privileged perspective. They didn't have the perspective that you have now. And so Beth Schweiger says, well, that means we have a little bit of power.

over the dead. We have quite a bit of power over the dead. And how are we going to use that power? We can use that power either for self aggrandizement, or we can use that power for self-examination. So Beth Schweider talks about how the work of history actually changes the historian. It changes me. When I read history, it changes me. That's aspirational conservatism. I aspire to be a better man than I am, a more virtuous man.

a more faithful man, a better man in terms of how I treat others, treat my neighbor, a more faithful believer, more faithful to my wife and my children. History teaches me that because I value history, I value the past, I value tradition. These are all things, again, that comport with what conservativism holds up.

podcast notes for today's conversation include a link to view this episode on YouTube. Remember to follow or subscribe to stay updated with our latest episodes in your podcast app.

This is sort of off script, but have you read the novel The Ender's Game? Okay, so it's a sci-fi novel from the 80s written by Orson Scott Card, who's actually known as a conservative science fiction writer. Anyway, I will not go into the plot for the audience, but there is a role that Ender, the main character, plays, and it's called Speaker for the Dead. That's actually what he's known as. And he's speaking for a race of aliens that were killed in a conflict that is at the center of the story. But it just made me think that actually...

the way you're talking about the conservative imagination in relationship to the dead is probably what informed the way Orson Scott Card sort of created this fictional role in his novel as well. It sort of comes out of a conservative imagination. And that's one of the things I want to talk about next here is the way that when we think of conservatism, even in the way you're talking about, John, we're thinking of something really, as you said, pre-political, something that is sort of informs art and sort of philosophy and

the way you think about nature and these things that often aren't talked about when we talk about conservatism. I think one of the people at the core of sort of expanding this tradition in that, maybe not expanding, but at least articulating it for Americans was Russell Kirk, who I know you spent some time at the Russell Kirk Center that sort of carries on his legacy. So that probably informed some of why you talk about him in the book. But talk to us about Russell Kirk, give us a thumbnail of who he was when he lived.

and why he's another person when you go into this history, sort of you have to mention him as a pivotal figure as well.

worked in his own library in his own office and everything was in a converted toy factory. And that toy factory is just down there, just a short walk down the, down to country lane from his, from his house. And Russell Kirk was a great personality as was, as were all these people. All these people have great personalities. And Russell Kirk is no, no exception. He was a famous night owl, for example. He had a tradition of taking

long walks in the middle of the night. And I'm an eyed owl. So I did spend a few weeks, about a month in Mecosta at the Kirk Center. And when I, in fact, when I wrote chapter one, I wrote chapter one while I was spending those weeks at the Kirk Center. And I adopted that as my own habit, just in the spirit of being in Mecosta. So I would take walks at one and two o'clock in the morning and

They were fun. They were interesting. I would work in the Kirk Library at, you know, wee hours the night to two, three, four o'clock in the morning in the spirit of Russell Kirk. And it was a fun time because, you know, Russell Kirk was a great conservative writer and thinker, but he was also a novelist and he wrote what he called ghostly tales, horror stories. And my favorite of those is his

collection of short stories, Ancestral Shadows, which is a collection of just wonderful stories. And he has an essay at the end of that collection of why he writes ghostly tales, why he wrote ghostly tales. And he did so, he said, because he wanted to use ghostly tales in order to imaginatively illustrate the power of moral justice, of truth, goodness, and beauty as they're applied in the world.

and that these things are objective and they're also eternal. They're truly real. And being real, they transcend space, time and circumstance. So I could say a lot more about Kirk, but Kirk is an inspiring figure. and his wife is a widow, is of course still living. This is Annette Kirk, and she's still in Mecosta, still lives in the house. And the Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal is a very

very active and very vibrant, a center still there in Mecosta. And you can go and visit and see the library and see the old toy factory and see where he did his work.

really interesting. think the thing that's striking to me about Kirk, remind me, what was his big book on the history of conservatism? What was that called?

concerned mind that's right

Right. OK, so most if you sort of read around the history of conservatism, The Concert of Mind will certainly be referenced as this sort of seminal book. I think it's interesting how much of a you how you give a much more well-rounded sense of who he was and his interests, and they included literature and art. Because I think for many sort of American readers in the 21st century, it's interesting just to think about how a lot of the authors that are still beloved

come out of what you would call like a conservative imagination. And I think of the sort of, I'd mentioned Orson Scott Card, I guess he would be part of this too, but really thinking of the British authors like GK Chesterton and C.S. Lewis and Gerard Tolkien. They would all fit in your sort of definition of conservative and they build out these worlds that go way beyond the, just talking about politics or anything like that. But they have concepts and ways of thinking about

supernatural and what it means to be human that are ultimately rooted in some deep convictions, Christian convictions as well. think it was, I'm going to butcher the quote, but GK Chesterton said something like a detective novel only works in like a Christian worldview or something like that because of the assumptions you're making about truth and about, you know, sort of justice and things like that. So you can think of even certain genres that we just take for granted in American culture.

come out of these much deeper commitments that I don't think most of us contemplate at a given time. But anyway, Russell Kirk seems to me to be someone who was very influential in shaping a certain, you could say, conservative worldview that did include politics, but also had all these other perspectives or interests that weren't explicitly political.

Right, exactly, exactly.

Okay, so talk to us about one more person. And this is sort of one of the more, most people will have passing familiarity with Burke and Kirk. These are sort of the big names. But Peter Vieric comes up again and again in your book and probably less well known as to most of us. Who was Peter Vieric and why is he important figure for the way you're thinking about conservatism?

Please.

He said, the conservative principles par excellence are proportion and measure, self-expression through self-restraint, preservation through reform, humanism and classical balance, a fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux, and a fruitful obsession for unbroken historical continuity.

These principles together create liberty, a liberty built not on the quicksand of adolescent defiance, but on the bedrock of ethics and law. And I love when he says, a fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux. And again, that's that emphasis on, we recognize that change is part of the world. So we call either the flux, but change is channeled.

change is managed by the permanent things. And we get the permanent things through from tradition, from religion, from authority. One of the things he said was, it is so emblematic of his wit and such a good writer. In critiquing Rousseau's social contract, of course, Rousseau begins with that very famous statement that man is born free and everywhere he's in chains. And Virik responds by saying,

in chains. And so he ought to be. And what he means by that is that, know, chains, the chains that Rousseau talks about are social custom, tradition and authority. And Virak had a realistic view of human nature. Human nature is not basically good. Human nature is basically flawed, fallen, sinful, reaches for power. So authority and tradition and order.

and just law. These things are guardrails that keep us from careening off a cliff.

Yeah, I think another way to think of that that chains quote is I remember you've all of in who's maybe I can you know, a contemporary conservative writer. He he has a book from a few years ago on on institutions and defending the role of institutions in our society. And he has a great question that I ask myself continually all the time. And he says, you know, one of the most fundamental questions you can ask as a citizen of a country or of a community, a member of a community is given my location,

sort of what should I do or how should I act? And there's always that, that first part is so helpful to me, the given my location or given my role, given my standing in this institution, giving my, where I am on the org chart in my, how should I act based on that? And for some people that would feel like you're sort of, you're, chaining down or you're, you're locking down someone into a certain role.

or certain setting, but of course we're in those settings all over the place in our society, whether it's in our family or in voluntary societies or at our job or elsewhere. I think raising that question and really saying it's not actually chains, these aren't actually things that burden us in some type of way where they're imprisoning us, but they are actually from where we act and from where we're called to act and we're called to act thoughtfully from a location. So it's not just an individual in a vacuum and saying, what should I do now?

it's given where I'm at, given my responsibilities, what should I do? So I always think of that, you've all live in quote, as a way to try to temper or really try to think wisely about how to speak out, how to exercise authority, when to stay quiet based on location, not just sort of in a vacuum. Okay, just a couple more things I wanna touch on now that we've sort of touched on a few of the key figures. One of the things,

I love it.

I wanted to sort of just hit home talking about your book, John, is this sense that there is a lot to conservatism that is missing when we usually talk about conservatism. And this is one last way to get at this. I want to just give you a quote from page 65 in your book and ask you to talk a little more about it. So this is on page 65. in the chapter on the conservative imagination.

And you write, conservatives missed an opportunity to fight for the private life, to take the road less traveled, and to cultivate an imagination and an inner life that led to true freedom from the spirit of the age. Give us some context for that quote and help us think about how can a conservative imagination really inform the inner life that leads to a true freedom.

Yeah. the context for that is, I was reflecting on Peter Virick and his book, The Unadjusted Man in an Age of Overadjustment. And Virick, I said something about Kirk's personality a minute ago. Virick was also another really interesting personality. he was very strange. He was a very strange man, but in a good way, not in a bad way, in a really, in a really endearing way. A couple of quick things. This again sets the context.

his life on campus, when he was first hired at Mount Holyoke, he forgot to request an office. So he taught there for 50 years and he never had an office on campus. He was always, always 15 to 20 minutes late to class for 75 minute classes. Always 15, 20 minutes late. When he would lecture, he would focus on a light fixture. He would never look at the students in the face.

He never returned papers. He never gave any feedback. So you always found out how you did in this class when you got your report card. He could go for days, even weeks after daylight savings time, living by the old clock because he just didn't remember. He would run into things. He would run into a wall. He would run into signs because he was in deep thought.

He enjoyed climbing trees on campus and he would sit in the trees and the students would walk by and there's Professor Virick in the tree. So he was a character. was, he wrote a book in 1956, I believe called The Unadjusted Man in an Age of Over-Adjustment. And he had these three metaphors, these three geographic metaphors. One was an island, one was a peninsula, and one was the mainland. And in terms of our relationship to the culture,

relationship to the broader culture. The maladjusted man that is the man on the island, someone who rejects culture, who hates the culture, get off my lawn, a hermit, kind of like the character in Gran Torino. He's the maladjusted man. He didn't like people, didn't just want to be left alone. You don't want that. You're misanthrope at that point.

And the other extreme is to be on the mainland and to have your entire personality, your entire worldview defined by cultural fads and cultural values. And you don't want that either. What you want is to be like a peninsula. You want to be far enough removed from the culture that the culture doesn't shape who you are. But you also want to be informed enough about the culture that you can contribute.

to the goodness of society, to the good of society, is. So conservatives, my statement there that you read is about how conservatives have missed an opportunity to follow that advice about being unadjusted to the culture. Being a conservative by definition is to be unadjusted from the culture. Conservativism in the way that I'm advocating is always going to be the minority. We're always going to be the weird ones.

Peter Vierich has another great line where he says, liberalism argues, conservatism simply is. Conservatives live by concrete reality and aren't trying to build utopias in the sky. And so on the progressive left, you have a vision to create a perfect society informed by progressive values or

revolutionary Marxism or what have you. And on the counter revolutionary or reactionary right, you have a different vision, but it's equally utopic. It's a different set of things that they want on their agenda list, but it's just as utopic. It's just as abstract. But what a conservative advocates for is what's real and what we have to work with now. In Federal 65, Alexander Hamilton

defends the Constitution by saying it's not perfect. It wasn't meant to be perfect. It wasn't designed to be perfect. And the anti-federalists are always going to be right when they critique it. It's going to be flawed. But what the project of the anti-federalists is not to say that the Constitution fails hither and thither. What their task is, to say that the Constitution is evil and it's bad and they can't do that. And that's an imminently conservative perspective.

It's easy to critique the real and the concrete because it's what we live with every day. It's very difficult to critique the utopian vision, either of the hard right or the hard left. It's easy to critique that which we have, and it's the conservatives' task to defend that which we have. That's unadjusted to the culture. And to be unadjusted to the culture, you have to be more than just political. You have to cultivate an imagination.

that is humanistic, but that's also centered around the transcendentals, the good, the true, the beautiful. It has to be centered around God. Conservatives believe in God. Conservatives believe in the transcendent. And our worldview is sort of anchored on those things that are eternal, the permanent things that don't change, God and his ways, submission to God and his ways. These are things that are very important.

in a society, in a family, in a nation, and in the world. And it's a joyful task. It's not a burden. It's an aspirational task. It's also a lot of fun. It takes a little bit of sacrifice at times, but it also makes our lives worth living.

Well, you mentioned God there, and I want to end by talking about religious freedom and ask you just help us fit in the idea of religious freedom into your view of conservatives. Why is it so important? And ultimately, where do you hope the conversation with religious freedom, you know, it centers now and going forward?

Is there a particular way you hope conservatives talk about religious freedom? I can think of just as one example. know in arguments have been made in the past and in the present that particularly Christians who, as you mentioned, tend to have the majority, or at least tend to be seen as part of the majority culture, should be especially concerned about protecting the freedoms of minorities as a way to say this isn't just about majority rules, it's actually when it doesn't

necessarily make sense from the majority that these religious freedoms should be protected. I don't know if that's what you'd advocate or something else, but how do you think conservatives should be articulating the universal value of religious freedom?

I love that pairing of freedom and responsibility. Thanks, John, for the conversation. Again, the book is Religious Freedom, a Conservative Primer. And thank you for tuning into the Upwards podcast. We hope you enjoyed today's conversation. And for more information about the Stephen Lowe Brown Foundation, please visit slbf.org, where we have dozens of conversations just like this one on our studio page. Until next time, go in peace.