The Christians Who Want to Scrap the Constitution to Crown a King
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Brad is joined by Dr. Jerome Copulsky, author of American Heretics, to discuss radical Catholic and Protestant movements that challenge democracy. The conversation spans from the colonial era to today’s political landscape, shedding light on influential figures like Doug Wilson and JD Vance. The episode also dives into current Catholic intellectual trends inspired by thinkers like Bozell and Deneen, unraveling the complex interplay between orthodoxy and America’s religious-political sphere.
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Axis Mundy Axis Mundy 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.
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. Rushduni, the father of Reformed Reconstructionism, talking about how Christ is King and how He has called the Church to occupy the whole world.
Rashtuni 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 Kopulski, 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 Rush Dooney'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, J.D. 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.
Straight White American Jesus 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 Kopielski.
And the book is American Heretics, Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order.
Jerome, you've never been here.
Thanks for coming.
First time guest.
Thanks for coming to hang out here.
First time guest, but long time listener.
Thanks for having me.
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.
Do I know you well enough to guess that, or am I wrong?
In another podcast, we can talk about the 100-page chapter on the Mormons and the Kingdom of God that I think I cut down to maybe two footnotes.
But yeah, and there was a lot, you know, there was a lot also that had to be called.
There's a lot of material out there, you know, both historically and in our contemporary times and kind of being able to condense it into something that the university press was willing to publish was an interesting experience.
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, all of that, like, 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 some of 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've really believed 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 a thesis of the book.
What else should we know as we just kind of start to dig in a little bit?
The story goes back to really the very beginning of the project of the United States of America.
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, right?
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 a different key, somewhat different keys as we go along.
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 revolutionization.
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, you know, 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.
I've read the books.
I listened 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 can 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. Rashtuni, 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, or kneeling at the cross simultaneously?
Well, I could sum it up in one word, Chief Brad.
You know what that one word was?
Mistiocracy.
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 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 of 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 list in America, and he confuses the language of the Declaration of Independence with its appeal to the deity with the Constitution, and that they want to restore this, what they believed was a widely understood The conception of America as a Protestant Christian nation that had been lost in the second half of the 20th century.
It had been lost since, you know, 1947 and ever since the Supreme Court decision, the way that they had to do 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 a 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 state.
But a theocracy, that is to say that rule by God, or in the case of the Reconstructionist, a rule by means of divine law, the divine law that is presented in the Hebrew Bible in the 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.
The New Religious wanted to restore something.
The Reconstructionists wanted to actually build something very different.
Well, this brings us...
You mentioned Gary North.
Gary North's father-in-law was R.J. Rush Dooney.
And for those listening who are familiar with him, they may know where the story's going.
But Rush Dooney 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 Rush Dooney's idea of reconstruction?
What was the idea behind his, as you say, theocracy or eventually the idea of theonomy?
So the idea is that the Indians are not to await for an immediate second coming of Christ, which would then radically transform the world.
But rather that he had a, you know, technically speaking, was a post-millennial vision that Christians were charged with actually control of the creation now, after sort of the first appearance of Christ, right?
So this 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, right?
The sphere of the family, the sphere of the church, the sphere of government, of civil society, and living accordance to the rules that had been set up A voucher to Moses for the operation of those spheres.
So the idea, and this is what Rashtini's vision is really interesting and really radical, was they weren't interested in taking over the government and sort of establishing a theocracy.
Slating religion, because Christianity is already related, right?
The law is there.
The purpose of it being is not to live politically, but to live out those laws.
And this, you know, was a very different vision than the vision of most Christians, most Protestants, most Catholics, right?
That didn't sort of see the biblical laws still pertaining to their religious lives or their political lives.
Rush Dooney 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.
Rush Dooney grows up in Northern California.
He attends Berkeley.
He's Armenian in terms of heritage, and he just seems to have kind of a different lens than that Southern, in some ways Baptist kind of approach by 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, you know, 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.
In order to do that, and I want to read a kind of particularly startling line from page 218 of your book, they employ a presuppositionalist theology, or excuse me, presuppositionalist epistemology.
And I want to, A, 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 pretty scary.
Yeah, so, you know, this begins, you know, Rashtuni and North didn't come up with this idea of presuppositionalism.
Rashtuni gets it from Cornelius Van Til, who was a professor of apologetics.
At Westminster Theological Seminary.
We went away from Princeton Theological Seminary because Princeton had become too liberal, too modernist.
And the idea was that, you know, there's no neutrality.
There's no kind of neutral way of knowing things in the world, right?
You know things through being within a particular perspective.
That God's revelation provides the lens through which you understand the world.
Right.
So if there's no, there's no kind of 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, right?
Athens and Jerusalem that sort of reverberates through Christian history and maybe, you know, finds one of its high points in the synthesis.
Thomas Aquinas, right?
That human reason, unassisted human reason can understand the world and Rush to me and those who are following this Van Til method are like, no, we understand the world through the lens of the Bible.
That is the only way in which we can have true knowledge.
So in this way, they're standing apart from You know, traditional Catholic teaching, which would, you know, make appeals to natural law, that there's something, there's an access to knowledge, that even if you don't have access to that revelation, you as a rational agent can grasp.
But it's also, you know, it's more radical.
It means that there's no, you know, experience.
There are no other channels of proper human knowledge other than through Scripture.
Now, of course, that raises all sorts of problems.
It should be evident, right?
How do you read Scripture?
But 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 and faith.
Well, and it seems to lead to some of the more, I think, well-known aspects of Rashtuni'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 Rushduni is he doesn't believe that equalitarianism, 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. Equalitarianism 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 Rashtuni.
What did that kind of belief...
What kind of conclusions did that kind of belief lead him to?
Well, first, you know, I... There are ways of accepting church tradition, right?
So he does accept the early creeds of the church as being authoritative.
And actually, one of the driving, I guess, 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.
Now, as far as...
Can I just say, though, I love this.
I love it when people are like, hey, only biblical law, except for a creed.
Put together in 451, about, I don't know, four or more centuries after the life of Christ, that's totally authoritative.
But most everything else just too modern and completely woke and, well, we can't let that.
But the Creed of Chalcedon, they were really on to something, even though that was 400 years after Jesus was no longer supposedly on this planet.
Oh, or being within the larger sort of interpretive paradigm of Calvinism.
So, yeah.
Totally.
Totally.
So, you know, when we get to democracy, the very sort of basic building blocks of sort of modern American liberal democracy are seen by Rush News followers as a rebellion against Christian teaching, right?
And I should actually go even further.
That's not just, you know, liberalism or liberal democracy, but most of Christianity in America, Rushduni would claim is a false or debased form of Christianity, something that he calls the religion of humanity.
And what's interesting about comparing Rushduni's account of American decline to someone like Falwell's account of American decline, as I suggested 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.
Rush Duny, 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 what's true.
So it's democracy, it's secularism, but it's even the Southern Baptist Convention.
Yeah.
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, honestly, Jerome, I could sit here and talk to you all day about this because I think Rush Dooney 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.
A lot of the homeschooling networks in this country are heavily influenced by Reconstructionist ideas.
I'll just name a few, though, that are in our contemporary political moments so people can kind of see the refractions into the 21st century of a teaching like Rush Dooney'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 Rushduni.
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, that 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 may be too strong a word, but there are lines that lead us from Rush Dooney all the way to current cabinet nominees in the Trump administration.
Correct me if I'm wrong, elaborate.
Yeah, and I think this line of influence.
From what Rush Dooney was doing in the 1960s and 70s and 80s to where we are today, been traced really well by Julie Ingersoll in her work and Michael McVicker in his.
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 of the Reconstructionists.
I brought up.
So you mentioned, you know, people like Doug Wilson and, you know, 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 Yes.
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, you know, those ideas of dominion, those ideas of a political Christianity, of Christianity taking on social, economic, political theme, were generated by people like Rastrini and Gary North and their inner followers.
Well, and we also have the growing popularity among reformed Theobros like Stephen Wolf and Joel Webin 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.
You know, there's 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's 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 Rashtuni and North and others who really, I think, laid the groundwork for those kinds of ideas and reformed circles to To make their way to the 21st century and the current, you know, kind of political moment we're living through.
Yeah, and one of the things that I try to do in this book is to show that, in fact, Rush Juni and North aren't new or unique in American history.
Right.
So Gary North writes this book, Political Polytheism, comes out in the late 80s.
And it's his argument that America was never adequately established as a Christian nation.
And even the evangelicals of his time, like Francis Schaeffer, are doing enough in envisioning what that Christian society would look like, what that Christian civilization would look like.
And he dedicates the book To the Reformed Presbyterians or the Covenanters.
And he's 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, right?
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, which is pluralism, right?
Article 6, section 3 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 Rush Dooney 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.
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 farther than we're going to talk about today, but going back to the mid-20th century.
Be right back.
All right, Jerome, this is 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 Bella.
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...
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 has, 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 like 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.
Yeah, he, you know, L. Brent, 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 of Limer Kandel.
Kandel, he converts to Catholicism, but he and Buckley are really the two wunderkinders of the mid-century American conservatives.
They co-write a book defending John McCarthy, Bozell He ends up being the ghostwriter for Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative, which is his key text of the modern conservative movement.
He's there on the masthead of National Review.
Can we just stop there?
So these two, there's people listening who don't know any of this.
These two, Buckley, starts the National Review, and Bozell, his brother-in-law, write a book defending Joe McCarthy, defending him.
Like, oh, you know what?
He was right.
We needed that.
And then Bozell is like, you know, next gig, I'm going to go ahead and ghostwrite The 100% instant classic perennially read Goldwater book that like, you know, the conscience of a conservative that like kind of, you know, 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.
Like what kind of biography?
I mean, how old is he by now?
He's probably late 20s, early 30s.
Like this would be your whole life at this point.
Yeah, the young man.
Incredible.
And he then sets off...
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 says, you know, gives him some advice.
You want to write this book.
You want to like, he already had a family.
You want to sort of raise your family, be able to pay for that.
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.
It's 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 the National Review as the organ of this new right was to bring into a big tent A number of disparate conservative elements, right?
So there were traditionalists, Catholic traditionalists, but also Southern agrarians.
There were libertarians who wanted the state out of our 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 big deal, the burgeoning big deal state that was continuing under Eisenhower.
And this attempt to hold these, you know, different factions together allowed them, allowed these, the conservative movement to really take off.
But it also was maybe, you know, internally incoherent, right?
You know, what do, you know, Catholic traditionalists have in common with, you know, libertarians who, you know, must 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 the MD Republic.
It's a very famous essay, influential essay, Freedom or Virtue.
But by the mid-60s, he's realizing that this is just not going to happen.
And he decides to start his own magazine, which he calls Triumph, which was really originally kind of focusing on conservative Catholic issues and skepticism of the modernizing Catholic Church, the 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 the 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, right?
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 these as a radical break, and therefore there's nothing to conserve in America.
It's a conclusion eerily similar to the one we spoke about in terms of Rashtuni, 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.
Yeah.
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 heroes where 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, right?
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 cafe, 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 let you continue on the ideas that were put forth by Bozell in Triumph and his cohorts.
Talk about here 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.
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 at this time?
So Bozell and its co-editors at Triumph looked at the, you know, they're now in the moment of the civil rights movement, it's turning violent.
That the moment of the marches on Washington under Martin Luther King Jr. have passed for now in the late 60s, where the frustration is now sort of overflowing in urban areas.
And it seems that the liberal order is no longer able to contain or no longer able to make do on its promises.
And Bozell looks at this and he says, this really illuminates a failure of liberalism, right?
The fact that the liberal order has kind of given up, you know, and there's, you know, 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 drug culture.
He's looking at the legalization, the growing acceptance and legalization.
And so he looks at a society which he thinks is collapsing, right?
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, 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, like, this is not...
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 a project of setting up Summer schools in Spain that take, you know, 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 movement, abortion protest in Washington, D.C. at the George Washington University Hospital.
So they had, you know, and they did so sort of dressed in the style of Spanish Carlists and in khakis and berets and chanting people Cristo Rey.
So they really, they weren't even that interested in, you know, they...
In trying to change the uniform and the chance for their American audience, they were that enamored by what they saw over there.
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 disfavorable.
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.
And talked about this lots on this show, talked about it in relationship to J.D. 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, who's a Notre Dame professor, and the Harvard Law professor, Adrian Vermeule, among others.
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