Intellectual debates on the right over the place of illiberal policy in the conservative political coalition have recently taken on a religious tone as Catholics and Protestants both stake out the limits of their traditions regarding liberalism’s influence. Andrew Walker, a professor at the flagship seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention, noted that while he criticized the direction recently taken by liberal democracy, he was not a post-liberal. Patrick Deneen, a professor at Notre Dame, argued that it was “Catholic post-liberals who are reminding Protestants of the existence in America of state establishments, Sabbath laws, obscenity laws, and the like.” The Protestant response, according to Deneen, was “to appeal to a fictionalized American founding in which we have always been Millians.”
The idea that the Catholic tradition maps easily on to post-liberal traditionalism and that Protestantism — hardly a unified religious or sociopolitical definer — is analogous with libertarianism is a popular trope but one that does not bear out in the history of the United States. Deneen’s engagement with Walker appears to be not necessarily an engagement with Protestant practice per se — Anglicans, Lutherans, and Presbyterians all have a history in Britain, Europe, and even the United States of supporting state establishments, sabbath laws, obscenity laws, etc. — but instead with Evangelicals. Evangelical Protestants in the United States largely reflect Baptist social and political commitments. Although they exercise an outsized place in political discourse through their electoral activism, their beliefs do not and did not ever displace other historic Protestant intellectual, civil, and social commitments. Indeed, the United States’ history has illustrated that Protestants and Catholics alike have at times supported illiberal politics and fought illiberal politics. The American story is one of liberal Catholics and conservative Catholics, and liberal Protestants and conservative Protestants.
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