Alexis de Tocqueville, during his 1831-1832 tour of America, observed a distinctive balance in American life — the tension between liberty and religion. Such a tension serves as the foundation of John D. Wilsey’s latest work, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, where the author argues in favor of this distinctively American dynamic rooted in the conservative tradition.
Wilsey bookends this work with introductory and concluding chapters surveying in detail the tension between religion and liberty while the intervening chapters discuss how the two relate to a properly ordered sense of imagination, nationality, liberty, history, and religion. All the while, the author lays out the path of “aspirational conservatism,” defined in contradistinction to the reactionary tides of our day.
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