Easily missed in the welter of anti-conservative actions and headlines: This story from the weekend Wall Street Journal on pastor and leading Christian nationalist Douglas Wilson. (The frequently-but-not-always-overused label clearly fits in this case.) Some pieces of the lengthy article strike me as stretching the framing too far. One may justly be alarmed by a regime that pays lip service to religious liberty but explicitly focuses its efforts only on Christians. But a policy like permitting federal employees to discuss religion or proselytize in the workplace, whatever its wisdom, is not self-evidently a leading edge of a plan to “erod[e] the separation between church and state.” Framing aside, the actual reporting is detailed and useful.
The story also exemplifies the difference between a by-God genuine Religious Test Clause story and a more attenuated pseudo-Test Clause story. As the story notes, Wilson’s more immediate plans involve a “return”–as is usually the case with calls for a “return” or “restoration” or invocations of “tradition,” the word here should be understood to denote a positive substantive vision rather than an actual “return”–to being a “Christian republic.” To Wilson, that appears to mean not only rejecting same-sex marriage but making the closet the boundary between protected and criminal status. Also on the shorter-term agenda: Using immigration policy, not incidentally but deliberately and specifically, to bar Muslims from becoming American citizens. Somewhere in the middle term: Eliminating the voting rights of millions of women. And in the longer stretch:
Ultimately—many years in the future—non-Christians would be barred from public office. “You want all the office-holders to vow to uphold the Constitution. And if the Constitution is Christian, then yeah,” Wilson said.
Now that is what you would call a paradigm case of a Religious Test Clause violation. Presumably this would accompany the constitutional amendments revising, inter alia, the First, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments to implement his prescriptions. This does not, of course, embody a “return.”
The world is full of people with interesting legal views and a microphone, and I would not normally call any more attention to Wilson’s take on the Constitution than I would to someone with similarly situated views, such as a member of the sovereign citizen movement. But the story makes a persuasive case, for anyone who was not paying attention, for his influence on the right, including those sectors of the right that have considerable influence with or actual positions in the current regime. (“Right” is the correct label here. Wilson has no particular influence with conservatives. But, as one never tires of observing, neither the regnant illiberal right nor the members of the Trump executive branch and its apologists are conservatives.)
Some of the story makes that argument by association: Secretary of don’t-call-it-Defense Pete Hegseth is an admirer and a member of the Calvinist denomination co-founded by Wilson. I find that kind of argument meaningful but incomplete–and, at times, perilous. (It does demonstrate, however, that the Religious Test Clause cannot and does not bar all questions about the religious or religiously related views of a nominee.) More convincing, to my mind, is what one might call the argument from embrace. Wilson was an invited speaker at the recent National Conservatism Conference. He spoke last year as well, and a co-panelist at that event makes clear in the WSJ story that the moment was not simply about inviting people with various views, as one might (or ought to) with a panel at an academic conference. Rather, it was a more deliberate embrace freighted with “public significance.”
More generally, Wilson’s views on the status of non-Christians are to the right of but largely consistent with the national conservatism movement’s own statement of principles. That statement relegates “Jews and other religious minorities” to the status of protected groups who are more than guests but ultimately, in effect, are to be treated as tolerated alien elements in a Christian state. Strikingly, the statement also endorses the same view of the privatization of (non-Christian) religion that religious liberty scholars and advocates have long criticized: “Adult individuals should be protected from religious or ideological coercion in their private lives and in their homes.” Religion, at least for non-Christians, thus occupies roughly the same closet to which Wilson would relegate gays and lesbians.
I might note that it is not clear that Catholics, whom Wilson sees as erroneous idolaters but allows are capable of salvation, are in much of a different boat, or perhaps closet, than Jews. That depends on how one reads this quote in the Journal story, which–by way of distinguishing them from the to-be-barred status of Muslims–says, “Protestant America did successfully adapt to the presence of Catholics and Jews.” I imagine Wilson’s desire to strip American Jews of full citizenship–which surely is a fair way to describe the view that they should not be entitled to hold office in these United States–does not extend to Catholics. But it does require imagination rather than being a certain and obvious thing.
In short, if you’re looking for a story that really, squarely, unmistakably raises Religious Test Clause issues, here it is. For myself, as a Jew and a citizen, I would rather be persecuted than “tolerated,” and would choose the camps over the closet. Whatever some dude with the keys to the Homeland Security Twitter account, the intrepid bloggers of the State Department, the Leo Frank revisionists at the Pentagon, Douglas Wilson, or the Edmund Burke Foundation may think or want, I have no interest in second-class citizenship, and even less interest in being bribed into supporting my own subordination.