The Minervan Republic

A Civic Republican Reaction to Wolfe, Vermeule and Reconstructionist Christian Nationalism

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Dominique Montoya-Johnson
INTRODUCTION

The projects advanced by Stephen Wolfe in The Case for Christian Nationalism (2022), Adrian Vermeule’s common-good constitutionalism (and its integralist underpinnings), and the older dominionist and reconstructionist strands associated with R.J. Rushdoony and Gary North deserve serious engagement. They are not crude theocratic fantasies but intellectually coherent attempts to diagnose liberalism’s failures and recover pre-liberal ways of ordering political life toward substantive goods. They are also, from the perspective of the civic republican tradition that shaped the American founding, fundamentally at odds with the architecture of non-domination the Founders constructed.

Wolfe’s Magisterial Protestant Nationalism

Wolfe argues that a Christian nation should use civil laws and social customs to procure both earthly and heavenly good in Christ. Government has a duty to promote true religion (Christianity), a Christian prince or magistrate should direct the people toward God within the limits of civil power, and the nation should maintain cultural and religious homogeneity. He retrieves early modern Protestant political thought and presents this as compatible with ordered liberty, distinguishing it from full theocracy while still endorsing state suppression of false religion in its outward forms.

A republican response begins with Madison. In Federalist No. 10, Madison observed that a religious sect might become a political faction in one part of the union, “but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source.” Wolfe’s project treats religious homogeneity and state promotion of one faith as features, not bugs. The republican design treated that same homogeneity as the condition that makes domination possible. Once the state is redefined as the promoter and protector of true religion rather than a neutral arbiter among competing sects, the multiplicity that Madison relied upon to prevent any single faction from capturing public power is deliberately weakened.

Wolfe frames his vision as measured and non-coercive of inward conscience. Yet the logic of state-directed cultural Christianity and suppression of false religion still concentrates authority in ways republicanism historically distrusted. The Founders did not merely tolerate diversity; they engineered institutions around the assumption that diversity of sects would function as a safeguard. Wolfe’s retrieval of magisterial models effectively asks the republic to unlearn that lesson.

Vermeule’s Common-Good Constitutionalism and Integralism

Vermeule’s project is more sophisticated and more radical. In his 2020 Atlantic essay “Beyond Originalism” and the 2022 book Common Good Constitutionalism, he calls for recovering the classical legal tradition in which law is “an ordinance of reason promulgated by political authorities for the common good.” Judges and administrators should interpret law to direct persons and society toward substantive goods such as justice, peace, prosperity, and morality, rather than remaining tethered to original public meaning or living constitutionalism. In its integralist form, this includes the subordination of temporal power to spiritual authority because the end of the state is subordinate to the supernatural end pursued by the Church.

This is a direct challenge to the liberal proceduralism and individualism Vermeule (and many on the post-liberal right) rightly criticize. From a republican standpoint, however, the cure risks recreating the disease in new form. The republican tradition’s suspicion of concentrated power was not limited to kings or bishops; it extended to any arrangement that allowed one vision, however philosophically rich, to dominate the making and interpretation of law without robust internal checks. Replacing originalism or progressivism with a “common good” jurisprudence administered by a strong executive and administrative state still concentrates discretionary power. The classical tradition Vermeule invokes (Aquinas, ius commune) operated in very different institutional contexts. Grafting it onto the modern administrative state does not automatically produce the mixed government and checks against arbitrariness that Polybius, Machiavelli, Harrington, and the American Founders prized.

Integralism’s explicit goal is the subordination of the state to the Church, which makes the fusion even clearer. The republican response is not that the Church has no legitimate claims or that natural law is irrelevant. It is that making any specific religious authority the ultimate director of civil power recreates the very problem of arbitrary ecclesiastical-political power that disestablishment and religious pluralism were designed to solve. Jefferson’s Virginia Statute treated religious liberty as a natural right precisely so that civil capacities would not depend on conformity to any one tradition.

Republican Counterargument TO INTEGRALISM

Adrian Vermeule’s project is the most intellectually formidable of the three strands under discussion. In his 2020 Atlantic essay “Beyond Originalism” and the 2022 book Common Good Constitutionalism, he calls for recovering the classical legal tradition in which law is “an ordinance of reason promulgated by political authorities for the common good.” Judges and the administrative state should actively direct persons, associations, and society toward substantive goods (justice, peace, prosperity, and morality) rather than remaining tethered to original public meaning or living constitutionalism. In its integralist form, this includes the subordination of temporal power to spiritual authority because the end of the state is subordinate to the supernatural end pursued by the Church. Vermeule presents this as a return to the pre-liberal Western mainstream and a cure for the individualism and procedural emptiness of modern liberalism.

From the civic republican tradition that informed the American Founders, several precise and structural counterarguments follow.

1. The classical tradition is not unitary, and Vermeule selectively emphasizes its hierarchical rather than its republican elements.

Cicero, Polybius, and the mixed-government tradition that the Founders actually read emphasized balanced powers, popular liberty, and institutional checks against any single will (monarchical, aristocratic, or popular) becoming arbitrary. Vermeule’s retrieval leans heavily on the Thomistic and ius commune strands that prioritize hierarchical ordering toward a substantive good, while downplaying the republican emphasis on non-domination and the danger of concentrated discretion. The American Founders deliberately fused classical mixed government with Enlightenment and colonial experience of religious establishments; they did not treat the classical legal tradition as authorizing a strong administrative state directed by natural-law experts. Presenting “the classical tradition” as a coherent alternative that justifies strong rule therefore oversimplifies a contested inheritance.

2. Strong administrative power directed toward the “common good” recreates the very problem of arbitrary power that republicanism was designed to solve.

Vermeule argues that “strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate” and that the administrative state is well-suited to infuse technocratic work with a moral vision. Republican constitutionalism (Montesquieu, Harrington, Madison) treats concentrated discretionary power as inherently dangerous even when (especially when) the holders believe they are pursuing the true good. The Founders’ separation of powers, federalism, and bicameralism were not procedural fetishism; they were mechanisms to prevent any single will (executive, judicial, or administrative) from unilaterally defining and enforcing the common good. History repeatedly shows that administrative states become tools of domination regardless of the sincerity of their moral claims. Vermeule’s model underestimates this risk by treating the administrative apparatus as a reliable vehicle for natural-law determination.

3. In a society of deep metaphysical disagreement, vesting the state with authority to determine and enforce the common good (including moral formation) reconstitutes the factional domination Madison feared.

Madison’s Federalist 10 and 51 solution was multiplicity of interests and sects so that no single comprehensive doctrine could capture national power. Vermeule’s common-good constitutionalism requires judges and administrators to make substantive moral determinations that will necessarily favor one contested vision of the good over others. Who decides what the common good requires regarding family, sexuality, education, religious expression, or economic distribution? Once the state claims the authority to “legislate morality” and form citizens toward a particular natural-law vision, religious and philosophical minorities become subject to an official orthodoxy. This is precisely the outcome the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and the First Amendment were written to prevent: civil capacities becoming contingent on conformity to the state’s preferred moral framework.

4. Integralism’s subordination of the temporal power to the spiritual power is a direct repudiation of republican non-domination.

Integralism holds that the state must be subordinated to the Church because the temporal common good is subordinate to the supernatural end. This makes full citizenship and the content of law ultimately dependent on a hierarchical religious authority outside popular or constitutional control. The Founders rejected colonial establishments and confessional tests for exactly this reason: they produced arbitrary power over conscience and second-class status for dissenters. Even a “soft” integralism that claims not to coerce belief still grants the state (guided by spiritual authority) the power to shape law, education, and public culture in ways that privilege one tradition. Republican liberty is freedom from being subject to an uncontrolled will, not freedom within the bounds of the true religion. Vermeule’s framework reintroduces an uncontrolled (or only theologically controlled) will into the structure of the state.

5. The practical trajectory of “legislating morality” via strong state power historically produces coercion of conscience and erosion of free exercise.

Vermeule insists his project is not theocratic. Yet the logic of using positive law and administrative power to form moral citizens and promote the highest goods has repeatedly led to the suppression of non-conforming religious and moral practices. The republican tradition’s answer was not metaphysical neutrality for its own sake, but institutional design that keeps any comprehensive doctrine (religious or secular) from capturing the instruments of coercion. Jefferson’s natural-right framing of religious liberty and Madison’s multiplicity mechanism were practical responses to lived experience of establishment. Vermeule’s confidence that a modern administrative state guided by classical natural law will avoid those outcomes is historically unconvincing.

6. Vermeule’s critique of liberalism is partly valid, but the republican alternative is more robust than either liberalism or integralism.

Liberal individualism and proceduralism have real weaknesses—atomism, cultural thinness, difficulty sustaining shared purpose. Vermeule is right to diagnose them. The republican tradition, however, already contains a thicker conception of civic virtue, public deliberation, and ordered liberty that does not require subordinating the state to a spiritual hierarchy or granting strong administrative power to determine the common good. It cultivates virtue through institutions that force deliberation among plural interests rather than through top-down moral direction. Recovering that tradition (as the Founders did) is a more faithful response to liberalism’s failures than retrieving a hierarchical classical model that the American constitutional order deliberately modified.

In sum, Vermeule’s common-good constitutionalism and its integralist foundations offer a sophisticated diagnosis but a dangerous prescription. They replace the republican architecture of non-domination, multiplicity, and institutional checks with a model that concentrates discretionary power in the service of a contested substantive vision. That concentration—however sincerely directed toward the true good—is exactly what the civic republican tradition, from Cicero through the American Founders, was designed to prevent. The reaction to Vermeule is therefore not a defense of liberal emptiness; it is a defense of the more robust republican alternative that treats power itself as the problem that institutions must continuously restrain.

Dominionist and Reconstructionist Strands

The theonomic vision associated with Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law and later reconstructionist writers is the most explicit. It calls for the reconstruction of society according to Mosaic case law, applying Old Testament penalties and standards across civil life under the dominion mandate of Genesis 1:28. While this strand has limited mainstream influence today, it represents the logical endpoint of treating biblical authority as directly binding political authority.

Republican pluralism and disestablishment were responses to exactly this kind of project. Colonial establishments and the resulting conflicts with dissenters (Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers) demonstrated the practical dangers. The First Amendment and state-level disestablishments were not secularist innovations but pragmatic and principled recognitions that religious uniformity enforced by law produces domination and instability. The Founders did not believe the Bible was irrelevant to morality; they believed the state should not be the enforcer of any one interpretation of it.

DEEPER STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS

Across these projects, the common move is to redefine freedom, citizenship, religion, and the state in ways that invert the republican framework. Freedom shifts from non-domination to the privilege of living under the true religion. Citizenship becomes membership in a religiously defined people rather than shared responsibility under plural institutions. Even religion moves from private conscience (protected but not imposed) to public identity that the state must actively cultivate or enforce, and then the state ceases to be a neutral arbiter among factions and becomes the protector and promoter of one tradition.

These are not minor policy differences. They represent incompatible political philosophies. The republican tradition the Founders drew upon from classical mixed government through Harrington and Montesquieu, treated the prevention of any single power (civil or ecclesiastical) from exercising arbitrary control as the central task of constitutional design. Christian Nationalism, in its intellectual forms, treats the alignment of political authority with religious truth as the central task.

CONCLUSION

Critics sometimes dismiss these Christian Nationalist projects as fringe or theocratic. That actually underestimates them. They offer a coherent diagnosis of liberalism’s spiritual and cultural weaknesses and a positive alternative rooted in older Western traditions, which liberalism still continues to not address even after the defeat of Fascism. They also exploit a genuine vacuum, where the decline of serious civic republican education and culture has left fewer resources for articulating why the Founders’ pluralist, anti-establishment design was not a concession to secularism but a deliberate safeguard of liberty.

A robust reaction therefore cannot be purely defensive or procedural. It must recover and articulate the positive content of the republican alternative, or the tradition of fighting arbitrary power through institutional multiplicity, civic virtue cultivated by deliberation rather than imposition, and a state that protects the conditions for self-government without claiming to direct souls. The Minervan Republic seeks to position itself as a forum for this living civic republican tradition, representing the kind of work that can make such a reaction more than reactive.

Even when pursued with sincere conviction that one is ordering society to the highest good, the concentration of authority to mold law, culture, and belonging according to a single religious vision recreates the conditions of domination the republican constitution was built to restrain. That is why Madison’s mechanism of multiplicity and Jefferson’s natural-right disestablishment remain more than historical curiosities. They are structural answers to the problem these Christian Nationalist projects propose to solve by different means.

Engaging Wolfe, Vermeule, and the reconstructionist tradition on their own terms, while insisting on the republican architecture of non-domination, remains one of the more important intellectual tasks available to anyone who takes the American founding’s design seriously rather than as a temporary deviation from Christendom.

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