John Quincy Adams Amongst the Postliberals

Religious nationalism seems to be experiencing a moment. The postliberal faction’s great tribune, Vice President J.D. Vance, occupies the second-highest constitutional office in the land. Its proponents in right-wing academic, cultural, and journalistic institutions are riding high in the saddle. But in American politics, more often than not, moments are fleeting. Consider, for instance, the so-called “libertarian moment” of the mid-2010s – some Republicans may have won elections deploying ideological rhetoric, and plenty of mainstream media outlets published glowing profiles of them, yet it all amounted to very little in terms of actual political change. 

Despite this fleetingness, it is easy for those of us dissatisfied with the reigning liberalism to look to the triumph of religious nationalists and want to join in. Even in these early days, after all, the new administration has already accomplished a number of social conservative priorities worth celebrating, especially executive orders implementing pro-life policies. But the history of religious nationalism in America provides a host of cautionary tales about compromising with this kind of power. Reactionary ideologues have occasionally seized control of the national stage, but only rarely have they held onto it for very long. 

One tragic example of this reactionary failure is America’s first conservative party, the Federalists. Originally formed to combat growing public disorder and ideological sympathy for the French Revolution, the Federalists experienced immense popularity in the face of radical opposition from Thomas Jefferson and his Republicans. As time wore on, however, the elite of the party became more and more committed to a religious nationalism that alienated them from the great body of the people. Only by rejecting this vortex of panicked extremism could conservatives such as John and John Quincy Adams maintain their principles and influence on the young republic. 

The Adams’s conservative credentials are impossible to question. Republican opponents such as John Randolph of Roanoke dismissed them as the “American House of Stuart.” John Quincy burst forth onto the political scene with a series of papers defending Edmund Burke from Thomas Paine – and therefore the old British constitution against the French Revolution. Adams fils was one of the ablest articulators of the American Republic’s religious roots, famously declaring that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” Both men were earnestly committed to a Christian conception of American nationhood as a bulwark against revolution, even if the exact nature of that commitment was at times a bit vague.

This put the Adamses squarely in the mainstream of Federalist politics throughout the 1780s and ‘90s. As Jonathan Den Hartog outlines in his excellent book Patriotism and Piety, however, that mainstream drifted further and further to the right as the logic of the American Revolution worked itself out and produced something far more democratic than the old colonial order. He identifies three “stages” of how Federalists thought about politics and religion:

1. The Republican Stage – Perhaps best represented by John Adams himself, at this stage Federalists believed in an optimistic cooperation between Church and State. Good Christians would be good citizens, and the church would act as a pillar of the republic. Placing religion at the heart of American identity, the Federalists hoped, would stabilize the new nation and provide ballast to the growing democracy.
2. The Combative Stage – As Jeffersonian iconoclasts seized more power at home and French Revolutionaries got more aggressive abroad, though, many Federalists adopted a culture war mentality. No longer could a passive Christianity provide social glue for the young nation; instead, Federalists such as Timothy Pickering and Fisher Ames thought believers needed to openly contend for power and reorient American politics towards pious ends. These “Combative Federalists” bitterly defended established churches even as voters turned against them.
3. The Voluntarist Stage – Needless to say, this extremism did not resonate with the American people; it only served to solidify Jeffersonian gains and alienate key constituencies. A number of key Federalist leaders – including John Jay and John Quincy Adams – instead turned to what are now called “intermediary institutions” such as the American Bible Society or the antislavery American Colonization Society to educate and uplift the republic’s citizens and make them fit for self-government.

The aforementioned Fisher Ames, a leader of the Massachusetts Federalists, stands out as one Early Republic thinker who has much in common with today’s postliberals. Although he began his time in national politics as an advocate of religious toleration (he worked with James Madison to draft the First Amendment), Ames quickly became disillusioned with the republican consensus. Especially as the Congregational Church lost its grip on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Ames came to see Jefferson, the Republicans, and even the American national project itself as inherently destabilizing forces.

Ames’s most forceful statement of his anti-liberalism came in a stunning essay titled “The Dangers of American Liberty,” published only after his death in 1808. Originally written eight years after he left elected office, it is an expression of an anxious mind terrified of the changes happening to his country – perhaps one of the most despairing texts of the American Founding. Ames prophesies a number of dangers to the young republic, but he especially warns that the Jeffersonians will undermine her religious principles. “Are our civil and religious institutions to stand so firmly as to sustain themselves and so much of the fabric of the public order as is propped by their support?” he asked. “On the contrary, do we not find the ruling faction [the Jeffersonians] in avowed hostility to our religious institutions?”

It is difficult to overstate just how pessimistic Ames was for the future of the country. The thesis of “The Dangers of American Liberty” is that “there is no return to liberty” because patriotism cannot “grow in a soil, from which every valuable plant has… been plucked up and thrown away as a weed.” He believed that Jefferson and the Republicans truly were something like a coven of witches, and that the people were siding with them as they established a kind of atheism at the heart of the American republic that would undermine any moral habits necessary for self-government. “Federalism was therefore founded on a mistake,” Ames concluded, “on the supposed existence of sufficient political virtue, and on the permanency of the public morals.” 

Interestingly, Ames himself has been celebrated by more contemporary postliberals. In 2014, for example, integralist bloggers at The Josias republished excerpts of “The Dangers of American Liberty” to buttress their critique of the American regime. Certain paleoconservatives, too, have praised Ames’s pessimism. But the founder of modern American conservatism, Russell Kirk, knew that his reactionary pose was not solid ground for social renewal. Although he praised Ames’s critique of Revolution in The Conservative Mind, Kirk also warned his intensity led to a kind of “internal decay.” Americans needed other sources than reactionary pessimism to counterbalance leveling ideology.

To find that counterbalance, Kirk looked especially to the “sobering practicality of the Adamses, father and son, who converted a lost cause into an American tradition.” John Quincy especially took up arms against Ames and his followers in the early years of the nineteenth century. That fight culminated with a series of essays in the Boston Patriot – later republished as a pamphlet titled “American Principles” – condemning these dark thoughts as a regrettable stain on Ames’s legacy. As he looked around Massachusetts, Adams simply could not see the anarchy which gave Ames such anxiety. He exclaimed: “Americans! Federalists! Are you that stupid — that infamous herd which you are here represented to be — No — Nor could it possibly be the calm and dispassionate judgement of the writer [Ames] that you were.” Instead, he saw the young America as a fundamentally well-ordered society, where religion’s influence was, if anything, growing rather than shrinking. 

Adams condemned the High Federalists peddling a false view of America as members of a “junto.” He describes the faction in explicitly religious terms, as “fraudulent monks at [Ames’s] shrine” and “worship[pers] of British power.” Adams particularly saw their religious conservatism as a threat to the nationalist project of the Constitution, especially insofar as Federalist extremists hated their Southern rivals. “The sentiment of the heart which disowns all love, but such as is select and exclusive, is neither congenial with republicanism nor with Christianity,” Adams wrote. Indeed, “It sharpens all the asperities of party spirit, and makes federalists and republicans consider one another, not as fellow citizens having a common interest; but as two rival nations marshalled in hostile array against each other.” For him, narrow concerns ought to be set aside for the sake of national unity.

Prior to 1809, John Quincy Adams had always identified more or less with the Federalists. But with the publication of “American Principles” and his acceptance of a diplomatic post in James Madison’s administration, Adams’s allegiance began to shift more noticeably. That said, his differences with the Federalists can be traced back at least to 1803 when he was serving as a Senator and was still very much active in the party. As he recorded in an agonized diary entry:

I have already had occasion to experience, what I had before the fullest reason to expect, the danger of adhering to my own principles - The Country is so totally given up to the Spirit of party, that not to follow blindfold the one or the other is an inexpiable offence- The worst of these parties has the popular torrent in its favour, and uses its triumph with all the unprincipled fury of a faction; while the other gnashes its teeth, and is waiting with all the impatience of revenge, for the time when its turn may come to oppress and punish by the people's favour. Between both, I see the impossibility of pursuing the dictates of my own conscience, without sacrificing every prospect not merely of advancement, but even of retaining that character and reputation I have enjoyed - Yet my choice is made, and, if I cannot hope to give satisfaction to my Country, I am at least determined to have the approbation of my own reflections

Neither John Quincy nor his father could ever quite reconcile the Massachusetts sectarianism of Federalists such as Ames with their dream of a unified American nation pursuing certain great ideals. J. Patrick Mullins has labelled the Adams’s mature position as one of “Yankee Continentalism.” The Adamses thought of their home state as a model of a well-functioning society that ought to be imitated throughout the American union. They hoped to make the whole nation more like Massachusetts, including in its religious outlook. But they also knew that central power alone could not achieve this, and so they never despaired when it did not.

By distancing himself from the reactionary position of the Federalists, Adams found a way to pursue advancement without sacrificing his principles. While he certainly experienced some short-term political pain after his time in the Senate, his sobriety was deeply appreciated by the American people in the aftermath of the War of 1812. Returning home from diplomatic service, Adams was elevated first to a Cabinet post and then to the presidency itself. Of course, despite those accomplishments, he eventually lost that office to the original populist, Andrew Jackson.

Adams was deeply bitter about the Jacksonians’ rise to power. But rather than embracing reactionary despair like Ames did in the face of Jefferson’s victory, Adams chose to seek out a new cause to express his republican faith: antislavery. He was deeply committed to the principle of universal human equality as a matter of faith. That faith led him to believe, in the words of his biographer William J. Cooper, that a proslavery politics “establishes false estimates of virtue and vice.” Yankee Continentalism mixed with antislavery principles to make Adams more than simply the partisan of a failing party. Today he is justly remembered as one of the great champions of American freedom, especially for his contributions in this last stage of his career.

The ultimate lesson of John Quincy Adams’s statesmanship is that the “philosophical cause” of the Union – that is to say, the republic’s moral core – is far more important than any regional or sectarian or ideological interests. The rage of postliberalism today is not that unlike “the unprincipled fury of faction” Adams stood against in the early nineteenth century. If conservatism is to flourish, if it is to actually preserve the nation, then it must stand for something more enduring.

Parts of this essay are adapted from a paper by the same author, “A Perpetual Panic: Fisher Ames, John Quincy Adams, and Religious Nationalism in the Federalist Party, 1789-1809,” originally presented at the 2024 annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association. The research for that project was generously supported by the Liberty Fund visiting scholar program.

Originally published in the spring 2025 Mere Orthodoxy print journal. To become a member and receive future issues, join today.