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# Russell Kirk’s Understanding of a Christian America
- URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/russell-kirks-understanding-of-a-christian-america/
- Published: 2026-10-19T11:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-19T11:00:07.000Z
- Description: Kirk reinvigorates the spirit of America by giving us a way of life; or rather by reminding us of the way of life which we have been historically given by a sovereign and almighty Providence.
- Author: Jake Meador

**Michael Lucchese.** [***Russell Kirk on America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776***](https://creedandculture.com/books/on-america-how-to-understand-the-legacy-of-1776/?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Creed & Culture, 2026\. $28.00\. 234 pp.**

As the United States has crested its 250th anniversary, this is a fitting occasion to consecrate anew the spiritual and moral underpinnings of our Founding, the things that continue to hold our country together. No American thinker recognized this need for renewal more in his lifetime than Russell Kirk. Michael Lucchese’s careful selection of Kirk’s thoughts on America’s spiritual and moral order, *Russell Kirk on America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776*, answers many of the questions that Protestant Christians are wrestling with regarding America’s Christian roots. 

The book speaks to three aspects of American civil order and national character: the roots of our moral and spiritual constituted order; the statesmen who understood and cultivated the American character; and the writers, poets, and lettered men who gave expression to the American imagination. In his introduction to the volume, Bradley Birzer notes that it was Kirk’s attachment to the spiritual loves and duties in his home, family, and local community that centered his love of country on the Permanent Things. 

For Kirk, a love of America is not a nationalism that binds smaller loves together, but rather a spreading tree that gives protection to those local loves and is itself comprised of the smaller things. But all these loves are also connected to the higher love of God. Kirk does not compromise the Christian essence of America, nor does he insist on a national force which compels the conscience. Instead, Kirk believes in a republic of laws—not men—under God, and in defense of an ordered liberty of loves. To that end, three aspects of the American order emerge from this volume: the bulwarks of order in our Founding; the landmarks of liberty that have preserved this order; and the wardrobe of imagination which has given it life and vitality.

## **The Bulwarks of Order**

Kirk claims that America is not just a religious nation, but that its first principles were founded on the Bible and that its people constituted a Christian nation. He states that all our presidents have been self-professing Christians, save perhaps Jefferson, and that not one early statesman in America was a professing atheist. Nevertheless, this Christian civil social order was not a nationalism of force or legal compulsion, but rather one rooted in local customs, proliferated variety, and toleration for conscience. 

The moral principles of Christianity nurtured America’s common law, but it was not subject to religious or political dogma. Kirk does not subscribe to a propositional or nationalist view of America, but rather one rooted in institutions and cultural customs of British origins, though not ethnically so, as many other ethnicities blended into the British institutional orientation of America. This “ancient constitution,” or an unwritten patrimony and order of institutions inherited from forefathers who came to America’s shores, is the real founding of America, more than its ratification and propositional expression in 1765-1787.

As such, Kirk holds a conservative view of the so-called American Revolution and the national formation of the United States under the Constitution. Rather than a radical revolution, the genius of the American settlement lies in its preservation of prior customary rights of Englishmen under a federal system of government and political independence. If it was a revolution, Kirk conceives of the American settlement as a revolving return to first principles under a legal order which protects them, rather than a new proposition or experiment in liberty. 

The novelty of this order is that it balanced the claims of order and liberty, rather than establishing a new settlement. America was neither a French Revolutionary experiment in universal rights of man independent of civil and social history and context, nor was it a new nationalist experiment. There were no simple metaphysical principles of revolution in America like “liberty, equality, fraternity” as there were for the French. Kirk is quite clear about the dangers of seeing America as a nationalist experiment in self-determination, arguing that the American use of the word “revolution” often breeds a romantic notion of nationalistic movements and democratic reform that does not reflect America’s origins.

## **The Landmarks of Liberty**

Against the chaos of the present modern decadence of America, Kirk sets the men of the past and the successive brilliance of past American ages as landmarks that continue to safeguard some of our liberties and hold back the flood of institutional collapse. 

Indeed, Kirk sees that America’s great figures were always contesting against disorder and gave America a sense of place. To the average reader, Kirk’s choices may perhaps be a bit obscure, but this is only because we do not read our history as we ought. Rather than Jefferson or Washington, Kirk chooses John Adams and his argument for aristocracy rooted in nature. Any people who wish to abolish a virtuous aristocracy will only end up with a vicious one. Against Jefferson‘s egalitarian model for an agrarian republic, Kirk sets Randolph of Roanoke as representative of the agrarian interest to America. Randolph’s commitment to the aristocratic squirearchy in the old Tidewater of Virginia made him the defender of the old county and parish system, as opposed to an egalitarian view of western agrarian expansionism. Randolph also held back America from committing to a standing military presence. These figures led the way for an American mission.

Kirk turns to Orestes Bronson for a description of the character and foundation of the American Republic, and its mission and purpose in history. Bronson in his book *Under God* argued that the popular interest in democracy must exist under God’s sovereignty, and that it is established customary local authorities that root the freedoms in America into a godly order. Bronson courageously attacked individualistic humanitarianism as the foundation for the American Republic. The Republic must be democratic in form, but not in essence. 

America’s Providential mission, as Bronson wrote in his book *The American Republic*, is to reconcile the claims of order and liberty inside a just society for free American citizens. Further, Bronson argued that democracy was not classless or placeless, but rather organically nurtured authority and liberty inside the territorial growth of customary democratic republican institutions. This localism under the sovereignty of God made America strong. Bronson thus breathed meaning into the American Republic. Bronson is Kirk‘s linchpin between the Founding and early Republic and its more contemporary manifestations.

Kirk is no stodgy traditionalist who hates the present. Like Randolph and the old Republicans, Kirk believes that Abraham Lincoln was dedicated to that high old Roman virtue and exemplified all the character traits of a republican leader such as Washington, including piety, gravity, and constancy. Kirk’s Lincoln is no Caesar. 

If Lincoln was the beginning of the contemporary guardians of America, Ronald Reagan was the bookend in Kirk’s lifetime, who reinvigorated American statesmanship. Kirk sees Reagan as the initiator of what he called a conservative audacity (lifting audacity from Benjamin Disraeli); a nearly cinematic propensity to renew and re-imagine America’s mission and to protect what both Reagan and Kirk called the “walls of order” against the welfare state at home and Communism abroad. It is precisely because Reagan had imagination and an effortlessly poetic and humorous way of expressing truth that he was so successful at guarding American liberties.

## **The Wardrobe of Imagination**

And it is to the imagination that Kirk finally turns for any hope of cultural renewal and reinvigorating the spirit of the American Republic in contemporary times. Poetry and not policy will save the American Republic; a poetry rooted in the Christian truths of man before his Maker and Redeemer, and a poetry rooted in a realistic sense of place. Kirk rightly notes that America inherited from the British Isles its great poetic sensibility and that the Anglo-American character of our institutions is best suited to the expressions of writers and poets from the British Isles.

Against the American Transcendentalists, such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Lowell, Nathaniel Hawthorne stands as an example, not of an abstract dreamer in the individual goodness of man, but rather as a melancholic reminder of the problems of conscience in the sinful heart of man. As Sir Walter Scott did in Britain, Hawthorne, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper rooted the American imagination inside a conservative spirit and reverence for dead generations.

Hawthorne, more than any other American author, exhibited this reverence, and combined it with a love of the mystery of antiquity, without romanticizing the quarrels and struggles of old families and the nature of sinful man. We can learn from the lessons of Ecclesiastes; that is the essence of Hawthorn’s spirit, and it is rooted in Hawthorn‘s Calvinistic critique of American Puritanism. 

The Calvinistic spirit runs strong through American literature, argues Kirk, but when divorced from theology, in its secular forms it has often substituted a reverence for God with a worship of the individual. Mark Twain and Henry and Brooke Adams serve as Kirk’s examples. Like modern Stoics set against the onslaught of an overwhelming mechanistic enemy, they stood against the scientific determinism of Huxley and Spencer, but without any spiritual hope.

Spiritual hope returns to the American mind through the poets T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost, just as the cataclysms of the World Wars pressed the need for recovering the purpose of man under God as his Maker and Redeemer through Christ. Eliot firmly admits the Christian truth that time in this world is ultimately unredeemable as sinful time, yet he believes that with redemption in the incarnation of Jesus Christ comes the redemption of our time. 

While all of man’s works are ultimately doomed to fading in this life, man plants seeds for eternity here only as a redeemed creature by Christ. These seeds are what Kirk called the Permanent Things of life. The conservation of these Permanent Things in the soul and in society as incarnational truths sanctified in Christ, nurtures a love for God and for the sense of place and belonging in this life. 

While Eliot was metaphysical in his poetic cast of mind, Robert Frost implanted the same truths inside America. His poetry of old America, his defense of a conservative ethos, if not exactly a conservative political philosophy, roots him both into place and in the American tradition. Humanity and art challenge the utilitarian revision of education and the radicalism of a reckless view of life against that which is old and good. Frost is a champion of American order and purpose.

For Kirk, place itself is poetic. In his essay on Mecosta County, he describes his venerable old family estate, the local life that emerged in Mecosta as part of the settler community of the logging era, and his hopes for its charms to reinvigorate the American order. Mecosta exhibits what Kirk believed to be an unwritten and organic constitution to America that grounded its Constitutional order inside “little platoons” of family loyalties, personal loves, and friendly institutions.

## **Conclusion**

Kirk reinvigorates the spirit of America by giving us a way of life; or rather by reminding us of the way of life which we have been historically given by a sovereign and almighty Providence. Cultural renewal begins with gratitude; a gratitude for the many blessings from God that have been granted to our forefathers, and that continue to come down to us. This gratitude does not keep Kirk back from criticizing those elements of American thinking that have been averse to God‘s design. Nor does his gratitude place America as the center of the world, or conflate the covenantal order of America with man’s spiritual redemption in Jesus Christ. It is not nationalism, but conservatism at its highest. 

It is a conservatism of the higher meaning of man as a redeemable creature, of a love of place, and of a blessed order and variety of American institutional life.

(Disclosure: The editor of this volume, Michael Lucchese, serves on the board of *Mere Orthodoxy*'s parent organization, the Institute for Christianity and Common Life.)