IN DECIDING to hear its first Second Amendment case since 1939, the Supreme Court is taking up an issue with more profound consequences than gun control and the right to bear arms. The five conservative Justices will be forced to choose — more directly than before — what kind of conservatives they will be. And the entire court must confront a fundamental aspect of constitutional democracy.

To understand what’s at stake, it helps to consider the differences between the American and French revolutions. Notwithstanding the oxymoronic sound of it, America’s break with England was a conservative revolution. Americans did not seek to radically alter their society. They were not fundamentally suspicious of government; they believed government was necessary to secure liberty. Nor were they even opposed to the British form of government, though they devised ways to improve upon it. They believed England’s government failed them because they were unrepresented in Parliament.

Americans undertook a revolution to preserve more than to destroy. Even though they went to war to secure independence, Americans never lost faith in ordered liberty. By contrast, as historian William Doyle puts it: “The initial impulse of the French Revolution was destructive. The revolutionaries wanted to abolish . . . the old or former order, the ancien rÉgime.” French revolutionaries sought liberty through violence — and came to romanticize violence. Some 16,000 were guillotined or otherwise executed during the Terror; another 150,000 died in factional fighting.

The Russian and Chinese revolutions were stepchildren of the French Revolution. According to Mao Tse-tung: “War is the continuation of politics. . . . Revolutions and revolutionary wars are inevitable in class society, and without them it is impossible to accomplish any leap in social development. . . . Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” This philosophy is antithetical to that of the American Founders. For them, power comes from the ballot box, and constraints on power come from a constitutional structure that includes separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and freedom of speech and press.

This brings us to the debate over the Second Amendment, which reads in full: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

The traditional view is that the amendment grants people the right to keep and bear arms only within the constitutionally-mandated militia — that it guarantees the states armed militia to provide for their own security. (There is reason to believe James Madison wrote the amendment to assure the South that Congress could not undermine the slave system by disarming the militia, upon which the southern states relied for slave control.)

A federal court, however, has now held that the Second Amendment was adopted in part so that people may arm themselves “to resist and throw off a tyrannical government.” This represents an insurrectionist view of the Second Amendment: people may have weapons so that if the government becomes tyrannical, they can throw off the yoke of oppression through force of arms. The fundamental problem with the insurrectionist view is that there are always people who believe that governmental tyranny is not merely a future prospect but a present reality.

Consider how the Founders reacted to such views. In 1786, Shays Rebellion broke out in western Massachusetts. Complaining that the government had become tyrannical because courts were permitting creditors to seize their property to satisfy delinquent debts, a thousand small farmers and shop owners — armed with muskets — closed the courts and began to threaten the state government. Thomas Jefferson, then ambassador to France on the eve of the French Revolution, was momentarily swept away. In a letter to Madison, Jefferson remarked that “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing.”

Madison would have none of it. In his reply, Madison called Shays Rebellion “treason.” Massachusetts Gov. John Hancock raised an army to crush the rebellion. His action was endorsed not only by Madison but by Samuel Adams, John Jay, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and John Marshall.

In the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, backcountry farmers in Pennsylvania and Kentucky threatened tax collectors and otherwise used intimidation to obstruct collection of a federal tax on whiskey. They carried muskets and marched as militia under banners proclaiming “Liberty and Equality” and other slogans of the French Revolution. Washington said allowing such conduct would bring an “end to our Constitution & laws,” and he personally led 12,000 troops to extinguish the rebellion.

The Constitution is more than a legal document; it is the scripture of American political theology. The interpretation of the Second Amendment is about more than the government’s authority to regulate guns. It involves whether we choose to place our ultimate faith in constitutional structure or in guns.

The insurrectionist view has been present throughout American history, but until relatively recently it has primarily been popular with vigilantes and paramilitary groups. But this view is now being taken up by libertarians who worship the individual and are hostile to government. A senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute is engineering the case the Supreme Court will hear. He is betting that the Supreme Court is ready to cross a Rubicon — leaving behind a faith in ordered liberty that has long been embraced by both traditional conservatives and liberals, including Edmund Burke and the American Founders, and entering a new conservatism that, ironically, has much in common with Robespierre and Mao Tse-tung.

Carl T. Bogus is a professor of law at Roger Williams University.