Who’s Afraid of Integralists?

About half a century after the Constitution’s ratification America faced a novel test: waves of Roman Catholic immigrants whose political theology was explicitly contrary to Anglo-American liberal democracy. However, in 2021 few worry about Catholic conspiracies and especially as America secularizes, divisions among orthodox Christians seem ever less important. But what if the fears of earlier Americans are finally coming true?

At least for a small but growing cadre of intellectual Roman Catholics the political philosophy of “integralism,” with church and state integrated, not separate, is increasingly common. There’s disagreement over practical specifics, but what unites integralists is their conviction that the liberal democratic order is now, and perhaps always was, morally bankrupt. Liberalism from John Locke to America’s founders to John Stuart Mill to John Rawls may have lasted this long, they say, but it’s been on borrowed time. Along with “integralism,” “post liberalism” has also become a byword for extreme dissatisfaction with the status quo and desire for radical change.

While it’s hard to pinpoint when post liberalism started picking up steam, one landmark moment came when Notre Dame Professor Patrick Deneen published Why Liberalism Failed in 2018. The book polemically critiques the liberal-democratic order and argues America’s problems, like ever increasing atomization, inequality and cultural decay are endemic to liberalism; they won’t be solved without tectonic shifts.

Sohrab Amhari, op-ed editor of the New York Post, shot to prominence with his 2019 First Things polemic “Against David French-ism.” He attacked French, senior editor of The Dispatch, for declining to endorse using political power to enforce Christian social teaching, such as banning “drag-queen story hour” at public libraries. The New Yorker profiled their dispute, describing it as a “battle for the future of conservatism.” Ahmari represents a rising tide of postliberal to whom French’s liberal conservative orthodoxy is impotent in the face of overwhelming social progressivism. French’s description of Christians and drag-queens getting to use the same public spaces as a “blessing of liberty” to Amhari’s infinite disapproval perhaps best encapsulates their differences.

Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule also made waves when he published “Beyond Originalism” in The Atlantic last March. There, he advocated for discarding constitutional originalism for “common-good constitutionalism.” This new legal philosophy “should be based on the principles that government helps direct persons, associations, and society generally toward the common good, and that… the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate.” Vermeule doesn’t hide his contempt for liberalism’s quest to separate religion from politics; “common-good constitutionalism” is his way of penetrating the courts with post liberalism against “the relentless expansion of individualistic autonomy” even if electoral victories are far-off. 

R.R. Reno, editor of First Things, has also come into the integralist camp. Although not in favor of a confessional state, Reno has argued that Christians are approaching a place where the liberal paradigm is untenable. At a conference hosted by postliberal group New Polity, Reno said America will soon “cross a Rubicon” where religion is no longer even alluded to in politics. At that point, he said, “it will put a person like me, who is not ready to sign on to the maximalist integralist release program, in a difficult position.”

But the most prominent promoter of an explicitly confessional “maximalist integralist” state is Father Edmund Waldstein, a Cistercian monk. As he writes, “human beings are political animals… ordered to the common good of the complete communities” they belong to. “But, ends are only truly good if they are ordered to the absolutely final end: God as the end of all creatures.” In the same article he asks “Is not society corrupted in its very root when those who have charge of the common good do not order it explicitly to God?” At the New Polity conference in response to a question about “reasonable pluralism” where “people can reasonably disagree about the temporal good and the religious good” Waldstein was resolute: “There can be no disagreement about last ends. Either you’re right or you’re wrong.”

Currently the integralist movement is primarily confined to iconoclastic academics, but as conservatism rearranges post-Trump this could change. What makes responding to integralists hard, though, is the disagreement over what exactly they want to happen.

Within integralist debates Waldstein constitutes the extreme end of the spectrum, desiring some kind of restored Catholic Habsburg Empire. This may be the most improbable notion ever, but beyond being unlikely it’s wrong for reasons the Founding Fathers recognized: unaccountable absolute authority, even if beginning with right intentions and pure convictions, will inevitably become corrupted and tyrannical. This is true of centralized states but also unaccountable democracies which can descend into mob rule, hence the necessity of checks on the state and the citizenry.

But while it’s easy to dismiss Waldstein’s vision as outlandish and critically flawed, the political desires of less excessive Christian postliberal don’t actually seem to necessitate the paradigm shift they advocate for.

For example, in 2019 Deneen delivered a lecture on constructive solutions to the issues discussed in Why Liberalism Failed. Yet none of Deneen’s proposals necessitate a postliberal paradigm. Maybe the most popular proposal entailed attacking and perhaps breaking up large corporations that are too influential. This may happen sooner rather than later, with Mitch McConnell threatening big companies for getting involved in the controversy over Georgia’s new voting laws. If taking a combative stance towards big business is postliberal then William Jennings Bryan, Teddy Roosevelt and now Mitch McConnell are apparently integralists.

To recover the way mandated military service used to instill civic virtue and mix socioeconomic classes, Deneen also argued for a national service corps to do the same without a huge standing military. He recommended reducing the concentration of power in Washington by moving federal bureaucracies to economically left-behind places like St. Louis or Dayton. And, he said, elite universities should be coerced by threats of taxation to open satellite campuses in poor areas and more highly prioritize socioeconomic diversity. Again, this isn’t particularly radical.

Reno, for his part, argues that we must overturn Supreme Court decisions which banned organized school prayer, mandate biblical literacy in schools, penalize divorce, and reinstate “blue laws” that forbade Sunday commerce until a generation ago. Even Waldstein, when giving examples of integralist policies with New Polity, jumped to child allowances like those best known for their articulation by Mitt Romney – not exactly a Catholic postliberal.

With the exception of Waldstein’s Catholic empire and Ahmari’s plea to legally bar drag-queens from libraries, few integralist policies require a postliberal theory of politics. In Vermeule’s essay he points out that few Founding Fathers would have been comfortable with the individualistic excesses of modern liberalism. In 1811, for example, “the influential early jurist Chancellor James Kent upheld a conviction for blasphemy against Jesus Christ as an offense against the public peace and morals.”

If this is the future Vermuele wants, why not just return to the Founders’ vision instead of destroying it? The reality is that the Anglo-American tradition has the philosophical foundation necessary to address most problems articulated by integralists without the litany of new issues. They utilize iconoclastic rhetoric, but except for Waldstein their desires aren’t beyond the scope of liberalism. We should look to our roots, not be uprooted.