Christian anti-liberal integralism has vaulted from obscurity to an emerging movement in recent years, complete with conferences, essays and intellectuals. Rapid social change has left many conservatives reeling. And to overcome decades of losing culture wars some look to a philosophy of governance involving a confessional state in which the church is paramount in public policy. Some would call this perspective theocratic.
Self-described “integralists” may diverge, but they’re united on America’s inability to survive on founding principles they see as more rooted in John Locke and the Enlightenment than Christianity.
I’ve written elsewhere on this political theory, but the main takeaway is that we need a theo-political paradigm shift to have any hope of a better future.
The University of Dallas recently hosted a conference entitled “America, Liberalism, and Catholicism” to bring together defenders and detractors of American liberalism in conversation.
It had an all-star cast of Catholic public intellectuals, including host Ryan Anderson, author of When Harry Became Sally, Patrick Deneen, Notre Dame Professor and author of Why Liberalism Failed, a seminal text for postliberals. It also had Joseph Capizzi and Chad Pecknold, Professors at the Catholic University of America, Columnist Ross Douthat of the New York Times, and Professors Christopher Wolfe, Gladden Pappin and Daniel Burns of the University of Dallas. The conference ended with remarks from Robert Koons, Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Deneen and Wolfe debated first. Deneen began by arguing that while we may think of individual liberty as the essence of conservatism, Americans in fact have a long history of using the state to inculcate virtue. Only in the latter 20th century did this change. For example, while the Constitution forbids an established national religion, this was understood in reference to the federal government. Connecticut, for example, had Congregationalism as its established religion until 1818 and many states had religious tests to hold office. While today we may think of this as a violation of the separation of church and state, to early American Protestants these rules were apparently fine.
Deneen also quoted “representative Protestant” clergyman Taylor Lewis who argued that “government has a duty to inculcate virtue so that this superior part of man’s nature may be cultivated.” But post-WWII America’s identity shifted. The Cold War “called for the development of a kind of ideological competitor to the Soviet Union, a… self-understanding of America as a global nation, an imperial nation.”
This new ideological movement entailed the triple alliance of free market libertarians, social conservatives and anticommunist hawks. But since the libertarians control the money, free-market inclined Republicans have long dominated domestic policy. Deneen pointed to the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation as examples of ostensibly conservative organizations where libertarian economics are the actual focus. For Christians to achieve their political ends, Deneen concluded, a new conservative coalition is necessary; one which is no longer guided principally by free-market capitalism or individual liberty.
Wolfe replied that modern American liberalism isn’t intrinsically linked to the founders’ conception of liberty. Referencing Tocqueville, Wolfe argued liberalism can take different paths depending on the willingness of the people to commit to “what is best in their communities: history and tradition” within their liberal framework.
Wolfe defined liberalism as the “narrowly political project of constitutional government and juridical defense of rights.” Deneen agrees that’s part of it, but he also insisted that a society whose first principle is individual liberty necessarily tends towards individualism and atomization. Across the liberal-postliberal split there is some agreement that a positive form of liberalism can and has existed, as in early America. But Deneen believes the primacy of individual rights, however tempered, must lead to the excesses of modern individualism.
Douthat also had a solo talk where he laid out predictions for the future of American Catholicism as well as four typologies of post-fusionist Christians. Within post-fusionism, the first type are the populists, like R. R. Reno of First Things, who describe themselves as “integralists” though it’s a misnomer. Whether it’s Reno or senators Josh Hawley or Marco Rubio, these people act “as a kind of solidarity and religious corrective within the liberal order rather than an alternative to American-Constitutionalism.”
Then, there’s the actual integralists like Pappin or Pecknold, who want to refound society on specifically theocratic principles, though their particular policies resemble the populists’. There are also the Benedictines, referencing Rod Dreher’s book The Benedict Option. They argue Christians in America will soon be so overwhelmed by secular culture that our best best is to wall-off in our communities and cultivate virtue there. Lastly, there’s the “tradinistas;” leftist Christians who see unfettered capitalism as the real greatest threat to the Church; this group would include Alasdair MacIntyre, Elizabeth Breunig and Pope Francis.
As for the future of American Catholicism, pulling on demographics from baptisms to first communions to marriages in the RCC to immigration, Douthat concluded the situation is bleak. Especially as older Catholics pass away and immigration is more Protestant and Asian than Catholic and Latin-American, the Church will be increasingly hollowed-out from the inside. But, for those who do remain, the RCC will be a smaller but more dynamic body, composed only of those with a deep connection to it.
Capizzi and Pappin, similarly to Deneen and Wolfe, debated what should and shouldn’t fall under the umbrella of liberalism. For Pappin, “liberalism has been the denial of the Church’s nature and its corresponding rights.” As Pappin argued, the rise of freedom of speech and religion, core tenets of liberalism, were weapons to be used against the Roman Catholic Church and liberalism’s essence “is its opposition to the Church itself.” All weakening of ecclesiastical authority has ultimately been to the detriment of the Church’s mission.
Capizzi disagreed, insisting that the Church has long emphasized “regard for man’s last end, even in liberal societies, and as a greater foundation for the liberal political institutions those societies have embraced.” Every Pope, he noted, since at least Pius XII in 1944 has affirmed the “legitimacy and appeal of democratic governance.” According to Capizzi, Pius XII’s “emphasis on the individual… as the foundation and end of social and political order reflects the tendency of modern Catholic teaching to absorb some elements of liberal political thought, including this embrace of democratic government.”
But are these “liberal” ideas Catholicism now embraces actually new or are they reiterations of pre-existing Medieval ideas of liberty? Capizzi argued that Catholicism did in fact “learn” something new, or at least realize something it had forgotten, from liberalism. Pappin, in contrast, said that every “liberal” premise the Catholic Church today accepts actually existed within Catholic pre-modern civilization; any rapprochement between the Church and liberalism is a prudential affirmation that, though liberalism didn’t invent individual conscience, it’s still a useful protector of it.
The final liberalism vs. postliberalism conversation had Pecknold and Burns discussing politics from sharply contrasted angles. Pecknold focused exclusively on metaphysics. In his view, our society cannot be morally upright unless explicitly ordered towards God. “The common good has metaphysical weight… to sever the bond between the common good and God is already to degenerate into nihilism and despair about the universe itself.” Absent some kind of confessional state, our government can’t be oriented towards God, and if our nation isn’t ordered towards God then we’ve already lost.
Burns’ view was more grounded. As he argued, even if many American Catholics buy into postliberalism, that has no practical bearing on American politics. Nobody has ever been elected on a platform of abolishing the Bill of Rights or otherwise fundamentally changing the structure of American government. Therefore, the only way for an integralist to influence American politics would be to lie about their actual views, which would be dishonest. Moreover, most Americans are so far removed from anti-modernist arguments that utilizing those lines of rhetoric would only be counter-productive.
Overall, the most notable part of the conference was how much agreement there was between the liberals and integralists. Despite their theoretical differences, the speakers were mostly trying to hit upon where exactly they diverged. In the end, this may show that for how radical the integralist rhetoric is they still aren’t terribly far off from conservative liberalism-endorsing Catholics.
Comment by td on May 6, 2021 at 8:40 pm
I am still really dumbfounded by this integralism thing. Are they really saying that we should ditch our form of government because they think it is the definition of liberal progressivism?
I think someone is really on the fringe if they think we should ditch our form of government.
This seems like a group whining because they are losing the battle of ideas and morality, and their solution seens to be that if they can force their ideas on people through government action then everything will be perfect.
Comment by David on May 7, 2021 at 8:47 am
“By their actions, the Founding Fathers made clear that their primary concern was religious freedom, not the advancement of a state religion. Individuals, not the government, would define religious faith and practice in the United States. Thus the Founders ensured that in no official sense would America be a Christian Republic. Ten years after the Constitutional Convention ended its work, the country assured the world that the United States was a secular state, and that its negotiations would adhere to the rule of law, not the dictates of the Christian faith. The assurances were contained in the Treaty of Tripoli of 1797 and were intended to allay the fears of the Muslim state by insisting that religion would not govern how the treaty was interpreted and enforced. John Adams and the Senate made clear that the pact was between two sovereign states, not between two religious powers.” —Frank Lambert (2006). “The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America.”