Catholic integralism: response to a response

During my time at Calvin University earlier this month, I was invited to respond to an important book by Kevin Vallier, titled, All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (Oxford: 2023). The subject is Catholic integralism, a position calling for the state to establish the Roman Catholic Church, giving it a privileged position above other churches and religious faiths. In his book, Vallier, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University and a convert to Orthodoxy, makes a carefully argued case against integralism, effectively demonstrating its flaws with respect to history, symmetry, transition, stability, and justice. He then examines Confucian and Islamic anti-liberalisms before proposing in an epilogue his own alternative, which amounts to tolerance of "integration writ small," that is, local experiments in integralism within an adapted liberal order coupled with a more decentralized federalism: "Liberals must both unite to protect liberal order and concede some political independence to nonliberal communities of faith" (275).

I was one of three respondents to Vallier. Here is an edited version of my remarks:

One of my earliest political memories is of the 1960 presidential election campaign in which Vice President Richard Nixon ran against Senator John F. Kennedy. My parents supported Nixon, who spoke at the small university in my hometown west of Chicago. They brought me to this event, but I have no memory of what Nixon said, as I was only five years old. However, even at that tender age, I was aware that Kennedy's candidacy was controversial because of his membership in the Roman Catholic Church. In those days no one talked about elephants in rooms, and I suppose they still don't, even if the metaphor has become ubiquitous. But if there was an elephant, it might have been labelled Catholic integralism. Only one Catholic had run for the presidency before: New York Governor Al Smith in 1928, and he was defeated by the ill-starred Herbert Hoover. American Protestants feared that a Catholic in the highest office in the land would take orders from the Pope and that he would use his power to privilege the Catholic Church and oppress all those good Protestants out in the heartland.

Then came the Second Vatican Council two years later, and everything changed. Vatican II promulgated a document called Dignitatis Humanae, which for the first time put the weight of the Church behind a broad definition of religious freedom. No longer would the Church seek to enshrine its own status in the world's political constitutions. No longer would it be issuing anathemas against Protestants and Orthodox, who were now upgraded to the status of “separated brethren.” Kennedy himself had already moved to allay Protestant fears when he spoke to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in Texas, indicating that “I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic.” More than two generations later, a Catholic sits in the White House once again, but few assume that he will be taking orders from the Pope any time soon. In any event, the current Pope seems disinclined to issue such orders.

However, although Catholic integralism has fallen out of favour even with the Vatican itself, it is by no means dead and appears to have undergone something of a renaissance in recent years, motivating Vallier to write the book under discussion. To be honest, when I began reading the book, I wasn't sure what to make of it. Is Vallier serious? I asked myself. Or is this a tongue-in-cheek exercise? Is he a Don Quixote tilting at theocratic windmills? Who anymore actually advocates for a Catholic state giving the Church broad powers to police the lives of baptized Christians?

As it turns out, there are quite a few integralists who, having soured on the dominant liberal paradigm in the United States and elsewhere, now believe that a virtuous society will come about only when the Church has been accorded its apparently rightful place. Admittedly, before reading the book, I had had little knowledge of flesh-and-blood integralists, although, having written occasionally for First Things, I noticed uneasily that that magazine, under its current editor, had made a not so subtle shift from the Catholic liberalism of the late Father Neuhaus and Michael Novak to a form of post-liberalism that carried the faint whiff of integralism, as Vallier notes early in the book.

To be sure, there is something attractive in the integralist vision. Here is Vallier:

Christ's reign is not limited to individuals, families, civil society, and the church. It extends to every human institution, including political ones. Indeed as two Catholic authors put it, “To deny these propositions is to maintain the illogical position that man owes God religious worship under only one aspect of his life, in only one department of his life” (49).

I couldn't help thinking of Abraham Kuyper's memorable assertion: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” Every believing Christian who takes seriously the sovereignty of God in Jesus Christ must hope and pray that his kingdom will indeed extend throughout the entirety of his creation and that “every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:10-11).

However—and this is where I would part ways with the integralists—does the sovereignty of God necessarily translate into the sovereignty of the institutional church? Prior to 1960s, the province of Québec exhibited many of the features of an integralist society, with bishops running, not only their dioceses and churches, but a whole network of civil society institutions such as hospitals, labour unions, charities, schools, and universities. After 1960, during the Quiet Revolution, the church pulled back from its multiple commitments, but, sad to say, as the church retreated, so did the faith of ordinary Quebeckers. Six decades later Québec is as secular as France and the Scandinavian countries, adhering instead to a syncretic faith of expressive individualism and nationalism. I believe that Vallier has successfully demonstrated, through his careful arguments, that integralism is ultimately unstable and cannot withstand the historic tendency towards what Dutch Christian philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd described as the differentiation of society, much less the collective opposition not only of unbelievers but of those Christians who remain separated brethren and even ordinary Catholics themselves.

I would like to make one point about liberalism of which I see only a hint in Vallier's book. I believe we need more clearly to distinguish liberalism as an ideology from what some persist in calling liberal democracy. As I see it, liberalism as an ideology undertakes to reduce all communities, including the most basic of social institutions, to mere voluntary associations indistinguishable from each other except by the wills of the component individuals. This is the upshot of the social contractarianism of Hobbes, Lock, Rousseau, and their successors. Given the dominance of liberalism in our societies, it is hardly surprising that the logic of this voluntarism would be extended, not only to the state, but to marriage, family, and institutional church, which in reality have their own unique status as communities and not simply as aggregations of consenting individuals.

However, liberal democracy, although it has certainly been influenced by the ideology, should not be identified with it. In fact, to avoid this all too common confusion, I would prefer to call the system under which we live constitutional democracy. Liberals have long sought to portray themselves as impartial referees standing above the religious divisions in their societies, valiantly attempting to keep these divisions out of the public square, while they themselves fail to recognize the religious character of their own ultimate commitments, which they exempt from these efforts. In like manner, liberals identify their own principles with the institutions of democracy as a whole. Thus they are wont to accuse anyone who disagrees with the ideology of rejecting democracy and the procedures that enable people with varying ultimate commitments to get along for proximate political purposes. We ought not to allow liberals to get away with this sleight of hand. Indeed, I believe that it is possible—indeed desirable—to question liberalism at its religious roots while enthusiastically upholding the rule of law and the institutions of constitutional democracy, which historically owe much to pre- and non-liberal traditions.