Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty
When J.D. Vance converted to Catholicism five years ago, he came into contact with what the Associated Press recently called “a Catholic intellectual movement, viewed by some critics as having reactionary or authoritarian leanings.” Vance has called himself a “postliberal” Catholic in the past and has endorsed policies and tactics favored by adherents of the label, such as purging the administrative state and his rhetorical promotion of “pro-family” policy. (His actual legislative record on this subject leaves much to be desired.)
His rise as a national figure has carried relatively obscure ideologies closer to political power, including what the AP called a “subset” of postliberalism, known as integralism. What is integralism, then, and could it influence our would-be vice-president? As held by prominent thinkers like Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School, integralism imagines a future when the state may punish the baptized for violations of ecclesiastical law. Kevin Vallier, an associate professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University and the author of All The Kingdoms of the World, spoke with me about Vance, integralism and the political order that integralists seek to create.
I wanted to start by defining our terms. Briefly, could you tell me what is integralism and how it differs from views held by prominent conservative Catholics like J.D. Vance or someone like Leonard Leo?
J.D. Vance is friends with many of the leading integralists, so it’s not entirely clear to me how far away he is from thinking that this would be the best system of government. It’s just unknown. He’s called himself a Catholic postliberal, which, in my view, is less radical than a Catholic integralist. But he’s been to one of their conferences as a speaker.
Integralists think church and state should be integrated for the entire common good of the people, not just in this life but also the next. But the way that it works is that the Church is the primary mode of social organization that’s guiding people into the next life. In certain cases, the Church can deputize the state to help enforce some of its spiritual policies.
An integralist regime doesn’t necessarily have to be at all violent or super oppressive. It just depends on what the Church directs the state to do. Still, we’re looking at heresy laws. We’re looking at apostasy laws. If someone leaves the faith, there’s some kind of penalty. If you teach heresy, and you’re condemned by the Church and so by the state, something happens to you. You distribute banned and heretical books, something happens.
Can we fit integralism under the broad rubric of Christian nationalism, or is it somewhat distinct?
Christian nationalism is usually very Protestant, and also, integralism is not nationalist. Christian nationalism to me is like bargain-basement integralism. Integralists are very intellectually sophisticated. Christian nationalism, frankly, I think it began as a way for the right to troll the left four or five years ago. It was kind of to scare Democrats. So it doesn’t really cohere intellectually very much, which is why you hear Marjorie Taylor Greene talking about Christian nationalism, but you have Catholic theologians talking about integralism.
Obviously, integralism is not a new idea, so when did its resurgence begin, and why did it begin?
The story’s pretty interesting. There was an informal group of American intellectuals who were thinking of these things before Trump — some of whom considered themselves on the left, and some of them considered themselves on the right. They opposed everything they thought of as liberal. They opposed theological liberalism, any kind of looser, more ecumenical or less miraculous understanding of religious texts, political liberalism in terms of stressing the dignity of the individual and sharply limited government, along with the market economy and the separation of church and state.
The right-wing people wanted to bring Catholicism back to public life and even some control on the grounds that it would have better family policy in many cases. When Trump was elected, though, it really divided them because the Catholic left were less extreme on church/state stuff, but they really just thought Trump was as un-Catholic as a leader could be. The right-wing integralists thought that Trump was a way of destroying liberal elites and hoped that is what he would do. They just didn’t see much social progress unless there was a new elite.
I’ve been told that by 2020 any semblance of left-wing integralism was gone. The right-wing integralists spent a large amount of time building connections with Viktor Orbán, whom they’re very big fans of. He’s a Calvinist, but because he’s enforcing cultural Christianity in some way, they think that’s better than nothing. He’s trying to grow families. So the history, like any early radical sect, is full of strong, crazy personalities and weird fights and stuff.
It’s a small community, as you note in your book.
Yes, it is. It’s weird because you would think it would have no influence at all. Catholics over 50 tell me that this is a joke. There’s nothing to it. But then I meet all these Catholic graduate students at different universities, and they’re super excited about it. Maybe they’re not fully integralists, but their friends are, and they’re like, “Oh, I don’t know what to think.” It’s in the air. I had a blast last year just going to different students all over the place and talking to them about it.
But the biggest thing I think that will change things is that there are lots of priests that are becoming integralist and that can really matter because people go to their priests. A lot of these younger Catholic priests, if they say Latin Mass, they’ve got growing churches. This isn’t a dwindling church somewhere. So they’re influencing people. They’re shaping minds and spirits and so on. So that could matter, but it’s very hard to know how much it matters.
It ebbs and flows. I thought last year, the only way that integralism was going to have a future after all the infighting was if J.D. Vance became VP nominee, and then he did.
You go over this at length in your book, but could we discuss how integralists propose capturing the state and enforcing their agenda?
What Vermeule gets is that you’re not going to be able to do this with a small government. You’re going to need a very powerful executive branch, and you’re going to need a very powerful administrative state. Then the question is just going to be how you prepare a large pluralistic society to submit to a religion that they don’t all share. So the first thing you have to do is you have to think you know that liberalism will collapse.
While liberalism is collapsing of its own weight, you get the right reflective, deeply committed Catholic people into those bureaucracies, into the judiciary, into the executive. It’s like, history will hand you this opportunity. You have your small group. They’re training their own people. They’re ready to go.
So getting there requires a large state. It requires the intellectual discrediting and collapse of liberalism and having the right place and the right time for a new elite to take things in as integralist direction as possible as they can, hopefully with relatively little bloodshed.
It doesn’t seem like they’re necessarily planning some civil war where they take over and crush dissent violently in the streets. But is it possible to do what they want to do without engendering violence in some way?
Well, the engendering is the key because it depends on who controls the levers of government. If it’s still controlled by the left, or however you want to think about it, yeah, it’s going to require bloodshed. So they’re not going to say, “Yeah, let’s do that.” I don’t think these are bloodthirsty people. I think some of them are mostly nerdy intellectuals, then some of them are really politically obsessed nerdy intellectuals.
There are two groups of people. There are people who want to argue theology all day. I like them. They’re weird, but I like them. Then there are people who are obsessed with politics and are hanging out in Hungary, making sure Orbán has an audience with DeSantis and all this kind of stuff. They’re the first ones to really grease those wheels. They like Orbán because they can see him as destroying the elite power of the Hungarian left, although Orbán’s benefited tremendously from the left being completely fragmented there, and so he can create a coalition that wins fair and square.
So I don’t think they’re eager to hurt people. I just think they believe today’s society, and liberal society generally, is just so profoundly corrupt that you’re just not going to make life better for people without what they call a postliberal order. You’d have to fundamentally change the terms on which a modern society operates. They’ve told us almost nothing about how that is, as opposed to banning some stuff.
What would religious freedom look like under an integralist regime?
That’s actually one of the most complicated questions, and it’s one of the ones that got integralism started in the first place. The quick answer is you have to have religious freedom for the unbaptized. You can’t force them into the Church. But if they are baptized, if they’re members of the Church, then they’re subject to the Church’s jurisdiction, which means that in an integralist state, of which all the baptized were members, the Church could direct the state to control but usually to punish the baptized for culpable sins.
Thomas Pink, a philosopher emeritus at King’s College London who’s its chief intellectual but perhaps rejects its politics, has said integralism isn’t going to happen. People disagree too much now. You can’t get the kind of uniformity that you would need for this kind of ideal society.
But you can imagine a very Catholic society. Then people know a lot more about Catholicism, and they know what’s bad about defecting from it. In those cases, you could punish them. The same way that in some Muslim countries, where Christians and Jews are people of the book, and so they’re to be tolerated. At least in principle. But if you’re Muslim, then the policies can apply to you. Now, there are modern Muslim societies. There are much more conservative ones. So I’m not talking about a general tendency of Islam. I’m just saying if you’re trying to get a sense for this, with integralism you’re going to use coercion against your co-religionists to keep them on the straight and narrow. That’s the main kind of coercion that would be introduced.
I’m curious about their view of racial and gender equality.
They’re fine with racial equality. Most of the time they’re trying to deflect worries about antisemitism, which is complicated. Gender, on the other hand, is completely different. They reject LGBT equality in every way that one can. They’ll say, “Look, there are certain gender roles that are appropriate.” Most of the new right factions have this masculinist component.
They would definitely get rid of same-sex marriage. They would ban pornography of every kind. In many cases, they are associated with very patriarchal views of marriage. They don’t talk about that a lot, but it’s there.
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