Catholic Integralism's deepest deprivations

God spoke to Elijah in a whisper

Is it possible to be a Catholic and an American without compromising one of the first questions in the Baltimore Catechism:

Q: “Why did God make you?

A: “To know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next.”

The answer was settled for Catholics after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, in part due to the work of Fr. John Courtney Murray, S.J. who showed the connection between America’s founding principles and key documents and the natural law. This important distinction between American liberalism and its anti-religious, and often violent, European expressions meant that not only is possible to be a faithful Catholic in America but that its freedoms and elevated view of human dignity integrated core Catholic beliefs about the person into America’s governing fabric.

Courtney Murray’s view prevailed in the Church just as the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s transformed America and the Catholic Church made stunning changes to the liturgy, music, architecture, and curriculum in parochial schools and seminaries. We have woken up 70 years later to find empty pews and a society reeling from interlocking breakdowns in families, communities, schools, and neighborhoods. America has become sad and mean as David Brooks writes. What happened? Who or what is to blame?

There is no shortage of diagnoses. American political conservatives have for decades lamented the loss of virtue education and the breakdown of the family as foundational disasters wrought by the sexual revolution. Many Catholics place blame on a Church hierarchy that failed to teach the faith or who have given tremendous scandal in their handling of clerical sexual abuses cases. Progressives lament a consumerist culture and profit-seeking corporations as the source of economic injustice and hollowed out cities.

A new ideological movement has woven these criticisms into a damning indictment of America’s sins. These voices come not to praise America and its inbuilt ability to repair itself but to bury its founders in the hopes the country can be resurrected into a confessional republic held together with a ‘we-know-what’s-best-for-you’ administrative state.

The post liberal integralists are unknown to the vast majority of American Catholics. Their primary idea that we should “secure the common good” by subordinating the political authority to the Catholic Church’s spiritual authority is not part of a groundswell movement among the laity. It has no endorsements from the world’s bishops. Pope Francis disapproves.

What began as a discussion confined to online salons is now gaining an audience in some colleges and lay apostolates. It tracks with the decade-long crack-up in the conservative-libertarian consensus: a foil to fusionism’s blind spots. In a short time the notion travelled from a few philosophers such as Thomas Pink to the blogs and Twitter feeds of New Right journalists.

Attractive to young Catholics who see a world in moral freefall the Integralist critique of American society is alienating and despairing. American integralists define their vision of government as “post liberal,” because they reject conservatism, liberalism, and libertarianism as ideologies that all flow from a flawed American founding based on Protestant/Scottish Enlightenment falsities which denied Catholic truths about the ‘telos’ of man and the ordering of the Supernatural over the Natural order.

Their cri de coeur: “When will we realize that we are the victims of the moral chaos guaranteed by our philosophical patrimony?“ falls into immediate trouble with its blunt rejection of religious liberty.

“Do you really think 330 million Americans will peacefully assent to rule by the nation’s Catholic minority, who, according to recent Pew statistics, aren’t quite filling up the pews?“

The “sheer implausibility‘ or “Hey, that’s obnoxious!” argument is easy to make but it is also inadequate.

We should not be complacent in understanding integralism’s re-emergence in America and its roots in Internet-stoked disenchantment with both American elites and the scandals, omissions, and commissions of the post-Conciliar Catholic Church.

It is also important to reckon with what is actually being said. Even integralism’s advocates acknowledge their full vision is unlikely to happen. The real danger of the movement is in its power to create myths that feed ‘restorationist fantasies,’ and lead to the emergence of new kinds of “monstrous moral hybrids” in American discourse and institutions that conflate State and Church in ways that undermine both.

American integralism begins with a small set of professors with bespoke political ideas based on a particular reading of Catholic theology and tradition, Enlightenment, Marxist, and post liberal philosophy, Ancient and Medieval history, communitarianism, legal theory, and Catholic Social Thought. This fuels a fire-branded ‘retconning’ of American political history and the post WWII free-market movement that crested with Reagan’s presidency. In general they seek a “post-liberal” constitutional order to undergird a New Deal-esque Christendom. Eject John Locke and Adam Smith. Install Aquinas and Michael Sandal.

Sympathizers and critics of the integralists defy easy categorization. Ross Douthat helpfully breaks down a taxonomy of today’s political Catholics: populists, fusionists, integralists, benedictines, and tradinistas.

What’s the allure? It’s erudite. With an underbelly of contradictions. Idealistic. And darn sure of its chances. Angry. But they come in peace.

The most insightful responses come from within the traditions they claim to represent. They are:

• It’s not post-liberal philosophy.

• It is a solvent on Catholic Social Thought.

• It ‘paganizes’ Christianity and seeks God’s kingdom in the fallen world.

I. That’s not post-liberal philosophy. It’s theo-technocracy for the soul.

American integralism operates on two levels. It is philosophically consequentialist and breezily pragmatic offering a short list of virtue-supporting regulations for the good of the American people. Integralism’s most notable advocate, Harvard law professor, Adrian Vermeule, makes a case for promoting the common good through the administrative state, infused by the natural law, and led by a super-charged executive branch. A semi-structural change that empowers the Executive over the other branches. His policy prescriptions include banning pornography, instituting Sabbath laws, strong protections for the environment, and bolstering welfare programs.

There are two problems here. First, it is at odds with the natural law tradition. Secondly, it is not post liberal philosophy, properly understood.

As Sam Gregg writes, the natural law tradition on which Vermeuele seeks to ground the U.S. Constitution (which some argue is already infused into it) can be “known by human reason without the aid of revelation.” It holds that the political authorities should seek the political common good by ensuring justice and peace. The state is not ordained to legislate over matters of private virtue. We have traffic laws to protect human life. We do not fine people for gossiping or gluttony, even if those acts may harm others. Those are matters proper to moral formation and not the domain of the state. This was recognized by Aquinas.

Post liberal philosopher Jason Blakely identifies another of Vermeule’s devastating inconsistencies. Vermeule rejects, on theological grounds, the liberal order and then suggests deploying its social science toolkit (rational choice theory and behavioral economics) to enable an elite class of administrators to enact regulations in the service of a benevolent theo-technocracy.

It is neither Catholic nor post-liberal.

It’s also not “Legal History nor Academic Jurisprudence but Dworkian Fit and Justification”.

Call it simply, “Vermeulism.”

Tocqueville in Hungary

Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, in his most recent book, Regime Change, calls for ‘a revolution’ in American government. He seeks to peacefully encourage the emergence of an “aristopopulist” movement to serve a new national consensus which combines elements of Tocquevillian localism, cultural conservatism, and social democratic economic policies. Build a new elite class drawing from “the people” who will preference anti-big business, and pro-union policies to benefit the middle class and encourage family formation, civic virtues, and localism.

Starry-eyed and also ordinary. Deneen adopts a “Vermeulian contradiction”. Build the common good “top-down and from-within”, turning the concept upside down. CST holds that “the common good” flows from the principle of subsidiary and is a ground-up phenomenon. The state’s role is to provide the conditions (justice, order, and peace) to allow lower levels (family, churches, neighborhoods, charities and associations) to do what is in their domain. That is because these foundational institutions have their existence, “prior to the State,” as John Paul II writes in Centesimus Annus.

Baptism in the Potomac

Who gets to decide what is just in a post-liberal constitutional order? That depends. To be fair, Deneen is religiously ecumenical in vision for a new “expert class.” At least some of the regulations they seek are not. CUA theologian Chad Pecknold wants to ban blasphemy and Sorhab Ahmari is partial to blue laws. As Dominican friar James Dominic Rooney observes this is nothing more than an abuse of power with new kinds of ideological purity tests.

But is it “post-liberal“ properly understood, or merely over-intellectualized power politics?

Post-liberal philosopher Michael Hanby notes in several recent essays that today’s integralists by virtue of even offering technocratic solutions fail to grasp the nature of the problem they claim to have discovered: the more than half millennium-deep desacralization of the world. American integralists not only seek the impossible. They seek to achieve it through incoherent methods.

This intellectual project cum pragmatic policy agenda conflates, “theory and praxis, knowledge and power, truth and unity, philosophy with intellectual archeology.” They mistake metaphysics and medieval scholasticism for a 21st century manual on how to operate a virtuous American bureaucracy. There is also the McLuhanesque irony of conducting a conversation about the nature of the cosmos and man’s relation to God on Twitter.

A perspective from Plato’s Cave

If once accepts Peguy’s “Mystical Disaster,” that we have lost touch with the most elemental understanding of reality, human nature, and the meaning of life, then the problem that the American integralists claim to solve is intractable. “The metaphysical disaster” of liberalism far exceeds the domain and power of politics to fix.

Hanby recognizes this. The role of the integralist (properly understood) is not as political strategist but philosopher-king - one who is able (as saint, mystic, or artist) to reveal man to himself “not by imposing its truth forcibly upon the world, but by suffering even unto death its apparent absence.”

II. A Solvent on Catholic Social Thought

The challenge in applying Catholic Social Thought (CST) developed over the last 150 years of papal, conciliar and episcopal writings is threefold.

1. CST is a set of principles not positions. These are: Respect for human life and the dignity of the person, solidarity, and subsidiarity which are the basis of just and flourishing societies. These principles are rooted in binding moral teachings on the sanctity of life and our duty to care for the poor.

2. CST is also contextual, contingent, and limited.

   Much of CST is non-binding, constituting papal reflections on everything from corporatism to climate change. Popes are entitled to their views. There is ample room for disagreement on whether the best way to help the poor is by removing occupational licensing laws, welfare policies, or raising the minimum wage. In fact, CST is clear, these debates are best left to experts, not theologians.

3. CST is not a game of proof-texting or pitting “Pope against Pope.” Catholics of all political persuasions are apt to cherry-pick encyclicals to bless their preferences (“proof texting”). Or they stress the writings of some popes and discount others. For Integralists this manifests as emphasizing the encyclicals of pre-Conciliar popes. They cite Leo XIII to make a case for the Social Kingship of Christ. Or find a blessing for specific economic and environmental policies in Laudato Si where Francis calls for the circumscription the market to protect the poor and the environment. (See number 2).

   An ongoing and serious challenge of CST writes Sam Gregg is that the Church itself does not always make these nuances and distinctions clear. Social encyclicals at times suffer from ambiguous scope and the conflation of positive and negative norms

The integralist’s appeal to reorient society around a confessionally-defined common good via a civil bureaucratic rule that preferences Catholicism disintegrates on contact with both the U.S. Constitution and one of CST’s binding teachings: the dignity of the person.

Catholicism teaches that we are each made in the image and likeness of God (Imago Dei), as such we have reason and free will. God is Love (agape). Love cannot be not forced. It is a response to God’s call.

Pope Benedict’s reflections In Deus Caritas Est begin with how we are to understand a God who is love, and then how we are to practice what we have received in faith and the sacraments as a “community of Love.”

“the entire activity of the Church is an expression of a Love that seeks the integral good of man: it seeks his evangelization through Word and Sacrament, an understanding that is often heroic in the way it is acted out in history; and it seeks to promote man in the various arenas of life and human activity.”

How are we to do this?

Benedict defines the separate yet interrelated spheres of Church and State, as rooted in Christ’s admonition to “render unto Ceasar”. (Matthew 22: 15-21)

The State’s role is not to impose religion, but to “guarantee religious freedom and harmony between the followers of different religions.” Catholic Social Thought “… has no intention of giving the Church power over the State. Even less is it an attempt to impose on those who do not share the faith ways of thinking and modes of conduct proper to faith. Its aim is simply to help purify reason and to contribute, here and now, to the acknowledgment and attainment of what is just.”

Then how do we square Leo XIII’s Social Kingship of Christ with Paul VI’s encyclical Dignitatis Humanae and the subsequent writings of John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis in favor of religious freedom while avoiding the game of “proof-texting”? We distinguish between the principle of “how to live the Gospel” and its prudential application in different historical contexts.

In an interview, Francis addresses the paradox of a missionary Church operating in settings where religion is to be a solely a private matter. He distinguishes between a healthy secularism and an oppressive laicism as legacies of the Enlightenment.

“…. In general, a lay state is a good thing; it’s better than a confessional state because confessional states always finish badly. But secularism is one thing, and laicism is another. Laicism closes the doors to transcendence, to the dual transcendence: both transcendence towards others and, above all, transcendence towards God; or towards what is beyond us. And openness to transcendence is part of the human essence. It is part of man…”

We could even say that the liberal order is itself an imperfect refraction of Christianity’s elevated view of human dignity and freedom even as we struggle to articulate and acknowledge it in a post-Christian age.

III. My Kingdom is not of this World

Benedict’s “Separate yet interrelated” points to the necessary and inescapable connection between religious belief and the formal structures of society.

A recent lecture by Prof. Russell Hittinger at CUA identifies a problem with the concept of integralism as a “first principle.” The problem is “Christological.” What Christ accomplished was “separation” of the temporal and spiritual. In the pagan world the deities and the state were intertwined.

As Benedict writes in Deus Caritas Est (2005)

The Church cannot and must not take upon herself the political battle to bring about the most just society possible. She cannot and must not replace the State. Yet at the same time she cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice. She has to play her part through rational argument and she has to reawaken the spiritual energy without which justice, which always demands sacrifice, cannot prevail and prosper. A just society must be the achievement of politics, not of the Church. Yet the promotion of justice through efforts to bring about openness of mind and will to the demands of the common good is something which concerns the Church deeply.

The Catholic faith is to be lived. It is not a call to quietism or passivity in the face of injustice. It is the task of individual believers to witness the Gospel and to live its teachings in all settings. It is not to take the reins of power to compel religious practice. Our prayers and fasting, speaking truth in love (agape) - even at personal cost - and love of neighbor and acts of charity will infuse its institutions and transform the world. And we may not live to see the results.

For Sorhab Ahmari that’s quitter talk wrapped up in Benedict Option fantasies. Enough with the catacombs and mustard seed stuff. It’s time to ‘do something.’

Post-liberal Catholics Michael Warren Davis and Marc Barnes offer him a fraternal correction, here and here.

By lightly casting aside, the one thing necessary for believers, political Catholicism runs into trouble quickly, and it is not hard to see why.

“My grace is sufficient for you.”

I am not a trained theologian or philosopher. America has become sad and mean.

What do we do about it? Who is to blame?

He is heard in the silence and speaks to the heart.