Since the neo-integralists (as I’m calling them) first broke into the national conversation, I’ve struggled to make sense of their ideas. Though at first I was deeply sympathetic, my reservations about neo-integralism have grown. What follows are my ten main objections.
1. There’s no single “integralism.”
First, we must define our terms.
When Louis Veuillot coined the phrase integral Catholic in 1866, it was by way of contrast with a group he called liberal Catholics. The liberals had made peace with the post-Revolutionary order; the integrals still believed that all private and public affairs should be ordered according to Church teaching.
At first, this seems very straightforward. Either you accept Catholic social teaching, or you don’t. Indeed, there are many Catholics who don’t. Some are on the Right, like fascists. Others are on the Left, like communists.
Of course, we know that “Catholic fascist” and “Catholic communist” are contradictions in terms. This was Veuillot’s point. Catholics who identify with liberalism—like those who identify with fascism and communism—are schizophrenic. They claim to follow the Church in all things… except politics. So far, I agree with the neo-integralists.
I also agree with their popular micro-manifesto, “Integralism in Three Sentences”:
Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that, rejecting the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holds that political rule must order man to his final goal. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end, the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power.
But we must point out that there are many different ways of being an integralist—i.e., an integral Catholic. There are many theories about how best to apply the Catholic social teaching to modern political problems. To name just six examples:
I. Royalism: A movement to overturn the revolutionary order and restore Medieval monarchy. (Joseph de Maistre, Juan Vázquez de Mella)
II. Distributism: A movement emphasizing the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, or decentralization, both in politics and economics. (G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc)
III. Corporatism: A kind of “statism” organized according to Christian principles and used to provide for the common good. (Fr. Denis Fahey, António de Oliveira Salazar)
IV. Integral Nationalism: A largely prewar effort to blend Catholic social teaching with elements of the early 20th century far-right, particularly its militarism and nationalism. (Charles Maurras, Engelbert Dollfuss)
V. Christian Democracy: A largely postwar effort to graft Catholic social teaching onto the welfare state. (Jacques Maritain, Konrad Adenauer)
VI. Personalism: A movement placing a radical emphasis on solidarity—the dignity of the individual and the interdependence of individuals within society. (John Paul II, Dorothy Day)
What we’re calling neo-integralism is distinct from the above six tendencies. Now, it may be the proper interpretation of Catholic social teaching. The royalists, distributists, corporatists, etc., may have been misapplying Catholic social teaching all along.
But neo-integralists often claim that any Catholic who (rightly) rejects liberalism as incompatible with the Faith must, therefore, embrace their interpretation of Catholic social teaching. They claim that neo-integralism is the only integralism. That’s incorrect. And, in my opinion, neo-integralism is one of the least faithful to the Church’s political tradition.
2. Neo-integralism is incompatible with Catholic social teaching.
So, how do we define neo-integralism as distinct from the other six “integralisms”? We should begin by looking to their most important exponent, Adrian Vermeule.
Professor Vermeule is widely (and rightly) applauded for highlighting the paradoxes inherent within liberalism. For instance, liberalism’s efforts to purge metaphysics from public life—especially politics—has led to an invasion of the private lives of its constituents. As Professor Vermeule points out, metaphysical neutrality has morphed into a militant secularism.
Yet he also admires the modern administrative state’s ability to harness raw power over its citizens. He believes that Catholics ought to infiltrate and seize control of the state, a strategy he refers to as “integration from within”. Then, we may use the state to Catholicize the nation. In this sense, neo-integralism is very similar to Christian Democracy. The major difference is that neo-integralism is more intrusive because modern governments are more intrusive than they were in the postwar era.
For that reason, however, the modern state cannot be reconciled with Church teaching. The scale on which we “do government” is offensive to the principle of subsidiarity: that all decision-making ought to be made at the lowest possible level. This is one of the bedrock principles of Catholic political philosophy.
We as Catholics are fundamentally opposed to centralism and large-scale bureaucracy. We are localists. Those who claim otherwise have more in common with Catholics who advocate for liberalism, fascism, or communism: they use the Faith to justify and reify some non-Catholic ideology. They are, ironically, not integralists at all.
3. Neo-integralism is ahistorical.
Now, one might argue that the American government in the year 2021 has just the right amount of centralism, and that any reduction in our bureaucracy would be harmful to the common good.
I would humbly point my reader to my recent essay in The American Conservative on how liberals invented “big government” as we know it. I did my best to show that Medieval Europe—history’s purest Catholic polity—enjoyed and upheld “small government.” In fact, Orthodox rulers in Byzantium and Russia were disgusted by how much freedom the Western kings allowed their subjects. It was a major point of division between the two civilizations.
Here in the West, “big government” is actually a product of Protestantism first and foremost. Look at poor England. Magna Carta was written by Catholics, Patriarcha by a Protestant, and The Leviathan by an atheist. As anyone who has read Belloc’s The Servile State or Chesterton’s Short History of England will know, that’s not a coincidence.
Yet big government as we know it really came of age under liberalism. The liberals, in their devotion to cold rationalism, set about centralizing power in the hands of an efficient bureaucracy. The goal of that bureaucracy was to fundamentally transform Europe from a land of free Christian kingdoms into a federated secularist empire.
Now, we should ask ourselves this question: Every great civilization that flourished in the first 1,500 years A.D. were despotisms. There was not only Byzantium, but also Persia and China, to name just three. Why, then, was the West so adamant on its
“decentralism”? Why did the peoples of Europe reject every effort to reorganize the Catholic world into a new Roman imperium?
One may blame infighting or foreign interference. No doubt there’s much to be said for those arguments. But this new imperium never even emerges as an ideal for Catholic thinkers.
As Christopher Dawson points out, the Medievals were happy to act as a loose confederation of free kingdoms, supreme in their own domains. Christendom was “a free and universal spiritual society under the sovereignty of the Apostolic See,” where the pope served as “the president of a kind of European league of nations and the supreme authority in international law.” That was all.
While they would have rejected a “wall of separation” between Church and State, they did not advocate for the union of Church and State that mark true theocracies. There was no desire for a sort of Pontifical Empire that ruled every Christian on earth in a single polity.
On the contrary. In The City of God, St. Augustine wrote, “What does it matter under whose rule a man lives, being so soon to die, provided that the rulers do not force him to impious and wicked acts?” Likewise, St. Thomas Aquinas wrote in his commentary on the Sentences, “In matters of civil good, it is better to obey the secular power than the spiritual.”
Of course, it’s possible that Augustine and Aquinas were wrong. Perhaps the Oriental despots and theocrats were right. But that’s a possibility too remote for me, as a Catholic, to entertain.
4. Neo-integralism is too conservative.
Which brings us to the next point. Frankly, neo-integralists don’t give the impression that their priority is the objective, dispassionate application of Catholic social teaching to modern political problems. Their priority rather, appears to be the preservation of the administrative state.
No offense to Professor Vermeule, but The Atlantic wouldn’t have published his essay attacking conservative Originalism and defending judicial activism if the progressive elite regarded neo-integralists as a serious threat.
Now, I certainly don’t mean to accuse the neo-integralists of being insincere. But I do get the sense that they’re too comfortable with the current order of things. That order has two hallmarks:
(A) The federal government is the only efficacious institution in the country. All lasting change is accomplished by Washington, D.C. Of course, non-governmental avenues for change still exist. These include lobbying, news media, social media, the courts, academia, and major corporations. But until the goals of these other “avenues” are codified in (federal) law, their victories are regarded as incomplete and ephemeral.
(B) By the same token, the means of influencing the federal government—of having one’s priorities advanced in Washington and codified in law—is by those non-governmental avenues. But because the government is so wealthy, powerful, and centralized, the avenues of influence are necessarily “elitist.” For example, grassroots activism is not in itself effective. Activists’ goal is always to win over Big Business and Big Media, who will then lobby the government on their behalf.
These are the two pillars of the current order: centralism and elitism. Integralism seeks to preserve them both. Why?
In part, perhaps, it’s because they fear disorder more than injustice. This would be consistent with the well-documented influence of the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt upon Professor Vermeule.
5. Neo-integralism is too skittish.
Schmitt was driven by a fear of dissolution. He observed that, by the end of World War I, liberalism had manifestly failed in its own stated goal: to prevent domestic unrest and international conflict. Schmitt therefore dismissed liberalism and emphasized the need for a common worldview to unite the public, and a powerful state to preserve that worldview.
Though a Catholic and a conservative, Schmitt threw in his lot with the Nazis when he realized that Hitler offered Germany an escape from the chaos, poverty, and factionalism of the Weimar Republic.
Likewise, many integralists no doubt sense (as we all do) that the Western order is teetering on the verge of collapse. Trust in our public institutions is at historic lows. Animosity between Democrats and Republicans is at its highest point since the Civil War. Our supply chain is wearing perilously thin.
The neo-integralists will do anything at all to reverse “Weimarization” and the inevitable collapse that follows. And their logic follows the same lines that Schmitt’s did a century ago. But because they’re faithful, orthodox Catholics, they feel the best way to preserve the state is by tearing it up from its liberal soil and re-grounding it upon the strong rock of Rome.
Obviously, they’re sincere in their convictions. But it seems to me that their priorities leave something to be desired.
6. Neo-integralism is self-serving.
Of course, that assumes (A) Weimarization can be reversed, (B) the administrative state can be “converted” to serve Christian interests, and (C) the modern order is actually preferable to whatever might follow it. I don’t believe we can assume any of these things, for reasons that have already been discussed and others that will be discussed in a moment.
But before we go on, I want to make this observation about the character and workings of the neo-integralist mind. If I may again be frank, I suspect that many integralists belong to the “elite,” especially in academia and the media. They may wish to preserve the administrative state because it offers the potential for great personal power and influence.
They might also want to believe that they can change the world by doing exactly what they’ve always done: giving lectures, writing essays, and tweeting. As a journalist, I’m more than sympathetic to this desire.
One may also prefer neo-integralism to any of the other “integralisms” simply because it’s the least threatening to the liberal regime. It gives one the best opportunity to voice one’s mind while also remaining nonthreatening to liberal friends and attractive to “mainstream” employers.
Preserving the centralism and elitism of the current regime also offers academics, journalists, etc., the most potential for power and influence.
Once again, I don’t mean to attribute low motives to the neo-integralists. But there are always these personal factors that shape our worldview almost without our noticing. For example, I find it much easier to be a distributist because I don’t like cities. That doesn’t discredit distributism, but it’s important to be conscious of our biases.
7. We lack the manpower.
Polls show that roughly eight percent of American Catholics agree with Church teaching on contraception. So, one must assume that (at most) eight percent of American Catholics would be comfortable living in a country whose laws were based on Catholic moral teaching. If 23 percent of Americans are Catholic, that means neo-integralists’ potential “base” is about 1.8 percent of the population.
Meanwhile, about 1.7 percent of the country is Mormon. So, just going by the numbers, America is as likely to have a Mormon theocracy as a Catholic one.
Of course, this isn’t technically a problem if one is following Professor Vermeule’s “integration from within” strategy. And to that point…
8. “Forced conversion” is ineffective.
Even if the integralists could seize control of the government, they couldn’t do much good with it.
Governments and laws are effective in upholding polities and reinforcing existing norms. They are not effective in imposing new norms or inculcating people in unpopular worldviews.
Integralists point to the outsized role that Constantine played in Christianizing the West. Needless to say, they’re right, up to a point—but only up to a point. Listening to an integralist, one almost gets the sense that they believe the Edict of Milan marks the birth of the Church, not Pentecost.
In fact, the idea that Catholic Christianity was “imposed” on the whole Empire by the Emperor is an anti-Catholic myth. Emperor Constantine, for all his virtues, didn’t win the West for Christ. That honor belongs to the millions of nameless missionaries who devoted their whole selves to sharing the Gospel.
In fact, the Church began to flourish under severe persecution. It was St. Peter who planted the Church in Rome, not Constantine. “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” said Tertullian. The blood of the martyrs—not the edicts of emperors.
So, yes: it would have been nice of Donald Trump to swim the Tiber and declare Catholicism the official religion of the United States. But that’s not how Constantines are made. And while Constantines may sign edicts and pass laws, they don’t convert nations. That’s up to the Peters.
Conversely, the 20th century is full of examples of rulers trying to use the State to serve the Church’s interests. Even the more salutary, like Salazar, ultimately ended up damaging the Church’s fortunes.
As Salazar himself recognized, he was fighting a losing battle. Even with the entire Portuguese government at his command, he couldn’t stem the tide of modernity that was eroding Portugal’s Christian foundations. And he saw that, ultimately, a Catholic state will not be popular with citizens who didn’t want a Catholic state.
He was right. After his death, his Estado Novo collapsed and the Church was less popular still for being identified with that unpopular regime.
So, in some senses, the integralists seriously underestimate our government. They’re not wary enough of the administrative state. In another sense, they grossly overestimate our government. Again, states can preserve or destroy an existing consensus; they cannot build a new consensus.
Even if integralists managed to “integrate from within,” the American people won’t like it. Even if we manage to convert the Department of Education into the Department for the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, a neo-integralist regime would be ousted before it can do any good.
9. Mysticism is better than politics.
The final and most important objection to neo-integralism is that it’s too political. Politics is about government, and government is about coercion. It’s about changing minds without winning hearts—either through propaganda, intimidation, or some combination of both.
As we said, this may work in preserving the status quo. You might nip a new heresy in the bud by throwing a few of its more charismatic leaders in jail. But as a means of revolutionizing a hostile society, it simply doesn’t work. That’s putting far too much faith in the state—and far too little in God.
No: the first and only step towards building a Catholic state is to convert the West to Catholicism. If we can achieve that, the government will sort itself out. If we can’t, then there’s very little point in talking about the state at all.
How, then, do we win the West back to the Faith? Why, the same way we did it the first time: apostolic prayer, street evangelism, and the Works of Mercy.
That much should be obvious, as it was to Dorothy Day and her mentor Peter Maurin. Way back in 1957, Maurin wrote:
The order of the day in Catholic circles is to fight Communism. To denounce Communism in Catholic halls is not an efficient way to fight Communism. The dally practice of the Works of Mercy is a more efficient way to fight Communism. The dally practice of the Works of Mercy by the first Christians made the Pagans say about the Christians, “See how they love each other.”
Likewise, the great Charles Péguy:
The politically minded… think they can save themselves, by saying that they are at least practical, and that we are not. That is precisely where they are mistaken. Where they mislead. We do not even grant them that. It is the mystic who is practical, and the politically minded who are not. It is we who are practical, who do something, and it is they who are not, who do nothing. It is we who accumulate and they who squander. It is we who build, lay foundations, and they who demolish. It is we who nourish, and they who are parasites. It is we who make things and men, people and races. It is they who wreck ruin.
The only way to make knees bow at the name of Jesus Christ is by following the methods that Jesus Christ laid down in His ministry. The praxis of integralism is the practice of Christianity.
10. Politicism is incompatible with Christianity.
And that, for me, is the ultimate reason why I rejected neo-integralism. I realized that I had my priorities all wrong.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “Lay people also fulfill their prophetic mission by evangelization, ‘that is, the proclamation of Christ by word and the testimony of life.’” Yet I never thought of acting as an “evangelist” until it occurred to me that evangelism might serve some political goal.
I realized that I, too, had been infected with politicism. I believed that all problems are basically political problems. I sought political solutions to those problems. I acted as though the government alone was efficacious—that, if I was to do any good, I needed the approval and support of the state from beginning to end.
This is a profoundly modern (and deeply un-Christian) way of seeing the world. And while this may not be the case for all neo-integralists, it was the case for me.
Then I had to ask myself another question. Why was I thinking about these questions at all? Why did I even want to bend the government to my will in the first place? What did I mean to accomplish?
Was I trying to protect myself and my fellow Catholics from the secular Left? That’s not a bad reason. Was I simply obeying Our Lord’s command—to proclaim the social reign of Christ the King—without really understanding that command? Not a bad reason, either, if it’s the best we can do.
Still, it’s worth noting that, when Christians were a minority in the Roman Empire they didn’t set up think-tanks, publish newspapers, or spend much time lobbying politicians. Converting the state was very low on their priority list. In fact, St. Paul urges Christians not to waste much time with “quarrels over the law” (Titus 3:9).
Rather, he says, “Let all you do be done in love” (1 Corinthians 16:14). We must be motivated by love for our fellow man. And the greatest act of love is introducing sinners to Jesus Christ.
“Politicism” can’t accomplish this goal. The political mentality—dividing men into factions and sects based on ideologies, and where every problem must be solved by some law or regulation—is not only wrongheaded but inhuman. It robs us of our agency. It strips us of our fundamental identity as sons and daughters of God, as brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ.
This preoccupation with politics is unhealthy. It appears to give a Catholic veneer to secular means (the administrative state), which are pursued for the sake of secular goals (peace and prosperity). There seems to be very little about loving God saving souls. It strikes one rather like a sort of right-wing liberation theology.
That’s why I’m not a neo-integralist. As St. Augustine says, “Christ is our Liberator insofar as He is our Savior.”