Kevin Vallier, All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023)
Philosophy, as Etienne Gilson famously observed, always buries its undertakers. Perhaps the same will one day be said of integralism. For decades after Vatican II, it seemed lost to oblivion. Yet around ten years ago, it reemerged with surprising suddenness, vigor, and visibility, attracting formidable advocates such as Thomas Pink, Adrian Vermeule, Gladden Pappin, and Pater Edmund Waldstein. As these names indicate, the movement has been able to draw on academic expertise across a wide variety of fields, including philosophy, law, political science, and theology. And if there were any doubt that integralism is very much alive, it would be dispelled by the fact that so many seem desperate to kill it off.
Kevin Vallier’s book All the Kingdoms of the World is the latest attempt, and the most detailed and systematic yet. Vallier is a curious would-be assassin. He is not only affable by nature and in writing style, but strives to be fair-minded to a view he clearly finds distasteful. In that he partially succeeds, though he fails badly in the particular case of his treatment of Vermeule. And that vitiates his entire project, since he makes of his travesty of Vermeule’s position a stand-in for integralism in general.
All the same, Vallier acknowledges certain key and indeed obvious strengths of the integralist position that too many of its critics stubbornly refuse to concede. He treats integralism as a worthy opponent whose arguments need to be engaged with seriously, rather than a bogeyman to be shunned or shouted down. He raises important problems that would face any attempt to implement integralism in the near future, even if he is too quick to judge that these refute integralism tout court. In all these ways, he not only does not kill integralism but makes it stronger. Vallier’s book ought to be read by integralists and their critics alike, so that each may have a better idea of what they’re up against.
What is integralism?
What integralism is cannot properly be understood except against the background of certain fundamental Catholic doctrines concerning the human condition. We are by nature oriented to God as our last end, and to a life of virtue as essential to the realization of that end. We were by grace also offered the supernatural end of the beatific vision – an intimate knowledge of the divine essence that would not be available to us by means of our natural powers alone – and special assistance in the moral life, apart from which we would, given the limitations of our natural powers, fall into sin. Now, because of the original sin of our first parents, we lost both that special divine assistance and the possibility of the beatific vision. As a consequence, all have fallen into sin and merit damnation. But through the sacraments of the Church, the guilt of sin can be wiped away, the possibility of avoiding sin restored, and the way to the beatific vision reopened.
Human beings are also social animals, our dependence on and obligations toward others being no less natural to us than the fact that we eat, sleep, see, hear, walk, and talk. The family is the immediate manifestation of this social nature, but larger social orders, including the state, are also natural to us. The duties of the state include facilitating the moral life, including the fulfillment of our duties to God. Indeed, the same natural law that directs us to honor and obey God as individuals also directs us to do so as a corporate body, so that a just state ought to affirm at least a generic theism.
It is crucial to emphasize that nothing said in the previous paragraph has anything necessarily to do with integralism. There is nothing distinctively Catholic about a state that honors God, conceived of in terms that pagan Greek philosophers, Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike could agree on. An atheist or secular state is contra naturam, not merely contrary to the order of grace. An integralist political order would be one that is distinctively Catholic. It is one that facilitates its citizens’ realization of their supernatural end, not merely their natural ends. And it also makes use of the supernatural assistance by which our incapacity to attain even our natural ends can be remedied. In these ways, a Catholic political order integrates Church and state, the pursuit of our supernatural end with the realization of our natural purposes, the means of grace with our natural powers, and the deliverances of special divine revelation with those of natural reason.
For example, in an integralist political order, the state may make official acknowledgement of the Catholic faith as the one true religion. It may teach the Catholic faith in its public education system. It may punish blasphemy and schism. It may assist the Church in the suppression of heresy. And so on. I say it “may” do these things, because an integralist can argue that whether it ought in fact to do any of them is a matter of prudential judgment.
Elsewhere, I have drawn a distinction between “soft integralism,” “moderate integralism,” and “hard integralism.” Soft integralism holds that, though in theory the state may and ideally should favor the Church, in practice this is unlikely ever to work out well. Politics and culture, on this view, are always too messy for the ideal to be anywhere close to realizable. Hence, for the soft integralist, the Church is better off keeping integralism on the shelf as a dead letter. It is a doctrine of only theoretical interest and too hazardous to apply in practice.
Hard integralism would be the view that it is always best for the Church to try to implement integralism as far as she can, so that Catholics should strive not only to convert the world to the faith, but also to get the state to uphold the faith, by all possible means, wherever this is practically feasible. Moderate integralism, naturally, falls in between these extremes. Whereas the soft integralist thinks it is never or almost never a good idea to try practically to implement integralism, and the hard integralist thinks it is always or almost always a good idea to do so, the moderate integralist thinks that we have to go case by case. In some historical and cultural contexts, getting the state to favor the Church might be the best policy, in others it might be a very bad policy, and in yet others it might not be clear what the best approach is.
For the moderate integralist, we can’t determine a priori that any of these answers is the right one, but should treat the question as highly contingent on circumstances. Furthermore, even where some kind of integralism is feasible, it may not be best for the Church to assert all of her rights in this area. For example, it may be good for the state to acknowledge Catholicism as the true religion, but not good in practice for the state to try to suppress heresy. Or it might be good to uphold laws against blasphemy, but not laws against apostasy.
Now, Vallier is not sufficiently attentive to these distinctions. When initially characterizing integralism, he writes that “Catholic integralists say that governments must secure the earthly and heavenly common good” (p. 5). But “must secure” is too strong. An integralist need hold only that governments may facilitate the heavenly common good as well as the earthly common good. Vallier does sometimes acknowledge that there are different ways and degrees to which integralism could be implemented. But in chapters devoted to systematic treatments of how a state could transition to integralism, how stable an integralist regime would be, and whether it would be just, he tends to focus on a very hard form of integralism. More moderate integralists will complain that he has directed his fire only at the easiest target.
Arguments for integralism
Vallier is at his best when setting out the positive case for integralism, for here he is very fair-minded. The first is the argument from Catholic dogma and history. Vallier is not himself a Catholic, and, naturally, no one who is not a Catholic is going to find Catholic integralism compelling. But the question is whether one ought to accept integralism if one is a Catholic. Liberal Catholics answer in the negative, and indeed hold that the Church herself repudiated integralism with Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae. Integralists hold that the Church did no such thing, and that in fact integralism remains irreformable Catholic doctrine. Who is right?
Vallier inclines to the view that at least on this question, the integralists have the better of the argument, and indeed that the strength of the case from dogma and history “should worry non-integralist Catholics” (p. 88). This is a major concession. Since Vallier is not himself a Catholic, he has no personal stake in the outcome of this dispute. Indeed, if anything, it would serve his purposes better if he could endorse the liberal Catholic position, which is currently by far the more fashionable one.
There are several relevant considerations here. One of them is that integralism was for centuries both embodied in the practice of the Church and endorsed by the ordinary Magisterium. It was defended by theologians of the stature of Aquinas, Bellarmine, and Suárez and taught by many popes, up through the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pontificates of Pius IX, Leo XIII, and Pius X. The Fourth Lateran Council taught that the pope can depose secular authorities for failing to suppress heresy. Liberal Catholics would dismiss all such teaching as non-irreformable. But it is one thing to say that the ordinary Magisterium erred on this or that particular occasion, and quite another to claim that it consistently taught error for centuries. The latter supposition is not reconcilable with the Church’s claims about her own indefectibility (as I have argued in another context).
Then there is the fact that integralism has also been taught or implied by acts of the extraordinary Magisterium. The Council of Trent anathematized the view that the baptized should never be coerced into fulfilling their obligations as Christians. Pius IX’s Quanta Cura is held by integralists to meet the conditions for an infallible ex cathedra affirmation of key integralist claims. (See John P. Joy, Disputed Questions on Papal Infallibility, pp. 79-85.)
Needless to say, all of this is controversial. But in Vallier’s estimation, while non-integralist Catholics may propose a work-around for this or that particular magisterial statement, they cannot plausibly overcome the cumulative weight of the tradition as a whole. Meanwhile, they can in their own defense appeal only to Dignitatis Humanae. But for one thing, this document itself in fact explicitly asserts that “it leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.”1
For another thing, Pink has developed a powerful case for interpreting Dignitatis Humanae as affirming a right of religious liberty for the unbaptized, while not denying that the Church retains the right to coerce the baptized. On Pink’s interpretation, the Church has simply opted not to exercise that right in modern times. This reconciles Dignitatis Humanae with traditional teaching in a way that undermines the liberal Catholic’s case for treating integralism as superseded. Pink’s views too are controversial, but Vallier judges him to have the stronger position, even if one that is currently in disfavor in mainstream Catholic circles.
A strong case can be made, then, that at least “soft integralism” (as I have labeled it) has been irreformably taught by the Church. But why would the Church teach such a doctrine? This brings us to a second argument for integralism discussed by Vallier, which he calls the symmetry argument. The state is obligated under natural law to facilitate the realization of natural goods. But if the state ought to do that, then it ought to facilitate the realization of supernatural goods as well. For one thing, supernatural goods are vastly more important than natural goods. For another thing, supernatural goods also assist us in knowing and pursuing even natural goods. Given original sin, we cannot fulfill the natural law without grace. And modern secular states have proven themselves no longer able even to recognize the demands of the natural law, as their embrace of abortion, euthanasia, and the like illustrates.
Vallier considers, and rejects, various replies to this sort of argument, including those associated with the “new natural law theory” developed by writers like Germain Grisez and John Finnis. Here too he concedes that integralists are on stronger ground than their critics.
An especially important concession in this connection is Vallier’s acknowledgment that coercion can indeed sometimes facilitate sincere religious belief. To be sure, it cannot do so directly, and no integralist favors forcing people to convert in any event. But it can do so indirectly. For example, if heretical ideas are suppressed, fewer people will become aware of them, and thus fewer people will be tempted to adopt them. Even direct coercion can have an indirect effect on others. Consider, for example, those who first converted to Islam at the point of a sword. Whether or not they sincerely believed in it, they have had countless descendants who do sincerely believe.
The history of liberalism itself shows how effective even far less severe and indirect forms of coercion can be in determining what people believe. The regime of anti-discrimination law that has arisen in the United States since the 1960s has effected a moral revolution, such that the very idea of “discrimination” has become taboo, something that millions of people instinctively regard as a paradigm of evil. Liberals have used the law as a moral teacher, even as they decry its use to uphold traditional morality. One suspects that the reason they disfavor laws upholding religious belief is not that they think such laws don’t work, but rather that they know that they can work.
Though acknowledging the point, Vallier explicitly declines to pursue it in any depth (pp. 90-91). This is a very odd lacuna, and indeed quite damaging to his overall case. As I have said, when he turns to his critique of integralism, he focuses on a very hard version of it. And he also envisages very direct and indeed ham-fisted methods being deployed in order to realize it. Unsurprisingly, he judges the project extremely unrealistic. But what he fails to consider is how a more moderate form of integralism, using more indirect and subtle forms of coercion, might be pursued in a piecemeal way over a long period of time. And thus he fails to take on integralism in its strongest form.
Straw-manning Vermeule
It is one thing to defend integralism as a theory, and quite another to put it into practice. Vallier focuses on Pink’s views as representative of integralist theory, and on Vermeule’s as representative of integralist strategy for implementation. And while, as we have seen, he concedes many strengths to the former, he is harshly critical of the latter. Indeed, Vallier’s generally charitable and fair-minded approach to his subject almost entirely breaks down in his treatment of Vermeule.
Describing how integralism would work out if Vermeule’s strategy were followed, Vallier tells us that “the church may… direct the state to enforce its [canon] law and promulgate its teaching among the state’s baptized citizens” (p. 169). And again, “when spiritual penalties fail, the church directs the state to coerce on its behalf…[states] may punish anyone who violates natural law and penalize the baptized for breaking canon law” (p. 174).
How would it do so? “An integralist state,” says Vallier, “will use mass surveillance… [to] suppress dissent” (p. 150). Specifically, “new integralist states will identify heretics and discourage heresy with digital technology. Chinese-level tactics could prove effective” and such states “could punish the most dangerous heretics – make examples of them” (p. 148). Depending on the stubbornness of such heretics, “modern heresy trials may require severe punishments to stop heresy” (p. 149). But this likely won’t be enough. If states ignore the Church, then “following Lateran IV, the church could claim conciliar authority to depose heretical rulers” (p. 193). Indeed, “unless the church regains military power, monarchs will ignore church directives. Prime ministers more so” (p. 150).
Nor is it Catholics alone who will face coercive measures. So as to prevent Catholics from being drawn away from the faith, “integralists… will feel pressure to segregate religiously diverse populations” (p. 154). Moreover, since they are baptized, “Protestants could face heresy charges” (p. 153). Indeed, claims Vallier, “according to integralism, Black Protestant churches have no right to exist” and “the state must decide whether to declare Black Protestant churches criminal organizations” (ibid.). And Vallier adds that “we should not assume that an integralist regime will treat Jews well” (ibid.).
Though this imagined integralist regime couldn’t be further from the world as it now exists, Vallier insists that “we must assess Vermeule’s plan as beginning from social conditions like ours” with a “culture [that] will probably remain inclined toward personal liberty and social equality” (p. 137). So, how could Vermeule and company hope to bring an integralist order about in such an unwelcoming cultural context? Vallier claims that “integralist strategists want a revolution” (p. 122), which will proceed by way of “five transition stages: party capture, state capture, state stabilization, church capture, and church-state integration” (p. 118). The history of how “Marxist parties” operated provides an analogy for understanding how an integralist movement would proceed (p. 132).
Hence, Vallier tells us, establishing an integralist order “probably requires abolishing democracy” (p. 136). And whether they like it or not, in order to bring their desired regime about, integralists “must use violence in ways that the Catholic Church rejects” (p. 137). Their “strategy might be aptly described as Thomism-Leninism” (p. 138). It may require, among other extreme measures, “ultra-loyal troops [to] subdue career military officials. (Hitler’s SS springs to mind)” and “youth programs to increase loyalty to their leader. (Hitler Youth springs to mind)” (p. 146). The end result is bound to include “human rights violations” and “secret police” (pp. 151-52), along with “leadership purges, replete with execution, torture, and show trials. A one-party state” (p. 147). Vallier writes:
Fascist and communist states imprisoned and executed political enemies. They controlled media, spread propaganda, indoctrinated children, subdued the military, and expelled competing factions. Integralists must follow the path forged by other ideocrats. (p. 157)
In short, alleges Vallier, “Vermeule’s integration from within requires massive violence” (p. 239). The reader might be wondering exactly where Vermeule sets out this extreme, bloodthirsty, and indeed unhinged program for action. The answer, as those who have read his work know, is that Vermeule nowhere says anything remotely like this. Indeed, Vallier admits that in fact “Vermeule wants to avoid coercion” and “says little about how hard integralists should fight for the ideal” (pp. 134-35).
Most of what Vallier describes is not anything Vermeule himself actually says, but only what Vallier claims would have to be done in order to realize Vermeule’s vision. The trouble is that Vallier tends casually to slide back and forth between giving quotes from Vermeule and setting out Vallier’s own fanciful scenarios for implementation. The actual quotes are never remotely as extreme as Vallier’s imagined schemes, but the false impression given by this procedure is that Vermeule has somewhere advocated the harrowing plan Vallier describes.
Hence, from Vallier’s discussion, one would think that Vermeule’s American Affairs essay “Integration from Within” is a revolutionary manifesto for instituting a Catholic integralist state. In reality, the word “integralism” is not used in that essay at all, and Catholicism is mentioned only once, in a footnote. What the essay is actually about is how, as liberalism crumbles, “nonliberal actors” and “nonliberal parties” in general should not retreat into a “Benedict Option”-style localism and abandon the central institutions of the state. Rather, they should enter these institutions and use them, to the extent they can, to shore up their nonliberal conception of the good, just as liberals have used them to try to implement their own vision of the good.
What does that amount to? Vermeule explicitly rejects any suggestion of somehow recreating a medieval political order in the context of modern America, writing that “there can be no return to the integrated regime of the thirteenth century, whatever its attractions.” Indeed, he explicitly eschews any grandiose positive political program, revolutionary or otherwise. “For the foreseeable future,” he writes, “the problem will be to mitigate the spasmodic, but compulsive and repetitive, aggression of the decaying liberal state against its perceived competitors.” In this way, Vermeule says, we may “shorten and lessen the birth-pangs of liberalism’s successor.” But rather than setting out any sort of aggressive plan to bring about that successor, Vermeule emphasizes that nonliberals must for the foreseeable future play defense rather than offense:
[They] mainly attempt to ensure the survival of their faith communities in an interim age of exile and dispossession. They do not evangelize or preach with a view to bringing about the birth of an entirely new regime, from within the old. They mitigate the long defeat for those who become targets of the regime in liberalism’s twilight era, and this will surely have to be the main aim for some time to come.
Nor, even in the long term, does Vermeule propose anything like the concrete agenda Vallier attributes to him, averring instead that the “postliberal future [is] of uncertain shape.” And Vermeule explicitly says too that “it would be wrong to conclude that integration from within is a matter of coercion, as opposed to persuasion and conversion.” It is true that he immediately goes on to say that “the distinction is so fragile as to be nearly useless.” Vallier gives the impression that this might open to the door to violence after all. But one need only read on in the paragraph to learn what Vermeule actually has in mind, when he writes that “we have learned from behavioral economics that agents with administrative control over default rules may nudge whole populations in desirable directions, in an exercise of ‘soft paternalism.’” In other words, the “coercion” Vermeule compares to “persuasion and conversion” has nothing at all to do with the secret police and heresy trials of Vallier’s fantasies. It has instead to do with mild interventions of the kind Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein describe in their (perfectly mainstream liberal) book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness.
Vermeule’s other writings too present nothing close to the program Vallier attributes to him. For example, in Vermeule’s First Things essay “A Christian Strategy,” he proposes the opposite of the “party capture” strategy imagined by Vallier, writing that:
The Church… must stand detached from all subsidiary political commitments, willing to enter into flexible alliances of convenience with any of the parties, institutions, and groups that jostle under the canopy of the liberal imperium.
Instead of party capture, much less state capture, “the main proximate short-run goal must be largely one of survival.” Vermeule continues:
Strategically, the Church can be flexible as necessary on all dimensions save one – the gospel teaching and sacramental practice of the magisterium… Like Paul, in the service of the universal Gospel, the Church can be “all things to all men,” politically speaking, precisely because political forms are merely possible means for carrying the core mission into execution. From the Church’s standpoint, many (although not all) political forms lie within the space of the determination – certainly a far broader range of political forms than liberalism permits…
Christians will always have many different options for political engagement. In some or other circumstances, one or another of them will prove best in the light of prudential judgment; none has any logical or theological priority.
What could be further from the ruthlessly doctrinaire and violent “Thomist-Leninist” revolutionary program Vallier absurdly attributes to Vermeule?
Vallier admits: “I may not synthesize Vermeule’s work as he would” (p. 123). That is putting it mildly – much, much too mildly. The reality is that Vallier badly misrepresents Vermeule, to the point of attributing to him nearly the opposite of what he actually says. I don’t think Vallier does this intentionally. I think that, like other liberals, he is so utterly hypnotized by the fear of fascist and communist bogeymen that he thinks they simply must be lurking behind the veneer of even the most genteel and learned non-liberal thinkers. Hence he hunts for proof-texts that will reveal their presence, and when he cannot see them there on the page, supposes that they must be lurking between the lines.
The failure of anti-integralism
There is not much left to Vallier’s case against integralism in the absence of this gigantic straw man. He has little difficulty showing that the “Thomism-Leninism” he attributes to integralists cannot plausibly be realized under contemporary circumstances, would not last long if it were realized, and would require immoral means if tried. But since no integralist writer I know of is committed to such a preposterous near-term project, the point is neither here nor there.
All the same, there no doubt are overenthusiastic readers of Pink, Vermeule, and other integralist authors who have much more unrealistic ambitions, and entertain the fantasy that integralism might be a workable platform in current politics. They may benefit from Vallier’s exhaustive survey of the problems that would face such a program. A realistic integralism may presuppose cultural circumstances as different from ours as the days of Constantine or Charlemagne were different from the days of St. Paul.
A further objection Vallier raises that is worth addressing is his suggestion that there is an inconsistency between allowing religious liberty for the unbaptized (per Dignitatis Humanae) but not for the baptized. He denies that baptism could be a “moral transformer” that makes just an otherwise unjust act of coercion vis-à-vis religion (pp. 207), opining that “it seems strange that states cannot force people into the faith but can make them remain in it, and odder still to think baptism makes the difference” (p. 208).
One problem with this is that in fact it is not strange at all, but extremely common, for there to be circumstances that remove the need for a governing authority to seek consent. You can’t be forced to marry, but if you do marry, you take on certain obligations you can be forced to live up to. You can’t be forced to have children, but if you do have them, you can be forced to provide for them. You can’t be forced to become a citizen, but if you do become one, you can be drafted into the military or forced to pay taxes. And so on.
All of these examples involve initial consent, and such consent can indeed be a precondition of some obligations. But not all of them, which brings us to a deeper point. Some obligations we have just as a matter of natural law, whether or not we consent to them. For the ends toward which our nature directs us are ultimately what determine the obligations, and we do not choose those ends. Now, in Catholic theology, baptism entails an ontological change in us by which we come to be directed to a supernatural end, and it does so of its very nature, not because we consent to it. Hence, just as we are obligated to pursue the ends set for us by nature, despite our not having consented to them, so too are we obligated to pursue the supernatural end that follows upon baptism, whether or not we have consented to it.
Though he does not make much of it in the text of the book, Vallier’s title, All the Kingdoms of the World, insinuates that integralists are tempted by the lure of worldly power, with which Satan famously tried in vain to tempt Christ. This is an unjust criticism, and a superficial one. For one thing, it is not their own glory that integralists seek to advance, but Christ’s. Criticize this motivation as you will, it cannot be denied that the dishonor to Christ they see in the repudiation of integralism has been a longstanding theme of integralist argumentation. And from the integralist point of view, if we are going to play the proof-text game, a scriptural text that might with greater justice characterize the mindset of Christian liberals like Vallier would be the cry of Christ’s persecutors in John 19:15: “We have no king but Caesar!”
Of course, Christ has no need of our honor. But that brings us to another point. We have need of him, and since human beings are by nature social animals, we need him as societies and not merely as individuals. To pretend that social affairs can go well enough without the influence of the sacramental life of the Church smacks of Pelagianism.
Again, that is not to dismiss Vallier’s point that, however attractive in theory, integralism has no realistic practical prospects for the foreseeable future. Then again, the world has changed so very radically even in just the last fifty years or so that it would be foolish for anyone to predict with confidence what it might look like fifty or a hundred years from now. In any event, the Church, as they say, thinks in centuries.
Edward Feser is a writer and philosopher living in Los Angeles. He teaches philosophy at Pasadena City College.
- Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae, 1. ↩︎
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