The Catholic Integralism and the Constitution

Stephen Fleming

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So lately I’ve been noticing some rhetoric on the right that seems at odds with what had been more standard claims to a great devotion to the constitution. I’m probably not as linked into these networks as many others, so I’m curious what additional information T&S readers may know.

I’d heard some rhetoric like the “Flight 93” concept and others, but was particularly struck by the popular clip of Medhi Hassan debating young conservatives and the statements made by a young while Catholic man. He said he didn’t mind being called a Fascist, that he loved Francisco Franco as the ideal ruler, and wanted to get American law aligned with Catholic standards including imposing blasphemy laws.

This came across as an odd combination to me.

Steve Bannon’s continual insistence on Trump serving a third term seemed equally adrift from the constitution and I was interested to learn that Bannon is a conservative Catholic. To be clear, me noting this trend isn’t a critique of Catholicism as a whole for which I have a lot of admiration. Clearly Catholics Integralists only form a portion of American Catholics (I have no idea what portion).

In this context, I was particularly struck by a claim from Mike Cosper on the Dispatch. Cosper, a former Protestant minister, was speaking with a Protestant son a friend who attends Columbia University, and Cosper expressed to the kid his condolences over the difficulties a conservative religious kid would going to school there (around minute 16).

“It is but not for the reason that you think,” the student responded. “When I go to the young conservative gatherings on this campus, it’s full of hardcore monarchists, Catholic Integralists; these people who are essentially saying that democracy was a mistake.”

I first heard the term “Catholic Integralism” from my dad as we were talking about these issues. Wikipedia defines it as “the principle that the Catholic faith should be the basis of public law and public policy within civil society.”

Put another way, the sense I’m getting from some of these Integral Catholics is the belief that how they interpret Catholic policy should the a highest political and legal rule, higher than the constitution. I wonder if such thinking motivates Bannon’s insistence on Trump’s third term.

Right after that statement from Cosper, he notes that such thinking “draws people into the influence of Nick Fuentes,” and Fuentes seems to make abundant references to his Catholic devotion and to also thinking in terms of Catholic Integralism. I know Fuentes is a hot topic recently, and again, I’m not an expert, but Cosper and the Dispatch host calling Fuentes a Neo-Nazi seems accurate.

Fuentes is his own topic, but the focus of this post is the interest and concern of a rise of a form of political thought among Americans who seem to want to subordinate the constitution to their own religious-political ideology. Again I’m thinking of Bannon’s insistence of Trump’s third term.

Such ideas becoming more popular seems particularly concerning and make me think of our white horse prophecy of the constitution hanging by a thread. I don’t mean to sound alarmist, but in the volatile times we seem to be in, such a trend isn’t encouraging.

Just to make a more explicit Mormon connection, I’ll note Jonathan Rouch’s recent Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Promises with Democracy who highlights President Oaks’s statements (minute 12) on the importance of political compromise in a pluralistic society. Our constitution may indeed need saving and President Oaks is in a remarkable position.

Comments

6 responses to “The Catholic Integralism and the Constitution”

  1. Stephen C.

    For what it’s worth, I know two Catholic integrationalists, but in both cases it’s not that they believe we should be a Catholic theocracy where political power is out in the hands of the bishops, but rather that the state should have Catholicism as the official church like the Church of England is in the UK. I’m obviously against both forms, but the latter version isn’t limited to people with crusader tattoos. Also, Bannon, IIRC, is a Straussian, so my bet would be that his Catholicism stems from him seeing Catholicism as a necessary myth for the masses more than any actual spiritual beliefs.

  2. Stephen Fleming

    Thanks for the input, Stephen. I guess my particular interest is what looks to me like increasing rhetoric on the right of at least giving lip service to getting around law and the constitution for a greater religious good.

    And having “Catholicism as the official church like the Church of England is in the UK” is, of course, a total violation of the constitution, bringing up the question of is that simply a pie-in-the-sky fantasy or a political objective some are working toward? I get the sense that Bannon and Fuentes wouldn’t mind pushing that objective, and Cosper claiming to see a rise a such thinking among young Christian conservatives seems alarming.

  3. Hoosier

    I tried to write a comment, and it turned into an essay, so I will post it in three parts.

    I guess I’ll tip my hand with how much I know about these largely online subcultures that are entering the “real” world through the youth. (“Real” world vs. the Internet seems like a false dichotomy these days.) I wouldn’t call myself a youth necessarily but I am a conservative under 30 and thus am part of the demographic being discussed here, with exposure to lots of similar pressures. Catholic integralism is by no means a majority of conservative youth, but it is best analyzed as an expression of a broader movement which frankly is, and will not go away any time soon. As they say, if you want to understand a man’s views, look at the world when he was 20. I’ll discuss the broader movement then how Catholic integralism fits into it. You’ll be able to tell, but I’ll say it straight out – I’m sympathetic to the diagnoses and descriptions of this school of thought though I don’t completely agree. Don’t ask me for a solution, I haven’t figured out my prescriptions yet.

    Catholic integralism rises out of general Gen-Z malaise. I’m on the older edge of Gen Z and I don’t remember a world before 9/11. I don’t think you need me to re-narrate the Gen Z malaise, you’ve probably heard it a lot. Right or wrong, it is a sociological reality. Trust in the U.S. government is at a low all around, and the mood is generally pessimistic. The precise nature of the failures is often different depending on which side of the political aisle the Gen Z’er comes from, but the dissatisfaction is pretty general. Faith in progress, as it were, has broken down. As a rule we think the current system – whether you call it capitalism, democracy, managerialism, whatever – gets in its own way when it comes to fixing a lot of problems, and we doubt it ever will. I have not met a single Zoomer who, when asked, thinks that he or she will ever see a cent of Social Security money. The deficit will never shrink. The price of apartments or college will never go down in any durable way. The factories will not come back. The strain of optimism that characterized the Kennedys, Reagan, and a lot of the Cold War is pretty much gone. You can see how this would open people up to ideas previously beyond the pale.

    Among the nerdy, wonky, and government-oriented (plus those inclined to deterministic thinking), there has been a resurgence – often implicit but also often stated up front – of a cyclical view of history vs. the progressive view. The progressive view is the ideology of Aaron Sorkin screenplays – society lurches towards refinement, the arc of history is long but bends towards justice – these are crude restatements of a more deserving tradition of political thought, but they capture at least the way the integralists think about it. The end of politics (“end” as both “goal” and “final state”) is to build and refine a state that increasingly approximates and instantiates a deontologically good set of values. The cyclical view, in contrast, holds that there can be no permanent political regime so long as the raw material of politics is humanity; every type of governing system will have flaws, blind spots, transcription errors which will eventually overwhelm it and lead to its collapse into something mechanically different. The death of regimes is as unavoidable as that of people, and a core element of politics is succession planning. You can see why this belief would really break from the postwar political dialogue in America, which was in many ways captured by the eschatological competition between the United States and Soviet Union. Progress was presumed, it was just a question of direction – this basic schema underlay the rhetoric of communism, the civil rights movement, and Reaganism alike. Doing away with that presumption – thinking of states in terms of evolution and adaptation as opposed to progress – will introduce a lot of weirdness into American politics.

    1/3

  4. Hoosier

    If the death of the state is assumed, though, what does that do to the goals of politics? This leads us to classical political theorizing. The conception of the “cycle of regimes” find its fullest classical expression in Polybius, who famously illustrated the cycle of regimes with reference to the Greek city states that cycled between periods of more-or-less popular rule, oligarchy, and dictatorship. However, throughout it all it remained the same city, the same physical place and the same ethnos. Another classic example is the the Roman Republic -> Principate –> post-Crisis of the Third Century empire –> Byzantines. The government of Justinian I was different from the government of the Julio-Claudians which was closer-to-but-still-different-from the government of the Scipiones, but there was a degree of symbolic continuity. There was a Roman state-meme that survived from the 700s BC to 1453 AD.

    The continuity of these state-memes through the cycle of regimes is enabled by a symbolic order beyond the mere function of the government – in the Greek city-states it was the community of the polis, in Rome it was the historic imagery and traditions of the Roman Republic. These symbolic orders survived wars beyond number, plagues, mass religious conversions, and changes in both the identity and function of the rulers. By providing an element of continuity, they even smoothed the inevitable transition of regimes, which becomes a core concern of politics under a cyclical view of history.

    This leads us to the real power behind the movement, of which Catholic integralism is only an aspect: postliberalism.

    The problem with modern liberal states, in the postliberal telling, is that they are explicitly against the sort of symbolic order that survives the decay and fall of a specific regime. The state will not establish such an order and anti-discrimination law prevents a non-governmental symbolic order from emerging. There is, and can be, no common religion or metaphysics enforced among the people. There is, and can be, no ideology that underwrites being a member of the “res publica” – even the conventional American civic religion is actively undermined by contemporary trends in journalism and education. The closest thing to it is the rainbow-colored internationalist ideology of the upper class, which is often referred to by the name “globohomo.” This name is partially a jape at LGBTQ+ (the liberation of whom is fundamental to the ideology) and partially an etymological reference to “homo” meaning “same” – a flattened world of sameness, nondistinction, perfect fluidity, fungibility, and homogeneity. Postliberals will point to the phenomena of supply-chain globalization and mass immigration powered by liberal egalitarianism and capitalist penny-pinching – liberal government has taken away any sense of being a people unified by common descent, language, or experience and replaced it with mere subjection to the same sovereign government. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people…but which people and what does it even mean to be that people? The formal egalitarianism and neutrality of the government allows for no overarching metaphysics, creed, or set of traditions. The only unifying factor is the institution of government itself. What was once government for the people has become people of the government. You can’t “become an American” by, like, revering the Founding Fathers or the Greatest Generation or something – we’d have to denaturalize most sociology and history departments. To be American these days is to be subject to Washington D.C. and no more.

    2/3

  5. Hoosier

    Under such circumstances, American constitutionalism loses its appeal. Postliberals despair of being able to solve the Social Security crisis, the birthrate crisis (but I repeat myself), the debt crisis, our manufacturing (and therefore military) deficits wrt China, the possible AI employment crisis, and a host of others, by democratic means. In any case, they say, the tendency of modern America is to abandon democratic governance anyway. It can generally be agreed that Congress doesn’t do anything and the president rules by executive order, whether Obama or Trump. Beyond that, though, there’s not really a feeling of identification with the government – even though we can vote for it, it is still an “other.” It’s just too big, it covers too many people, it takes on a logic of its own that doesn’t connect with your concerns. To the young postliberal the liberal arrangement of society is failing and as a final middle-finger it has destroyed the symbolic orders that might have allowed us to materially change the construction of our government while retaining a sense of being something other than a faceless subject. If you’re going to be a faceless subject of an elective monarchy, you’re two-thirds of the way to the Holy Roman Empire anyway.

    For postliberals seeking a replacement, then, Catholic integralism is probably the best-articulated alternative to liberal modernity without repeating the midcentury horrors of communism. The contemporary revival of Catholic integralism finds its scholarly expression in the works of legal and political scholars Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, respectively of the Notre Dame University Department of Political Science and Harvard University School of Law. Their works will give a good introduction to the motivation and theory behind Catholic integralism. The movement is not driven by any particular grace or charism of the Catholic Church. It’s not that Catholicism is winning the youth over, it’s rather that the throne-and-altar political theology of traditionalist Catholicism offers the best alternative symbolic structure to ground the authority of the state. If you have it as a central pole, a central symbolic structure that makes affirmative statements about what it means to belong to the polis, then maybe you can use that to reconstruct a democracy that solves some of these problems. Hillsdale College, famously a school for wonkish evangelical conservatives in southern Michigan, is more or less a Catholic baptistry at this point.

    Integralism is not a majority even among young conservatives, I would say, but it is prominent and ascendant, and most of the opposition to it is not out of love for liberalism but rather an unwillingness to go to that extreme.

    3/3

  6. I comment once a year

    I have to say that this description of the case for Catholic integralism scares me more than anything I’ve read on this blog for a long time. I thought MAGA was bad. This sounds so much worse to me.

    I am sure that you mean well, Hoosier, but what you just described sounds like a con job for unscrupulous young turks to burn everything in the name of symbolic [literally anything] so they can rule over the ashes. It also sounds like a great way to justify all manner of -ites. Like the people behind this want to move directly to 3 Ne 7:14 without bothering with the in-between steps.

    Liberal democracy is the best we’re going to get until we love each other enough to build Zion. It may eventually fail, but a Christian dictatorship, no matter how well meaning, will be awful and terrifying. But the very worst part is that it will push people away from actually following Christ more than anything else.

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