- adano on Snorkeling in Scripture: Joshua Sears on Why Latter-day Saints Need Study Bibles: “I’ve enjoyed my Zondervan NRSV study Bible. I wish I were equipped to evaluate it compared to the ones mentioned here.” Dec 15, 12:33
- on Catholic Integralism and the Constitution: “Stephen, Thank you for your kind words. I do want to clarify that, though I move in similar currents, I do not speak as a postliberal and definitely not as a Catholic integralist. I agree with a lot of their descriptions of our current condition, but a very common postliberal belief is that this state of affairs was always inevitable, that the logic and incentives of liberalism would lead us inexorably here one way or another. I don’t think that’s true, my acquaintance with the historical record leads me to believe that there was a lot more contingency involved than pop-postliberal theory would acknowledge. I’m acknowledge that mass democracy imposes an incentive structure that inhibits solutions to a lot of our problems, but I’ve not thrown in the towel. I admire the Founders and don’t want to toss their achievements aside, and I have no plans to provoke the wrath of God by setting up a king here. Those motivations, though, are themselves not very “liberal” – they come from a love of historical tradition and religion. The more liberalism deconstructs those sources of value, the more it saws off its own branch. Postliberals can be critical of the Constitution but not universally so – like every ideology, there are mild and extreme strains. Vermeule, for instance, is not really critical of the Constitution as a whole, though he’s criticized this-or-that clause. Rather, he’s critical of the common-law juridical tradition that controls our Constitution’s interpretation. We inherited that from the English. Roman law (also called “civil law”), in contrast, dominates the jurisprudence of the European continent. The difference boils down to precedent. In Anglo-American common-law, precedent is entitled to deference from the Court. In Roman law, the text of the law is what matters, and precedent is only an indicator of where the Court might go – they are free to judge each case based on the law, the merits, and their conception of the common good without the interpretive strictures of precedent. Vermeule prefers this, since it allows the government to flex a little with the times and makes the Constitution more of a “living document” (there’s some horseshoe theory for ya). Of course, Vermeule’s ideas about how we should flex are more “the Due Process Clause only guarantees whatever process the legislature says is due” and less “the Privileges and Immunities Clause guarantees the ERA.” If you’ve ever encountered the term “common-good constitutionalism,” that’s Vermeule’s term for what he advocates. That’s about as postliberal as you can get at Harvard Law. This strain of postliberalism is the strongest, I think. Even a lot of Catholic integralists want Catholicism to be the religion of the state governments – which the federal Constitution does permit, or at least did at the beginning, though most state constitutions do not. A state religion of all fifty states will become functionally the religion of the feds, after all. I don’t see a whole lot of appetite for tossing out the Founding Charter even among the integralists – the Venn Diagram of integralists and monarchists is far from a perfect circle. However, there is a LOT of Supreme Court revisionism, so to speak. Basically the Constitution is valuable as a Schelling point, a central organizing point to keep the country together, as long as we reinterpret it pretty aggressively in some ways. However, I would be very remiss if I did not address the monarchists in the room – I don’t want to sanewash. These guys are overwhelmingly extremely online and young, the archetype we’ve been discussing here. They’re mostly acolytes of Curtis Yarvin, an Internet-famous political theorist who was recently profiled by the New Yorker. There’s also a host of online influencer-philosophers who emphasize vitalism, physical-fitness-as-moral-signifier, hereditarianism about IQ, and a few other positions that also tend towards the same principle: hierarchy as a conferral of moral validity. If you’ve ever heard the names Bronze Age Pervert or Raw Egg Nationalist – this is what we’re talking about. Their general idea is that the United States and other liberal societies has coasted on cultural capital from the Before Times – cultural intuitions about social organization from a pre-liberal age that had not yet been deconstructed by egalitarianism – but the nature of egalitarianism eventually interrogates and deconstructs all value judgments and social hierarchies no matter their function, collapsing all into the “oppressed v. oppressor” dynamic of critical theory. Egalitarianism in their thought has all the function of an autoimmune disorder. Therefore the end of liberalism can be seen from the beginning and “globohomo” was written into the DNA. As part of that DNA the Constitution is an obstacle for the most part, though I’ve never seen a coherent plan for what would come next from this group – they don’t think they can predict what comes next and are therefore satisfied with ushering it into being and vanquishing the devil they know. When asked they mostly quote their midcentury luminary Julius Evola: “ride the tiger.” Groyperism, the personal following of Nick J. Fuentes, is a thing all its own. It is a cult of personality and a collection of behavioral tics, not an ideology with substance (I rather dislike them and that will come through here.) A lot of the more intellectual postliberals make fun of them, especially after Charlie Kirk was murdered and Nick Fuentes telegraphed that he was going to try to fill Kirk’s vacated niche. Fuentes is a troll, a talented streamer and entertainer to be sure, but a troll. He and Kirk had a sort of civil war for the soul of the youth which Kirk was winning handily before his assassination. Fuentes is all about provocation for its own sake, and that is his ideology: the modern world sucks and is upheld by a set of moral codes, therefore break those codes to break the spell. To be quite honest, Fuentes and the groypers are spiritual heirs of punk. Whereas the punk scene violated taboos against emo presentation and Satanism, the continuing liberalization of society removed all the taboos for them to violate…except for the taboos against Nazism and ethnic bigotry, the windmills against which they joust. However, provocateurs generally aren’t good at voter outreach, executive staffing, or getting favors done. Kirk was always much better at that, which is why the President of the United States got a football stadium for his funeral and Fuentes streams from a basement. The whole thing is gross, but I’m not as worried about it as I am the monarchists – Fuentes’ actions after Kirk’s murder seem to have burned his bridges with the gatekeepers of the actual Republican Party. Kirk was a generational talent at organizing, communicating, recruitment, and building bridges within the coalition, and he was deeply beloved by mostly everybody with any connection to the party structure. Fuentes is not, and his presumption has earned him great ire. Without him, there’s really nothing to groyperism.” Dec 15, 11:41
- on Snorkeling in Scripture: Joshua Sears on Why Latter-day Saints Need Study Bibles: “Thank you! I guess I’ll reup when it comes out” Dec 15, 09:36
- on Catholic Integralism and the Constitution: “To build off of Hoosier’s excellent description, another piece of the puzzle is that a lot of younger conservative people think that the Constitution has already been subordinated to a religious-political ideology for a while. Christopher Caldwell argues in his book “Age of Entitlement” that the 1964 Civil Rights Act basically created a second Constitution with a mandate to liberate every last racial or sexual minority from any and all oppression. His analysis has some bite – since the 60s, the Supreme Court has used the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to conjure up constitutionally protected rights out of whole cloth (abortion, contraceptives, same sex marriage etc.) You can argue about whether those are good or bad – but having them imposed via judicial fiat under the aegis of “the Constitution” made a lot of people think they were being conned. If “the Constitution” just means advancing whatever the bleeding edge of progressivism is at any given time then conservative people are going to wonder what the point of it is. There’s also kind of a prisoners dilemma problem here. Both major political parties in America seem fine with violating constitutional and governmental norms when they have something to gain from it, but turning around and waving the constitution like a bloody shirt when it’s done to them. I think seeing “the Constitution” deployed that cynically is going to make a lot of people view it as just another tool that’s subordinate to their actual religious or political aims.” Dec 15, 09:00
- on Catholic Integralism and the Constitution: “I know the OP is about Catholic Integralism, but I want to add a word about Mormon Integralism. I’m the not-so-recent past, I heard talk among Latter-day Saints about how wonderful a theocracy would be, but I always disagreed. The idea of an unelected Mormon mayor and governor and so forth is scary to me. Mormons, generally speaking, and using a church model, absolutely do not know how to govern a community — running a town like a ward and a state like a stake would be a dictatorship of the “elite” and would not be in the public interest.” Dec 15, 08:32
- on Catholic Integralism and the Constitution: “In terms of your last comment, Hoosier, I did see a lot of chatter a couple of weeks ago of an article claiming that a high percentage of young GOP inters and staffers (40%?) were “Groipers.” I know you know this, but for those less familiar, Groipers are those with similar ideologies to Fuentes. Is that that article you’re referring to? Again, my understanding is that while Fuentes does promote a form of integralism, he has a special brand of while supremacist and chauvinism that I’m guessing isn’t the view of all integralists (but I don’t know all that much). One way or another, the claims about highish numbers of Groiper attitudes among GOP inters and staffers IS concerning. The commentary I watched that discussed those claims asserted the numbers were really under 10%, but what do I know? It’s a concerning ideology for many reasons and it’s spread is definitely worrying.” Dec 15, 06:46
- on Catholic Integralism and the Constitution: “My initial reaction was to say “don’t worry, this is very much a minority position,” but as Hoosier has accurately pointed out it’s much stronger among young people than among old people like me. My take is that younger people today have correctly noted that our current system isn’t really working for them the way they were promised. They also haven’t been particularly well educated about how our constitution was designed to work, so they often associate this current failing system with “democracy” or “capitalism”. As a result, we see young people embracing socialism on the “left” or things like this Catholic Integralism on the right.” Dec 15, 06:45
- on Catholic Integralism and the Constitution: “Yes, thanks for your explanations, Hoosier, and my apologies if I don’t adequately respond to all of what you said. I do understand that people your age are facing a lot of worries, and you make a good point about our national disconnection. And even though the nation and our church makes a big deal of the constitution, I’m certainly open to debating its merits (if that is what you are saying). My understanding is that Integralists can be quite critical of the constitution. There’s the quote attributed to Churchill, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” So yes, I open to discussing concerns about the constitution, and am well aware of concerns about disintegration of our social connections. But having studied a lot of history, I think it’s quite clear that claims to fixing all our problems through Catholicism as the national church is pretty absurd (not sure if that’s what you’re saying or not, but my understanding is that integralists are). Very few Americans want that so it could only be imposed by a coup which sounds pretty bad. More Protestants than Catholics here, so that would truly be tyranny, and we’ve got plenty of history of awful Catholic/Protestant wars and violence that don’t look at all appealing to return to. That said, I do very much appreciate the concerns you expressed. We do have legit problems and as bishop I would quote DC 45:68-69 to my ward a lot when discussing our national and world troubles. I DO believe we have a wonderful church and community (https://www.timesandseasons.org/index.php/2024/03/a-secular-case-for-the-church/) and I do believe it is wise to take refuge among the saints and in Zion, even if only metaphorically, as we face these difficulties. I DO NOT think the answer is to chuck the constitution and to impose Catholic integralism.” Dec 15, 06:35
- on Catholic Integralism and the Constitution: “Jonathan: pleased to be of service. I travel in the parts of the Internet where this stuff is discussed and I figured I might as well report on what I’ve seen. I’ll state that, among the politically active Gen Zers that I know personally, I don’t know of any integralists. However, the circle of “who I know” is not that big (I live in a mid-size Midwestern city and am not the most sociable besides) and Online Integralism (TM) has been seen coming from a lot of people on the first rung of the D.C. ladder – junior congressonial staffers, social media handlers, etc. The journalist Rod Dreher had a piece out the other week arguing that up to half of Republican staffers in D.C. were some variety of integralist or other postliberal (most other varieties of postliberal are worse, as you might imagine), but a bunch of rebuttals were written and Discourse Ensued and estimates seemed to settle somewhere around 20-30%. Alarming, but not necessarily apocalyptic in my view. ICOAY: I’m only your friendly neighborhood eyewitness. Like I said, I don’t have my prescriptions figured out. I’m sympathetic to a lot of the descriptive conclusions of the postliberals but I think they do miss pretty important things here and there. There’s way too much determinism, specifically that this state of political affairs was baked into liberalism from the start. I don’t think that’s a defensible conclusion. But I am sympathetic to the idea that America’s national identity is precarious. The national mythos is being ruthlessly deconstructed more or less everywhere and has been for the better part of a decade. Meanwhile, we’ve had a lot of immigration. Our history as the much-memed “nation of immigrants” has been facilitated by nation-making traumas that fuse each wave of immigrants into the national body with a new and agglomerative mythos – the Civil War with the north Atlantic Irish and midwestern Germans and the World Wars with the Ellis Island cohorts. Those two wars also featured substantial expansions of the federal government. At this point I don’t know if we have another national bonding-trauma in us, there isn’t any more room for the federal government to grow, and the rising left-counterpart to postliberalism (decolonial theory) is all about actively undermining each stage of that national mythos. So I don’t really know how to handle, frankly, the question of what we are now. “Subjects of Washington D.C.” seems about right, and I doubt people will be willing to sacrifice for that at the necessary scale in times of war or austerity. Nations that don’t earn sacrifice will wither.” Dec 14, 21:52
- on Snorkeling in Scripture: Joshua Sears on Why Latter-day Saints Need Study Bibles: “RL, the New Oxford Annotated Bible would have made the list except that I was trying to be concise. That one and the SBL one (which is a rebranding of what in previous editions was called the HarperCollins study Bible) are similar in what they do and who their audience is. In addition, the sixth edition of the Oxford Bible is coming out in May 2026, so I would advise people to hold off a few more months and get that one.” Dec 14, 21:21
