Neo-Integralism Is Not Inevitable

In the latest issue of the magazine, Ave Maria University professor James M. Patterson has a marvelous essay against “neo-integralist” Catholics. They seek “to revive the model of church–state relations that some in the Catholic Church favored for centuries before the Second Vatican Council,” in which “the state directly established Catholicism as the national religion and provided the church with resources to help it operate schools, hospitals, and other public institutions,” as Patterson puts it.

Among the many problems with neo-integralism, Patterson identifies one of the more pernicious ones. Citing the work of political scientist James Ceasar, he notes that American political thought has tended to rest on one of three foundations: nature, History, and religion. Of the three, religion seems the most obvious choice for what neo-integralists would choose as their base. But, as Patterson notes, this is not the case. Instead, their belief, drawing from explicitly reactionary sources, in the inevitable triumph of their worldview is a kind of historical determinism. Patterson explains:

For neo-integralists, . . . religion is not a foundation but the source of the expertise that would enable them to master the historical moment and usher in the new age. As eugenics was to early progressives, a peculiar reading of Catholic theology is to the neo-integralists.

Neo-integralists have a political foundation in History, but their History is not progressive. It is reactionary. For most people, the meaning of “reactionary” is vague: “really, really conservative” or, perhaps, a big word for “fascist.” Neither understanding is entirely wrong, but neither is quite right. Although the reactionary philosophy of History has a past in America, with advocates such as Father Charles Coughlin and Triumph magazine, it has played a much greater role in the politics of Europe and Latin America, from the French Revolution through the end of the Second World War.

It is here that we discover the cause of the curious combination of social conservatism and statism. Reactionary History stipulates that the French revolutionaries promised consequence-free libertinism, which, when achieved, would plunge societies into chaos. For salvation, people would then look to the kings and clergy they once massacred. The kings and clergy would graciously return to build an even better monarchical regime than the one that the revolutionaries had destroyed, in what [Adrian] Vermeule calls liberalism’s “felix culpa.” Reformulating William F. Buckley Jr.’s description of conservatism, neo-integralists “stand atop History, murmuring Soon.”

Conveniently, this understanding accords unique privileges to its initiated:

Neo-integralists are the few who are capable of understanding History’s movement and equipped with the rhetorical skill to explain it in terms of Catholic theology. They are destined to prophesy the new order, not to rule over it. They must ready the people; they must shift popular allegiance from the present, failed, liberal regime to the future kingdom of God on earth.

Even more conveniently, this understanding liberates its practitioners from conventional politics. If they don’t win today, their intellectual progeny will win tomorrow, and revere them as prophets without honor in their time. And when their views are criticized as unrealistic, they merely accuse critics of a failure of imagination. As Patterson noted in another essay last year, for Providence magazine, to neo-integralists,

such a view is typical of mainstream conservatives who oppose progressive social change in the short term but ultimately seek accommodation within it in the medium- and long-term. Only postliberals and their allies in National Conservatism and other populist movements have the spine to resist such social change and, more importantly, the imagination to envision an alternative.

In their telling, a sufficiently committed minority, telling an appealing-enough story, and “wielding government power” from the top down (leading neo-integralists are quite fond of the administrative state) will, somehow, be able to turn America into a Catholic confessional state. Okay.

Why don’t we instead imagine an America returned to the principles of its Founding, in which Catholicism can flourish (and has flourished) — something that we actually have a tradition of in this country? Sorry, no dice: Neo-integralists reject the Founding principles. Well, I don’t. There are all sorts of reasons to prefer them over what the neo-integralists have to offer. For one thing, such a restored polity would have much kinder answers to the “Jewish Question” than neo-integralists are likely to give. Patterson recounts in his essay that one neo-integralist, asked what the fate of Jews would be in the polity of his imagination, simply replied, “Nothing bad.” By contrast, here is George Washington:

May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.

As a practicing Catholic, I might be tempted, you could think, by a vision that subordinated the American government to the Catholic Church. You would be wrong. Having taken a look at both the modern Catholic Church and at modern American government, I can think of no better way to damage both, but especially the church, than to mix them together. Especially if that means giving more power to the neo-integralists, whose number Patterson so clearly has.