In 1911, RH Benson, the Catholic convert son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote a book called The Dawn of All, set in 1973. This offered an account of an England returned to Christendom and embracing a kind of government which saw the interests of Church and state as identical, for almost everyone was Catholic, and the laws reflected the Christian worldview: adultery was illegal and heretics didn’t fare well either.
For agnostic and secularist liberals, this vista of the future reads like a nightmare, because for them, the separation of Church and state – either constitutionally, as in the US, or de facto, as in much of Europe – is the basis for an equitable social order. And for most people in contemporary society, the idea that the Church could be at the mainspring of the social order is alarming. But that is, in fact, at the root of an idea which suggests that the Catholic worldview should be integrated into the running of the state. Integralism is not exactly a working out of RH Benson’s vision, but it seeks to put Catholicism at the heart of politics in a way we have not seen in modern times.
Kevin Vallier, an academic critic, has desc-ribed integralism in a new book, All the Kingdoms of the World: “Catholic integralists say that governments must secure the earthly and heavenly common good. God authorises two powers to do so, they assert. The state governs in matters temporal, and the Church in matters spiritual. Since the Church has a nobler purpose than the state (salvation), it may authorise and direct the state to support it with certain policies, such as enforcing Church law. At times, the Church may need assistance to advance its objectives.”
The moving spirits behind this include Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, the philos- opher Thomas Pink, the American Cistercian Fr Edmund Waldstein and the theologian Alan Fimister. Whilst all are intellectually committed individuals their creation, integralism, has generated alarm among non-Catholics and incredulity on the part of most Catholics.
Of course religion cannot be excluded from politics: the prophets of the Old Testament did not think so. Our Lady, in the socially subversive proclamation we call the Magnificat, was magnificently indifferent to a separation of the religious and the secular. But it is one thing to bring a Christian perspective to bear on the political and social, quite another to insist that the laws of modern states should be determined by Catholic teaching. Integralists would suggest that political rule must consider man’s final end: salvation. Societies should orientate themselves around the authentic human good, even if others disagree. If Cathol-icism is true, what’s wrong with making government explicitly Catholic?
This latest reworking of the notion that politics should take its cue from the Church is very much an American phenomenon. It has barely registered in Britain or in the wider Church. But it does not reflect the aspirations even of all American Catholic conservatives.
Another who has been identified as an int- egralist sympathiser is Sohrab Ahmari, one of the most combative intellectuals in US Catholicism. His latest book, Tyranny Inc, is a robust criticism of the American economic model, and the extent to which human interests have been subordinated to the interests of private economic power, underpinned by judicial greed. It is a working out of the principles of Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII’s great encyclical dealing with the social ills of industrial society, which recognised the importance of unions. Tyranny Inc also recognises the importance of organised labour as a corrective to the inhuman economic order.
And this is an example of a helpful way for Catholics to approach politics: to stimulate debate, to refuse to be satisfied with a tired political consensus that ignores the interests of the poor, to introduce to secular society elements of Catholic teaching which challenge globalist plutocracy.
Debating such issues in the public square is very much preferable to integralism, to the possibility that Catholics should dominate pol- itical life and take over the levers of power from those secularists who wish the Church harm. The way to challenge the present tired political consensus is by engaging in debate, by recovering the radical pers- pectives of say, the just war and just price theories, and becoming, intellectual- ly and morally, the salt of the earth that Christ told us to be. Christanity is not a takeover project; Catholic teaching, underpinn- ed by prayer, is more like a galvanic current.
The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci fam-ously declared that those who wish to take power in a state must gain hegemony by taking over the high points of the culture – the moral leadership associated with the univers-ities, the media, politics – so as to alter the way people are taught and the way people think. Until comparatively recently, the moral underpinning of society was provided by Christianity and most people in positions of influence, at least in western societies, accepted the underlying precepts of Christianity even if they were not practising Christians. The climate has changed, and the default position of many of those who define themselves as liberals is now instinctively hostile to religion. They occupy many of the positions of influence that Gramsci identified – as university professors, top civil servants, political advisers, media pundits. That new anti-Church, anti-clerical, anti-Catholic consensus needs challenging and Catholics should be engaging in robust debate with those who see secularism as the only possible worldview.
This aspiration, to challenge the secular consensus and offer Catholic perspectives on the great issues of the day, from artificial intelligence to abortion, will never be wholly fulfilled. But it is something very different from seeking the levers of power. Integralism is an aspiration for the Church to run secular government, and it founders on the reality that Catholics do not constitute a majority of the population and Catholics themselves are profoundly divided. In Britain less than half the population defines itself as Christian. In the US, as Stephen Bullivant pointed out in an article in this magazine, the Nones, those of no religion, are becoming a dominant group. Given this frankly dispiriting situation, how does it make sense for Catholics to seek to control the levers of government, even if we wished to?
The pity of all this is that the individuals who have articulated the integralist idea are intelligent, socially engaged thinkers who can energise the Church with their aspiration to see God’s will done on earth. If that formid-able sense of purpose and moral conviction could be harnessed, not to a frankly terrifying project of political control but to evangelising society, the Church could only benefit. Integ-ralists are right that the purpose of our lives is salvation; they are wrong in how they are trying to go about it.
It is worth remembering that The Dawn of All, RH Benson’s book, the forerunner of integralism, turned out – spoiler alert – to be a dream. Benson’s other vista of the future, Lord of the World, written in 1908, was far darker: it envisaged the collapse of Christianity, the persecution of Christians, the coming of Antichrist and the end of the world.
Integralism is a fantasy which may distract us from reality.
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