I have a question mark in my title because the Catholic integralists for Trump are often evasive in avoiding the term "integralism." But if you look at what they say about what they call their "political Catholicism" or "common-good conservatism," it's clear that they are Catholic integralists who want to use Trump's MAGA movement as a step towards establishing America as a Catholic confessional state that would coercively enforce the authority of the Catholic Church and persecute Jews, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Muslims, atheists, and generally all non-Catholics.
Sure, that's preposterous. And that's why they are so hesitant to say openly what they have in mind. It's so preposterous that even many of the Christian conservative "post-liberals" like Rod Dreher and Patrick Deneen, who should be sympathetic to their cause, have scorned the integralists. Dreher has said that his "unwillingness to fully surrender liberalism is in large part because we still live in a highly pluralistic and diverse society," and "liberalism arose in the first place to accommodate pluralism." Consequently, "any non-liberal alternative would probably be tyrannical." Notice what he is saying: while claiming to be a "post-liberal," he is still a liberal, because he cannot endorse a truly illiberal alternative like integralism.
Clearly, people like Dreher and Deneen agree with Kevin Vallier's critique of integralism: "You can't go there, you can't stay there, and it's unfair." You can't go there, because you can't establish a Catholic confessional state in a society like America where Catholics are a minority of less than 20 percent, and where even most Catholics would not want to persecute non-Catholics. You can't stay there, because even if you could establish a Catholic confessional state, it would be overthrown by rebellion. It's unfair, because an American Catholic state would have to be an unjust tyranny.
As I said in my previous post, the evasiveness of the integralists makes me suspect that their integralism is only an insincere affectation that disguises the fact that while they want to pose as opponents of liberalism, they are really liberals--like Dreher and Deneen--who cannot openly give up the liberal principles of religious liberty and toleration as necessary for preserving social order in a pluralistic society.
As I have pointed out, the French Far Right has the same problem: they pretend to be Catholic integralists, but even in a historically Catholic country like France, a Catholic state in a pluralistic society is absurd; and so, the fake French integralists remain liberals in accepting the liberal principle of religious liberty.
This raises an obvious question: if integralism is such an obviously preposterous idea, why have some otherwise intelligent American conservatives tried to embrace it? One way to answer this question is to examine the personal histories of the integralists to see what motivated them to adopt this idea in the first place. For example, one could go to Sohrab Ahmari's memoir--From Fire, By Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2019).
Ahmari became one of the leaders of American integralism in May of 2019 with the publication of his widely discussed essay "Against David French-Ism" in First Things. At the time, he was the op-ed editor of the New York Post. He wrote to explain the reasoning behind a manifesto that had been published the previous March in First Things--"Against the Dead Consensus"--which was signed by mostly Roman Catholic conservatives who had supported Trump in 2016 in opposition to the "Never Trump" conservatives. "There is no returning to the pre-Trump conservative consensus that collapsed in 2016," they proclaimed. "Any attempt to revive the failed conservative consensus that preceded Trump would be misguided and harmful to the right." The mistake of that earlier Reaganite conservative consensus was its commitment to a liberal conservatism of classical liberalism that "too often tracked the same lodestar liberalism did--namely, individual autonomy." Ahmari's "Against David French-Ism" identified the classical liberal David French as the prototypical liberal conservative whose devotion to individual autonomy blinded him to the wisdom of Trump's common-good conservatism.
The most prominent passage of Ahmari's essay was his insistence that conservatives must "fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good." "French prefers a different Christian strategy," Ahmari explained, because he has a different "political theology" from that favored by Ahmari and his friends. A careful reader of Ahmari's essay could see that his political theology was Catholic Political Integralism, in which the "public square" is directed "to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good"--the "Highest Good" being the eternal salvation of the soul in Heaven.
That this required a Catholic confessional state was made clear by the Catholic integralists, particularly those writing for the online blog The Josias. Edmund Waldstein, a Cistercian monk, summarized integralism on the blog in three sentences: "Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that, rejecting the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holds that political rule must order man to this final goal. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man's temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end, the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power." Of course, "the spiritual power" is the Catholic Church and its claim to be the only true religion with the authority to speak for God's Revelation of the Truth and to demand that the "temporal power" of the state be used to coercively enforce obedience to the Church.
Waldstein's statement and many other essays from The Josias were published in a two-volume book--Integralism and the Common Good: Selected Essays from "The Josias" in 2021 and 2022. Waldstein identified Ahmari in the book as one of the most important proponents of integralism. And Ahmari wrote a laudatory blurb for the book: "The good, the common good, the highest good--these and other concepts have once more come to permeate political discourse in the West. While this is a salutary development, there is also much confusion in the air over what they really mean. No more: this lucid and learned anthology is a fantastic one-stop primer for the perplexed layman."
As he tells his story in his memoir, Ahmari's conversion to Catholicism and Catholic Integralism in December of 2016, just after Trump's election, was the latest of many conversions that he had experienced. He was born and raised in Iran in the years after the establishment of the Muslim Republic of Iran in 1979. As a child, he and his family rebelled against the stultifying cultural conformity of fundamentalist Islam. Then, as a teenager, he became a staunch atheist who looked to modern secular society, particularly in America, as the best way of life. When he immigrated to the United States, at age 14, he was shocked by the religiosity of many Americans, particularly in Utah where he lived.
Then, just before his senior year in high school, he discovered Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and it took over his mind and heart. He says that this book "set me off on an intellectual and spiritual road that, years later, would bring me to a most unlikely destination: the Roman Catholic Church" (85).
If Ahmari had discovered Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human rather than Thus Spoke Zarathustra, this might have set him off on a different road that would not have led him to Catholic Integralism. I think Lou Salome was right in seeing that after going through his middle period of writing in Human, All Too Human--devoted to evolutionary Darwinian science, Socratic philosophy, and liberal democracy, Nietzsche in his later writings--beginning with Zarathustra-- returned to his earlier fear of science as subversive of life--in The Birth of Tragedy--as he looked to "the eternalizing powers of art and religion" as the only way to restore meaning to life through religious transcendence. In Salome's book on Nietzsche--the first book on Nietzsche's writings--she explained this history of his writing as showing his struggle with a "religious drive" that he could never shake off. On the one hand, he denied the God in whom he had devotedly believed in his Lutheran household by proclaiming "God is dead." On the other hand, he needed to replace that orthodox religion with a new Dionysian religion of the Superman. She thought that only in his middle writings--during the time of his deep philosophic friendships with Paul Ree and herself--did Nietzsche achieve a position of scientific skepticism and liberalism free of religious longings.
Just as Lutheran piety was instilled in Nietzsche as a boy, which created a life-long religious longing for redemption, Islamic piety had moved Ahmari as a boy in Iran. In his Islamic education as a schoolboy, he says that he "discovered the Shiite faith's jagged beauty and deep pathos. Most important, I learned about Hussein ibn Ali, the third Shiite imam and the greatest martyr in a faith of martyrs. To this day, I hear in Hussein's story an echo of Christ's teaching that 'greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends'" (38).
When Ahmari announced his conversion to Catholicism in 2016 to his friends, who had known him as a classical liberal who was skeptical of religion, they questioned his motivation, implicitly asking "Had I found in the Catholic faith a way to express the reactionary longings of my Persian soul, albeit in a Latin key?" (18). From my reading of his memoir, my answer would be yes. Even Ahmari himself says: "that my becoming Catholic had something to do with being Iranian- and Muslim-born but that it was ultimately a response to the universal call of grace."
But before that conversion to Catholicism at age 31 in 2016, Ahmari went through four other conversions over a period of fifteen years--from Nietzscheanism to Marxism, then to postmodernism, and then to neoconservatism. But none of these enthusiastic conversions satisfied the deepest longing in his soul.
That deepest longing was manifest one day, when he was 18 years old, and he happened to open the Bible and read the Gospel of Saint Matthew. As he read the first twenty-five chapters, he was not impressed: "Here we go with the hocus-pocus, blah-blah, Jesus is born, blah-blah, Jesus tells a parable, blah-blah, Jesus performs a miracle, blah-blah, another parable."
But then when he got to chapter 26, he began reading attentively the story of the crucifixion of Jesus. "I was an atheist, yes, but I also held onto certain fragments of my Islamic education." He thought "that the Jesus portrayed by Matthew is an extraordinary figure."
"When the strong torment the weak, we pity the latter and are outraged by the former. The martyrdom of Imam Hussein was the quintessential example of this. . . . But the Passion of Christ is radically different. On the Cross, it is the strong one who condescends to the weak and evil many. He allows them to persecute him" (109).
Ahmari wonders: "What was it about sacrifice, whether Hussein's or Jesus', that left such a searing imprint on my mind? Why did I long for sacrifice?"
That spiritual longing was expressed again, five years later, when he was 23, and he happened to walk into a Capuchin monastery in New York City, where a Sunday evening Mass was beginning. As a friar held up the bread that was the body of Christ and then the golden cup with the blood of Christ, Ahmari choked with sobbing. "I was in the proximity of an awesome and mysterious force--a force bound up with sacrifice, with self-giving unto death, the idea that had made my heart tremble ever since I was a boy."
After the Mass was ended, and he walked out to the vestibule, he happened to see a portrait of Pope Benedict XVI hanging on a wall. Seeing that image of the Pope, he once again was choking back tears. Ahmari explains: "Pope Benedict XVI stood for the principle of continuous, even absolute, authority--the authority of the Catholic Church, in other words, which the pope embodied, and which shone through his portrait. I longed for stable authority as well as redemption" (147).
From this point, he was no longer an atheist, but he had not yet fully assented to a Christian faith. That came 13 years later, in 2016, when he was 31 years old, and he converted to Roman Catholicism. He was in London, where he was an editorial page writer and editor for the European edition of the Wall Street Journal. He had considered becoming an evangelical Protestant, but he saw a problem: "I couldn't help but detect the problem of authority in the Protestant orbit, which, I came to suspect, lay behind Protestantism's theological shortcomings. At that point, mind you, I had yet to recognize the authority of the Catholic Church--though, as my weeping over Benedict's photo showed, I was instinctively drawn to Catholic authority. But in 2016, my attraction to Catholic authority was strong enough that I sensed the fragility and thinness of authority among Protestants" (193-94).
Before he was baptized and confirmed on December 19, 2016, Ahmari underwent six months of instruction in the Catholic Catechism, guided by his reading of Monsignor A. N. Gilbey's book We Believe. The critical first step was understanding and accepting the authority of the Catholic Church:
"Start with the authority of the Catholic Church. To believe in God, it sufficed to rely on natural reason alone, as I had done. But to go further with him, as it were, it was necessary to believe divine revelation on the authority of the Revealer. And there was nothing wrong with accepting things on authority. As Gilbey put it, 'We ought not to make heavy weather about doing in our relationship with Almighty God what we do daily in our dealings with other people'--that is, to accept all sorts of propositions solely on authority."
"And the whole of revelation turned on a single proposition: namely, that the Catholic Church was Christ's supreme revelation. Assent to Jesus Christ thus meant assent to the Church he founded and the powers he granted her, chiefly to forgive sins (Jn 20:23; Mt 16:19) and to teach all nations (Mt 28:19). Scripture and Tradition confirmed all this, yet the Church didn't need to appeal to these things for her authority. Before Scripture or Tradition existed, the Catholic Church was there at the Cross and the Resurrection" (201).
Once he had accepted the supreme authority of the Church based on Scripture and Tradition, it was a short step to integralism. If the Catholic Church is the only church with the authority of Christ's supreme revelation through Scripture and Tradition, and if Scripture and Tradition teach that the Catholic Church has the supreme authority to use the state as its "secular arm" in coercively punishing heretics, apostates, and schismatics, then the Catholic Church has the authority to establish a Catholic confessional state.
But while Ahmari rightly recognizes "the problem of authority" in the Protestant churches, he is silent about how the same problem of authority arises in the history of the Catholic Church. The authority of divine revelation in Christianity depends on the belief that the Holy Spirit will convey the truth of revelation to all Christians. But the inspiration of the Holy Spirit has always been too obscure to lead Christians to agreement about revelation. Protestants believe that revelation comes from reading the Bible, but the Bible is so obscure that Protestant Christians disagree about its meaning. Catholic Christians believe that while the Bible is sometimes obscure, Biblical revelation is clarified by the Church's tradition in which the Holy Spirit infuses priests with the truth of revelation. But the history of the Catholic Church shows that this does not work, because even as conveyed through tradition, the Holy Spirit is obscure.
As I have indicated in some previous posts, the history of the Catholic Church's tradition is a history of schisms, in which divinely inspired Christians have disagreed about the truth of revelation. There have been over two dozen major schisms in the Church--such as the Great Schism of 1054 that separated the Latin Church in the west from the Greek Orthodox Church in the east and the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century.
Consider, for example, the case of Jan Hus. In 1415, Hus, a Catholic priest who sought to reform the Church, was condemned by the Council of Constance to be burned at the stake for heresy. He sang hymns as he was burned to death. Hus was a charismatic priest who inspired his followers in Bohemia to defeat five consecutive papal crusades against them from 1420 to 1431--the Hussite Wars. Hus and the Hussites were intensely pious Christians. Similarly, Martin Luther and the other Protestant Reformers were all intensely pious. Thus does the mystical experience of grace--of being divinely inspired with an experience of the transcendent--often move Christians to dissent from Catholic orthodoxy.
In 1999, Pope John Paul II offered a public apology for the Church's killing of Hus, praised him for his "moral courage," and condemned the Church's policy of killing heretics. Thus, the Pope had to correct the Church's tradition of killing heretics. Here the Pope was following the Second Vatican Council's "Declaration of Religious Liberty" that overturned the Church's tradition of Catholic Integralism.
Ahmari says nothing about this.
This shows that John Locke was correct in seeing that "everyone was orthodox to themselves," in that everyone must believe in whatever they decided was necessary for them to believe to be saved, but with the understanding that they might be wrong, and that others must be free to believe other doctrines that seemed orthodox to them.
Now, what does this have to do with Donald Trump and the MAGA populist movement? In his 2019 essay for First Things, Ahmari suggested that conservatives had to support Trump in order "to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good," with the implication that this would require that America become a Catholic confessional state.
If this is what he was saying, it was just as preposterous as the general argument for Catholic Integralism. Because it's preposterous to believe that most Americans--including the evangelical Protestants who support Trump--would ever agree to an American Catholic confessional state. This is why I suspect that Catholic integralists like Ahmari are not really what they say they are because they cannot sincerely deny the American liberal principle of religious liberty.
For the same reason, I doubt the recent claim by Vallier that if Ohio Senator J. D. Vance became vice president in a second Trump administration, that could give an intellectual and political boost to Catholic Integralism. Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, just a few months before Ahmari's Catholic baptism. But it's not clear to me that Vance's Catholicism is integralist.
It is true, however, that during his campaign for the Senate in 2022, Vance spoke at a conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Steubenville, Ohio, that was organized by Ahmari that was devoted to the themes of Catholic Integralism. And yet, as far as I can tell from the reports about the conference, none of the speakers explicitly endorsed the establishment of a Catholic confessional state in America.
Josh Hammer, a Newsweek opinion editor, did say this during one panel discussion: "Overt biblically grounded lawmaking, a concomitantly biblically informed constitutional jurisprudence, and an approach to God in the public square that we might think of as an ecumenical integralism, represents our only hope for recovery at this late hour in our ailing, decadent republic."
Well, there it is--"integralism." But, strangely, it's "ecumenical integralism." Isn't that self-contradictory? If "ecumenical" means cooperation among different churches, that must deny the integralist supremacy of the Catholic Church as the one true church.
Was Hammer suggesting that Catholics and Protestants should cooperate in reaching agreement about what "biblically grounded lawmaking" means? If so, that's not Catholic Integralism.
But maybe he was suggesting a kind of Christian Integralism, in which American Catholics and Protestants would cooperate in coercively enforcing "biblically grounded lawmaking" that would persecute non-Christian believers (like Jews and Muslims) and atheists. This sounds like what Father Antonio Spadaro has described as the "surprising ecumenism" of evangelical fundamentalism and Catholic integralism in America.
Even if that's a little less preposterous than Catholic Integralism, it's still hard to believe that most Americans would tolerate a government that would persecute those who would resist "biblically grounded lawmaking."
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