The Catholic Integralist Critique of Locke on Toleration: The Holy Spirit Cannot Overcome Religious Pluralism

Pope Gregory I (the Great), Pope from 590 to 604.  He is Writing in his Study.  The Holy Spirit as a Pentecostal Dove Whispers in His Ear.  Below, Scribes Copy His Work.  A Tenth-Century Ivory, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

 

I have long argued that the desire for religious understanding is one of the twenty natural desires of our evolved human nature.  If the good is the desirable, then we can judge the goodness of a social order by how well it secures the conditions for human beings to pursue the satisfaction of those natural desires. 

The Catholic Integralists say that a Catholic Integralist regime is the best social order because it enforces belief in the one true religion in a Catholic confessional state, and thus satisfies the natural desire for religious understanding.  But they are mistaken because they fail to see that the evolved natural desire for religious understanding is pluralistic in that human beings will always disagree in what they believe to be the true religious experience of the transcendent world.  And there has never been a divine revelation of the religious truth clear enough to bring religious believers to agreement.  Whatever the Holy Spirit might have whispered to Pope Gregory the Great was not clearly heard by others.

The evolutionary science of religious pluralism supports John Locke's liberal theology of Christianity--that since "everyone is orthodox to himself," and "every Church is orthodox to itself," there is no set of universal doctrines binding on all Christians, except perhaps the belief that Jesus is the Messiah; and therefore, there is no one orthodoxy strictly speaking that can be properly enforced by government.  

For this reason, a Lockean liberal social order that secures religious liberty and religious toleration is the best regime for promoting the pluralistic pursuit of religious happiness.  It does this by creating a marketplace of religion in which churches compete for customers, and those churches that best satisfy the desire for religious experience increase their share of the market.  I have elaborated this argument in some previous posts.

But I haven't yet responded to Derek Remus's integralist critique of Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration.  This was originally published at the website for The Josias, the main online outlet for integralism, and then published in print in Integralism and the Common Good: Selected Essays from The Josias, volume 2: The Two Powers, edited by P. Edmund Waldstein (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2022), 335-371.  Remus first wrote this paper as an undergraduate thesis at Thomas Aquinas College (Santa Paula, California).  Father Remus is now an Associate Pastor at St. Luke's Catholic Church in Calgary, Canada.

Remus's introduction to his paper is a brief history of Christianity and the relation between church and state.  He then states his thesis--that the Catholic Church is right about the proper relation between church and state, and Locke is wrong.

To support this thesis, the main body of his paper has three parts:  a summary of Locke's claims in A Letter Concerning Toleration, an exposition and defense of the Catholic Church's position on church and state that relies largely on Thomas Aquinas's teaching, and then a Catholic refutation of Locke's position.  

Finally, Remus adds an Appendix on the question of whether the Catholic integralist understanding of church and state can be defended in the modern world where Catholics are in the minority in many Western countries (such as the United States).

I will respond to each of these parts of his paper.  My references to Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration will be to the Liberty Fund edition edited by Mark Goldie (2010).

THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE

Remus's first two paragraphs survey the first 1600 years of the history of Christianity in relation to the state:

"The first three centuries of the Catholic Church's existence were a period of violent and bloody persecution at the hands of the Roman Empire--that is, the state.  The Church persevered through this trial, however, and, instead of diminishing, increased in proportion to the persecutions she suffered, until at last she was granted freedom of worship and hers was made the official religion of the Empire.  This was the beginning of that harmonious union between Church and state which gave rise to Christendom--a union in which the state recognized that its proper good was ordered toward a higher good, namely, eternal beatitude, and the Church, to the extent that affairs of state bore upon the salvation of souls, was solicitous about those affairs."

"This union lasted throughout Europe for twelve hundred years.  Then came the Protestant Reformation.  The divine origin of the papacy was challenged; the religious unity of Europe was shattered; Christendom unraveled.  The Church still existed, however, and the question of how governments ought to deal with her under the new order of things became an urgent problem for political philosophers" (335).

Remus then notes that while political philosophers like Hobbes and Spinoza thought the head of state should also be the head of the Church to ensure religious peace, Locke thought there should be a separation of church and state, with the church devoted to the salvation of souls in the afterlife, and the state devoted to securing the earthly goods of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Moreover, Locke thought the state should tolerate all religions except when religious doctrines or practices threatened the peace of the community.

Remus observes that the United States has clearly adopted the Lockean position through Locke's influence on American Founders like Thomas Jefferson who insisted on "a wall of separation between Church and State."  Consequently, many American Catholics have adopted the Lockean view of church-state relations as the ideal that all nations should follow.

But this kind of thinking, Remus asserts, is "clearly opposed to that of the Church's Magisterium."  The "Magisterium" of the Catholic Church is its "teaching" function--the authority of the Church through the popes and the bishops to truthfully interpret the revealed Word of God as conveyed through the Bible and the Church's tradition.  So, here, Remus interprets the Church's Magisterium on the relation between Church and state by quoting from the papal pronouncements of three popes--Pius IX (1846-1878), Leo XIII (1878-1903), and Pius XI (1922-1939).  They all agree, in the words of Leo XIII, that the state is bound by divine law to support the "public profession of religion . . . not such religion as [men] may have a preference for, but the religion which God enjoins, and which certain and most clear marks show to be the only true religion"--the religion of the Catholic Church (337).  Here Remus is quoting from the encyclical Immortale Dei (par. 6).  This shows, then, that Locke is wrong in arguing for the separation of church and state, because this contradicts the Catholic Church's teaching.

In this introductory section of his paper, Remus makes three dubious claims.  The first is that from the beginning of Christianity, the Catholic Church has been "the Church," the only Church, because it is the only truly Christian Church, or even "the only true religion," as Leo XIII declared, as confirmed by "certain and most clear marks."  

This denies the historical fact of religious pluralism in Christianity.  Contrary to Remus's assumption that there was no religious pluralism in Christianity prior to the Protestant Reformation, the history of Christianity beginning with the first Christians has been a history of disagreement over Christian doctrines and practices as manifest in the many schisms and heresies among Christians.  A Christian schism is when one Christian group divides into two groups that cannot live together as one religious community.  A Christian heresy is one Christian's religious belief that is considered false by other Christians.

Beginning in the early history of the Christian Church, there have been constant battles with one group of heretics after another.  For example, between AD 150 (with the Marcionist schism) and 1054 (with the Great Schism that separated the Latin Church in the West from the Greek Orthodox Church in the East), there were at least twenty-two major schisms in Christianity.

The Church Councils that met during the first five centuries of Christianity were called to rule against the numerous heresies that sprang up, many of which had to do with how to understand the place of Jesus Christ in the Trinity.  The first Council of Nicaea in 325 ruled against Arianism--the anti-Trinitarianism of Arius, an Alexandrian priest, who believed that while Jesus was the Son of God, he was not equal to God.  The Council of Ephesus in 431 ruled against Nestorianism--the teaching of Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople, that the incarnate Christ had two separate natures--one divine and the other human--and that Mary was only the mother of the human Jesus, and thus not the Mother of God.  The Council of Chalcedon in 451 ruled against the view of the Coptic Churches that Christ had only one divine nature (monophysitism) and in favor of the view that Christ had two distinct natures, one divine and one human, but united in one person (dyophysitism).  The Coptic Churches continue today in North Africa, the Near East, and Ethiopia.

Surveying the entire history of Christianity, Wikipedia has lists of over 50 schisms and over 40 heresies.  That's what I mean by religious pluralism in Christianity.  Later in his paper, Remus speaks of "that great achievement of contemporary man called religious pluralism" (370), as if there had been no religious pluralism until recently.  But that is obviously not true.

This religious pluralism in Christianity also denies Remus's second dubious claim in his introductory section--that there was a "harmonious union between Church and state" that sustained Christendom for twelve hundred years prior to the Protestant Reformation.  Beginning with Constantine, rulers who tried to enforce Catholic orthodoxy, often through violent coercion, were frustrated by the heresies and schisms that made it impossible to sustain any "harmonious union" of Christians.

In 313, the Roman Emperor Constantine I issued the Edict of Milan that granted religious freedom: Christianity and all other religions would be free from persecution.  Later, in 380, the Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica that declared Christianity as defined by the Nicene Creed of 325 as the official religion of the Empire; and those who disagreed with any part of the Nicene Creed--such as the Arians who denied that Jesus was of "the same essence" as God--could be punished by the Church and the state.  But the debate over trinitarian theology--often a violent debate--continued to fester for centuries.  These and other theological disputes created a religious pluralism among Christians that neither the Church nor the state could suppress.  Remus is silent about all of this theological conflict within Christianity.

The irresolvable problem of religious pluralism in Christianity eventually forced the Catholic Church in the Second Vatican Council to issue the "Declaration on Religious Freedom" or Dignitatis Humanae in 1965, which endorsed the human right to religious liberty and thus embraced the Lockean argument for religious toleration.  This denied the teaching of Leo XIII that divine law requires the state to enforce Catholicism as the true religion.  

This refutes the third dubious claim in Remus's introduction to this paper--the claim that the Church's Magisterium opposes Lockean religious liberty.  Strangely, however, Remus never even mentions Dignitatis Humanae anywhere in his paper.

Remus might agree with Thomas Pink's argument that Dignitatis Humanae was a change in policy but not a change in doctrine.  Pink explains: "The Church is now refusing to license the state to act as her coercive agent, and it is from that policy change, and not from any change in underlying doctrine, that the wrongfulness of religious coercion by the state follows."  The unchanged doctrine is that while the state has no authority on its own to coerce religious belief, because the ultimate authority over religious belief belongs to the Church, the Church can authorize the state to act as the "secular arm" of the Church in enforcing religious belief.  In particular, the Church can ask the state to punish those baptized Christians who have been condemned by the Church as heretics, apostates, or schismatics.  

Pink relies heavily on a passage in the first section of Dignitatis Humanae: "Religious freedom, in turn, which men demand as necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God, has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society.  Therefore, it leaves unchanged (integram) traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ."  Pink infers that if "traditional Catholic doctrine" remains "unchanged" by Dignitatis Humanae, that must mean that the traditional doctrine about the Church's authority to use the state as the "secular arm" of the Church in coercing religious belief has not been changed by Vatican II.  That Remus agrees with Pink about this is perhaps suggested by the fact that Remus's paper in Integralism and the Common Good is immediately preceded by a paper by Pink, and both papers are in a section of the book with the title "Religious Liberty."

As I have argued, there are lots of problems with Pink's reading of Dignitatis Humanae.  One is that there is no reference anywhere in Dignitatis Humanae to the "secular arm" doctrine of the Catholic Church.  Another problem is that when the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2105) quotes the passage about the "unchanged traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion," the Catechism explains this as affirming the moral duty of the Church to be "constantly evangelizing men," and nothing is said about the possibility of using a "secular arm" to coerce Catholic faith.  Remus is silent about all of this.

LOCKE'S FIVE ARGUMENTS FOR TOLERATION

In summarizing Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, Remus correctly identifies four of Locke's main arguments (341-42).  But he fails to recognize the importance of a fifth argument, which is actually Locke's primary argument.  

Remus also fails to see the importance of Locke's numerous references to the New Testament as providing crucial scriptural support for his arguments.  Unlike Locke, Remus provides almost no scriptural support for his arguments--he quotes from the New Testament only once.  Consequently, Remus seems unwilling or unable to refute Locke's claim that the New Testament teaches liberal toleration.

Locke makes four arguments for why the state (or "Commonwealth" as Locke calls it) secures only the "civil interests" or "civil goods" in caring for "the things of this World," and therefore it must be separated from the churches that secure the salvation of souls in "the World to come."

First, the care of souls has not be committed to any civil magistrate by anyone--neither by God nor by consent of the people (LCT, 13).

Second, "the care of Souls cannot belong to the Civil Magistrate, because his Power consists only in outward force: But true and saving Religion consists in the inward persuasion of the Mind; without which nothing can be acceptable to God" (LCT, 13).

Third, even if outward force could influence people's religious beliefs, this would not necessarily lead to the salvation of their souls, because given "the variety and contradiction of Opinions in Religion" among political rulers, most rulers would favor false religions that would lead to the eternal damnation of most people (LCT, 14-15).

Fourth, the duty of the magistrate to secure the civil interests of everyone does not require enforcing any religious belief, because my neighbor's religious beliefs do not affect my civil interests (LCT, 20, 37, 44-46).  Thomas Jefferson expressed this Lockean argument for religious liberty in a memorable way: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.  But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg" (Notes on Virginia, Query XVII).

Although Remus rightly identifies these four arguments, he ignores Locke's primary argument set forth in the first pages of the Letter Concerning Toleration--that toleration is "the chief Characteristical Mark of the True Church," because "every one is Orthodox to himself," and Jesus taught Christians to show "Charity, Meekness, and Good-will in general towards all Mankind," so that the "Toleration of those that differ from others in Matters of Religion, is . . . agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ" (7-12).

To prove this, Locke quotes from the New Testament 6 times in this introductory section, and a total of 14 times in the whole of the Letter Concerning Toleration.  He also quotes from the Old Testament 5 times in order to contrast the Mosaic theocracy of the Old Testament and the religious liberty of the New Testament.  The "Commonwealth of the Jews" was an "absolute Theocracy," so that there was no difference between the Commonwealth and the Church; and "God himself was the Legislator."  "But there is absolutely no such thing, under the Gospel, as a Christian Commonwealth," because Jesus "instituted no Commonwealth."  "Nor put he the Sword into any Magistrate's Hand, with Commission to make use of it in forcing men to forsake their former Religion, and receive his" (42).

As I have argued in previous posts, the proponents of early modern classical liberalism like Locke could plausibly read the New Testament as teaching religious toleration and religious liberty.  Remarkably, Remus is silent about all this.  He quotes from the Bible only once when he quotes Matthew 28:19: "Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost" (357).  So, he never attempts to refute Locke's interpretation of the Bible.

Last year, I wrote about how the coronation of King Charles III of Great Britain showed the acceptance of Locke's liberal interpretation of New Testament Christianity as supporting toleration and religious liberty. 

REMUS'S REDUCED INTEGRALISM

After explaining Locke's account of the separation of church and state, Remus turns to "the way things really are," or to "the truth about Church and state" as taught by the Catholic Church.  This is a teaching about "the primacy of the common good," and defending this teaching must move through five steps, as explained by "the Common Doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas" (337, 346-47).

First, Remus shows how the common good is preferable to the private good.

Second, he shows how the end of the state is the political common good.

Third, he shows how religion promotes the political common good.

Fourth, he shows how the end of the Church established by Christ is the common good of eternal beatitude.

Fifth, the rulers of the state are subject to the rulers of the Catholic Church in so far as the lower common good of politics must serve the higher common good of eternal beatitude.

Although Remus does not explicitly say that this teaching is Catholic Integralism, it clearly is.  But what's remarkable about Remus's account of this teaching is that it is a reduced Catholic Integralism.  A full Catholic Integralism, such as found in the teaching of Thomas Aquinas and in the history of the Catholic Church prior to Dignitatis Humanae in 1965, includes the claim that the Catholic Church has the divine right to employ the state as its secular arm in persecuting and even killing heretics.  Remus rejects this claim because he agrees with Locke about "the unjustness of using the state to kill and persecute one's neighbor on account of religion" (338, 362).  Although he does not explicitly explain to his reader what he is doing, Remus is reducing or revising the Catholic tradition of integralism by rejecting the traditional integralist claim that the Church is divinely commanded to persecute and even kill heretics.

The clearest indication of what Remus is doing is in his selective reading of Thomas Aquinas and of the history of the Catholic Church's persecution of heretics.  Remus is silent about Aquinas's endorsement of the Inquisition.  Aquinas taught that heretics--those who claim to be Christians but deny some of the doctrines of the Church--can be rightly compelled to keep the faith.  Heretics must be given repeated chances to recant their heretical beliefs, but if they refuse, they can be rightly executed (ST, II-II, q. 10, aa. 8, 11; q. 11, a. 3).  Aquinas cannot cite any passages from the New Testament that condone the killing of heretics, because as Locke pointed out, there are none.  Remus says nothing about this.

Remus also says nothing about the history of the Catholic Churches execution of heretics.  For example, in 1415, Jan 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.

Remus says nothing about this.  He claims that God's revealed truth is conveyed to believers by the "grace of the Holy Spirit" (356).  But he is silent about how pious Christians like Jan Hus and the Protestant Reformers were inspired by the Holy Spirit to dissent from the Catholic Church, which exposed them to the violence of the Inquisition.  This shows that the grace of the Holy Spirit cannot overcome religious pluralism by conveying the message of revelation so clearly that all or most believers can agree on that revealed truth.

Remus also says nothing about how some of the recent popes--John Paul II and Benedict XVI--have asked forgiveness for the Church's history of violence against heretics.

A REFUTATION OF LOCKE'S "GODLESS STATE"?

Remus begins his paper by promising his readers that he will refute Locke's position on church and state in the light of the Church's position.  But when Remus comes to that part of his paper, his supposed refutation of Locke's "godless state" actually agrees with Locke on some crucial points, which explains why his reduced Integralism is so different from the Church's traditional Integralism.

As already indicated, Remus agrees with Locke that it is unjust to persecute and kill people because of their religious beliefs.  He also says that "the Catholic Church agrees with Locke that it is unjust for the state to force its citizens to perform acts whereby they become members of a given religion, even if that religion is the true one" (362).  The reason for this is that Locke is right in saying that faith is not real if it depends on "outward force" without "inward and full persuasion of the mind."

But still, Remus observes, Locke is wrong not to see how even though the coercive force of the state cannot influence the mind and will directly, that force can influence the mind and will indirectly by creating social conditions that help Catholic citizens fortify their faith and become more effective in persuading non-Catholic citizens to become Catholics. 

Remus says that "in a nation where most people are Catholic," and the rulers are Catholic, there are four ways in which the state can rightly use force to indirectly favor the Catholic Church without directly forcing anyone to become a Catholic (360, 362).   The state can refuse to give marriage licenses to Catholics who have been married in a non-Catholic marriage ceremony, because according to the Catholic Church, this is not a real marriage.  The state can require that students in state schools are instructed in the Catholic faith.  The state can prohibit the building of non-Catholic schools.  And, finally, "the state also has the right to prohibit the propagation of opinions in the press which are opposed to its citizens' attainment of heaven, such as opinions that are blasphemous or constitute an attack on the Church" (360).  This is what I mean by Remus's reduced Catholic Integralism: the state uses force to favor the Catholic Church, but without the killing of people for public heresy and blasphemy that was part of traditional Integralism.

But notice that Remus recommends this only for countries where the majority of the citizens are Catholic, and the rulers are Catholic.  Why couldn't Protestants turn this argument around to say that these same four ways for the state to enforce religious belief could be used to enforce a Protestant religion in countries where most of the people and the rulers are Protestant?

In fact, that was the argument of the High Church Anglican Protestant Jonas Proast, who wrote three tracts criticizing Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, which provoked a prolonged debate between Proast and Locke.  Like Remus, Proast argued that while Locke was right in saying that the mind cannot directly be coerced into religious belief, Locke failed to see how legal coercion with moderate penalties without persecution could indirectly dispose men's minds to submit to religious instruction.  Also like Remus, Proast insisted that this use of legal coercion to enforce religion was proper only for enforcing the "true religion."  But, of course, for Proast, the evidence clearly showed that Anglicanism was the true religion, and Catholicism was a false religion.  (Proast's three tracts are available in the 5th volume of The Reception of Locke's Politics, edited by Mark Goldie [London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999], 25-128.)

Here's Remus's response: "To say that the state has a care of souls and that it has a duty to worship God, however, is not to say that the state may adopt whatever religion it happens to like or even judges to be true.  Rather, it is to say that the state has a duty to adopt the religion which has truly been revealed by God, namely, the Catholic religion" (363).  Remus then quotes from Leo XIII's Immortale Dei (1885), saying that "it is evident that the only true religion is the one established by Jesus Christ Himself, and which He committed to His Church to protect and to propagate."  Remus does not notice, however, that Leo cited many New Testament verses as supporting this claim.

The most important New Testament text for Leo and other Integralists as establishing Catholicism as the true religion was Matthew 16:18-19, where Jesus says to Peter: "And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.  And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."  The Latin version of these words is inscribed around the base of the dome of the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome, in letters six feet high.  On these few words rests the entire structure of the Roman Catholic Church.  Catholics interpret these words as teaching that the Apostle Peter was chosen by Jesus Christ Himself to be the first pope--the Bishop of Rome--and all the other popes have been the direct successors of Peter as the Bishop of Rome, and thus have had the papal authority granted originally by Jesus.

                                                      The Dome of St. Peter's Basilica

Remarkably, Remus says nothing about Matthew 16:18-19.  Locke denies that Jesus ever conferred on any bishop of a church "Ruling Authority derived from the very Apostles, and continued down unto the present times by an uninterrup0ted Succession" (16).  But, oddly, Locke never mentions Matthew 16:18-19.

Locke could have argued that there are good reasons to doubt the Catholic interpretation of these verses.  First of all, these words in the Gospel of Matthew do not appear in any of the other Gospels, which should make one suspicious.  Secondly, it's not clear what Jesus meant by these words.  The word for "church" (ecclesia) occurs only twice in the four Gospels, and it's not clear that Jesus was really thinking about founding a church.  Moreover, Jesus says nothing about Peter having an endless number of successors who would inherit his apostolic authority; and Jesus says nothing about there being bishops in Rome.  And one would think that Jerusalem would be more important than Rome for Jesus.  Furthermore, there is no evidence in the New Testament that Peter ever went to Rome.  There is no contemporary reference to Peter as having been a bishop in Rome.  And the first indications of there being a bishop in Rome come from the second century.

What is said in the New Testament about the first Christian churches confirm Locke's claim that they were "voluntary and free societies" that did not use violent coercion to enforce belief, although they did excommunicate those they deemed deviants from church norms.  And while these churches had bishops, there is no evidence that there was a strict hierarchy of bishops with the bishop of Rome enforcing orthodoxy on all the churches.

So, again, it seems that the New Testament teaches the classical liberal principles of religious liberty and religious toleration.

INTEGRALIST CATHOLICS ARE INTOLERABLE

In his Appendix, Remus responds to the objection that in modern countries like the United States with religious pluralism, and where Catholics are in the minority, it seems absurd to propose that the Catholic Church should be the established church enforced by the state.  Remus's answer is that yes, in these circumstances, a Catholic confessional state is not practicable, and so it would be imprudent for the Catholic Church to insist that the governments in these countries should subject themselves to the religious rule of the Catholic Church.

Nevertheless, Remus argues, the imprudence of doing this does not deny the truth of what he has said about the proper relationship between the Church and the state.  Consequently, Catholics are obligated to strive to win as many converts to Catholicism as they can, as they work toward achieving the social and political power over their societies that will someday allow the Catholics to establish the rule of the Catholic Church and to use legal force to restrict the religious freedom of non-Catholics.

Locke argued that churches that do not teach and practice religious tolerance of other religions cannot themselves be tolerated.  Remus agrees!  "A government which holds in principle that it must treat all religions within its domain equally and that those religions must in turn refrain from any intervention in politics cannot tolerate the Catholic Church and be consistent with itself" (371).

Amazingly, the final conclusion of Remus's argument for Catholic Integralism and against Lockean toleration is that Lockean liberal regimes like the United States must not tolerate Catholic Integralists.

 

The Evolution of Religious Pluralism Refutes Integralist Orthodoxy and Supports Lockean Liberal Christianity

I have long argued that the desire for religious understanding is one of the twenty natural desires of our evolved human nature.  If the good is the desirable, then we can judge the goodness of a social order by how well it secures the conditions for human beings to pursue the satisfaction of those natural desires.  The Catholic integralists will say that a Catholic integralist regime is the best social order because it enforces belief in the one true religion and thus satisfies the natural desire for religious understanding.  But they are mistaken because they fail to see that the evolved natural desire for religious understanding is pluralistic in that human beings disagree in what they believe to be the true religious experience of the transcendent world.  

In a new book--All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism--Kevin Vallier has developed this point as the fundamental weakness in integralism:  since religious pluralism is natural to human beings, integralism's attempt to suppress religious pluralism contradicts human nature.  Vallier acknowledges but does not develop Robin Dunbar's evolutionary explanation of this natural religious pluralism.  Neither Vallier nor Dunbar see how this evolutionary science of religious pluralism support's John Locke's liberal theology of Christianity--that since "everyone is orthodox to themselves," there is no set of universal doctrines binding on all Christians; and therefore, there is no orthodoxy strictly speaking that can be properly enforced by government.  

For this reason, a Lockean liberal social order that secures religious liberty is the best regime for promoting the pluralistic pursuit of religious happiness.  It does this by creating a marketplace of religion in which churches compete for customers, and those churches that best satisfy the desire for religious experience increase their share of the market.

VALLIER'S CRITIQUE OF CATHOLIC INTEGRALISM

Vallier begins by developing what he regards as the two strongest arguments favoring integralism.  But then he counters this with three arguments that refute integralism.  The three arguments against integralism are all rooted in the problem of natural religious pluralism.  Vallier does not see, however, that the problem of pluralism also subverts his two arguments favoring integralism.

The two arguments in support of integralism are the history argument and the symmetry argument.  The history argument is that for many centuries the practice of the Catholic Church has been to strive for a coercive political authority in enforcing Catholic orthodoxy, and the traditional teaching of the Church in authoritative Church documents has supported this practice.  But that history is a history of the Church's attempts to suppress religious pluralism by coercively punishing heretics, apostates, and schismatics.  Far from favoring integralism, this is a history of integralism's failure to achieve any stable agreement on the truth of the Church's view of orthodoxy.

Beginning in the early history of the Christian Church, there have been constant battles with one group of heretics after another.  For example, between AD 150 (with the Marcionist schism) and 1054 (with the Great Schism that separated the Latin Church in the West from the Greek Orthodox Church in the East), there were at least twenty-two major schisms in Christianity.

The Church Councils that met during the first five centuries of Christianity were called to rule against the numerous heresies that sprang up, many of which had to do with how to understand the place of Jesus Christ in the Trinity.  The first Council of Nicaea in 325 ruled against Arianism--the anti-Trinitarianism of Arius, an Alexandrian priest, who believed that while Jesus was the Son of God, he was not equal to God.  The Council of Ephesus in 431 ruled against Nestorianism--the teaching of Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople, that the incarnate Christ had two separate natures--one divine and the other human--and that Mary was only the mother of the human Jesus, and thus not the Mother of God.  The Council of Chalcedon in 451 ruled against the view of the Coptic Churches that Christ had only one divine nature (monophysitism) and in favor of the view that Christ had two distinct natures, one divine and one human, but united in one person (dyophysitism).  The Coptic Churches continue today in North Africa, the Near East, and Ethiopia.

This persistence of religious pluralism weakens not only the history argument for integralism but also the symmetry argument.  What Vallier calls the symmetry argument is that governments should promote not only the natural goods of human life but also the supernatural goods such as salvation.  Governments should treat these goods symmetrically.  

But Vallier does not see how religious pluralism denies that these goods are symmetrical, because while human beings can agree on the general character of the natural goods, they cannot agree on the doctrines necessary for securing the supernatural goods.

Vallier does see how religious pluralism sustains his three arguments against integralism--the transition argument, the stability argument, and the justice argument.  The transition argument is that Catholic Integralism is infeasible because there is no realistic way to transform modern liberal societies that are religiously pluralistic into integralist societies that coercively enforce Catholic orthodoxy.

The stability argument is that even if a Catholic integralist order could be established, it would be so unstable because of religious pluralism that it would quickly collapse.

The justice argument is that while the integralists rightly recognize the injustice of forced baptism as a denial of religious liberty, they do not see the injustice of denying the liberty of baptized Christians to dissent from the doctrines of the Catholic Church.  Because of the natural human propensity to religious pluralism, any attempt to enforce Catholic orthodoxy in a large community must engage in unjust coercion. 

Vallier summarizes these three arguments against Catholic integralism in one sentence: "You can't get there, you can't stay there, and it's unfair" (226).

For an integralist social order to be feasible, stable, and just, Vallier suggests, grace would have to limit or overpower pluralism, but there is no reason to believe that could ever happen.  In the New Testament, "grace" is the translation for the Greek word charis, which denotes a divine influence upon the heart or what Vallier calls "God's unmerited aid" or "divine favor"--God's gift of faith through which Christians are guided by the Holy Spirit to see the truth of divine revelation, which could never be understood by natural human reason without the divine inspiration of faith (Vallier 2023:  49, 174).  If all, or at least most, people in a society were divinely infused with a faith that would enlighten their minds to embrace the same set of Catholic doctrines about what is necessary for salvation, this would be an integralist social order that would be feasible, stable, and just.  

This is not attainable, Vallier argues, because grace cannot limit pluralism.  On the contrary, grace promotes pluralism, because "heresy first arises from highly observant Christians who receive God's grace" (Vallier 2023: 188-98).   For example, in 1415, Jan 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.

DUNBAR'S EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE OF RELIGIOUS PLURALISM

Vallier points to Robin Dunbar--in his How Religion Evolved--as possibly providing the best explanation for religious pluralism as arising from the evolution of religious experience (Vallier 2023: 1, 176).  Dunbar distinguishes between two broad kinds of religion.  The oldest religions that arose in the human evolutionary prehistoric state of nature of our hunter-gatherer ancestors are what Dunbar calls "shamanic" or "immersive" religions based on mystical experiences of the transcendent and charismatic shamans.  The newer religions that arose over the past 3,000 years are "doctrinal" religions based on formal ritual practices and theological belief systems.  Dunbar argues that in the doctrinal religions, "beneath the surface veneer of doctrinal rectitude lurks an ancient foundation of pagan mystical religion."  And consequently, the doctrinal religions are always threatened by a constant welling up of cults and sects fired by individual mystical experiences and the religious entrepreneurship of charismatic leaders (1-11, 26, 48, 243-44, 261-62).

I have written about the evolution of religion from the earliest animist mysticism to the later doctrinal theistic religions.  Dunbar distinguishes four or five phases in this evolutionary history that correspond to the expanding population of religious groups (256-61).  I have commented on Dunbar's "social brain hypothesis" as he presented it at the Mont Pelerin Society conference on evolution and liberty in the Galapagos in 2013.  In his evolutionary history of religion, Dunbar applies that idea to explain the natural propensity to religious pluralism.  

In the earliest period of human evolution, humans in very small hunter-gatherer bands of 100-200 individuals living in dispersed camps of 35-50 developed informal animistic religions. They did not have any gods as such, but they did imagine the natural world to be animated by spirits; and they believed that this world of spirits could be experienced through trance.  This animistic religion did not enforce any morality, but it did bind people together in their small bands through their shared religious experience of a transcendent spirit world.  These first human beings had larger brains with more neurons in the cerebral cortex than their primate ancestors.  This gave them a uniquely human mental capacity for symbolic imagination that allowed them to imagine spirit beings with minds similar to theirs.

In the second phase of religion, there arose religious specialists who practiced healing and divination through their special access to the spirit world.  Some of these charismatic shamans would attract followers who wanted to benefit from their special ability to intervene with the spirit world.

In the third phase of this evolution of religion, about 10,000 years ago, as human beings settled into permanent agrarian settlements, the size of their communities exceeded 300-400 individuals.  At this point, they had more formal religions with local gods, and formalized rituals with priests and temples, which provided some top-down collective control over communities that had become too large for social coordination through face-to-face relationships of reciprocal exchange.

In the fourth phase, about 4,000 years ago, societies became much larger with the establishment of the first city-states and empires.  Religion became even more formal and professional in the enforcement of formal ritual practices and theological doctrines.  Religious believers had some sense of belonging to the same religious community, but this membership was not based on any personal knowledge of the other members.

Finally, about 2,500 years ago, in what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, there arose the first monotheistic religions with "Moralizing High Gods" that enforce a doctrinal moral cosmology; and in some cases, with eternal rewards and punishments in the afterlife.

These modern doctrinal religions--including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism--have become global in scale with many millions of members around the world.  This creates a fundamental problem for the doctrinal religions, Dunbar observes, because if human beings have an evolved psychic disposition to live in small, intimate groups rather than large, impersonal groups, the large doctrinal religions will always have to fight against the religious fragmentation into cults and sects led by charismatic entrepreneurs and animated by personal mystical experience of the transcendent.  All forms of religious integralism have had to try--without much success--to coercively suppress this natural religious pluralism (243-64).

LOCKE'S LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY VERSUS PROTESTANT INTEGRALISM

John Locke saw the futility and cruelty of the attempts by both Catholic and Protestant integralists to suppress Christian religious pluralism.  His solution to this problem was to propose a reform of Christian theology that would support religious liberty and toleration of religious pluralism.  To do this, he had to reject the traditional understanding of orthodoxy as a particular set of doctrines that was absolutely necessary for salvation.  Instead of this, Locke argued, "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.  Recently, John Colman has explained this in his new book--Everyone Orthodox to Themselves: John Locke and His American Students on Religion and Liberal Society.

In The Reasonableness of Christianity, Locke claimed that the preaching of Jesus and His apostles in the New Testament made it clear that salvation required believing in only one doctrine--that Jesus is the Messiah.  This one doctrine was simple and clear enough to be understood by everyone, even the great multitude of uneducated and illiterate people to whom the gospel was directed.  

There are many other doctrines in the Bible that are so hard to understand, perhaps even beyond ordinary human understanding, that there have been endless controversies over their meaning, which has produced conflict among Christians about what set of doctrines should count as orthodoxy.  But once one sees that these disputed doctrines are not absolutely necessary for salvation, then one can say that as long as they believe that Jesus was the Messiah, we can allow Christians to decide for themselves whether they need to believe those other doctrines that have been debated.

This will allow us to say, as Locke did in the opening of his Letter Concerning Toleration, that "toleration is the chief characteristic mark of the true church," and that all Christians should be free to decide what is orthodox for themselves.

THE MARKETPLACE OF CHRISTIANITY

This Lockean liberal regime of toleration and religious liberty creates a marketplace of Christianity in which churches compete for members.  Even before the full opening up of that marketplace in the modern liberal regimes, there has always been a somewhat restricted marketplace of religion.  For example, the Protestant Reformation can be seen as a successful penetration of a religious market dominated by a monopoly firm--the Catholic Church.  The Catholic reaction in the Counter-Reformation continued the competitive process with doctrinal and organizational innovations to make the Catholic Church more competitive (Ekelund, Hebert, and Tollison 2006).

Roger Finke and Rodney Stark (2014) have shown how the history of religion in the United States can be understood as a free market economy of religion based on the Lockean principle of religious voluntarism.  Churches in America have competed for adherents by evolving to satisfy the changing demands of religious consumers.

In all of this, we see the cultural evolution of the Christian churches to serve the natural desire for religious understanding in the pluralistic pursuit of religious happiness.

REFERENCES

Colman, John. 2023. Everyone Orthodox to Themselves: John Locke and His American Students on Religion and Liberal Society.  Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

Dunbar, Robin. 2022. How Religion Evolved, and How It Endures.  New York: Oxford University Press.

Ekelund, Robert B., Jr., Robert F. Hebert, and Robert D. Tollison. 2006.  The Marketplace of Christianity.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Finke, Roger, and Rodney Stark.  2014.  The Churching of America, 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy.

Vallier, Kevin.  2023.  All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Catholic Integralists for Trump? Sohrab Ahmari and J. D. Vance

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."

Pope Leo XIV Will Not Endorse the Integralism of Pope Leo XIII

When Cardinal Robert Prevost chose Leo XIV as his papal name, he suggested that his papacy would advance some of the themes of Leo XII's papacy.  Those conservative Catholics who argue for Catholic Integralism might infer from this that Leo XIV will revive the Integralism that can be found in some of the encyclicals of Leo XIII.

The integralists argue that in any good social order, the government will coercively enforce belief in the doctrines of the Catholic Church as the one true religion.  Against this, I have claimed that since religious pluralism is natural to human beings, integralism's attempt to suppress religious pluralism contradicts human nature.  The evolutionary science of religious pluralism support's John Locke's liberal theology of Christianity--that since "everyone is orthodox to themselves," there is no set of universal doctrines binding on all Christians; and therefore, there is no orthodoxy strictly speaking that can be properly enforced by government.  For this reason, a Lockean liberal social order that secures religious liberty is the best regime for promoting the pluralistic pursuit of religious happiness.  It does this by creating a marketplace of religion in which churches compete for customers, and those churches that best satisfy the desire for religious experience increase their share of the market.

As far as I know, Prevost has never commented on Catholic Integralism.  But what I have learned about his life and work as a priest and a cardinal suggests to me that he would agree with me in rejecting Integralism and affirming Lockean religious toleration and religious liberty as securing the conditions for pursuing a religious life.  After all, Prevost grew up in Lockean liberal America, where a Catholic community in Chicago cultivated his faith, and where he could enter at age 14 a junior-seminary boarding school in Michigan run by the Augustinian order.  He then became an Augustinian missionary in Peru, later the head of the Augustinian order, a cardinal, and finally Pope.  In becoming the first American Pope, Prevost shows how America's liberal social order can allow for the flourishing of the Catholic Church without any Integralist enforcement of the Catholic faith.

Moreover, this is compatible with Prevost's respect for the papacy of Leo XIII because the encyclicals of Leo XIII that are often quoted as endorsing Integralism are ambiguous in ways that suggest that he was not fully embracing Integralism.  Integralists like to quote from Leo XIII's encyclical Immortale Dei in 1885, which is entitled "On the Christian Constitution of States," where he wrote that 

The State, constituted as it is, is clearly bound to act up to the manifold and weighty duties linking it to God, by the public profession of religion. . . . Since, then, no one is allowed to be remiss in the service due to God, and since the chief duty of all men is to cling to religion in both its reaching and practice--not such religion as they may have a preference for, but the religion which God enjoins, and which certain and most clear marks show to be the only true religion--it is a public crime to act as though there wee no God.  So, too, is it a sin for the State not to have care for religion as a something beyond its scope, or as of no practical benefit; or out of many forms of religion to adopt that one which chimes in with the fancy; for we are bound absolutely to worship God in that way which He has shown to be His will.  All who rule, therefore, would hold in honor the holy name of God, and one of their chief duties must be to favor religion, to protect it, to shield it under the credit and sanction of the laws" (par. 6).

He went on to say that in the Middle Ages, "there was once a time when States were governed by the philosophy of the Gospel," and "Church and State were happily united" (par. 21).  But then, in the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation, with its "deplorable passion for innovation," threw the Christian religion "into confusion" (par. 23).

This created violent conflicts over religion.  And so, to create peace, it was decided that there should be a separation of Church and State, and the State should "grant equal rights to every creed, so that public order may not be disturbed by any particular form of religious belief" (par. 25).

The Church has been ambivalent about this modern separation of Church and State.  On the one hand, the Church "deems it unlawful to place the various forms of divine worship on the same footing as the true religion."  On the other hand, the Church cannot rightly "condemn those rulers who, for the sake of securing some great good or of hindering some great evil, allow patiently custom or usage to be a kind of sanction for each king of religion having its place in the State" (par. 36).  

The Church must condemn as false the principle that all religions are equal, because the Church knows that the Catholic Church is the only true religion, which should be supported by the government.  But the Church must also recognize how the separation of Church and State secures the "great good" of religious peace and avoids the "great evil" of religious war.

Leo XIII expressed this same ambivalence in his encyclical Longinqua in 1895 on "Catholicism in the United States."  Speaking to American Catholics, he wrote:

. . . thanks are due to the equity of the laws which obtain in America and to the customs of the well-ordered Republic.  For the Church amongst you, unopposed by the Constitution and government of your nation, fettered by no hostile legislation, protected against violence by the common laws and the impartiality of the tribunals, is free to live and act without hindrance.  Yet, though all this is true, it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced.  The fact that Catholicity with you is in good condition, nay, is even enjoying a prosperous growth, is by all means to be attributed to the fecundity with which God has endowed His Church, in virtue of which unless men or circumstances interfere, she spontaneously expands and propagates herself; but she would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority (par. 6).

So while the Pope is grateful for the "prosperous growth" of Catholicism in America made possible by its protection of religious liberty, he must also say that "the most desirable status of the Church" would be for the American government to enforce Catholicism as the true religion.

This ambivalence of the Church about the Lockean separation of Church and State was finally overcome in 1965 when the Second Vatican Council issued the "Declaration on Religious Freedom" or Dignitatis Humanae, which endorsed the human right to religious liberty and thus embraced the Lockean argument for religious toleration as the necessary response to the irresolvable problem of religious pluralism.

The wisdom of that decision is now confirmed by the Church's choosing for Pope a man whose Catholic faith was nurtured by the religious liberty secured by America's Lockean liberal social order.

Are Most of Us Going to Hell? Is Don Giovanni Already There?

J. D. Vance has said that Kamala Harris "can go to Hell" for her failure to investigate the killing of 13 U.S. military service people during the evacuation from Afghanistan in August of 2021.  When he was asked whether he should apologize for using such language, he said that he would not apologize for using "a colloquial phrase" to express his moral disgust with Harris.  Of course, he is right that most of us today use the words "go to Hell" as a "colloquial" expression of our emotional disgust with someone.  

This suggests that we have forgotten that for most of Christian history, orthodox Christians spoke of "going to Hell" as a literally true Christian doctrine--that most human beings after they die will go to Hell where they will be eternally tormented by God as punishment for their wickedness.  As I have indicated in my recent posts on Vance and his association with Catholic Integralism, Vance professes to be a traditionalist Catholic who believes in the truth of Christian orthodoxy, who also believes that the identity of America as a Christian nation depends on enforcing belief in that Christian orthodoxy.  

For the Catholic Integralists, the highest end of man is to avoid eternal torment in Hell and enjoy eternal beatitude in Heaven.  And achieving that end requires a Catholic theocracy: the temporal power of the state must serve the spiritual power of the Catholic Church, the only true Church that can lead human beings to eternal salvation and away from eternal punishment.  But as I have argued previously, the Catholic Integralists don't really believe this, because they are still liberals who accept the liberal principles of religious liberty and toleration.

Moreover, people like Vance and the Catholic Integralists--and most Christians generally today--believe that the truth of Christian orthodoxy has been divinely revealed by the Holy Spirit through scripture and tradition.  But that belief is denied by the fact of religious pluralism--by the fact that devout Christians cannot reach agreement on fundamental Christian doctrines such as the doctrine of Hell as eternal torment for most human beings.  This confirms Locke's claim that "everyone is orthodox to himself," and for that reason we need to secure the religious liberty and toleration that will allow a free debate over religious doctrines without any coercive enforcement of one church's orthodoxy over another's.

Last year, the Gallup polling organization reported that the proportion of Americans professing to believe in God, Heaven, and Hell has declined over the past 24 years.  In 2001, 90% believed in God, 83% believed in Heaven, and 71% believed in Hell.  In 2023, that had gone down to 74% (God), 67% (Heaven), and 59% (Hell).  In some other countries, the percentages are lower.  In Great Britain, for example, it's 49% for God, 41% for Heaven, and 26% for Hell.  Hell is always less popular than Heaven.  Nevertheless, the international surveys report that in a few countries--like Egypt and Morocco--almost 100% of people report believing in Hell.

Over the years, I have written many posts on the evolutionary history of Heaven and Hell.  And in the last four hundred years of that evolutionary history, particularly in Europe and North America, there has been a notable decline in belief in the Christian orthodox doctrine of Hell as the place for the eternal torment of most human beings.

DID DON GIOVANNI GO TO HELL?

Recently, I had to think more about this when my wife and I attended performances of Verdi's La Traviata and Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Santa Fe Opera.  Don Giovanni was a legendary libertine who was reputed to have seduced (or raped) over 2,000 women.  The Italian libretto for Mozart's opera, written by Lorenzo Da Ponte, is based on this old story.

At the beginning of the opera, in seventeenth-century Seville, we see the Don struggling with Donna Anna, who is resisting his sexual assault.  Donna Anna's father, the Commendatore, comes out of his palace, and he challenges Don Giovanni with a sword.  At first, the Don is reluctant to fight with an old man, but finally he draws his sword and easily kills him.  Leporello, the Don's servant, is horrified by what he has seen.  The Don and Leporello leave together.  

Meanwhile, Donna Anna and Don Ottavio, her betrothed, come out of the palace and are shocked by the dead body of the Commendatore.  Together, they sing about their "oath to the gods . . . to avenge that blood."  That sets the recurrent theme in the opera of "vengeance" as indicated by the many appearances of the Italian word vendetta in the libretto.  Every woman who is assaulted or betrayed by Don Giovanni seeks vengeance against him.  And as they warn other women about his predatory ways, the Don fails in all his attempts at new conquests because he cannot escape his bad reputation.

Near the end of the opera, the Don and Leporello are walking through a graveyard with monuments and statues, including one of the Commendatore.  The Commendatore's marble statue speaks: "You will cease laughing before dawn!"  Mozart uses three trombones here for the first time in the opera.  In the eighteenth century, trombones were used mainly for religious music and for supernatural scenes in operas.  This sudden entrance of trombones in what is a comic opera must have awed Mozart's audiences.

Don Giovanni is surprised, and he asks Leporello to read the inscription on the statue: "Here I await vengeance [vendetta] on the wicked man who brought me to my death."  Leporello is frightened.  But the Don is amused.  He invites the statue to come to dinner.  The statue agrees.

Later, Don Giovanni is having a grand party in the banquet-hall of his palace.  The statue arrives and enters the room.  He invites the Don to have dinner with him.  The Don agrees.  He gives his hand to the statue as his pledge.  The statue's hand is freezing cold.  He orders the Don:  "Repent, change your life, it is your last moment!"  Giovanni refuses to repent.

Roaring flames begin to surround Giovanni, and demon voices are heard from below: "All is as nothing compared to your crimes! Come!  Worse is in store for your!"

Giovanni cries: "Who tears my spirit?  Who shakes my innards?  What twisting, alas, what frenzy!  What hell.  What terror."

With the demon voices screaming, Giovanni cries "Ah!" as he is enveloped by flames and sinks to hell.

A few minutes later, all of the main characters appear in the room.  Leporello explains what happened: "right over there the devil swallowed him up."  Don Ottavio says: "we all have been avenged by heaven."  The opera ends with all singing the "very ancient song"--"And the death of wicked men is always just like their life."

Don Giovanni has always been one of the most popular of all operas.  And some opera critics have said that it is the greatest of all operas.  And yet many people have found the end of the opera with the Don's descent into Hell unsatisfying.  This ending just does not feel right.

                     Don Giovanni, the Commendatore Scene, from the Movie Amadeus

Or perhaps it does not feel right only for modern secular audiences and opera directors who have no understanding of Mozart's Catholic Christian conception of Hell as the place where evil men like Don Giovanni will be eternally tormented for their sins.  

But that's not a good answer, because the religious language in Don Giovanni sounds more like a vaguely pagan polytheistic view of the Underworld rather than a Christian view of Hell.  The characters invoke "the gods" without any reference to the God of the Bible or to Jesus.  In explaining what has happened to the Don, they say that he has gone to be with "Proserpina and Pluto"--the ancient Roman gods of the Underworld.  This is very strange for people supposedly living in the Catholic Spanish world of 17th century Seville!

Furthermore, whenever the characters appeal to a "just heaven" to punish Giovanni, they seem to be projecting their own personal vendetta onto "heaven."  For example, Donna Elvira tells Giovanni: "A just heaven willed that I would find you, in order to accomplish its own vendetta and mine."

What I see here is confirmation of Judge Morris Hoffman's claim that evolution has built our brains to punish cheaters.  Our brains incline us to three kinds of punishment.  As first-party punishment, most human beings punish themselves for cheating through conscience and guilt.  As second-party punishment, wrongdoers are punished by retaliation and revenge (delayed retaliation) from their victims.  As third-party punishment, we punish wrongdoers for harming others with retribution.

It's clear to me that Don Giovanni has no moral conscience or sense of guilt, and so he doesn't punish himself for his wrongdoing.  He's a psychopath or what I have called a "moral stranger"--someone who does not feel the moral sentiments that most of us feel.

Nevertheless, Giovanni is punished by the second-party retaliation and revenge coming from his victims and by the third-party retribution coming from those who observed his wrongdoing.  If he really was sent to Hell by the gods of a "just heaven," that would be a supernatural form of third-party punishment.

Stephen Barlow--the Director of the Santa Fe Opera's production of Don Giovanni--disagrees with my claim that Giovanni has no conscience, and he even designed his production of the opera to show that Giovanni's guilty conscience drove him to kill himself at the end, and this self-inflicted punishment takes the place of his being thrown into Hell.

Barlow's idea was to alter the staging of Don Giovanni to make the story similar to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.  Dorian Gray is a young man in Victorian England whose beauty is admired by both men and women.  When an artist paints a portrait of Dorian, he realizes that while he will always be beautiful in the painting, he will lose his beauty as he ages.  So, he wishes that the face in the portrait would age, while he remains young and beautiful.  His wish is fulfilled.  He devotes his life to beauty and sensuous pleasures, and he experiments with every vice, even murder.  Reflecting the increasing degradation of his soul over the years, his portrait becomes ever more hideously ugly, while he still looks beautiful.

Struggling with his guilt, he decides that he must destroy the only evidence of his vicious conduct--the portrait.  He takes a knife and stabs the picture.  Doing that, he actually stabs himself in the heart and dies.  The next day, when people find his body, they see a withered and ugly corpse, while the portrait beside him is young and beautiful again.

To mimic this story, Barlow staged his Don Giovanni in Santa Fe as set in Victorian England.  At the opening of the opera, the audience sees a young and beautiful Giovanni having his portrait painted.  Then, at the end of the opera, the statue of the Commendatore is replaced by a portrait of the Commendatore, who looks like an aged and ugly Giovanni.  The Commendatore steps out of the portrait to challenge Giovanni.  Refusing to repent, Giovanni rushes toward the painting and stabs it with a knife.  But then Giovanni falls back and collapses.  He has actually stabbed himself and dies.  His guilty conscience has driven him to kill himself.

I do not see any evidence in the music or the libretto of Don Giovanni to justify Barlow's claim that Giovanni is punished and finally killed by his own guilty conscience.  The Don as depicted in this opera acts like a psychopathic libertine who has no conscience, whose punishment comes not from himself but from those provoked by his wrongdoing into a vendetta of retaliation and retribution.

I suspect, however, that many people in the Santa Fe audience found Barlow's clever alteration of the opera's ending more satisfying than Mozart's staging of the Don's descent into the eternal torment of Hell.  This is because in recent centuries, beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, belief in the Christian doctrine of Hell as a place of eternal torment has been in decline, particularly in Europe and North America.

In my next post, I will say more about this cultural evolutionary history of the symbolic reality of Hell, so that increasingly many people today, even devout Christians, can no longer believe in that traditional doctrine of Hell.