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Christian Nationalism or Catholic Integralism, What's More Likely? With Kevin Vallier
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Most of us consume more Christian media than ever. Podcasts, videos, social media. And yet slowing down and really thinking feels harder than it used to. Our newest project was designed with this in mind, introducing the Sola Newspaper, a quarterly print publication featuring articles on theology, the historic creeds and confessions, and reflections for the Christian life. Delivered straight to your mailbox for free. Subscribe@solarmedia.org newspaper and we'll send it to you at no cost. Read it, mark it up, leave it somewhere someone will find it. The Sola Newspaper, free today@solarmedia.org newspaper we
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don't want to live in the Village Green. At the end of the day, we can all leave and return to our houses of worship. But but our goal is to encourage conversational theology in the Village Green, where we can rub shoulders with Christians from different traditions and expressions. Doctor Valliere is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toledo's Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership. He is the author and editor of many books, including Liberal Politics and Public Faith, Must Politics Be War? Restoring Our Trust in the Open Society and Political Utopias. Trust in a Polarized Age. And the topic of this program is focused on his book all the Kingdoms of the World on radical religious alternatives to liberalism. Dr. Vallier, it is a pleasure to have you on.
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C
Thanks so much for having me.
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B
Trying to understand, first of all, what classical liberalism is and what anti liberalism represents. I know that's kind of a nest to get into with all kinds of distinctions, but could you give us, first of all, a brief overview of what we're talking about?
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C
Sure. So when I talk about liberalism in the broad sense, I mean someone who approaches government with kind of four political values in mind. This isn't to say that about their ultimate metaphysics or their religion, but when they think about what government should and shouldn't do, they think something like the following. It should protect individual and small group freedom. It should recognize the equality of persons in terms of their equal dignity and equality before the law should be tolerant of a diverse range of doctrines and it should seek to harmonize the interests of competing groups rather than, say, a hierarchy or class conflict. So these are four of the things, I think, that are truly distinctive of the liberal tradition. Now, there are different kinds of liberals. Some liberals are really focused on natural rights. Some liberals are really focused on maximizing the good. Some liberals are left liberals in the sense that they think about equality, say, as requiring redistribution. Toleration means having a secular public square, as opposed to, say, classical liberals who would say something more like toleration allows for a range of open dialogue that can be religious and diverse, and that equal rights means something more like equal property rights and equal opportunities. So there's different kinds of liberals, but typically what they do is they say that what government should do for whatever reason is to protect the freedom and equality of persons and to tolerate and to harmonize difference. The post liberal is interestingly different because really they're pre liberals. Their understanding of the state is much closer to what we saw like the ancient, the medieval and early modern world, which is that the. And really for most of human history, the goal of the state is to realize the true unrestricted good life of the human person, meaning that there are no really restraints on what the state may do to promote the human good. The liberal will say something like, well, you know, people disagree about the good, and so the state should try not to take sides in certain cases. But the post liberal will say, well, that ends up in effect embodying a false view of the good. Really what we should be doing is promoting the true human good. Now in the post liberals case, in the Christian case, the thought is, well, what we're trying to do is to somehow promote Christendom. And there's different versions of that because Christians disagree. The Christian post liberal tends to be someone who says, well, we tried this liberal thing where we tried not to base society on the good. We did that, we based it on a false notion of the good, and that was worse for us. And now we should base it on the true Christian notion of the good, or at least the notion of the good that can be discerned by natural law. And all this business of toleration, the harmonization of interests, unrestricted freedom, all of these really were just an attempt to mask what all societies ultimately really do, which is to promote the true good. So the liberal is someone who is trying to say in one way or another, if we try to embody the true good in politics, the whole good, we'll get less of it. And the post liberals pushing back, you write.
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This is from your introduction. Liberal societies claim to advance human freedom and equality and resist building social life around a single religion. But today, an opposing clan of doctrines is on the rise. Call them religious anti liberalisms. They claim that society should recognize a single religion as correct, and they reject liberal order with intensity and total conviction. 20th century politics focused more on economic conflict than religious conflict. Many thought that religion had become a private matter and would fade away. Yes, fanatics might sometimes intrude into secularized politics, but free societies would make quick work of these challengers. Sensible people could safely dismiss anti liberals as theocrats, bigots and fascists. No longer Christian anti liberalisms often appear after communism or they develop as a reaction to excessive church state separation in liberal orders. My book assesses the truth of these new anti liberal ideologies. If you want to understand the case for and against them, this book is for you. And further you write as a Christian I see the attractions of these orders, but I also think highly of liberal society. Radical alternatives to liberalism have significant weaknesses. So I reject these doctrines, but I do not dismiss them. Why do you think is compelling about anti liberation in Christian circles? Intellectual discussions at least it seems that a Christian making the case for liberalism is going to be set back on on his heels that you're going to be a lone, a lonely person in that room.
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C
Yeah, I mean it really depends on the time period and it depends on who, who what other Christians and non Christians you're arrayed against. Christians are very happy to be liberal when everyone else is Muslim or communist because liberalism has this really nice feature of equality, respecting diverse perspectives. And so when you're in the minority, liberalism is pretty nice. Now in majority Christian societies, yeah, it's less common, but even there plenty of it was liberalism came to be under Protestantism and not for no reason. The Protestant doctrine of liberty of conscience, for instance, combined with the priesthood of the believer starts to look a lot like proto liberalism. If you think, look, people can be conscientiously convicted but mistaken, okay, they should have the freedom to be wrong. And if, you know, all believers are priests, the thought is if we can interpret scripture for ourselves, why not the rest of morality? And this is why I think ultimately Christian nationalism is incoherent. I think, I don't because it tends to be Protestant. This is why the Catholic version, the Catholic integralist version was the one that I took on in the book is because I think it's much more coherent. And so I think, I actually think the Catholics are right that Protestantism tends to lead to liberalism. I don't think they're an unnatural pairing at all. And so while many Protestants protest against liberalism, they seldom protest against the version as I defined it. They usually mean something like theological liberalism or something like left liberalism. But usually when it comes to classical liberalism, almost all the Protestants I know are pretty favorable. Unless like some friends of mine, they're just like very keen on the Anglican Church or something, an Anglican establishment. But I think that that one tends to bleed into Catholicism. So the interesting question is going to be what kind of Christian, what kind of liberal, what composition of society, what country are you in depending on, you know, what, what you mean. Now, the anti liberal doctrine has a very simple attraction which is, well, look, I mean, if you want to promote the true human good, then you should promote it directly. Right? Like if Christ is king, then the state should say Christ is king and do things deliberately to improve recognition that Christ is king. Right? Like, it just seems pretty straightforward. Like, Christianity is true, stays from Christianity. But many Christians came to liberalism in part because they thought, well, that may not be the best way to promote the gospel. So, you know, you look at someone like Locke and he's writing a lot about toleration, in part because he's seeing conflicts between Christians. But if you take seriously, for instance, the Christian doctrine of freedom of conscience, and you think, well, people can be conscientiously mistaken, as it appears to be given all the religious strife and disagreement in Christendom, that might mean that on Christian grounds you can't force the whole good. And maybe states are really bad at picking winners and losers. Right? You know, we're not to separate. Locke often pointed out from Scripture the wheat and the tares. So there might be Christian grounds to move in a liberal direction.
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Yeah, I mean, that's even Augustine, Right? This isn't the time to separate the wheat from the tares. Your book focuses mainly on Catholic integralism. Can you talk about that and maybe distinguish it from Christian nationalism? Christian nationalism is a Protestant thing. Catholic integral.
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C
Yeah, yeah. So Catholic integralism is the form of Christendom or political theology that was dominant in, particularly in the high Middle Ages and the late Middle Ages. And it has a vision of politics like the following. Society should be ruled by kind of diarchy, a kind of complex relationship between pope and crown. Integralism isn't essentially monarchical, but it often is. And the purpose of the crown of the political or temporal order is to promote the natural good, the good that's discernible by natural law. And the aim of the Church led by the Pope, is to promote supernatural good, particularly the supernatural virtues of faith, hope and love, and the good of dispensing the sacraments. But then the question becomes, well, okay, like, obviously their missions are going to overlap in some ways. What's the relationship with overlap? And here they postulate, as the great scholastic theologians like Suarez taught, the indirect power of the Pope. That is where the temporal powers policies impacted ultimate matters of, like, say, faith and morals. The Pope could direct a Christian state to enforce penalties for violations of The Church's law. So, for instance, if there was a heretic that the Church had deemed a heretic in a Christian domain, then the Pope could direct the crown to punish, enforce that penalty. Protestant Christian nationalism is a little different because you don't have the centralized ecclesiastical hierarchy. And oftentimes the monarch or ruler or elected official will have ecclesiastical functions in a way that, you know, the British monarch being the head of the church. Now, typically, the American Christian nationalism is not Anglican, but. But there are Christian nationalisms that are, that hold to their state, their Protestant state churches. So you have a much bigger role for the secular ruler in religious affairs. And so you don't have these two distinct powers. Typically under Christian nationalism, you have one power. Or if you have the Church, it doesn't have any official coercive authority. The state's just supposed to enforce some amount of its dictates. But this is where Christian nationalism gets a little vague because it's never entirely clear why what subsection or piece of scripture is supposed to be enforced by the state. It obviously can't. You know, Catholic Church has centuries of canon law that makes this, like, very specific. With Protestantism, oftentimes it ends up reducing to something like natural law. But then there are also facts that are revealed in scripture that are supposed to be enforced, but not like too many of them. So, like, well, Doug Wilson will say, well, you can ban a Catholic processional because a Eucharistic procession because you know that like the. That's idolatry. Or you could ban certain, like, public presentations of Mary because that's idolatry. But I don't know whether he thinks that's because we know it's idolatry from reason alone or we know it's from Scripture. But like, obviously we can't. You know, he thinks, well, you can be publicly. You can't be like publicly Muslim or Jewish. Exactly. You kind of can, but privately you should be able to. So it's like, well, what. What's going on there? So I'm never quite clear with Christian nationalists about, like, when does revelation get enforced versus.
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B
Not that almost sounds like Hobbes.
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C
It's quite complex because in his case there's a social contract. But ultimately God is still, even though we authorize the sovereign, going to blame the sovereign if we follow his heretical commands. But usually the Christian nationalist doesn't think that at all. Usually the Christian nationalist, not Hobbesy in the slightest, because they say you can know what Scripture says independently of the ruler and you can oppose the ruler on that basis, which for Hobbes is just a recipe for instability. But that's another thing, I think, that's unstable about Christian nationalism, which is that people have conscientious objections and their own private readings of Scripture that go against the dominant confession. And then the question is what to do with them in Catholicism. If they're baptized, you can coerce them anyway. And because baptism makes you a member of the Church and subject to the Church's law, and so there's no deal and your conscience is malformed now, it doesn't mean they can do whatever they want to you. But usually a Christian nationalist doctrine of baptism cannot sustain that level of coercion, in particular if you're not baptizing infants, because then if someone isn't baptized as an adult, they're like, basically outside the Church's jurisdiction, in which case, how do you enforce heresy law against them? Catholic integralist doctrine tends to be much more coherent. I just don't think Christian nationalists have a very good account of when revelation gets enforced and against whom. And when I see coherent accounts, it ends up seeming unstable, like it's going to collapse in some way apply to a relatively small number of citizens. Similar issues arise for Catholic integralism, but it's a subtler matter in part, because you really did have a lot of integralist regimes in the sense of being able to really look at the law in the books. Now, of course, it's really true of Christian nationalist regimes as well. But I think, again, once you get to the relationship between Scripture and the enforcement of Scripture, it starts to get unstable, which is one reason I didn't write on it, because I found that very vexing to get a grip on.
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B
So would you say, for example, to give people something to hold on to here? Russia, for example, would be another example of sort of an integralist approach. Hungry war.
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C
That's Eastern Orthodox, which is its own tradition. It's my tradition, but it's different still. And this is more the tradition of Symphonia and the Orthodox Church, which is its own variety, where you do not have total ecclesiastical supremacy, but you also have a much richer doctrine of the Church and a more limited role for the secular leader in ecclesiastical affairs relative to Protestantism. So I think of it as somewhere kind of in between Christian nationalism and Catholic integralism.
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B
Post liberals often say, as you've mentioned, that the secular is never neutral and it's going to be filled with some religion, even if that religion is secular humanism and so forth, by promoting a kind of egalitarian view of human equality in society actually privatized religion, neutered it and made it impossible for it to thrive even in private. Well, let me just quote this. This is so Good. On page 24 you say the integralist narrative is that the liberal is not peaceful, the liberal is not neutral. The liberal drags pious Christians out of their own, as in a poorly acted movie, forcing them to compare the truths of Christianity with the myths of others. The liberal distances us from our values, from God, weakening our resolve and increasing our doubts. The pious Catholic who seeks to govern pursues the divine mission of the Church. We cannot delay in our quest to sanctify the governments of the world by bringing them into the kingdom of God. The integralist promise, shed liberalism and pursue your values without apology. Is that integralist narrative even possible in a world that already has been shaped by the liberal order?
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C
It's a really good question because, I mean, one of the things that the post liberals have insisted upon in some cases is that we're past the liberal order. We're in a post liberal order, and yet the post liberal aspects of it seem like they're passing away. You know, we've had nationalism, but that seems to be a little on the ropes. We've had right wing populism, but that seems to be a little bit on the ropes. There's something about liberalism where it kind of has a tendency to bounce back. Liberalism was down in its luck in the middle of the 19th century. It recovered. It was down in its luck around the interwar period. It recovered. And there's nothing to say that it can't recover again. And it might be recovering even now. One of the difficulties is that its alternatives have a variety of their own weaknesses. There's something about liberalism that's sufficiently resilient that makes it very hard to escape. And my own view about this is that liberalism looks unstable in part because it accepts a level of instability that's stable. So I know that may sound paradoxical, but the idea of having democracy and toleration, you kind of contain the natural fractiousness of the human person. A bit like James Madison and Federalist 10. You create certain free institutions and you just let natural human instability boil, but it doesn't boil over. Whereas if you try to contain it and produce a kind of mono culture, it blows up or collapses, and in many cases empowers people that are sufficiently ruthless that they end up being corrupt. Which is, I think, what happened in Hungary. In Orban's case, the attempt to culturally Christianize a largely secular country, which has failed. And it's going to lead, I think, very clearly to a very sharp backlash. And I think something similar will happen with Trump. I have some friends that discuss, like, the next Democratic administration as being dark, woke, you know, on the grounds that there will be revenge. And I think we're going to see that this fall. So the interesting question is going to be, you know, liberalism has this ability to bounce back, and I think that's partly because it can contain a certain level of diversity and that attempts to suppress that diversity, to move society towards a certain level of agreement and don't really work. This is one reason I think, things broke down for the left under Biden and under Progressivism is it got illiberal, it created its own monoculture, it got too secular, and it got too radically egalitarian. And then that's produced the vibe shift and the backlash. And so the true liberalism is like, you never get fully realized, but it's a kind of center of gravity in societies that are very large, diverse, and changing because it's not ideal. It's Churchillian, right? So with democracy being the worst form of government, except for all the others. And I think liberalism is the worst political ideology, except for all the others. And so, you know, it has all these obvious deficiencies, and yet it keeps sticking. It defeats communism, this defeats fascism. The question is whether it can now defeat populism. But if it beat communism and fascism, probably eat populism, too. So, you know, that's going to be, you know, I mean, the only thing actually, so far it hasn't been able to eat is Islam. That's really the only doctrine that liberalism has ever really been resisted by. And I'm not saying that as someone who's excited about that necessarily. I mean, I'm very much a Churchillian liberal. It's the worst ideology, except for all the others. I don't think a Christian can be happy with any of the ideologies on offer. They're all imperfect approximations of the truth at best. So, you know, I'm not. I wouldn't describe myself as a happy liberal, but a Churchillian one.
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Well, and a Christian has a kind of sober view of this, right? The fall, you know, human sinfulness and. And so forth. That was very much something that Madison was aware of. It's kind of baked into the project, isn't it, that, that, hey, don't expect much from humanity and don't expect much from the government. It's basically, we have to preserve people from the government trying to reach into every aspect of our lives.
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C
Yeah. And I think that the more your liberalism is kind of Augustinian is another way to say Churchillian, I suppose it's all fallen. The more meaningful to Christianity it becomes. The more of a kind of ideal theory liberalism is, the more hostile to Christianity it becomes. This is one of the difficulties of the liberal theories that's sort of common in political philosophy is that they create this kind of deep suspicion of religion, even though they shouldn't in principle, if they're rightly understood. It's interesting the ways in which liberalism can go wrong. And this is one of the things we're seeing in the book. It's like liberalism has a secularizing tendency. If there's anything that, for instance, all liberals agree upon from the very beginning is you shouldn't have an established religion beyond like some, like mild Anglicanism or something. And that leads some to say, well, we should go much further than that. There's a sense in which a truly tolerant public square can't prioritize a particular faith of the truth of particular faith. And of course, the Christian can't really say that we want everyone to be Christians, period. That's what's best for them. Right. And so any society that says, well, no, Christianity is not true or we're not going to talk about it, has to be resisted. So the interesting question is, when Christianity contends with liberalism, do we have to throw the whole thing out, the whole liberal thing out, or do we get something chastened that's better and tolerable? And that's my view, that when Christians try to overthrow liberalism, we get worse things. So, you know, that's the question is what is the most stable instability.
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B
I like that. Yeah, yeah. You give a couple of different examples of Catholic post liberals. You say folks like Patrick Deneen and Saurabh Amari are strategists, and you say figures like Adrian Vermeul and Thomas Pink are theorists. Maybe explain the differences in position between these groups.
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C
Well, it's quite complicated because I'm moving around. So. So, you know, Pink is in many ways like the. The sort of intellectual godfather, the integralist movement, but he's not interested in political power at all. He's a British philosopher who I actually have extremely high opinion of. We have a nice exchange on Integralism in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly that just came out. So he's over there and watching all of this kind of American stuff go down and thinking it's very strange. Vermeule was the sort of head of the American Integralist movement, but it's really since fractured and died down a whole lot in ways that are really interesting. I thought it would maybe revive a bit with Vance being vice president, but I actually think that's made things worse because he hasn't been a good post liberal in power. Deneen has said he's moved on from talking about post liberalism. His next book's on the Odyssey. And Amari is gone his own way. It's not even clear he's post liberal anymore. He's more of a pro life social Democrat who focuses much more on the economic teachings of the papacy on behalf of the working class now and has come out against Trump pretty forcefully in the last couple of weeks. The Dean's gone largely politically silent and Vermeule is mostly focused on constitutional theory these days. So, you know, when I wrote the book 21:22, it was a much more coherent movement, but really in 2025, things started to break down. And that's been a very interesting phenomenon in its own right.
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B
You say that maybe in the next decade or two you could have a young Catholic on the Supreme Court who's influenced by Vermule or by Catholic integralism. What would that look like?
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C
Well, you have a somewhat clearer view of it now. Essentially they'll be, I need to be fair, hold on right wing judicial activists in the eyes of many. That's what many people would say. In essence, they're going to have a conception of the common good that richly and expressly informs their jurisprudence. So instead of trying to stick to a kind of textualist procedure, they're much more likely to say, look, there's a lot of ambiguity here. And in cases of ambiguity, we have to appeal to the correct underlying values. In particular, a conception of the common good. That's not entirely fair to Vermilion, but what it's going to look like is a kind of right wing living constitutionalism, Someone who's much more inclined to appeal to, say, the underlying values of the constitutional order in order to interpret the Constitution than to its strict text.
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B
Which is ironic because conservatives are usually associated with a strict reading of the Constitution.
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C
Yeah, well, that's the whole point. I mean, Vermeer's whole thing is to move past textualism because he thinks textualism has gotten in the way of the realization of the common good. And he was making a little bit of progress with this, but then he got hit with a kind of one, two punch over a two year period. The first was Dobbs, because the textualists were successful in getting Roe overturned finally. And then it was sort of like, well, why do we need common good constitutionalism to have political victory? The other was last year, Amy Coney Barrett saying that she doesn't like common good constitutionalism, that she thinks it's conclusion driven judicial reasoning like the left. And she's the most Catholic of the Supreme Court justices, the only one from Notre Dame, and the one most likely to have clerks from Notre Dame, which is going to be the main way that Vermual would get clerks. So I think there's not a really good way for like true Vermulians to get a foothold in the federal judiciary, but we'll see.
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B
You point out that even though integralism is nearly impossible to establish in the United States, it should be taken seriously. But you've also said you don't take Christian nationalism seriously. Why wouldn't one take both seriously if its pastors are going on Tucker Carlson and speaking at the Pentagon and having a kind of pop media voice?
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C
I take Christian nationalism politically, but not intellectually seriously. And I take integralism intellectually, but not politically seriously. So integralism, you can open up Suarezes on long God, the Lawgiver, and you can read hundreds of pages of working out the doctrine. It's not the same as reading some contemporary, you know. And you know, there are historical closer to Christian nationalists that are actually really interesting. I mean, Hooker. I mean, it's Anglican Christian nationalists. So it's like, don't get me wrong, they're not amazing. They're truly amazing early modern Christian nationalists. So don't I need to be fair. But the, the problem is like the contemporaries, like Pink, Pink's a Suarez scholar. And so you get like a direct download from the sophistication of the originals to the sophistication of the contemporaries. Whereas I don't see, say in Stephen Wolf the same degree of transfer of rigor of argument with Pink. There's always something deep going on. And so it was really fun to engage intellectually. Also, a lot of their more interesting arguments were kind of covered a generation before with the Christian Reconstructionists. I mean, they're different beasts, but like Rush Tuni was actually a lot really intellectually sophisticated. Gary north, you know, that had already kind of been done. Integralism had been dead for decades, at least when it came back. And so it was not a done thing, you know, but the Christian Reconstructionists had been written about and written about and written about. And so another thing I think about the Christian nationalists is like to some extent, a lot of their more interesting Arguments about, like, the enforcement of biblical law, for instance, had just, you know, you just read like people had to say about Rushduni 30 years ago or Gary north, and then you've kind of gotten it. So in a sense, it's kind of like that actually was interesting. Like, I remember, you know, hearing about it, you know, and people were taking that seriously in a certain way. In a certain way. And, you know, I mean, you get stuff earlier like this, you'd get a little bit like in Francis Schaeffer or what have you. So by the time we get to the current iteration, it's like, way less interesting. Whereas with the current iteration of Catholic integralists, it's like they're trying to be as sophisticated as their forebears. And no one had been really being defending integralism with that level of rigorous for quite some time. And I would argue, like Pink's probably at the level of sophistication of about.
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B
It's.
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C
It's in about a century at least. It was just a lot more rewarding. But I should be fair to Christian nationalists. Like, there's great historical Christian nationalists, like, like Hooker's amazing. So I should be fair. And there's people who have made arguments about enforcement biblical law, like in a Calvinist frame, like Russ Dooney, who were like, at least they wrote a whole lot. At least there's a lot of books. So I guess to my mind it was just like, what else is interesting is there to really say since then, though, I think in my next book I will talk about them a little.
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B
You're Eastern Orthodox, but would you say that one development that could be positive here might be for a group of Reformed Lutheran, Anglican Protestants to go back into their history, reach into the history, including the shared history of patristic and medieval sources the way that Catholic integralists have done, not the way the theonomists of yesteryear and today are. Are doing. That would be. That. That would be a really positive thing. David Van Drunen, for instance here.
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C
Yeah, there's so much to be done there. I mean, like, like, look, I'm Orthodox, so if you say go back to the Fathers, I'm just gonna say yes. So I would say Wolf does try to go back to some, like, historical reform folks, but most reform thinks he reads them pretty badly. So the idea would be, you know, you want, you know, pretty rich reading. And this is why, you know, when I've done work with Jordan Valor, you know, we read Hooker along with interrelists, because there's really good stuff you go way back when, I mean, but it was back when all these guys had to do the most rigorous political theology they possibly could because of what was all going on all around them. So really a lot of what you're going to find is the best stuff is going on in like the 16th and 17th centuries. That's where like things got their, pretty much got to their highest level of sophistication. But then there's, you know, all these really interesting intermediate figures. And of course Kuiper comes up all the time. And you know, my favorite non liberals are my neo Kyperian friends who are like, we're basically liberals, but it's just like, like, I mean we just, we just, we just agree on a. A lot. So you know, there are all these intermediate folks. But I guess I think the real difficulty for Protestant Christian nationalism is you have a strong doctrine of liberty, of conscience, and you also allow that conscience can err. And once you have those two things engaging in like biblical coercion starts to look pretty dicey against people who don't
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B
agree and violates the Christian doctrine.
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C
Yeah, yes. And so then it's like, oh, you want to enforce natural law? Okay, well fine. I mean it's like, but that's not really Christian nationalism anymore. Like Catholics agree and it's like, okay, you want to ban abortion or it's like, okay, you just want to legislate some rational moral truths. Okay, I mean like fine, I mean be for that, but that's not like really interestingly Christian. You know what I mean? So the interesting thing with Christian nationals, like you're supposed to enforce some Christian stuff, right? But if you abandon that, then you're just a natural law theorist.
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B
It seems like there is common interest among Christian nationalists and some Catholic integralists in Carl Schmitt, the German political philosopher who was a Nazi. Other than that, what do you make of that?
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C
So a big part of the interest in Schmidt actually began on the left with its interest in Schmidt, where the thought was he gave a really compelling analysis of power relations and its relationship to the law and the way in which power shapes the law and shapes not only what the content of the law, but what the law is and who the sovereign is. You know, on the left, the idea that the far left, the idea that society and social order rests on raw power relations was as old as Marx. There were just different kinds of analysis of that and non Marxist approaches. But the idea that there's, you know, just sort of sadistic sort of raw power relations. Now if you really hate liberalism and you're really looking to expose liberalism. A Schmittian analysis of liberalism is pretty attractive because the thought is like, look, we're just exposing liberal power and who the true liberal power is. It's about, it's about revealing the naked power of liberalism and exposing its false neutrality. So a lot of the interest in Schmidt has to do with like unmasking liberalism is really all about power. The danger with Schmidt is that he doesn't think that's limited to liberal regimes. So once you go down the route of unmasking power, it's everywhere. And then you're just like, you end up just being a far left person. It's just all power and power relations. And so I think the Schmidt stuff is super dangerous because you can't just restrict it to liberal order. This is one of my objectives to Vermeule's analysis, is that once you're a Schmittian about liberal law, why not about integralist law? And so I always wondered, like, how does he get to be like very morally high minded in areas that he likes in like very morally low minded in areas he doesn't like? I think this is like a very central tension in his thinking, which is quite sophisticated. I have always wished I was in a position to talk to him about these matters. And we tried and failed because I'm very. This seems to me just a chief incoherence. If Schmidian analysis of liberal regimes hold, why doesn't it always hold? But that's why it's attractive is that the Schmittian leftists were trying to expose what they saw as liberal capitalism and the Schmittian right wingers are trying to expose liberal secularism.
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B
Either way, politics is war.
- [38:11]
C
Yeah, it's totally playing with fire because once you strip morality out of some kinds of politics, it's going to be really hard to get it back in. And as Christians, we just can't play that game.
- [38:23]
B
Yeah, right.
- [38:24]
C
Yeah.
- [38:25]
B
Some post liberals are happy to critique liberal society and political order, but also are not as combative and antagonistic as others. We spoke with Presbyterian Minister James Wood on the program about this. He's an ecclesiocentric post liberal, so he's not someone associated with the more radical depictions that we see online. But he still thinks it's proper for the civil magistrate to promote Christianity since it's the true religion. What might you say to those who are sympathetic to post liberal ideas but don't desire for them to be carried out in imprudent ways?
- [39:12]
C
So the interesting question for guys like James, who I like, is always, if the states promote Christianity, but not in the integralist way, in what way? And when you start to spell those out and you look for an underlying principle, there's going to be an instability. And the instability is either going to be, well, if you're not okay with some coercion, why not more? And if you're not okay with some kinds of coercion, why not less? This was Locke's argument against Prost in their debates about toleration. A lot of people think that Prost won that exchange, and I did for a while. But I think Locke's later points were good, which is Prost would always say, whoa, I'm not for all of that coercion. I'm only for some. Like, I'm only going to force people to show up to church. I'm not going to force them to believe. And Locke's question was like, well, I mean, why is that principled? Why are you entitled to say, and James wouldn't even force people to go to church. Right. Vermeer would force people to go to Mass. And of course, then the question of whether you'd force baptize Jews to go to Mass comes up, and then he blocks you. But, you know, James doesn't. Wouldn't force people to go to church. But I mean, for many parts of American history, like, if you were a member of a church, you were war. You did have to go, of course, whether we allow diverse membership in most states. But the thought was like, yeah, you got to go. Like, you got to go to church. So then the question is going to be, okay, well, I'm for this kind of religious coercion, but not this kind. And the question is why? And you might just be, like, totally prudential and say, well, this kind is shown to work and this kind is not shown to work. And then I just want to see the data. Yeah. And there's not.
- [40:46]
B
At the end of the day, it comes down to sentiment.
- [40:48]
C
Right.
- [40:48]
B
I just, I. I feel that this would be where you would stop. And I feel that you could probably legislate this, but not that rather than principled arguments.
- [41:02]
C
Yeah. It's a question about what that stable middle ground would be. Because my thought is either it's so weak it won't matter, or it's so strong that it violates the dignity of the person. So in Islam, it's strong enough to matter, but it violates the dignity of the person. Like the idea that leaving the faith gets you Killed as many, many Islamic regimes support and enforce. It's not acceptable to Christians. We don't kill people for leaving Christianity. We don't do that. That's not Christ's way. It would work. I mean, and also, okay, we could tax more heavily people that don't agree with us. That works for Islam. That's one of the main ways. That's the. They're the only group of people that can destroy us. And it's because they're incredibly patient. That's one of the things I learned from studying Islamic anti liberalism. They're incredibly patient. They take most millennials. You conquer, you impose the jizya, you don't force people into the faith, but you create financial incentives for them to join. And then once they join, they can't leave. And then you wait centuries. That's what's happened. That's how you, that's how you turn a Christian country into Islamic country, essentially. It's happened a lot, many times. But we can't do that, right? Like we're not allowed to do it. And no integralist or Christian nationalists think that's at all acceptable. None of them. And because one of the things we understand as Christians is we really do believe in free will. So in Islam, you know, it's really fate, you know, and I think that has a really big effect because it's like, well, we think, well, no, the will has to be free. They don't believe in free will just
- [42:41]
B
to tell people that they have to worship the right God, they have to worship him in the right way. And they have to not only affirm that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, but that the state has a duty to enforce. That is a violation of Christian doctrine itself, as you say of people structural disadvantage.
- [43:14]
C
It's just our disadvantage with respect to Islam. Our main advantage with respect to them is we're better evangelizers because they don't really do that. So, you know, that's the dynamic. You know, we create richer societies, we educate women and so we have a
- [43:27]
B
lower reproduction rate, but we want to do that.
- [43:29]
C
There's no Christian country in which, in which the education of women is banned. So, you know, once, but once women get college degrees, birth rates tend to fall pretty, pretty fast. So, you know, I just think we have to deal with our structural disadvantages because we have to trust Christ that if we follow his commands that things will work out. And I think that's what I say to a lot of the post liberals. They Were like, well, if we don't fight, if we don't win, we're going to lose. And we're going to like, you're just a beautiful loser, a sucker, you know? To which my response is, well, but I mean, like, please, like with Chris Rufa, for instance, like, please just like, draw some lines, like, tell me what is too far. When do the ends not justify the means? And I think my general problem with Christian nationalists, when they talk about, if you listen to Joel Webbing or Dale Partridge or whatever, talk about fighting the left, it's like, okay, what are the restraints? Like, what, what, what may we not do to them? And why? Because my suspicion is once they specify what we may not do to the left to win or to the secularist to win, then that principle is going to expand in a way they don't like. So, for instance, we say, oh, we have to respect equal rights. My thought was going to be, well, do men have a right to vote? Okay, well, Dale, like, so do women. Because this is one of the things he says is we beat the left by getting rid of depriving women of the right to vote. Or, you know, maybe the thing to do is Joel seems to think of, I don't know if Jesus is Jewish or not. You know, so, you know, there's. There's not a lot of. There's. There's this sense that we have to be tough, right? There's a sense that we have to win, right? But, like, when it comes to actually thinking it through and what the principles are that are Christian that would allow us to win, I don't see a lot of Christian reflection on the means. There's a lot of Christian reflection on the ends, but there's not a Christian reflection on the means. But once you start crabbing a Christian reflection on the means of winning, then I think you end up towards this Churchillian liberalism that I've been describing throughout. And I just would say anyone who's listening, just think very, very hard about the way that Christ wants us to defeat our enemies. Because Christians have enemies. We're supposed to love them to.
- [45:36]
B
We're supposed.
- [45:36]
C
We don't not have them. We have enemies and we're supposed to resist them. And we're not supposed to just lose, right? But, like, just really reflect on it theologically. I think I found that very fruitful. What may I not do to win? What may I not do? And to any young new right guy who wants to email me about this, tell me, please, what may you not do to win? And why? And I think that question starts to expose a host of problems across the New Right and where even though I agree with them on many of their goals, I think we're really they're going to reap what they sow with respect to this administration pursuing its goals in whatever way it wants all the time. Like, that's my biggest problem with the second Trump administration, not so much its goals, is that it just thinks it can pursue it however it wants. Right. Like with respect to immigration or foreign policy, it just doesn't care about the procedures. I think we're going to pay for that. I think it's not going to be pleasant. But I would really encourage all young Christians to think about what's the right way to win and what's the wrong way to win, because that's where I am with Christian nationalists. Do I want a Christian society? Yes. What am I willing to do to get it? I don't want to hurt people, and I don't think Christ wants me to either.
- [46:58]
B
It's a great note to end on. Thank you for your insights and your wisdom, Kevin. Appreciate it very much. Been talking to Kevin Vallier. He is political philosopher at the University of Toledo Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership, and the author of all the Kingdoms of the World on Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism, published by Oxford University Depress. Kevin, it's been a pleasure to hear your insights on this very important topic.
- [47:30]
C
Thank you so much.
- [47:35]
A
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