Kevin Vallier dedicates this crisp and valuable book to “young people considering illiberal ideas.” These days, the young have many such ideas to tempt them, but it is against those with a conservative religious provenance that Vallier writes here. One of these anti-liberal devotional traditions, traveling under the label of “Catholic integralism,” forms the centerpiece of Vallier’s critique. “Integralism” is most prominently associated today with the Harvard legal scholar Adrian Vermeule. As this book documents, however, far older intellectual currents stand behind Vermeule’s alleged attempt to “build[…] a new anti-liberal elite designed to steer the New Right” (17). Vallier concentrates on Catholic integralism because he believes that it illustrates the perils of a resacralized politics in an especially clear way. Accordingly, having highlighted the flaws of this strongly Christian attempt to supplant modern liberalism, Vallier extends his diagnosis to some parallel positions advanced by contemporary Confucians and Islamists.
Recognizing that hurling insults at integralism from a secular angle will be counterproductive, Vallier does not attack his target from an adversarial external position. Indeed, as a committed theist himself, Vallier is sympathetic toward the intuitions underlying integralism. His critical strategy is therefore to explain why integralism fails by standards its own exponents must embrace.
Vallier starts from an assumption to which he thinks all theists are committed: since both temporal and spiritual flourishing are aspects of the human good, then both “natural” and “supernatural” goods must have political relevance (chapter 2). Indeed, Vallier goes further, endorsing what he calls the “symmetry conditional”: “if states should promote natural goods, they should promote supernatural goods” (98). To this extent, Vallier is prepared to grant the “proto-integralist” thesis that securing spiritual goods is a legitimate public aim. That thesis need not entail that a single, plenipotentiary government assume responsibility for securing both secular and spiritual flourishing, but only that the state and the church should form a “dyarchy” to further them propitiously. However, a proto-integralist position does imply that, on at least some matters, the authority of the state must bow before that of the church—particularly concerning baptism, religious education, heresy, and salvation.
While on these grounds Vallier finds some appeal in the integralist proposal, he claims that three decisive problems nonetheless afflict any attempt to realize it: “you can’t get there; you can’t stay there; and it’s unfair” (226). You can’t “get there” because Vallier is unable to reconstruct any plausible transition strategy that would move us from the current liberal order to a stable dyarchy of state and church. He finds Vermeule’s own transition plan (“integration from within”) ludicrously naïve. Vallier nicely shows how Vermeule vacillates between credulous speculation that liberalism’s collapse is foreordained and wishful delusions that the integralist aftermath will command gratitude rather than opposition, and be immune from the corruption, vice, and incompetence to which all transformational political movements are prone.
You can’t “stay there” because Vallier maintains that an integralist regime would lack “moral stability,” a term that he uses in a Rawlsian sense to refer to the capacity of a regime to command the conscientious support of its own members over time. In chapter 5, Vallier develops a fairly complex formal model that shows convincingly that integralist societies will tend to become too pluralistic to hold together without excessive coercion and institutional intimidation. On Vallier’s account, rather than establishing propitious social structures that tend to generate their own sincere support, integralism will rapidly undermine itself. Like the unstable dyarchies of medieval Europe, any future integralist order will have a short half-life, as state and church wrestle over their respective jurisdictions and as intransigent dissent of the sort exemplified by Hus and Luther inevitably breaks out.
Finally, Vallier complains, integralist political orders are endemically unjust, not by the lights of some extraneous liberal standard of justice, but because integralism’s theology of baptism harbors a profound moral contradiction. While Catholic teaching has historically opposed forced conversion, it has allowed coercion of the baptized (punishment of heretics and apostates) on the grounds that baptism “transforms” what would otherwise be unjust mistreatment into justified enforcement of an agent’s vows. Vallier considers the various ways Catholic thinkers have tried to maintain this position but finds all of them wanting even from a theological perspective.
Vallier’s book provides abundant information about various doctrinal traditions that will be obscure to many contemporary political theorists, and is worth reading on this score alone. Whatever one thinks about the religious views surveyed here, Vallier is a vigorous guide to writers who think outside the liberal mainstream, and readers will learn a great deal from his refreshing tour of political theology, both Christian and non-Christian.
Vallier is also quite successful in exposing the dangerous illusions of contemporary integralism. Even so, his book is arguably overly charitable toward its interlocutors. Atheists, agnostics, and non-Christians will in particular find the book far too ready to grant Christian assumptions without any serious scrutiny. Consider, for example, Vallier’s endorsement of the “symmetry conditional”—the view that it is arbitrary to treat “natural” and “supernatural” goods differently. That claim is supposed to help readers take integralism more seriously, but, perhaps because he is himself a theist, Vallier massively overestimates its power in that regard.
Far from treating natural and supernatural goods “symmetrically,” the argument in fact turns out to state that the latter are more important than such merely temporal benefits as peace, justice, health, and security (100). Vallier’s arguments for symmetry also presuppose the truth of doctrines of sin and grace that only committed Christians are in a position to accept (100–2); what force such arguments are supposed to have for others is left unclear. On Vallier’s gloss, moreover, the symmetry argument appears to justify the repellent conclusion that only one human organization (the Catholic Church) has authority to “confect” a valid Eucharist (99), as if any God worth believing in would deny salvation to someone just because their ticket hasn’t been properly punched (perhaps it is no accident that the leading integralist writing today is an administrative lawyer). Many non-Catholic theists will reject—indeed resent—this claim. More generally, is the “symmetry conditional” supposed to apply to those who deny that they need salvation, doubt that an afterlife even exists, or who assert that the really important “supernatural” goods are to be found in consuming Ayahuasca, engaging in meditation, cultivating a recognition that the “self” is an illusion, or practicing Tantric sex?
Vallier is doubtless right that integralist arguments are rarely boring to those who take the trouble to understand them (6). He is also right that they have the weight of history behind them. But neither of these considerations establishes that Christian accounts of the conditions of human flourishing are entitled to any automatic privilege over the equally arresting alternatives that diverse human communities (religious and nonreligious) have found important. Yet Vallier consistently treats Christian models as exemplary points of reference. I worry, therefore, that his book, despite its laudable ambition to curb religious hubris, still gives integralism far more credit than it is due.
