In dueling speeches at Davos and Munich, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently agreed on one thing: the “rules-based international order,” such as it was, is dead.Footnote ¹ Where they differed was in the lessons they proposed from this failure. For Carney, a path of resuscitation, of “creating institutions and agreements.”Footnote ² For Rubio, an age of “renewal,” rooted in civilizational unity, Christian heritage, and the rejection of the “abstractions of international law” in favor of decisive action to combat civilizational threat.Footnote ³ This juxtaposition displays openly a rhetoric with which a sector of conservatives has grown quietly comfortable over the last decade: the rhetoric of law as rooted in the civilizational moral core of Christianity prior to, and often against, being rooted in individual protection or procedural justice. Through this rejection of procedure for moral and sovereign force, this rhetoric identifies itself as anti- (or post-, or il-) liberal.

In All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism, Kevin Vallier tackles an influential Christian—and particularly Roman Catholic—form of antiliberalism, Catholic integralism. It is the first (and to this point, only) monograph to do so. Vallier’s effort can be seen as balancing three major tasks. The first is a descriptive account of integralism: presenting the historical antecedents (chapter 2) and contemporary social character (chapter 1) of Catholic Integralism; and applying analytic political philosophy to formulate the core of Catholic integralism as a syllogistic argument (chapter 1). Vallier’s second task is evaluative. He evaluates integralism as superior to new natural law theory in several respects (chapter 3), but then formulates several critiques of integralism: in chapter 4, he presents a transition argument (integralism cannot transition into power without violating Catholic morality); in chapter 5 her offers a stability argument (integralism will be authoritarian and so decay); and in chapter 6 he offers a justice argument (integralism is contradictory by asserting liberty to enter Christianity but denying liberty to enter it). Vallier’s third task is to make two precarious temporal, philosophical, cultural, and geographical leaps into “Confucian and Islamic anti-liberalisms,” and propose that their similarities to Catholic integralism make his arguments in chapters 3 through 6 apply in these contexts, as well.

Clearly, Vallier offers a variety of readers a variety of pathways, each suited to a variety of aims. However, some of these pathways reach more fertile territory than others, and some seem to wander until lost. To my view, perhaps the single greatest gift Vallier provides to scholars of modern integralism in particular and contemporary conservative legal and political movements in general is his descriptive account of the social and historical context of modern integralism. While trained as an analytic political philosopher, Vallier both perceived the need for and then executed what is functionally an ethnographic survey of the people—young and old, prestigious and unknown, public authorities and private citizens—who have shaped integralism into a community that includes anonymous online commenters (or anons), Harvard constitutional scholars, and the current vice president of the United States.

Vallier’s account of the development of integralism is compelling, and he ably makes the case that it is a niche movement worthy of broad attention. From the 2018 Mortara Affair article in First Things—in which an author defended the Vatican’s 1890s refusal to return an infant who was kidnapped and trafficked into the Holy See on the grounds that the child’s parents were JewishFootnote ⁴—to Adrian Vermeule’s motivation of a powerful (if uncertain) group of young Federalist Society members to challenge the conservative legal movement via his Common Good Constitutionalism,Footnote ⁵ Vallier demonstrates ways in which this community of integralists has affected public discourse in the Trump era (9–24). He then presents the historical sources that have shaped this community’s beliefs as they understand them, using the documents cited by integralists to defend their positions (54–91). However, this history is best read not as an historian’s survey of the development of Catholic political thought. Instead, it is best read as a narrative of how contemporary integralists position themselves, part of what Vallier aptly calls integralism’s “narrative allure” (24). Across All the Kingdoms of the World, Vallier has crafted a compelling and substantial, though sometimes scattered, introduction to integralism for interested scholars.

But this introduction is not perfect, and it strays furthest when it attempts to repackage the core of integralist belief. The deviation is both historical and philosophical. It first strays historically by missing one major historical antecedent that deeply affects integralism’s self-understanding. Contemporary Catholic integralism draws on the antecedent debates of the 1930s to 1960s, found prominently in the oblique disputes over the common good between Catholic theologians and legal theorists Jacques Maritain and Charles de Koninck.Footnote ⁶ De Koninck’s work provides the initial ammunition for what Vallier aptly notes as “Pink’s Quest,” after the integralist scholar Thomas Pink, to reread the encyclical Dignitatis Humanae on an integralist ground, against Maritain (9–10).Footnote ⁷ The Thomistic scholarship that both influences and has been influenced by the integralist movement continues to draw intensely on De Koninck as its center of gravity.Footnote ⁸ To my knowledge, Vallier makes no reference to De Koninck in All the Kingdoms of the World.

The consequence of this historical misstep then bears philosophical weight when, midway through chapter 1, Vallier presents a formal, schematized definition of Catholic integralism. He identifies integralism as believing in a natural and supernatural authority, whereby the supernatural authority holds a superiority over its natural counterpart. This is a proper account of most contemporary integralist self-understanding. Where Vallier goes off the path is when he claims that the natural authority involves the state advancing the “natural common good,” while the supernatural authority advances the “supernatural common good” (37). Vallier never develops an adequate basis for this division of the common good into natural and supernatural elements. In the Thomistic Catholic theology from which the integralists are working, and which was disputed between Maritain and De Koninck, the good may have a natural or supernatural end, according to how it is ordered and portioned.Footnote ⁹ However, Thomistically, the common good always necessarily consists of both natural and supernatural elements. This is because commonness itself is a function of the scholastic metaphysics of participation, in which something (often inferior) shares in the nature of something else (often superior).Footnote ¹⁰

The more popular and straightforward self-articulation of integralism from integralist Father Edmund Waldstein clarifies this position: “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 his 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.”Footnote ¹¹

Here, the temporal and eternal ends recognize temporal and eternal goods. But the temporal power of the state is subordinated to the eternal power, meaning that it does not organize political community to a natural end alone, but arranges it to the supernatural end as directed by the teaching of the eternal power, the church. This is, in fact, part of the integration from which the movement gains its name: the integration of natural and supernatural ends in the pursuit of the common good. This is the basis by which integralism—at its most coherent—proposes the integration of not only authority (church and state) but law (in moral and procedural ends). Here, the formulation of philosophical metaphysics bears directly, rather than tenuously, on the theory of law.

This failure to finely parse this metaphysics makes it difficult to use All the Kingdoms of the World to adequately interpret how integralism may be influencing present legal and political developments. When Vallier formulates his critiques of integralism (transition, stability, and justice), only the transition argument is truly an internal critique, operating on integralism’s own terms. The stability argument maintains that an integralist regime would simply disintegrate. The justice argument relies on a functionally liberal notion of justice, requiring that if one may freely enter an institution, one must be allowed to freely leave it (a norm the church clearly does not hold, as in baptism). And Vallier’s effort to defend the justice argument in the introduction to the 2026 paperback edition fails. He defends himself from accusations of begging the question of liberalism by asserting that his arguments do not draw on liberal theories that presume consent. Instead, he holds that he draws only on the Catholic Church’s own position that “coercing the unbaptized into faith violates human dignity,” and so “I ask: Why don’t these same reasons apply equally to the baptized who have lost their faith” (xiii). That Vallier does not address the congruity between these positions has less to do with a bias toward liberalism than with the absence of theological engagement here. Simply, the immediate answer would be that—in the context of the theology that informs integralism—baptism, a sacrament, enacts a change that its subject cannot rescind by human agency. Asking otherwise would be like asking ice to turn to steam of its own volition

The transition argument alone holds that establishing an integralist regime would violate integralism’s own Catholic morality: “Whatever its principles, integralists must violate Catholic teaching to seize power. The simple reason is that they must overcome political factions that will use violence to defend themselves. The integralist party and the integralist state must respond with sufficient violence to succeed. But Catholic social teaching cannot legitimize the level of violence required” (136).

This claim about what Catholic social teaching permits is never substantiated. Nor can it be: it begs the question it presumes to answer. If the metaphysics of the integralists is correct that moral and legal realms are integrated in the interest of a common good, then those who oppose the common good by maintaining political and legal regimes contrary to Catholic morality are not, in fact, innocent. The level of permissible violence is then a moral question. In his only real internal critique of integralism, Valier argues that supporters of liberalism are not necessarily enemies of integralism. This is doubtful, both by reason and by observation of integralist behavior. The metaphysics and moral logic on which integralism is founded inscribe the circle of possible enemies of moral order very wide.

And enemies, I fear, is the proper term. Vallier notes the influence of Roman Catholic Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt in contemporary integralist thought (78–79). But he fails to acknowledge the substance of this influence. Two of Schmitt’s famous maxims—that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts”Footnote ¹² and that politics can be reduced to the distinction “between friend and enemy”Footnote ¹³—produce a clear rubric for integralism: Theological metaphysics can dictate the scope of one’s political enemies. Because integralism integrates this eternal moral metaphysics with the temporal regime, opposition to the temporal superiority of Catholic institutions as lodestars for legislative governance can render a person a political enemy. To dispute this argument on integralism’s own ground would require a theological argument as to why this perspective is in contradiction with Catholic morality and metaphysics—precisely the argument Vallier does not make.

And unfortunately, the argument needs to be made. Returning to the remarks made in Davos and Munich, the juxtaposition of Carney’s rhetoric of procedural reform and Rubio’s rejection of procedure in favor of grounding international cooperation in a Christian heritage takes on a new light. It is unlikely that Rubio would identify himself as an integralist—few do these days, even among their own number. But integralism has played an essential role in connecting conservative political and legal thought to an antiliberal perspective that both grounds political legitimacy in cooperation with nebulous moral values and theoretically licenses violence on the basis of any opposition to the moral regime.

All the Kingdoms of the World will not provide the reader with all the tools to analyze this development or what comes after it. But it does provide an initial exposure to the key players and their worlds at a particular essential moment in time. It provides the committed liberal reader a set of well-articulated but familiar rebuttals of integralism’s core claims. But for those of us committed to refuting integralism on its own terms, it leaves much work. And for those interested in tracing precisely the connection between integralism and contemporary conservatism, it offers mostly a clear point from which to begin a much larger investigation.