For nearly a decade, a strain of political theology known as “integralism” was ascendant. Kevin Vallier’s All The Kingdoms of the World (2023) tells the story of integralism’s rising star and explores the limits of its case for illiberal political rule. In doing so, Vallier leveled integralism’s reputation as a coherent philosophical movement.
Integralism, or the full integration of the Roman Catholic Church’s authority within our present political order, is an impossible and undesirable aspiration on this side of heaven. In chapter after chapter, Vallier demonstrates in short, simple sentences how integralism fails to function even according to its own native terms and conditions.
And yet, the heart has reasons that reason knows not. In the year since Vallier’s book was released, many of its former postulants have moved on to vaguer and more diffuse forms of illiberalism. Ironically, the book’s triumph has rendered it partially obsolete, as illiberalism, much like the Greek god Proteus, proves nigh impossible to pin down with its ever-morphing forms (though, more often than not, devolving into an unsophisticated Macchiavelianism obsessed with Christian strongmen like Francisco Franco).
And there are good reasons for these “reasons of the heart” (or “vibes,” as Gen Z might translate Blaise Pascal’s French)—even if they should not lead certainly overly online Christians to long for Spanish fascism to make port in America like the conquistadors of yore.
To Christians struggling to stay afloat amid the deluge of liquid modernity, it makes sense that integralism, with its claims to historic authenticity, would have a strong appeal. Stanley Hauerwas was not wrong when he warned that the project of modernity was to produce people without any story except the story they chose for themselves. We truly are adrift, cut off from history and warned against nostalgia lest we find ourselves on “the wrong side of history”—after all, who but God could possibly know if history has sides, let alone “wrong” ones?
But the liberalism rejected by the integralists and their postliberal brethren is not reducible to that history-denying project of modernity. Vallier makes a similar distinction in All the Kingdoms of the World between “social liberalism” (roughly, Hauerwas’ “modernism”) and a more salutary “institutional liberalism.” Scholars like Jeffrey Stout and Eric Nelson have made compelling cases for the latter as an authentic Christian tradition rather than some secular falling away from our vital religious roots.
And if Brad East was right when he observed that our public conversation lags the scholarly one by several decades (as it did with the Benedict Option), popular appreciation of liberalism as a Christian phenomenon might be waiting just around the corner.
To his credit, Vallier has suggested that he will take up the affirmative case for liberalism in a subsequent book. In order to thoroughly rout illiberalism, such work will be necessary, as another reason for illiberalism’s rise has much to do with dissatisfaction with liberalism’s modern articulations and defenders (consider how strange it is that Bill Kristol and David French could have become considered proxies for the whole sum of a centuries-old liberal tradition).
Additionally, as I have argued elsewhere, the time could soon be coming when illiberalism loses its ‘cool’ factor as a reactionary position. With the “apotheosis of postliberal politics” in President Donald Trump and (especially) Vice President J.D. Vance’s forthcoming administration, liberal institutionalists just might be the slick new dissidents on the block. Whatever its philosophical merits or demerits, “compassionate conservatism” was a lot cooler as an abstract idea than when it became encumbered by the actual policy decisions and persona of George W. Bush’s administration.
But, to return to an earlier point, the triumph of All The Kingdoms of the World has only rendered it partially obsolete. Two threads in particular deserve far more attention and engagement than they have received in the year since the book’s publication: Vallier’s call for integralism’s proponents to create charter cities true to their theopolitical ambitions, and the specific social dynamics that launched integralism into the public discourse and earned it a book-length rebuttal under Oxford University’s imprint.
It is important to note that there are no integralist cities of which to speak. Veritatis Splendor, a planned Catholic development in Texas, might have come closer to the mark had it not been upended by sexual and financial misconduct. Yet even under more faithful leadership, Veritatis Splendor would have looked more like a Benedict Option retreat than Christendom’s resurgence—“not an imperium,” but “an archipelago,” as Vallier describes his preferred project of “integralism writ small.”
Likewise, the Catholic enclaves in Prince George’s County, Maryland are popular simply because people like to live near their friends and the housing prices are relatively affordable (at least when compared with the suburbs of Northern Virginia across the river). Could all this talk about integralism be little more than Christians coping with loneliness and a just-out-of-reach economy?
Finally, and related to what Robert Nisbet called the “quest for community,” there are lessons for liberalism’s defenders to learn from integralism’s meteoric rise. Integralism’s critics have loved pointing out that it doesn’t exactly possess the will of the people: it is in no sense a popular movement, even among Catholics. Nor does it bear any official recognition within the Roman Catholic Church (and, in fact, Pope Francis once denounced it as a “plague”). And yet, despite all this, we are still talking about integralism for some reason.
Even more embarrassingly, according to Vallier’s account of it, integralism was entirely a social media phenomenon in its origins, just one remove from Christian Mingle on the cringe meter: a Facebook group, then a Slack, then a slightly more elevated blog, supplemented with recruits from Twitter.
In Vallier’s own more generous description, it was “a digital clique in search of political power.” But unlike other Facebook groups, the Integralists’ eventually commanded headlines because, unlike other social media chat groups, these had well-positioned elites: first, Sohrab Ahmari (an editor associated at the time with the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post), and then, more significantly, Adrian Vermeule (an accomplished administrative law professor at Harvard University). As Vallier rightly notes, “without Adrian Vermeule, you and I would not be having this conversation.”
The lack of popular support for integralism is not insignificant, but more significant still are sociologist James Davison Hunter’s observations about how cultural change happens: through elite institutions rather than popular groundswells.
Wherever he learned it, Vermeule is following Hunter’s formula to a “T.” As Vallier writes, “Vermeule is building a new anti-liberal elite designed to steer the New Right.” If you want “to change the world,” (not incidentally, the title of Hunter’s book on the subject), that’s how you do it.
Combine that with the insights about the economic and social conditions driving the turn against institutional liberalism and you have the basic contours for counterprogramming the integralists and postliberals. In fact, this work is already being done, self-consciously or not, by institutions like the The Fund for American Studies and the Institute on Religion and Democracy (the latter of which publishes Providence), which are each, in their own way, connecting with students at elite institutions, building cohorts and fellowships, and finding ways to credential those students who pass through their doors, hungry for opportunity, community, and yes, free food.
It very well may be, as Emma Freire observed after studying some of these groups, that “the fight for the future of American conservatism could come down to who has the best free lunch.”
The post “Digital Cliques in Search of Political Power”: A Review of Kevin Vallier’s All The Kingdoms of the World first appeared on Providence.