The New Catholic Radicals
Kevin Vallier March/April 2025Integralism’s challenge to religious freedom
Illustration by Robert Hunt
The twentieth century saw an explosion of secular political movements and secularization, suppressing and marginalizing religion in many parts of the world. In milder cases these secularizing movements only suppressed the political expression of faith, such as in Turkey and India; in the USSR and Mao’s China, ferocious religious persecution took hold.
This secularizing trend reached its apex in the late twentieth century, coinciding with what appeared to be liberalism’s definitive triumph in the West. By the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, liberalism had seemingly defeated its opponents. Almost everyone in the West defended liberal institutions and ideals, such as universal religious freedom and church-state separation. Take the 2012 U.S. presidential election: Mitt Romney was no illiberal right-winger, and Barack Obama was never a socialist. They both were—to different degrees, indeed—liberals.
That changed in 2016. Suddenly immigration restrictions and aggressive right-wing approaches to the culture war became influential, if not dominant, within many liberal democracies. Nations as diverse as Russia, India, Poland, and Turkey saw a revival of religious politics. Liberal elites were rejected as oppressors. Culture trumped economics. In the U.S., race took over the national conversation—a place health care reform had occupied a few election cycles prior. The political right—now content with a large welfare state and eschewing fiscal discipline—started winning elections. Proclamations of liberalism’s victory now seemed premature.
Old Doctrines, New Threats
Of all the movements now challenging modern liberal democracy, Catholic integralism is the most intellectually sophisticated. Integralism is an intellectual revival that has emerged not from the traditional Catholic hierarchy but from lay academics and writers who saw themselves as defenders of an authentic Catholic political tradition that had been abandoned in the rush to accommodate modernity.
Integralists say the church and the state are parallel polities. The church is heavenly and eternal, while the state is earthly and temporal. The church has a nobler purpose—salvation. Thus, it can direct Christian states to support its spiritual agenda under certain conditions.
To fully grasp how integralism challenges liberalism and, by extension, modern religious freedom, we must first understand its theoretical foundations and historical development.
Catholic integralism can be defined through three core claims. These theoretical principles, while abstract, have profound practical implications for how integralists envision the relationship between religious and political authority.
Natural authority: God directs the state to advance the natural common good of a community.
Supernatural authority: God directs the church to advance the supernatural common good of all baptized persons in the community.
Indirect supernatural sovereignty: to advance the supernatural good, and only for this reason, the church may mandate state policies, backed by civil penalties, that advance supernatural ends directly without excessively undermining natural or supernatural goods in some other respect.
The first two conditions are easy to understand. God grants secular rulers the authority to foster the natural common good. The natural common good is essential for earthly flourishing. Further, one can grasp this authority through reason. God also endows ecclesiastical rulers with related authority. Their role is to promote the supernatural common good of the community of the baptized.
The third condition makes integralism unique. Most Catholic theologians believe that God empowers the church and the state to rule in their own domains. Theologians also agree that the church has a nobler mission than the state. But integralists diverge from even most traditional Catholics in a particular way. They think the church’s higher end has implications for political sovereignty. The state can threaten the church’s mission. The church must accordingly have some authority over the state.
This authority takes specific forms in practice. In cases in which the church cannot achieve its aims through spiritual punishments such as excommunication, it can authorize and, in some cases, require the state to back its punishments with civil punishments. For instance, if the church excommunicates a heretic, and the heretic does not repent, the state might impose civil punishments to turn the heretic back from perdition.
One crucial distinction sets integralist policy apart: in an integralist state, the church could direct the state to use civil coercion against the baptized. But the unbaptized are to be immune from such coercion. Because they are not under the church’s jurisdiction, the unbaptized cannot also be under the jurisdiction of state power in those cases in which the state exercises its power on behalf of the church’s spiritual mission.
These theoretical foundations create a complex hierarchy of jurisdictions that differs markedly from both secular separation of church and state and traditional theocracy. Unlike theocracy, where religious authorities rule directly, integralism envisions overlapping authorities with distinct but connected spheres of sovereignty.
While these claims might appear similar to mainstream Catholic social teaching, they diverge in crucial ways. Mainstream Catholic thought since Vatican II has generally accepted that the state should promote the common good while respecting religious pluralism. The integralist vision differs along three lines:
First, while mainstream Catholics believe the church should influence society through moral persuasion, integralists insist on direct political authority over baptized Christians.
Second, where modern Catholic social teaching emphasizes human dignity and religious freedom as fundamental rights, integralists view religious liberty as subordinate to the church’s mission of salvation. While the unbaptized have broad religious freedom, the good of the baptized person permits a state with church authorization (a “church-authorized” state) to keep them on the theological straight and narrow.
Third, while mainstream Catholic thought accepts the institutional separation of church and state, integralists demand a formal role for the church in directing state policy on matters touching supernatural ends.
In my view, integralism was a common doctrine in Rome for centuries and seems to have become standard by the eleventh century. One can make a case that it persisted through the nineteenth century. But in 1965 the Second Vatican Council promulgated Dignitatis Humanae, which boldly declared, “The human person has a right to religious freedom.” No more state enforcement of religious law. Integralism was, it seemed, dead.
From Theory to Movement
Starting in the mid-2000s, several traditionalist Catholic intellectuals grew skeptical of the church’s doctrine of religious liberty, blaming it for the decline of Western European and American Catholicism. Some 15 years ago the English philosopher Thomas Pink began to defend a unique approach. Catholicism was dying, he said, because the church had forgotten who she was, and she must be reminded. If she could remember, she might be reborn.
Pink faced an obstacle: Dignitatis Humanae. Some traditionalist Catholics rejected the document by rejecting the council. For Pink, division would not do. He sought to establish continuity between historic and contemporary church teaching. Pink reinterpreted the council’s leading “liberal” document on religious liberty as continuous with the nineteenth-century popes’ more traditionalist views about church-state relations.
The election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States changed the movement. While the British integralists continued their work, many American integralists saw a political opportunity. Some integralists, such as University of Dallas professor Gladden Pappin, saw Trump as a blunt tool to defeat secular liberalism. He encouraged fellow travelers to become more politically engaged. Sohrab Ahmari, a young and charismatic journalist, became Catholic and joined the integralists’ ranks. Most important, the integralists also converted Adrian Vermeule, a professor at Harvard Law School, who singlehandedly gave the movement some academic clout.
What drove them? Conservative Catholics felt blindsided by the LGBT movement’s rapid progress. They were shaken by the 2015 Supreme Court Obergefell decision, recognizing same-sex marriage, and the 2020 Bostock ruling, extending LGBT nondiscrimination protection. They were dismayed by an increasingly radical defense of abortion rights, worsened by limitations on religious exemptions. The Little Sisters of the Poor, a group of nuns that served the poor, came in for governmental scrutiny owing to the Health and Human Services contraception mandate. The mandate contained religious exemptions, but they failed to protect the Little Sisters’ freedom not to provide contraception to its members.
These pressures divided the integralist movement. The British project was church-facing: it hoped to revive the church. But the American integralists had a state-facing project: they wanted to bring the U.S. as close to integralism as they could. This state-facing approach manifested most clearly in the work of Vermeule, whose vision for transforming American governance reveals the movement’s practical implications for religious liberty.
This American approach marked a dramatic break from traditional Catholic political engagement in the United States. Historically, American Catholics had sought to demonstrate their patriotic compatibility with democratic institutions, as exemplified by John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 speech affirming the separation of church and state. Even conservative Catholics typically worked within the American constitutional framework, advocating for their positions through democratic processes while accepting institutional pluralism.
The new integralists, by contrast, rejected this accommodationist approach entirely. Rather than seeking to prove Catholicism’s compatibility with American democracy, they argued that authentic Catholic teaching was fundamentally incompatible with liberal institutions. Where previous generations of Catholic activists had sought religious exemptions and protections within the liberal order, integralists aimed to transform that order through strategic institutional capture.
This strategy found its most comprehensive expression in Vermeule’s vision for transforming American governance.
The Challenge to Religious Freedom
For Vermeule, the state and the church need strong administrative powers. They should work together to strengthen one another’s ability to control the populace and promote the common good. While Vermeule claims to want to avoid coercion and use persuasion and soft power to establish an integralist state, his vision carries profound implications for religious liberty.
The challenge to religious freedom appears most clearly in three areas: First, in constitutional interpretation. Vermeule developed “common good constitutionalism,” which, in contrast to conservative originalism, argued that judges should draw on substantive moral values in ambiguous cases. For instance, in free speech law, considerations of the common good might allow for more speech restrictions than current U.S. law allows. Additionally, if the administrative state better serves the common good when it can operate relatively free from Congressional interference, that should also guide judicial interpretation.
The integralist vision of administrative power represents a particular challenge to American federalism. Their preference for centralized authority conflicts with traditional conservative emphasis on states’ rights and local control. This is why integralists sometimes forge unusual political alignments with progressive advocates of strong federal power.
The second challenge to religious freedom lies in the integralists’ approach to the scope of state power. The integralist vision requires fundamental changes to the American constitutional structure, particularly regarding church-state separation. The most direct path would involve limiting the establishment clause to the federal government, which would require effectively uprooting the Fourteenth Amendment’s current interpretation. More broadly, integralists envision a gradual transformation of constitutional doctrine that would allow for increasing cooperation between religious and state authorities. According to my private conversations with movement leaders, their ultimate goal would be establishing the Catholic Church as a recognized spiritual authority. This constitutional transformation would likely proceed through incremental changes in judicial interpretation and administrative practice rather than sudden revolutionary change. The strategy reflects integralists’ recognition that their vision requires generational effort and institutional patience.
The third challenge to religious freedom lies in the treatment of religious minorities. While integralists defend religious liberty for the unbaptized, they reject it for the baptized. The church can direct the state to use civil coercion against baptized Catholics, including civil punishments to enforce religious obligations. As Vermeule puts it, Christians must build strong religious communities to resist liberal elites. Catholics must find “a strategic position from which to sear the liberal faith with hot irons, to defeat and capture the hearts and minds of liberal agents, to take over the institutions of the old order that liberalism has itself prepared and to turn them to the promotion of human dignity and the common good.”
In the United States, Catholics have enormous intellectual influence among right-wing elites: if integralists can convert them, they can rule. The nine U.S. Supreme Court justices have spectacular power; five are Roman Catholics. This institutional presence makes the integralist challenge to religious freedom particularly significant for American democracy.
These Catholic anti-liberals are not alone. The Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and his government share some of their agenda. The Russian Orthodox Church enthusiastically supports Putin’s war against the “decadent liberal West.” In the United States, Protestant Christian nationalism seems to be on the rise. Islamism’s work in this regard has never stopped. The Hindu Nationalists have become utterly dominant in India through the BJP. These parallel religious movements suggest a broader pattern of spiritual resistance to liberal democracy, making the integralist challenge particularly relevant today.
Why It Matters Now
Despite some political setbacks, integralists offer many on the New Right hope to defeat liberals on both the left and the right. Their goal is victory, not compromise: to create a new Catholic Christendom from the ashes of a doomed liberalism.
President Trump’s decision to select Ohio senator J. D. Vance as his running mate in 2024 is noteworthy. Vance has deep connections with the integralist movement, mainly through his associations and friendships with adjacent figures such as Patrick Deneen. The vice president of the United States is well acquainted with integralist thought and the integralists themselves. While Vance has similar connections with many on the New Right, he has described himself as a Catholic postliberal, a term that integralists frequently use to describe themselves. I do not know whether Vance is an integralist. Still, it is of global significance that someone whose political ideals resemble those of integralists is a heartbeat away from the presidency. A potential integralist may become the most powerful person on earth.
Half the world may fall under illiberal regimes in the twenty-first century. In 2024, 40 percent of the world’s population voted in presidential or parliamentary elections, including the people of the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, India, Ukraine, Pakistan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Taiwan. Authoritarians, dictators, and many nationalist-populist parties are attacking liberal democracy. Many of these leaders and movements take advantage of the millions who want to express their spiritual commitments through their political institutions.
In my view, liberal democracies must adapt to this new reality. Its leaders must preserve freedom of speech and expression and root out the corruption that anti-liberals use to critique liberal institutions. Liberals should ensure that the state strives to remain neutral between belief systems and moral doctrines and allow social and political space for diverse faith communities. Without such renewal and accommodation, many will conclude—and not without reason—that liberals are the enemies of faith and must be defeated if the church is to be saved from persecution. A few people who believe just this may soon possess enormous power.
Article Author: Kevin Vallier
Author and scholar Kevin Vallier is professor of philosophy at the Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership at the University of Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of six books on religion, politics, and law, including, most recently, All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2023). Follow him on X, at @kvallier.