James Lindsay, anti-Communist@ConceptualJames
So Integralism is in the discourse today. What is it?
Integralism BEGAN as a Catholic political and economic doctrine in the late 19th century, first explained by Pope Leo XIII, et al. The short version is that it holds that there is proper justification for the state, Church, and economy (in a subordinate way) to be re-INTEGRAted. That is, it believes the Church and state should merge and control the economy for the good of everyone.
The original point was that Catholic moral principles should structure the state and the economy for what it defines as the "common good." The reason given is that there are two spheres of authority, Temporal (political, State) and Spiritual (haha "not political," Church) that both need their own management but that the demands of the Spiritual sphere, thus Spiritual authority, supervene Temporal authority.
In short, Integralists believe that political authority should ALIGN with Spiritual authority, which they just so happen to have a monopoly of legitimate control over, in their own opinion, of course. The reason for this is that the Spiritual goals of humanity are its highest calling. Therefore, the state must operate as the state but must be brought into alignment or be subordinated to the Church.
In practice, this means that the Church authority will be able to use the temporal authority of the state to compel people in ways the Church, in its own sight, deems best for their spiritual circumstances. Humans, they say, have both temporal and spiritual ends, but the spiritual ones are higher, so the temporal ones have to serve the spiritual ones.
They frame this as "promotion of the common good," which is also something they define. The view is that the state has the duty to promote "true religion" and to direct citizens to the right beliefs in and duties before God, as they see it. Part of this includes ordering the economy in which citizens engage in the management of many of their "temporal ends."
(This could be managed, one might imagine, through something like Church-arranged social credit, for example. Indeed, a social credit system like they have in China is very much like a Communist Integralist system instead of a Catholic one, at least in how it manages the economy and using state power to coerce people toward what that faith believes is man's highest end, the fully realized completion of socialism.)
Integralism goes on to include a critique and rejection of classical liberalism, religious liberty, economic liberty, modernism and modernity, and whatever they mean by "the" Enlightenment (as if there was just one).
In its rejection of religious pluralism, Integralism often demands a single expression of faith in public. While it may tolerate or allow private belief of other faiths, it is the state's temporal role to urge citizens toward their one correct (in their opinion) spiritual end and to therefore prohibit and even punish public expressions or displays of other faiths as being generally damaging to social cohesion and unity and thus the magical "common good."
Pursuant to that, while Integralism isn't specifically anti-Semitic in its expressed character, its open rejection of religious pluralism tends to make it anti-Semitic in practice, which tends to remind its adherents to look for theological and scriptural reasons to blame Jews for the problems of society. See, people practicing the unapproved faiths in public damages the public circumstance and the common good, and "being Jewish" counts. Finding theological or scriptural justifications for these odious beliefs tends to follow.
Though Integralism began as a Catholic politico-economic doctrine, there's nothing in particular that would limit it to Catholic beliefs if you jimmy the underlying theologies enough. Protestants who believe in the state being the steward or shepherd of man's ends could very easily adopt an Integralist framework and, in recent years, have done so consciously and explicitly within the so-called "Christian Nationalism" movement.
Due to political alignment, like a kind of Integralist Intersectionality, there is even now an "ecumenical Integralism" project where the Catholic and Protestant exponents pretend they can get along. What this really means is using the Schmittian friend-enemy distinction to ally themselves against their common enemy, which is the American Constitution and American religious liberty. This is an experiment that is being tried in America today, and it hasn't been going well. Look no further than Yoram Hazony's National Conservatism (NatCon) to see what "ecumenical Integralism" combined with a renewed religious nationalist model brought as fruit. Poor Yoram!
Needless to say, most Catholics, especially American ones, do not subscribe to Integralism, and most Protestants not only reject it but laugh at the very idea as a kind of trick of Rome. Nonetheless, it has become a moderately significant movement that has a lot to do with the current idiocy many of us call the Woke Right.
You may or may not recognize all of the names involved, but you'll probably recognize some of them.
Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule is probably the progenitor of this idiocy, having come to it after wanting to force Carl Schmitt's Nazi legal theories into American society to justify the tyranny we adopted after 9/11 and then finding Catholic Integralism as a suitable vehicle to subvert the American order and engage in the libido dominandi (lust for dominance) behind all authoritarianism.
Aside from him, false luminaries like Chad Pecknold, R.R. Reno, Gladden Pappin, Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Amarhi, and their buddies Kevin Roberts and J.D. Vance are either Integralists or well within Integralist enclaves, among others. This doesn't count the raft of moronic "Protestant Integralist" hangers-on who don't realize the role they're playing or how it's going to work out for them in the end (these are hard to find because most of them have deleted most of the evidence that they publicly held such a dimwitted view, mostly in 2022 and 2023).
So while the young neo-Catholics of today are out howling about attacks on them in the present, you barely have to scratch most of them a little to find out that they're actually defending Integralist tyranny in the name of Catholicism (hashtag NotOurShield). They're something else, though, and it's good to know what and what's really going on here.
