The Utopian Madness of Catholic Integralism

It’s not a malice thing, it’s a despair thing. But it's still insanity.

Every couple of days, an email shows up in my inbox from a new online publication called “The American Postliberal.” Its creators have dubbed it an outlet for promoting “Catholic political realism,” and its contributors publish articles on a range of topics, from movie reviews to the Catholic quest to reclaim Pride Month. For me, it’s a window into the latest supposedly-new fad on the political Right: the Catholic integralist movement, a group of people who believe that social adherence to Catholicism is the only way for America to truly recover from the failures of liberalism. To integralists, such as the writers at the American Postliberal, “Mere variants of liberalism will not save the United States. Catholicism will. It is the religion given to us by our Lord, Jesus Christ, and is the only institution that can save the United States and the west.”

Full disclosure: I’m not a Catholic, despite some of my Grove City professors’ best efforts. I’m not a theologian, or a social scientist, or really an expert on anything save perhaps 21st-century meme culture—I am but a persistent and wild-haired undergrad journalist. I’m a firm believer in standing up for ideas and following your conscience, and I’ve seen no compelling reason to believe that the writers at the Postliberal (or, for that matter, the public intellectuals they seem to admire) are motivated by malice.

However, having engaged in a variety of circles on the political Right and encountered a baffling amount of people who believe the ideas of Catholic integralism to be worth spending time on, it’s probably time to have a very down-to-earth discussion about how this is pure utopian nonsense. No, the choice for America’s future is not Catholicism and paganism—that’s giving this particular brand of Catholicism far too much credit. 

Let’s start with some fairly obvious data: there aren’t that many Catholics in America. According to 2020 estimates, less than 20 percent (18.7) of Americans identify as Catholic at all. The astute reader will notice that is not particularly close to a majority. It’s true that, by some metrics, Catholics are the largest religious group in the United States if you count each Protestant denomination as a separate group. Such a categorization is useful in certain situations, but not if you’re going around asking people if they’re okay with Catholic doctrine being the source of American law. In that case, I’m willing to posit that Protestants, and frankly, everyone in America who’s not Catholic—y’know, that tiny fringe group of 82.3 percent of the population—are going to come together fairly strongly on resisting such a ridiculous notion.

As a journalist, I am constantly made aware of the fact that you can’t push an issue into relevancy. The news cycle ebbs and flows, readers are into different things at different times, and trying to force some radical idea into the conversation that nobody is interested in is not a successful strategy for winning hearts, minds, or really much beyond mildly-concerned-and-brief sideways glances from most people. Yet that’s what the integralists are doing, and the numbers are not good ones.

Let’s say that half of American Catholics are on board with the governmental restructuring that integralists are calling for, purely for the sake of argument (there’s zero evidence for the number being that freaking high). To claim that integralism is a workable solution for America is to claim that the bizarre governmental philosophies espoused by at best less than 10 percent of the population are a feasible way forward. For reference, 7 percent of Americans have "a great deal" of trust in mass media to report news accurately and fairly—that’s the level of fantasyland we’re dealing with here.

The amount of Americans who are on board with Catholic integralism is roughly the same as the amount of Americans who don’t own a computer. So why do people believe in these truly impossible, unworkable, and unconstitutional ideas? In lieu of the data, and as a practicing Christian, my speculation is this: the horrors of truly rabid progressivism have driven them to believe that this is a workable option. It’s easy to think, as a person of faith, that if we could just get people to see faith like we see it, and live it as we live it, everything would be better.

I sympathize with this—the ravages of progressivism too often are targeting the things we hold dear, from our faith to the most innocent among us. Progressivism is a destructive idea that must be fought. But can we settle on a better strategy than restructuring the government and the Constitution in keeping with an idea that less than 1 in 10 Americans are interested in? 

Integralists aren’t evil; in many of their critiques of liberalism, they raise quite valid points (“too much choice, too little tradition, and too weak institutions” seems like a largely accurate assessment). It’s point B where the problem has arisen, and it’s not a malice thing—it seems far more likely that it’s a despair thing: despair at the failures of the political Right to accomplish anything of substance to push back against a culturally dominant progressive order. Such despair is understandable but not excusable—my generation and the ones to follow have a higher obligation than utopian niche theological speculations stemming from our own despondency.

Progressivism needs to be resisted. But, for the love of all that’s holy, Americans deserve a better strategy than “what if we just magically made everybody Catholic.”