We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jasinski,
culture editor here at The Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts into the premium version of
our website as well. Today we are joined by Kevin Valier. He is
the author of the new book All the Kingdoms of the World on radical religious
Alternatives to Liberalism. He's an Associate professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University,
where he directs their program and Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and Law.
He's the author of four books. Kevin, thank you for joining us.
Really glad to be on. Yeah, you're writing in this book,
in large part about integralism, which has become once again a very hot topic
on the right, a lightning run for debate, especially as the Republican Party
sort of begins its transition. We've hosted a lot of conversations on this podcast
about it, you know, be it with Patrick Knee and or folks on
the other side of that question. And I wanted to ask you, Kevin,
just right off the bat here to tell us what you're doing in this
book, all the kingdoms of the world, with that kind of current context
in mind, your you know, just to give a little bit of background.
You know, the interegalism topic had gotten so sort of hot online that
Oxford actually commissioned this book and you know, a friend, a friend of
mine, recommended me to write it, and so that's kind of how hot
the topic was. I've been interested in it for actually positions like it for
for many years, and the idea was to take it seriously instead of writing,
you know, kind of an ex pose book of how horrible it is.
But it was to sort of clearly define the position, to give arguments
forward arguments against it. So you know, I'll define a position in a
moment, but you know, I spend sixty pages defending it one hundred and
ten pages critiquing it. So I really wanted to take these radical alternatives to
liberalism seriously as if they might be true. And so that's really what the
book is doing that very almost nobody else is doing. It also tries to
take the discussion to a much higher level than we often see, so,
you know, to move things up a little bit in terms of depth of
argument than what we see on Twitter or blogs or even you know, web
publications in general. And so I wanted to kind of show people how sophisticated
the position could be, what its attractions were, and you know, what
its weaknesses were. So so I think the book's doing something really unique.
I mean, if you're really interested in trying to go in depth about whether
this view is true or not, or whether similar views or true another phase,
then that's why I wrote this book. Now, another thing about it
integralism is that it's proponents are oftentimes kind of vague about what they're after,
and so I just you know, avoid being vague as much as possible.
And I have a kind of quick definition of it in three three conditions.
So this is sort of a God centered theory of the authority of government and
the authority of the church and their relationship. So, you know, the
first thing is, you know, God has authorized the temporal ruler to promote
the earthly common good of the community, pretty straightforward, especially for Christians.
The second is what makes the view catholic. It's that God has authorized the
church understood is the Catholic Church understands church to govern the sort of eternal or
ultimate common good of the baptized members of that community, and to preach the
Gospel to people outside of it. So that's you know, that's perfectly straightforward
as well. But here's an interesting little puzzle, which is that, look,
I mean their interests and agendas, church and state can conflict, or
they can work together, they can reinforce each other. So what's the ideal
relationship between them? And this is where integralism is unique. It isn't that
the church rules the state or the state rules of the church, or even
that they're separate. They're integrated in a particular way. In spiritual affairs.
The church can direct Christian states to help to enforce its spiritual policies. So,
for instance, if someone's determined to be a heretic in a church trial
or canonical trial, then there could be civil penalties if they don't repent of
their heresy. Same thing with apostasy and other kinds of sins, that they're
sort of crimes within the church, but that the state would also treat them
as crimes or as in general things to be punished or discouraged. So for
instance, you could ban books in order to preserve uniformity a belief. So
there's a kind of indirect sovereignty that the Church has over the state. Can't
take over agricultural policy, but it can say direct a variety of other factors
about the state in order to help people achieve salvation, to avoid false belief,
to in general enjoy the Christian life. So that's how I understand integralism,
the sort of two moments of authorization of church and state, and then
the special indirect sovereignty that the church is over the state. This is really
interesting because I interviewed Tom Holland for this podcast earlier this week, and we
were talking about the Romans and how the Romans would have just approached this concept
of separation between church and state. The phrase would really mean nothing to them.
It would be sort of baffering, and so on that note, I
want to ask about the history of integralism, which is obviously tied up with
the history of the Church and is most certainly most common among Catholics and the
United States at least. And so with that in mind, you know,
it's obviously the history is obviously complicated because you know, halfway through the Church's
history there's this Enlightenment period where the separation of church and state sort of becomes
a thing in ways that people hadn't really thought about, and Catholics like to
blame US Protestants and US Lutherans for that. It's probably fair in some ways,
but Kevin, what is the sort of how has an integralism? Sort
of what's its arc inture? So this almost all of chapter two of the
book is about this, and that chapter is doing double duty. It's not
just telling the history, but telling the story of the dogma as it developed
in the particular church documents that seem to favor intogollalism over the kind of church's
current position. So I think it's a real treat because I think I'm able
to summarize, you know, a lot of interesting points of history. So
then let me just begin with the story. The story really begins with the
collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Because states decay and in many places there's
no such thing as a nation state, the Church gradually expands in order to
take over the kind of state capacity that the Roman Empire had. So you
know, dioceses were originally Roman imperial jurisdictions. Pontiffis Maximus was the title of
Caesar, and so the church is just saying, look, you know,
people have these needs, you know, for legal services, healthcare services,
all these kind of things, and we're going to provide those things. And
so, you know, many cases over time, particularly in the early Middle
Ages, you know, the papacy and the church hierarchy is kind of looking
around and thinking, oh, you know, we're doing good. You know,
we're helping people. Maybe there's something divine about about this arrangement. But
it wasn't really very well theorized until the High Middle Ages, when states in
Western Europe started to kind of coalesce and growing power, because then you can
really get serious contests between pope and crown. And so that was the occasion
for things like in the eleventh century with the investor or contest, but a
variety of other issues raised by Pope Gregory. The sevenths rule. After the
East West Schism, you know, and sort of not exactly a schism,
but an alienation between the Orthodox and the Catholics, the popes are able to
kind of centralize their power, including their temporal power, and to create a
uniform canonical legal code that specifies a whole bunch of special rights and duties for
the church and freeze the church from any rule by the state or any interference
in ecclesiastical matters. And this just sets up a huge amount of conflict between
say, kings that want to try clerics for crimes in their own domains and
the Church saying, nope, we get to try and in canonical courts.
That was a big fight for a variety of reasons. So what happens is
you've got this very powerful church that is so powerful that in many cases it
has the power to depose kings. But then you've got these rising monarchies,
particularly the French monarchy, but more and more and more nation states with time,
and this raises the question very acutely of what that relationship is between church
and state. Because what's unique about Catholicism is having this independent hierarchy, which
is actually the pope is his own sovereign of it, the papal states.
It's very different than almost any other religion where you have this sort of separated
hierarchy that can greatly influence your country, can do things like depose a king,
and then you don't know who to follow anymore. So a number of
people took kind of extreme positions one way or the other. The other said,
you know, look, many French people believe this that the king had
authority and ecclesiastical affairs, He could appoint his own bishops, for instance.
On the other side, where the kind of strong papal centralists or sometimes kind
of hierocrats, who thought that, you know, the pope could sort of
depose or make any king at will. It just had an enormous amount of
temporal power. And the early integrals in the seventeenth century, they're not calling
themselves integralists, but it is the position take a moderate view. So some
important I understand this view arose. It was best articulated in the seventeenth century
as a compromise position between these two views. The thought here being, look,
the king can't appoint bishops. That's a matter for the church, and
the church can't just sort of run the state or just appoint all rulers.
It can only direct policy, secular policy indirectly. So Cardinal Robert Bellarmine develops
this idea of the indirect power of the pope, defends it it at great
length, almost gets in trouble with Pope. Six is the fifth you know,
his book was almost placed on the index of forbidden books. But you
know, his view became in some ways the kind of ideal in Rome to
such an extent actually that he was canonized in nineteen thirty admitted Doctor of the
Church in nineteen thirty one, So his influence extended a great deal of time.
Now what starts to happen with the counter Reformation is, obviously you get
these very powerful Protestant monarchs. You also get powerful Catholic monarchs that don't really
want the pope to a run things. So you know it's the Spanish crown
that runs the inquisition of the Church. So as these states get larger and
larger, they start to pressure ignore the Church, and then eventually start to
pressure and try to control the Church more and more, all the way down
until you get unification movements, that particularly Italian unification, that is gradually reducing
the power or temporal power of the pope to almost nothing. So in the
nineteenth century have a number of popes, particularly Pope Pius the ninth and Pupel
of the thirteenth, they say, look, we're going to reaffirm not just
our theological authority, but to some extend our political authority. And so integalism
kind of becomes a thing in Western Europe again, in part because of the
sort of nineteenth century popes being just especially conservative and pushing back really, really
hard against attempts by various different movements a socialist, nationalist, liberal, to
degrade or reduce its power, and they produced a number of documents that make
it look like something lot of integralism is what the church teaches, and a
lot of people understand it that way well into the twentieth century. So,
you know, Pope highest at Tense pontificate ends in nineteen fourteen, there's some
indications that he was an integralist in this sense. There hasn't been an integralist
pope since. And what starts to happen, particularly after the Two World Wars,
is that a lot of people in the Church are saying, well,
we want to be part of the post war order, and this is going
to be an order of human rights, and that means universal religious freedom.
And so at the Second Vatican Council, you know, in the early sixties,
the most controversial document there was Dignatatas Shumane, which is the Church's declaration
the right of religious freedom and part of the reason it's doing this is to
work out some inconsistencies people. Some people thinking the older medieval arrangements were good
our best, other people thinking they were totally terrible. And it produces this
document which seems like it's kind of giving away the game to liberalism and defending
universal religious toleration. And so it looks like the nineteenth century popes and all
the stuff that came before we're being set aside, because you know, Dagatas
Humani says that the human person has a light right to religious freedom and it's
justified both in terms of reason and revelation. So once the tatas Humani came
out, I mean Integralis, who were already a shrinking group, but they
became sort of total outliers in the Catholic Church. Many of them crowded into
the Society of Saint Pie's attent until about fifteen years ago when an extremely talented
Catholic philosopher at King's College, London, Thomas Pink, developed a new interpretation
of digging tatas Humani that would allow for Integralism to be a potential option for
the church in the future. It's not ruled out in principle, and I
can go into the details of that, but I won't. But what PINK
did is it kind of made it possible for Catholics to think that they could
reject anything about liberalism or liberalism entirely but still be good sons and daughters at
the church, because there are many people at that time that were anti liberal
but saw Catholic traditionalists as too oppositional to the hierarchy. It's also the case
that there were lots of young Catholics and young Christian intellectuals that kind of felt
like they were excluded by American society, in particular on Western European society because
of their conservative views on social issues, especially on abortion and LGBT questions.
And so there are a lot of people who felt like liberal order just actually
wasn't ever really going to tolerate Christians, and so maybe we should oppose it
entirely. So PINK begins an intellectual movement that supplies this kind of opportunity,
intellectual opportunity to oppose the liberal tradition entirely, but also to be a Catholic
and good standing with the church. And then the the discussion starts to blow
up, starting twenty twelve, twenty thirteen gets really big after Trump and twenty
sixteen for a variety of reasons. And then there's another couple of big jumps,
like in twenty eighteen twenty nineteen, where this movement starts to grow.
So there is the tour situation of the Early Middle Ages, the contest between
pope and crown, and the High Middle Ages, the counter Reformation, theorist
working out a moderate position. It continuing, but then the rise of nation
states following the French Revolution put the popes in a kind of defensive mode.
They reaffirm some of these teachings. But then in the twentieth century the Church
moves away and now there's been pushedback towards the older view. Hey, y'all,
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tethered is the concept, especially as you just kind of traced it there and
you know it's history in France, etc. How tied is that historically to
nationalism? And that isn't to say, you know, it's I'm not trying
to argue that it's it's in some ways essential to nationalism, or that nationalism
is integalism. But it does seem to me that their histories match up fairly
neatly, at least in the last several hundred years. So is there's something
to that at all? Maybe I'm just asking this because I listened to a
podcast on Franco this week, But what is the relationship because and nationalism and
fairly a fairly modern concept, at least as we see it today. So
I guess I'm just I'm wondering if there's a link. So there's one story
in the twentieth century and then but a more complex story before. So in
a very important way, integalism is not nationalist, is anti nationalist because you
know, this independent political unit of the Church is going to have enormous authority
over every Catholic nation, arguably will their view every Christian nation. And so
you know, it's saying that like the nation is not entirely self governing,
it doesn't you know, that's one of the key claims of nationalisms. That
nations have a right to self government and intergalsn't just denies this spiritual affairs.
States do not have the authority to self government. And so historically, you
know, in Western Europe, it was nationalist movements that were fighting against papal
power. That was the nationalist movements. The Tiany Unification ended the papal states
in eighteen seventy. Variety of movements sort of boxed the pope into the Vatican
for a various periods of time. So before the twentieth century, interuralism and
nationalist sentiment or in so many ways opposed with the with actually the kind of
exception of the Houstro Hungarian Empire, although that's so internal any diverse nationalism,
you know, it's kind of a weird, a weirder concept there. Twentieth
century things change, in particular after the Second World War, but also even
after the First World War, because a couple of things are happening. Liberalism
in the Anglophone world has seemed to be a lot more tolertive religion than liberalism
on the European continent, and so you have a more like French revolutionary liberalism,
a secularist liberalism, and so Catholics are kind of looking around these new
ideologies Marxism, fascism, liberalism, and they're looking at these options. They
say, well, liberalism wants to kind of put us into the shadows.
Socialism wants to kill us. Traditional conservatism just doesn't have the power or influence
to do what it can. The Pope can't save us on their own because
the nation states are too powerful, they have modern militaries. So we really
need is to make arrangements or support for Catholic fascist rulers. Now not all
Catholics thought, there's many many anti fascist Catholics, many many fascist Catholics,
and and so they support you know, a variety of different dictators or temporary
dictators Franco being the most powerful and popular for a time though you know earlier
were on Mussolini, Adolphus and Austria for a little bit of time, but
also Salasar and Portugal. So it's really Franco and Salasar that are the two
kind of fascists dictators, and Salasar is a little weaker, maybe call them
quasi fascist, dictator, authoritarian or something. They give special privileges to the
Church and are willing to use military power to suppress socialism and liberalism. So,
you know, I think a lot of Catholics felt like they were in
a trap. You know, there was really nothing they could do. They
didn't like fascism, but they thought, okay, you know, look,
it's the best of a bad deal. And in fact, you know,
you have poppies. I think I think it's the eleven or the twelve making
a deal with Musolini basically saying, you know, look, you know,
the Pope can have a certain kind of independence in exchange for kind of protection.
And the Pope ends up regretting this tremendously because he's destroyed his moral authority
when Mussolini is attacking Ethiopia and doing Semitti Semitic stuff. So you know,
that's been a complication about the Church's relationship to uh sort of fascist states.
But yeah, there's a pretty serious tradition of Catholic fascism. It died out
fairly quickly after the Second World War, but it was dead by the end
of Vatican too. You did have some hold over Francoists in the seventies and
so on, but but yeah, that element basically died. But I see
the rise of Catholic fascism as a kind of choice between which secular ideology or
we're going to Catholic's going to throw in with it. No, that makes
it. And maybe some franco Is still out there today. But on that
on that note, actually they are. They are. Well, I was
gonna ask you now integralism in the United States at least, and I'm definitely
pronouncing around because you keep seeing integalism and I feel like that's the proper way
to say, because you wrote a whole book on it. But it's there's
no subtle pronunciation. Some people say integralisms, some say integralism. Okay,
great, I'm so glad to hear because I was actually going to ask you
that question. So that's alves that. But on another note, the overlap
between integralism and populism in the United States right now is interesting. And if
people are looking at maybe the revival of Francoism in Spain or you'd see some
flirtation with that France and Italy, and there's some overlap with the not the
formal church but obviously orthodox Catholicism are what do you make of that sort of
the populist the fact that the fact that right Now this is somewhat of of
a popular if if you're looking at like Adrian for Mule, that's started coming
at it from a populist perspective, even if populists might not own Adrian for
Mule, that kind of post Trump interest, post Brexit interest in the in
the sort of concept of integralism. Now, what should we make of that?
I mean, it's it's quite comes, it's quite complex. So,
you know, Trump lets a lot of kind of nationalist friendly populist groups out,
but the intervals never really fit very well there, even though they had,
you know, the National Conservitism Conference didn't invite various figures. I'm pretty
sure they never invited ver Mule, in part because he's not a populist.
He's an extreme elitist and he's he's not a nationalist. I mean, he's
openly said, look, we need a sort of Catholic version of the EU
and the Western hemisphere. That should be one of our aims. We should
have open borders for Catholic immigrants. So he just didn't really fit and wasn't
ultimately invited to speak, I think, and then the intervals themselves gradually grew
alienated from the national conservatism movement, and this is one of the reasons they've
been doing more outreach to the economic left and like the kind of Bernie Sanders
left, like with Sir Roba Maury's new book. So you know, they're
they're this kind of floating sect and I think they thought they were going to
come in and be the intellectual leaders of national conservatism and say, well,
you know, look, we're not pure nationalists, but we think nationalism is
better than the liberal international order, and so we're gon we're gonna support nationalism
as a kind of second best. So that's I think one thing that was
really going on is that the intervals were not nationalists, but they saw nationalism
as superior to liberal internationalism. So so it's a kind of complicated relationship.
And I think they thought that because they have this rich intellectual tradition, unlike
many of the other factions on the New Right, that you know, they'd
be able to sort of command things intellectually. But but they're achilles heels.
They don't really know how to get along with people. They didn't even get
along with other integralists, and so you know, it's also the case that
they're sort of mock and block strategy on Twitter is extremely counterproductive them. There
they cultivate a kind of groupie fan base of people, but they also just
cut ties with so many influential people that you know, they kind of alienated
themselves right out of the New Right. So, you know, I think,
yeah, that's the relationship I've seen between integralism and the integralist having kind
of elite intellectual sect and then wanting to kind of helm this this this populism
and nationalism a moment without really being ultimately on board with all of it.
So yeah, the relationship to its intellectual is kind of complex, and politically
is a kind of complex. You're right to associate them, but I think
they thought they could sort of ride the horse of populism and nationalism into influence,
but that hasn't really worked out yet. The Washed Auto on Wall Street
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your podcasts. And I think you know, probably some people on the New
Right underestimated the power of the Barsteal Coalition, underestimated how much the barstl Coalition
kind of influenced or made up the comprised the faction of the Republican Party that
was interested in Donald Trump, or actually of the country. I shouldn't even
say the Republican Party that was interested in Donald Trump. And my question to
you is as a respite sort of from the pains of modern decadence, it
actually really makes sense to me why you have the sort of trad wife trends
on, like trad TikTok, like these sort of niches springing up. Because
you can understand why this retreat to tradition and as you say, want a
tradition that is as intellectually rich as integralism is. It does make sense.
At the same time, it doesn't make sense for you know, the broader
population. It seems to me something that's always going to be fairly niche in
the United States of America. Is that what we sort of saw with the
as you were just talking about, the attempt by integralists to really lead the
New Right, there was I feel like there was a lot of momentum that
sort of ultimately dissipated. It's just it's appealing in some ways when you're in
the middle of the sort of decadent, highly secular culture, and maybe historically
that's also where it's gotten its power from and where it's been able to find
support. But at the end of the day, in the US at least,
not to talk about Spain or Italy or anything like that, at this
point in the US at least, it seems to me it is so it
is so deeply liberal, classically liberal as a society. It's just the mentality
of an American. It's not a good fit. And that's partially an attack
that Catholics have been taking for for years, ever since they immigrated to the
US. And big numbers. Yeah, so this is a pretty pretty interesting
place where integalism gets even wilder than it could sometimes seem. One thing to
note is that, you know, Catholics are at the height of their intellectual
influence in the United States, and they're also at the height of their political
influence relative to everyone else, so they lead the conservative movement. But you
know, we until Nancy Pelosi retired, we had a Catholic President, the
Catholic Speaker of the House, in five Catholic Supreme Court justices. One hundred
years ago, no one would have believed that was possible. Now, of
course you have progressive Catholics, and the Conservatives say, oh, look,
you're caltowing to progressive elites or what have you. But the point is that,
like Catholic elites are pretty influential, and so intellectual movements among Catholic elites
can have a great deal of effect in terms of trickling down into the public.
Intervals, for instance, been working really hard to normalize the sort of
tactics of Victor Orbon in the Republican Party. I think De Santis has absorbed
some of this, but it's been the Intervals and more than anyone who've been
trying to normalize organism and the Publican Party that no Orbon, one of them
works for Orbon now. So so first there's there's sort of that sort of
line of influence. As far as actually getting to intergalism, I talked about
this in chapter four. They've sometimes flirted with the plan, and I think
of how this would go, but it's based on an extremely elite heavy theory
of social change. The thought is, if you can get into power,
most people are sheep and will conform. And so the thought is, you
know, look, if you can co opt the relevant high institutions, that
people you know, kind of fallow suit. This isn't really true, but
it is something I think they think. They also think liberalism is doomed,
that liberals are going to destroy themselves, but they're going to leave most of
the sort of governmental bureaucracy in place. So in the same way, like
the Soviet Union collapses and communists vacate the apparatus state apparatus and newer, more
liberal leaning people came in, the same thing, you know, could happen
with liberalism in the United States where integrals leadership comes in, where the sort
of bureaucracies have been vacated. So in the meanwhile, what sort of Mule
and now Denean and others are doing is they're creating a kind of counter elite.
Hence, you know, Denean book on regime Change, a lot of
Mule's writings about the judiciary. He wants they want to place this little counter
elite into positions of power, the administrative state and the judiciary, and trying
to grease the wheels for that. And then I think history is going to
do the job for them less it's what they think in terms of liberals and
being doomed once liberalism falls, their people are in place and then can come
to control the main centers of power. Now, look, this is pretty
you know, it's like I said, it's pretty well. But it's consistent
with everything they're doing. It's consistent with their writing, is consistent with the
little conferences that they're having, the way that they block people on Twitter to
kind of protect their little community of people from challenge, the way in which
you know they're trying to make inroads into the federal judiciary and so on,
and their public writings that liberalism is unstable and will collapse it should be replaced
with the new elite. Now, Dene's outlined all of this, but without
being specifically Catholic, whereas Vermul has some pieces spread around online about you know,
the strategy being specific specifically for Catholics. So I don't think this is
exactly a secret, but it's the strategy they call integration from within. In
some contexts, they're not using the term integrat integralism as much anymore. They
in post liberalism, but you know Denian's last chapter and regime change, I
think it's called integration. So just sending clear code to people about what they're
really for. So that's what I think is going on. They're trying they
hope that liberalism will fall and that they will be ready. The way of
freedom came to be defined, and I'm thinking of a lot of actually conservative
Catholic thinkers in the twentieth century. Throughout the twentieth century was really interesting,
and on the one hand you have the far left and it spans the spectrum
in from actual communism to you know, this context liberation theologists, and on
the other hand you have these these ideas about freedom being defined an effusionist sort
of context. And over the course of the twentieth century, and this is
coming to a head now. You know, people like Vermuel would have a
very different definition of freedom, you know, than than people like Stephanie slated
Reason, both Catholics, but both with very different ideas of what freedom is.
And so much of this, I think for people who are making these
definitions today, it's just inextricable from the Cold War, from the sort of
West versus the the uh, you know, the idea of communism versus liberalism.
And I want to ask how how the integralist sees freedom and how that
contrasts, perhaps with how the liberation theologist sees freedom. Here's a political philosopher
a lot to say about the concept of liberty, but let's let's lay out
to two concepts the verses. You know, it's all been called negative liberty,
and that's really freedom from interference by other people. So it's a kind
of freedom of your own person to be protected against interference by others. But
then there's this idea of positive freedom. And positive freedom comes in a few
flavors, but the one in which that vermial is going to be most concerned
with is the idea of freedom is self mastery. That is, people being
able to live a life of reason and virtue, free from being dominated by
their passions. So this is a classical ideal of liberty going all the way
back to the Greeks. The idea of non interference being a central idea as
a part of the theory is something that liberals tended to foreground, you know,
starting in the seventeenth century. So vermial is going to just totally reject
negative liberty is an important kind of liberty. Yes, sometimes non interference is
important, but it's important because of this kind of broader rational freedom that's is
what of real value. It's also important that your freest when you have the
correct ultimate ends, that is, you're actually aiming at the truth and the
faith. But I think he thinks, you know, reason sort of lines
up with the faith, and so those won't be totally opposed. So I
think a Mules for instance, and the others as people who are very worried
about the sort of dominance of the idea of negative freedom and want to stress
this ideal of positive freedom as reason and as self self mastery and situation of
the virtues. So where a Stephanie, you know, I think she's going
to try to have both. I mean, she's gonna think, yeah,
hon our farence is super important, but it actually facilitates positive freedom. So
there's not really ultimately some trade off that has to be made between the two.
And so many Catholic libertarians or you know, Christian libertarians like myself,
I think that, you know, both forms of freedom are important, but
for formule, there's so much focused on the common goods, you know,
there's so much, so little focused on the dignity of the individual, that
yeah, negative freedom becomes I think a lot less important in his system of
thought. Is there anything else? Well, one question I have is what
the practical And you get some of this in Denise new book, and he
talked about it here, but what the immediate sort of practical policy changes would
look like from an integralist perspective, Say, you know, if someone is
elected governor of Florida that is actually more overtly a follower of this, you
know, what sort of policies would be immediately on the table. What would
the envision sort of taking the reins of right off the bat. So what's
clear from what they're talking about is one, they want to reinterpret the fourteenth
Amendments to protect all feed of life, and so they want essentially to impose
pro life policy from the federal level down. And they're kind of like to
mock the idea of leaving abortion to the States and that you know, so
total ban on abortion, a total so a lot of it's a lot of
just straight Catholic stuff. They total ban on euthanasia, total ban on same
sex marriage and even same sex acts, sawomy, black anti blastphemy laws,
blue laws, you know, uh, you know, restrictions on drugs and
probably alcohol, making birth free. They're really big on trying to facilitate larger
families. They would restrict your band, contraception, ban in pornography entirely.
So these are all things that they've talked about as nearby policies. When you
get closer to the ideal, things start to get kind of more extreme.
So when they used to talk about this really openly on Twitter, particularly between
twenty sixteen twenty nineteen, you know, for Mules said, well, you
know, once it's kind of established, you know, every baptized person would
be under the requirements of weekly mass tenants and that would include Protestants, so
you and everyone would have to have to have to attend mass. And you
know, then you could sort of ban heretical books, you could sort of
control educational curriculum and things of that of that sort. But as far as
yeah, adjacent policies, this is something they're talking about. They've also got
some sort of institutional restructuring agenda, so you know, for instance, for
mules and interpretation or theory of constitutional interpretation trying to set itself up as an
opposition to kind of originalism textualism, which I think would grease the wheels for
the federal judiciary to legitimize the modern nation state in order to sort of adopt
kind of robustly conservative set of values and to use you know, the regulatory
state and so on in order to foster those value us. So, yeah,
and is there anything else just as we wind down here that you think
is like widely misunderstood, even from like an anti integralism perspective about integralism,
or even from the pro perspective that you know, because it gets it is
and it must be frustrating for you, somebody who's studied this very closely to
see it become such a sort of a football And I'm sure that's like interesting
for a number of reasons, but also a little bit frustrating as somebody who
understands it very well. So are there misconceptions, anything that we haven't touched
on that comes up a lot in American politics or maybe even just in politics
in general world politics that you think is worth the spelling. Gosh, there's
a lot. I mean, the main thing to do is to separate integralist
doctrine from what Savor mule Amari Denien and so on are up to. So
integralism has no particular association, say, with the ideas of the German legal
theorist Carl Schmidt. It has nothing to do with a particular necessarily form of
government like a large state or a small state, or monarchy or democracy.
It has nothing in particular to do with constitutional interpretation. So almost all the
distinctives of the kind of twitter jet set integralists are just not intrinsic features of
integralism. And so if you want to get a grip on the doctrine,
if you want to get a grip on thinking through what we might call the
ideal theory of integralism, and I really recommend reading, say Thomas Pink's work,
you can get that on all of it pretty much. When academ me
about e du reading a number of Paul Edmund Walstein's articles on the Josiah's Reading
Thomas creen Allen, the Minister's book on Integralism on Manual Political Philosophy. So
I just really encourage people interested in the ideas too deep to delve into them
and to realize that, you know, there are a lot of different kinds
of integralists with respect to the sort of thing that they support their strategies.
There's a lot of dissent from Verriola and the others, but they just don't
get a lot of airtime. So that's what i'd says, try to try
to dissociate integralism as a as a system of thought that you might find of
interest from the kind of practical political spin that it's given high today. Yeah,
that's so interesting and we really appreciate it. Kevin Valuer, author of
All the Kingdoms of the World on Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism. That's from
Oxford University Press. It's on sale September first. And Kevin, you have
a website as well that people can go to. Where should they Where can
they find you online? Yeah, Kevin Value dot com. So it's just
my first and last name dot com and take you to the book page,
give you some good links to buy the book pretty cheaply, and you know
you can learn more about me and my work and other things that I've written
and value spelled V A L l i e R. Kevin, thank you,
Thank you so much for joining us and breaking all this down. Oh
sure, very happy to do so. All right, well, we've been
listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jasinski, culture
editor here at the Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until then,
be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray. You are right?
What are you wrong