In an earlier article on the Boundless Reading website I examined the political strategies and likely educational outcomes of Oklahoma’s approval for a state-funded Catholic virtual charter school. The intention of Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Public Instruction—along with, of course, the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and Diocese of Tulsa—is to deliberately violate state and federal laws regarding non-sectarian political activity to provoke legal actions they hope will ultimately permanently establish and protect state-sponsored religious activities and education. What I did not address in my previous article, aside from quoting a triumphalistic public prayer given by Governor Kevin Stitt, was the theological rationale for establishing a state-funded religious school. As we will see, the Catholic principle of integralism, along with a similar—albeit ultimately competing—Protestant theology of Christian nationalism is foundational not only for this Oklahoma educational strategy, but also for a conservative Christian approach to government as a whole.
Interestingly, Archbishop Coakley and Bishop Konderla use the word integral in describing their reason for starting a Catholic virtual charter school. “Catholic education is unique in combining innovative ways of uniting learning with best practices,” the bishops write, “so that teachers can serve the whole person in a process of integral human development.” Catholic Relief Services gives an expanded definition of integral human development:
IHD suggests a state of personal well-being in the context of just and peaceful relationships and a thriving environment. It is the sustained growth that everyone has the right to enjoy and represents an individual’s cultural, economic, political, social and spiritual wholeness — a wholeness that we all want to experience and that, in concern for the common good, we want others to experience as well . It is participation in the fullness of life and includes enjoyment of family, society and nature, as well as the gifts that come from learning new things, from earning a dignified living and contributing to a rich civic life. The IHD concept is relevant for both the poor we serve overseas and the Catholic community and other persons of goodwill in the United States.
This is a powerful perspective of human development I fully support. The Oklahoma bishops claim their proposed Catholic virtual charter school will fulfill integral human development by helping students with “learning differences” (specifically dyslexia) who are underserved in their home area. Given the problems with this claim I identified in my previous article—the special education programs for virtual charter schools are frequently egregiously under-supported and ineffective (even after taking funds away from such programs at local school districts)—we are confronted by a question: if the academic and educational support services offered by a Catholic virtual school are likely to be dismally low, how can they be said to equip students to achieve integral human development?
The answer is that the bishops are being disingenuous when they claim they will pursue integral human development through such things as providing educational support services—they will undoubtedly provide a few required services at minimal levels, but those are not the real reason for starting a virtual charter school. Instead, their use of integral human development is a truncated hint of their true goal: human development through integralISM.
Integralism
The Catholic virtual charter school movement is built upon the idea that the secular government is obligated to fully support in every way religious schools, but simultaneously has no authority over the curriculum or practices of these schools. As Richard W. Garnett, law professor and director of Notre Dame Law School’s Program on Church, State & Society (and whose work is highly influential in the Oklahoma movement), writes on the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ website, “A full account of religious freedom in education, however, goes beyond merely being legally permitted to attend a religious school. ‘Freedom for’ religion takes into account not only the mere legal permissibility of attending a religious school, but also the considerations which make such attendance practically possible.”
This understanding is rooted in the principle that, “since religious practice is a crucial dimension of human flourishing, a well-ordered state does not merely allow for religion; it positively seeks to foster the conditions in which religious practice can thrive”—including financially funding those conditions. Approaching religious education—and society in general—in this way is part-and-parcel of the Catholic philosophy of integralism, and the fact that it is advocated on the USCCB’s website and in a program at Notre Dame shows that, rather than being a fringe ideology, integralism is increasingly part of mainstream Catholicism.
So what is this ideology? Integralism, in the words of Kevin Augustyn, insists
that it is essential Catholic teaching that the church and state should not be separated. Rather, integralism holds that, since natural good is ordered to supernatural good and the common good to eternal life, the state should recognize the Catholic Church as the sole legitimate spiritual authority. Further, the state, through its subordination to the Church, should act as its arm in the temporal sphere to promote and establish the Catholic vision of the common good and submit to the authority of the Church in areas where the spiritual and the temporal overlap.
This is, of course, a relatively traditional view of the church-state relationship from the Roman Catholic perspective (Thomas Pink affirmatively summarizes its history here). As leading integralist Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist proclaims, “Catholics who wish to adhere without reservation to the teachings of the Church on faith and morals” generally wish to establish a governmental system like the “baroque confessional state” or “something like High Medieval Christendom.” Pink himself argues,
The state should be Catholic, or at least broadly Christian, not because the state is a believer to be saved as an individual is, but because political authority has been divinely established to confess public reason in the service of a genuinely common good. This is only possible if the state recognizes both natural law and the transformation of law and public reason brought about by the raising of religion to a supernatural good.
The ideal society envisioned by integralism, Micah Schwartzman and Jocelyn Wilson warn, is “a social system in which church and state are so well integrated that it no longer makes sense to distinguish between them.”
How would such an integralist society look and function?
Integralism is fundamentally anti-liberal, not merely in the sense of opposing social and political progressivism, but in its hostility to any toleration of differing value systems (even neoconservatism, with which many of its adherents have been aligned in the past). “The problem,” integralist Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule laments, “is the relentless aggression of liberalism, driven by an internal mechanism that causes ever more radical demands for political conformism, particularly targeting the Church.” The pluralism of modern American society is, from this perspective, a dead end necessitating a strong traditional institutional—specifically, Catholic—response (here Vermeule relies on the works of such individuals as Catholic-turned-Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt and staunchly authoritarian philosopher Joseph de Maistre(brother of Xavier de Maistre, about whom I partially wrote my previous article)). Integralism is therefore an ideology of domination; as Vermeule argues, Catholics “work within a liberal order towards the long-term goal, not of reaching a stable accommodation with liberalism, even in a baptized form, but rather with a view to eventually superseding it altogether.”
This anti-liberal, anti-pluralistic ideology would have dire consequences for other religious groups (putting the lie to Garnett and the bishops’ claim to be promoting “freedom for religion”). A notable text in the integralist movement is Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy, in which Thomas Crean, O.P. and Alan Fimister (theology professor at a major Catholic seminary) emphatically describe an integralist approach to other religions (the summary is from Timothy Troutner),
Crean and Fimister openly state that Jews, atheists, and all non-Catholics will be denied citizenship and voting rights. They will be forbidden to proselytize, while polytheistic religions will be banned (along with, the manual insinuates, Islam). Protestant ministers will not be tolerated, and heretics can be put to death.
A particularly vivid example of the integralist attitude toward other religions—and their individual members—is the 1858 abduction of Jewish boy Edgardo Mortara under the order of Pope Pius IX (author of The Syllabus of Errors and instigator of the doctrine of papal infallibility). The Inquisition learned that Mortara had been secretly baptized by a Catholic housekeeper, so he was taken and raised under Pius’ supervision. Pius refused to return the boy to his Jewish parents because canon law—and, particularly important here, the civil law of the Papal States over which the pope was ruler—required raising baptized children in a Christian (i.e., Catholic) household. Modern integralists enthusiastically support this action. Romanus Cessario, O.P., proclaims that Pius’ actions, which from his perspective properly disregard “putative civil liberties,” demonstrate “a right understanding of baptism and its effects.” He sniffily concludes that anyone who disagrees “should examine how much they themselves prize the gifts of supernatural grace that ennoble human nature.” Another pseudonymous integralist—published on one of the ideology’s foremost websites—supports Cessario’s position by arguing, “It is understandable and natural that many would react strongly against a child being taken from his parents’ home. Christ, however, did not come to bring peace, but the sword. (Mt 10:34.) So we must follow the radical truth of the Gospel, wherever it leads.”
Waldstein agrees with Cessario regarding the Mortara case, calling the abduction the rescue of a child who would have been denied his Christian inheritance. He goes even farther—though not necessarily farther than Crean and Fimister—in his proposed treatment of those Catholics whose beliefs and practices are not in line with his interpretation of Catholicism: not only should such people potentially be put to death by the government, but burning them at the stake is allegedly in accordance with the will of the Holy Spirit (he turns to an encyclical from Pope Leo X—written in 1520 in a slapdown of Martin Luther—for support).
Beyond the opposition to other religions, Troutner notes a similar hostility to other groups in Crean and Fimister’s manual:
Women, unless they are heads of households, will not be allowed to vote and may work outside the home only with the permission of their husbands, by whom they are governed and to whom they must offer sex whenever requested. Sexual minorities fare no better. Cohabiting couples and those born out of wedlock can be disenfranchised, and a footnote implies (with a reference to an obscure Latin text) that the execution of some LGBTQ people may promote the salvation of souls. It should not be totally surprising, then, that the manual also insists that permanent and even hereditary slavery can be ‘a potentially valid legal relationship’ in certain circumstances.
Lest one think these positions are an extreme version of integralism, Wyoming Catholic College theology professor Kent J. Lasnoski says in his enthusiastic review of the book in the Journal of Moral Theology, “Integralism is a refreshing and successful attempt to confidently explicate the historic, scholastic political philosophy of the Catholic Church…Such an accomplishment really is a feat.”
Of course, we do not need to imagine what life would be like under an integralist governmental system—history gives us an extensive example with the Papal States, a series of territories on the Italian peninsula ruled directly by the popes from 756–1870. For example, David Kertzer describes the experience of living under the direct rule of Pius IX:
The pope had absolute power over his people. He, in fact, inflicted capital punishment at the extreme case. So there’d always be a certain popular interest in attending the executions by guillotine or by other means in the center of Rome of people found guilty of major crimes.
But more than that and what the people really feared in the Papal States were the ecclesiastical courts that had power over them. The parish priest could send their spies into people’s homes or intrude themselves at any time to see if anything illicit was going on, such as eating meat during Lent or—on a Friday—or unmarried people living together. And then haul them off to jail to await sentencing, and the sentencing would be by a court ruled by a priest. So priests had this dual role, and the clergy had this dual role of—basically—police and government as well as spiritual guides.
Is such a culture really, to use Waldstein’s words, “an ordered relation of temporal and spiritual power in the deliberate pursuit of the good for human beings?”
Christian Nationalism
Catholic integralism is not the only form of Christian political theory informing things like public funding for religious schools; Protestantism has its own forms of Christian political dominionism. For example, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters, who in addition to supporting public money for religious schools is pushing to require Oklahoma public schools to teach a Christian version of American history and promote prayer periods in school, is a Protestant.
The primarily Protestant ideology of Christian nationalism differs from integralism in that, to staunch integralists, Christian nationalism is ultimately just another form of liberalism that exalts the individual rather than acknowledging the requirement of natural law to submit all things to God through the Catholic magisterium (related, Protestants would unsurprisingly object to the integralist goal of outlawing Protestantism). Like integralism, however, Christian nationalism argues for a uniquely privileged position for Christianity in American governance and culture.
Paul D. Miller, noting the dangers posed by Christian nationalism, describes the goals for many of its adherents:
Christian nationalists want to define America as a Christian nation and they want the government to promote a specific cultural template as the official culture of the country. Some have advocated for an amendment to the Constitution to recognize America’s Christian heritage, others to reinstitute prayer in public schools. Some work to enshrine a Christian nationalist interpretation of American history in school curricula, including that America has a special relationship with God or has been “chosen” by him to carry out a special mission on earth. Others advocate for immigration restrictions specifically to prevent a change to American religious and ethnic demographics or a change to American culture. Some want to empower the government to take stronger action to circumscribe immoral behavior.
Christian nationalists believe “Christians are entitled to primacy of place in the public square,” he concludes, “because they are heirs of the true or essential heritage of American culture, that Christians have a presumptive right to define the meaning of the American experiment because they see themselves as America’s architects, first citizens, and guardians.”
Many promoters of Christian nationalism work to achieve its goals through following the charismatic Protestant Christian doctrine of the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” in which Christians are ordained by God to achieve success in seven spheres—or “mountains”—of influence: religion, family, education, government, arts and entertainment, media and business. The mainstreaming of this ideology can be seen in Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s announcement at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2020, “Finally we have a president that understands the seven mountains of cultural influence” (I’ll leave it to readers to try to guess how Donald J. Trump has exercised godly influence in his family—not to mention the other mountains—but I digress). Rep. Lauren Boebert also advocates this type of Christian dominionism, proclaiming last year, “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church. I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk.”
Frederick Clarkson, in a broad survey of Christian nationalist leaders (and particularly the “New Apostolic Reformation” leaders pushing the Seven Mountain Mandate), concludes that the movement is increasingly threatening violence:
Since the 2022 elections, there has been a noticeable uptick in the threatening rhetoric of NAR leaders and the political figures associated with them, both on the prayer calls and in public. Their politics appear to be animated less by ‘conservative’ political philosophy or even strong religious values than by a vengeful vision of purging those who refuse to be converted and are deemed to be demonically possessed enemies.
Fear Itself
These ostensibly Christian ideologies are rooted in fear. Rachel Bovard gave a litany of concerns during a recent conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville:
If the last 30 years has taught us anything, it’s that the left’s fascist orgy is not somehow going to abate. No one knows what lunacy is coming next, but we all know what’s eventually coming: normalized pederasty, forced euthanasia, postnatal abortion, persecuting dissident faiths, disqualifying religious traditionalists and political conservatives from banking, property rights and public benefits.
In a widely-read earlier article, Sohrab Ahmari gives what integralists and Christian nationalists see as the only acceptable response to these threats:
Fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good…Progressives understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism. Civility and decency are secondary values. They regulate compliance with an established order and orthodoxy. We should seek to use these values to enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral. To recognize that enmity is real is its own kind of moral duty.
The equation is disturbingly simple:
- We fear anyone to the socio-political left of the Inquisition will persecute us…so we’ll wipe them out first.
- We fear we will be disenfranchised because of our religious faith…but not if we disenfranchise everyone who is not us first.
- We fear the sexual mores of others will contaminate our children…so we’ll make these things illegal and impose maximal punishment for transgressions.
- “Civility and decency are secondary values…Enmity is a moral duty.”
The simple fact is that integralists and Christian nationalists look at the basic demographics of American religion and society—particularly the ongoing (and likely to increase) decline of Christian affiliation in the country—and they panic: how can we stop this trend and, even more, how can we reverse our losses? Catholic leaders are alarmed by surveys showing 50 percent of those raised in the Catholic Church leave (with the average age at which they leave being 13); the numbers are apparently worst for Catholic youth who attend public schools, of whom a whopping 95 percent are said to leave. Still more, 87 percent of those who leave say they will never return. The numbers are also high among Protestants, where 66 percent leave their churches before turning 22. In fact, only 35 percent of Gen Z claims to be a Christian at all, and that percentage declines each year.
Christian leaders increasingly realize their attractiveness (and therefore potential for future growth using techniques of attraction) is almost non-existent. So…they’re resorting to brute force to maintain their viability.
“You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma”
This subheading is from a country love song from the 1980s (readers of my history blog are familiar with my habit of using song lyrics as titles), but political and Christian leaders in Oklahoma are applying it quite literally to Christians…and only Christians. The Catholic virtual charter school, rooted in Catholic integralist ideology and supported by a Christian nationalist superintendent who sees the school as one prong in his plan to Christianize public education, is a vivid example of this.
The push for publicly-funded Christian (or, failing this, at least Christianized) schools is intended in part to address the demographic crisis noted above. The belief is that ongoing Christian instruction and prayer throughout the school day will reverse these trends (particularly by suppressing all LGBTQ+ elements, which both Catholic activists and Ryan Walters have identified as the great threat to the Christian identity—and even physical safety—of youth).
Such hopes are largely unfounded. Even putting aside the concerns I raised in the conclusion of my previous article on the Catholic virtual charter school—that a mediocre education (and the subsequently reduced academic and career prospects), combined with enforced religiosity, is more likely to generate resentment in students than fervent piety—the most recent extensive study of the religious results of Catholic primary and secondary schooling shows that, while Catholic schooling does increase the personal identification of its graduates with Catholicism (compared with such an identification by public school graduates), Catholic schools generally have a negligible impact on the beliefs and religious practices of their graduates. Given the failure of both churches and Christian schools to retain younger members, a mandatory Christian public education is unlikely to achieve its goal of forming a vast contingent of foot soldiers for integralism and Christian nationalism.
I believe this article has proven that, even though integralists and Christian nationalists hope publicly-funded religious schools will compensate for some of the failings of their Christian institutions, the schools themselves are only of partial importance—they are merely one component of the larger agenda of a societal takeover. Integralists and Christian nationalists certainly hope to retain Christian students and convert others but, failing that, they will at least have conditioned those less assured and assertive members of future generations to fatalistically accept a theocratic social structure as simply “the way things are;” the young adults may not like this structure, but many will have been conditioned to “go along to get along.” This could make it easier to implement ostensibly Christian laws and social policies as many of these Christian-educated young adults tune out the aggressively Christianized politics as the background noise of their culture.
There is, at the same time, another motivation for establishing publicly-funded religious schools that drives its advocates: as seen in the description, it’s the distribution of public funds. One-third of all state and local spending is dedicated to primary and secondary schools and higher education; this is a tantalizing trough of money from which a wide array of characters wish to feed. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that, like membership, financial support for Christian institutions is in continual decline: the total percentage of charitable giving in the United States that was received by churches dropped 43 percent between 1954–2021—from 70 percent of all charitable giving to 27 percent.
By redefining religious organizations as public services, and reallocating public funds accordingly, Christian institutions could theoretically access public money beyond that dedicated to education and thereby greatly alleviate current and future financial pressures (and enrich the Elmer Gantries in the bunch). Think of the possibilities: churches could be given funds as “community centers,” with their pastors and staff as “public service workers” and parking as “transportation infrastructure”…the possibilities are endless. Such redefinitions would also only be necessary until that longed-for day when the integralists or Christian nationalists attain sufficient political power to dictate policy, at which point they could legislate the money to their control under the rationale of “Jesus (or the pope) says so.” Still more, the Christian institutions would undoubtedly argue—as they are already doing regarding school issues—that the public can have no oversight over the use of these funds because such usage is protected by the First Amendment. Public funding for religious schools is simply “the camel’s nose under the tent” for this redistribution of public money.
Conclusion
There are many ways to respond to all this—even a writer for The Gospel Coalition (a Reformed Christian website that has never been mistaken for being open-minded or egalitarian) says our response to the culture wars should be “grace, dignity and love”—but I will conclude with just two brief points.
First, attempts to establish theocracies have always failed—they have invariably contaminated both the churches and the governments, and too often resulted in unspeakable atrocities (or at least I would classify them as atrocities…Waldstein might find them a bit pusillanimous). As Augustyn—himself no progressive—puts it,
The desire to re-create a new Christendom is nostalgic and a failure of imagination. Christendom was not a necessary outgrowth, a requirement, of evangelizing the world for Christ; another path could have been taken, possibly one with a better outcome. Christendom was ultimately a political failure that led to a 300-year revolt and hatred for what is perceived as Christianity. In the end, Christendom as a mode of political life was not necessarily good for the spread of the Gospel. Why, then, would we want to do it all over again, given what has been learned?
Secondly, as Catholic integralists well know, Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, states, “The human person has a right to religious freedom,” and therefore “all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power.” While integralists argue this does not prevent the Church from using the government to coerce people into becoming Catholics (because the Church is a “supernatural” power rather than a “human” one), this reading is specious at best. Park MacDougald relates a conversation with church historian Massimo Faggioli, who replies,
Their reading of the document is a ‘theological aberration’ and ‘the equivalent of saying the Earth is flat.’ ‘Honestly,’ he added, ‘I suspect it’s very entertaining for them, but it’s irresponsible. It creates an environment of cognitive dissonance where you know exactly how your country is governed but you keep dreaming of this return to a postmodern version of the Middle Ages.’
Political domination and brute force failed as Christian maintenance techniques in the past, and they will fail in the future. Oklahomans should resist current efforts to establish publicly-funded religious schools as conditioning centers for a theocratic regime, and all Americans should resist the brutality and dehumanization that integralists and Christian nationalists are striving to unleash upon our country.
Image: An auto-da-fé of the Spanish Inquisition—Wood engraving by Bocort after H.D. Linton (Source).
