One and a Half Cheers for Integralism: Liberalism’s Broken Promises and the New Draw of the Confessional State

Introduction

In the traditional textbook account, the Nicene Creed was the end result of a monarch who had commanded the Christian bishops of his empire to convene a council whose primary purpose was to resolve a fundamental theological question: Is the Son of God eternally begotten of the Father, or was there a time when the Son of God was not? It is difficult to imagine such a scenario happening today in any one of the Western democracies that can trace its cultural and religious roots to that empire whose bishops gave us that creed. Or is it? In recent years there has arisen in the United States a movement—mostly among young, educated, professional Catholics—that goes by the name of integralism.^[1] It is one of the two growing postliberal movements within the Christian world in the West.^[2] The other goes by the name of Christian nationalism, and is almost entirely a phenomenon within the orbit of Reformed Protestantism, though it has also made some inroads within non-Reformed evangelical circles. Both movements, and the variations within them,^[3] call for the creation of some form of a Christian confessional state, but they nevertheless differ in fundamental ways. Integralism, because it is Catholic and has a long history in Europe, is more global in its aspirations, offering a general blueprint for how the temporal powers should be in the service of our spiritual ends, while allowing for that relationship to take a variety of forms given the particularities of the diverse cultures, nations, and societies in which Catholicism may take root. ^[4] On the other hand, Christian nationalism, at least in the American context, champions a return to what its advocates believe is the nation’s original Protestant founding.^[5] Unlike integralism—which champions cooperation between the global Catholic Church and the individual nation while still maintaining clearly defined boundaries between the two—Christian nationalism is a spectrum of views that bind Protestant Christianity to a particular national identity. This is why it was not surprising when in 2026 the Christian nationalist pastor Douglas Wilson said in an interview that in his ideal America Catholics would not be allowed to have a parade honoring the Virgin Mary and probably not be permitted to engage in a Eucharist procession.^[6] Integralism, for its part, maintains that the Catholic Church may enlist the state to enforce moral and theological obligations on all the baptized, including Protestants,^[7] but it has no jurisdiction over the nonbaptized (e.g., Jews, pagans, Muslims) unless the behavior of the nonbaptized interferes with the propagation and sustainability of the faith.^[8]

I am neither an integralist nor a Christian nationalist, and nor do I consider myself an expert on either point of view. But as I have had the chance in recent years to interact and speak with advocates of both positions—some of whom are learned friends and gifted students—at formal and informal academic gatherings and in the classroom at Baylor University, I have become convinced that most of the critics of both positions have not fully come to terms with why many young and accomplished American Christians—both Protestant and Catholic—have found themselves increasingly drawn to the idea of a confessional state. My thesis is that because contemporary liberalism—from which ideas of religious liberty and state neutrality on religion get their salience—has failed to live up to its promises, these postliberals may very well have a point that their critics ignore at their peril. What follows is my cashing out of this thesis with a particular focus on integralism, though much of my analysis can easily be applied to Christian nationalism as well.

Liberalism

The story of liberalism (or so we are told) begins soon after the Reformation and the wars on religion. Its pedigree is complicated. Everyone agrees that John Locke, Montesquieu, Mary Wollstonecraft, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill were liberals, but not everyone is so sure about Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or Immanuel Kant. When it comes to conceptualizing the relationship between church and state after the nineteenth century, Western democracies have settled on a variety of arrangements. Although the United States has been largely (though not entirely) Lockean in its sensibilities, other nations have embraced different though overlapping understandings, ranging from religious liberty with an established church (the United Kingdom) to privatized religion with an anticlerical ethos (France).

In his Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke argued that the state and the church have different responsibilities over different spheres of human existence in incommensurable jurisdictions.^[9] The commonwealth, writes Locke, exists only “for the purpose of preserving and promoting civil goods,”^[10] which he identifies as “life, liberty, physical integrity, and freedom from pain, as well as external possessions, such as land, money, the necessities of everyday life, and so on.”^[11] But the commonwealth’s authority does not extend to those matters that concern religion, what Locke calls the “care of souls.”^[12] This is because no one—neither the government nor ecclesial authorities—has been granted by God jurisdiction over the individual’s soul and his religious opinions.^[13] A church, writes Locke, “appears … to be a free association of people coming together of their own accord to offer public worship to God in a manner which they believe will be acceptable to the Deity for the salvation of their souls.”^[14] But is the government required to tolerate churches that “if they want to sacrifice a child or—as was once said falsely of the Christians—engage in promiscuous conduct, should the ruler tolerate these things simply because they take place in a church service?”^[15] Locke answers no, as long as the laws that prohibit such conduct apply universally to all citizens regardless of whether they are motivated by their faith.^[16] As he notes, the state may ban the killing of cattle, but it may not ban the religious killing of cattle.^[17]

Not only is a church merely a human institution whose membership is purely voluntary, but Locke also maintains that “the principal mark of the true Church” is toleration, at least as he understands it.^[18] Although he asserts that “care of souls cannot belong to the civil ruler, because his power consists wholly in compulsion,” Locke also asserts that the commonwealth should assume in its laws that “true and saving religion consists in an inward conviction of the mind; without it, nothing has value in the eyes of God.”^[19] The implication for ecclesiastical matters is clear, as Locke notes: “Each person then has a care for his own soul and must be allowed to exercise this care.”^[20] Unsurprisingly, Locke rejects the idea there is such a thing as a visible church which has a pedigree that can be traced back to Jesus’s first apostles and whose current leadership has juridical authority and spiritual responsibility to shepherd the church as well as a sacred obligation to form the consciences of its members. Writes Locke: “I ask you to point to the edict in which Christ laid down this law for his church…. The saying ‘where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them’ (Matthew 18:20) appears to suggest otherwise.”^[21] Thus, in Locke’s mind, Constantine not only had no authority to convene a council of bishops, but there literally were no bishops for him to summon.^[22]

But what should one do when the commonwealth enacts laws that require that the believer violate his conscience? According to Locke, this will seldom happen if government is in fact advancing the public good. But if it does happens, the citizen must comply, since “the private judgment of any person concerning a law enacted in political matters, for the public good, does not take away the obligation of that law, nor deserve a dispensation.”^[23] But if the magistrate legislates outside his jurisdiction and competence—such as requiring citizens “to adopt an alien religion and practise different forms of worship”^[24]—the citizen is not obligated to obey the law. But what if the magistrate sincerely believes that this law advances the public good? Locke answers that this is merely the magistrate’s private judgment, and just like the private judgment of any one of us, it “gives him no new right to legislate for his subjects.”^[25] But if the magistrate “believes that his commands are within his authority and in the best interests of the commonwealth, but his subjects take the opposite view,” it is only God who can adjudicate the dispute.^[26]

There is something elegant and attractive about Locke’s account of religious toleration, even though it seems to violate its own boundary categories (“civil goods” and “care of souls”) by suggesting that the government ought to assume as correct an ecclesiology and understanding of church membership that is congregationalist and Pelagian, and that a true church’s doctrines should include religious toleration.^[27] Nevertheless, it is easy to see the wisdom of Locke’s account given the conditions of his era and the theological questions over which European Christians had been deeply divided since the time of the Reformation.

Lockean Liberalism and the American Founding

To be sure, Locke had a profound influence on the American Founding,^[28] but the regime’s understanding of religious liberty was not purely Lockean and hardly uniform. Other influences abounded in an already religiously diverse nation that included Congregationalists and Presbyterians—the descendants of the Puritans—as well as Episcopalians and other groups that made their way to North America, such as the Quakers, Baptists, and Lutherans.^[29] Out of this theological stew arose a range of perspectives on religious liberty that, despite their differences, nevertheless shared a common conviction:^[30] the government may not coerce a citizen to assent to religious beliefs or practices that are in violation of what the citizen believes is his duty to God. This principle is reflected in both the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause as well as in various state constitutions. For example, part 1, article 2, of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 affirms:

It is the right as well as the duty of all men in society, publicly, and at stated seasons, to worship the Supreme Being, the great creator and preserver of the universe. And no subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained, in his person, liberty, or estate, for worshipping God in the manner and season most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience; or for his religious profession or sentiments; provided he doth not disturb the public peace, or obstruct others in their religious worship.^[31]

However, the Massachusetts Constitution also allowed for the legislature to authorize and require that local governments make suitable provisions for the public worship of God and the support of Protestant ministers, as well as to require attendance at religious instruction as long as the citizen might do it conscientiously and conveniently.^[32] This seems counterintuitive to many of us today, but the people of Massachusetts thought differently. They did not think (whether rightly or wrongly) that robust religious liberty was inconsistent with some state support of the church as long as individual believers were not coerced to personally affirm or practice what they believed violated their conscience.^[33] Advocates of such a benefit saw it as advancing the common good, since they believed that religious formation cultivates in citizens certain virtues that make them better neighbors and compatriots.^[34] This is not unlike how many have defended tax-supported free public education,^[35] even though some devout parents send their children to private religious schools and pay tuition out of pocket for that education while still paying property taxes for public schools that their children do not attend. As long as the religious parents are free to send their children to religious schools and are not coerced by the state to affirm or practice what they believe violates their conscience, so the argument goes, these parents still possess robust religious liberty despite the fact that they are required to contribute to the public schools just like all taxpayers, including those who do not have children.^[36]

But, of course, others at the Founding, like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, argued that it is unjust when the government creates taxing schemes for the purpose of directly supporting Christian ministers and, for this reason, such policies should be proscribed by law. When Patrick Henry drafted a Virginia bill that if enacted would have created a property tax whose revenues would be used to financially support Christian ministers,^[37] Jefferson and Madison strongly opposed it. The proposed bill inspired Jefferson to write a draft of what eventually became the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.^[38] For his part, Madison produced a pamphlet that he published and promulgated anonymously: A Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments.^[39] Like the Massachusetts Constitution, both Jefferson and Madison understood religious liberty as at least meaning that the government recognizes the citizen’s conscientious duty to God as outside the state’s jurisdiction unless it threatens peace and good order. But unlike the Massachusetts Constitution, Jefferson and Madison argued that any direct financial support of religious clergy or ecclesial bodies was a first step in establishing the sort of mischief and tyranny associated with the history of religious persecutions in Europe. Referring to Henry’s bill, Madison writes, “Instead of holding forth an Asylum to the persecuted, it is itself a signal of persecution. It degrades from the equal rank of Citizens all those whose opinions in Religion do not bend to those of the Legislative authority. Distant as it may be in its present form from the Inquisition, it differs from it only in degree. The one is the first step, the other the last in the career of intolerance.”^[40] Jefferson offers similar sentiments.^[41]

There seems then to have been at the American Founding two competing accounts of the relationship between church and state that were in tension:^[42] one whose advocates believed that if the government intentionally supports a community’s dominant religious tradition, this undermines equality between citizens and inevitably results in the debasement of the faith and persecution of dissenters; and another whose advocates believed that because a community’s dominant religious tradition is essential to the cultivation of personal virtue and public mindedness, government may be intentional in supporting it. Variations of both accounts remain with us to this day, neither of which has been able to secure a decisive victory in the culture or in the courts.

Steven D. Smith calls one of them “the secularist interpretation.”^[43] Represented in the works of figures like Jefferson and Madison, it is marked by its strict view of the separation of church and state and its call for the government to remain neutral as to religion. But it would be a mistake to see this account as inherently hostile to religion, since it had wide support among Baptists, Quakers, and certain pietist groups, such as Mennonites and Moravians, all of whom had suffered persecution by governments that had established churches. These groups, in line with Jefferson and Madison,^[44] saw a causal connection between an established church and the corruption of religion.^[45]

Smith labels the other account “the providentialist interpretation,” which I associate with figures like Henry and the drafters of the Massachusetts Constitution.^[46] Unlike advocates of its rival, advocates of this view see a causal connection between the total disestablishment of religion and the moral corruption of the community. For them, religion is an aspect of the common good that the government may legitimately support as long as the individual conscience is not coerced.

Despite their differences, it seems undeniable that both views—the secularist interpretation and the providentialist interpretation—are at their core liberal, with the former being more Lockean than the latter.^[47] For each affirms that the religious liberty of the individual conscience is an unalienable right.

Given the presence of both accounts at the American Founding,^[48] it is not surprising that the First Amendment’s religion clauses effectively reaffirm the status quo: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”^[49] As Smith notes, “The central purpose of the clauses was … to simply acknowledge in writing that even under the new Constitution, matters involving the establishment and exercise of religion would remain the business of the states, as nearly everyone agreed they should be.”^[50] Because the clauses were a limitation on Congress’s power to affect the power of the states to craft laws pertaining to religion, they protected the individual conscience from coercion by the federal government while forbidding that same government from both establishing its own official religion and preventing those states, like Massachusetts, from providing support to religious activities that were widely believed to advance the common good.

When Massachusetts ended its taxing scheme in 1833,^[51] there were no longer any states that provided direct financial support to religion, even though states still retained the power to enact such policies. But on other matters concerning religion, state and local governments advanced policies that required or allowed for public schools to teach about religion and begin the day with prayer, banned blasphemy and obscenity, enforced Sunday closing laws, hired chaplains to offer invocations in legislatures, and celebrated religious holidays in public spaces. This was the norm well into the twentieth century. Yet the United States remained undeniably liberal in its understanding of religious liberty.^[52]

Religion, the Supreme Court, and the Changing Face of Liberalism

This is not to say that there were not disputes or disagreements about the wisdom of such policies, but they were virtually never seen as matters that had to be resolved by the United States Supreme Court because they were possible violations of the Constitution. That, however, changes in the 1940s when the Court incorporates the First Amendment’s religion clauses through the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause and applies them to the states. In Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940),^[53] the Court used the free exercise clause to strike down a statute that required the licensing of door-to-door evangelism. And in Everson v. Board of Education (1947),^[54] the Court used a strict separationist reading of the establishment clause to argue that it was permissible for a public school district to reimburse the bus fares of children who attended private religious schools. With the religion clauses now applying to the states, the Court was faced for the first time with addressing those policies that had been, since the Founding, left to the discretion of the state legislatures and local officials. But culturally, and among legal scholars and activists, the secularist interpretation was in ascendancy,^[55] eventually becoming in the minds of many the only authentic American account of the relationship between church and state.^[56] Yet, when it comes to the rulings of the Supreme Court, the secularist interpretation gets a run for its money from the providentialist interpretation. For this reason, over the subsequent decades neither interpretation achieves anything remotely resembling total victory.^[57] On the one hand, the Court rules against prayer in public school classrooms,^[58] public displays of the Ten Commandments,^[59] some public religious displays,^[60] released time for religious education on public school grounds,^[61] direct funding of private religious schools,^[62] a Christian Legal Society student chapter that had been denied official status by a public law school because it excluded from leadership students who did not practice chastity,^[63] members of the Native American church who had been denied state unemployment benefits after being fired as drug counselors because they had consumed peyote at a religious ceremony,^[64] and a student who had been refused a state scholarship because it would be used to fund his ministerial education.^[65] On the other hand, the Court rules in favor of some public religious displays,^[66] prayer in state legislatures and city councils,^[67] equal access to public facilities by religious entities,^[68] the ministerial exception,^[69] a Christian baker who refused to design a cake for a same-sex wedding,^[70] the right of parents to direct their children’s religious education,^[71] the right of parents to receive vouchers or tax credit scholarships for private religious schools that had only been allowed for private secular schools,^[72] the right of a state government to create a school voucher system that allows parents to use a voucher at a private religious school,^[73] a church that had been denied a grant application for playground repair because of its status as a church,^[74] and the right of religious groups at public colleges to not be denied funding because they are religious.^[75] To be sure, the current Roberts Court (in 2026) seems far more inclined to be providentialist than secularist, a direction to which the Court has been moving since the early years of the twenty-first century. But from the 1940s through the late 1990s the Court’s inclinations were in fact largely (though not entirely) reversed.

During those decades in which many of the most important secularist-inclining Court opinions were issued, several prominent philosophers, political theorists, and legal scholars began developing and defending accounts of liberalism that sought to cabin religion from the public square on what they argued were principled grounds. Most notable among these scholars were John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. Like Locke and virtually everyone at the American Founding, they defended a robust understanding of the individual’s freedom of conscience. But unlike those other figures, Rawls and Dworkin (and like-minded thinkers) offered a more capacious account of what would count as “religious,” while combining it with a strict separationism akin to what one finds in Locke and the champions of the secularist interpretation. What results is essentially the sort of liberalism that once dominated the way in which most Americans, until fairly recently, tended to categorize their disputes over cultural, political, and legal issues of great controversy.

Think, for example, of issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, obscenity, or physician-assisted suicide. The Rawls-Dworkin approach to such issues was not to ask the question, “Which is the correct moral view that should be reflected in our laws?” Rather, they framed these debates as conflicts between contrary ethical traditions or comprehensive doctrines that, depending on what laws would be enacted, would either vindicate or violate a citizen’s personal liberty and right of conscience.^[76] (An ethical tradition or comprehensive doctrine refers to one’s vision of the good life, which is bound to be diverse for citizens exercising their reason in a free society).^[77] For Rawls and Dworkin such visions function in largely the same way as “religion” functioned for Locke and the secularist interpreters. Although for Rawls and Dworkin their new category includes the beliefs of conventional religions, it also includes beliefs tightly tethered to so-called nonreligious traditions and doctrines like utilitarianism, Kantianism, or Marxism. Because it is fundamental to justice to allow citizens to live out their vision of the good life unless it harms others, the only way that a coercive law can pass muster is if it is based on the sort of reason that it would be irrational for the coerced to reject.^[78]

One of the virtues of this position is that it cultivates a kind of epistemic modesty about ultimate questions. In that sense, it is not unlike what one finds in Locke and some of the American Founders.^[79] Another virtue of the position is that it seems to resolve disputes in a way that still requires respect for those whose views do not become law. Instead of saying, for example, that one’s opposition to physician-assisted suicide is irrational, the liberal can honestly say, “I know of no good reason why your view may not be the morally correct one, but because it is not irrational for others to reject it, we should leave the matter of physician-assisted suicide to the individual citizen informed by her own vision of the good life.” And this is precisely the argument that Rawls and Dworkin, along with four other philosophers, made in an amicus brief they submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996 in the cases of Washington v. Glucksberg and Vacco v. Quill,^[80] in which the Court addressed the question of whether or not the Constitution includes an unenumerated right to physician-assisted suicide. (The Court, in a 9-0 decision, answered no). In what was called “The Philosophers’ Brief,”^[81] Rawls, Dworkin, and their collaborators write, “Different people, of different religious and ethical beliefs, embrace very different convictions about which way of dying confirms and which contradicts the value of their lives…. None of these dramatically different attitudes about the meaning of death can be dismissed as irrational. None should be imposed, either by the pressure of doctors or relatives or by the fiat of government, on people who reject it.”^[82]

So even though this form of liberalism is not ideal for the providentialist interpreter, it still allows the conventional religious believer some breathing room and social space. To be sure, it shifts the scope of religion from mere duty to God to a more expansive vision of the good life, but at least the religious believer can appeal to liberal principles to defend her own conscience when the government wants to enact a coercive law that she is not irrational in rejecting. This is why in 1992, when testifying before Congress in support of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), the quintessential liberal, Nadine Strossen, then-president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), argued that without RFRA, “at risk [are] such familiar practices as … the sanctity of the confessional, religious preferences in church hiring, establishing places of worship in areas zoned for other use, permitting religiously sponsored hospitals to decline to provide abortion or contraception services, sex segregation during worship services, exemptions from mandatory retirements laws, a church’s refusal to ordain women or homosexuals, exemptions from landmark and zoning regulations, and the inapplicability of highly intrusive educational rules to parochial schools.”^[83] Although Strossen surely knew that almost all of the issues she listed were matters that Locke would have categorized as civil goods, she also knew that they were nevertheless integral to the moral theologies and ecclesiastical practices of groups devoted to the care of souls, just as the authors of the “Philosophers’ Brief” surely knew that Locke’s taxonomy was not up to the task in distinguishing civil goods from the care of souls at the very moment medicine could no longer prevent the civilian’s soul from separating from the believer’s body.

But soon after the dawn of the twenty-first century, this sort of liberalism—which I call political liberalism^[84]—begins to wane in the culture and something quite different begins to develop: a kind of secular progressive scrupulosity that I call hegemonic liberalism.^[85] Not only does it lack the epistemic modesty, capacious understanding of religion, and respect for conscience advanced by its predecessor, but it also cultivates reflexes in its advocates that seem indistinguishable from the judgments of inquisitional bureaucrats of a confessional state. We are all familiar with the stories and issues, some of which have been addressed by the Supreme Court in the cases mentioned above: parents disallowed from exempting their children from public school lessons inherently hostile to the family’s moral theology,^[86] Catholic priests specifically targeted by state government to break the seal of the confessional in sexual abuse cases while confidentiality in other professions remains protected for the same cases,^[87] religious vendors being coerced to use their talents to celebrate a same-sex wedding,^[88] Christian students at a public college not being permitted to form an official prolife group,^[89] an order of Catholic nuns being required by the Secretary of Health and Human Services to offer birth control in its employees’ health insurance plan,^[90] a college professor ordered by the administration of a public university to use the preferred pronouns of his transgender student,^[91] and a Catholic foster care agency banned by a local municipality from receiving referrals because the agency cannot as a matter of conscience place children with same-sex couples.^[92]

To give you a sense of the tectonic shift that these stories signal, consider just two historical contrasts. While the “Philosophers’ Brief” argued that none of the contrary views on how to morally address end-of-life care can be dismissed as irrational and imposed on citizens who cannot assent to views that violate their conscience,^[93] the contemporary literature in medical ethics is replete with professional ethicists arguing that if a physician will not cooperate with legally sanctioned active euthanasia or the performance of an abortion, she should probably find a different line of work.^[94] While political liberals like the ACLU’s Strossen defended RFRA because of its promise to protect Catholic medical institutions from being coerced to violate their church’s moral theology in the types of care they offer,^[95] the contemporary ACLU considers it a miscarriage of justice for the state not to coerce those very same institutions if they insist on not violating the teachings of their church.^[96]

Under a strict Lockean interpretation of religious liberty, none of the cases listed in the previous two paragraphs is difficult, since they all involve, at least at first glance, general laws that do not single out religion for a special burden.^[97] Thus, the religious citizen should always lose. Although under the secularist interpretation of the religion clauses the prospects of religious dissenters may be more promising, I have my doubts, since in each of these cases the law or policy in question was enacted to advance something the government believed was necessary for peace and good order or public health. Under political liberalism or a providentialist interpretation, the religious citizen stands a better chance. But that will largely depend on whether or not she can convince her compatriots that her actions are politically or theologically reasonable.^[98]

Integralism

Imagine that you are a serious Christian believer under the age of forty who embraces doctrines that can be traced back to the earliest adherents of your faith. You are, in some important ways, out of step with what seems to have been the dominant trends in the wider culture over the past five decades. Suppose further that you are a highly educated professional in a field like business, medicine, or law, or you may be an academic who studies literature, philosophy, religion, sociology, or public health. In such employment venues you are subjected to a steady cognitive diet of memos, seminars, and trainings—not to mention a special vocabulary with its own moral grammar—that never ceases to remind you that much of what you believe about the most important things in life are outside the institution’s circle of inclusion.

When you were younger you were told that you live in a liberal democratic republic whose citizens hold a variety of reasonable, and sometimes contrary, beliefs about religion, morality, politics, the welfare state, and the good life. But you were assured that because of this deep pluralism, you and everyone else has a civic obligation to cultivate in themselves a spirit of tolerance, openness, and critical reflection, while not hesitating to engage in robust and civil debate on contested matters in the proper currency of that endeavor: reasoned argument sustained by mutual respect. You were, in effect, told to be a good political liberal, with the promise that your own way of life—the religious community and tradition which is constitutive of who you are and how you understand goodness, truth, beauty, and your ultimate end—will not be the target of a government seeking to change or eliminate what you hold dear and what you believe to be your duty to God.

But from your teenage years onward, from your days in elementary school through your studies in college and in graduate school, as well as from what you have come to know about the trajectory of law, culture, and the best practices of your employer’s human resources department, you get the sense that many of your compatriots—especially those who lead the most influential institutions in the land—seem to want to establish what you cannot help but conclude is the de facto equivalent of a secular confessional state.^[99] You were promised by the advocates of political liberalism the fruits of reciprocity: so that each of us may live our vision of the good life unmolested by government and its many private subcontractors, all of us have an obligation to uphold our end of the bargain to not employ the mechanisms of law, politics, and culture to coerce or morally form fellow citizens who as a matter of conscience cannot assent to our vision of the good life. But because you have witnessed over the decades all the cases documented above, and how deeply burrowed into so many of our institutions are the sensibilities and moral reflexes that triggered the conflicts that made those cases possible, it seems to you that the political liberal’s agreement for reciprocity is not worth the paper it is not written on.^[100]

Imagine further that, because of your age, the only world you have ever known is one in which those institutions and ways of life that prior generations took for granted, and that your faith maintains are essential to the common good, have become fragmented, as well as mocked, marginalized, and designated as oppressive by the most important culture-shaping forces in North America and western Europe. Over time, you attribute these phenomena to the cultural primacy of what you come to believe is the autonomous, expressive, and unencumbered self of liberal philosophy,^[101] which, whether intended or not by its advocates, provided the justification for the unraveling of the natural bonds and unchosen obligations that your ancestors uncontroversially believed were part of the furniture of the universe.

It is in this context that integralism steps in and makes its case and draws in so many bright and devoted young people. According to integralism,^[102] God has authorized two separate authorities—spiritual and temporal—the former of which should direct the latter on matters over which their jurisdictions overlap. Because human beings are ordered toward communion with God, the temporal government should be in the service of the spiritual government. How that gets cashed out in practice will depend largely on contingent circumstances. For those of us who still identify as liberals, this sounds quite shocking and disorienting, since it means, as I noted in my introduction, that the state may assist the Catholic Church in not only carrying out its juridical responsibility over all validly baptized Christians, but also in restricting the freedom of the nonbaptized if the exercise of that freedom disturbs or impedes the sustainability and propagation of the Church’s mission. But those drawn to integralism are not the least bit shocked or disoriented. For they generally accept what philosopher Kevin Vallier calls the “no alternative objection”: “In my experience, all postliberals [including integralists] reject liberalism in part on the following grounds: there’s no alternative to government imposing a substantive value system or religion on the populace.”^[103] In other words, the movement toward what I call a secular confessional state is not at all surprising, argues the integralist, since no nation, society, or culture can exist without substantive claims about the good, the true, and the beautiful that have implications for what the state enacts in its laws and policies. As the integralist sees things, if liberalism means forcing an order of Catholic nuns to provide birth control for its lay employees, requiring Christian artists to custom design websites and culinary items to celebrate liturgical events with which they cannot in good conscience cooperate, and compelling elementary school children to read sympathetic accounts of human intimacy inherently hostile to their parents’ religiously informed moral beliefs, then, reasons the integralist, why cannot the government enact an opposite set of policies, at the behest of the church, that advances its own moral vision of the good life?

Although I am convinced that one ought to reject integralism for all the reasons the Second Vatican Council affirmed religious liberty in Dignitatis Humanae,^[104] I am also convinced that it is unlikely that the integralist-curious will be swayed by the sort of boilerplate liberal critiques that seemed so powerful up until just recently.^[105] Such an approach will not gain any traction with young, intelligent, well-educated, and serious Christians who have lived for virtually all of their lives under a liberal regime that has not kept its promises.^[106]