Every couple of days, an email shows up in my inbox from a new online publication called the American Postliberal. Its creators have dubbed it an outlet for promoting “Catholic political realism,” and its contributors publish articles on a range of topics, from movie reviews to the Catholic quest to reclaim Pride Month. For me, it’s a window into the latest supposedly new fad on the political right: the Catholic integralist movement, a group of people who believe that social adherence to Catholicism is the only way for America to truly recover from the failures of liberalism. To integralists such as the writers at the American Postliberal: “Mere variants of liberalism will not save the United States. Catholicism will. It is the religion given to us by our Lord, Jesus Christ, and is the only institution that can save the United States and the west.”
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Full disclosure: I’m not a Catholic, despite some of my Grove City professors’ best efforts. I’m not a theologian, a social scientist, or really an expert on anything save perhaps 21st-century meme culture — I am but a persistent and wild-haired undergrad journalist. I’m a firm believer in standing up for ideas and following your conscience, and I’ve seen no compelling reason to believe that the writers at the Postliberal (or, for that matter, the public intellectuals they seem to admire) are motivated by malice.
However, having engaged in a variety of circles on the political right and encountered a baffling number of people who believe that Catholic integralism is worth spending time on, it’s probably time to have a very down-to-earth discussion about how this is pure utopian nonsense. No, the choice for America’s future is not Catholicism versus paganism.
Catholic Integralism Is Unrealistic by the Numbers
Let’s start with some fairly obvious data: there aren’t that many Catholics in America. According to 2020 estimates, only 22 percent of Americans identify as Catholic. The astute reader will notice this number is not particularly close to a majority. It’s true that, by some metrics, Catholics make up the largest religious group in the United States, if you count each Protestant denomination as a separate group. Such a categorization is useful in certain situations, but not if you’re going around asking people if they’re okay with Catholic doctrine being the source of American law. In that case, I’m willing to posit that Protestants, and frankly, everyone in America who’s not Catholic — you know, that fringe group of 78 percent of the population — are going to come together fairly strongly on resisting such a ridiculous notion.
As a journalist, I am constantly made aware of the fact that you can’t push an issue into relevancy. The news cycle ebbs and flows, readers are into different things at different times, and trying to force some radical idea into the conversation that nobody is interested in is not a successful strategy for winning hearts, minds, or really much beyond mildly concerned and brief sideways glances from most people. Yet that’s what the integralists are doing, even though they don’t have the numbers to support it.
Let’s say that half of American Catholics are on board with the kind of governmental restructuring that integralists are calling for, purely for the sake of argument (there’s zero evidence for the number being that freaking high). To claim that integralism is a workable solution for America is to claim that the bizarre governmental philosophies espoused by, at best, less than 10 percent of the population are a feasible way forward. For reference, that same number of Americans — 7 percent — have “a great deal” of trust in mass media to report news accurately and fairly. That’s the level of fantasyland we’re dealing with here.
Integralism Stems From Despair
So why do people believe in these truly impossible and unworkable ideas? In lieu of the data, and as a practicing Christian, my speculation is this: The horrors of truly rabid progressivism have driven integralists to believe that this is a workable option. It’s easy to think, as a person of faith, that if we could just get people to see faith as we see it and live it as we live it, everything would be better.
I sympathize with this — the ravages of progressivism too often target the things we hold dear, from our faith to the most innocent among us. Progressivism is a destructive idea that must be fought. But can we settle on a better strategy than restructuring the government and the Constitution in keeping with an idea that less than 1 in 10 Americans are interested in?
Integralists aren’t evil. In many of their critiques of liberalism, they raise quite valid points (“too much choice, too little tradition, and too weak institutions” seems like a largely accurate assessment). The problem has arisen with their solution, and it’s not a malice thing; it seems far more likely that it’s a despair thing — despair at the failures of the political Right to accomplish anything of substance to push back against a culturally dominant progressive order. Such despair is understandable but not excusable — my generation and the ones to follow have a higher obligation than utopian niche theological speculations stemming from our own despondency.
Progressivism needs to be resisted. But, for the love of all that’s holy, Americans deserve a better strategy than: “What if we just magically made everybody Catholic.”
Isaac Willour is an award-winning journalist with work in outlets ranging from National Review to the Wall Street Journal Opinion. He has covered a wide variety of topics, from America’s death row to the war in Ukraine, and currently serves as an ELP fellow at the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He studies political science and psychology at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, where he is an award-winning columnist and a teaching assistant for Drs. Carl Trueman and Paul Kengor. Follow him on Twitter @IsaacWillour and on Substack @TheUnafraid.
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