Catholic Integralists Versus the American Spirit

The Founders wouldn't be surprised by the new right-wing collectivists

“I did verily believe, as I do still, that much more is to be dreaded from the growth of Popery in America than from the Stamp Act or any other Acts destructive of civil rights.” — Samuel Adams, 1768

One debate that people sometimes like to have is whether America was founded as a Christian nation. My view is that it depends on the exact nature of the question. Have the vast majority of Americans throughout history been Christians or significantly influenced by the Christian faith? Of course. On the other hand, if you look at the historical context in which the nation was established, it is clear that the American Founders were primarily influenced by classical and Enlightenment ideals, which for at least some of them involved a rejection of the Christian faith, and for most a separation of religion and government. The Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution mention a creator but say nothing about Jesus or traditional Christianity. These were men of the Enlightenment, who rejected the idea that theological concerns had a role to play in political affairs, which was intimately related to a rejection of the divine right of the British King.

Regardless of how we answer the Christian question, one thing you can say for sure is that America was definitely not a Catholic nation. Indeed, from before the founding until the late twentieth century, the American mainstream was suspicious of Rome. Maura Jane Farrelly, in her book Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860, writes that,

The Catholic Church represented different threats to different Americans at different points in time; and yet, over the course of the two and a half centuries that this book explores, one characteristic of the threat remained constant: Catholicism was at all times seen as antithetical to freedom. Freedom, in turn, was seen as the foundation of “American” identity – whether that identity belonged to the Puritans in the seventeenth century, the Patriots in the eighteenth century, or the Unitarians and Nativists in the nineteenth century.

It is somewhat strange, then, to see Catholic traditionalists at the center of modern nationalist thought. Last week, Vivek was questioned by a Groyper on whether his non-Christian faith was compatible with him being an American political leader. This movement represents a kind of Catholic nationalism that is at the core of the America First movement. In a less extreme form, Matthew Schmitz recently wrote in The New York Times about the influence that religious Catholics are having on the right, with jurists, intellectuals, and politicians having pushed for socially conservative views on topics like sex and abortion, as they challenge laissez-faire economics. While a previous generation of conservative Catholics assimilated into the mainstream American right by accepting free market ideals, the new Catholics, many of them converts, adopt relatively statist positions more in line with those of their church.

Unfortunately, such positions show why theology is a bad guide to economic policy. The new Catholic traditionalists, often called integralists though many reject the term, are in many ways hostile to the ideas, norms, and institutions that have made the American experiment a unique success. Catholic social thought is in the end remarkably consistent in its hostility to individual liberty and support for state intervention in the economy and people’s personal lives. Understanding how previous generations of Americans saw the dangers of Catholicism can help shed light on the rise of the illiberal right today.

A Brief History of American Anti-Popery

Columbus’ discovery of America occurred a mere nine years after the birth of Martin Luther. As an adult, Luther’s writings on the flaws of the Catholic Church helped inaugurate a new historical era that would engulf Europe in flames, and England was no exception. The pope’s unwillingness to grant King Henry VIII an annulment of his marriage in 1527 led to the monarch getting parliament to declare him the head of the Church of England. For the next hundred years, Catholics and Protestants fought for political power, with the matter finally being settled with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which William III of Orange and Mary II deposed James II of England, who was Mary’s brother. In 1701, parliament passed the Act of Settlement, a law that is still in effect and restricts the English throne to Protestants.

William III of Orange (1650-1702)

In this atmosphere, according to Farrelly, “[o]pposition to Catholicism was the primary reason English Calvinists came to the New World in the 1620s and 1630s.” Those who settled in what became the United States tended to be upset that the English crown was in the hands of monarchs who were either themselves Catholic or not hostile enough to that faith. This formed the basis of identity in Colonial America, especially after the Glorious Revolution settled the religious issue in the mother country once and for all. Being Protestant, English, and a believer in individual liberty were all interconnected.

In 1686, James II, the last Catholic king, decided to establish unified control among his Northeastern American possessions and therefore combined parts or the entirety of what would later become Maine, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire into the Dominion of New England. The colonists resisted this development, and after the Glorious Revolution a series of revolts helped to bring about its dissolution. Anti-Catholicism served as a rallying cry for Americans seeking to regain their lost liberties.

These rivalries would later influence the American founders, although anti-Catholic sentiment was tempered by Enlightenment values that stressed religious pluralism. Anti-Catholic arguments were thus secularized and adapted to new circumstances. While in the seventeenth century Catholicism was a threat to men’s souls, by the time of the American Revolution it was criticized more commonly as potentially hostile to individual liberty.

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For instance, in 1765, John Adams published “A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law,” in which he noted the religious practices of the first English settlers of America, and contrasted their masculine liberty loving spirit with the effeminate, slavish ways of the Catholic Church.

This conduct at once imposed an obligation on the whole body of the clergy, to industry, virtue, piety and learning, and rendered that whole body infinitely more independent on the civil powers, in all respects than they could be where they were formed into a scale of subordination, from a pope down to priests and fryars and confessors, necessarily and essentially a sordid, stupid, wretched herd; or than they could be in any other country, where an archbishop held the place of an universal bishop, and the vicars and curates that of the ignorant, dependent, miserable rabble aforesaid; and infinitely more sensible and learned than they could be in either. This subject has been seen in the same light, by many illustrious patriots, who have lived in America, since the days of our fore fathers, and who have adored their memory for the same reason. And methinks there has not appeared in New England a stronger veneration for their memory, a more penetrating insight into the grounds and principles and spirit of their policy, nor a more earnest desire of perpetuating the blessings of it to posterity, than that fine institution of the late chief justice Dudley, of a lecture against popery, and on the validity of presbyterian ordination.

The citation “that fine institution of the late chief justice Dudley” refers to the Dudleian lectures, held annually on the topic of religion at Harvard beginning in 1755 and ending in 1857. Each lecture would be on one of four themes that were addressed on a rotating basis, among them "detecting, and convicting, and exposing the Idolatry of the Romish Church, their tyranny, usurpations, damnable heresies, fatal errors, abominable superstitions, and other crying wickednesses in their high places."

When the British parliament adopted the Quebec Act of 1774, which granted tolerance to Catholics, it became one of the five “Intolerable Acts” denounced by the Continental Congress. In its address to the people of Great Britain, the Americans argued that Catholic migrants had the potential “to reduce the ancient free Protestant Colonies to the same state of slavery with themselves.” This wasn’t a matter of benign cultural differences. The Continental Congress wrote, “[n]or can we suppress our astonishment, that a British Parliament should ever consent to establish in that country a religion that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed bigotry, persecution, murder and rebellion through every part of the world.” In other words, the British had seen the dangers of Catholicism first hand, and now they risked watching the same faith subvert governing institutions in the new world.

It must be noted that there were few Catholics in the United States at the time of the Founding, perhaps 1-2% of the population. Catholicism was more a symbol of what was wrong with the old world than a direct threat to the nation. A country that was founded on the basis of individual liberty, belief in scientific progress, and the separation of church and state saw as one of its primary antagonists a faith that believed in miracles, divine authority granted to individual men, and a world in which God had a direct role to play in earthly affairs. That is not to say that there were not Founders who themselves were believing Catholics, or that Catholics could not be government officials or respected members of American society. And even as the colonists denounced the Quebec Act, they were trying to get the French Canadians on their side against the crown, although this two-faced approach ended up backfiring when they learned about the letter to the British people.

So it would be wrong to say that the Founders were consistently anti-Catholic in principle. Yet any acceptance was based on the condition that Catholics assimilate into the larger culture or, in the case of the Quebecois, at least be allies in the fight for liberty; the idea that the teachings of Rome would form the basis of American governance was anathema to the Founders, and most Americans throughout history.

Anti-Irish/Catholic cartoon by Thomas Nast published in Harper’s Weekly, September 2, 1871.

When Catholic numbers did start to rapidly increase in the United States, it caused an inevitable backlash. In places where German and Irish Catholics settled in the mid-eighteenth century, natives tended to organize against them. Many Americans naturally sympathized with the liberal revolutions of 1848, and the Pope standing with the forces of reaction further reinforced the belief that the Catholic Church was fundamentally hostile to liberal ideals. In its platform of 1855, the American Party, more often referred to as the “Know-Nothings,” listed as one of its planks “[r]esistance to the aggressive policy and corrupting tendencies of the Roman Catholic Church in our country.” It reached the peak of its power in 1854, when the party captured over one-fifth of seats in the House of Representatives. Two years later, former president Millard Fillmore running as the Know-Nothing candidate received 22% of the vote in the presidential race. But by then the party was on its way out, as it split over the issue of slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War. Like nativists of today, the Know-Nothings were seen as an embarrassment to most educated Americans, though their views certainly reflected mass sentiment as can be seen in the political success of their party.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the percentage of Americans who were Catholic went from around 13% to about a quarter of the population. With some hiccups, this was mostly a story of successful assimilation. Perhaps too successful, as historian Richard Hofstadter would at one point explain McCarthyism’s popularity by pointing to what he saw as the high representation of Catholics in the movement, who proved their loyalty to the nation by overcompensating and declaring elites in positions of power to be traitors. Hofstadter eventually backtracked and came to see right-wing extremism as mostly an expression of the views of certain classes among old stock Americans, but the point is that at the time this was considered a plausible interpretation of events given that McCarthy was himself an Irish-Catholic.

Kennedy’s religion would still be a major issue in the 1960 presidential campaign, with the candidate feeling the need to reassure the public that he was committed to the separation of church and state and did not take his orders from Rome. He went so far to declare that he did not seek to court Catholics as members of a community, and did not want Americans to vote for him on account of his religion. Viewed from our modern vantage point in a time when identity politics has been normalized, Kennedy’s desire to not be seen through the prism of his faith seems paranoid, but it reflected the extent to which mainstream American society was still skeptical of Catholicism into the 1960s.

The Conservative Movement

Catholicism as a marker of otherness would decline in the years after Kennedy’s election. Among conservatives in particular, the Cold War created a movement that brought together Jews, Catholics, and Protestants in common alliance against communism and secular humanism.

The mid-to-late twentieth century saw Americans divided less along sectarian lines and more according to beliefs about the role of religion in public life. The Supreme Court would, in the course of a decade, ban prayer in public schools (1962), mandate that contraception be legal (1965), and protect the right to an abortion (1971). The last issue in particular, first a strictly Catholic cause before influencing Protestants too, would become a political obsession of the religious right. Anti-communism also tended to bind Christians of all kinds together, as the Soviet Union was both an oppressor of Catholics in Eastern Europe and the atheistic rival of the United States.

From the beginning of the Cold War, Catholics played a major role in shaping American conservatism, among them William F. Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly, and Russell Kirk. Reflecting this influence, today 5 of the 6 conservative Supreme Court justices are Catholics who represent older generations of believers.

Unlike today’s traditionalists such as Adrian Vermeule and his ilk, Catholic influence on American conservatism throughout the postwar period has mostly been the result of them assimilating into the dominant culture. Until recently, Catholics and non-Catholics on the right tended not to differ all that much on topics like foreign policy and economics. The splits among conservatives in the early Cold War era tended to be over the axes of libertarians versus conservatives, and cranks versus mainstreamers. So William F. Buckley, a Catholic, wrote the Protestant Robert Welch, leader of the John Birch Society, out of the conservative movement, but there was nothing strictly theological about this rivalry. Libertarians like Murray Rothbard also had their issues with Buckley, but they mainly broke off from the mainstream of the movement due to disagreements over foreign policy. Decades later, Buckley would take issue with Pat Buchanan’s antisemitism as the latter came to be skeptical of the US-Israeli relationship and started to make increasingly overt appeals to white identitarianism. But Buchanan was a Catholic like Buckley.

In The Making the American Conservative Mind: The National Review and Its Times, Jeffrey Hart notes that in the early days of the magazine there was debate about the role of religion in the conservative movement, but not over sectarian issues. Of course, given America’s history as a Protestant nation, it would have been absurd to define Catholicism as central to the conservative movement.

The fact that Catholicism had assimilated into American conservatism rather than the other way around can be seen in how often National Review was at odds with the Church. The magazine took a hawkish position on the Cold War while prominent officials within the Church often favored arms control agreements and a nuclear freeze. Pope John Paul II called for an abolition of the death penalty in 1999, yet American Catholics on the right didn’t seem to pay him all that much attention. And of course, National Review accepted free market orthodoxy, in opposition to the teachings of Rome, which throughout the twentieth century has expressed support for the welfare state. Paul Ryan once even justified his opposition to entitlements by pointing to his Catholic faith, and this was not considered all that unusual.

The New Catholic Collectivists

In recent years, we have seen something completely new in the rise of integralism, which puts Catholic social teaching at the center of thinking about public policy. Many if not most of the figures associated with this movement are converts, including Adrian Vermeule, and the two founders of Compact Magazine, Sohrab Ahmari and Matthew Schmitz. The most prominent Catholic convert in politics is of course JD Vance. The word “integralism” has fallen out of favor and some of them reject the term, but one can still see the influence of this Catholic-tinged movement that calls itself conservative while putting forward a critique of American society in which the problem is that it allows too much liberty.

What distinguishes these people from previous generations of Catholic conservatives is that they don’t really dissent from the church on any issue, save immigration, which is sort of the exception that proves the rule as they have a fundamentally collectivist outlook. On nearly any other topic you can think of, they seek to pull conservatism in the direction of the Church. This means having a hardline position on life issues, but also going to the left on economics and foreign policy. They oppose affirmative action and other kinds of wokeness, but tend to be hysterical anti-racists when it comes to thinking about group differences in a scientific way. As mentioned, immigration is an interesting exception here, and I think that this is related to the fact that most tradcaths have a kind of natural conservative orientation. While a relatively intellectual movement can be both socially conservative and welcoming to outsiders, that is, combining say anti-abortion, etc. with pro-immigration views, such a union is deeply unnatural to anything that aspires to be a mass political movement.

Integralists aren’t shy about their contempt towards American notions of individual liberty. Works like Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed [note: it hasn’t] make this explicit, although these aren’t numbers people, and one can’t really analyze their arguments about the failures of liberalism by standards anyone who doesn’t already agree with them will accept. While they heap scorn on concepts like free speech, individual liberty, or the idea that someone should be able to get a job without getting approval from union bosses first, they declare themselves American patriots. This is strange, given that integralists act as if they read anti-Catholic polemics of previous centuries and decided to become caricatures of the kinds of political actors that Americans traditionally feared and detested.

Related to their ideas, there is an anger and hysterical edge to this movement. Deneen can in a supposedly serious book call the current American elite one of the worst ruling classes in history without providing any arguments as to why. Vermeule declares that “[l]iberalism is visibly sagging and collapsing around us, having undermined its own foundations.” Sohrab Ahmari went to war with David French and his calls for incremental improvements in American governance by screeching about drag queen story hour, which he thought required a completely new approach to politics. And throughout this campaign cycle, the Trump campaign has had to deal with one video after another of JD Vance seething at childless cat ladies and their miserable and pointless lives.

The mood is dark and pessimistic, and it seems obviously true that there must be a connection between such attitudes towards society and the kind of existential crisis that causes someone to adopt a new faith. This faction is not only anti-American in the sense of having collectivist values, but in their angry, despondent, and often hysterical approach towards public policy.

It’s not simply a few prominent figures. Over the last decade or so, it’s become common for young conservatives to turn to Catholicism. Often, this is a sign of a kind of alienation from mainstream society. I know one guy who went to an Ivy League school and now has a powerful position in the legal profession who converted during college, which led to a bunch of other guys who looked up to him doing the same. Eventually he realized it was just a sign of him being depressed at the time, though I don’t know if this caused the rest of his group to eventually become less religious too.

There seems to be a divide where the Catholics who were born into the faith tend to be decent and reasonable people, while converts who came to it as adults often are undergoing some kind of existential crisis. That’s not to say I don’t know some Catholic converts who are decent people. It’s just that when you see a Catholic openly fantasizing about his enemies being crushed by the state and one day burning for all eternity, he’s much more likely to be a convert than societal demographics would suggest. The angry and miserable tone of the integralists reflects this, as does their tendency to take the position hostile to liberty on nearly every issue.

A kind of generalized right wing pessimism is a common occurrence throughout history. All over the world, we see conservative movements that are angry about the way their society is headed, have a rose-colored view of the past, and reach for a powerful state as the crudest tool available to correct what they see as having gone wrong. Americans have been blessed by the fact that this kind of politics has been relatively rare here. Openness, tolerance to different viewpoints, and individual liberty, all of which seem to require a more optimistic outlook, have always been central to our society and political culture, a hybrid of Protestant and Enlightenment ideals. The assimilation of Catholics into a predominantly Protestant nation has been one of our great successes. But Americans of previous generations realized that there were dangers in having a large segment of the population that put its faith in the power of the state rather than individuals and private institutions to run their own affairs.

The success of Catholic assimilation means that integralists do not have many followers among the mass public. But they are coming to play an outsized role on the American right. This is a key difference between the kind of Catholic influence that previous generations of Americans worried about and what we are seeing today. Before, it was the popish masses that were potentially the problem. Today, collectivist ideas are being preached by a handful of intellectuals seeking influence within the American conservative movement, which for its power to a large extent relies on uneducated masses, mostly non-Catholic, that can easily be led in different directions.

Their views on abortion in particular are electoral poison, though Vance for one has shown an impressive degree of flexibility on the issue. Their economic positions may occasionally poll well but are contrary to the values and interests of the class of business owners and individual proprietors that provide much of the funding and institutional capital of the right. To the extent that integralists gain control over the conservative movement, they will drive it to the ground. We would then see a permanent triumph of the left, which at that point wouldn’t be the worst possible outcome.