Catholic Integralism and the Social Imaginary

As a Catholic integralist looking out onto the playing field of American politics, I have to ask myself what in America would need to change in order for political Catholicism of any sort to really take root in this country. Critics of integralism have often observed that American culture is simply not predisposed to respond favorably to the prospect of a Catholic regime being imposed upon them from above, and therefore Catholic integralism as a political project is up against incredible odds when it comes to acquiring any kind of public legitimacy. For some critics, this mere fact alone disqualifies integralism from the start as any kind of serious participant in the political discourse; for others, it remains a serious participant in the discourse, even though its prospects are too thin for it to really guide any practical political program.

In response, certain integralists, such as Adrian Vermeule, have pointed out that it is simply unimaginative to rule out the possibility of an integralist future on the basis of its sheer unlikelihood. After all, the last few years have offered us many examples of political unlikelihoods becoming reality, despite the fact that nobody could have foreseen them. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was one such event. To many cultural and religious conservatives in the nation, it signified that the range of political possibilities far exceeded the range of probabilities, and this gave them cause for optimism. Several public integralists have added their voices to this chorus of optimism.

Is such optimism justified? I presume that this is the sort of question on which even integralists may reasonably disagree, without compromising their fundamental commitment to the principles of Catholic political doctrine. In any case, a Catholic’s primary cause for hope must come not from surveying the state of the world and assessing its readiness to receive political Catholicism, on the grounds of any purely human observation; rather, it comes from the supernatural promise that Christ himself gave to the Church, which is that the gates of hell would never prevail against her, and thus she would always remain the visible form of His eternal kingdom on earth. Even should all the kingdoms of the world refuse to recognize Christ’s reign, Catholics may remain firm in the conviction that they will all be subdued by Christ in the end – and this counts for much more than any worldly optimism. 

But as one surveys the world itself, it may very well be that the kingdoms of earth refuse to recognize Christ’s supremacy, and there is little prospect of persuading them otherwise. This realization may stem from a very earthbound perspective, rather than from the eternal perspective of the Eschaton. This earthly perspective is not illegitimate in itself, and it may be rooted in very genuine and even scientific analyses of the condition of the world. The advantage of Christian hope is not that it disqualifies such earthly perspectives, but that it continues to believe in and fight for something beyond what such limited perspectives can reveal. After all, it is a supernatural hope that is rooted in a faith in things unseen.

A Catholic might take seriously the observations gained from certain social sciences, such as those developed in the Marxist tradition, to the effect that contemporary American social and material conditions do not presently make it possible for political Catholicism to be implanted in a deep way. Indeed, the evidence of how Catholicism as a religion is practiced in America does not seem to bode well for an integralist future. Catholics are too easily seduced by the ways of the world, and what little of their Catholicism is left is an empty shell of the real thing. In other words, to use the Marxist jargon, the material infrastructure of American society does not support a Catholic superstructure. This same observation could be restated in the terms of Thomistic-Aristotelian philosophy: the matter must be properly disposed to receive the form, and if the form is political Catholicism, then the matter of American society is simply not properly disposed to receive it. 

If one observes the many surprising and unforeseeable events that have taken place in recent politics, it is impossible to ignore the fact that none of these events have fundamentally changed the basic material infrastructure of American society. For one thing, American society remains basically capitalist; and as Max Weber famously elucidated, the only appropriate religious superstructure of capitalism is Protestantism, not Catholicism. Arguably, the latest iterations of American politics have only produced more stubborn variants and descendants of this same Protestant superstructure. (The rise of “wokeism” is easily accounted for as the natural outcome of Protestantism.) Characteristic of these quintessentially American ideologies is their inability to imagine a radical alternative to the present social conditions in which life is imprisoned, an inability that goes right along with the seemingly unchanging character of those conditions themselves at a basic, material level (despite events that all would agree are historic in some way or another). 

It would take nothing short of a revolution to upend the conscious habits of American culture, which are so deeply immersed in the well of capitalist ideology, Protestant ethics, and their descendents. Working from within this complex nexus of ideologies and deeply embedded ways of life is thus unlikely to produce radical change, much less remake the material base of American society in a manner that would be receptive to the religious superstructure of Catholicism. If that is the sort of change that integralists desire, they must consider just how extensive are the transformations that must take place in order to prepare American minds for the reception of a religious superstructure that is almost totally foreign to them.

Carl Schmitt, the famous German jurist, offers a useful perspective on this score. In a work that has often been cited by certain integralists themselves, he seems to display a marked pessimism about the changing conditions of contemporary capitalist society. In Roman Catholicism and Political Form, he writes that “An alliance of the Catholic Church with the present form of industrial capitalism is not possible.” This is because, in accordance with integralist thought, Catholicism can only ally itself with genuinely political power. Yet capitalism (and Soviet socialism, in Schmitt’s estimation) tends to substitute a purely technical and economic form for a genuinely political form. The business of political governance is replaced by a purely technocratic form of administration, what the Frankfurt Marxists dubbed “instrumental rationality” – and what Pope Francis has regularly criticized throughout his pontificate.

In order for an alliance between Catholicism and capitalism to take place, Schmitt observes, present forms of governance currently dominated by purely economic modes of administration would have to be made political again. In a certain way, Schmitt is claiming that the social infrastructure of capitalist society needs to be updated and properly disposed, if it is to be receptive to an integralist alliance of Church and State. Although this claim echoes the Marxist analysis of the relationship of base and superstructure, it adds to that analysis the claim that the infrastructural elements of contemporary capitalism do not even support a political form as such, much less a Catholic one. The monumental task, then, is to repoliticize what has been depoliticized – to put back in the service of a grand idea, indeed a theological idea, a whole social apparatus that has been put at the service of mere production and consumption.  

What exactly would this mean, in practice? Once again, the Marxist tradition offers some insight. Carl Schmitt’s imperative of repolicitization is echoed in an unlikely place by the late Mark Fisher, a British socialist and cultural critic who suffered from a crippling depression that he himself traced to the decadence of late neoliberal capitalism (he ended up taking his own life in 2017). In his well read book, Capitalist Realism, Fisher took a deep dive into the very tendency towards depoliticization which Schmitt identified as the effect of capital, and in the end of the book he briefly reflects on what it would take to repoliticize the public space that capital has vampirically sucked dry. Coming from what is obviously a Leftist perspective, Fisher’s recommendations (which are fairly tentative) merit some reflection from Catholic integralists and postliberals generally.

The basic challenge, for Fisher, is to imagine an alternative to capitalism and to pave the way for realizing this alternative through meaningful political conflict. Moreover, the challenge is to do this in a world where the capacity to imagine and create such alternatives has been thoroughly suffocated by the cultural and material constraints that neoliberal capitalism itself has imposed. This will require a concerted movement to capture those institutions, and especially in building new ones, which play a central role in shaping the imagination and desire of late capitalism’s consumeristic subjects – because, according to Fisher, it is the desire for “the strange, the unexpected, the weird,” that effectively acts as the motive power for real social transformation. In other words, energy for real social change is to be provided by the presentation of “strange, unexpected, and weird” images to the imaginations of the masses, with the purpose of reawakening their desire for something other than their present oppressive conditions.

There is something in this sentiment that is connatural to Catholicism. In contrast to the desacralizing ideologies that followed the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, Catholicism has always answered to the innate human desire for the strange that Fisher claims is the “most powerful form of desire.” The sacred forms that populate the outward face of Catholicism towards the world are nothing if not strange, unexpected, and weird. Indeed, it is inherent to the sacred forms of Catholicism that they announce the possibility of transcending the ordinary and mundane circumstances of a worldly existence – a possibility that is denied to the inhabitants of late capitalism.

Thus, in keeping with his Marxist roots, Fisher urges Leftists to occupy the apparatus of the state – and not with the sole purpose of using it to exert control over labor and production, though this purpose of course remains, but also with the purpose of using it to present “the strange, the unexpected, and the weird” in a visceral form, to awaken the masses from their imaginative stupor to the possibility of a radical alternative to their present conditions. Fisher calls such a state a “Marxist Supernanny,” to evoke a paternal state that intends to answer the deepest desires of its subjects – desires of which they themselves are not always conscious, even though they willingly undergo the dull and depressive routine of life under capitalism.

Doubtless, there is again some overlap between this train of thought, traced out of the Marxist lineage in which Mark Fisher was writing, and the aforementioned thought of Carl Schmitt. Although Schmitt does not appear especially optimistic about the prospects of repoliticizing what capital has depoliticized, he does not hold back from giving his prescription of what such a repoliticization would entail. For Schmitt, it is encapsulated in the concept of “representation,” which he regards as an essential function of any truly political entity. Such an entity must represent something, whether it is a great idea, or “the people,” or God. Obviously, in Schmitt’s estimation, the Catholic Church is an eminently representative institution: “It represents the civitas humana. It represents in every moment the historical connection to the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ. It represents the Person of Christ Himself: God become man in historical reality. Therein lies its superiority over an age of economic thinking.” 

This is in stark contrast to the administrative entities – e.g. managers’ bureaus and corporate committees – that preside over purely economic society, i.e. capitalism. Such entities do not represent anything; they merely play the functional role of operating the giant economic machine. “The savant and the merchant have become suppliers or supervisors. The merchant sits in his office; the savant, in his study or laboratory. If they are really modern, both serve a factory — both are anonymous. It is senseless to claim they represent something. They are either private individuals or exponents; not representatives.” 

As capitalism extends its totalitarian grip into all known social reality, including the state itself, it is the Catholic Church that increasingly plays the only political role worthy of the name. This is because of its possession of the power of representation, a power that gives meaning and purpose even to its juridical quality – its status as a lawgiver. Its legitimacy as a lawgiver is supported by the visible imagery in which it girds itself: the liturgical regalia of divine majesty that belong properly to the Church are the very instruments of its representative authority, the symbols by which she presents to the world a powerful idea capable of changing that world forever. The Church is the personification of absolute authority. 

The implication of all this is that the repoliticization of secular society would entail reinvesting the state with many of the same elements of representative power that belong to the Church, in order to make the state into an acceptable companion. One is reminded, in this vein, of the elaborate mystical theologies that were often formulated to exalt the medieval Catholic monarchies, under the doctrine of “The King’s Two Bodies.” As Ernst Kantorowicz demonstrated in his magisterial tome of that title, the theology of the king’s two bodies was in many ways a direct imitation of the theological claims of the Church herself. Which is to say that the state gains its truly political character in the degree to which it imitates the heavenly society itself, of which the Church is the incarnate form. 

To be sure, integralists to date are very conscious of this project: the state features as a central aim and focus of their efforts to develop a coherent political philosophy, if not a concrete strategy. The legal project of the integralists at blogs like Ius et Iustitium certainly has a role to play in the larger project of using the state to reawaken hidden desires; after all, the law is a teacher, and even Marxists (such as Antonio Gramsci) have acknowledged its power to shape human desire. 

But the integralist project must, in a way, be larger than a legal project. It must also entail a radical transformation of the “imagescape” that perpetually imposes itself upon the imagination of the masses—what Charles Taylor calls the “social imaginary.” Indeed, even the juridical function of the state on this account must be understood in relation to the state’s capacity to represent a powerful idea, a new possibility for human existence, the possibility of transcendence. To draw from yet another Marxist thinker, Georges Sorel, the possibility of political transformation will depend upon the motivation of the greater masses by profound images, symbols, and myths that evoke the possibility of a world beyond their present conditions. Indeed, it is worth noting that Sorel, in Reflections on Violence, drew this insight largely from his study of the Catholic Church itself.

What are the practical implications of all this? Contrary to many unjustified caricatures, integralists have put much thought into matters of praxis. Yet I will venture to say that there is one area to which integralists, including myself, have not yet given much thought: the problem of reinvesting the state with the representative and symbolic power that is proper to political authority. This problem boils down to that of radically reshaping the social imaginary, which will be necessary in order to render society less resistant to political and cultural Catholicism. If, as Adrian Vermeule has written, the inability to conceive an integralist future represents a failure of political imagination, this failure is deeply rooted in the social imaginary of contemporary American society. Therefore, the task for integralists is to transform the social imaginary. This is, in many ways, a superhuman task, considering the extent to which the social imagination is already overloaded by the images that pervade contemporary consumerist society. The practical dimensions of this task are yet to be explored.