Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Cranky Catholic Nationalists Look to Hungary and Poland for Political and Cultural Inspiration
March in Warsaw (Konrad Lembcke)
January 31, 2022
By Bill Berkowitz
If you think that attacks on democracy are only coming from the Republican Party and armed white nationalists, think again. A cadre of Catholic intellectuals is proposing anti-democratic solutions to Christianize America. Their project revolves around a concept called Integralism.
“Integralism” is a concept I was unfamiliar with which until I read a recent report by author/journalist Kathryn Joyce. “Integralism” Joyce wrote, is “a conservative Catholic legal movement advanced by many prominent post-iliberals, which opposes church-state separation and the prioritization of individual rights in favor of a system ordered to uphold ‘the common good.’” Currently, the best places for right-wing Catholics to find such illiberal expression are the governments of Hungary and Poland.
Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, recently wrote in the evangelical World magazine, that “evangelicals and others should be concerned about growing challenges to the founding premises of American democracy, not just from secularists but also from conservative Christians preferring some form of theocracy or confessional state. Likely you have never heard of integralism, but you need to know about it.”
Tooley added: “Integralism is a growing movement popular among Catholic intellectuals who think America’s liberal democracy, with its free speech and religious liberty, was doomed from the start because its design is at odds with God’s purposes for the community and state. Liberal democracy, the integralists believe, allows for the proliferation of immorality by its denial of any sort of religious basis undergirding society.” Integralists believe that “Catholic faith should be the basis of public law and public policy within civil society.”
Joyce’s Type Investigations report pointed out that at an early November National Conservatism conference, conservatives from across the right-wing spectrum, including GOP Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley, as well as their would-be colleague, the Ohioan writer J.D. Vance, met to discuss the creation of a “new shared vision.”
One of the questions posed: Is it possible to unite the right.
Despite Democrats being in disarray, some conservative are concerned that they too have no solid principles to stand behind.
What could be more American, than pushing the idea that America has always been and always should be a Christian nation? And, where might conservatives find guidance? How about Hungary and Poland?
Integralism is not a new political idea. According to Timothy Troutner, writing for Commonweal in October 2020, “Integralism clearly breaks with Vatican II’s teaching on religious liberty and expresses a commitment to the political disenfranchisement (or worse) of women, sexual minorities, and non-Catholics.”
“This fall,” Kathryn Joyce wrote, “integralism received renewed attention thanks to the increasingly public alliance between the U.S. right and the ruling classes of Hungary and Poland, which in recent years have assumed the aura of conservative utopias due to their governments’ fusing of traditionalist ideology with populist nationalism. In Poland, the ruling Law and Justice Party equates conservative Catholicism with patriotism, to the extent that two Catholic relics have recently been enshrined within the Polish parliament and Law and Justice campaign posters are displayed on church grounds.”
Joyce noted that: “In Hungary, … [Viktor] Orbán’s government has transformed the country into a pointedly ‘illiberal’ Christian democracy. It has funded an extensive suite of pronatalist policies (including a lifetime income tax exemption for women who bear four or more children) as a bulwark against Muslim immigrants—who, Orbán says, can’t be assimilated because ‘multiculturalism is just an illusion’—and passed a constitutional amendment that all children should be raised ‘in accordance with values based on Hungary’s constitutional identity and Christian culture.’”
During an informal discussion at November’s confab, Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony basically suggested to Make America Hungary and Poland. Hazony “had a proposal for where to begin: with an avowal that America is a Christian nation with a Christian majority, where Christians should get to dictate the country’s laws and social norms,” Joyce reported.
“There could be ‘carve-outs’ for minorities, he said, but no pretense of a neutral public square in which pluralistic concerns trump the majority’s right to see its culture reflected around it. Could the panel agree on that: not to actively persecute minorities but to let the majority control the public square?”
American Conservative contributing editor Sohrab Ahmari,
“suggested the model of Hungary—which banned same-sex marriage and adoption, legal recognition for transgender people, and, recently, sharing LGBTQ content with minors, but where homosexuality itself isn’t outlawed. ‘The minority, in this case, is well treated,’ he insisted, ‘and not excluded and not oppressed in any way.’”
At least in the case of Hungary, conservative Catholic leaders are receiving mutual support. “The Budapest-based private college Mathias Corvinus Collegium has spent the last two years hosting American thinkers alienated by liberal mores at home,” Joyce reported. “Eastern European cities are now key book-tour stops for postliberal writers, and Orbán himself encouraged conservative American writers like Rod Dreher to consider Hungary their ‘intellectual home.’”
There was also Tucker Carlson’s visit to Hungary, which included an Orbán-centered interview on his Fox program.
And Donald Trump recently offered his “Complete support and Endorsement for [Orbán’s] reelection as Prime Minister.”
As might be expected, when some newish order of thinking emerges, it begins a round of insider debates between advocates and critics. (Read Joyce’s piece to get a better sense of how these debates is being framed.)
Interestingly, Hazony, a major player in these debates, sees his proposals as a way to avoid growing white supremacist movements. Hazony told Joyce: “All these efforts to overthrow traditional Anglo-American law, religion, and language … are forcing a choice between individualism, which the right is leaving, and racialist white supremacy, which is definitely getting stronger on the fringes of the right in America. A lot of people … consciously see the revival of national conservatism as an alternative, trying to head off the grotesque political impulses that we see on the far right.”
Ahmari told Joyce: “If we don’t propose a reasonable idea of the nation,” tempering “liberal imperium and barbarous nation-idolatry and race-chauvinism” with Christianity, “we will get an unreasonable one.”
As Mark Tooley acknowledged, there are very few Catholics that currently embrace integralism. However, he notes, “this perspective commands zeal from a band of smart thinkers and highly educated young people whose influence exceeds their small numbers.”
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