Christian Nationalism or Catholic Integralism, What’s More Likely? With Kevin Vallier

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:00] (Dr. Vallier) — The anti-liberal doctrine has a very simple attraction which is, well, look, if you want to promote the true human good, then you should promote it directly. If Christ is king, then the state should say Christ is king and do things deliberately to improve recognition that Christ is king. It just seems pretty straightforward — Christianity is true, states promote Christianity. But many Christians came to liberalism in part because they thought that may not be the best way to promote the gospel. You look at someone like Locke and he's writing a lot about toleration, in part because he's seeing conflicts between Christians. But if you take seriously the Christian doctrine of freedom of conscience, and you think people can be conscientiously mistaken — as it appears to be, given all the religious strife and disagreement in Christendom — that might mean that on Christian grounds you can't force the whole good.

2. 00:56

   Michael Horton

   We don't want to live in the village green. At the end of the day, we can all leave and return to our houses of worship. But our goal is to encourage conversational theology in the village green — where we can rub shoulders with Christians from different traditions and expressions.

3. 01:21

   Michael Horton

   Dr. Kevin Vallier is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toledo's Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership. He is the author and editor of many books, including Liberal Politics and Public Faith; Must Politics Be War? Restoring Our Trust in the Open Society; Political Utopias; Trust in a Polarized Age, and the topic of this program is focused on his book All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism. Dr. Vallier, it is a pleasure to have you on.

4. 01:57

   Dr. Vallier

   Thanks so much for having me.

5. 01:58

   Michael Horton

   Trying to understand, first of all, what classical liberalism is — and what anti-liberalism represents. I know that's something of a nest to get into with all kinds of distinctions, but could you give us a brief overview of what we're talking about?

6. 02:17

   Dr. Vallier

   Sure. When I talk about liberalism in the broad sense, I mean someone who approaches government with four political values in mind. This isn't to say their ultimate metaphysics or their religion, but when they think about what government should and shouldn't do, they think something like the following: it should protect individual and small group freedom; it should recognize the equality of persons in terms of their equal dignity and equality before the law; it should be tolerant of a diverse range of doctrines; and it should seek to harmonize the interests of competing groups rather than, say, enforce a hierarchy or class conflict. These are four things I think are truly distinctive of the liberal tradition.

7. Dr. Vallier

   Now, there are different kinds of liberals. Some liberals are really focused on natural rights. Some liberals are really focused on maximizing the good. Some are left liberals who think equality requires redistribution and that toleration means having a secular public square. As opposed to classical liberals, by contrast, would say toleration allows for a range of open dialogue that can be religious and diverse, and that equal rights means something more like equal property rights and equal opportunities.

8. Dr. Vallier

   So there are different kinds of liberals, but typically what they do is they say that what government should do— for whatever reason — is to protect the freedom and equality of persons, and to tolerate and to harmonize difference.

9. Dr. Vallier

   The post-liberal is interestingly different, because really they're pre-liberals. Their understanding of the state is much closer to what we saw in the ancient, medieval, and early modern world — and really for most of human history — the goal of the state is to realize the true, unrestricted good life of the human person. There are no real restraints on what the state may do to promote the human good. The liberal will say something like people disagree about the good, and so the state should try not to take sides in certain cases. But the post-liberal will say, well, that ends up embodying a false view of the good. Really what we should be doing is promoting the true human good.

10. Dr. Vallier

    Now, in the post-liberal's case, in the Christian case, the thought is that we're trying to somehow promote Christendom — and there are different versions of that because Christians disagree. The Christian post-liberal tends to say: we tried this liberal thing where we tried not to base society on the good, and it ended up based on a false notion of the good, which was worse for us. Now we should base it on the true Christian notion of the good, or at least the notion of the good that can be discerned by natural law. All this business of toleration, the harmonization of interests, unrestricted freedom, all of these were really just an attempt to mask what all societies ultimately do, which is promote the true good. So the liberal is someone who is trying to say: if we try to embody the true good in politics — the whole good — we'll get less of it. And the post-liberal is pushing back.

11. 05:25

    Michael Horton

    You write–this is from your introduction– "Liberal societies claim to advance human freedom and equality and resist building social life around a single religion. But today an opposing clan of doctrines is on the rise — call them religious anti-liberalisms. They claim that society should recognize a single religion as correct and they reject liberal order with intensity and total conviction. Twentieth-century politics focused more on economic conflict than religious conflict. Many thought that religion had become a private matter and would fade away. Yes, fanatics might sometimes intrude into secularized politics, but free societies would make quick work of these challengers. Sensible people could safely dismiss anti-liberals as theocrats, bigots, and fascists. No longer. Christian anti-liberalisms often appear after communism, or they develop as a reaction to excessive church-state separation in liberal orders. My book assesses the truth of these new anti-liberal ideologies. If you want to understand the case for and against them, this book is for you."

12. Michael Horton

    And further you write: "As a Christian, I see the attractions of these orders, but I also think highly of liberal society. Radical alternatives to liberalism have significant weaknesses. So I reject these doctrines, but I do not dismiss them." What do you think is compelling about anti-liberalism? In Christian intellectual circles at least, it seems that a Christian making the case for liberalism is going to be set back on his heels — that you're going to be a lonely person in that room.

13. 07:22

    Dr. Vallier

    Yeah, it really depends on the time period and on which other Christians and non-Christians you're arrayed against. Christians are very happy to be liberal when everyone else is Muslim or communist, because liberalism has this really nice feature of respecting diverse perspectives. So when you're in the minority, liberalism is pretty nice.

14. Dr. Vallier

    Now, in majority Christian societies, yes, it's less common. But even there, plenty of liberalism came to be under Protestantism — and not for no reason. The Protestant doctrine of liberty of conscience, for instance, combined with the priesthood of the believer, starts to look a lot like proto-liberalism. If you think people can be conscientiously convicted but mistaken, then they should have the freedom to be wrong. And if all believers are priests, the thought is if we can interpret Scripture for ourselves, why not the rest of morality?

15. Dr. Vallier

    And this is why I think ultimately Christian nationalism is ultimately incoherent — and it tends to be Protestant. The Catholic integralist version is the one I took on in the book because I think it's much more coherent. I actually think the Catholics are right that Protestantism tends to lead to liberalism. I don't think it's an unnatural pairing at all.

16. Dr. Vallier

    And so while many Protestants protest against liberalism, they seldom protest against the version as I defined it. They usually mean something like theological liberalism or left liberalism. But when it comes to classical liberalism, almost all the Protestants I know are pretty favorable — unless, like some friends of mine, they're very keen on the Anglican establishment. But that one tends to bleed into Catholicism. So the interesting question depends on what kind of Christian, what kind of liberal, what composition of society, what country are you in — depending on what you mean.

17. Dr. Vallier

    The anti-liberal doctrine has a very simple attraction: if you want to promote the true human good, then you should promote it directly. If Christ is king, the state should say Christ is king and do things deliberately to improve recognition that Christ is king. Christianity is true; the state should promote Christianity. But many Christians came to liberalism in part because they thought that may not be the best way to promote the gospel. You look at someone like Locke who was writing about toleration in part because he was seeing conflicts between Christians. If you take seriously the Christian doctrine of freedom of conscience — and you see that people can be conscientiously mistaken, as it appears to be given all the religious strife and disagreement in Christendom—that might mean that on Christian grounds you can't force the whole good. Maybe states are really bad at picking winners and losers. As Locke often pointed out from Scripture, we're not to separate the wheat and the tares. So there might be Christian grounds to move in a liberal direction.

18. 10:29

    Michael Horton

    That's even Augustine, right? This isn't the time to separate the wheat from the tares. Your book focuses mainly on Catholic integralism. Can you talk about that and distinguish it from Christian nationalism?

19. 10:48

    Dr. Vallier

    Catholic integralism is the form of Christendom or political theology that was dominant particularly in the high and late Middle Ages. It has a vision of politics like the following: society should be ruled by a kind of diarchy — a complex relationship between pope and crown. Integralism isn't essentially monarchical, but it often is. The purpose of the crown or temporal order is to promote the natural good, the good discernible by natural law. The aim of the Church, led by the Pope, is to promote supernatural good — particularly the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and love — and the good of dispensing the sacraments.

20. Dr. Vallier

    But then the question becomes: obviously their missions are going to overlap in some ways. What's the relationship with overlap? Here, the great scholastic theologians like Suárez taught the indirect power of the Pope — that where the temporal power's policies impacted ultimate matters of faith and morals, the Pope could direct a Christian state to enforce penalties for violations of the Church's law. For instance, if there was a heretic whom the Church had condemned in a Christian domain, the Pope could direct the crown to enforce that penalty.

21. Dr. Vallier

    Protestant Christian nationalism is a little different because you don't have the centralized ecclesiastical hierarchy. Often the monarch, ruler, or elected official will take on ecclesiastical functions — in a way that the British monarch being the head of the Church. American Christian nationalism is typically not Anglican, but there are Christian nationalisms that do hold to state Protestant churches.

22. Dr. Vallier

    So you have a much bigger role for the secular ruler in religious affairs. You don't have two distinct powers — typically just one, or a church that lacks any official coercive authority, with the state simply expected to enforce some of its dictates. But this is where Christian nationalism gets vague, because it's never entirely clear what subsection or piece of Scripture is supposed to be enforced by the state.

23. Dr. Vallier

    Catholic canon law, developed over centuries, makes this very specific. With Protestantism, it often ends up reducing to something like natural law. But then there are revealed facts in Scripture that are supposed to be enforced — just not too many of them. For example, Doug Wilson will say you can ban a Eucharistic procession because that's idolatry, or certain public presentations of Mary because that's idolatry. But I don't know whether he thinks that's because we know it's idolatry from reason alone or we know it's from scripture. But obviously he thinks you can't be publicly Muslim or Jewish exactly. You kind of can but privately you should be able to. And it's never quite clear with Christian nationalists when revelation gets enforced versus when it doesn't.

24. 14:17

    Michael Horton

    That almost sounds like Hobbes.

25. 14:19

    Dr. Vallier

    It's quite complex. In his case, there's a social contract, but ultimately God will still blame the sovereign if the sovereign's commands are heretical. Christian nationalists typically don't think that way at all. Usually they aren't Hobbesian in the slightest. They say you can know what Scripture says independently of the ruler, and you can oppose the ruler on that basis — which for Hobbes is just a recipe for instability.

26. Dr. Vallier

    And that's another thing I think is unstable about Christian nationalism: people have conscientious objections and their own private readings of Scripture that go against the dominant confession. The question then is what to do with them. In Catholicism, if they're baptized, you can coerce them — baptism makes you a member of the Church and subject to its law, and so your conscience is malformed. It doesn't mean they can do anything they want to you, but usually a Christian nationalist doctrine of baptism cannot sustain that level of coercion, particularly if you're not baptizing infants. If someone isn't baptized as an adult, they're basically outside the Church's jurisdiction — which raises the question of how you enforce heresy law against them.

27. Dr. Vallier

    Catholic integralist doctrine tends to be much more coherent. I just don't think Christian nationalists have a very good account of when revelation gets enforced and against whom. And the more coherent accounts seem unstable and about to collapse or apply to a relatively small number of citizens. Similar issues arise for Catholic integralism, but it's a subtler matter — partly because you can actually look at integralist regimes in the sense of being able to really look at the law on the books. This is true of Christian nationalism as well, but once you get to the relationship between Scripture and the enforcement of Scripture, it starts to get unstable. That's one reason I didn't write on it at length — I found it very vexing to get a firm grip on.

28. 16:14

    Michael Horton

    Would you say Russia is an example of a kind of integralist approach? Hungary was…

29. 16:31

    Dr. Vallier

    Russia is Eastern Orthodox, which is its own tradition — and my tradition, though it's different still. That's more the tradition of Symphonia in the Orthodox Church, which is its own variety. You don't have total ecclesiastical supremacy, but you do have a richer doctrine of the Church and a more limited role for the secular leader in ecclesiastical affairs relative to Protestantism. I think of it as somewhere in between Christian nationalism and Catholic integralism.

30. 17:06

    Michael Horton

    Post-liberals often say that the secular is never neutral — it's going to be filled with some religion, even if that religion is secular humanism. By promoting a kind of egalitarian view of human equality in society actually privatized religion, neutered it, and made it impossible for it to thrive even in private.

31. Michael Horton

    Let me read from page 24 of your book: "The integralist narrative is that the liberal is not peaceful, the liberal is not neutral. The liberal drags pious Christians out of their own — as in a poorly acted movie — forcing them to compare the truths of Christianity with the myths of others. The liberal distances us from our values, from God, weakening our resolve and increasing our doubts. The pious Catholic who seeks to govern pursues the divine mission of the Church. We cannot delay in our quest to sanctify the governments of the world by bringing them into the kingdom of God. The integralist promise: shed liberalism and pursue your values without apology." Is that integralist narrative even possible in a world already shaped by the liberal order?

32. 18:42

    Dr. Vallier

    It's a really good question. One of the things post-liberals have insisted upon in some cases is that we're past the liberal order — we're in a post-liberal order. And yet the post-liberal aspects of that seem to be passing away. We've had nationalism, but that seems to be a little on the ropes. We've had right-wing populism, but that seems to be on the ropes.

33. Dr. Vallier

    There's something about liberalism where it tends to bounce back. Liberalism was down in the middle of the 19th century. It recovered. It was down in the interwar period. It recovered. And there's nothing to say it can't recover again — it may even be recovering now.

34. Dr. Vallier

    One of the difficulties is that its alternatives have significant weaknesses of their own. There's something about liberalism that's sufficiently resilient that makes it very hard to escape. My view is that liberalism looks unstable in part because it accepts a level of instability that is, in fact, stable. By having democracy and toleration, you contain the natural fractiousness of the human person — a bit like Madison in Federalist 10. You create free institutions and let natural human instability boil, but it doesn't boil over. Whereas if you try to contain it and produce a monoculture, it blows up or collapses, and often empowers people sufficiently ruthless that they end up corrupt.

35. Dr. Vallier

    I think that's what's happened in Hungary with Orbán — the attempt to culturally Christianize a largely secular country has failed, and I think it's going to lead to a sharp backlash. And I think something similar will happen with Trump. I have friends who discuss the next Democratic administration as being dark woke, on the grounds that there will be revenge. I think we may see that this fall..

36. Dr. Vallier

    So the interesting question is: liberalism has this ability to bounce back, partly because it can contain a certain level of diversity, and attempts to suppress that diversity and move society toward social agreement don't really work. This is one reason things broke down for the left under Biden and progressivism — it got illiberal, it created its own monoculture, it got too secular, too radically egalitarian. That produced the vibe-shift and backlash.

37. Dr. Vallier

    True liberalism is never fully realized, but it's a kind of center of gravity in societies that are large, diverse, and changing. It's not ideal — it's Churchillian. Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. Liberalism is the worst political ideology, except for all the others. It has obvious deficiencies, and yet it keeps sticking. It defeated communism. It defeated fascism. The question is whether it can now defeat populism. But if it beat communism and fascism, it will probably beat populism too.

38. Dr. Vallier

    The only thing it hasn't been able to eat to defeat is Islam. That's really the only doctrine that liberalism has ever ready been resisted by. And I'm not saying that as someone who's excited about that, necessarily — I'm very much a Churchillian liberal. It's the worst ideology except for all the others. And I don't think a Christian can be fully happy with any of the ideologies on offer. They're all imperfect approximations of the truth at best. I wouldn't describe myself as a happy liberal, but a Churchillian one.

39. 22:28

    Michael Horton

    A Christian has a kind of sober view of this — the Fall, human sinfulness, and so forth. That was very much something Madison was aware of. It's kind of baked into the project, isn't it — don't expect much from humanity, don't expect much from the government; basically, we have to preserve people from the government trying to reach into every aspect of our lives.

40. 23:01

    Dr. Vallier

    Yes. And I think the more your liberalism is Augustinian — another way to say Churchillian, I suppose, since it's all fallen — the more amenable to Christianity it becomes. The more it becomes a kind of ideal-theory liberalism, the more hostile to Christianity it becomes.

41. Dr. Vallier

    This is one of the difficulties with the liberalism common in political philosophy — it creates a deep suspicion of religion, even though it shouldn't in principle, if rightly understood. It's interesting–the ways in which liberalism can go wrong. Liberalism has a secularizing tendency. If there's one thing all liberals have agreed upon from the beginning, it's that you shouldn't have an established religion — beyond, say, mild Anglicanism. And that leads some to say, well, we should go much further than that. There's a sense in which a truly tolerant public square can't prioritize the truth of a particular faith. But of course, the Christian can't really say that — we want everyone to be Christians, period. That's what's best for them. So any society that says Christianity isn't true, or we're not going to discuss it, has to be resisted.

42. Dr. Vallier

    The interesting question then is: when Christianity contends with liberalism, do we have to throw the whole liberal project out? Or do we get something chastened and better and tolerable? My view is that when Christians try to overthrow liberalism, we get worse things. So the question is what is the most stable instability.

43. 24:44

    Michael Horton

    I like that. You give a couple of different examples of Catholic post-liberals. You say figures like Patrick Deneen and Sohrab Ahmari are strategists, and figures like Adrian Vermeule and Thomas Pink are theorists. Can you explain the differences in position between those groups?

44. 25:10

    Dr. Vallier

    It's quite complicated, and things have moved around. Pink is, in many ways, the intellectual godfather of the integralist movement, but he's not interested in political power at all. He's a British philosopher for whom I have extremely high opinion of — we actually have an exchange on integralism in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly that just came out. He's over in Britain watching all this American activity and finding it rather strange.

45. Dr. Vallier

    Vermeule was the head of the American integralist movement, but it's really since fractured and died down a whole lot in ways that are really interesting. I thought it might revive a bit with Vance becoming Vice President, but that's actually made things worse — he hasn't been a good post-liberal in power.

46. Dr. Vallier

    Deneen has said he's moved on from talking about post-liberalism; his next book is on the Odyssey. Ahmari has gone his own way — it's not even clear he's post-liberal anymore. He's more of a pro-life social democrat focused on the economic teachings of the papacy on behalf of the working class, and he's come out against Trump pretty forcefully in recent weeks. Deneen has largely gone politically silent, and Vermeule is mostly focused on constitutional theory these days.

47. Dr. Vallier

    When I wrote the book in 2021–22, it was a much more coherent movement. But really in 2025 things started to break down, and that's been a very interesting phenomenon in its own right.

48. 26:50

    Michael Horton

    You say that in the next decade or two you could have a young Catholic on the Supreme Court influenced by Vermeule or by Catholic integralism. What would that look like?

49. 27:05

    Dr. Vallier

    We have a somewhat clearer view of it now. Essentially, they'll be — and I need to be fair — what many would call right-wing judicial activists. In essence, they'll have a conception of the common good that richly and expressly informs their jurisprudence. Instead of sticking to a kind of textualist procedure, they're much more likely to say there's a lot of ambiguity here, and in cases of ambiguity we have to appeal to the correct underlying values — in particular, a conception of the common good. It won't be entirely fair to Vermeule to say this, but what it's going to look like is a kind of right-wing living constitutionalism — someone much more inclined to appeal to the underlying values of the constitutional order than to its strict text.

50. 27:58

    Michael Horton

    Which is ironic, because conservatives are usually associated with a strict reading of the Constitution.

51. 28:04

    Dr. Vallier

    Yes, that's the whole point. Vermeule's project is precisely to move past textualism because he thinks textualism has gotten in the way of realizing the common good. He was making a little progress with this, but then he got hit with a one-two punch over about two years. The first was Dobbs — the textualists were successful in getting Roe overturned finally, which raised the question of why we need common good constitutionalism to achieve political victory. The second was last year Amy Coney Barrett saying she doesn't like common good constitutionalism — that she thinks it's conclusion-driven judicial reasoning, like what the left does. And she's the most Catholic of the Supreme Court justices, the only one from Notre Dame, and the one most likely to have clerks from Notre Dame, which would be the main way Vermule would get clerks. So I think there's not a very good path for true Vermeulians to get a foothold in the federal judiciary — but we'll see.

52. 29:07

    Michael Horton

    You point out that even though integralism is nearly impossible to establish in the United States, it should be taken seriously. But you've also said you don't take Christian nationalism seriously. Why wouldn't one take both seriously, given that its pastors are going on Tucker Carlson, speaking at the Pentagon, and having a kind of pop-media voice?

53. 29:33

    Dr. Vallier

    I take Christian nationalism politically seriously, but not intellectually seriously. And I take integralism intellectually seriously, but not politically seriously.

54. Dr. Vallier

    With integralism, you can open Suárez's On Laws, God the Lawgiver and read hundreds of pages of carefully worked-out doctrine. That's not the same as reading contemporary Christian nationalist writing. And there are historical figures closer to Christian nationalism who are really interesting — Hooker, for instance, is a great Anglican Christian nationalist. There are truly amazing early modern Christian nationalists. I need to be fair.

55. Dr. Vallier

    But the problem is that with contemporary integralism, you have someone like Pink, who is a Suárez scholar. You get a direct download of sophistication from the originals to the contemporaries. Whereas I don't see that same transfer of rigor in someone like Stephen Wolfe. With Pink, there's always something deep going on, and it was genuinely rewarding intellectually to engage. Also, many of the more interesting arguments had already been covered a generation earlier with the Christian Reconstructionists. They are different beasts. Rushdoony and Gary North were actually quite sophisticated, and that had already been done. Integralism had been dead for decades at least when it came back. But the Christian reconstructionists had been written about and written about and written about. And so another thing I think about with Christian nationalists is to some extent a lot of their more interesting arguments about the enforcement of biblical law for instance had been read like people had to say about Rushdooney thirty years ago or Gary North. So in a sense, it was interesting and people were taking it seriously. And you saw it in people like Francis Schaeffer. By the time we get to the current iteration, it's considerably less interesting.

56. Dr. Vallier

    With the current Catholic integralists, they're genuinely trying to match the sophistication of their forebears. No one had been defending integralism with that level of rigor for quite some time. Pink is probably operating at a level of sophistication not seen for at least a century in that tradition. So it was just much more intellectually rewarding. But I should be fair — there are great historical Christian nationalists – Hooker is amazing – and there are people who made rigorous arguments about the enforcement of biblical law in a Calvinist frame like Rushdooney. At least there are a lot of books. I guess to my mind it was just like what else interesting is there to say. In my next book I will talk about them a little.

57. 32:32

    Michael Horton

    You're Eastern Orthodox. Would you say that one positive development might be for a group of Reformed, Lutheran, and Anglican Protestants to go back into their own history — including the shared patristic and medieval sources — the way Catholic integralists have done, rather than the way the theonomists of yesteryear and today are doing? David VanDrunen, for instance.

58. 33:21

    Dr. Vallier

    There's so much to be done there. I'm Orthodox, so if you say go back to the Fathers, I'm just going to say yes. Wolfe does try to go back to some historical Reformed figures, but most Reformed thinkers think he reads them rather badly.

59. Dr. Vallier

    The idea would be a genuinely rich reading of those sources. This is why, when I've done work with Jordan Ballor, we read Hooker alongside the integralists, because there's really good material there. When you go way back — to the 16th and 17th centuries especially — those figures had to do the most rigorous political theology they possibly could, given everything going on around them. That's really where things reached their highest level of sophistication.

60. Dr. Vallier

    And of course Kuyper comes up all the time. My favorite non-liberals are my neo-Kuyperian friends, who are basically liberals–we agree on a lot. There are all these interesting intermediate figures.

61. Dr. Vallier

    But I think the real difficulty for Protestant Christian nationalism is that it holds a strong doctrine of liberty of conscience while also allowing that conscience can err. Once you have those two things together, biblical coercion starts to look pretty dicey against people who don't agree.

62. 34:58

    Michael Horton

    And it violates the Christian doctrine itself.

63. 34:59

    Dr. Vallier

    Yes. And then if you say, well, we'll just enforce natural law — fine, but that's not really Christian nationalism anymore. Catholics agree with natural law too. If you just want to ban abortion or legislate some rational moral truths, okay, but that's not distinctively Christian in the interesting sense. The interesting thing about Christian nationalism is that you're supposed to enforce some specifically Christian stuff. But if you abandon that, you're just a natural law theorist.

64. 35:34

    Michael Horton

    It seems like there is a common interest among Christian nationalists and some Catholic integralists in Carl Schmitt, the German political philosopher who was a Nazi. What do you make of that?

65. 35:57

    Dr. Vallier

    A big part of the interest in Schmitt actually began on the left. The left found in Schmitt a compelling analysis of power relations and their relationship to law — the way power shapes not only the content of law but what the law is and who the sovereign is. On the far left, the idea that social order rests on raw power relations was as old as Marx, with various non-Marxist approaches alongside it. The idea focused on power relations.

66. Dr. Vallier

    Now, if you really hate liberalism and you're looking to expose it, a Schmittian analysis is pretty attractive. The thought is: we're just revealing liberal power and exposing its false neutrality. A lot of the interest in Schmitt is about unmasking liberalism as really being about power.

67. Dr. Vallier

    The danger with Schmitt is that he doesn't think raw power relations are limited to liberal regimes. Once you go down the route of unmasking power, it's everywhere. You end up just becoming a far-left figure — it's all power and power relations.

68. Dr. Vallier

    So I think the Schmitt stuff is genuinely dangerous, because you can't restrict that analysis to the liberal order. This is one of my objections to Vermeule — if you're going to be Schmittian about liberal law, why not about integralist law? I've always wondered how he manages to be morally high-minded in areas he likes and morally low-minded in areas he doesn't. That seems to me a central incoherence in his thinking, which is otherwise quite sophisticated. If the Schmittian analysis holds for liberal regimes, why doesn't it hold everywhere? I have always wanted to speak with him about this because it seems to be a chief incoherence.

69. Dr. Vallier

    But that's part of what makes it attractive — Schmittian leftists were trying to expose liberal capitalism; Schmittian right-wingers are trying to expose liberal secularism.

70. 38:13

    Michael Horton

    Either way, politics is war.

71. 38:16

    Dr. Vallier

    It's totally playing with fire. Once you strip morality out of some kinds of politics, it's going to be very hard to get it back in. And as Christians, we just can't play that game.

72. 38:27

    Michael Horton

    Some post-liberals are happy to critique liberal society and political order, but are not as combative and antagonistic as others. We spoke with Presbyterian minister James Wood on the program about this. He's an ecclesiocentric post-liberal — not someone associated with the more radical depictions we see online — but he still thinks it's proper for the civil magistrate to promote Christianity, since it's the true religion. What might you say to those who are sympathetic to post-liberal ideas but don't want them carried out in imprudent ways?

73. 39:16

    Dr. Vallier

    The interesting question for someone like James — whom I like — is always: if the state promotes Christianity, but not in the integralist way, then in what way? When you start to spell that out and look for an underlying principle, there's going to be an instability. Either, if you're not okay with some forms of coercion, why not more? Or, if you're not okay with certain forms of coercion, why not less?

74. Dr. Vallier

    This was Locke's argument against Proast in their debates about toleration. A lot of people think Proast won that exchange, and I did for a while. But I think Locke's later points were strong. Proast would always say, I'm not for all that coercion — I'm only for some. I'll only force people to attend church; I won't force them to believe. And Locke's question was simply: why is that principled? Why are you entitled to draw the line there?

75. Dr. Vallier

    James wouldn't even force people to attend church. Vermeule would force people to attend Mass — and of course that raises the question of whether you'd force baptized Jews to attend Mass, at which point he blocks you. James wouldn't force people to go to church. But for many parts of American history, if you were a member of a church you did have to go, of course, whether we allow diverse membership in most states. But the thought was yeah you got to go to church. So the question becomes: I'm for this kind of religious coercion, but not that kind — why? You might answer purely on prudential grounds, saying this kind has been shown to work and that kind hasn't. Then I'd just want to see the data. And there isn't really any.

76. 40:49

    Michael Horton

    At the end of the day, it comes down to sentiment, right? I just feel that this would be where you would stop. And I feel that you could probably legislate this but not that rather than principled arguments.

77. 41:05

    Dr. Vallier

    Right. It's a question about what that stable middle ground would actually be. My thought is that it's either so weak it won't matter, or so strong that it violates the dignity of the person. In Islam, it's strong enough to matter, but it violates the dignity of the person — the idea that leaving the faith gets you killed, as many Islamic regimes support and enforce, is not acceptable to Christians. We don't kill people for leaving Christianity. We don't do that. That's not Christ's way–It would work!

78. Dr. Vallier

    And yes, you could tax people more heavily if they don't agree with you — that works in Islam. They are the only group of people that can destroy us. And that's because they are incredibly patient. This is something I learned from studying Islamic anti-liberalism. They're incredibly patient. You conquer, you impose the jizya, you don't force people into the faith, but you create financial incentives for conversion. And then once they join, they can't leave. And you wait. Centuries. That's how you turn a Christian country into an Islamic country. It's happened many times.

79. Dr. Vallier

    But we can't do that. No integralist or Christian nationalist thinks that's acceptable. And it isn't — because as Christians, we really do believe in free will. In Islam, it's really fate, and I think that has a profound effect on their approach to coercion. We think the will has to be free. They don't believe in free will.

80. 42:46

    Michael Horton

    To tell people they must worship the right God in the right way — to affirm not just the chief end of man as glorifying God and enjoying him forever, but to say the state has a duty to enforce that — is itself a violation of Christian doctrine.

81. 43:18

    Dr. Vallier

    It's just a structural disadvantage for us. Our main advantage over Islam is that we're better evangelizers — they don't really do that. We create richer societies and we educate women. And so we have a lower reproduction rate.

82. 43:33

    Michael Horton

    But we want to do that!

83. 43:34

    Dr. Vallier

    There's no Christian country in which the education of women is banned. But once women get college degrees, birth rates fall pretty fast. So I just think we have to deal with our structural disadvantages, because we have to trust Christ that if we follow his commands, things will work out. And that's what I say to a lot of the post-liberals.

84. Dr. Vallier

    They say: if we don't fight, if we don't win, we're going to lose — you're just a beautiful loser, a sucker. My response is: please, draw some lines. Tell me what is too far. When do the ends not justify the means? My general problem with many Christian nationalists — when you listen to Joel Webbon or Dale Partridge talk about fighting the left — is: what are the restraints? What may we not do to them, and why?

85. Dr. Vallier

    My suspicion is that once they specify what they may not do to win, that principle is going to expand in ways they don't like. For instance, if you say we have to respect equal rights, well — do men have a right to vote? Okay, Dale, well, so do women. Because this is one of the things he says, is, well, we beat the left by depriving women of the right to vote. Or maybe, as Joel seems to think, I don't know if Jesus was Jewish or not. So there's this sense that we have to be tough, right? That we have to win, right? But when it comes to actually thinking it through and what the principles are that are Christian that would allow us to win, I don't see a lot of Christian reflections on the means. There's a lot of Christian reflection on the ends, but not nearly enough on the means. And once you start thinking seriously about the Christian means of winning I think you end up moving toward this Churchillian liberalism I've been describing throughout.

86. Dr. Vallier

    I would say to anyone listening: think very, very hard about the way Christ wants us to defeat our enemies. Christians have enemies — we're supposed to love them. We're also supposed to resist them. We're not supposed to simply lose. But really reflect on it theologically: what may I not do to win–and why? That question starts to expose a host of problems across the New Right. And even though I agree with many of their goals, I think they're going to reap what they sow with respect to this administration pursuing its goals in whatever way it wants all the time.

87. Dr. Vallier

    My biggest concern with the second Trump administration is not so much its goals but that it thinks it can pursue them however it wants — like with respect to immigration, or foreign policy — without regard to procedures. I think we're going to pay for that.

88. Dr. Vallier

    I would really encourage all young Christians to think about what's the right way to win, and what's the wrong way to win. That's where I am with Christian nationalists. Do I want a Christian society? Yes. What am I willing to do to get it? I don't want to hurt people, and I don't think Christ wants me to either.

89. 47:02

    Michael Horton

    That's a great note to end on. Thank you for your insights and wisdom, Kevin. We've been talking with Kevin Vallier, political philosopher at the University of Toledo's Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership, and the author of All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism, published by Oxford University Press. Kevin, it's been a pleasure.

90. 47:34

    Dr. Vallier

    Thank you so much.