Kevin Vallier’s Politics of Peace Against Theocracy in “All the Kingdoms of the World”

“Integralism has fallen!” proclaims Kevin Vallier, who, nine months earlier, found integralism—the anti-liberal, minority Catholic social-political worldview now thrust into the spotlight of American politics through its association with JD Vance—so provocative that he challenged the view in All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism. Vallier is not so daft as to think that integralism is dead, as he believes that a Trump-Vance ticket may give post-liberalism “renewed intellectual energy.”

Reading Vallier’s technical, nearly three-hundred-page text on integralism requires motivation, and the work pays off for three reasons. First, Vallier provides a thorough account of integralism and integralist arguments, which reveals the view’s similarity and differences from other forms of illiberalism. To discuss and rebut integralism, Vallier considers how integralism would respond best to a particular problem and determines why its strongest versions—and, frequently, the strongest illiberal approaches—fail to resolve critical limitations of the theory. Vallier’s work has a second, equally important result: crafting the best versions of integralist arguments and objections to integralism creates a foundation for debate between liberalism and integralism. Understanding different kinds of religious anti-liberalism, including Confucian and Islamic varieties, allows for Vallier’s critique to be generalized and apply to a variety of illiberalisms, constructing a dialectical map to help liberals and their illiberal opponents advance debates concerning justice, stability, and other significant political questions. 

For those who are uninclined to invest hours into understanding a political philosophy based upon religion, All the Kingdoms of the World should be of interest because of what the book does, which is considered in the second part of this review. The text should be of interest as a substantive continuation of Vallier’s previous works, Must Politics Be War? and Trust in a Polarized Age. Defending liberalism requires action, including engaging integralism and other anti-liberalisms to determine truth and integrate minorities into a more inclusive politics. Vallier writes to forward this Millian defense of liberalism; more importantly, he works to advance politics as peace, the liberal approach to politics that is the antithesis to politics as war, Carl Schmitt’s view of politics accepted by many anti-liberals. In forwarding a liberal politics, Vallier reveals that empathy and engagement with opponents redeems political foes, thereby providing liberalism with its strongest defense. 

Reading All the Kingdoms of the World 

All the Kingdoms of the World is a rigorous text that is simultaneously generous to its target, integralism, and aware of its readers’ needs. Vallier composes technical philosophy with the nonspecialist in mind: he makes his arguments and objections plain, repeats central concepts and critiques, and directs his audience based on their varied motivations for reading the text. The introduction lays out the book’s goals and begins the first of many instructions to the reader to skip passages and chapters that do not align with their interests (1–8). Each chapter features a notice, usually at the beginning, about how sections will unfold and points in the text where the reader, if uninterested, can skip without losing track of Vallier’s general argument. The chapter 8, the book’s closing chapter, considers Confucian and Islamic religious anti-liberalisms, in part as an application and review of the book’s framework (263–264).

If only measured by standard criteria for philosophical works, All the Kingdoms of the World deserves praise for its excellent arguments, demanding critiques, and thoughtful rebuttals. But it is excellent for another reason, unusual for a philosophical text. A singular virtue of the text, highlighted in the second part of this review, is that Vallier does the right things with words. His curiosity, magnanimity, and fixation on truth over ideology extends beyond rhetoric: Vallier invites illiberal and liberal alike to take part in a discussion to assist both sides and contribute to society’s political development. The book constructs a framework centered on arguments concerning history, symmetry, transition, stability, and justice. While the former two arguments feature as reasons for integralism and the latter three tend to be objections against integralism, critiques are generous, focusing primarily on how integralism does not live up to its own criteria for a just political order. Ultimately, the book is successful because it improves both integralist and liberal thought, while establishing a bridge for debate between liberals and forms of illiberalism. 

Chapters 1 and 2 introduce contemporary integralism and its leading thinkers, the ways integralism is similar to, but distinct from, other forms of illiberalism, and the place of integralism in Catholic thought. Chapter 1 highlights the work of Thomas Pink, Adrian Vermeule, and other contemporary thinkers who restored this formerly prominent theological-political theory, along with detailing the view’s conceptual foundations in Catholic religious doctrine, social teaching, and canon law. Because integralists diverge on their works’ aim, to the point where it is hard to determine “what integralism is a theory of” (37), Vallier bases his approach around a definition constituted by three general principles of integralism as a political theory (32ff.). In integralist thought, for the state, God requires officials to advance natural goods necessary for their community to survive and thrive as human beings. However, for the church, God requires its leaders to encourage supernatural goods—goods necessary for the spiritual life—in the baptized members of that state. The church’s superior goal of advancing the most important goods for humanity—supernatural goods, necessary for this life and the next—justifies the church to intervene in state affairs by encouraging the state to promote supernatural goods, as long as that support does not undermine natural goods or other supernatural goods. The church’s power over the state is indirect and only justified when the church must direct the state to fulfill its supernatural interests.

Chapter 2 focuses on the history of integralism, particularly its conceptual development and political instantiation. Constantine (306–347 CE) began a two-millennium interaction, vacillating between a struggle for power and a sharing of authority, between the Catholic church and various states in the West. Constantine’s conversion and encouragement of Christianity, highlighted in calling the Council of Nicea (325 CE), provided an opportunity for rulers of the eastern and western Roman empires to gain power through intervening in church affairs as “sacred kings,” instituted by God to govern religious and secular affairs. While emperors engrossed their reach in the church through selecting bishops and determining religious jurisdictions, an opposing political theology, which evolved into integralism, was developed by the church to defend the need of a dyarchy—dual rule by throne and church—to maintain balance between church and state, though the church would gain independence and power as the Roman empire crumbled. Charlemagne’s coronation by Pope Leo III in 800 CE rejuvenated the ideal of a sacred kingship, buttressing the king’s authority as a secular and spiritual power.  The church’s secular power rose to its apogee during the Middle Ages through Pope Gregory VII’s successful defense of church primacy in appointing bishops, the schism between the Roman and Orthodox churches in 1054, the Fourth Lateran Council (which defended the Pope’s ability to excommunicate and dethrone kings), and events surrounding the Papal Schism (1378-1417), highlighted by Pope Boniface’s excommunication of, but eventual defeat by, King Phillip IV of France and the eventual re-establishment of the papacy. 

However, the church lost its secular strength through the Reformation, the rise of liberalism and thinkers, including Hobbes and Locke, who effectively argued against integralism, and European revolutions, particularly in France, that rejuvenated states’ power as political entities. In the 19^th century, Popes Pius IX and Leo XIII repositioned defenses of integralism based on the theory being an ideal—a superior moral and spiritual theory, not a practical guide for politics or political action. The ideal relationship between church and state was like that between soul and body, with church playing the soul’s role of active, controlling partner of the body, in this case, the state. However, this recapitulation did not stop integralism disintegrating as a church doctrine in the 20^th century. Catholic liberalism was empowered by the defense of religious liberty at the Second Vatican Council and the support of liberty and rejection of religious coercion in Dignitas Humaniae, one of the primary documents to emerge from the Council. The chapter ends at the present: liberalism appears weak, as it lost its major foe, Communism, its major alliance, the Old Right, and its intellectual superiority, as conservative populist groups support politicians like Trump and thinkers sympathetic to illiberalism.  

After galloping across nearly a hundred pages of history, from the early church to contemporary politics, All the Kingdoms of the World commences the second of its arguments, concerning symmetry, the idea that the two major political goods, natural and supernatural, should be supported by the state when they can. Integralism’s defense of symmetry separates it from another political philosophy popular among anti-liberals, natural law theory, which only supports the state’s defense of natural goods, including life, friendship, knowledge, and aesthetic beauty. Supernatural goods are superior because of their multitudinous significance: they are necessary to provide grace to redeem the evils of this life and to enjoy the blessings of the eternal life to come. Two objections are significant for symmetry, with the first focusing on the state. The state may not seem to have the authority to support and secure supernatural goods—its goal is to encourage and gain natural goods. As Vallier points out, this does not mean that the church cannot authorize the state to promote supernatural goods through state obedience or constitutional reforms. Significant motivation against such an argument defending church authorization comes from skepticism about whether the church can authorize the state to use coercion, which falls outside of the church’s competency. The integralist only requires state action when it can promote true religion and limit the harms from false religion—both of which are within the church’s competency concerning religion. 

The second objection arises from recognizing, based on chapter 1, that it may not be prudent for the state to use coercion to foment true religion. Such an argument is successful against integralism as a non-ideal political position, what the integralists traditionally identified as hypothesis. Practicality does not count against integralism as an ideal theory or, in integralist terms, as a thesis. Integralism can be an ideal political-religious position, even if history reveals humanity is far from realizing it—an ideal that, if Vallier is correct in succeeding chapters, is immoral even if it is considered only as a theory. 

Chapter 4 presents the transition argument, the first argument in Vallier’s framework against integralism. Adrian Vermeule is the preeminent thinker on how integralism could capture the state, transitioning from a non-ideal political order to an ideal utopia. Vermeule’s large-scale integralism rests on the assumption that liberalism, rife with anxiety over the need for liberation, desiring to smother anti-liberal elements, and drunk on self-conceit and unable to make accurate assessments of the liberal project, is inherently unstable and will generate its own demise. Now rid of liberals, an integralist elite must move into state positions, finding staff to populate the bureaucracy and leaders to head government positions. This approach to transition has a number of problems (161): as the need for new integralist leaders grows, the possibility of poor leaders and corruption to head the new integralist state balloons. Internal opposition from non-integralist citizens is highly likely; significant coercion, antithetical to Catholic doctrine, requires mass surveillance and control of the nation’s communication network, especially the internet, to squelch heresy, propagandize skeptical fellow Catholics, and keep the military in integralist hands. Subduing support from external sources, including the global Catholic church and democratic groups sympathetic to subdued minorities, would require extreme, immoral measures similar to eliminate internal opposition. As Vallier details the most realistic opposition to an integralist regime, the wages of integralism appear so severe that the theory appears best as an unrealized ideal—once integralists try to instigate the ideal, they will make everyone, including their fellow Catholics, worse off. 

If an integralist political order is ideal, then it should be stable through morally justified means. In chapter 5, Vallier argues that an integralist regime will be unstable, utilizing an economic model to show why grace and coercion—the primary mechanisms for regulating stability of an integralist state—are a poor combination to overcome destabilizing pluralism and deviancy from Christian morality. Whenever pluralism overcomes grace, and coercion is needed to help the church create moral citizens (i.e., sincere integralists), the amount of coercion will either be too weak, resulting in a fractured polity, or too strong, creating an immoral order based upon fear of punishment. The integralist political order needs a significant number of integralist Catholics to function, more than fifty percent of the population, to staff the state and church (182). As the number of integralist Catholics increases, the more grace, the spiritual work of God in humanity to sustain right action, upholds society. However, it is highly unlikely that all or even a significant number of citizens will be integralists or that pluralism is eliminated, so coercion will be required to maintain stability. Coercion is effective when it appropriately encourages moral citizenry, such that the amount of grace and coercion offset the disruption of pluralism and deviancy, creating a stable equilibrium. How plausible is an equilibrium in an integralist order? There is reason to be skeptical. 

Fellow Christians and Catholics who are not integralists must be motivated to become genuine integralists; incentives to become baptized integralists opens the door to further church-based coercion, making incentives either very strong and biased towards preferred denominations or weak and ineffective. Democracy would encourage more pluralism, breeding competition to control an empowered church, while alternative political arrangements, notably monarchy, are less stable and would encourage pluralism to sustain the dyarchy’s power (185). To buttress integralism and reduce pluralism, education may need to include more propaganda, communication may be limited, and state-church engagement more factious—all of which would further advance pluralism and the need for more coercion, reducing the number of morally-legitimate equilibria necessary for stability. Vallier declares this chapter to feature the book’s central argument (182). He is right: defenses of integralism fail if the integralist political order is inherently unstable or if destabilization would occur quickly (i.e., within a few generations) (168). Considering the amount of coercion to realize an integralist regime, the dubious history of integralist regimes, and the limits of integralism as an ideal theory, the integralist lacks a plausible response to the stability critique. 

Chapter 6 focuses on justice, specifically the injustice that would be realized for Christians under integralism, which accepts two conflicting norms for baptism: individuals cannot be forced into faith, yet the church, following medieval Catholic doctrine, should punish members who try to leave Christianity. This allows for state coercion to require members to remain in the church but not motivating non-members to become part of the church. Here the integralist needs to consider whether baptism, the rite that inducts a person into the church, justifies coercion—if it is, as Vallier describes, a “moral transformer” that makes just religious coercion but not religious coercion of the non-religious. Is there some feature of baptism that serves as a moral transformer? The best strategy, in part inspired by Aquinas, is that baptism is conceived of as, perhaps with the assistance of, a vow, the beginning of an obligation to God. A critical part of most vows is consent, which will be difficult to establish in the cases of child baptism—and consent, because of its individualistic features, is not favored by integralists to ground obligations. Vallier reviews a number of defenses—that the vow constitutes baptism (215), that religious duties emerge whenever one is part of the church (219), or that gratitude or natural duties to religion ground duties to God (217, 222)—all of which have significant flaws. Perhaps the best defense of baptism as a moral transformer is to rely simply on the transfer of authority from the church to the state in matters of coercing the baptized. Baptismal duties can be created and enforced by the state, sufficiently authorized by the church to uphold vows of those who are part of the church. However, the defense of state authorization of the church, defended in chapter 2, was ultimately based upon integralism as an ideal theory, which justifies the transfer of authority on a theorical level. What the integralist needs to justify state enforcement of baptismal vows is a justification, based upon the actual conditions of baptism, that the state should be authorized by the church to uphold these vows. Based upon Vallier’s fastidious analysis, there is no reason to think that baptism has such conditions that makes believers unique subjects for religious coercion.

Steelmanning Satan?

An unexpected image covers the text. The dust jacket features a painting of two individuals in conversation—an illustration of Matthew 4:8–9 in which Satan promises Christ the entire world if he is worshiped. This verse is the source of the book’s title, repeated before the table of contents, and discussed on page 21. But what is this image meant to illustrate? Unlike most reviewers, Edward Feser notes Vallier’s use of the verse and objects to it as an insult to integralists, who, unlike Christ, are seemingly willing to embrace evil to gain temporal power. Is this a renunciation of the spirit of engagement and respectful dialogue promoted by the text? Is Vallier claiming that the integralists are selling out to Satan, sacrificing the sacred to secure the secular? 

In a podcast on the text, Vallier explains his use of Matthew 4:8–9. It is a political Rorschach test: for the integralist, politics provides the church with a means to save secular powers from evil by infusing politics with grace; for the liberal, it is a reason to reduce and limit state power. Importantly, the verse also functions as a warning: when grappling for secular control, enacting evil is a genuine danger.  Reviewing church history in chapter 2, the church, even when acting to sustain supernatural goods through engaging Christian rulers, disrupted political order, provoked violence, and abused its secular authority. Considering the transition, stability, and justice arguments, there is good reason to believe that a transition to an integralist regime requires severe, immoral action, and the resulting political regime will be unstable and unjust. Integralists may lose their souls—their identity as agents of grace—trying to redeem secular powers through the construction of their ideal political system. 

Why should Vallier compose All the Kingdoms of the World, a text that encourages debate with individuals whose ideal political reality is unrealizable, unstable, and unjust? As a philosopher, Vallier recognizes the danger of ill-formed falsehoods, and as a Christian (277), he is sympathetic to the integralist’s religious ideals. For Vallier and other liberals, Mill’s defense of truth emerging from disagreement with misguided viewpoints is a strong reason to engage integralism (78). Vallier’s approach is ultimately motivated by political reconciliation: to see integralists fully integrated into the liberal political order as reflective, keen members of the body politic. This desire motivates his extended discussions of the best integralist positions and responses, because integralists cannot respond to the most serious critiques of their theory, due to dismissing critics and seldom updating their beliefs based upon evidence (162). Lacking political power, a disregarded faction within their own church, integralists will likely be relegated to the role of unheard political minority. Vallier’s idea of integralism writ small, suggested in the postscript (265–267), is to allow integralists a locale to develop their politics and demonstrate their superior political ideals, to become a trustworthy, engaged religious minority in a liberal polity, flourishing as an alternative approach to life chosen by nearly all of society, much like the Amish. However, many integralists and illiberals accept Carl Schmitt’s view that politics is war, a bloodless means to eliminate enemies and buttress friends. Even the best integralists, including Vermeule (16), accept Schmitt’s politics, which is one of the most significant reasons why integralism is inherently antithetical to liberalism and tends towards the demonic politics of destruction.  

Liberalism and politics as peace 

Vallier implores the integralist and their illiberal and liberal brethren to reject politics as war—to move beyond politics as a venue in which to decimate opponents and gain fidelity through domination. To understand the threat of politics as war, we must return to Vallier’s two previous works—Must Politics Be War? And Trust in a Polarized Age—and, more importantly, to politics as peace, the nature of a flourishing liberal politics that replaces politics as war as the ideal approach to the political.

In its simplest form, politics as peace is contrary to politics as war. Inspired by liberals from Locke and Mill to Kant and Rawls, politics as peace begins by acknowledging the need for disagreeing citizens—disagreeing on the most profound, significant questions facing humanity—to cooperate and coordinate action through a political system. This requires tolerance, allowing radically different persons to live together, and rejects the elimination of opponents, who, while wrong, cannot be purged in a politics focused on cooperation and coordination in the face of disagreement. Political domination, wherein the political system is biased towards a particular class, religion, or faction, discourages cooperation; a system which incentivizes positive outcomes for one side over another does not allow for fair, honest interaction and distorts results towards the favored side. For human beings to live together, we must understand that, in the political arena, perceiving our opposition as the enemy, to be distrusted, damned, and destroyed because of their views, and one’s allies as friends, to be supported and safeguarded against all opposition simply because they are on our side, makes genuine society impossible. Ultimately, radical political equality, acknowledging that a person’s moral status does not change based upon their political preference, is required for politics as peace and, therefore, has no place for Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction.

During the twentieth century, radical advances in politics as peace, most notably through Gandhi and Kings’ non-violent social resistance, emerged under the domination of states characterized by Schmitt’s politics as war. Gandhi’s strict avoidance of violence under British rule required moral creativity, engineering morally and practically superior responses that demonstrated the weaknesses of colonialism. Actions like the Salt March were effective because they rejected biased systems and presented a realistic alternative based in peace. King recognized the need for radical redemption of those who benefitted from statecraft as warfare, fellow citizens who could be eliminated on the basis of being enemies to those who were peaceful and in the right. Yet he recognized that a defeated enemy is not a transformed individual—only redemption, founded in peace, allows for genuine change and re-integration into politics. King promoted a radical form of tolerance, acknowledging the full humanity of his evil opponents and recognizing the need to see them as more than political enemies, if society was to resume a productive politics. 

Vallier’s previous works, Must Politics Be War? Restoring Our Trust in the Open Society and Trust in a Polarized Age, add to the public reason defense of politics as peace by explaining the significance of trust and public justification for a truly liberal politics. In a politics that exists for cooperation and coordination, individuals must be able to view fellow citizens as worthy of trust. Social trust is the expectation that others will encourage one’s goals, either directly (through assistance) or indirectly (via non-interference), while most or all members act in accord with moral rules that support such actions (Trust in a Polarized Age, 50). Trust is based upon recognized moral reasons and rules motivating actions; furthermore, such expectations can be the content of social norms and built into state and non-state institutions (Must Politics Be War?, 8–11). The fact that trust has a public component—agreeing with and acting on accepted rules and reasons—allows for criticism and regulation of uncooperative, untrustworthy citizens (Must Politics Be War?, 79–80). If reasons for action are publicly justifiable, open to criticism from all, then it is possible to call out radical deviations from the appropriate norms. Gandhi and King could not have instigated non-violent social resistance unless there were reason-sensitive moral norms that could be used to identify untrustworthy citizens and officials. When trust is established, it encourages virtuous cycles that reinforce trust and peace and, simultaneously, discourage distrust and violence (Trust in a Polarized Age, 16). It is not an accident when individuals—the integralists—who distrust liberal society and its members, along with being unable to justify their political and social positions to fellow citizens, remain unheard and are banished from social-political debates.  

In All the Kingdoms of the World, Vallier provides a pragmatic defense of politics as peace by writing a text to do something—to bring integralism into conversation with contemporary political thought. The text constantly focuses on how to improve integralism by steelmanning its positions. At certain points this requires updating integralist thought: for example, the use of contemporary arguments for political obligation provides unique, though ultimately unsuccessful, defenses of baptism as a moral transformer in chapter 6. While this extends the book and makes some chapters incredibly complex, through Vallier’s fixation on charitable interpretation, integralists are brought into political debates that would benefit from motivated disagreement. Vallier’s work to bridge integralism and liberalism would be impossible without his outstanding affective virtues. Vallier’s respect for opponents, humility, and charity shine through each chapter. Curiosity and a desire for truth motivate Vallier even when he acknowledges that integralists fail to update their beliefs based upon new evidence and prematurely shut down debate (162). In conclusion, All the Kingdoms of the World should be read for what it does—demonstrating how a liberal should approach opponents—in addition to what it states—even when the text is a guidebook for future debates between liberals and illiberals, an extension of previous work, and an addition to one of the greatest liberal projects, politics as peace. 

Did Vallier need to write this book? 

Vallier’s framework for analyzing integralism via history, symmetry, transition, stability, and justice is validated through an effective application to Chinese and Islamic anti-liberalisms in chapter 8. Both Jiang Qing’s Confucian Way of the Humane Authority (WHA) and Islamic Democracy draw on the history of their traditions to defend religious anti-liberal regimes that symmetrically treat religious and secular goods. Because of its basis in Islamic theology, social teaching, and Islamic legal canons, Islamic Democracy’s approach to symmetry mirrors that of Catholic integralists, while the WHA draws on the nature of heaven (tian) in Confucian thought to explain religious and political norms.

Islamic Democracy shares integralism’s violent, morally bankrupt transition (256), and while there is more religious continuity within Islamic states, traditional measures to encourage political security, such as the jizya tax on non-Muslims, will be insufficient to provide genuine stability. Contemporary pluralism requires significant coercion that would not allow for a morally justified equilibrium in Islamic Democracy. Confucian flexibility and integration with other worldviews would encourage a just society. Confucianism has a history of toleration and any social-political difference between persons would be on account of some becoming more sagely, more attuned to Confucian virtues, generally shared among Chinese citizens. The nature of the sage, who is the ideal ruler and should be atop the social hierarchy, makes stability difficult. Even if a variety of Chinese religions and worldviews converge on identifying the sage and how to measure sageness, pluralism within these religions and from other citizens would be sufficient to undermine identifying rulers. Stability for the WHA would rest on the tricky establishment of sages between varying perspectives and the problem of non-virtuous persons recognizing, and putting in power, persons of exemplary virtue. 

All the Kingdoms of the World should not be read simply because of its philosophical consequence—its useful framework, impressive argumentation, thorough critiques of illiberalism, and creative defenses of integralism and liberalism. Instead, it is significant because its author recognizes, and writes to realize, one of liberalism’s greatest strengths: utilizing systematic pluralism and deep political and social disagreement, particularly expressed by its opponents, to create stable, just political orders. Vallier writes in part to fulfill the Millian need (75) to engage informed integralists to provoke liberals to construct more defensible, feasible liberalisms, possibly through integralism writ small, through which integralists would remain part of a liberal state through developing limited, legitimate integralist communities. While this might seem unjustified and pandering to a discordant minority, liberalism flourishes when flexible and adapting to, indeed absorbing, the viewpoints of its strongest critics (270). 

Buttressing the Millian defense of liberalism is politics as peace. Vallier is not speaking up for the integralists based upon his religious journey or completing a self-interested project to defend his religious concerns. Rather, his religious perspective helps him gain one of the most important insights from religion for politics as peace: the redemption of political enemies. Redemption perfects tolerance, encouraging harmony between former enemies where other systems would endorse disillusion or political warfare. The right liberal order cultivates values that make life better for the public and meets the social needs of distinct minorities. Ultimately, disagreement and debate are epistemic engines that, when properly supported by trust, respect, and redemption, promote intellectual progress and peace. 

Featured image is King David, by Lawrence OP