Luther’s “wise Turk” quote that he didn’t say

August 31, 2012 By Gene Veith

Now that a Mormon is running for president and tends to be favored by Christian conservatives over his Christian liberal opponent, we are hearing more and more that famous quotation from Martin Luther: “I’d rather be ruled by a wise Turk than by a foolish Christian.” The problem is, no one has been able to find that famous quotation in any of the voluminous works of Luther. It appears that the quotation is apocryphal. I suspect it may have originated as an attempt to explain the implications of Luther’s doctrine of the Two Kingdoms, as in, “Luther would have rather been ruled by a wise Turk. . .” which then was recalled as “Luther said he would rather have been. . . .” At any rate, I would love to identify the earliest occurrence of that quotation in print. (If any of you could help with that, I would be very grateful.)

Anyway, despite his reputation as a political fatalist, Luther had quite a bit to say about foolish Christian rulers (just ask Henry VIII). And he had a lot to say about the threat of being ruled by Turks, wise or otherwise, as the Ottoman Empire was then engaged in a major invasion of Europe, an Islamic jihad of conquest that had taken over much of Europe and that was finally turned back at the gates of Viennain 1529.

Anyway, the frequent commenter on this blog with the nom de plume of Carl Vehse has researched these issues. Back in 2007 I posted what he put together on this blog, which, unfortunately, was when it was a sub-blog with World Magazine and so is no longer accessible. So I think it’s time to post it again. Carl has updated and tweaked the original article, which I post with his permission:

The Wise Turk quote

An August 26, 2012, updated version of an article located at http://web.archive.org/web/20071231154836/http://cranach.worldmagblog.com/cranach/archives/2007/02/draftthe_wise_t.html

In his January, 1997 editorial in First Things, “Under the Shadow,” Richard Neuhaus pointed out that despite the efforts he and others have made to show that Martin Luther never said, “I would rather be ruled by a wise Turk than by a foolish Christian” or anything like it (even in German), the alleged quote seems to crop up in articles, sermons, blogs, interviews, and even in testimony before a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The year 2012 is an election year and there are non-Christians on the presidential ballot. Thus political editorials in Christian magazines and websites, as well as the fifth-column media, are bound to repeatedly trot out this hackneyed phrase, misattributed to Martin Luther. Let’s be clear. The “wise Turk” quote is an urban legend, an old wives’ tale, just like the oft-repeated fairy tales that Luther threw an inkwell at the devil (or vice versa), or invented the Christmas tree, or that Billy Graham referred to Lutherans (or the Lutheran Church, or the Missouri Synod) as “a sleeping giant.”

This article is yet another Sisyphean attempt to drive a spike through this urban legend non-quote, and specifically to address the erroneous claim that the alleged quote is a loose paraphrase of the following excerpt from Martin Luther’s “An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation“:

“It is said that there is no better temporal rule anywhere than among the Turks, who have neither spiritual nor temporal law, but only their Koran; and we must confess that there is no more shameful rule than among us, with our spiritual and temporal law, so that there is no estate which lives according to the light of nature, still less according to Holy Scripture.”

As will be shown below the urban legend quote has absolutely nothing to do with this quoted excerpt from “An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility” and any such claimed paraphrase is quite unlikely to have been even loosely uttered (in German or Latin) by Dr. Luther elsewhere. The key points, as they should be for all phrases bandied about as being uttered by (or paraphrased from) Luther, are context, context, context. (more…)

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The Two Irreconcilable Poles of the New Right

April 11, 2024 By Gene Veith

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American conservatism in the 20th century–the era of William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan–is often described as “fusionist.” That is, it was a joint effort of two very different political philosophies–traditionalism and libertarianism–who united against the common enemy of collectivism, socialism, and totalitarianism as embodied in Soviet Communism.

The so-called New Right of today consists of a different kind of fusionism, an alliance between two even more irreconcilable political philosophies: Roman Catholic integralism and Nietzschean “vitalism.” Though in many ways opposite, one being explicitly Christian and the other being explicitly anti-Christian, they have a common enemy in woke progressivism.

So argues a writer with the pen-name Cincinnatus Smith in an article for Quillette entitled Funhouse-Mirror Fusionism. We’ve blogged quite a bit about integralism, the project of imposing a Catholic political order under the temporal authority of the Pope. Smith describes “vitalism” in terms of the writings of the Romanian internet personality Costin Alamariu, also known as the “Bronze Age Pervert,” whose book Bronze Age Mindset has acquired a cult following among some conservatives. Here is Smith’ description of what it says:

[Bronze Age Mindset] is Nietzschean at its core. Justice is the will of the strong. Strength and vitality are paramount virtues. . . . Egalitarian ideals and democracy were incompatible with the idea that the strong shall rightfully rule over the weak. The individual great man was to be cherished. Moreover, much like Nietzsche, BAM’s message is directed to the few supermen capable of understanding it and giving themselves new purposes and ends to strive for. Alamariu makes this clear from the outset: the book is not philosophy, but an exhortation to this narrow few. It’s for the lost few who will make up the small piratical bands that will lay waste to the modern landscape of liberalism:

Here is my vision of the true justice, the justice of nature: the zoos opened, predators unleashed by the dozens, hundreds … four thousand hungry wolves rampaging on the streets of these hive cities, elephants and bison stampeding, the buildings smashed to pieces, the cries of the human bug shearing through the streets as the lord of beasts returns. . . .

For Nietzscheans like Alamariu, the chief problem with liberal modernity is not that it removes constraints on individuals, but that it’s too concerned with the many, who can and should be sacrificed for the good of the few. Contemporary elites promote a sterile form of individualism that treats victimhood as a virtue and masculine vitality as a cancer, which sedates their would-be competitors and buttresses their own power. Where modern liberalism insists on the inalienable natural rights of each person, Nietzschean individualism is for the few, not the many.

The many are derided as sub-human “bugs,” the implication being that they are worthy of extermination. He also believes in eugenics. All of this, of course, is the same Nietzschean mindset that, as I document, constitutes Fascism.

Though old-style conservative fusionism of traditionalism and libertarianism–with its support for the Constitution, traditional values, free-market economics, individual liberty, and small government–is still around, New Right fusionism pushes both of those poles to new extremes. Instead of a traditionalism that seeks to conserve American ideals and a culture built around church, state, and family, the integralists champion a more specific tradition: the Roman Catholicism of the Middle Ages. Instead of a libertarianism built around individualism and freedom, the vitalists champion the Nietzschean superman, the survival of the strongest, and the subjugation of the inferior.

Whereas the old fusionism is strongly pro-American, the New Right fusionism is anti-American. Both integralists and vitalists despise the Constitution and the human rights it protects. Both oppose democracy. Both dismiss the American experiment for its “liberalism.”

The integralist Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard Law professor (!), wants to completely reconstitute the United States of America and rename it the “Empire of Our Lady of Guadalupe.” The Bronze Age Pervert says that the only legitimate form of government is military dictatorship.

Vermeule’s solution to the immigration problem is only to admit Catholics. The Bronze Age Pervert’s solution is only to admit white people.

I would add that neither integralism nor vitalism can be reconciled with evangelical Christianity, whether of the Lutheran, the Reformed, the Arminian, the Baptist, or the Pentecostal variety. Bronze Age Pervert is explicitly anti-Christian, mocking as Nietzsche does its ethic of love and compassion. Integralism is explicitly Christian, but it is intrinsically anti-Protestant, blaming the Reformation (correctly, I would say) for leading to individual rights and liberal democracy. As I have shown, Protestants wouldn’t fare well under integralism. They would be among the “heretics” that a properly ordered government, according to the integralists, would be obliged to suppress.

Both of these new extremes are clearly off-the-wall fantasies, more suited to alternative reality games on the internet than actual political philosophies capable of being implemented and actually governing. (Integralists, how would you actually go about turning secularist America into the Empire of Our Lady of Guadalupe? And how would all of this work under a liberal pope like Francis? Bronze Agers, what makes you think that you are all that superior? Do you really think you would be among the supermen running your military dictatorship?)

The classic conservative fusionism of more measured traditionalists and more measured libertarians might have its tensions, but Smith says that these are the tensions in Western civilization itself. Individualism needs to be guided by virtue; and virtue needs to be freely chosen and not coerced. And that fusionism can govern, and it accomplished much, such as the dismantling of Soviet Communism.

Furthermore, I think the classic conservative fusionism can address today’s pressing issues. The dangers are still an all-powerful and all-intrusive government and the violation of individual rights. Democracy can still check the power of the social and economic elites. Traditional values can still build strong families, churches, and communities. And Christianity of all varieties can certainly thrive under our Constitutional order, as our history has proven.

Illustration: St. Thomas Aquinas and Friedrich Nietzsche, two public domain images via Edward Feser

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The Alternative to Christian Nationalism & Integralism

February 22, 2024 By Gene Veith

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So if both Integralism and Christian Nationalism are wrong, what is the Christian conservative to do?

Those are the two Christian political theories out there today. They are related–Integralism mostly for the Catholics and Christian Nationalism mostly for the Protestants–and can motivate Christian political activists to address the horrendous dysfunctions of our society.

If those two approaches are theologically deficient, should Christians just give up on politics? That’s what some are advocating. Stop agitating, stop supporting candidates, stop voting. Let the secular world degenerate while the church forms its own subculture and waits for Christ’s return.

Well, there is another alternative: the political theory that Christian conservatives used to have.

Mark Tooley reminds us of that in his Law & Liberty article A Christian Nation? He is responding to Senator Josh Hawley’s article in First Things entitled A Christian Nation. (I just found out that, as a new Missouri resident living in the congressional district that I do, I am being represented by both Hawley as my senator and hard left squad member Cori Bush as my congressional representative! It’s almost enough to turn me too against liberal democracy!) Hawley is articulating a very mild version of Integralism and Christian Nationalism, one which retains Constitutional government and draws back from an established church, while agreeing with those ideologies that position that the government should advance “the good” and work to bring back a Christian culture. Tooley responds (my bolds):

There is much that is laudable in Hawley’s diagnosis if not so much in his prescription. Much of America’s public life is shifting away from biblical transcendence towards either rabid secularism or stridently “woke” utopian fantasies with religious zeal while denying religion’s power. Unmentioned by Hawley is a growing post-Christian right that is indifferent to Christian doctrines and ethics but exploits Christianity as a tribal identity against leftist enemies. He is unfair about earlier versions of politics from a traditional Christian perspective that supposedly focused on culture while ignoring economics.

The 1980s and 1990s Religious Right was deeply influenced by Presbyterian cultural critic Francis Schaeffer, Baptist theologian Carl Henry, Catholic philosopher Michael Novak, and Lutheran/Catholic editor and writer Richard Neuhaus. They advocated a synthesis of traditional morality, democratic constitutionalism, and free market economics as the preferred alternative to planned economies. Their ideas are out of fashion in our time, but they were also out of fashion when first proposed. Hawley dismisses their perspective without contending with it. He implies they left economics outside their spiritual concern. But they advocated for private enterprise not just as more productive than statism, but as better exemplifying God-given human creativity.

To be sure, this approach to Christian activism has a much more modest political vision than that of the Integralists and the Nationalists, with a more modest expectation of what government should do. It attacks manifest evils in the government, such as legalized abortion. And it preserves the liberty of the church–an institution hardly mentioned by Hawley–so that Christians can be salt and light in the culture, rather than overlords.

“But this approach has failed!” say the illiberal critics. It overturned Roe v. Wade.

“But it didn’t prevent gay marriage!” The divinized all-powerful, omnipresent state created gay marriage. A limited government would never presume to do so. The divinized state has also imposed its woke theology on schools, public policy, businesses, and the law. A properly limited government would never do that.

It is as if the Christian big-government conservatives want to keep the divinized state, but change the divinity. Instead of the state itself being the supreme authority over all of life, they want the true God to exercise His rightful authority over the state and to use the state as His instrument to create a godly nation. God does exercise His authority by means of political vocations to restrain external evil, but that is not enough to make anyone, much less a nation, godly. For that we need the church, but not the church as a political institution designed to enforce the Law, as with the Roman Catholic hierarchy that the Integralists want to invest with temporal power. We need a church that proclaims the Gospel of salvation through the forgiveness of sins in the Cross of Jesus Christ.

Sen. Hawley concludes his article by saying,

America has been a Christian nation. We can be again—if Christians will recover again their confidence that the gospel of Jesus Christ speaks to every facet of our common life. For the future of the nation, and the honor of the gospel, we must.

Yes, the gospel of Jesus Christ speaks to every facet of our common life, but it does so by bringing grace and forgiveness, since every facet of our common life is stained with sin. The Senator is speaking of the gospel as some sort of law. Catholics often do that, and now I am hearing the same from Protestant evangelicals. God’s law does speak to every facet of our common life. The state is restricted to the First Use of the Law, concerned with curbing external sinful behavior. That is critically important, though it can never make anyone righteous.

But the state should not “speak to every facet of our common life.” The state has its sphere, and, properly, it is a relatively small one. Our common life includes the family, our participation in the economy, our social networks, the church, and all of our other vocations. The state should stay out of “every facet of our common life” and, as much as possible, leave us alone.

UPDATE: If you are all for limited government, the critics say, how can you oppose abortion and wage all of your other culture war issues? The issue is what government is limited to. The primary purpose of government, rightly considered, is to protect its citizens. Thus, operating an effective criminal justice system–as opposed to defunding the police–and building a strong military are legitimate functions of a limited government.

Limited government Christian conservatives oppose legalized abortion because the government is supposed to protect the lives of children in the womb. On the same principle, limited government Christian conservatives are right to fight against mutilative transgender surgery, pornography, threats to the family, etc.

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC by-SA 2.0

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Can Integralism Make People Good?

February 21, 2024 By Gene Veith

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Integralism is the political theory being advanced by some Catholics and even some Protestants that would put the national government under the authority of the church. Specifically, for Catholics, under the authority of the pope as it was before the Reformation.

I have been critical of this revival of Catholic political theory even though many Christian conservatives, disillusioned about liberal democracy, would love to see it put into place. Though how to do that in an increasingly secular society and an increasingly leftwing papacy is not clear.

Kevin Vallier’s All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism offers a sympathetic critique of Integralism, along with similar anti-democratic, anti-freedom attempts at religious rule in Chinese Confucianism and Sunni Islam.

Terence Sweeney reviews Vallier’s book in his article for the liberal-leaning Catholic magazine Commonweal entitled Integralism’s False Promise: In search of a politics that enables the good. It brings out an aspect of Integralism–indeed, of at least some strains of Catholic ethics, which even some Protestants are flirting with–that is especially problematic: the notion that the state, using coercive power, can make its citizens good.

Here is Sweeney’s summary of the Integralist philosophy:

Integralists contend that liberalism’s internal contradictions are causing it to fail, and they seek to accelerate its decline while working for a new society freed from such contradictions. In this new “integral” society, people could live integrated lives ordered toward the right ends. Vallier argues that the integralist project depends on three claims: that the state exists to direct people to their natural good; that the Church is a polity ordering people to their supernatural good; and that the Church, therefore, ought to have indirect power over the state to direct people to their supernatural good. . . .

Catholic integralists such as the Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule and the Cistercian monk Edmund Waldstein argue for a society ordered toward the supernatural end of union with God. While the state should direct citizens toward natural virtues (something the liberal state refuses to do), the Church alone can foster supernatural virtues. Being good, integralists believe, requires both kinds of virtue. The two polities, Church and state, remain separate, but the Church directs the state where needed to promote the Catholic faith. This coordinated separation, Vallier writes, means that “the church has the right to rule the baptized, the state has the right to govern its citizens, and the church has the right to direct the state in a confined range of cases.”

The thing is, both the Integralists and its two critics, the liberal Catholic Sweeney and the politically liberal Vallier (whose religion I don’t know) agree that, in the words of Catholic Worker founder Peter Maurin, ““we must try to make that kind of a society in which it is easier for people to be good.”

The problem with Integralism, according to Vallier, is not its goal of making people better, but that it would not achieve that goal.

Having established the strengths of integralism, he proceeds to show how integralism actually makes it harder to be good. He does this in three ways. First, he demonstrates how the process of creating an integralist America would require unjust actions. The kind of administrative and judicial seizure of power that Vermeule and others promote might work, but would require dramatic actions of coercion to overcome the majority of Americans who would passionately oppose an integralist state. Second, if the integralists were to succeed, they would establish an unstable regime torn between the rival powers of Church and state, opposed by most Catholics and the hierarchy, and split between those who support the regime and the majority who do not. The use of force would be required not only to install such a regime but also to maintain it. Finally, Vallier argues, even if integralists could somehow take power and establish political stability, their regime would still be unjust. Integralism means that the state, guided by the Church, may compel the baptized to fulfill their religious obligations. For Vallier, this compulsion cannot be justified by baptism.

But the deeper problem is the very project of using state power to compel people to be “good.” Compelling the baptized to fulfill their religious obligations might create external compliance, but it cannot create faith. Forcing virtue makes it no longer a virtue. Morality has to do a person’s character, not external controls. In fact, the external controls prevent a person from being truly moral, since the imposition of power by the alliance of state and church that would make it impossible to do something wrong takes away agency, conscience, and freedom that are necessary in a virtuous human being.

The fact is, we are sinners no matter what the state does to us. Yes, the state must curb the worst external expressions of our sinfulness, otherwise any kind of society would be impossible. But the state cannot make us good.

That is the role of the church, but it can do so not by the exercise of power or control, but by the Gospel of Christ. The church’s tools are the Word and Sacraments, not governmental coercion. Integralism makes the reduces the church to a law-enforcer, effacing its true message of grace and forgiveness through the work of Christ.

I think of what Milton said in Areopagitica, that great defense of Christian liberty: “Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure, he has yet one jewel left: ye cannot bereave him of his covetousness. Banish all objects of lust, shut up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercised in any hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste that came not thither so.”

You can’t make a person virtuous by physically preventing him from doing anything bad. The sin remains on the inside. The remedy for that is the work of the Holy Spirit through faith in Christ.

This is why Luther and the other Reformers opposed the temporal authority claimed by the pope. It was a matter of the Gospel. This is why Lutherans have as one of their binding confessions in the Book of Concord the Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope. Read that as a cure for Integralism.

Illustration: The Doctrine of the Two Swords [ideology of the Holy Roman Empire] by Eike von Repgow (1180-1235) – http://dca.lib.tufts.edu/features/law/books/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66454097

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Protestants Wouldn’t Fare Well under Integralism

October 4, 2023 By Gene Veith

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Catholics and Protestants have been at each other’s throats for centuries. But lately they have been getting along. Evangelicals and other conservative Protestants see conservative Catholics as allies in pro-life issues, the assault on sexual morality, the critique of transgenderism, and the common struggle against secularism.

Since Catholics have a long philosophical tradition–which evangelicals tend to lack–they are a good source for Protestants in their arguments and reflections on today’s issues.

Now that a strain of this Catholic philosophical tradition is advocating “integralism,” which calls for the state to be under the leadership of the church, some Protestants are getting on board with that, calling themselves “Protestant integralists.”

Talk of “Protestant integralists” is exceedingly naive. That becomes clear in James Dominic Rooney’s review article The Utopian Philosophy of the Confessional State in Law & Liberty. He is reviewing All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism by Kevin Vallier, a philosophy professor and Eastern Orthodox Christian. Vallier offers a fair reading of integralism, recognizing its continuity with historic Catholic teaching and noting the good parts about it. But he ends up rejecting it because it is unfeasible, inherently unstable, and unjust. The reviewer is a Catholic–a Dominican friar–who also rejects integralism, though with a different take than Vallier.

Rooney summarizes the three assumptions of integralism (my bolds):

God directs the state to advance the natural common good of a community.
God directs the church to advance the supernatural common good of all baptized persons in this community.
To advance that supernatural common good, and only for this reason, the church may mandate state policies, backed by civil penalties, that directly advance that supernatural good, without excessively undermining either the natural or supernatural common good in some other respect.

What struck me is the notion that these “civil penalties” would be applied against such threats to the “supernatural good” as heretics. That is to say, Protestants. Also non-Christians and followers of other religions. Here is what Rooney says about it [my bolds]:

To begin with the elephant in the room, there is an unaddressed worry about the place of non-Catholics within integralist states. Whereas Vallier has arguments against Islamic versions of these measures, he largely leaves these considerations aside in his case against Catholic integralists. This is a mistake. For non-Christians, the injustice of the integralist system is that it de jure involves limiting their participation in politics on equal footing with Catholics. No matter how nice integralists are, the ideal would limit non-Catholics’ political participation to ensure that the Church exercises effective influence over the affairs of state. Non-Catholics are thus always and necessarily second-class citizens in Integristan. Even if baptism rightly subjects a citizen to the Church’s coercive authority, merely living under a given civil government surely does not.

Remember how the old Protestant bigotry against Catholics included the fear that they wanted to do away with democracy, take over the country, and turn it over to the Pope? And this was why so many Protestants, especially in the South, were leery about voting for John Fitzgerald Kennedy because he was a Catholic? And how JFK forthrightly pledged to voters that he was under no marching orders from the Vatican and that he would not let his Catholicism interfere with what is best for the country?

That pledge and JFK’s presidency were probably turning points in evangelicals’ attitude towards Catholics.

But it sounds like the integralists want to do exactly what the bigots were afraid of. Integralism sounds like a return to the bad old Catholicism.

To be sure, Reformed theology has a theocratic strain, which might come to some of the same conclusions as the integralists. But confessional Lutheranism cannot. Luther crusaded against the temporal authority of the pope and insisted that the church may not use coercive authority. Rather, the secular authorities have the temporal authority, and God works through them to restrain evil in the course of their vocations. Read the Treatise on the Power & Primacy of the Pope, in the Book of Concord, a confessionally binding document on all Lutherans.

I know, I know, the Lutheran state churches, a big mistake in my view as a violation of the doctrine of the Two Kingdoms as borne out in the tyranny of the Prussian Union, which led to the emigrations that gave birth to the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. But even in the Lutheran state churches, it wasn’t that the church exercised authority over the state–as in Catholic countries–but that the state exercised authority over the church.

At any rate, Protestants would not fare well under an integralist regime. Fortunately, Catholics such as Rooney, whom I suspect represents the Catholic mainstream, don’t want such a regime either.

Photo: The Pope’s Triple Crown [not used since John XXIII]. As described by the Holy See Press Office: “The Triregnum (the Papal Tiara formed by three crowns symbolizing the triple power of the Pope: father of kings, governor of the world and Vicar of Christ).” By Dieter Philippi, The Philippi Collection, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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The Integralists’ Strategy

September 8, 2023 By Gene Veith

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I have always thought that those who advocate running the United States as a theocracy–whether the dominionism of the Reformed, the Seven Mountains Mandate of the Pentecostalists, or the Integralism of the Catholics–were mainly engaged in a theoretical or imaginative exercise.

Surely imposing Christian rule over a nation as secularist as the United States has become is impossible. One might picture what that would look like, but it is hardly a realistic possibility.

But I recently read an article that quotes a key thinker who wishes to bring our nation under the yoke of the pope (my characterization) who discusses his strategy for making that happen.

The author of the article is alarmed at the prospect. As a Lutheran who agrees with Luther that the church must not exercise temporal authority, I am too. But it illustrates something important about all of the various “illiberal” ideologies from both the right and the left that have come into prominence today. (“Illiberal” literally means opposed to freedom, but more broadly it opposes the tradition that gave us American constitutionalism.)

William Galston published an article for Persuasion entitled What Is Integralism?, with the deck “The Catholic movement that wants to use government power in the name of public morality.” After summarizing what integralism is (you can read about that here), he writes this:

But is this a plausible strategy in a religiously diverse country where Catholics constitute only one-fifth of the population and integralist Catholics could fit into a small auditorium? Enter Adrian Vermeule, a well-known Harvard law professor and another convert to Catholicism. New Right advocates, he says, should set aside originalism in favor of “common good constitutionalism.” This new doctrine rests on the principles that government directs individuals, associations, and society as a whole toward the common good and that “strong rule” to attain the common good is “entirely legitimate.” In practice, this means “a powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy.” While traditional conservatives seek to deconstruct the administrative state, a common good constitutionalist will see the bureaucracy as the “strong hand of legitimate rule.”

Traditional conservatism, says Vermeule, is content to act “defensively” within the procedural rules of the liberal order. By contrast, common good constitutionalism represents an “illiberal legalism” openly willing to “legislate morality.” Forget about limited government and judicial restraint. Instead, use strong government to bring about a new religious and moral order. In a theological flourish, Vermeule suggests that “The vast bureaucracy created by liberalism … may, by the invisible hand of Providence,” be turned to new ends.

Still, the reintegration of Church and State seems like a dream without a strategy to make it real. Not so, Vermeule insists. Neo-integralists do not need anything close to a majority. Purposeful and determined integralists must come to occupy “strategic positions within the shell of the liberal order.” Their goal must be to seize the commanding heights of the administrative state. Once there, they can work with an equally purposeful and determined chief executive to bring about outcomes that majorities would not have endorsed at the ballot box.

Isn’t this coercion? Not exactly, says Vermeule, because the distinction between coercion and persuasion is “so fragile as to be nearly useless.” Soft paternalism can “nudge” whole populations in desired directions, while strategic positions can be used to “sear the liberal faith with hot irons” and turn the institutions of the old order toward the promotion of the common good, as people such as Professor Vermeule and Father Waldstein define it.

Yipes! My fear is that “searing the liberal faith with hot irons” may not be just a metaphor. The Inquisition applied that political theory to lots of crypto-Lutherans.

But all of this is to remind us that authoritarian rulers don’t need the support of a majority of their citizens.

To think they would is a “liberal” notion. In an “illiberal” regime, we have rulers and we have the ruled, who have no say in what is done to them.

Photo: Adrian Vermeule by LSE Law – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cHJsB8j5yw, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=97674503

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