Yesterday, we invited a few of the leading lights of what we might call statist integralism to debate us. Jonathan Culbreath took up the invitation in a thread. It is worth reading in its entirety. It sums up a common response to our claim, namely, that the modern nation state (and the economic systems integral to it) are fundamentally anti-Christian, with a counterclaim that the Church, far from saying what we say, has an eminently practical vision: “states” are simply the form that we have given to the exercise of public authority, and the Christian is not permitted to stand by idly, daydreaming about some “other form” with which he can participate. He says:
In our day and age, we (the laity) must work with the institutions that we have. Chief among them is the institution we call “the state.” The vocation of the laity with respect to the state is nothing else but “to infuse, as it were, into all the veins of the State healthy sap and blood of Christian wisdom and virtue” (Immortale Dei). Likewise, Gaudium et Spes states that “the Church praises and esteems the work of those who for the good of men devote themselves to the service of the state and take on the burdens of this office.”
Culbreath ends by saying:
In summary, the modern state cannot be excluded from the proper role of the laity in their apostolate to the temporal order. In keeping with Vatican II, which is in continuity with Leo XIII, the office of the laity must be understood as that of sanctifying the state…Just because Catholic laymen ought to “integrate from within” the modern state, it does not follow that some big structural changes to that very state are not in order.
This, I think, is how this argument usually goes. We say states are “bad.” We get the response that, while they may be imperfect, they are nevertheless the political form confronting us, and thus the proper objects of integralism, which would orientate them towards God as their proper end.
I agree with everything Jonathan argued. I would simply assert that the end to which something is aimed and its form are intrinsically linked. So, if we want to use the word "state" for whatever form politics might take in any given historical circumstance, as the modern tradition, including the papacy, often does— fine. We can do that. If we concede this, then, yes, the laity ought to gain control of the state, which is to say, of politics.
However, in aiming this state toward our supernatural end, we will transform it—not embellish it or correct it here and there, but give it a new form. This form will not be the modern, centralized, unitary, bureaucratic, administrative and militaristic form. (I call this form "the State" because that is what the people who built it called it and they were the first ones to use the term. I think I am being historically accurate, but I'll give on that point. Let's call it, instead, "the sovereign state"). This form was explicitly built in order to remove the spiritual power from political life—in order to render the attainment of true virtue irrelevant to its power. It was and still is built and maintained as an anti-Church for the purpose of destroying the social significance of the Catholic Church. Its form is irredeemable because it is the form of slavery. It is incapable of leading men to virtue. What it calls “law” is not law at all but tyranny. Its power is rooted in the fostering of vice, the extension of vice ever deeper into the life of men. The form that a Christian State would take would bear very little resemblance to this monstrosity. I have to repeat: The form is not independent of the end. To believe that is to remain a liberal—one who asserts that the political is neutral towards ends.
In fact, we all know that form is not independent of end. A temple slave-state ruled by a god-king would not be just the particular form that Christians might find politics taking in a certain time and place. Would we say in this circumstance, “Christians need to take control of this regime from the inside, need to become priests to the idol, need to become commanders of the slave army, need to manage the theft of the peasantry’s crops and the sacrifice of their children to the gods”? Of course not! What we might say is “Christians need to gain power in this society so that we can dismantle the structures of sin that oppress the people who live within it. Christians must sanctify this order, must align it with the law of the true God, must convert it, must transform it.” But we would know that this transformation is nothing other than the destruction of the slave regime and its replacement with something else. This is what the New Law is all about. As John Paul II asserted, Christians are called on to destroy the structures of sin.
So, if we all agree that we can use the word "state" to talk about any political order, and we agree that the state would take on a different form if it were Christian, then, it seems to me we should discuss what that different form might be. What, I want to know, do the statist integralists think? How would the form of the “state” change? Within this semantic framework, that seems to be the only question where there is any philosophical or theological content over which to debate.
This is the question that New Polity is engaged in answering at every level, whether in Schindler’s metaphysical claim that the Christian form of politics prioritizes the actual over the potential, Barnes’ claims that the Christian form of politics is built and maintained on a presumption of abundance rather than scarcity; Imam’s claim that the Christian form of politics desacralizes money; or Ménard’s claim that legal pluralism is a characteristic of the Christian form of politics. The Christian form of politics is particular and recognizable, and it is certainly not the flavoring of some other thing. This was my motivation behind writing Before Church and State, which expresses the unique particularly Catholic form that politics took in the 13th century, with its foundation of peace, custom’s primacy over positive law, its decentralized distribution of authority, or, put negatively, its lack of any concept or practice of what we now mean when we say “sovereignty.”
This glimpse of a Christian form, and our work to implement it, fuels rather real conclusions—conclusions which we would hope would answer to Culbreath’s postscript arguing that “big structural changes” would result from any Christian control of the state. Our only caveat would be that these structural changes are formal changes—one does not tinker with the sovereign state’s “primordial presumption of violence” and end up with a merely more Christian sovereign state. One does not submit “a monopoly on legitimate violence” to the Roman Pontiff and end up with a monopoly on legitimate violence that simply does things the Roman Pontiff wants. For a sovereign state to confess Christ, really and truly, in deed, structure, and word, is the birth of something new. If we have limited the meaning of the word state to include any political arrangement, then we may call this new thing “the Christian state.” Let's discuss this new thing. Let's discuss the New Law.
At the very least, I would ask that we can put any assertions that we are quietists or anabaptists to rest. It would be hard to more completely misunderstand or misrepresent the political theology that animates the work of New Polity’s chief editors and many of our writers, which, when it comes to violence, is really about more people using force more directly and when it comes to contemporary politics wants to leave nothing alone, wants to retreat from nothing, and most certainly doesn’t pretend that Christians shouldn’t get their hands dirty.
It seems to us that the statist integralists either disagree with us on the nature of the Christian form of politics; or they are still liberals, and believe that the political form is neutral towards its particular end, and so have no problem in saying that Christians should take over and wield this thing called “the sovereign state”; or they simply have not clarified that the presumed “structural changes” effected by integralism are, in fact, formal changes. To clarify this, we reiterate our invitation to debate.