REPLACING CHRISTIAN WITH cHRISTIANIST iDENTITY:

 A few years ago a group of Catholic post-liberals founded a website, which has expanded into books and podcasts, called The Josias. Josias is Latin for Josiah. (The Hebrew original, Yoshiyahu, most likely means "healed by God.") The first editor of The Josias, Edmund Waldstein, is a Cistercian monk in Austria who -- judging by his own contributions to his journal -- is a sophisticated theologian, as are some of the other contributors. I have now read a good deal of The Josias and I can report that, except when it surrenders to a genuinely foul invective about what it abhors -- abhorrence is one of its main activities -- its writings have all the rigor, and all the charm, of dogmatics. In its way it reminds me of orthodox Marxist discourse, in which fine points of doctrine are scrupulously examined without any interest in the scrupulous examination of their philosophical foundations. The difference between theology and philosophy is that philosophy inspects the foundations, whereas theology merely builds on them. How serious can thinking be when its own premises are protected from it?

As in all doctrinaire writing, the writings of these post-liberals, of all post-liberals, has a settled and self-congratulatory tone, and expresses the mutual admiration of a quasi-conspiratorial fraternity. (Are there are any women among them?) They are the club of the just. The motto of The Josias is non declinavit ad dextram sive ad sinistram, "to incline neither right nor left." This may sound like an invigorating assertion of intellectual independence, until one recalls that it is also the title of the definitive historical study of the rise of fascist ideology in France. "Neither right nor left" was the motto of a crack-up, of a philosophical desperation. The purpose of The Josias, its founding editor has written, is "to become a 'working manual' of Catholic political thought." But not all Catholic political thought. It is the organ of a particular school, known as integralism. Here is Father Waldstein's explication of the concept: "Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that, rejecting the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holds that political rule must order man to his final goal. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man's temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end, the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power." Or in the less reflective words of an American integralist, "the state should recognize Catholicism as true and unite with the Church as body to her soul."

Premises, premises. The Catholic post-liberals are animated by a crushing sense that we, America and the West, have fallen. The feeling of fallenness is not theirs alone: it is one of the few things that unites this disunited country, though we differ in our preferred heights. For the integralists, whose very name suggests that the rest of us are disintegrated, what we have lost is the magnificent unity of church and state. That is the fissure that infuriates them, that they wish ruthlessly to repair. They are wounded holists; yet another bunch of moderns with a burning hunger for the whole. They detest "the personalization of religion," as if there are no religious collectivities and religious institutions and religious movements in our liberal polity, as if social domination and political control are necessary conditions of spiritual fulfillment. It is important to understand who were the authors of the abomination that the American integralists wish to repeal. Whereas some of them can live with aspects of Karl Marx -- neither right nor left, remember -- it is finally James Madison whom they cannot abide. He, after all, was the diabolical author of the separation, and Jefferson, and Mason, and the other founding fathers of the American dispensation. (And Roger Williams, the founding grandfather, whose banishment from the highly integrated Massachusetts Bay Colony marked the inauguration of the separation.) Integralism as an ideology originated in late nineteenth-century Europe, particularly in France, in the Action Francaise of Charles Maurras (the American integralists remind even the editor of First Things of Maurras, and also of the Catholic phalangists of Franco's Spain); but now Maurras has been pitted against Madison. What a villain Madison was!

I call these Christians Christianists, in the way that we call certain Muslims Islamists. Christianism is not the same as Christianity, just as Islamism is not the same as Islam. (There are Jewish parallels in Israel.) Christianism is a current of contemporary Christianity, of the political Christianity of our time, a time in which religions everywhere have been debased by their rampant politicization. The Christianists, who swan around with the somewhat comical heir of an avant-garde, are in one respect completely typical of their day: they are another group in our society that judges governments and regimes and political orders by how good they are for them. This selfishness, which is a common feature of identity, is as tiresome in its religious versions as it is in its secular ones; it is an early form of contempt, and extremely deleterious to the social unity that the Christianists fervently profess to desire.

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