Trump, Leo, and the Death of Integralism (Stephen Daisley, April 20, 2026, First Things)
Wait until the quixotic utopianism of the Catholic integralists encounters the final boss of postliberal politics: immigration. While many faithful American integralists will submit to the pope’s instruction, the Catholic Church’s pronouncements on immigration attack concepts as fundamental to Republican politics today as freedom and enterprise were in the Reagan and Bush years.
Even if some accommodation could be reached between Catholic social teaching and either Republican postliberalism or Democratic economic justice, such an arrangement would be agonizingly fragile in a polity where executive power can change every four years and legislative power every two. Orbán’s illiberal democracy, which he has spent the past sixteen years embedding in the institutions and culture of Hungarian national life, looks set to be dissolved by a successor keen to embrace all the European Union diktats Orbán’s ascendancy was predicated on opposing. On how a postliberal order can be developed into a society organized around material and spiritual virtue, integralism has few convincing answers. On how such an order would be maintained against the vicissitudes of democracy, it has no answers.
Integralists will not like hearing it, but there is already a means by which to live faithfully, extol the doctrines of the Church, and contribute to the forging of a common good society. Their old enemy, liberalism, properly understood, gives the Catholic holder of public office the freedom to live a life integrated to the eternal verities and ordered to virtue, while exercising temporal power under the law with ex officio neutrality, and promoting a culture conducive to religious devotion in which the faithful are secure from coercive state secularism. It is an imperfect model, it does not always deliver victory, and its concepts and mechanisms have been directed to un-Christian and anti-Christian ends and will be again. That is all the more reason to fight for the proper understanding and application of liberalism, and thus the right and ability of the faith to flourish in “enemy” territory, rather than taking the political Catholic tradition out of the mainstream and into the coercive, authoritarian fringe.