Catholic Integralism Replacing Evangelicals?

Are Catholic Integralists, who want a Catholic confessional state, and their populist fellow travelers, displacing Evangelicals as the main political energy on the political right?

A social media account called “Insurrection Barbie” wrote an extensive and widely read article on X claiming so. Here’s how she frames it:

Who controls the ideological and theological DNA of the Republican Party’s base?

For seventy years, that answer has been evangelical Protestant Christians. Roughly 30 percent of the American electorate, 80 percent of whom vote Republican, motivated by deep biblical conviction, organized through tens of thousands of local churches, and bound together by a theological commitment to the Bible have been in the driver’s seat of the conservative movement.

Remove it, or transform it, and you have a different party. Not a party with different policies. A party with different gods.

Her article has shards of legitimate points. Postliberal Catholics, some of whom are integralists, others of whom perhaps are only adjacent, have an increasingly loud public voice. They are influencing social media stars like Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes and Carrie Prejean Boller, among others, who have denounced evangelicals as heretics for touting Christian Zionism. She also cites Steve Bannon.

Insurrection Barbie is rightly troubled by the postliberal Catholics, including some integralists, who traffic in or facilitate anti-Jewish views. (Integralist intellectuals are typically more careful than their populist allies.) She includes Tucker Carlson on her list of concerns although he is not Catholic, because he has hosted anti-Jewish Catholics like Fuentes. And he has called Christian Zionism a “brain virus.”

Weaving a seeming conspiracy theory, Insurrection Barbie ties the Catholic integralists and their kindred spirits to pro-Putin Russian nationalist theorist Alexander Dugin.

Oddly, Insurrection Barbie omits any mention of Protestant Integralists, who sometimes identify as Christian Nationalists, and who also oppose Christian Zionism and tout anti-Jewish views. Instead, she assumes that evangelicals by and large are pro-Israel and Dispensationalist, i.e. believing in an End Times scenario in which Israel features.

Perhaps 30-40 percent of evangelicals are Dispensationalist, which is a school of thought whose influence peaked perhaps twenty years ago. Other evangelicals may share some Dispensationalist beliefs or simply believe that the promise to Abraham is still binding. And while evangelicals largely remain pro-Israel, that support has been declining, especially among the young.

Protestant Integralists who espouse a Christian confessional state, ideally guided by Calvinist theology, are, like Catholic Integralists, supercessionists who do not believe that Jews and Israel have any ongoing providential purpose except as targets for conversion. Their Calvinist confessional state would leave Jews and other non-Christians as less than full citizens.

Insurrection Barbie ignores the Protestant Integralists to focus on Catholic Integralists.  She explains they are numerically small but have big plans:

So, it must change the base — by demoralizing and theologically disorienting the evangelical voters who currently constitute it, by recruiting the next generation before they have formed stable convictions, and by capturing the institutional infrastructure through which that base is organized.

According to Insurrection Barbie, evangelicals “are not being invited into a new political coalition. They are being hollowed out and replaced. And the people doing it are counting on them not to notice until it is too late.” And “legitimate grievance” is the “on ramp” while “antisemitism is the highway,” for a “project imported from Russian geopolitical theory and pre-Vatican II European political theology.”

Insurrection Barbie claims the plan is to replace “broadly Protestant Christian nationalism” and its Judeo-Christian framework with “something older, harder, and more explicitly exclusionary: European blood-and-soil ethnic nationalism with a Catholic or Orthodox Christian face.”

Alexander Dugin, as a Russian, Insurrection Barbie explains, understands that “evangelical Christianity is not just a religious preference” but a “civilizational architecture,” which includes the U.S.-Israel alliance. “Crack the theology, and the politics crumble with it,” she surmises. Steve Bannonn met with Dugin in 2018 in Rome, she recalls, and Dugin’s thought has been transmitted through Bannon and others.

Insurrection Barbie insists:

You cannot dismantle evangelical political power without first delegitimizing evangelical theology. The movement’s entire political architecture rests on a theological claim: that God made an eternal, unconditional covenant with the Jewish people, that the modern state of Israel is a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, and that Christians who “bless Israel” are obeying a direct divine command.

Insurrection Barbie claims the Catholic Integralists and friends are targeting Protestant teaching about sola scriptura, insisting the Bible does not stand alone, to be interpreted by individual believers, but is subordinate to the church, which precludes believers from friendship with Israel. The Catholic Integralists and friends claim the “covenants with Israel are fulfilled — superseded — in Christ.”  So young evangelical men, when confronted by these claims, lose their faith in the Bible and their friendship for Israel.

The Catholic Integralists claim, according to Insurrection Barbie, that Catholics and Protestants can work together now but believe that “evangelicals [are] cannon fodder to defeat the secular left,” to be later defeated and replaced. She says:

The institutional infrastructure of American conservatism is, at its leadership level, increasingly Catholic integralist in its theological orientation while remaining dependent on evangelical Protestant voters for its electoral margin.

Insurrection Barbie rightly notes that the Catholic Integralist vison of a “theocratic monarchy with a cross on the flag” is what America’s founders rejected for a constitutional republic without an established church. And she is right that Catholic Integralists oppose “self-governance” with liberty. And she is right that America was “designed to prevent the kind of religiously defined political tribalism that destroyed the Old World.”

But Insurrection Barbie is wrong to focus exclusively on Catholic Integralists and their allies, whose antisemitism and authoritarianism are rejected by their own church. Today’s anti-democratic impulses are not confined to them. The Case for Christian Nationalism is a Protestant book advocating a Christian confessional state that can execute blasphemers and apostates. Protestant Christian Nationalists mock Christian Zionism and deride Jews and Israel as irrelevant. The case for a “Protestant Franco” has been floated.

These currents against America’s political tradition of constitutional rule with all citizens having legal equality irrespective of religion are not coming strictly from Catholics or Protestants. Nor are they imports from Russia or Europe. They are weeds in our own garden, sprouting from ennui and despair. These advocates of state religion and authoritarianism are bored with self-government and want a state that tells society what to believe.

A democratic, constitutional America robustly faithful to its founding will reject antisemitism and other bigotries. And it will remain friends with Israel and with others who share our commitment to democracy and liberty.

Insurrection Barbie is rightly concerned about Catholic Integralists and their allies who foment bigotry especially antisemitism. But as the Scriptures urge, our judgements should start in our own house. We Protestants should focus on our own communities where what she rightly derides, antisemitism and authoritarianism, are also sprouting, without help from the Catholic Integralists.

More from IRD :

Why Religious Freedom Matters

The West Will Not Save You: C.S. Lewis and the Hope Beyond Civilization

Postliberal Protestants & Pagan Secularism

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