Reversing Climate Change 314: Will Catholic Integralism Be a Force in World Politics?—w/ Dr. Kevin Vallier, Author & Associate Professor at BGSU
Does liberalism's attempt to let us all pursue different visions of the good life ironically make the good life even harder to achieve? Should there be an established church? Are the people who hold these ideas politically ascendent, or likely to remain part of a small counter-revolutionary fringe?
In this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Nori Cofounder Ross Kenyon invites Dr. Kevin Vallier, Associate Professor and Director of the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics program at Bowling Green State University, on to discuss the rise(?) of Catholic integralist thought, with which he engages in his latest book, All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism.
Vallier provides a comprehensive overview of integralism, a formerly default ideological perspective derived from various religious traditions (but especially Catholicism), which advocates for religious governance and the intertwining of church and state. He lays out its history, core ideas, and some speculation on its sociology.
Critics of modernity argue that free choice has led to a libertinism that has lowered standards and made us less happy and that we should return to an explicitly religiously ordered society with established churches and codes of behavior. Liberalism, in trying to be all things to all people, has made it adaptive but offering very little public meaning. That, it turns out, is the responsibility of the private person.
Vallier steelmans these ideas to the best of his ability in an attempt to reckon with them as a a devout member of the Orthodox Church, while also defending the importance of the liberal tradition.
Of course, were liberalism to be replaced by such a tradition, there are huge open questions of how that might impact world politics and climate action. Vallier predicts (and maybe even hopes) it remains a small intellectual insurgency rather than becoming what its advocates desire.
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Resources
All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism