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
The Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter (FSSP)
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m one of the co-founders of Nori and the director of creative and marketing here. I have an alumnus of the show coming back on Kevin Vallier, associate professor and director of the philosophy, politics and economics program at Bowling Green State University and author of trust in a polarized age, which we did the show on a few years ago. His newest book is called all the kingdoms of the world on radical religious alternatives to liberalism. Thanks for being back, Kevin.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Great to be back.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a little bit of an obscure topic. I swear this relates to climate change because it relates to all sorts of things. There’s connections here that maybe you’ve noticed in your personal life. Last time Kevin and I spoke, I had mentioned that I’ve noticed that my left-leaning friends tend to be more self-identifying as socialist or communist than socialist. Even when I was an undergrad, when you would expect people to have extreme beliefs, I feel like I see more of that now. Many of my right-leaning friends are no longer the sort of dorky, young Republican future accountant people that I knew in college, but oftentimes are quite extreme populist.
They have an iconoclasm of what they view as good beliefs that they purposefully contradict that set them apart from polite society sometimes. And then of that group on the right, the people that I know who have Accelerated their rightward lean some ways have also become religious in many cases. And they’re not become religious in, you know, they’re not joining Unitarian churches or mainline Protestantism. They’re often Orthodox or Catholic. And when they are Catholic, they’re FSSP people, which are like pre-Vatican II, if you’re listening.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, they kind of split off and developed on their own – not split off, maybe too strong. But yeah, the idea there is really to reject anything that’s remotely liberal about our political order because they see it as sort of causing all these political ills and as being – resting on some kind of false theology.
Ross Kenyon: What is it about liberalism that is making these people so dissatisfied? And I know this is a question that you’ve built your entire career on, but what even is liberalism in the first place for someone starting from scratch?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Sure. So when I think of the liberal tradition broadly, I think of it as concerned at minimum with four principles for how the government should operate. The first is a principle of individual small group freedom. Liberals have disagreed about what exactly freedom comes to, but freedom is the first and foremost thing about the liberal tradition. The second is an ideal of equality, which is at the minimum inequality of rights, but very often in liberal tradition, it was a form of equality that wanted to resist arbitrary forms of power, things like absolute monarchs, extremely powerful, organized religions that were coercively established, and With time, that became also drawing on socialism with worries about capitalist domination, but also drawing on classical liberals, pro-market people in the tradition that were worried about government domination.
So liberty, equality, and then a doctrine of toleration, specifically religious toleration, where the idea here is the state shouldn’t really be involved in taking sides in religious matters. They should lead people to themselves. That’s manifested itself in different ways. You have an American approach to this, a French approach to this. And then finally, I think of liberalism as the win-win ideology. It’s trying to understand how we can build a society of mutual advantage or maybe one of the harmony of interests. And some in some liberals. So the thought here is, you know, you have a society of mutual exchange or democratic interaction that sort of makes government better.
So, broadly speaking, a liberal tradition are those who emphasize these four principles as limitations or authorization of government. Liberty, equality, toleration and the harmony of interests.
Ross Kenyon: It sounds nice, especially if you compare the religious wars of the last millennium in Europe, all the strife. It seems nice if you can just say, believe whatever you want, try not to bring it into the public sphere or have independently articulable reasons when you bring these concerns into the public sphere. And we can all live together without fighting. That sounds nice, but in practice...
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Although I would put that too strongly. I mean, a lot of my early career... was rejecting even the idea that you keep, that you privatize your faith in any way or any requirement that you have to speak in non-religious terms in the public sphere. I think that a liberal should reject those requirements on grounds of respecting diversity. So I’m about this little a secular liberal as one could be and still be a liberal.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, that’s quite interesting. But then why isn’t your view here more attractive to these people who maybe this is just going too far and accommodating beliefs that they just view as wrong? We know what the truth is. Why are we letting people persist in error? We’re damning their souls. We should be much more interventionist here.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Well, what’s interesting about these kind of anti-liberal positions, and we’ll get into those specifics in a bit, I’m sure, is that It’s Catholic dogma that you can’t coerce the unbaptized for religious ends. Like they’re not members of the church. And so the church can’t ask the state to help them coerce their members because the unbaptized aren’t members. So you’re not just trying to maximize salvation, right? You’re not trying to use violence on people to get them in the church. And the interesting question is why... And how you can have a lot of religious coercion without at least accidentally engaging in religious coercion of the unbaptized.
So even them say, look, there are constraints on how salvation can be realized. Faith has to begin free. So yeah, they’re not, I mean, so they say, oh, maybe some people go to hell, but we leave that in God’s hands. That’s what happens with their freedom. If they’re not members of the church.
Ross Kenyon: It doesn’t seem genuine if you force someone to be baptized and then you end up with things like, you know, crypto Judaism in Spain or in Mexico. People, you know, it’s just a superficial thing that they were forced to. They don’t actually believe it. Does that actually result in theology and then ending up in heaven anyways?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah, well, I mean, if they don’t have the will or at least lack the opposition like an infant does, then I think it isn’t valid or at least certainly doesn’t save your soul. So, yeah, there is that. Of course, the broader worry is that if The baptized have certain privileges, like not being forced to live in a ghetto in Rome, then yeah, you’ll get a lot of insincere conversion. And from the anti-liberal perspective, that’s actually a really worrisome thing, people coming in for the wrong reasons, because then they’ll take the sacraments like communion or the Eucharist.
And insincerely, which is grave sin. And so essentially, I think a lot of worries about a lot of this coercion is that people are insincere in their religious practice. And that’s been an argument going all the way back to Locke, but it’s one of those I think is a good one.
Ross Kenyon: Are there other reasons that maybe if it doesn’t get insincere converts into heaven, it still results in enough public virtue that it may enhance the likelihood of believers who sin end up in heaven and therefore on net leads to more salvation and therefore we should be coercively religious?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: So two points there. So yes, the thought is once people are baptized and put under the authority of the church, that the church can help them to become sincere. Well, that’s certainly true. And I think there is a thought, yeah, you’ll save more souls, but there is still this proto-liberal part of it, which is that you cannot use force to save the souls of the unbaptized. Now, hopefully, having faithful Christians in a society will draw the unbaptized in, but historically, that hasn’t really been the trend. That hasn’t really been what happens.
In fact, one of the reasons I think a lot of these views went away is because they did require the suppression of religious minorities so as not to tempt the faithful. But then those persistent non-Catholic or, say, non-Christian communities were turning out to add a lot of society, and they turned out to resist. And the cost, the economic and moral cost of suppressing these groups was just too high.
Ross Kenyon: How much of this attraction do you think is something – did you watch The New Pope – Or is it the Young Pope?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Young, I think, yeah. I don’t know. One’s with Jude Law. I think that’s the Young Pope. That’s the Young one. And then there’s a new one with Charles Dance, isn’t there? I can’t remember. But I haven’t watched either of them.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, well, you’d probably like it because it’s probably the only representation of illiberal or anti-liberal Catholic integralism. Because he is saying that we need the smells and bells. We need the mystery. We don’t need this sort of like God loves everyone equally. No, God makes demands upon you. You have to comply in order to receive God’s love and forgiveness. And the Catholic Church has been failing because they’ve neglected this in terms of, I don’t know, there’s a line from King of the Hill, Where he says with regard to Christian rock, you’re not making Christianity better.
You’re just making rock and roll worse.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah, I love that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. It’s a great line. And I attend mass at a parish nearby. And oftentimes there’s a folk band that plays. And I would prefer probably a high church choir in cases. I’m not sure that it’s aesthetically the best. But part of this is just there’s no mystery. There’s no power to it. There’s no requirements here. Just show up if you want. And if you don’t, that’s okay too. And there needs to be a strictness here. And I feel like people, maybe liberalism permits everything and therefore there’s no, there’s no like elite to it.
You don’t have to do anything to be a part of this crew. It’s a very weak tie. Is there something weird that I’m getting on that is correct? Yeah.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: I mean, this is actually how the, this is actually how the new, um, A sort of Catholic Integralist movement got started was seeing the idea that seeing the churches of a merely voluntary organization within the state was going to lead us to not take the church very seriously. So, yeah, I should probably just define Integralism here just so people know what we mean, because even Integralists seldom define their view. So I take integralism to consist in three claims. The first two, as far as Christians go, are pretty benign. The first is that God authorizes the state to govern in favor of the temporal common good of the community, the earthly common good.
Part of Christian tradition, Old Testament monarchs, Romans 13, and so on. Then God authorizes the church to ascend to govern the spiritual good of its members, and also to evangelize the unconverted. So those are fine, but it’s the third condition that’s pretty interesting. In the medieval period, you know, the church really was thinking of itself as a polity, and it was not only powerful spiritually, it was powerful temporally. And the result of this, yeah, the Pope was a temporal sovereign from the donation of Rome by Pepin the Short in 756, was King of the Franks, all the way down to Italian unification forces in 1870, taking it back, confining the Pope to the Vatican.
So yeah, the Pope was a temporal sovereign for over a thousand years. And so this idea of the church being a polity, We should become a citizen of through baptism. And the state being a polity raised these questions about their relationship that don’t really come up for modern political thought. Essentially, they’re doing a different kind of political philosophy, what I like to call two-polity political theory. And we do one-polity theory, right? State versus the individual and civil society and so on. So they just ask different questions. And approach things differently.
But the reason this view, so then what are the powers of church and state, right? Well, how do they relate? God has authorized them both. They both have divine missions. Well, the Pope can’t take over everything because the state has its own independent divine mission and the state can’t take over what the church is doing. So they have to be integrated in some way. And the way this came to be was that baptism made one a citizen of the church, subject to all the rights and responsibilities thereof. That means that you’re subject to church law, the canon law.
The church can give you spiritual punishments like excommunication. But sometimes the church would judge that those spiritual punishments were ineffective. A heretic doesn’t repent, starts to cause all kinds of trouble. And so they could call on the state to serve as what was often called its secular arm. So the church could ask the state to use the state’s civil code and civil punishments to apply to its members, as long as that state were Christian and the church authorized it to do so. So, summing up. Integralism says three things. God has authorized the state to promote the temporal common good of the community.
God has authorized the church to promote the spiritual common good of its members in that community. And finally, the church can authorize the state to help to back its spiritual mission, which is the kind of indirect power of the pope as it was described for a long time.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. What happens when you have a case like Anglicanism, where Charles III is the head of the Church of England, and so there’s an established church, but it’s not like it was hundreds of years ago where there’s fights over the Book of Common Prayer, and the Scots are still having none of it, and there’s all, that doesn’t happen anymore, yet there’s still an establishment, but it’s part of liberalism now too, like you can’t have establishment without it being a polity, or is this line more blurry than I’m putting it here?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Well, a lot of it has to do with the way that the Anglican Church, but also the Catholic Church, have come to understand themselves. In the late 20th century, the Catholic Church often sees itself as the people of God, not so much a polity. And so that way of conceiving of the Church and establishing the Church means something different than it would have meant before. The establishment of a church, particularly Catholic Church historically, is a way of bringing the two polities into proper alignment. The heavenly polity has a nobler purpose, salvation.
So yeah, you can have mildly established religions today that can remain broadly liberal because the ecclesiastical power is totally toothless. So yeah, these are forms of establishment that are pretty mild, but the integralist says that the ideal is a very coercive form of establishment. The Pope can authorize the state to engage really serious civil penalties for ecclesiastical or canonical crimes.
Ross Kenyon: When did that change? When did the Pope lose that authority? Was it reunification of Italy?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: So it was already starting to die off with early modern Catholic states. The ones that were established primarily after the wars of religion. As they were called. So, you know, the Spanish crown would be loyal to the Pope in some ways, but it didn’t have to be. They just had so much more power. And then it’s time when other societies started to become nations and much later with Germany and Italy, and Italy in particular becoming its own state and being unified in the late 19th century, put the papal states away from the Pope, confine the Pope to the Vatican.
And so basically it stripped the Pope of any temporal power outside of, you know, Vatican City basically. I mean what is – so yeah, the European states just took away the pope’s authority even though by the Reformation it had – by the end of the Reformation. It really wasn’t effective in many places. And there are even questions about how effective it was in the high Middle Ages and late Middle Ages, because in many cases, kings would just ignore the pope. And so there wasn’t an effective indirect power. So actually, the presence or existence of the indirect power, as I’ve described, is actually not that common as functioning in effect in medieval Europe as you might think.
Ross Kenyon: You have quite a big section here about the crowning of Charlemagne and the dance between who’s crowning and who’s bowing. Napoleon taking the crown for himself much later. Something happened in a millennium.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yes, yes, although really with Charlemagne it happens because he doesn’t think he gets any legitimacy as emperor because Leo III crowned him, but Leo III took something very different away from it. And so, yeah, even then, you know, he thought he could call councils and did. There’s a council of Frankfurt that rejected icons, but all the ecumenical councils were called by Byzantine emperors. And one Empress, the seventh one, but Regent Empress Irene. But so the thought was, yeah, the king had a great deal of ecclesiastical power, even though they couldn’t define dogma.
Now, they could have their own bishops and appoint their own bishops was up to up to the state. And that was a position that was actually not that uncommon, even in the high Middle Ages in France. So often in France, there was a greater sense of the monarch’s power in ecclesiastical affairs, in part because of Charlemagne’s legacy.
Ross Kenyon: We have a state of affairs now where in much of the world that listeners are listening from, there is a strong separation of church and state. This is a fairly voluntary or mostly voluntary association that you might have with your church if you go to church at all. There’s no compulsion to go if you don’t. And I think we’ve taken for granted. You probably were taught in school that was a good thing and that it’s all good, helps us get along. But actually that’s more controversial and it’s becoming more controversial as time goes on, it turns out.
Maybe we can walk through the challenges to liberalism here from integralism and why that’s happening now.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: So one reason it’s happening now, and then we can shift to the intellectual challenges, is that I think many young Catholics feel betrayed by liberal order. They were told that they would be tolerated when in fact their views are often despised by American elites. A lot of these really smart Catholics have gone to really top-notch universities where they felt that they were on the outs. They were marginalized. They couldn’t talk about their views. Their views are hated and bigoted and so on. And I think there’s a greater willingness among young Catholics to say, and even conservative Protestants are saying, you know, look, maybe this whole American project is culminating in progressivism.
Maybe the problem was there for the start. Maybe the American idea was a mistake. You don’t have many young conservatives with pocket constitutions anymore. But 20 years ago, you did. And it’s because Christians felt comfortable in social order, the American social and political order, even though not everyone agreed with them. They didn’t feel like the state was openly hostile. The culture is openly hostile to them. And so that created a demand for kind of right-wing radicalism, a sense that you could cure political ills if you radically change society. So I think that’s a big part of the attraction of integralism.
Another big part of it is this idea that as Christians, we really should be willing to have a Christ-focused political approach. The Republican Party and the Democratic Party are not giving us political ideals in a theological context, and that’s oftentimes what they want, which I understand that. I understand both impulses. It’s just going as radically far away from where we are now as possible does not seem to me to be a good idea, really warranted or effective given our Um, social conditions. Intellectually, part of the argument is that the integralism fits better with the, the, uh, history of the church.
And I, I discussed that in the book. Um, and it also makes some more kind of philosophical sense that the state would at least be involved in promoting our ultimate good. Um, like why would the state, you know, be restricted to only promoting temporal goods if it could work with the church to help people go to heaven? And this was the point you’re getting at, like, It’s crazy that the state shouldn’t do that. It’s negligent, even though, as I said, there are limitations on the means that can be used to promote the supernatural good.
The idea that it would just not be in the business of doing that at all is just really peculiar. So those are the things I think really driving intellectually. There’s the history, what I call history argument. And then there’s what I call the symmetry argument, which is just the claim that, look, if states are going to promote natural goods, why then they should promote supernatural goods like salvation and virtue of faith and the Eucharist as well. Right. So there’s a symmetry between how the state treats natural and supernatural goods. I think those are the two main arguments in the arsenal.
The integralist, and they clasp, I think, pretty well. The one gives you the kind of institutional form, the history argument, and the other gives you the sort of political philosophical rationale, the moral argument.
Ross Kenyon: So much to talk about there. I’m curious why you associate this with being a right-wing proclivity, because whenever I’ve read the Gospels, it always strikes me as very demanding and almost pre- or apolitical in a way. I often think of the line from Romans of, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The demands made on you just in the Sermon on the Mount are extreme. There’s a lot of you and basically however much you give, you’re probably not going to get to that saint level or that Christ level.
That’s just sort of mostly beyond you unless you are really truly that elect little crew that can do it. It doesn’t even strike me as being something that is like a way to own the libs or anything else. Dorothy Day, I think, is a great example of someone who’s lived in the Catholic worker movement. That’s not a right-wing thing, but that strikes me as in line with the Gospels. Why is it not the Catholic worker movement blowing up rather than some sort of right-wing populist integralism?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Well, it’s interesting with the integralists that they’re no fan of markets. And there used to be a lot of left-wing integralists, but Trump’s election gradually produced a kind of fracture in the movement and the left-wing folks would eventually split off and then kind of die out. So that’s just kind of like part of the story why integralism got to be associated with Trump and such things. But they’re still very economically more left wing. They just say that the problem with the progressives is they make all the theology watered down and heretical.
And so the thought is like if you want to be a true Catholic, yeah, you should lean left on economic issues. You’ve got to lean right on politics. But what really makes them right-wing is their response to America. They’re not conservatives in the Anglophone sense of preserving institutions. They’re more like right-wingers in the French sense, in the sense of trying to undo the revolution, right? So it’s less, say, Edmund Burke and more Joseph de Maistre. So, you know, they’re counter-revolutionary right-wingers. They’re not really conservative.
Ross Kenyon: Counter-revolutionary or reactionary is a term that’s pejorative but often used for these people too.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Well, that’s why I use counter-revolutionary instead of reactionary because reactionary is a pejorative. But I don’t think counter-revolutionary is.
Ross Kenyon: I mean counter – I guess revolutionary has a more positive – yeah, but maybe it’s better. Yeah, maybe.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: It’s more obscure. Definitely.
Ross Kenyon: If someone called themselves that, I’d be like, who? What kind of dog whistle is this or what audience is this term for exactly? But yeah, when I think of Edmund Burke’s a great example of Change needs to happen, but it has to happen. And he took stands too about India, about America. Edmund Burke is not some sort of horrible person like this, but he thought that we should do things gradually, not through fiat. We should respect change and make sure things come from the bottom up kind of thing. That does not strike me as being in line, kind of revolutionary kind of mentality.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: No, although there’s a new book by a Roger Scruton student, Sebastian Morello. That actually makes the case that Burke has some integralist elements, Anglican-wise. I don’t know how convincing it is, but it’s detailed and it’s really grounded in the text. I had no idea about that side of him, but he’s definitely not Maestra and a counter-revolutionary and all of that. I just think he thinks if society preserved the right sorts of things, it would gravitate Towards integralists or quasi-integralist institutions. But that would just be a claim about evolution, development of societies.
And you couldn’t really know for sure whether that was true or not. So like Morello, for instance, when I’ve talked to him, is just very clear. He’s like, we have no idea what religious establishment is going to look like when we’re getting society right. But we have some guesses. So in any event... There is at least one guy who’s quasi-integralist who has made the argument for pushing Burke and Maestro a little closer together. But that is just the exception that proves the rule, I think, of the association between them. So, yeah, I mean, I think that, yeah, the idea is to undo the order that exists, to replace it with a better order rather than trying to preserve what’s best in it.
Because as many integrals will say, well, how much good is even left? You can’t conserve things if they’re bad.
Ross Kenyon: I think if you say, well, look at the Hutterites, the Mennonites, the Amish, those are opt-in, there’s a rumspringa sort of ability to exit, but that’s just, but the mainstream, you’re, so that maybe is that the exception? Foolish proxentism, proto-liberalism.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Even that’s part of liberalism? The Mennonites? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they think the Protestants are an inevitable, liberalism is an inevitable consequence of Protestantism because Protestantism says you can have private judgments in matters of faith and what to believe in your conscience and liberalism just generalizes that, universalizes that idea.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, priesthood of the believers as you.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yes, yes. But now not as a priesthood of your moral beliefs too.
Ross Kenyon: What would it look like to have an established church? Could we even do that in the United States?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Is that even going to make – Well, it’s unconstitutional. So you can’t do that, but you do have to change the establishment clause or at least to somewhat modify it, and that would take – that’s never going to happen. I think what they’re imagining – like Adrian Vermeule has written a bunch of why he thinks that liberalism will destroy itself. And I think he’s imagining something a little like what happened with the Soviet Union and its collapse. So Marxism gets intellectually discredited. The Marxists leave the government, but the government still exists.
And there are enough people sympathetic to liberal democratic capitalism that have been inside the state that then they’re able to kind of reorient and take over the state and push it in a new direction. So the thought is that, you know, what might happen is that American liberals collapse. They lose their authority. But then if you have the right people in the judiciary, the administrative state, they’ll be ready to create a kind of Catholic establishment, or at least a broadly Christian establishmentarian state in the ruins of collapsed liberal ideology. So, you know, I mean, it’s not the claim that, like, There haven’t been ideological collapse and recolonizations of the state and a change in its ideology.
The problem for Catholics is that they can’t actually do it on the integralist view unless the Pope supports it. They’re not allowed to. The Pope has to authorize this. So the Catholic Church isn’t going to do that. Francis called integralism a plague in a private meeting. Yeah, you just Google that. I mean there’s 5,600 bishops in the Catholic Church. You’re going to have to find cardinals from there that are integralists. They’re going to have to decide to elect an integralist pope. The integralist pope is going to have to decide to be integralist again in terms of policy.
I mean getting a Catholic state in the United States, just focusing on state capture over time, either the timeline is short, in which case it’s inevitably violent. I don’t think the integralists want that, but it’s inevitably violent. Or it’s just so – Yeah. It’s like Hayek says about socialists. It’s like to get to socialism, you have to use means that most socialists reject. Or the plan for takeover is over centuries, and then you just have no idea about what the social conditions would even be. So either it’s a bloody short-term plan or it’s a hopelessly vague long-term plan.
But that’s just on the state side of things. That’s just getting control of the state. You have to get control of the church, and then the church and the state have to reunite when states now have nuclear weapons. I mean, their power is unimaginably greater than... So I don’t really see why any modern state would submit to the Pope. It seems crazy. So I don’t see why the – I mean I think the transitional problems are just overwhelmingly difficult, and I talk a lot about that in Chapter 4 when I talk about Adrian Vermeule’s kind of transition strategy or plans based on about 15 different short articles he’s written about various aspects of it.
Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: What about something like Benedict Option, Rob Dreher?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Well, the problem with that is, is that Vermeule addresses it in his review of Deneen’s book. And he says, look, the liberal state is too toxic. It’s not going to allow for this local stuff. So, you know, you have to find, as he says, a strategic position to sear the liberal faith with hot irons, you know, to capture the institutions of the old order that liberalism has prepared for human dignity and the common good. So, yeah. You know, he just thinks you have to engage in a kind of capture the state.
This is in his review integration from within an integrations kind of a code for integralism. Right. So, yeah, so that’s the worry about Deneen. But now I think Deneen agrees with him because of regime change stuff. He, too, is thinking about taking over the state. And that’s, I think, between his friendship with Vermeule on the one hand and his, I guess, friendship in a way with Victor Orban.
Ross Kenyon: Do you ever feel like your scholarship, this sounds insulting, Kevin, I don’t mean it this way, is boring though, because these people are advocating radical things and you’re defending the established order, you know, some changes, I’m sure, but broadly defending the institutions that exist, that seems like kind of a hard, kind of unsexy academic place to be. Is that wrong?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: That’s right. I mean, the problem right now is, you know, liberalism is less exciting than it once was. But I think that as liberals try to adjust to these, you know, liberalism is very adaptable. I mean, when socialism came along, it took on socialist elements. When conservatism was opposing socialism in the US, UK kind of harmonized with Conservatism, and so you get these two sort of quasi-liberal governing ideologies, progressivism and a kind of fusionist conservatism. So like that’s one of the reasons that liberalism has done so well. It’s kind of survived by mitosis and then symbiotes.
So, you know, liberal is super, super adaptable so that it’s the reform ideology. So it doesn’t screw up the local niche like socialism does. It just changes everything and collapses. But unlike conservatism, it can sort of experiment. Right. So. So I won’t put it past liberals to find a way to draw on the insights of these folks to develop a kind of richly Christian form of liberalism that’s a lot more inspiring. And I want to be a part of that. So yeah, you can’t ever count liberalism out. Like it’s looked like it was going to die in the late 19th century.
It looked like it was going to die in like the 30s and 40s. And then it just keeps not dying. So I’m hopeful.
Ross Kenyon: Do you never feel the temptation to, I don’t even know how to say this properly, but filioque?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: The filioque.
Ross Kenyon: Do you ever just want to just tell the Catholics they’re wrong and then have the Orthodox just like subsume Catholicism and then just end the schism permanently? Wouldn’t that just be a nice clean solution though?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: To which problems?
Ross Kenyon: To make it exciting.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Well, yeah, orthodoxy is pretty exciting. And it’s also new and radical. And it doesn’t have – like almost all the local churches are pretty respectful of religious freedom. Russia had said some nice stuff in the early 2000s, but now it’s kind of gone back on it to some degree, not entirely. But yeah, I mean the orthodox actually because – For a lot of the time, you had the Byzantine emperor being way more powerful than all the local bishops. Integralism doesn’t really come up because you don’t have a pope that’s superior to the crown.
And so you get this doctrine of symphonia, which is a kind of integration, but it’s still a very central role for a czar or an emperor or something like that. I don’t think that’s what’s required to be orthodox. But I do think we should get the band back together ultimately. I mean we need to because that’s what God wants us to do. And I actually think we can agree to disagree about the filioque but still be in open communion with one another. But yeah, I mean the orthodox are not very liberal.
They’ve not really dealt with liberalism except in a ways that they perceive as hostile. There are young American radical orthodox that are kind of like integralists that think there should be a Christian state. But yeah, the idea that orthodoxy would be the established religion of the U. S. is thousands of times less likely than Catholicism being the established church of the U. S. , which is already a one in a million, if not more, chance of actually occurring. So not the best way to go.
Ross Kenyon: It’s amazing that you think that ending the schism is both desirable and even possible here. I guess it depends on what you have to acknowledge that the supremacy of the Pope over the patriarchates, does it do it?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: No, well, sort of. So what it would involve, in my view, is the Pope being granted, recognized by the Orthodox as having a purely judicial position. To resolve disputes between the other patriarchs, because that’s how Orthodox see the role of the Pope in many cases in the first millennium. So, and I don’t think any of the last six or seven Popes had any interest, say, in picking the bishops that are on the Orthodox jurisdiction. And in fact, I don’t think the Pope’s ever, maybe one exception, tried to appoint the Patriarch of Constantinople.
Um, which, you know, that bishopric goes back to Constantine. Um, so I don’t, I think there could be some kind of concordant where there was an agreement where the Pope says, look, I’m not going to try to appoint your, your bishops or depose your bishops, but, you know, we’ll be in communion, you’ll acknowledge me as arbiter, um, and, um, It could be something like that. A lot of Orthodox are really hostile to this, but there are other Orthodox that are interested in reunion. Catholics tend to be very interested in reunion, and they will say, well, yeah, papal primacy, you need to acknowledge that.
It’s critical not to acknowledge it on the one hand, but we should really find a way to bury the hatchet. But yeah, if that were to happen, I mean, the Orthodox Catholicism, whatever we would Call it, instead of Roman Catholicism, let’s call it Orthodox Catholicism or Roman Orthodoxy or who knows. But it would be a much more conservative organization and also one a lot less inclined toward certain kinds of liberalism. And that’d be good in some ways and bad in others, in my view.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’d like to unpack that. And also to add to it, do you think it would lead to more agreement, having a more unified Christendom in this way? Is it bad that there’s so many sects? Does it lead to more conflict or does it lead to more options for exit that result in less conflict on that?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Well, I mean, you know, the Orthodox Church has been pretty good at avoiding internal schism. I mean, we have a little bits and ones here and we have a little bit of believers, right? Yeah, it’s not, and all the calendarists, too. I mean, that’s not a big deal, really. But I mean, the Orthodox Church has done pretty good in avoiding schism, and so has the Catholic Church. But I think there’s a de facto schism in the Catholic Church that there isn’t in the Orthodox Church over doctrine. I mean, Ecumenical Patriarch and Patriarch Kirill, the Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia, they don’t disagree on theology.
It’s mostly just like geopolitics. So we have a lot more internal dogmatic unity, although we have a lot less dogma too. But yeah, I mean, the patriarchs, they do not have Francis’s social views. They might be somewhat sympathetic to his economic views, but not his social views. And I think there’s also would be a lot of trust issues with the papacy trying to sort of mess with Orthodox liturgy, in part because of Francis coming down on the Latin Mass.
Ross Kenyon: A lot of hurdles. There are, but there’s also, is it Uniate? Is that how I say it? I’ve only ever read these. Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: That’s how some of the Orthodox came under and how the Catholic Church and you’ve got the Byzantine Rite, which still exists.
Ross Kenyon: There’s a monastery pretty close to Seattle, actually. A couple hours drive up in the mountains. There’s a Byzantine Rite. They’re here.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Oh, yeah. They’re amazing. And we have the exact same liturgy as they do, and they don’t even say the Filioque. So they don’t have to because it’s an early, you can keep As Catholics to an older liturgy, as long as it doesn’t make claims that the church has denied. So they actually leave the Orthodox liturgy alone for the Byzantine liturgy alone. And so it’s identical to our liturgy, except for commemorating the Pope. So yeah, it’s just the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. So there’s still huge similarities.
Ross Kenyon: And do you, did we answer that? Do you think on net, us agreeing more like among co-religionists or near co-religionists, would that lead on net to like more harmony? Do you think that would actually happen or too soon to tell?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: I mean, it depends on, it would depend on the issue. I think there would be more harmony in resisting certain modern social teachings. There’d be more harmony with respect to agreement about things like abortion. But I also think that... There would be internal tensions because many of the progressives would be kind of pushed back on their heels. And maybe the Orthodox would develop really powerful progressive faction, but we really don’t have one. We have a very small intellectual progressive faction surrounding Fordham. But I don’t think it’s going to happen for a century or so because The Orthodox, we had such a disastrous 20th century between the Ottomans and the Communists that I think we really need to recover ourselves and our institutions and writings and self-understanding because I think a lot of Orthodox would worry that a reunification would lead to the sort of Catholic culture and influence undermining and diluting Orthodox, the Orthodox Church.
Ross Kenyon: I can see that, but you might gain some, too. Having a transnational pope has the benefit of geopolitics becoming less of a thing for state churches at the national level. Russian orthodoxy, I’m sure, feels pressure. They felt certainly pressure during the Soviet times, but even now with the war. They feel pressure now, yeah.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: I mean, in terms of the war, although Kirill is so for the war, he doesn’t see it as pressure here. But all the same, it’s still done a lot to discredit Russian Orthodoxy in a lot of ways that made me very sad. So, yeah, I mean, I think there would still be national churches in Orthodoxy, I think, but having the Pope as our arbiter and recognized, and he played more of a diplomatic role And so would be, I mean, kind of restored as the first bishop of Europe. That, yeah, that would give him a lot more prestige and power.
Now, it depends on how he would use it. But if the Orthodox had the power to vote for Pope, you know, the patriarchs would say, for instance, in the Metropolitans or what have you, then you get fewer progressive Popes. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: That’s pretty fascinating. So New Francis would be unlikely. Less likely.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Depends on what the voting rights of the Orthodox would be. Maybe the Catholics don’t give them voting rights. I don’t know. It all depends. They have to work it out. But if they’re going to be governed by the Pope at all, then you would think they’d get a vote. On the other hand, if they’re not governed fully, then you might think they don’t.
Ross Kenyon: Well, how does it work with bishops that oversee, I guess, with these liturgical rite differences here, do they have?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: They all can have cardinals that can vote. Actually, I think they have their own system. Because if you look at the College of Cardinals, you’ll see a couple of ones dressed like Orthodox, if you pay attention. Small number. That are the Byzantines. So, yeah. Yeah. But no, the details would have to be hammered out, and that would take decades too. But the ecumenical patriarch, Bartholomew, he already supports Reunion. He says that he’s told, even our holiest monks, he says it’s going to happen eventually. So that matters.
Ross Kenyon: Do you think that’s a this century kind of thing? Any odds?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: No idea. Yeah. A lot of it has to do with Orthodox regain their confidence as... In terms of its institutions after being just utterly destroyed and dominated and obliterated. There’s still a lot of intellectual work in orthodoxy and figuring out like who we were historically, like there’s been so much forgetting. So for instance, a lot of orthodox think that like Aquinas is the devil or whatever, but like Byzantine reception of Aquinas actually varied quite a bit. There were some who didn’t like him and there’s some who liked him a lot.
The orthodox have kind of forgotten our tradition of natural law. Because there’s so much desire to distinguish ourselves. But many of our, you know, great, you know, saints and intellectuals like Maximus, you know, had a doctrine of natural law. So, you know, I also think that, you know, Orthodox think you have to reject any substitutionary view of the atonement. But it turns out they’re Orthodox, some Orthodox have, you know, in the past, centuries ago, have substitutionary views, not penal substitution, but Substitutionary abuse. So I think recovering Augustine as an Orthodox saint, I mean, there’s a lot of things that could happen that would lead to some harmonization.
I just don’t think it’s going to happen for a long time, if it happens at all.
Ross Kenyon: Well, my layperson understanding here, oh, I’m actually using layperson in a kind of appropriate way here. But also, I associate it with the Desert Fathers and mysticism. I’ve been inside of many Orthodox cathedrals and churches. Church Slavonic is often very beautiful. There’s lots of chanting.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: There’s censors going around. Oh, yeah. I sing in my choir, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: And it’s beautiful too. I’ve also been to the FSSP here in Seattle. And it is the most fecund place I’ve ever seen. Everyone there has so many children. And they’re all dressed appropriately. It’s not like, well, show up as you want. They’re like, no, you show up in your Sunday best. The Sunday best actually exists in those places. And I can see those standards being attractive to people. It’s beautiful in a way that the megachurch inside the strip mall is just not. And I can see that growing. Maybe this is relevant for climate change, too, because the way that we’ve described it right now, it sounds like there’s some intellectuals like Deneen at Notre Dame, or I guess you should say Notre Dame here if you’re in America.
That’s... That’s like intellectuals and some weird internet people, but like this probably will have trickle out from anecdotes from you and I and the intellectuals out to having more of an impact on society in the next decade or two, I think. Do you agree with that? Is that going to influence our politics more than it is now?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: The problem with the American integralists is they want political power now, now, now. And so they’ve taken the doctrine esoteric and don’t talk about it that much. For instance, they’ve not engaged my book at all, not even a mention. They don’t really want to talk about this stuff openly. Now, I didn’t expect them to engage. I’m not bothered by it either. I’m kind of relieved because of how they – well, because of how they tend to engage people intellectually is just pretty negative. Do you think? Mean. Mean. Me. At least.
Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Just kind of nasty and dismissive. There’s a lot of integralists, though, who are totally the opposite of that.
Ross Kenyon: You bend over backwards, by the way, to be like, well, to be fair to Catholics here, I’m not a Catholic, but I read all this stuff, and this is what they would say. You were very generous to them, too.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: I tried to be. I tried to be. I think I was. I think most integralists realized that. I know one of them told me that it was jarring to see me defend integralism. That’s not what they were expecting. So yeah, but I give it the best shot I can.
Ross Kenyon: You steel man it pretty well. I think that you do. Oh, thanks. But so would you predict that they want it now, now, now, but will it go from being intellectuals and internet people to being, will this become a force in politics that people will know by name in a couple of years?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: No, unless they have some high-profile conversions with Catholics in the administrative state of the judiciary. But that’s something they’re working toward. So they want to convert elites because they think if they can convert elites, then they can have it. They’ve got a kind of elite-based theory of social change. It’s almost like what I call vanguard Thomism. Can you make that up?
Ross Kenyon: That’s a very short term, but love it. Yes.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah. So, I mean, you know, not... You know, not as a violent thing, but just as a theory of social change, right? You’ve got to bring it about with leaders bringing about the, in this case, counter-revolution. I mean, one integralist on Twitter compared it, used this analogy, even compared it to the Albigensian Crusade, which was extremely violent.
Ross Kenyon: He wants to reenact that?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Well, he said it would take something, to win it would take something like the Albigensian Crusade. Which is not a good analogy. I mean or at least it’s not a good association to put in people’s minds, right? But I think they think that liberalism is going to collapse at some point in the next 50 to 100 years. And so they’re working pretty hard on trying to win converts among the powerful and then younger people really trying to reach younger people that they’re not really interested in developing the ideas.
Ross Kenyon: There is one area where I do agree or feel kinship with some of those ideas, and it’s that I think liberalism alone feels pretty thin if that’s the only thing that you believe in. There’s not a lot to hold on to.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: This is the libertarian pipeline to integralism that there is. It’s the sense that libertarianism is so thin, but then libertarians put this form of life to it that’s just utterly debased, which I think you and I – I agree is probably true. All this stuff about value being totally subjective and they’re not really being much morality and thinking most morality is nonsense and authoritarian. And I think, yeah, a lot of libertarians and classical liberals, they end up having what Rawls would call a comprehensive doctrine or theory the good, but they don’t really try to develop it.
And when they do, it’s, you know, Oftentimes, it’s pretty problematic. Now, there are those who try to develop a virtue theory in various ways, but then, you know, it gets kind of complicated. I mean, Deirdre McCloskey has a very rich view. She, in bourgeois virtues, I think she even speaks to supernatural virtues. She’s Anglican. But then, you know, there aren’t a lot of conservative Christians that are probably going to follow Deirdre, you know, too much.
Ross Kenyon: Just because she’s trans or there’s like a gender...
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Let’s just put it this way. That’s not a bureau to me in any way to take her ideas seriously, but it’s going to be for a lot of conservative Christians. That’s just the reality.
Ross Kenyon: Converting elites, do you think something like Amy Coney Barrett, is she sympathetic to these views or no?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: No. My guess is that she’s enough of an obedient Catholic that she thinks the church’s teaching on religious liberty and Dignitatis Humanae that came out in 1965 is the standard view. So, I mean, I know people at Notre Dame that knew her when she was there. And yeah, I mean, she’s quite theologically conservative, but they didn’t say she has no sympathies, but I’m pretty sure she would just say, look, I’m in line with the council and I accept the council and its teachings.
Ross Kenyon: So there’s so many terms here that I’ve only, I’ve read a lot about this, but I’ve never said them out loud. Is Sede Vacantis? Sede?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah, they’re such a small minority. They think the papal throne is vacant because of various bad popes and stuff. But they’re an extreme minority. They only get brought up because their view is so wild and hilarious.
Ross Kenyon: I thought I was reading the Wikipedia page once upon a time. I’m sure Mel Gibson is on there or maybe it was Mel Gibson.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. He said when he converted that like the Pope was the he was the chair. So he seemed to seem to think that then. But who knows what direction he’s gone and hard to say.
Ross Kenyon: So beyond intellectual interest here, I mean, I think this stuff is inherently interesting and that’s good. I was trying to connect it to, will this small group have influence in the future? And that will clearly have an impact for climate change and many, many issues here. But it sounds like you think unless they make some major changes, this will likely remain a small group. And it seems like your writing is intended to nip it in the bud, essentially, and hope that it stays that way. Is that a correct reading here of your...
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah, I mean I want Christians to be doing political theology because I do think right now the church is – American church is in a state of captivity to political polarization. And I think the good thing the Integralists did is that they revealed that there was all this young energy and youthful energy and passion. And so what I wanted to do was take the integralists seriously in order to kind of shed insight on sort of Christian political theology as a whole. It’s the reason I don’t go after it as much as possible.
But yeah, I also don’t want integralists in power, but I like that they’re around. So in the same way that like in moral philosophy, I’m glad there are act utilitarians out there. You learn a lot from engaging their views, but I don’t want Peter Singer in power. Yeah. But I like that he exists. I like that he’s putting ideas out there. Even some of them are horrible.
Ross Kenyon: You have to deal with his challenges, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: So I want Enderalists out there to shed insight, but I just don’t want them in power. For me, if there’s the intellectuals like Thomas Pink, who I talk to often, he’s great. I mean he just wants to talk – I mean for him, he is – he’s not a counter-revolutionary guy in terms of practical politics. But he does think integralism is the ideal. But he and I have even been talking recently about how mind-bogglingly complex some of the issues raised by integralism are. And I think what’s exciting is this prospect of shedding insight together.
So yeah, I think I’m pretty pleased about that. But yeah, I mean, chapter four is meant to kind of try to make clear to young integralists like, look, you’ve got like the smartest theory of this, one of the smartest theorists of the state around. And, you know, he has to make these kind of instability claims and sort of predictions and implicitly assuming an elite-led theory of social change without really defending it and downplaying certain challenges of pluralism and It’s just a really implausible sort of project that I think ultimately will lead young Catholics to impious places because either they just give in to their desire for power or worse, if you were moving in that direction, they’d erode democratic institutions and the state would become more dangerous to people.
So, yeah. Yeah. I don’t think they intend that, by the way. I just think that’s an inevitable consequence of their position. Like Einstein was a socialist, right? I don’t think he’d hurt a fly.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I think some of what you said there is some of the most liberal thinking that I’ve ever heard articulated, and it probably just comes natural to you. But I feel very similarly, too. Just because you write against someone doesn’t mean you don’t want them to exist. And I often feel that we’re best as a society when, you know, I’m not many of the people I named at the beginning of the show. I don’t share these beliefs. I don’t want them to not exist because they offer challenges. Both far left and far right offer challenges that you have to reckon with.
And even the center. The center has weaknesses as well. They often are very good at pointing them out. And you have to be able to sustain those arguments and address them if you want to have an integrity-filled life here. That’s good.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: No, I think that’s right. And I’m going to be at Notre Dame Law on the 24th of January. And that’s the talk I’m going to give. I’m going to say, look, here’s what I think it is. Here’s what I think a good argument for the view is. Here’s what I think a good argument against it is. I’m not here to bury integralism. I’m here to kind of take some of its energy and refocus it in a way that I think is productive.
Ross Kenyon: You doing this with Deneen?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Oh, he won’t come.
Ross Kenyon: He won’t come? Not even him? He’s been kind of a superstar now.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: No. No. No. He’s blocked me.
Ross Kenyon: Twitter? You guys quarrel?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah. No, I didn’t quarrel. He just got locked. I don’t know why.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, well. Yeah. I mean, he’s the person I most associate with this. And it sounds like Notre Dame is just a hub for this at this point.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Not exactly. Among young people, there are just a huge amount of interest. But in many cases, they don’t want to go all the way. Yeah. So, yeah, but we’ll see what people say. None of the faculty are really sympathetic, but the young people, I’ve been told by younger people at Notre Dame are.
Ross Kenyon: I think we’ve spoken. I think I have probably been a little bit careless in this show, too, of associating all of the authoritarianisms that are present now with integralism. But that’s not actually the case. I know people who are secular who like the able law and they like some of the mystic fascist kind of. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yes, yes. This is where the new secular, weird secular part of the new right, like BAP and Bronze Age Pervert and people like that. Oh, you don’t know that guy? Oh, yeah. His political philosophy book was like number one on Amazon. Yeah, and James Lindsay and just like these weird, weird guys. But yeah, they’re totally – there is this weird non-Christian new right mystical fash kind of – Yeah, I had a moment during the early days of COVID where she became Orthodox.
Ross Kenyon: I think she came from DC and was dissatisfied.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Who? Who?
Ross Kenyon: I’d rather not name her on the show. I’m not sure.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Oh, I see. Okay.
Ross Kenyon: I’m not sure you know her, but she was only an acquaintance of mine, but she was arguing against any COVID restrictions, which independently of the effectiveness of any of them, it doesn’t even matter. So we ended up Kind of going back and forth a little bit because she was saying that Christianity doesn’t actually require the protection of the weak over the strong. We’ve lived in such a milk toasted society here that we actually need to prioritize the needs of the strong. And I had this sort of Will Durant broad arcs of philosophy moment.
Yeah. Isn’t that because Christianity inverted paganism. Paganism was the worship of the strong over the weak. Christianity was blessed are the meek. And that was a major change for the entire human universe. And she was sort of inverting it. But I didn’t understand it because she was also a very serious Orthodox believer. And I was like, but isn’t, isn’t that very contrary to your views that I misunderstand her in some way?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think she would, I would just disagree with that position completely. So, yeah. I just think the institutions that actually help the poor are just really different than people on the left. So it’s still a – it’s God’s world ultimately. If we don’t care for and protect the marginalized, he’s not exactly going to be pleased with us. So yeah, I just have a different view of that happens. I mean I think poverty gets eliminated only in market societies. And oftentimes government plays a role in trying to – Make sure that people don’t remain marginalized under a market system.
And my opposition to that is by no means total because we don’t know enough about what the patterns of charity would be in the absence of the welfare state and how well it would go. So, yeah, I mean, I think you have to have capitalism if you’re going to take care of the weak. The question is what kinds of protections from capitalism’s drawbacks are necessary in order to make them better off. I think that’s a really important question.
Ross Kenyon: I didn’t know if I just didn’t understand something about orthodoxy or she sounded like Ayn Rand or Nietzsche. I was just like, what synthesis has happened here that I don’t even know about? Is this some sort of weird? Okay. So it’s just wrong. Anyways, Kevin, we should probably- Well, but I mean, yeah, yeah.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: It’s just that a lot of orthodox will get like interested in weird ideas and some, so you hear some of that, but they’re still kind of trying to piece together their politics.
Ross Kenyon: I’m really glad you’re here. It was very fun to talk. Yeah. And then if you’re listening and you’d like to pick up a copy of Kevin’s book, here it is. Watch out for the blur. How can I get it to work?
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Oh, where am I? Yeah, there you go. You did it. You did it. All the kingdoms of the world. Beautiful.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Link to the show notes. We talked about so many ideas and thinkers. I’ll put them all in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Kevin.
Dr. Kevin Vallier: Yeah. Thank you so much.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com. Follow us on social media. We will catch you next time.
