After secularism, beyond facile separations: classical Anglican political theology redux?

Thou art in small things great, not small in any ...
Thou art in all things one, in each thing many: 
For thou art infinite in one and all - George Herbert, 'Providence'.

'What is Integralism Today?' - by Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist, in the Church Life Journal - is required reading for those seeking to understand how political theology should respond to the context analysed in both The Politics of Virtue (John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, 2016) and Why Liberalism Failed (Patrick Deneen, 2018).  In particular, we should note his statement:

Secularization in the sense of the separation of social spheres from religion acts against the practice of the true religion. By doing so it acts not only against supernatural virtue, but against natural virtue as well

This is not to say that an Anglican can heartily endorse Waldstein's account of integralism.  For example, consider this statement from the article:

As long as political institutions attempt to remain “neutral” towards the Church of Christ, they will in fact be under the power of the Prince of this World.

This seems to suggest an understanding which John Milbank has described as "Baroque neo-scholastic decadence":

a confessionalised religion became more a matter of formal belief, prescribed rule, private beneficence and clerical surveillance.

Milbank has also outlined the origins of this: 

the intellectual and spiritual betrayals perpetrated by Catholic baroque scholasticism - any facile separations between the sacred and the secular or between faith and reason, grace and nature.

Much depends on the meaning of Waldstein's rejection of "neutral".  Does it mean, on the one hand, "something more like the paleo-Durkheimian arrangement of the baroque confessional state"?  Or, on the other, is it an acceptance of a different constitutional arrangement which yet also expresses "an ordered relation of temporal and spiritual power in the deliberate pursuit of the good for human beings"?

At this point, we might consider an important post on The Hipster Conservative, 'The Idea of An Anglican Society'.  The post notes:

Mostly absent from the discourse is the normative Christian worldview of the English-speaking world for centuries: that of classical Anglicanism.

This absence - which is not least due to a lack of Anglican confidence in our own tradition - means that the discourse is not enriched by the Anglican experience, an experience which, as The Hipster Conservative states, has much to offer contemporary political reflection:

But Anglicanism’s deep connection to the polity of England and its colonies during its time as a (relative) champion of ordered liberty and human flourishing suggests that it has much to teach us if we put forth the effort to learn from it 

So how might a classical Anglican perspective respond to Waldstein's summary of contemporary Roman Catholic integralism?  A good starting point is C.S. Lewis' description of Hooker's vision:

Few model universes are more filled - one might say, more drenched - with Deity than his.  ‘All things that are of God’ (and only sin is not) ‘have God in them and he them in himself likewise’, yet ‘their substance and his wholly differeth’ (V.56.5).  God is unspeakably transcendent; but also unspeakably immanent.  It is this conviction which enables Hooker, with no anxiety, to resist any inaccurate claim that is made for revelation against reason, Grace against Nature, the spiritual against the secular.  We must not honour even heavenly things with compliments that are not quite true: ‘though it seem an honour, it is an injury’ (II.8.7).  All good things, reason as well as revelation, Nature as well as Grace, the commonwealth as well as the Church, are equally, though diversely, ‘of God’.  If nature hath need of grace’, yet also ‘grace hath use of nature’ (III.8.6). 

In this vision, political institutions are not condemned as 'secular' apart from a recognition of the Church.  The commonwealth, as well as the Church, is "of God": duties, obligations, and responsibilities within the commonwealth are from God and are called towards God.  Thus, according to Hooker, those who administer the commonwealth "are themselves agents in [God's] busines, the sentence of right Godes own verdict, and them selves his preistes to deliver it" (LEP V.1.2).

Thus, when Hooker declares that "True Religion is the "roote ... and staye of all well ordered common-wealthes" it is because "religion ... perfecteth mens habilities unto all kinds of vertuous services in the common wealth" (V.1.5).  It is for the flourishing and good ordering of the commonwealth, not in service of the ecclesial triumphalism and militancy of the Baroque confessional state.

John Hughes described this classical Anglican vision as "integral humanism".  It has a quite different genealogy to the traditionalist Roman Catholic integralism described by Waldstein, leading to a 'higher' understanding of 'secular' authority:

The rediscovery of the dignity of the laity at the Reformation and the suspicion of the clericalism which had developed in the medieval West from the Hildebrandine reforms of the eleventh century onwards, meant a return in the Church of England to the more non-dualist, integralist ecclesiology of the first millennium, combined with a more Byzantine  or Carolinian view of the 'priestly' nature of secular authority, which was recovered in the Reformation.

Tomorrow's post will reflect on the significance of this for the contemporary political and cultural context.  For now, however, it is appropriate to end with the closing words from Hughes' essay 'Anglicanism as Integral Humanism'.  Rather than handing over significant aspects of the created order to a fallen angel who claims to be "Prince of this world", Anglican integral humanism joyfully, robustly confesses all things - including the commonwealth - "as flowing from him and to him, who is the Alpha and Omega of all things".