Against Integralism: the Anglican case for ordered liberty

Mostly these new traditionalists are Catholic. None are Protestant, which maybe isn’t surprising, since arguably classical liberalism and modern capitalism are Protestant projects. Or maybe Protestantism is too intellectually exhausted to produce serious political thinkers!?!

So said a recent article in Providence, the journal of The Institute of Religion and Democracy.

Let's begin with the suggestion that "Protestantism is too intellectually exhausted to produce serious political thinkers". A few Anglican names came immediately to mind.  (To save any debate about whether or not Anglicanism is Protestant - hint: it is - we can agree that for most of the 'new traditionalists', Anglicanism is indeed Protestant.)  Oliver O'Donovan.  Nigel Biggar. Rowan Williams.  Roger Scruton.  Each of these Anglican thinkers have made serious contributions to contemporary political theology.  

To give some examples, Biggar's forthcoming What's Wrong with Rights addresses a significant contemporary political debate, close to the heart of the convulsions being experienced by the liberal order.  O'Donovan's The Desire of the Nations and The Ways of Judgment articulate a substantive political theology.  Rowan Williams's thinking on secularism and on pluralism offered an important critique of secular political assumptions.  And Scruton's definitions and defences of conservatism had a profoundly Anglican ethos.

Outside of Anglicanism, we might consider the work of David VanDrunen.  As a review of his Politics after Christendom has stated:

He sets out to demonstrate why and how Christians should value and exercise their common citizenship with non-Christians in various political communities (broadly construed) of penultimate finite secularity ... For VanDrunen political institutions grounded in the Noahic Covenant are legitimate, provisional, common, and accountable. These four concepts are intended to frame Christian engagement with society in a way that retains theocentric depth, while remaining intelligible to the broader pluralistic community.

In other words, it certainly is not the case that contemporary Protestantism is "too intellectually exhausted to produce serious political thinkers".  What is the case, rather, is a failure to consider what serious contemporary Protestant political theology is saying.  This is partly because a significant stream within the 'new traditionalism' is represented by the Integralism of Adrian Vermeule.  When Vermeule declares "there is no stable middle ground between Catholicism and atheist materialism", we get an indication of why his 'new traditionalism' has little interest in Protestant political theology.

We might also contrast Vermeule's Integralist critique of common law and precedent with Scruton's emphasis upon them:

it has been one of the strengths of our constitution that judges have been able to reinterpret harsh, absolute or confused legislation in the light of their own existing principles ... Naturally it is not possible to dispense with statute; all administration depends upon it.  But in England statute has been been a deliberative affair, constrained as much by judicial precedent as by 'reasons of state'.

As Addleshaw noted in his The High Church Tradition, this understanding of common law and precedent was related to ecclesiastical experience:

In the Church of England there is no sovereign in the sense in which the papacy is sovereign in the Church of Rome; no part of the Church can arrogate to itself the title of speaking for the whole.  The only sovereign they recognize is the traditional customary law of the English nation, viewed as a Church, and the name they give it is ecclesiastical common law.

It is not too much of an imaginative leap to then identify the rather different ecclesiastical experience which leads Vermeule to declare that his "common-good constitutionalism will favor a powerful presidency".  The Protestant concern for ordered liberty, by contrast, has historically nurtured a balanced, mixed constitution, in which no single part of the constitutional order can arrogate to itself the power to determine the common good.

Ironically, one of the voices amongst the 'new traditionalists' illustrates the rather different concerns of Protestant ordered liberty against Integralism's "common-good constitutionalism".  Jewish political philosopher Yoram Hazony has pointed to the key figures in what he terms the tradition of "Anglo-American conservatism":

What is of interest here is a particular conservative political tradition, the conservative tradition of English-speaking countries, which I will call Anglo-American conservatism. This is a tradition that can be traced back to the Middle Ages. But we may speak of a kind of classical period for this tradition that begins with John Fortescue in the 1470s, and continues with individuals such as Richard Hooker, Sir Edward Coke, John Selden, Edward Hyde (Earl of Clarendon), Sir Matthew Hale, Sir William Temple, Jonathan Swift, Sir William Blackstone, Josiah Tucker, Edmund Burke, John Dickinson, John Adams, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton. Scottish philosophers such as David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and Thomas Reid contributed much to this tradition as well.

Yes, with the exception of Fortescue, they are all Protestants.  Hazony goes on to suggest the key features of this political tradition, amongst which are:

Limited Executive Power. The powers of the king (or president) are limited by the laws of the nation, which he neither determines nor adjudicates. The powers of the king (or president) are limited by the representatives of the people, whose advice and ­consent he must obtain both respecting the laws and taxation.

Individual Freedoms. The security of the indivi­dual’s life and property is mandated by God as the basis for a society that is both peaceful and prosperous, and is to be protected against arbitrary actions of the state. The ability of the nation to seek truth and conduct sound policy depends on freedom of speech and debate. These and other fundamental rights and liberties are guaranteed by law, and may be infringed upon only by due process of law.

Helpfully emphasising the point that this tradition of ordered liberty has deeply Protestant roots, he continues:

These principles can serve as a summary of the Anglo-American conservative tradition that was the basis for the restoration of the English constitution in 1689; and for the American restoration, which took place upon the ratification of the American Constitution of 1787, after twelve years of disarray.

All of which brings me to the 1842 illustration at the beginning of this post: Hooker seated, attended by Francis Bacon and Edmund Burke.  We can recognise Hooker's defence of ordered liberty against both Puritan and Papal tyranny, and Burke's defence of "a liberal descent" against the tyranny of Jacobin mobs and the destructive ideologies of the philosophe.  What of Bacon?  We can interpret his presence here as a sign of the 'new science' expressing, rather than refuting, divine wisdom (remembering, in the words of J.C.D. Clark, that 18th century Anglicanism had a "robust attitude" emphasising the compatibility of reason, science and faith).

In other words, the illustration points to the Anglican experience - part of a broader magisterial Protestant experience - as an alternative to the Integralism advocated by many of the 'new traditionalists'.  There are important reasons to urge a confident restatement of this tradition.  The present convulsions which threaten to overwhelm the "idea of a liberal descent" expose the hollowing out of the institutions and practices of ordered liberty, leaving them incapable of articulating an understanding of the Good and how they are called to be oriented to the Good. At the same time, the unchallenged advocacy of Integralism (itself, of course, a distinctly modern ideology) runs the risk of this deeply unpalatable vision of social order being regarded as the Christian vision for the polity, rather than a discredited theory and practice which fundamentally compromises the Church's public witness and undermines - in the words of the 1689 Declaration of Right - "religion, rights, and liberties".  

It is time to again heed Hooker, attended by Burke and Bacon, and set forth the theological grounding of ordered liberty as a means of securing human flourishing.