Writers are intimately familiar with the dialogue that occurs over even the smallest of details in the course of creating and publishing a piece. Does this phrase concisely articulate my point? Is that example relevant? Would a comma here provide greater clarification? Is there a better way to word something for the sake of the reader’s understanding so that they will be persuaded by my argument and reasoning? Initially, this dialogue is internal to a writer’s mind in the drafting process; then it becomes a conversation between the writer and editors of a publication. Occasionally, this feedback comes from readers and other concerned parties after a piece is published, leading to changes that correct an error or strengthen an argument. Sometimes editor’s notes of these changes are included; sometimes, rightly or wrongly, they are omitted.
For the average reader, this back-and-forth is largely irrelevant and uninteresting; they are only interested in considering the final product and discussing its merits. However, there are times writers and editors can take the process for granted, leaving readers out of the loop and causing unintended confusion, even creating controversy when there was never meant to be any. To that end, I want to take some time here to explain a change I made to a piece more than two years ago. While it might seem strange to some to make a note of such an old change, clarity and transparency in the editorial process are necessary and valuable, as is maintaining the trust of an audience. This particular change also continues to impact how some readers engage my work, so I hope that shining a light on this will reveal the true reasoning behind my decision and thus allow for actual engagement with the ideas, rather than continue erroneous discussion about the process.
In February 2024, I composed a review (“Neo-Integralism Delenda Est”) of Kevin Vallier’s All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism. My review commended Vallier for his decisive arguments against Catholic integralism, or the reactionary Catholic political philosophy that requires the Church to exercise indirect state power over governments and overrides concerns of human dignity. My issue with the book was not his arguments but rather his choice of audience. Vallier seems keen on persuading Catholic integralists themselves. My position was then—and remains now—that Catholic integralists do not want to be persuaded; hence, they must be stopped. Toward the end of the review, I said:
Neo-integralists are teachers of evil. Many do not mean to be; but some do. They must be treated as such. They must be hounded out of conservative institutions, made pariahs in religious circles, and alienated from polite discourse on politics. Associations with neo-integralism need to be automatically expelled. There is no other way to respond, and there is nothing wrong with doing this.
A few days later, the text was changed without an editorial explanation to this:
Those neo-integralists who agree with Deneen are teachers of evil by exploiting the present “disorder” of republican government to advocate for their “postliberal order” like the older integralists of the late 1890s through the 1930s. Not all neo-integralists are on board with this approach. Many are serious and decent scholars. However, neo-integralists cannot ignore or escape their past. They must confront it. Historically, integralists have associated with absolute monarchy, right-wing authoritarians, and fascist dictatorships. The original integralist theologians espoused paranoid conspiracies about Jews and Freemasons to justify a state of emergency to install these regimes. The neo-integralists Vallier confronts refuse to confront these issues but rather cite the very same figures to advocate for absolute, arbitrary government rooted in paranoid conspiracy. If decent neo-integralists wish to distinguish themselves from figures like Vermeule or Deneen, they must reckon with the enormity of King St. Louis IX’s crimes against French Jews and Schmitt’s obsessive demand to purge Germany of the “Jewish spirit.” Failing this, one can only conclude that neo-integralism is an evil teaching and must be shunned.
Conservative author Helen Andrews has spent the past two years raising the issue of this change, especially its lack of editorial explanation, to present me as a dishonest broker in discussions about Catholic integralism. She does this by using a screenshot she took of the old language and then saying that the review was changed without editorial comment. See, for example, her posts here and here.
While I cannot definitively speak to her motivations for why she does this, I believe it has something to do with defending postliberals (the term Catholics integralists use to refer to themselves now) and their ideological allies. For example, Ted Richards directly cited this event in an essay he wrote. The suggestion of my underhandedness is never made directly but rather in the description of the change to the text itself, which Andrews and others say happened “silently.” However, the change was not made silently. I posted about why I made the change on Twitter (now X). The trouble is that I also regularly delete my posts, so that explanation is no longer online, while Andrews continues to peddle her screenshot to credulous writers like Richards.
So, let me explain what happened here.
In February of 2024, I was an associate professor of politics at Ave Maria University, and I was going into my sixth year as a participant in the debates over Catholic integralism, postliberalism, and Christian nationalism. Not only does this subject fall into my academic research, my view was that, as a faithful Catholic professor at a Catholic institution, it was especially incumbent on me to refute Catholic integralism. Then, as now, I regard it as evil. However, Ave Maria University has on its faculty those who disagree with me, to the point of regarding it as the doctrine of the Church even after the Second Vatican Council. Three of them saw my review and objected to it. They then went to the provost to see if I could be disciplined. He declined.
After the meeting with the provost, one of them came by my office to request I change the language, although he made no mention of his meeting with the provost. Indeed, I did not learn of that meeting until around a year later, so I was speaking to this colleague without any knowledge that this person had already tried to have me punished. I explained that, for this change to happen, he must be willing to consider that Catholic integralists need to reckon with their very dark past. He agreed, and we amicably settled on the general outline of the revised text. I composed that text and sent it to the Reading Wheel Review. The change was subsequently made by the publication’s editorial staff, who agreed to the change and decided how to handle that change at the time. Thus Andrews bandies about a screenshot that was borne out of a good faith conversation I had with someone who before that conversation had secretly tried to have me disciplined.
This experience is typical for me as a critic of Catholic integralism and postliberalism. In 2021, I wrote for Law & Liberty a review of Scott Hahn’s and Brandon McGinley’s It Is Right and Just: Why the Future of Civilization Depends on True Religion. McGinley was furious with the review and sent multiple people in the administration at Ave Maria emails demanding that I be punished, even giving them a deadline. He and Matthew Walther, editor of The Lamp, sent similar demands to Richard Reinsch, who was then editor at Law & Liberty. (For the record, Hahn apparently had nothing to do with this). The following year, Daniel Gullotta and I wrote for Deseret News an op-ed that criticized the idea that Vladimir Putin was the new Constantine. Our original draft had some discussion of how postliberals regard Putin this way but couched their position in careful language. The editor opted not to include these lines and instead settled for much more direct language, and the result was an online outrage machine fueled by Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, and other Catholic integralists I had written about and argued with. They began to demand my punishment by tagging their posts with the official Ave Maria University Twitter account handle and even insisted that I was open to a libel suit because, after days of pressure on the editor at Deseret, they finally extracted a modest correction.
And then there is the regular harassment. When I first published about Catholic integralism back in 2018, Vermeule ridiculed me for days. I offered to pray for him; he responded in deleted posts on X by profaning the language of Catholic prayers to describe me as “owned.” After another essay I wrote, Ahmari dismissed me in a deleted post at X as a “pisher junior academic at a no name university [Ave Maria University].” Quite recently, Philip Pilkington, who until Viktor Orbán’s recent loss worked for Catholic integralist Gladden Pappin at the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs (HIIA), has repeatedly accused me of being gay because I shared a story by a Hungarian journalist who discovered that the HIIA had been infiltrated by a Russian spy. They do all this mostly from behind accounts blocking me from responding. The entire strategy is to form a social media bubble in which they share followers and pump them up with a sense of intellectual superiority premised on animus rather than reason and to raise the personal costs on critics until they give up.
I am hardly alone in having these experiences. If you have seen someone publicly criticize Catholic integralism or postliberalism, you can take it as a given that they have been harassed by a kind of right-wing cancel culture. I will keep things anonymous out of respect to the people who told me of their own experiences, but I know of multiple priests who have used social media to challenge Catholic integralism, only to learn from their bishops or heads of their order that they had been contacted with complaints about their online behavior. One prominent conservative wrote a reasonable, mild critique of integralism in a national newspaper, and he was flooded with emails from those he critiqued in a type of digital intimidation tactic. The intimidation in this case did not work, in part because I told this person about my own experiences. At this point, we critics have so many stories that the intimidation efforts have no effect on us, but we are not the targets—our bosses are, to exploit fear of bad press, lost reputation, or even litigation to force us into silence.
This strategy is nothing less than the application of the principles postliberals have outlined in their condemnations of liberalism as they understand it. Politics is not about debate for postliberals (that’s liberal nonsense to them); instead, politics is reducible to friend and enemy, and success in politics is reducible to the use of power, not persuasion. Because critics are their enemies, they must use, as Deneen describes it, “Machiavellian means to Aristotelian ends,” or what Vermeule has called the “dark arts.” They have no intention of winning on the strength of their arguments. Instead, they hope to use their standing in academic circles, their superior follower accounts, their access to political elites, and their greater digital reach to win.
And this gets us back to what Andrews is doing by quoting the old language of my review. It seems Andrews wants to discredit me because I tried to maintain a collegial relationship with a member of faculty at my former university. If so, then she views relationships as sources of leverage and efforts to keep those relationships cordial as points of weakness. I cannot control her actions, and I would never try to. Instead, I hope to ensure that those she directs to this review have the full story. To that end, I have requested that the current director of the Center of Religion, Culture & Democracy, Dr. Jordan Ballor, provide this explanation of events and their broader context, as well as restore the original language of the essay. The later edit will be preserved in an editorial note on the original review.
For those who wish to use this minor, if unpleasant, slice of my life to discredit me, let me request that you reconsider. Yes, I still believe that Catholic integralists and postliberals should have no place in the conservative movement. If you disagree, make a case better than those of Andrews, Richards, and the postliberals; unlike them, I welcome criticism and am open to forming a modus vivendi.
James M. Patterson (Ph.D., University of Virginia) is a fellow at First Liberty’s Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy and an associate professor of public affairs at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In addition to publishing numerous academic and popular articles, he is the coauthor of Why Postliberalism Failed and author of Religion and the Public Square: Sheen, King, Falwell.
