The Church Against the State:
On Subsidiarity and Sovereignty
by andrew willard jones
new polity, 321 pages, $34.95
Eight years ago, Andrew Willard Jones’s Before Church and State was described in these pages as “the hot beach read of the summer” for young integralist Catholics. In his latest book, a collection of essays titled The Church Against the State, Jones has turned against the integralists—or, more precisely, against “the statist, pro-sovereignty form of Catholic postliberalism.”
Why does Jones take aim at “sovereignty”? For him, it is closely associated with “the State,” which he defines (following Max Weber) as “an entity holding a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a certain geographical area.” Thomas Hobbes, in Jones’s opinion, is the intellectual architect of the sovereign state, the modern conception of which presupposes that the fundamental human condition is primordial violence, the war of all against all.
The state is sovereign because there is no power beyond it. Its sovereignty is ubiquitous (a point Jones illustrates with appeals to George Orwell’s 1984) and reaches all the way into citizens’ souls. Within the state, every person is a legal persona and all actions occur within the state’s registry of rights and obligations. Mediating institutions such as fraternal organizations do not evade the state’s sovereignty but are merely corporate personae within the state’s all-encompassing power. The “private,” therefore, does not really exist within the modern state; it is just a category within the public. As Jones puts it, you can quit your job or your church, but you can’t quit the state.
Against “sovereignty,” Jones champions “subsidiarity”—not merely as a procedural matter but as something more exalted, the “form of justice itself” and the “form of the common good itself.” Subsidiarity, for Jones, reflects the hierarchy of the created order and its relation to God; it is “a series of analogical participations” of lower and higher levels of association. The higher perfect the lower, and the lower the higher. Thus, the child is fulfilled by elevation into the family, and the family by elevation into the village; but the village is a village only inasmuch as it incorporates families into it, and a family a family inasmuch as it incorporates children.
What’s wrong with modern politics, then, is that sovereignty destroys subsidiarity by making one level of the hierarchy absolute: the state is divorced from lower levels (such as the family) and from higher levels (such as God), which it sees as threats. Our current regime, Jones thinks, is increasingly tyrannical. This tyranny so distorts our vision that we can no longer see a way out of it. It causes us to imagine that the disputes that mark our political era—among liberals, socialists, capitalists, “woke” progressives, libertarians, and nationalists—are fundamental conflicts, when in reality, Jones claims, they are just squabbles within the one overarching form of tyrannical state sovereignty. Part of Jones’s project is to stimulate our imaginations, stunted by centuries of thinking within the cramped confines of liberalism, so that we can recover the anthropological and metaphysical presuppositions that make a Christian political order possible.
To this end, Jones reaches back to the Middle Ages (his area of scholarly expertise) to show that societies ordered according to the principle of subsidiarity have in fact existed. In Before Church and State, Jones held up Louis IX’s France as a salutary example. In The Church Against the State, Jones considers the pontificate of Innocent III and the works of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure. The medievals, Jones argues, with their rich conception of the senses of Scripture, understood history as a continuation of Scripture itself and perceived the world as a liturgical cosmos. In the Middle Ages there was neither sovereignty nor a state, but instead what Jones calls a “priority of peace” or a “tranquility of order.” To be sure, there was a temporal sword, and at times it wielded coercive power. But this power was not sovereignty. The temporal sword presupposed an already existing set of social associations. Its coercive power did not establish order but was exercised intermittently to restore peace when conflict broke out. In short, “the temporal power was not a medieval State.”
Today’s Catholic integralists boldly call for a confessional state. For Jones, such rhetoric is liberal through and through, because it retains the framework of the sovereign state. A Christian sovereign, ruling by Divine Right, is judged by no one. His subjects can do no more than submit to him fideistically. As soon as one posits some truth above the sovereign to which his power must conform, one is no longer talking about sovereignty. Sovereignty’s very logic excludes any regulative truth beyond the sovereign’s power. Thus, Jones says, the assertion of the “Primacy of Spiritual Power” (a phrase he questionably attributes to the integralists) is nothing more than a fideistic battle cry for the victory of one faction of society over others—“just another slogan, like Make America Great Again; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; or Just Do It!”
One wonders whether Jones’s integralist opponents hold the notion of state sovereignty divorced from truth that Jones attributes to them—and even who these integralists are. We suspect Jones has in mind those he identifies at the beginning of his book as “the postliberals gathered around Adrian Vermeule,” as well as Christians sympathetic to Carl Schmitt (whom Jones, in a chapter dedicated to the German thinker, presents as a popular parroter of Hobbes). But Jones offers no substantial engagement with the work of these figures, neither quoting them nor even citing them after the first few pages of the book. This lack of exegetical labor weakens his argument. Often Jones seems to be arguing more with his idea of integralism than with integralists themselves. He assumes that the only conception of the modern state on offer is the Hobbesian one and therefore claims that this is the idea of the state his integralist opponents endorse.
But are there not other conceptions of the state available, ones that appeal to truth beyond sovereignty? Catholic social thinking has long wrestled with the concept of the state. As Russell Hittinger has pointed out, by the time John Paul II became pope in 1978, his predecessors had written more than 120 encyclicals on the state—and every pope from 1775 on had treated the topic in his inaugural encyclical. Although the popes raised many concerns about the state that are similar to Jones’s, in time they also worked out conceptions of the state that are not Hobbesian but rooted in transcendent truth and open to subsidiarity. Pius XI (ironically, the one pope whose social thought Jones engages in detail) went so far as to use the sacral term munera to speak of the functions of the state.
In the end, the main difference between Jones and the integralists is this: The integralists think that the modern state can be directed toward Christian ends, whereas Jones thinks it is built upon an anti-metaphysical and anti-Christian notion of sovereignty that in principle excludes any truth beyond power. For Jones, a confessional state can only be “a monstrosity.”
The differences between Jones and the integralists, however, should not be overstated. Jones rejects confessional states because he rejects the state itself, not because he endorses a separation of Church and state, nor because he thinks Christianity should be relegated to the private sphere or to civil society. Like John Milbank, whose Theology and Social Theory Jones frequently cites, Jones thinks there is no sphere of human activity, including the political, that is to be untouched by grace. There is no division between a secular realm and a religious realm. This is not to deny the distinction between temporal power and spiritual power but to contend that temporal power does not exist outside the Church. Rather, Jones argues, both temporal and spiritual power function synergistically within the Church. For, as Jones explains (he also does so at greater length in another of his books, The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics), the Church is not an actor on the stage of history; the Church is history, the very field on which human history is being played.
Given his overall argument, Jones’s comment that his project is aimed at “defending America” is unexpected. He sees in America more than “hedonistic liberalism overlaid by shallow Lockean platitudes.” Rather, America’s fundamental political principles can be seen as capturing a way of life built on self-rule and bravery, one ordered to true human freedom under God. At its founding, Jones suggests, America represented a sort of “illiberal liberalism” because the sovereign’s registry had not yet extended into all human relations.
What Jones means by these claims is not entirely clear, perhaps because he believes that “America is a nation of contradictions; it is part of our character to be inconsistent.” Another reason is that Jones’s explicit reflections on America are inchoate, limited to a few paragraphs in the book’s preface. Jones contrasts his love of America with the disdain toward America shown by pro-sovereignty postliberals. Yet his appreciation for America differentiates him even more from another species of Catholic postliberalism, with which he otherwise holds much in common. Thinkers associated with the English edition of the journal Communio, such as the late David L. Schindler, his son D. C. Schindler, and Michael Hanby, share Jones’s thoroughgoing ecclesial Christocentricism but have argued that America is fundamentally liberal, anti-Catholic, and animated by a false notion of freedom. One hopes Jones will write more on America in the future, perhaps in conversation with these authors.
The target audience for Jones’s proposal—of a vigorous freedom ordered toward the hierarchical goods of family, polity, and God—includes young men drawn to the post-Christian neo-Nietzscheanism represented by “Bronze Age Pervert” (Costin Alamariu), mentioned in this book. In the main, Christian theologians—despite much chattering about the “signs of the times”—have been slow to respond to the concerns of disaffected young men who are flocking to the New Right with anything more than silence or blanket (and ineffective) condemnation. Jones is a rare Catholic thinker who listens to the griefs and anxieties of the young men of this age and offers a serious theological-political counterproposal.
At a lecture in Washington, D.C., last fall, Jones argued that at the heart of the lay Christian vocation is power—true Christian power, which is an expression of authentic freedom and ordered to the active shaping of the world. Jones exhorted his listeners “to put the barbarian back into Christianity,” pointing out that medieval Christianity came about not just from the confluence of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, but also from the Germanic tribes—restless, brave, warlike peoples who supplemented the contemplative dimension of Christendom with an active, world-shaping spirit. Christian power, Jones believes, is what young men long for and what the laity are called to exercise. Because the contemporary Church often gives the sense that Christianity is domesticated and emasculating, young men are turning to the dangerous idols of power found in hard-right neo-Nietzscheanism. In the book’s meditative final chapter, Jones reminds his reader that true power is found only in the Cross.
Cultivating a positive sense of freedom ordered toward the exercise of Christian power requires, Jones believes, an education that instills the virtues, knowledge, and skills needed to shape the world and fearlessly face tyrannical injustice. This is the aim of the newly founded College of St. Joseph the Worker in Steubenville, Ohio, where Jones serves as academic dean and professor of history and political theory. Here, students receive a Catholic liberal arts education, learn a trade such as carpentry or plumbing, and graduate debt-free.
The college is an important context for evaluating the charge that Jones’s vision of Catholic politics is mere academic theory, a type of LARPing, or an excuse for political inaction. Jones says that he is concerned “with the pursuit of truth” and not “with what is politically expedient in contemporary fights,” and he admits that this focus will disappoint some of his readers. He thinks that a major failure of much Christian postliberalism has been the subordination of truth to an immediate political agenda. According to Jones, “We need to figure out what is true before we run off and do something.”
Jones’s involvement with the College of St. Joseph the Worker shows that his ideas are not mere intellectual games, nor do his proposals result in political quietism. No less than his pro-sovereignty postliberal opponents, Jones has run off and done something. Where he and his opponents disagree is not in their commitment to action but about what is to be done. For Jones, young Christians should not move to Washington and take up internships. Instead, they should learn a trade, build up their families and local communities, and form friendships—which, Jones often reminds his reader, is what tyrants fear most of all. Christian “love of neighbor and love of God,” Jones writes at the end of the book, “is the solution to our political problems. All other efforts will fail.” Although readers might have good reason to question some of Jones’s arguments, he concludes with a principle that all interested in the renewal of our political life would do well to heed.
