In 1911, RH Benson, the Catholic convert son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote a book called The Dawn of All, set in 1973. This offered an account of an England returned to Christendom and embracing a kind of government which saw the interests of Church and state as identical, for almost everyone was Catholic, and the laws reflected the Christian worldview: adultery was illegal and heretics didn’t fare well either.
For agnostic and secularist liberals, this vista of the future reads like a nightmare, because for them, the separation of Church and state – either constitutionally, as in the US, or de facto, as in much of Europe – is the basis for an equitable social order. And for most people in contemporary society, the idea that the Church could be at the mainspring of the social order is alarming. But that is, in fact, at the root of an idea which suggests that the Catholic worldview should be integrated into the running of the state. Integralism is not exactly a working out of RH Benson’s vision, but it seeks to put Catholicism at the heart of politics in a way we have not seen in modern times.
