Many publications in Europe portray U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance as sympathetic to “radical right ideas” such as integralism.

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I would like to propose a solution to the moral panic over “integralism,” the obscure Catholic political philosophy that says the State should, at least under certain circumstances, follow the teachings of the Catholic Church.

I call this a moral panic because the political alarm is wildly disproportinate to the movement’s tiny constituency.

Writing in 2020, even one of its chief critics observed that, apart from three prominent figures, integralists “largely keep to personal blogs and Twitter accounts.”

In Europe especially, integralism often seems a rhetorical bogeyman used by bureaucrats, politicians and the media to frighten citizens into voting for governing parties and coalitions that are now wildly unpopular with their constituents.

In the U.S., some conservative podcasters such as Daily Wire co-founder and outspoken Trump critic Jeremy Boreing has promoted the controversy by questioning whether integralism is “a Catholic plot to overthrow America.”

What nonsense.

What Are We Actually Arguing About?

The truth is, integralism is an obscure, serious, but quite small intellectual movement within conservative Catholic circles to examine the presuppositions of philosophical liberalism – the U.S. Founding as well as the teachings of such philosophers as John Locke and John Stuart Mill – to see if they are compatible with the teachings of the Catholic Church.

The short answer is that, taken in their more extreme libertarian forms – in which there are few if any moral facts and everyone is free to do whatever they wish with their own bodies -- they are not.

In their more moderate forms, which helped give birth to such institutions as the separation of powers, religious freedom, democratic legislatures and so on, they are.

The Second Vatican Council, in its landmark 1965 declaration Dignitatis humanae, the Declaration on Religious Freedom, recognized this.

Yet it grounded its acceptance of religious liberty in human dignity rather than religious indifferentism and explicitly allowed special constitutional recognition of state religions, provided that religious freedom and equality before the law were protected for all.

At the moment, the debate over integralism is of course framed in apocalyptic political terms.

The political theorist James M. Patterson is on the podcast circuit – such as Jeremy Boreing’s – portraying contemporary neo-integralism, including the work of Notre Dame scholar Patrick Deneen and Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, as a revival of authoritarian Catholic politics.

His entertaining and very informative book, Why Postliberalism Failed (2026), written with Thomas D. Howes, is worth reading as an overview of the dispute.

Moral Truth Is Not Theocracy

To clear away the smoke of the battle, I propose making some distinctions – for example, between what we might call “moral integralism” and “religious integralism.”

The first states that there are some fundamental moral truths that the state can and must recognize, even “liberal” democratic states that claim to be “neutral” on all religious questions.

The second asserts that states also should recognize religious realities – for example, as the State of Israel does when it says Israel is officially a “Jewish” state and insists the Jewish marriages performed in Israel must be performed by designated Orthodox rabbis to be recognized by the state.

I also propose distinguishing “extreme” integralism from what I like to call “moderate” or even “light” integralism.

The philosopher Edward Feser does something similar, distinguishing “soft,” “moderate,” and “hard” integralism and insisting that asking whether someone supports integralism is unhelpful without disambiguation.

Integralism in its stricter Catholic sense argues for the goal of creating of Catholic confessional states in which the temporal authority is subordinate, in matters bearing on humanity’s ultimate end, to the spiritual authority of the Church.

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Yet that is not the same as recognizing established religions and the moral assumptions held by the majority of citizens. I propose calling the latter “light” or “moderate” integralism, while acknowledging that this extends the term beyond its usual Catholic meaning.

Many people of good will – not a fascist or neo-Nazi among them! – have no objection to Denmark’s established Evangelical Lutheran Church, to which most of the population belongs, provided the rights of religious minorities are protected.

Other people of good will – also not fascists – think that the State can and must recognize certain basic moral truths, among these the right to life. Such a principle can even be found in the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

The Liberal State Takes Sides

Part of integralism’s contemporary appeal, I would argue, comes from frustration with progressive claims – in the Democratic Party in the U.S. and in various far-left political parties in Europe – that moral considerations should have little, if anything, to do with practical politics.

Many left-wing parties claim that any limitations on people’s free choices – such as with abortion up to the moment of birth, physician-assisted medical killing, or even polygamy – is “intolerance,” “anti-democratic,” and a regression into a fascist state.

Many voters in the U.S., at least, disagree.

Instead, millions woke up one day and realized that the liberal state, far from being “neutral” on important moral issues, such as gay marriage or euthanasia, had taken sides against the majority of the population.

Under the Obama and Biden administrations, Americans discovered that government organizations were advancing the “trans” agenda using the force of law – and that parents who objected to some policies were being prosecuted and, in some cases, even had their children taken from them.

A Republic, Not a Confessional State

Despite this, I think Patterson and other critics of “integralism” are largely correct.

The American Catholic tradition of reconciling religious conviction with republican government offers a better starting point.

What Patterson calls the “Catholic Republicanism” pioneered in the U.S. by such figures as John and Charles Carroll, John Hughes, John Ireland, Fulton Sheen, and John Courtney Murray, is more than adequate to overcome the latent authoritarianism within many liberal political parties.

We don’t need a Catholic confessional state to oppose Democratic-backed laws that would force Catholic hospitals and religious caregivers to facilitate physician-assisted suicide.

Yet I also don’t think the State of Israel, in having a “light” integralism that recognizes the moral and religious character of the Jewish state, is being unjust in doing so.

So is integralism compatible with republican government and democratic norms?

The answer depends on what we mean by integralism.

Public recognition of fundamental moral truths (“we hold these truths to be self-evident”) or a majority religious tradition is not the same as giving ecclesiastical authorities coercive political power.

If critics want to challenge the latter, they should do so directly—not treat every public moral judgment as a step toward fascism.

What I have called “light integralism” can coexist with democratic government.

More demanding forms, which have no clear Christian examples outside the Vatican itself, raise different questions about religious liberty and political authority.

It is intellectually dishonest to discuss them as though those differences don’t matter.

Spread the Word

At Disputed Questions, we examine the questions that divide us—in the Church and the world. We look behind the news to explore competing claims about faith, morality, politics, science, and human dignity: where those claims come from, what supports them, and what follows if they are true.

The purpose is understanding.

That requires checking sources, considering historical context, presenting opposing arguments fairly, and making judgments the evidence can support. It also means acknowledging when a question remains unresolved.

You do not have to share our beliefs—or agree with our conclusions—to find a place here. We welcome readers who believe that difficult questions deserve serious examination and that disagreement is an occasion to think more carefully.

If you value this work, there are three straightforward ways to support it:

Subscribe to Disputed Questions. A free subscription brings future columns to your inbox. A paid subscription helps sustain the research and writing behind them.

Share this Post. Share this post (and Disputed Questions) with a friend who might enjoy it —or offer a thoughtful objection to the answer.

Support Disputed Questions. This fuels this project’s mission.

Whether you subscribe free or contribute financially, thank you for reading. Our commitment is to give each question a fair hearing, explain how we reach our conclusions, and remain willing to reconsider them.

Robert J. Hutchinson is the author of When in Rome and Searching for Jesus. His forthcoming book, Two Leos: The Popes, Technology, and the Struggle for Humanity’s Future, examining the parallel pontificates of Leo XIII and Leo XIV, will be published by Angelico Press in 2027.

Pope Leo XIV visits the city of Madrid on an official trip, June 6, 2026 ( SPORT PRESS MEDIA / Shutterstock.com).

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The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith has just released a very interesting document on how Christian faith can be transmitted in what it calls an “epochal age.”

Entitled Venite Ad Me, the nearly 30,000-word text is a series of “considerations” on how faith can be shared that draws extensively on the teaching of recent popes, particularly Pope Francis, the mentor and protector of the DDF’s current prefect, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández.

This topic is of particular interest to me since it’s also the subject of my research in the philosophy of religion, the nature of faith and its epistemic rationality.

I’m still reading it but Venite Ad Me makes several key points, all of which are worth considering.

More Than Believing in God

Venite Ad Me’s most basic claim is that Christianity is an encounter with Jesus Christ, not an assent to an intellectual system.

This very “evangelical” emphasis may strike many as self-evident but it’s not really. Many people believe that Christian faith is simply “believing in God” or going to church.

The document notes the traditional distinction between fides qua, the personal act of believing and entrusting oneself to God, from fides quae, the content believed. They go together, of course, but faith is not merely assent to a series of propositions but rather a trusting commitment to a person.

The problem is, the ways the Christian churches pass on this personal commitment to Christ have quite obviously broken down, at least in the wider world.

When Faith Is No Longer Inherited

Religious affiliation and practice have declined markedly in the United States and Europe in recent decades, driven largely by people leaving the faiths of their childhood (primarily for the “nones”—atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular”).

In the U.S., Pew’s 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study found that 62 percent of adults now identify as Christian (40 percent Protestant, 19 percent Catholic), down from 78 percent in 2007. The unaffiliated share rose from 16 percent (2007) to 29 percent.

Venite Ad Me argues that the passing on of the faith – that is, the trusting commitment to Jesus Christ -- among family, school, parish, and surrounding culture can no longer be assumed.

One interesting point: Its practical conclusion is that concentrating on children’s religious instruction is insufficient.

The Vatican document Venite ad me asks whether faith is something you learn or someone you trust (Shutterstock).

Beyond Religious Instruction

Adults who do not themselves live and embrace the faith cannot reliably transmit it. As a result, adult evangelization therefore becomes indispensable (nos. 42, 101).

In addition, Christian churches must now come to terms with the digital age and how it reshapes attention, relationships, memory, and authority.

Better Christian or Catholic “content” online is simply not enough.

Quoting Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas, Ad Venite Me insists that the communication of faith is “deeply relational, built through bonds of trust and shared practices, as well as an honest exchange with others and with the world (no. 62).”

Rebuilding Communities of Faith

Ultimately, what is required is nothing less than the rebuilding of communities of faith both within and without the traditional Christian (parish) structures.

In the Catholic Church, many people have been inspired by the new movements of the past century, from the charismatic renewal to Opus Dei, the Focolare Movement and Comunione e Liberazione to the Neocatechumenal Way and the Community of Sant’Egidio

When I was studying in Israel in 2014, I was greatly inspired by two groups, the French order Chemin Neuf (with its house above an important archaeological dig in Nazareth) and the Hebrew Mass celebrated by the Saint James Vicariate for Hebrew-Speaking Catholics.

Different Paths to Belonging

Of course, many people I know are drawn to “trad” groups around the Latin Mass, such as the annual pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres Cathedral around Pentecost... or the Catholic Land Movement (CLM).

Home-based Bible studies... Latin study groups... online classes... all of these are attempts to build communities of adults drawn to a deeper encounter with Christ through the Church.

And Venite Ad Me makes the obvious point that these efforts are all, ultimately, based on the cultivation of friendship – which was always one of Opus Dei’s main strengths.

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One Person at a Time

The personal encounter with Jesus Christ is passed on through friendship, one person at a time.

“Friendship, in fact, constitutes a privileged space in which personal witness, mutual support, and the sharing of life’s joys and struggles make it possible to share the faith in a way that engages one’s entire existence,” the document concludes. “Along with the family, healthy friendship is the setting par excellence for authentic relationships, where believers can accompany and support one another in following Christ (no. 89).”

In the past, this cultivation of friendship occurred within a Christian or Catholic world – CYO summer camps, parish youth groups, choir or guitar mass practice, even boxing clubs.

That world is now fading away... and we must seek out new ways to make friends for Christ. According to Venite Ad Me, that is one of the key ways faith will be passed on to future generations.

Spread the Word

At Disputed Questions, we examine the questions that divide us—in the Church and the world. We look behind the news to explore competing claims about faith, morality, politics, science, and human dignity: where those claims come from, what supports them, and what follows if they are true.

The purpose is understanding.

That requires checking sources, considering historical context, presenting opposing arguments fairly, and making judgments the evidence can support. It also means acknowledging when a question remains unresolved.

You do not have to share our beliefs—or agree with our conclusions—to find a place here. We welcome readers who believe that difficult questions deserve serious examination and that disagreement is an occasion to think more carefully.

If you value this work, there are three straightforward ways to support it:

Subscribe to Disputed Questions. A free subscription brings future columns to your inbox. A paid subscription helps sustain the research and writing behind them.

Share this Post. Share this post (and Disputed Questions) with a friend who might enjoy it —or offer a thoughtful objection to the answer.

Support Disputed Questions. This fuels this project’s mission.

Whether you subscribe free or contribute financially, thank you for reading. Our commitment is to give each question a fair hearing, explain how we reach our conclusions, and remain willing to reconsider them.

Robert J. Hutchinson is the author of When in Rome and Searching for Jesus. His forthcoming book, Two Leos: The Popes, Technology, and the Struggle for Humanity’s Future, examining the parallel pontificates of Leo XIII and Leo XIV, will be published by Angelico Press in 2027.

Please. California Democrats had front row seats the last time this movie was in theaters.

And the plot is the same as you remember it.

Big elected official. Supporting spouse with a “c…

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Someone proposed building an AI deepfake version of him so website visitors could have virtual papal audiences.

“I said, ‘I’m not going to authorize that,’” Leo recalled. “If there’s anyone who shouldn’t be represented by an avatar, I would say the pope is high on the list.”

The f…

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I wouldn’t have lasted a month before being shot.

I would almost certainly have hesitated if a perpetrator ignored my commands and climbed back into his car, only to come out with a loaded Glock in his hand.

Thus, I am naturally very reticent when it comes to police shootings like the one that occurred in Minneapolis recently, when an ICE officer opened fire at a woman driving an SUV in his direction.

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My first reaction, when seeing the initial videos, was that the cop didn’t have to shoot the woman.

Subsequent videos were more ambiguous and made it appear that the ICE officer may have thought the woman was intending to drive straight at him when, in fact, she was making a hard right turn to get away.

It was the kind of split‑second decision that only police have to make and now, understandably, everyone has an opinion about whether the shots were justified or not.

The entire incident in Minneapolis is a tragedy and will only hurt the legitimate effort of ICE to arrest dangerous illegal aliens who should never have been allowed to enter U.S. territory under the Biden Administration’s deliberate open border policies.

But let’s see if there are any actual facts that can shed light on the matter.

The issues may help clarify things: how often police in the U.S. open fire compared to police in other countries and, even more important, how much more violent U.S. criminals are when compared to criminals in other countries.

U.S. cops may well seem trigger‑happy, but they also could have very good reasons for being so — namely, that they face a criminal underclass (yes, including female activists trying to interfere with police operations) who are far more violent, better armed, and with less respect for human life than in other countries.

Once you start looking at comparative data, one thing becomes unavoidable: American policing does not happen in a vacuum.

In per‑capita terms, the United States is an outlier in both police killings and serious violent crime. Recent cross‑national analysis estimates that in 2019 U.S. police fatally shot people at a rate of about 3.1 per million population, roughly five times the rate in Australia and more than 22 times the rate in France.

Historical comparisons suggest that American police in 2014 were about 18 times more lethal than Danish police and 100 times more lethal than Finnish police, and still substantially more lethal than police in countries like France, Sweden, and Germany.

That’s the sort of number that fuels the narrative that U.S. cops are unusually quick on the trigger.

​But then you look at the underlying crime landscape.

It turns out American gang neighborhoods are far more dangerous than the rough and tumble streets of Helsinki or Vienna.

On intentional homicide, Austria’s rate sits around 0.6–0.7 per 100,000 people, while Germany is under 1 per 100,000; the United States has been running in the 6–7 per 100,000 range in recent years.

In other words, the average American cop operates in a society where killing is roughly an order of magnitude more common than in Austria and substantially higher than in Germany.

When you widen the lens to include other serious violent crimes — armed robbery, aggravated assault, rape — U.S. rates are again several times higher than those typical in Western Europe.

A U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics international comparison found that crimes of violence such as homicide, rape, and robbery are four to nine times more frequent in the United States than in Europe.

And crucially, U.S. violence is much more heavily weaponized: firearms are used in roughly two‑thirds of American murders and a substantial share of robberies, far more than in most European states.

​What that means on the street is that an American patrol officer is simply more likely to confront an assailant who is armed, desperate, and prepared to use lethal force. That environment plausibly explains part of the gap in police shootings.

A high rate of gun homicide is extremely strongly correlated with a high rate of fatal police violence; one comparative study found a 0.97 correlation between gun homicide rates and police killings across 18 countries.

In that framework, U.S. officers don’t just “decide” to be more lethal — they are operating in a setting where the background level of lethal threat is much higher.

​At the same time, the police‑lethality gap is bigger than the crime gap alone.

Even when you compare the United States to other countries with armed police and some level of civilian gun ownership, such as Germany or Austria, the U.S. still stands out.

German officers are routinely armed, but firearms are discharged at people only a few dozen times a year, with around a dozen fatalities nationwide, in a country of more than 80 million.

Austrian police also carry guns, and yet fatal shootings are rare enough that some years go by with no one killed by police gunfire at all.

These are hardly pacifist societies, but the combination of tighter gun laws, different tactics, more restrictive legal standards and a far more peaceful, homogenous society seems to keep lethal encounters down.

When you pull all of this together, the YouTube clip of the ICE officer and the SUV stops looking like an isolated moral drama and more like a node in a larger social tragedy that regular officers have to confront on a daily basis.

On one level you have a human being making a split‑second judgment about whether a metal box hurtling toward him is a weapon; on another you have a country where violent offenders are more heavily armed and more lethal than in most peer democracies, and where the line between justified fear and overreaction gets crossed more often than anyone would like.

That doesn’t tell you, by itself, whether the Minneapolis shots were justified.

But it does suggest that if you want to understand why American cops seem more willing to fire than their Austrian or German counterparts, any honest accounting has to take into account the different worlds these officers are policing — and the fact that U.S. police face a criminal ecosystem that is far more dangerous than that faced by their European counterparts.

Robert J. Hutchinson is the author of numerous books of popular history, including Searching for Jesus: New Discoveries in the Quest for Jesus of Nazareth (Thomas Nelson), The Dawn of Christianity (Thomas Nelson), The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible (Regnery) and When in Rome: A Journal of Life in Vatican City (Doubleday). Email him at: roberthutchinson@substack.com

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The American Right is in the middle of its most dangerous moment since 1964.

A loud and growing chorus -- led by Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, and Florida state representative Randy Fine -- has declared open ideological war on Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and anyone who questions unlimited U.S. aid to Israel or dares interview Nick Fuentes.

Their weapon of choice is excommunication: public denunciations, donor pressure, and calls for primaries.

The goal is noble in their eyes -- defending Israel and marginalizing antisemites.

The result, however, is catastrophic.

Point 1: Splintering the coalition is electoral suicide

Donald Trump won in 2024 with the broadest Republican coalition in modern history: 74 million votes, the first GOP popular-vote majority since 1988, and massive gains among young men (up 18 points with under-30 males versus 2020, per AP VoteCast). Exit polls showed 41% of 18–29-year-old men backed Trump -- the highest Republican share ever recorded for that demographic.

That youth surge was powered by economic frustration, anti-war sentiment, and distrust of institutions. If the MAGA tent shrinks to exclude anyone skeptical of $20 billion annual foreign commitments while American cities crumble, the 2026 midterms become a Democrat massacre.

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The Left -- currently led by AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Zohran Mamdani, and the DSA wing -- will not hesitate to exploit a divided Right. History is merciless: the GOP lost the House in 1964 after the Goldwater purists purged the Rockefeller wing. We cannot repeat that mistake when the stakes are infinitely higher.

Point 2: Jewish safety and the tragic irony of the purge

No group suffered more from real Nazis than the Jewish people. Six million murdered, an existential trauma that still echoes. When Nick Fuentes or anonymous X accounts traffic in tropes such as Jewish control of media and politics, the reflex to isolate and condemn is completely understandable.

Yet the cold strategic reality is this: handing Congress to a Democrat Party whose progressive caucus now contains open opponents of Israel’s existence will hurt Jews far more than a few thousand edgelords on the internet ever could. In 2025, 68% of House Democrats voted against a resolution simply condemning “from the river to the sea” rhetoric.

The ADL’s own 2024 audit showed antisemitic incidents in the U.S. spiking 337% after October 7 -- driven overwhelmingly by far-left and Islamist sources, not paleocon Twitter.

AOC’s squad grows stronger every cycle; MAGA’s pro-Israel record in government (Abraham Accords, Golan Heights recognition, moving the embassy) remains the strongest in history.

Throwing away that alliance simply to police speech on the margins is a tragic miscalculation of the actual threat vector.

Point 3: The excommunication campaign is failing -- spectacularly

• Tucker Carlson’s subscriber base on his own network grew 28% in the three weeks after his Fuentes interview (Nov 2025 data, Tubulus Analytics).

• The Fuentes conversation itself has 21 million views and counting.

• Candace Owens’s daily YouTube show averaged 1.4 million viewers per episode in Q4 2025 -- higher than Shapiro’s peak daily numbers.

• On X, posts containing “Ben Shapiro” + “excommunication” or “purge” generated 4.2 million impressions in the last 30 days; sentiment analysis shows 72% negative toward the tactic (Brandwatch, Nov 2025).

• Marjorie Taylor Greene’s fundraising actually increased 34% after Trump called her a “traitor” over Ukraine/Israel aid votes (FEC filings).

• Nick Fuentes’s Cozy.tv concurrent viewership is up 312% year-over-year -- precisely because every public denunciation drives curious zoomers straight to him.

In other words, the Streisand Effect is on steroids.

The more loudly Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin swing the “banhammer,” the more the targets grow. The excommunicators are burning their own cultural capital to feed their opponents’ rise.

Point 4: Conversation and facts beat cancellation every time

The MAGA base is not antisemitic; it is exhausted.

Young white men -- the demographic most receptive to Fuentes’s messaging -- face the worst economic prospects of any cohort since the Great Depression: real wages down 4% since 2021 for under-30 non-college males, student debt at $1.7 trillion, homeownership rates at 1930s levels.

Fuentes tells them “the system is rigged by a hostile elite that hates you.” That diagnosis lands because parts of it feel true. Where he goes wrong -- and where he must be called out -- is the scapegoat.

The villain is not “the Jews.”

The villain is a bipartisan ruling class that shipped their factories to China, addicted their cousins to fentanyl, and sent their brothers to die in forever wars while spending $150 billion in Ukraine and $20 billion in Gaza with no accountability.

Direct the righteous anger at the actual architects -- McConnell, Pelosi, the Davos set, the military-industrial complex -- and Fuentes’s appeal collapses. We win with truth, not with excommunication.

1. The pro-Trump, pro-MAGA path forward is clear and unifying: Reaffirm ironclad support for Israel’s right to exist and defend itself.

2. Demand transparency and debate on every foreign dollar -- because American citizens should come first.

3. Expose actual antisemites without alienating millions of patriotic young men who just want a future.

4. Keep the coalition big enough to win.

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It’s often said that the LPE is no longer considered a valid argument. It supposedly has succumbed to purely logical objections raised by the Christian…

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These experts claimed that there are structures underlying biological organisms, on both the anatomical and molecular level, that are so complex – “irreducibly complex,” as they put it – that the only plausible explanation is that these structures did not arise through the evolutionary process of natural selection but were, instead, planned by an intelligent designer.

The leaders of the movement insisted that they were making a strictly scientific proposal, not a religious one, and that the designer to which they were appealing was not necessarily God. The movement was met with skepticism, even outright hostility, by many scientists, legal professionals and the media who derided it as pseudo-science, even likening the movement to the so-called “creation science” popular among some conservative Christians.

Overview of the Intelligent Design Movement

Future historians could date the founding of the ID movement to the encounter in the early 1990s that Phillip Johnson, a University of California professor of law, had with Richard Dawkins’s polemical and bestselling 1987 interpretation of evolution, The Blind Watchmaker. By his own account, Johnson was appalled by the unproven assumptions that undergirded Dawkins’s book and set about, with lawyerly thoroughness, to examine and rebut these assumptions in a series of equally best-selling books, most famously Darwin on Trial (1993). Johnson himself is a lawyer, not a scientist, and he focused his attack on Dawkins and evolution by concentrating on the unproven philosophical assumptions and faulty logic that, he claimed, lie throughout The Blind Watchmaker.

Very soon after Darwin on Trial appeared, however, others joined the ID crusade, including some with scientific credentials. Perhaps most influential was the Catholic biochemist Michael Behe who did his best to provide the scientific ammunition that Johnson lacked in his assault on standard evolutionary theory. In two influential books, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (1996) and The Edge of Evolution (2007), Behe attempted to provide a theoretical framework for the claim that the theory of unguided evolution does not, and even cannot, explain all of the complex biological phenomena in nature.

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Behe was joined by the mathematician William Dembski and together they developed a positive vision of a scientific alternative to standard evolutionary theory which they called Intelligent Design. Although Behe is a Catholic and Dembski Eastern Orthodox, not all proponents of ID are religious. Some of those open to ID arguments, such as the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, are impressed by the philosophical criticisms that ID presents. What’s more, ID proponents such as Behe go out of their way to stress that ID is a scientific movement, a criticism of standard evolutionary theory from within science itself.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Intelligent Design was championed by the Discovery Institute in Seattle and by some conservative and evangelical political organizations. These sought to pressure local school boards to include ID ideas and materials as part of the teaching of evolution in schools. This led to a famous court case in 2005, reminiscent of the original Scopes Monkey Trial, in which a conservative judge and practicing Lutheran ruled that ID could not be taught in schools because it is “not science,” fails to meet the requirements that “limit science to testable, natural explanations” and constitutes an attempt to impermissibly advance a particular religious viewpoint.

At the center of ID’s critique of standard evolutionary theory lies the concept of “irreducible complexity.” According to Behe, there are entities within biological systems that are so complex that they could not have evolved through the normal pathways of evolution, that is, through random genetic mutations and natural selection. Among the entities that Behe cites are the bacterial flagella, blood clotting and the elaborate assemblies of protein molecules that appear, within cells, like “an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines.”

In Darwin’s Black Box, Behe defined an irreducibly complex system as “a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.” He adds that such a system “cannot be produced directly… by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition non-functional. In other words, for Behe an irreducibly complex system has parts that have no other functions than those of that particular system and which are essential to that system.

Behe points to the bacterial flagellum as an example.

The flagellum is a kind of microscopic propeller system used by different types of bacteria for propulsion. As Behe explains, it consists of a long, hair-like filament embedded in the cell membranes that is attached to a rotor drive. Powerful electron microscopes have revealed that this rotor drive is powered by energy produced by ion exchange through a flow of acid into the bacterial membrane and which turns the filament like a propeller. Behe claims that the three parts that make up the flagellum – a paddle, rotor and motor – show that it is irreducibly complex.

“Gradual evolution of the flagellum… therefore faces mammoth hurdles,” he writes, by which he means it almost certainly was designed, not evolved through small, incremental changes over billions of years. “Even though we are told that all biology must be seen through the lens of evolution, no scientist has ever published a model to account for the gradual evolution of this extraordinary molecular machine,” Behe writes.

Denis Alexander’s Criticisms of Intelligent Design

Sophisticated ID advocates like Behe concede that the natural selection mechanism proposed by standard evolutionary theory provides reasonable explanations for some complex systems, just not for others – such as the bacterial flagellum. Behe agrees that evolution can explain biological complexity in principle and merely argues that we have no evidence for how it could do so in specific cases. According to critics of ID like the Christian biochemist Denis Alexander, however, the problem with arguments like this – so-called arguments from ignorance – is that new information has a way of popping up unexpectedly and ruining your case. For example, Alexander argues that scientists have discovered that some of the parts that make up the flagellum do have functions in other organisms, such as the ion exchange energy system that powers the flagellum filament. This seems to undercut the perception of design in this case because this part is not unique to the flagellum.

Alexander makes the same criticism for another example of an irreducibly complex system that Behe proposes: blood clotting. In Darwin’s Black Box, Behe argues that the complex biochemical system that is blood clotting – the way the body forms blood clots to stop bleeding when someone cuts his or her finger, for example – is irreducibly complex. Behe describes in great, professional detail the myriad steps that go into forming blood clots – how proteins called Hageman factor stick to cells near a wound, and then another protein called HMK activates the first proteins to turn another protein, called pre-kallikrein, into kallikrein, which then starts a whole chain reaction of complex biochemical transformations that result in the attraction of sticky platelets that flow through a wound and eventually congeal into a plug that stops the bleeding.

It’s an unbelievably complex, delicately balanced process involving a “menagerie of biochemicals” that Behe likens to a Rube Goldberg machine and before which, he says, “Darwinian theory falls silent.” What Behe means by this is that biologists have no explanation for how such a clotting mechanism could have gradually arisen through incremental, evolutionary steps.

Alexander’s reply is that this is simply incorrect. In fact, he claims that an evolutionary mechanism could explain how blood clotting arose “quite easily.” The details are difficult for a non-expert to follow, but in essence Alexander argues that all that is required to show an evolutionary pathway is to find simpler blood clotting systems in other animals from which larger animals evolved – for example, starfish.

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They are waking up, and, perhaps for the first time, finally realizing just how murderous their heroes on the political Left really are.

The cold-blooded assassination of conservative activ…

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The European Union has began aggressive implementation of the Digital Services Act (DSA), an Orwellian legal regime that compels platforms to swiftly remove vaguely defined “illegal content” across all member states, which incl…

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This week, I’ve been in Istanbul, visiting historic mosques and reading the Quran back at my hotel at night.

As is my custom, I tal…

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After wandering the ancient streets of Istanbul’s Sultanahmet district, past the towering minarets of the Blue Mosque and the Byzantine dome of Hagia Sophia, I finally located the nondescript building.

The setting…

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The Greek vendors just looked blankly at me, bored, not saying a word.

In the Middle East, they would be all over you, hawking their wares, asking you your na…

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During the last Hamas-Israel war, in the summer of 2014, I was staying at the Catholic research center at Tantur, next door to Bethlehem.

Once a week, the center leaders would say a rosary to Our Lady of the Wall—the Wall being the massive concrete border wall, 30 feet high, that Israel built along the entire Green Line of the West Bank, from north of Je…

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You’re experiencing two complete civilizations layered on top of each other like some incredible historical sandwich.

There’s Christian Rome, the realm of the Vatican with its soaring basilicas and countless churches.

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And then there’s Roman Rome—the Rome of the Caesars, the gladiators, the empire that once ruled the known world.

Behind me in the video is the magnificent statue of Marcus Aurelius, one of the truly good Roman emperors.

This bronze masterpiece has quite the story.

I first stumbled upon it back in 1979 or 1980 during my initial Roman adventure, and it absolutely captivated me.

The last time I visited, it had vanished, whisked away for restoration and tucked safely inside some museum.

But now it’s back where it belongs, back in its original spot, and seeing it again felt like greeting an old friend.

Marcus Aurelius represents something profound about Rome’s dual nature. He was a Stoic philosopher — emperor, virtuous and contemplative, ruling at the very moment when pagan Rome was beginning its slow transformation into what would become Christian Rome.

As he himself wrote in his Meditations, he embodied the Roman ideal of duty and virtue that would later find new expression in Christian Rome.

This statue sits in the heart of Roman Rome, practically next door to the Forum where Julius Caesar’s body was burned after his assassination.

You can see those imposing statues of Roman senators looking down, and everywhere those four letters that define the Roman spirit: SPQR — Senatus Populusque Romanus, “The Senate and People of Rome.”

These letters are literally everywhere in the city, even stamped on modern manhole covers, because they represent something that never really died.

But here’s what’s remarkable about Rome. You can’t walk fifty feet without crossing from one civilization to the other.

The Romans themselves understood their city’s grandeur.

Emperor Augustus famously boasted, “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.”

By 117 AD, their empire stretched across the entire Mediterranean and beyond, with Rome as its beating heart—the first city in history to exceed one million residents.

The monuments they left behind still take your breath away. The Colosseum, seating 50,000 screaming spectators, remains the ultimate symbol of Imperial might.

Saint Venerable Bede captured its significance perfectly: “Rome will exist as long as the Colosseum does; when the Colosseum falls, so will Rome; when Rome falls, so will the world.”

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Walking through the Roman Forum, you’re treading where senators debated the fate of empires. The Pantheon, dedicated around 126 AD to all the gods, still boasts the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome nearly 2,000 years later—a testament to Roman engineering genius.

Then came the seismic shift.

In 312 AD, Emperor Constantine had his vision at the Battle of Milvian Bridge—”In this sign (the Cross) conquer”—and everything changed.

The Edict of Milan in AD 313 granted religious freedom, and suddenly temples were becoming churches. By AD 380, Christianity was the official state religion under Theodosius I.

Christian Rome rose from the ashes of persecution to become the spiritual capital of the world. St. Peter’s Basilica, built over the site of St. Peter’s martyrdom, became the world’s largest church and the heart of global Catholicism.

Mark Twain perfectly captured its majesty: “From the dome of St. Peter’s one can see every notable object in Rome… a panorama that is varied, extensive, beautiful to the eye, and more illustrious in history than any other in Europe.”

The Vatican Museums now house the world’s richest art collection, including Michelangelo’s breathtaking Sistine Chapel.

The city boasts over 900 churches—from the grand basilicas like Santa Maria Maggiore to tiny neighborhood chapels, each preserving centuries of faith, art, and history.

What fascinates me most is how these two Romes don’t just coexist—they’re completely intermingled. The Pantheon itself tells this story: originally dedicated to all the Roman gods, it was converted to a Christian church in 608 AD when Emperor Phocas donated it to Pope Boniface IV. Same building, completely different spiritual universe.

The great filmmaker Federico Fellini understood this perfectly: “In ‘Roma,’ I wanted to get across the idea that underneath Rome today is ancient Rome. So close. I am always conscious of that, and it thrills me.”

That’s exactly what you feel walking these streets.

You’re literally walking on layers of history, with pagan grandeur and Christian splendor sometimes occupying the very same stones.

Today, Rome draws over 10 million visitors annually, with the Colosseum attracting 7.7 million and the Vatican Museums over 6 million. Each visitor experiences what Goethe meant when he wrote, “Only in Rome is it possible to understand Rome.”

As Lord Byron called it “the city of the soul,” Rome remains what it has always been—Caput Mundi, the “Capital of the World.”

Whether you’re drawn to the echoes of gladiatorial combat or the whispered prayers of pilgrims, you’ll discover that in Rome, yesterday and forever meet in every single step.

Robert J. Hutchinson is the author of numerous books of popular history, including Searching for Jesus: New Discoveries in the Quest for Jesus of Nazareth (Thomas Nelson), The Dawn of Christianity (Thomas Nelson), The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible (Regnery) and When in Rome: A Journal of Life in Vatican City (Doubleday). Email him at: roberthutchinson@substack.com

As of 2025, updated figures from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center show that college enrollment in the U.S. has fallen by about 15% since 2011, which is a decline of roughly 2.7 to 2.8 million students.

The decline has hit every sector, public and private, four-year and community college.

What’s more, 41 percent of students who start college fail to finish after six years, often because they can’t afford to continue.

In 2025, the average net cost to students in the U.S., after financial aid, is $20,800 per year for public universities and $36,000 for private universities.

As a result, fully 70 percent of U.S. college students now incur student loan debt. 

The most recent figures are that some 44 million Americans now owe an estimated 1.7 trillion in student loan debt – an average of $41,000 per student for the class of 2029.  That’s more than all auto loan or credit card debt.

This is not true in most of the world. 

Only Americans tolerate what is, in effect, a systematic fleecing by the higher education establishment – which has raised costs at 8 times that of U.S. wages over the past decades.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the cost to attend a four-year public university has risen by an astonishing 31 times since 1969, far outstripping the rate of inflation. The average cost of tuition at U.S. schools is now a whopping $25,000, after aid.

In contrast, university education throughout most of Europe is virtually free.

That’s partly because European universities are stripped down, no-nonsense affairs with an emphasis on learning over lifestyle and a centuries-old commitment to meritocratic testing as the key to advancement. 

A few years ago, during a research trip, I toured a number of universities in Berlin and Vienna, schools where the likes of Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein received their educations. 

There are no climbing walls at Berlin’s famous Humboldt University, no gourmet cafeterias at the University of Vienna. 

The marble floors are cracked, the walls often need paint.  German students complain that there are often not enough desks for everyone to sit.

As a result, the cost to attend these prestigious universities, even for foreign students, is often less than $5,000 per year.

The average net cost for students at an undergraduate university is $500 per year in Germany, Norway and Finland, and $182 per year in France.

Netherlands, Spain and Austria can be more expensive with undergraduate tuition being between $1,800 and $4,500 per year.

(The UK is more like America, with the cost to attend elite universities like Oxford or Cambridge being as much as $12,000 per year for a British student.)

Coronavirus gave online education a big boost

Providentially, the explosion in online classes that the coronavirus crisis forced upon America’s universities and colleges was the catalyst for a long-needed reform of America’s over-indulged, over-priced higher education establishment.

A year before the pandemic, I took a year-long online course in German through a community college.

I travel to Germany frequently on business, and, after seven years of visits, wanted a thorough overview of German grammar and basic vocabulary.  It was an excellent course, difficult and thorough. 

My teacher prepared weekly videos that summarized the topics of that week.  I had about 15 to 20 separate assignments to complete every week, including video dialogues, along with quizzes and tests. 

I also interacted with my fellow students through Skype and telephone calls.  My professor also spoke to us regularly to see how well our conversation skills, practiced with fellow students, were progressing.

The course surprised me.  I have taken “in person” language classes most of my life – including four years of French in college and two years of Hebrew in Israel.  

Yet I was astonished to find that my online German course was nearly as rigorous as, and in many ways more challenging than, the traditional language classes I have taken in which 40 students gather daily in classrooms. 

I also saved a tremendous amount of time that would have come with driving 30 minutes to and from the college, finding parking, and sitting at a desk every day for 50 minutes.

The cost:  $264 per semester. 

Had I taken the same class at the private Catholic college my daughter then attended, I would have paid $7,500 per semester – or 28 times more.

Of course, it’s true that some fields, such as engineering and medicine, require intensive, in-person instruction that simply cannot be replicated adequately online.  And there is no doubt that at least some traditional in-classroom teaching would be ideal.

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Newman’s elevation, announced on July 31, 2025, finally gives proper due to a thinker whose ideas influenced not just Catholic theology but…

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