When rhetorical confrontations and legal & political coercions take the strategic lead, every triumphalistic nail will be looking for a church militant hammer.

Sam Rocha's once characterized Rod Dreher's view of the US culture wars by describing Dreher's sense of catastrophe as kitsch and parochial, his sense of despair as emotivist and modern. In my view, that description applies generally to the approach that both the Protestant evangelicals and the Catholic integralists take.

Now a proper integralist approach will only devolve into a sterile integralistic rigorism when the noncoercive soft powers of moral enculturation, creedal inculturation, pastoral accommodation and dialogical communication are forsaken for the hard powers of legal and political coercion. While the hard powers may often enough have a legitimate role, they should not be accorded the primacy due to the soft powers.

Prophetic protest, authentically voiced, articulates the Gospel invitations of charity, mercy, etc