Not All Postliberalism Is the Same: A Response to Fr. Portella

Over the past year, postliberalism has become a popular term surrounding debates about the relationship between liberalism and Christianity, particularly Catholicism. On June 11, 2026, Fr. Mario Portella published an essay here in Crisis Magazine called “On Postliberalism,” arguing that postliberalism is fundamentally incompatible with Christianity, citing Carl Schmitt as its protagonist. I offer a charitable rebuttal to his argument. Fr. Portella is correct in one way; he is mistaken in another. While I agree that certain forms of postliberalism that are connected with Schmitt are incompatible with Catholic teaching, I argue that others can be defended within the Catholic intellectual tradition.

First, it is necessary to define postliberalism. Fr. Portella describes it as a “modern ideological shift, moving beyond the conventional liberal emphasis on individual freedom and neutrality toward a society shaped by specific, state-endorsed values.” I believe this definition is too narrow. Instead, I understand postliberalism as a broad family of political philosophies and ideologies that seek to move beyond liberalism toward a different political and social order. In other words, it is a negative ideology. What unites postliberals is their opposition to liberalism. In this sense, Fr. Portella is correct: postliberals seek to move beyond conventional liberalism. However, postliberalism’s unity ends there, as it is, on its own, an umbrella term encompassing diverse, and sometimes conflicting, alternatives to liberalism. Marxism might also be understood as postliberal, insofar as it seeks to replace the liberal order with something fundamentally different. What distinguishes these traditions is not their opposition to liberalism, but their competing visions of what should come after it.

With this definition in mind, I argue that Fr. Portella is both right and wrong in his critique of postliberalism. He is right to raise concerns about Carl Schmitt’s political theory and its influence in certain postliberal circles. He is wrong, however, to suggest that the association between some postliberals and Schmitt justifies condemning all Christian postliberal projects.

Fr. Portella describes Schmitt as “the protagonist of postliberalism” and presents his writings as the key theoretical tradition for contemporary postliberalism that one sees in Vice President JD Vance (and, I might add, in Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen). Schmitt certainly influenced some postliberal thinkers, particularly those who favor a neo-absolutist understanding of the common good and the authority of the political community. But he does not represent every strand of postliberalism. To speak of Schmitt as the protagonist of postliberalism is to imply a unity that the movement does not possess.

However, on Schmitt, Fr. Portella’s criticism is well founded. There is a strand of postliberalism that invokes the common good to justify authoritarian political arrangements and the unjust imposition of values onto society. The Schmittian understanding of sovereignty is entirely counter to the Church’s understanding of the state and the common good. Such an approach rightly deserves criticism from the viewpoint of Catholic Social Thought as it violates the intrinsic dignity of the human person.

Where I disagree with Fr. Portella is in his rejection of the entire postliberal project on these grounds. Catholics can reasonably disagree about liberalism and its political legacy with Christianity. Some defend classical liberalism; others support elements of social liberalism and social democracy. Yet, the relationship between liberalism and Catholicism has also been marked by genuine tensions and conflict. Here we need prudential judgment in our discourse. It is important for a Catholic to discuss the incompatibilities between Catholicism and liberalism without concluding that every political alternative to liberalism is equally sound or equally objectionable. In other words, one can reject both Schmitt and liberalism while remaining faithful to the Church and Holy Writ.

What is needed, then, is a positive account of postliberalism: one that rejects the Schmittian authoritarianism Fr. Portella fears without concluding that liberalism offers the only legitimate foundation for political life. I believe that New Polity, through the works of academics such as Dr. Andrew Willard Jones and Dr. D.C. Schindler, offers a promising example of such an alternative. Jones, a professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville, advances a vision of Christian political life that is explicitly postliberal by recovering the possibilities obscured by the assumptions of modern political thought. Rather than proposing an authoritarian state of the kind that concerns Fr. Portella, Jones, throughout his academic career, “endeavored to show a non-liberal Christian order, in this case the order of St. Louis IX’s France” (Church Against the State, 30). This project already bears fruit in the success of new institutions such as the College of St. Joseph the Worker and the economic revival of Steubenville, Ohio, an often-forgotten Rust Belt town.

In his book The Church Against the State, Jones draws a positive vision of Christian postliberalism. Like Fr. Portella, he approaches politics through a Christian understanding, but he reaches a different conclusion about the relationship between Christianity, liberalism, and political authority. Drawing heavily on the principle of subsidiarity, Jones argues that liberalism entails “the steady elimination of power structures by which rival notions of justice can be sustained and from which, for that reason, conflict can emerge” (Church Against the State, 45). The argument can be summarized as the liberal state growing to control all lower-order social groups and especially the family. Liberalism means “liberation” from the forced bonds of family. Fr. Portella may disagree with Jones’s argument, but it cannot fairly be described as a call for a Schmittian total state under the banner of Catholic integralism. From this perspective, the danger of tyranny that concerns Fr. Portella cannot be attributed to postliberalism alone. Jones instead challenges the assumption that liberalism offers an adequate Christian response to the problem of political power.

Against Schmitt, Jones dedicates a whole chapter to rejecting Schmitt’s theory on postliberal Christian grounds. In no uncertain terms, Jones through the whole chapter breaks down Schmitt’s theory and its incompatibility with Christianity, ending with, “Schmitt isn’t merely mistaken. He couldn’t be more wrong. He is wrong about everything that matters” (Church Against the State, 262). Jones argues that Schmitt’s political theory emerges from the historical displacement of older Christian ideals by liberalism yet fails to recover those ideals in a genuinely Christian form. From this perspective, Schmitt does not adequately understand Christianity, and his political project may reproduce aspects of the liberal order he seeks to overcome, namely the authoritarian state for a false common good. For Jones, redeeming politics requires a radical vision based in Christ. In this respect, he shares Fr. Portella’s appeal to St. Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of the political community and the Holy Writ while extending that critique to liberalism itself, including classical liberalism.

Returning, then to the question: What kind of political and social order do postliberals wish to create? For the postliberals of New Polity, the answer lies in recovering a Christian vision that challenges the assumption of modern liberalism. A truly Catholic idea of sovereignty is beyond Schmitt and liberalism, starting from the local to build something old that was lost. Their academic works and practical efforts to build new Christian institutions in Steubenville invite Catholics to consider whether a political order shaped by Christian principles remains possible beyond the limits of modern liberalism. One may disagree with their conclusions, but their Christianity cannot be denied.

To conclude: This is a period of increased tension between liberalism and Christianity, and there are faithful Catholics on both sides of the argument. Fr. Portella is still a faithful Catholic as he defends liberalism within the bounds of the faith. But one can also be a faithful Catholic and a postliberal. Although Fr. Portella is right to warn against postliberal currents that embrace authoritarianism, a real threat that exists today, that warning should not foreclose the possibility of a different kind of postliberal project, one built as firmly on Catholic teachings as Fr. Portella’s rejection of Schmitt.