Critical Theology & Integral Humanism

Marc Lalonde, Charles Davis, & the Postmodern Conservative Challenge

Feb 03, 2025

Introduction

The recent passing of my former professor, Marc Lalonde, has led me back to his work and to the intellectual legacy of Charles Davis. Before his death, Lalonde and I had begun discussing a possible collaboration around Davis, critical theology, and some of the arguments I take up here. We never had the opportunity to pursue that conversation. This essay grows, in part, out of that unfinished conversation.

Davis and Lalonde offer important resources for thinking through a struggle that has only become more pronounced within contemporary Catholicism, particularly in the Anglosphere. Faced with the fragmentation and disorientation of the postmodern condition, an increasingly influential conservative response has emphasized the recovery of religious tradition, institutional authority, and a more coherent Catholic identity. There are important insights in this response. Traditions require continuity, institutions matter, and religious life cannot survive indefinitely as a collection of private beliefs and individual practices. The problem arises when this recovery becomes bound to a political project, and fidelity to the Catholic tradition becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from the defense of a particular cultural identity or social order.

The work of Davis and Lalonde points toward another possibility. Neither understood critical reason as the enemy of religious truth. Davis’s concern with the primacy of conscience, particularly conscience formed and illuminated by divine revelation, together with Lalonde’s later engagement with critical theory, offers a way of thinking about Catholicism that is neither simply secularized nor defensively traditionalist. What interests me is whether their work can help recover a more genuinely integral humanism: one capable of taking revelation seriously while also subjecting religious institutions, cultural identities, and political formations to sustained critical scrutiny.

Charles Davis: Revelation and the Primacy of Conscience

Charles Davis was a distinguished theologian and later Professor of Religion at Concordia University, though he remains best known for his dramatic decision to leave the Catholic Church in the 1960s, during the upheavals surrounding the Second Vatican Council. At the time, Davis was one of the most prominent Catholic theologians in Britain, and his departure sent shock waves through the English-speaking Catholic world.

What makes Davis interesting to me, however, is not simply the fact that he left the Church. It is the argument about conscience that led him there. Davis came to believe that the institutional claims of the Church could no longer override the responsibility of the individual to act according to conscience, particularly conscience formed and illuminated by divine revelation. His departure was therefore not simply a defense of individual freedom against ecclesial authority. It was a defense of the responsibility to respond truthfully to revelation even when one’s judgment brought one into conflict with the institution claiming to speak in its name.

This distinction matters. For Davis, conscience was not private preference or subjective feeling, nor was it simply an autonomous faculty standing outside faith. It was the place where the person remained responsible for discerning the demands of truth in the light of divine revelation. The Church could teach, guide, and mediate a tradition, but it could not finally remove that responsibility from the individual. In this sense, the primacy of conscience was inseparable from the seriousness with which Davis understood revelation itself.

Davis’s later work increasingly brought this concern into conversation with sociology, philosophy, and social criticism. This was part of the modern turn in theology that contemporary conservative critics often regard with suspicion. Yet Davis was not simply replacing theology with sociology. He was asking how claims about revelation and religious authority become entangled with human institutions and historical forms, and how those forms can themselves become ideological.

It was through Marc Lalonde that I first began to understand the larger significance of this trajectory. Lalonde also introduced me to Jacques Maritain and the tradition of integral humanism, which eventually became important to my own attempt to think about the relation between religious development, critical reason, and human flourishing. Read in that light, Davis’s work raises a question that continues to animate this essay: how can a religious tradition remain open to divine revelation while also recognizing that the individual conscience cannot simply surrender its responsibility to the institution that claims to interpret it?

Marc Lalonde’s Legacy: Critical Theology in Canada

Marc Lalonde devoted much of his scholarship to precisely this later period in Davis’s thought. After arriving at Concordia, Davis entered into sustained engagement with Marxist social criticism, the Frankfurt School, and especially the work of Jürgen Habermas. Lalonde regarded this period not as an abandonment of Davis’s theological concerns but as their further development. He argued that Davis produced some of his most difficult and important work during these years, including what Lalonde described as “one of the most sophisticated appropriations of critical theory within contemporary religious thought.”

Lalonde’s role as editor of The Promise of Critical Theology: Essays in Honour of Charles Davis was part of a larger effort to recover this dimension of Davis’s legacy. In his introduction to that collection, Lalonde described critical theology as a theological discourse in constructive dialogue with Marxist social criticism and the Frankfurt School. Its purpose was not simply to criticize religion from the outside, but to examine the ways both modern society and religious institutions can generate forms of domination that inhibit human emancipation.

This is what makes critical theology more interesting than a familiar opposition between conservative orthodoxy and progressive secularization. The critical question is not whether religion should accommodate itself to modernity. Modernity itself is subject to criticism. But so too are religious institutions, inherited traditions, and theological systems. Neither modernity nor tradition receives an exemption from critical scrutiny.

Lalonde developed this argument further in From Critical Theology to a Critical Theory of Religious Insight. What interests me about this work is the possibility of understanding religious insight as something capable of development without reducing religious truth to historical contingency. Critical reflection can expose ideology, distorted communication, and unjust forms of authority while remaining oriented toward questions of truth and transcendence.

This is also where Lalonde’s project begins to intersect with my own interest in integral humanism. A genuinely integral approach cannot simply defend tradition against modernity, nor can it dissolve religion into sociology or politics. It has to account for human development across personal, cultural, social, and spiritual dimensions while maintaining the critical capacity to distinguish religious truth from the institutions and identities that claim to possess it.

The Postmodern Conservative Challenge

This interpretation of Davis has been challenged more recently by Catholic thinkers such as Larry Chapp and Tracey Rowland. Their concern is that Davis’s turn toward critical theory ultimately participates in the secularization of Catholic theology. Once revelation becomes subject to the categories of modern philosophy and social criticism, they argue, theology risks treating faith as a human construction rather than as a response to a truth given from beyond ourselves.

The concern should not be dismissed. There is a genuine danger in reducing religion to psychology, sociology, politics, or culture. A Christianity that becomes indistinguishable from progressive social ethics has lost something essential. The conservative response to this development therefore cannot simply be written off as nostalgia or reaction. It reflects a legitimate concern about whether Christianity can retain its theological and metaphysical substance under the pressures of modernity.

But I do not think this resolves the problem Davis was attempting to confront.

The alternative cannot be to identify divine revelation with the historically inherited forms of the Church so completely that criticism of those forms appears as criticism of revelation itself. That move produces its own reduction. It risks turning Christianity into the defense of a particular cultural identity, institutional arrangement, or imagined social order.

This problem has become more visible within parts of the contemporary Catholic right, where theological retrieval increasingly overlaps with the politics of the New Right, post-liberalism, and various forms of neo-integralism. The desire for continuity, authority, and tradition is understandable in a fragmented culture. The difficulty begins when the recovery of theological resources from the past becomes tied to the recovery of an earlier social order—when fidelity to tradition is understood not simply as learning from inherited forms, but as re-establishing the cultural hierarchies, political arrangements, and religious authority presumed to have accompanied them. At that point, what begins as an effort to renew a tradition becomes an attempt to reconstruct a social and religious world that no longer exists in the same form.

Here Davis and Lalonde remain useful. Their work asks us to distinguish divine revelation from the historical forms through which it is interpreted and mediated. Those forms matter; we never encounter religion outside history, language, culture, or institutions. But neither can any particular historical form simply be identified with revelation itself.

This is why the primacy of conscience remains so important to Davis. Conscience does not mean that every individual simply decides what is true. It names the responsibility of the person to discern and respond to truth in the light of divine revelation, a responsibility that institutional authority cannot finally assume on one’s behalf. This is also why Lalonde’s engagement with Habermas matters: traditions require forms of internal criticism through which distorted authority and ideology can be brought into view.

The developmental dimension of this argument is something I would take further than either Davis or Lalonde. Thinkers such as Habermas, alongside developmental and integral approaches associated with figures such as Ken Wilber, give us additional tools for thinking about how religious consciousness itself changes. What appears at one historical moment as an adequate expression of faith may later become insufficient—not because revelation has changed, but because our capacity to understand, interpret, and embody it has developed.

This is where I see the possibility of a renewed integral humanism. Maritain’s language remains important because it refuses the reduction of the human person to either an isolated individual or a function of the social whole. But an integral humanism today also needs a more explicit account of historical and psychological development, institutional power, cultural pluralism, and the ways religious traditions themselves undergo transformation.

The issue, then, is not whether Christianity should become modern or retreat from modernity. It is whether a tradition can remain rooted deeply enough in its own sources to undergo criticism, development, and renewal without losing itself.

Prior to his death, I had contacted Lalonde about the possibility of recording a podcast together on precisely these questions. I wanted to return with him to Davis, critical theory, and the growing conservative critique of the theological tradition they represented. We never had the opportunity to have that conversation. Revisiting his work now is partly my attempt to continue it.

Conclusion

Returning to Charles Davis and Marc Lalonde has therefore become more than an exercise in intellectual history for me. Their work speaks directly to a conflict that has become increasingly visible within contemporary Christianity: how to recover the depth of religious tradition without turning tradition into an ideology, and how to preserve the critical achievements of modernity without reducing religion to another form of secular social criticism.

The conservative fear is that critical theology ultimately dissolves the Church into a human construction—a religious NGO whose transcendent claims have been replaced by the political and moral assumptions of the contemporary left. That danger should be taken seriously. There are forms of progressive Christianity in which very little remains that could not be expressed in entirely secular terms.

But the opposite danger is just as real. A Church organized around resistance to modernity can gradually identify Christianity with a particular political coalition, cultural identity, or social order. When this happens, transcendence is not preserved so much as subordinated to the defense of a particular vision of society. Christianity begins to function as a source of cultural coherence and political legitimacy rather than as a truth capable of judging every social order, including the one being defended in its name.

Davis and Lalonde help illuminate a way through this impasse. Davis insists upon the primacy of conscience as the responsibility to discern and respond to truth in the light of divine revelation. Lalonde shows why theology requires a critical account of the social and institutional conditions through which religious truth is interpreted and communicated. Neither requires us to choose between an uncritical traditionalism and the secular dissolution of religion.

What I would add to their project is a more explicitly developmental account of integral humanism. Religious traditions do not survive by remaining unchanged. They survive through processes of retrieval, criticism, reinterpretation, and renewal. The challenge is to distinguish genuine development from the dissolution of a tradition, while also distinguishing the retrieval of its resources from an attempt to reconstruct the social world in which those resources first emerged.

That distinction has become increasingly important to my own work. An integral Christianity cannot simply reproduce the forms of the past, but neither can it abandon the transcendent horizon that made those forms meaningful in the first place. It has to hold together revelation and critical reason, conscience and authority, tradition and development, the dignity of the person and the demands of social life.

This, I think, is where the unfinished conversation between Charles Davis and Marc Lalonde still has something important to offer us.

Further Context

Jacques Maritain

Integral Humanism: Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a New Christendom (1936; English translation, 1968)

Jürgen Habermas

The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (1985; English translation, 1987)

Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays (2005; English translation, 2008)

An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age (2008; English edition, 2010)

Integral [+] Facticity

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?