According to Eric Levitz, the values Vermeule promotes are those of Catholicism and the Christian right. Law professor Randy E. Barnett characterizes Vermeule's essay as "an argument for the temporal power "of the state" to be subordinated to the spiritual power "of the Church"." Constitutional law professor Garrett Epps characterizes Vermeule as "an authentic Christian nationalist to whom the Constitution is only an obstacle". Vermeule's common-good constitutionalism argument is, according to Epps, really "authoritarian extremism" which "has absolutely nothing to do with the actual United States Constitution, and in many ways flatly contradicts it. ... In fact, the Constitution as such is not a binding text to Vermeule" since it must be, in Vermeule's words, "read into" in order to arrive at the results he prefers. In the end, Epps criticizes Vermeule's concept as a "banal" anti-constitutional theory akin to Falangism. Levitz notes that Vermeule received little support from conservatives for his arguments, although some did object to characterizing him as "authoritarian".