The Neuhaus Moment

The Neuhaus Moment

Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square
by Randy Boyagoda
Image Books, 2015, 459 pages, US$30

Richard John Neuhaus (1936–2009) was one of the most prominent American intellectuals of the twentieth century. Beginning in the early 1960s, when he first achieved public notice in the American civil rights and anti-war movements, he remained in the public eye for the next four decades, becoming among the most important conservative Catholic intellectual voices from the 1980s through the turn of the twenty-first century. Some of his aphorisms (such as Neuhaus’s law: “Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed,” used to describe the state of mainline American Protestant denominations but later much expanded) have filtered into the pundit lexicon. He was an inveterate founder of institutions and signer of declarations, whose flagship, the journal First Things, remains a must-read among American conservatives and others interested in (as the journal’s subtitle indicates) “religion and public life”. Although best known for his cultural polemics, Neuhaus’s was a true religious voice; the book that emerged in part from his first battle with cancer, As I Lay Dying, is a profound reflection of his belief in the Saviour and on our own mortality. As this new book, the first biography of Neuhaus, makes clear, that fundamental commitment shaped all the others.

Neuhaus in turn challenged the Catholic Left for abandoning its traditions, his former Protestant co-religionists for selling out to passing ideological fads, and American secular elites for forgetting the importance of religion to public peace, in a style by turns acerbic and wry. His most famous book, The Naked Public Square (1984), remains a classic. Neuhaus argues that what is called (incorrectly) in the American constitutional system “the separation of church and state” eventually will require that religious voices be excluded from public debate entirely; moreover, the secular voices that will remain embody a morality hostile to religion in general, and Christianity in particular, and one that threatens moral and political disorder. Although directed to the United States, Neuhaus saw the same trend in the other historically Christian nations.

This provocative argument at once marked him as an enemy to his former friends on the Left and found him a welcome home among new political allies on the Right. What is less remembered, however, is that Neuhaus also argues against those religious fundamentalists who want a “wall” of their own; this religious isolationism, always a strong tradition in certain strains of American evangelical culture, is criticised for having “no convincing and coherent theory of democratic governance”. The book crystallised a debate that had been brewing for a decade, but redefined the terms. Religious people, liberal or conservative, now had a term to define their cultural unease; secular progressives now were able to be put on the defensive, to explain why the public square should be naked. Into these debates Neuhaus threw himself with full force.

That Neuhaus was born neither American nor Catholic makes his journey to the centres of American public life and the Catholic Church that much more remarkable. The Neuhaus family was Lutheran, and lived in eastern, rural Canada; Richard’s father was a pastor of several towns in Ontario and an imposing authority figure for his large family. For much of his adult life Neuhaus returned for the summers to a family home in rural Canada and at times even preached in his father’s church, though New York City became his true home.

Randy Boyagoda, a Canadian Catholic novelist and critic and one of different political commitments from Neuhaus, is respectful but not adulatory towards his subject. Perhaps their shared Canadian background allows for a perspective that Neuhaus would not be afforded by a veteran of what in America are called “the culture wars” that dominated the public square through almost the whole of Neuhaus’s public life. Boyagoda explains Neuhaus’s personal appeal and magnetism, while acknowledging that that magnetism came from a very strong ego that some found off-putting. His natural affinity for making friends, especially of those in high places, seemed to some to veer into self-promotion. And some positions taken in earlier years were quietly retired or reworked in later telling.

Three events emerge as the most significant in understanding Neuhaus. First are the years (1961 to 1978) he spent as a Lutheran pastor in a small, poor, African-American parish in Brooklyn. Given his upbringing, boarding school in remote Nebraska and seminary in rural Texas, New York was a revelation and where Neuhaus would make his home for the rest of his life. Neuhaus found the work of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others as offering a Christian witness in the public square similar to the one he was fashioning for himself in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s. This was not easy. Some fellow Lutherans opposed the radical positions he was taking, including his father, the elder Rev. Neuhaus; the two actually debated at a national Lutheran synod in 1965 on the church’s role in the civil rights movement. He later found the need to distance himself, not from King or his parish work, but from the adversarial posture the New Left was taking towards religion and American culture. He was to inveigh against that counterculture, in both its religious and political aspects, in the coming decades.

The second event was his conversion to Catholicism in 1990. By that point, Neuhaus had already been a well-known intellectual for decades. His 1987 book, The Catholic Moment, contended that the Roman Catholic Church retained a unique influence and substance that other Christian denominations lacked, and that it represented the best tradition to be matched with democratic self-government, and not a secular liberalism that in Boyagoda’s words, “failed to reflect or advance the deepest longings of many believing people around the world”. Reflecting on the book in 2003, Neuhaus wrote that the importance of Catholicism is its corporate existence, which provides historical and theological resources to oppose the secular view

that construes religion in terms of consumer preference and voluntary associations in support of those preferences … [and] the totalitarian impulse of the modern state, including democratic states, to monopolize public space and consign religion to the private sphere.

His conversion seemed to confirm the very dissolution of mainline Protestantism about which he was writing.

By this time also Neuhaus had become affiliated with that group of intellectuals known as neoconservatives. Boyagoda rightfully treats this issue only sparingly, as Neuhaus’s career was both larger and longer. Boyagoda writes that The Catholic Moment

articulates the religious, specifically American Catholic, dimension of neoconservatism’s emphases on advancing morally framed foreign policies and defending democracy as the strongest possible means of winning the Cold War, and in turn establishing the unrivaled power and influence of the United States in world affairs.

True, but not the whole story; Neuhaus was of course just as concerned about the domestic relationship between religion and politics, although his friend George Weigel in particular caused controversy by making a robust defence of military actions after the September 11 attacks in the pages of First Things.

More important was his long association with other Catholic neoconservatives such as Michael Novak and Weigel. These three worked to combine the Catholic concern for the poor and the dignity of the individual with the immense challenges and opportunities of a capitalist system. Doing so often caused controversy with the American Catholic bishops, who to Neuhaus represented too often simply liberalism in clerical attire. Their writings reached the attention of the Vatican and the pontificate of John Paul II, whose 1991 encyclical on economics, Centesimus Annus, seemed to endorse American-style capitalism as especially compatible with Catholicism. These efforts remain controversial and not without challenge; the present Pope, for example, seems little enamoured of capitalism, while under Benedict XVI their message appeared muted.

The third event in a very full life (Boyagoda ably controls the flood of positions, essays, people and places that formed the backdrop of Neuhaus’s daily rounds) was the founding of First Things, also in 1990, which became a centre of resistance by conservative and religious critics of the American regime, who saw in the nation’s increasing secularity a threat not only to religious liberty but also to the American experiment of self-government itself. (Disclosure: I have contributed to First Things, though I never met Neuhaus.) The journal published a symposium called “The End of Democracy?” where several contributors, including Neuhaus, argued that the Supreme Court was dismantling republican government by fiat, and mused whether such action justified widespread civil disobedience. The symposium caused an uproar, including the resignation of at least one First Things board member, but arguably Neuhaus has been proven correct: for many conservatives, the years since have only proven that a secular elitism has infiltrated the courts, one that is not good for self-government or for those truths about man and society that the American Declaration of Independence derives from “Nature’s God”.

At his death, Neuhaus’s importance and influence were noted in press outlets across the world, which attested to the continuing value of an American voice that spoke to fundamental issues of religion and culture beyond the shores of his own nation.