Illustration by Jason Logan. Click for larger image.Books discussed in this essay:
American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile
by Richard John Neuhaus
Basic Books (2009), 288 pp.
The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America
by Richard John Neuhaus
Eerdmans (1984), 280 pp.Can we consider the significance of Christianity to American politics without taking a Canadian delight in deploring American vulgarities? In posing this question, I’m paraphrasing Martin Amis writing about the same challenge from a British perspective. Amis was quoted to that effect by Richard John Neuhaus, one of the most influential Canadian-born intellectuals in American life over the past forty years. During this time, Neuhaus was at the very centre of American history and politics—as an activist, presidential adviser, and man of ideas, but foremost as a man of God. A Lutheran minister and later a Roman Catholic priest, he was comparatively little known in Canada. His Canadian background was an occasionally notable element in his cultural and theological works, and he wrote about Canada explicitly, even polemically, in the journal First Things. Upon his death, in January 2009, obituaries ran in the Ottawa Citizen, which mentioned his nearby birthplace, Pembroke; and in the Globe and Mail and the National Post. The latter also featured columnist Father Raymond de Souza’s moving tribute to Neuhaus as both a mentor and a friend. Meanwhile, in the US, there was nationwide media coverage and letters of tribute and condolence from scores of intellectuals, columnists, and public figures, including then President Bush and Republican leaders in both the Senate and the House.
That Neuhaus was underappreciated in Canada is by no means surprising, given the unapologetically religious cast of his ideas and actions. Contemporary Canadians take little sympathetic interest in the strongly religious dimension of American life. Instead, we tend to be outraged, embarrassed, and often smugly superior over the fact that the world’s most powerful nation seems so permanently in thrall to religion. Never mind that Canada’s own Charter of Rights and Freedoms begins with the declaration “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law,” or that every Canadian prime minister since Confederation has been either Catholic or Protestant. What matters is that neither a Canadian leader’s religious affiliation, nor the explicit enshrinement of respect for divine authority in the Charter, exerts much influence on the cultural textures or decision-making realities of our national life.
Early in his last book, the posthumously published American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile, Neuhaus sets forth an openly patriotic-sounding expectation of the afterlife: “When I meet God, I expect to meet him as an American.” From a Canadian vantage point, such a statement would seem to represent the way many Americans conceive of the relationship between religion and nation as an uncomplicated interplay of faith and patriotism. But Neuhaus’s mission as a public intellectual was to articulate the complexity of being both a believer and a citizen, without diminishing the significance of either or downplaying the inherent tension of their relationship: “Not most importantly [will I meet God] as an American, to be sure, but as someone who tried to take seriously, and tried to encourage others to take seriously, the story of America within the story of the world. The argument, in short, is that God is not indifferent toward the American experiment, and therefore we who are called to think about God and his ways through time dare not be indifferent to the American experiment.”
Born in Pembroke, Ontario, in 1936, one of eight children, Richard John Neuhaus was by no means indifferent to the American experiment. After dropping out of high school at fifteen, he made his way to Texas, where he worked for a while at a gas station. Eventually, he found his way into a seminary, was ordained a Lutheran minister, and became the pastor of a Brooklyn parish. Moving to New York seems to have provided a suitably intense and sizable arena for his passions and ambitions. He was arrested during a sit-in protest for the integration of public schools at the New York Board of Education, and marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and other clergymen in Selma, Alabama. With the Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Father Daniel Berrigan, he co-founded the anti-war organization Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam; as a Senator Eugene McCarthy delegate, he was also arrested during the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. And with Noam Chomsky, Jane Fonda, and others, he co-signed an anti-war letter published in the New York Review of Books in 1970. At that point, his credentials as a leading left-wing intellectual seemed impeccable. Thirty-five years later, he showed up in the New York Review of Books again, this time as the subject of a conspiracy-minded article by Garry Wills entitled “Fringe Government,” which described him as exerting, from the far religious right, influence in both the Vatican and the Bush White House.
What happened between 1970 and 2005 that so dramatically shifted the ideological space he occupied, if not his personal proximity to history and power? Among other things, a lot of abortions. For Neuhaus, to be against abortion was consistent with being for universal civil rights and against an unjust war. He argued that to be pro-life was to be authentically liberal. A true liberal, after all, is committed, as Neuhaus wrote, to “the protection of the weak and the helpless,” while a conventional conservative would put survival of the fittest and economic efficiency ahead of the rights and value of an unborn child. What may seem now like a rhetorical ploy made sense in the years following the US Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, when the left/right divide on abortion was not nearly as stark as it would later become. Indeed, during the ’70s, as the broader alignments in the culture wars came into focus, Neuhaus found himself differing with his long-time colleagues on the left on matters beyond abortion: US foreign policy, capitalism versus Marxism, sexual morality, racial and gender politics, and the role of religion in public life. His thinking on this last point was a response to an intensification of anti-religious feeling in the halls of American power, and the rise of aggressively Christian efforts to influence American politics.
Feeling little sympathy for either side, Neuhaus wrote The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (1984). Invoking de Tocqueville’s pivotal Democracy in America in the title, he framed the book as an intellectual response to the increasing clout of figures like Jerry Falwell and movements like the Moral Majority—then known as “the religious new right.” Throughout the book, he laments their power as dangerous to the integrity and vitality of both state and church. He identifies their appeal as a response to a hyper-secularized view of religion’s relationship to decision making in a modern free state. The questionable achievement of this view, according to Neuhaus, is “the naked public square,” which he describes as a political doctrine and practice “that would exclude religion and religiously grounded values from the conduct of public business.”
