Fr. Neuhaus and First Things

On friday I received in my campus mail box the latest issue of my favourite periodical, First Things, which is published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life in New York and edited by the redoubtable Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. I suppose one might describe it as a largely Catholic journal, with significant confessional protestant and observant Jewish contributions as well. Its tone is probably best described as neoconservative. While I myself cannot in good conscience call myself a neoconservative as such, I am quite happy to admit that thoughtful articles of substance appear in every issue making it well worth reading. Some of these I have discussed in previous entries in this weblog.

Fr. Neuhaus himself is a Canadian-born former Lutheran pastor who has now become a Catholic priest, an ardent proponent of what he calls the American experiment and an insightful commentator on the larger developments in the culture war in that country. His monthly Public Square is, I suppose, the print equivalent of a weblog, drawing readers’ attention to commentaries and articles in other sources and, of course, adding his own assessments, complete with his well-known sense of irony.

Neuhaus’ journey to Catholicism is recounted in “How I Became the Catholic I Was.” Raised within the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod, one of the more confessional of Lutheran bodies in North America, he eventually found his way into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which he soon judged to be losing its confessional moorings. In 1990, the same year he founded First Things, he became a Roman Catholic. Since he had never married, being re-ordained as a priest posed no obstacle. Pastor Neuhaus thus became Father Neuhaus. It is evident from his writings that he is devoted to the cause of Christ and that his priestly identity is central to his sense of personal calling.

At his best when he is skewering the pretensions of late liberalism in the public square, Neuhaus is a contemporary master of English style and has a keen eye for the absurdities of this ideology, which he treats in his own inimitably witty fashion. He was an early proponent of what would later come to be called civil society, namely, those communal formations and initiatives springing from the initiative of the people themselves, and not from the direction of the state. The essay he co-authored nearly three decades ago with Peter Berger, To Empower People, was an eloquent statement in favour of protecting civil society in all its variety.

One of the enduring themes in Neuhaus’ writings is the rather enlarged role the American judiciary has unilaterally assumed in decreeing sweeping social changes in the face of recalcitrant legislatures. This concern led to the publication of a controversial symposium in the November 1996 issue of FT under the general title, “The End of Democracy: The Judicial Usurpation of Politics.” Among those contributing to this special issue were Robert Bork, who had been Ronald Reagan’s unsuccessful nominee for a Supreme Court vacancy in 1987, Princeton University’s Robert George, and Charles Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship and the Wilberforce Forum. This led to several resignations from the FT editorial board by those who found this issue too inflammatory.

Despite my being a professed fan of Neuhaus’ writings, I cannot call myself an unqualified proponent of his overall approach, which is deficient in a rather basic way.

To begin with, his support for the “American experiment” and its constitutional democracy sometimes appears to outweigh his consciousness of the jural task of the state, which normatively holds for every political community everywhere. Whether or not a state is democratic, it nevertheless carries a divine mandate to do justice to all individuals and communities within its territory. St. Paul could write of even the Roman state possessing a divinely-given task of punishing evil and rewarding good in Romans 13. By concentrating so heavily on the American polity and its particular political traditions, including the liberalism of John Locke and the founders, Neuhaus risks minimizing the universality of this task.

Along with this affection for the American experiment comes what I would label a sort of highbrow populism. In his Public Square pieces in particular one can read, on the one hand, a diatribe against the debased character of contemporary popular culture, and, on the other hand, an invective against the political and cultural élites of his adopted country for pushing secularizing reforms against the presumably less corrupt mores of a confusedly “christian America.” If at some point America ceases to be christian and takes on the more overt secular identity of a France or a post-1960s Québec, Neuhaus will be hard pressed to continue with his present approach if he intends to retain his fidelity to the Christian gospel. I am confident Neuhaus does indeed believe in a transcendent standard of justice, but his principal method of argumentation here is basically historicist.

Moreover, while Neuhaus’ barbs at contemporary liberalism are always well aimed, he must finally be considered a liberal critic of liberalism. That is, he critiques late liberalism – or the advocates of what I call the choice-enhancement state in my book – but without actually repudiating liberal first principles. This becomes clear in his on-going debate with the likes of David L. Schindler and Fr. Michael Baxter in, e.g., “The Liberalism of John Paul II.” Here Neuhaus revealingly writes:

As sympathetic as we may be to some of the determined critics of liberalism, we do well to remind ourselves that all temporal orders short of the Kingdom of God are profoundly unsatisfactory. When we survey the depredations and ravages of our social, political, and religious circumstance, it is tempting to look for someone or something to blame. It is easy to say, "Liberalism made us do it." But liberalism is freedom, and what we do with freedom is charged to our account.

This statement provides a handy means for Neuhaus to avert the attacks of those who properly see liberalism as a larger ideology with its own spiritual underpinnings. But it fundamentally misconstrues the nature of liberalism. Or, as my friend and colleague Al Wolters would put it, it confuses creational structure with spiritual direction. Liberalism is not identical to freedom per se. It is, rather, based on a certain inordinate, and thus idolatrous, love of freedom, with its tendency to reduce the complexity of communal formations to mere voluntary associations.

Unfortunately Neuhaus has not entirely avoided this tendency even in himself. In arguing against US support for the International Criminal Court, he writes: "As stated in the Declaration of Independence, just government is derived from the consent of the governed." This is certainly in accordance with the Lockean tradition as mediated by Thomas Jefferson to the Americans, but one would be hard pressed to find a foundation for this belief in scripture. To be sure, consent is almost certainly a necessary precondition for just government, but it does not stand at its origin. To hold that it does is to risk making the political community into one more voluntary association whose purpose and task are determined by the possibly shifting whims of its members.

This said, I will continue to read Neuhaus and First Things, which have much to offer the discerning christian reader.