IF YOU DENY SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH HOW CAN YOU BE A GOOD CITIZEN OF THE REPUBLIC?:

THE CHRISTIANIZING OF AMERICA: Without a Doubt: a review of Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy, and the Splendor of Truth By Richard John Neuhaus (Damon Linker, 03.24.06, New Republic)

Following Pope Benedict XVI, Neuhaus maintains that, far from restricting or abolishing freedom, the surrender of the mind to the absolute authority of the Church is the "foundation of freedom." But this is sophistry. Matthew Arnold, who was himself deeply exercised by the cultural consequences of the crisis of traditional religion, beautifully and accurately defined free thinking as "the free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches." Neuhaus appears to want no part of such serious play, such open-ended inquiry. Denouncing it as pointless "complexification" and yearning for what Paul Ricouer called a "second naïveté" on the far side of reflection, he gives every sign of preferring a comprehensive and hermetically sealed religious ideology that will definitively insulate him from doubt. Those less inclined to recoil from the joys and the trials, the frustrations and the rewards, of critical thinking will look on such longings with a mixture of perplexity and alarm.

And then there is politics. In his insistent emphasis on the need for order, authority, and tradition, as well as in his warnings about the psychological and social ravages of modern skepticism, Neuhaus echoes such luminaries of the European (and Catholic) right as Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortés, and (once again) Carl Schmitt, all of whom were staunch opponents of liberalism and modernity. Yet Neuhaus would have us believe that his own anti-liberal and anti-modern views are perfectly compatible with--no, synonymous with--the principles underlying modern American democracy.

We have considerable reason to doubt this. Take the crucially important issue of authority. Setting aside the question of whether an authoritarian outlook is harmful in religion, and there is a considerable religious and philosophical literature on the subject, an authoritarian outlook can certainly be destructive in politics. A nation in which such an outlook is explicitly encouraged and esteemed will be tempted to support political leaders who promise to shield us from the inherent complexity and difficulty of truth itself. This temptation is especially dangerous in liberal democratic nations, which depend on citizens informing themselves about exceedingly complicated issues, making use of alternative sources of information, doubting the assertions of public authorities, and thrashing out an inevitably tentative truth in open-ended argument and debate. This is the unavoidable price of citizenship in a free society. It is our citizenly duty to be suspicious, and to cultivate suspicion, of any and all who would rescue us from the rigors of our own freedom.

The offense that Neuhaus's political theology gives to American pluralism and civility is no less great. Since 1984, he has maintained that "only a transcendent, a religious, vision can turn this society from disaster and toward the fulfillment of its destiny" as a "sacred enterprise." Since 1987, he has further stipulated that this vision must be supplied by the Roman Catholic Church. The legitimacy of this ideological project--its potential to unify rather than to polarize the nation--stands or falls on its ability to avoid the social dynamic that Neuhaus himself once identified with Protestant evangelicalism. The Moral Majority was incapable of providing the nation with a unifying religious ideology, he argued in The Naked Public Square, because non-evangelical Americans would inevitably view the attempt as one group's illegitimate effort to impose its private theological convictions on the nation as a whole. Conservative Protestants thus negated their claim to speak for the whole of society in the very act of presuming to do so.

Over the years, Neuhaus has gone out of his way to show that unlike evangelicalism, with which he has often made common cause, Catholicism is capable of speaking with moral force to all Americans, regardless of their religious attachments (or lack of attachments). In the Church's natural-law tradition and its social encyclicals can be found the rudiments of a spiritual and moral outlook that is perfectly compatible with pluralism and democracy in the United States. Whether or not individual American citizens are conservative Catholics--or even liberal Catholics, or even Judeo-Christians, or even believers in a personal God, or even believers in any spiritual reality at all--they can and should accept the universal validity of traditionalist Catholic moral arguments and employ them as an ideological framework through which to understand the nation and its role in the world.

It is a beautiful story, but it is a fairy tale--at least when viewed in the light of the narrow and sectarian form of Catholicism that Neuhaus defends in Catholic Matters. Consider his delight in repeatedly claiming that the Catholic Church provides "the true story of the world," of which all the other stories are merely a part, "including the story of America." Neuhaus helpfully elaborated on the point in a recent issue of First Things, where he likewise asserted that "it is time to think again--to think deeply, to think theologically--about the story of America and its place in the story of the world." The Catholic story of the world, that is. These statements make it quite clear that Neuhaus longs for an omnivorous Catholic Church to devour and to absorb American culture and public life. Short of universal conversion to traditionalist Catholicism on the part of the American people, this effort to Catholicize the nation and its public philosophy would surely generate much more division and do far more to heighten sectarian tensions than the rise of the Moral Majority ever did. (One wonders, for example, how even Neuhaus's traditionalist Protestant allies will respond to his ecclesiological boast that the Catholic Church is "the gravitational center of the Christian reality, the Church of Jesus Christ most fully and rightly ordered through time.")

And what would the Catholicizing of the United States portend for the country's millions of non-traditionalist Christians and Jews, let alone its many Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, and agnostics? To judge from a troubling essay that Neuhaus wrote in 1991, they would likely have to be excluded from the category of good citizenship. Focusing on unbelievers, he declared that while "an atheist can be a citizen" of the United States, it is on principle impossible for an atheist to be "a good citizen." The godless, he maintained, are simply incapable of giving a "morally convincing account" of the nation--a necessary condition for fruitful participation in its experiment in "ordered liberty." To be morally convincing, such an account must make reference to "reasons that draw authority from that which is higher than the self, from that which is external to the self, from that to which the self is ultimately obligated." No wonder, then, that it is "those who believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus [who] turn out to be the best citizens."

To his credit, Neuhaus fully acknowledged the blatant circularity of his argument--the way it excluded atheists from the category of good citizenship by appealing exclusively to the assumptions of those religious traditionalists who believe that good citizenship requires the affirmation of divine authority. Yet in his effort to defend this circularity, Neuhaus made a startling admission. Establishing standards of good citizenship on the basis of exclusionary theistic assumptions is thoroughly justified, he claimed, not because such assumptions can plausibly be found in the Constitution or in its supporting documents or in established American practice or tradition, but because such assumptions are supposedly made by "a majority" in contemporary American society.

This is an appeal to raw majoritarian power, and its implications are plain. Neuhaus has often portrayed himself as a defender of a "civil public square." He has frequently insisted, against evangelicals and others, that public debate should take place using reason and that it should employ categories and concepts that are equally accessible to all citizens. But in his remarks on atheism Neuhaus made it very clear that the country's moral and religious consensus is actually the imposition of the beliefs of one part of a highly diverse community onto its other parts. In Catholic-Christian America, dominated by a traditionalist Christian majority, might would by definition be synonymous with right.

Neuhaus would no doubt insist that this exclusionary logic applies only to atheists (as if that weren't bad enough!), though it is hard to see why we should believe him. In the Catholic-Christian story of America and the world, non-traditionalist Christians and Jews, as well as adherents of other faiths, are at best peripheral players--and at worst antagonists. The most vivid and ominous example of what politics might be like in an America marked by such theologically motivated antagonisms can be found in the November 1996 issue of First Things, in which Neuhaus and his closest ideological compatriots, repulsed by a series of Supreme Court decisions on abortion, euthanasia, and gay rights, let out a cry of religiously inspired fury, and suggested (in terms identical to those Neuhaus employed during his period of leftist radicalism) that a morally corrupt "regime" was usurping democracy in America--and that a justified insurrection on the part of the country's most religious citizens might very well be in order.

All of the participants in the First Things symposium--it was called "The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics"--permitted themselves radical rhetoric. Robert H. Bork denounced the nation's "judicial oligarchy" for spreading "moral chaos" throughout the land. The Catholic theologian Russell Hittinger asserted that the country now lived "under an altered constitutional regime" whose laws were "unworthy of loyalty." Charles W. Colson maintained that America may have reached the point where "the only political action believers can take is some kind of direct, extra-political confrontation" with the "judicially controlled regime." And in a contribution titled "The Tyrant State," Robert P. George asserted that "the courts ... have imposed upon the nation immoral policies that pro-life Americans cannot, in conscience, accept."

But it was Neuhaus himself who did more than anyone else to push the tone of the symposium beyond the limits of responsible discourse. In the unsigned editorial with which he introduced the special issue of the magazine, Neuhaus adopted the revolutionary language of the Declaration of Independence to lament the judiciary's "long train of abuses and usurpations" and to warn darkly about "the prospect--some might say the present reality--of despotism" in America. In Neuhaus's view, what was happening in the United States could only be described as "the displacement of a constitutional order by a regime that does not have, will not obtain, and cannot command the consent of the people." Hence the stark and radical options confronting the country, ranging "from noncompliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution."

It's hard to believe that Mr. Neuhaus yields the argument that atheists are "incapable of giving a 'morally convincing account' of the nation" as easily as Mr. Linker suggests because it is so manifestly true. You can't derive the Founding in the absence of the God of Abraham. And it's hardly circular to require belief in and adherence to the Foundation of the Republic as a standard of good citizenship of that Republic.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 27, 2006 4:09 PM