The Naked Public Square
By Richard John Neuhaus
Blackstone Audiobooks
Copyright © 1993
Richard John Neuhaus
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780786100682
Chapter One
Misreading the Signs of the Times
THE STORY IS TOLD OF A PREACHER WHO IN A SUNDAY SERVICE began with the
prayers this way: 'O Lord, have you read this morning's New York Times?'
The Lord has seen the comings and goings of many things that at the time
impressed his creatures as being of inordinate moment. We are all
susceptible to the imperiousness of the present. I say 'all' advisedly,
even though many of us try to resist the claims of immediacy by, as we
say, keeping things in historical perspective. The proposition is
nonetheless compelling that the past is past and the future is not yet and
therefore the present is all we have. On the Christian view of things,
that is a highly dubious proposition. In truth, it is false. It is false,
that is, if God is the Power of the Future who lovingly holds close to
himself every past moment as he leads us through the present to the
promise of what is to be.
In a New Yorker cartoon the directors are seated around a boardroom table
on which sits a box of breakfast cereal emblazoned with the word 'New!'
The chairman says to a director: 'What do you mean, 'What's new about it?'
The 'New!' on the box is what's new.' Despite our doubts about the
onward-and-upward view of historical progress, habits of mind persist in
thinking that what is new is better, or at least more important. In the
communications media 'news' is big business. An all-news radio station
where I live repeatedly asserts, 'Something is happening right now, and
the sooner you know about it the better.' That too is not true. Two
children were killed in a South Bronx fire this morning, Miss Connecticut
has been deprived of her crown because of fiscal irregularities, and
Nigeria has again denounced South Africa at the United Nations. About
these matters most of us have, as they say in the intelligence community,
no need to know. On this score our sanity is restored by vacations far
from newspapers, radio, and television. Returning after a week or three,
we pick up the newspaper and discover how very little we have missed.
We are neophiliacs, lovers of the new who are titillated by the news. It
gives us an illusory sense of involvement in our times. We fear being left
out of what is happening. The imperative of participation, carried to
excess, becomes frenetic and compulsive. Oscar Wilde somewhere said that
the trouble with socialism is that it leaves one with no free evenings.
Failing to participate fully in our own lives, we seek participation in
realties constructed by others. To the extent a person has a life of her
own, it is a life defined by limits. With respect to innumerable things
that are happening we are 'out of it,' thank God. Engagement in everything
that is happening is an impossible imperative. That is why is has been
attended to by God and is not our job. Our job, our vocation, if you will,
is to attend to that to which we have been called. Readers of this book
presumably are of the opinion that they are called-in one way or another,
to a greater or lesser degree-to attend to what is happing in American
religion, politics, and culture.
This book does not pretend to discuss, or even to touch upon, everything
that is happening in these fields of near-infinite complexity. At the same
time, I would not exaggerate the modesty of the intent. The intent is to
set out an analysis and argument that, if convincing, might significantly
change our understanding of America and of religion's role in our public
life. As what is happening is not entirely new, so neither the analysis
nor the argument is entirely new. Indeed, if a statement were entirely
new, it would be unintelligible. To be intelligible, to make sense,
requires that what we say be in continuity with past perceptions,
thoughts, and language. To the neophiliac mind, the admission that
something is not entirely new is fatal. Experts of all sorts have a vested
interest in the allegedly new. If the situation is not new, who needs
experts to research, lecture, and write books in order to explain the
situation? I am persuaded, however, that bringing together what we know or
think we know is both challenging and important. It is in examining the
taken-for-granted truths that our errors are unearthed. And in this
critical bringing together I am at least as impressed by the continuities
as I am by the discontinuities in the story of American religion and
culture. (It will become apparent that the story is, in turn, composed of
several quite different stories. The intriguing thing is that those
sometimes conflicting stories are today being told in unusual and often
disturbing ways.)
Having emphasized the continuities, I do believe there is something new
and important happening in American religion, especially in what might be
called public religion. That is more than a tentative hunch. It is a
belief derived from Christian teaching about history itself. That what is
happening is important is implicit in the assertion that the project we
call history was not created for nothing. That it is new is implicit in
the truth that God is not repeating himself; he is not going around in
circles. From the earliest times of Christian reflection upon history, the
basic posture has wavered between two biblical perspectives on change. The
first is Ecclesiastes 1:9-10: 'What has been is what will be, and what has
been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun. Is
there a thing of which it is said, 'See, this is new'? It has been
already, in the ages before us.' The second is Isaiah 43:18-19: 'Remember
not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing
a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?'
One is inclined to say that those statements are equally true, but the
second is more true than the first. To explore the new in the knowledge of
the sameness of things is to be wise; to let the sameness of things
obscure the new is to be jaded. Nothing is as new as it is cracked up to
be; nothing is quite the same as anything else. 'Behold, I am doing a new
thing.' Ours is not the definitive time in which that new thing is
happening (that time was the resurrection of Jesus, which is in mysterious
truth our past, present, and promised future); but neither is our time any
other time. Times past and present are littered with talk about
revolutions-new politics, new religious movements, new cultural crises.
The poignancy of innocents caught up in the latest novelty is matched by
the tragedy of the fatigued who deny the possibility of the new. Santayana
was only partly right: Whether or not we remember the past, we are not
given the chance to repeat it.
In the eighth decade of this century a new thing happened that portends, I
believe, major changes in American religion and politics. To be precise,
it did not just happen in the late seventies; it had been happening long
before that, or perhaps it is better to say that it had been building for
a long time, getting ready to happen. In any case, with a suddenness that
shocked most observers, it came to public attention in the year prior to
the 1980 elections. The new thing was the religious new right. Reflection
on the phenomenon has already produced a literature of considerable size
and uneven merit. This is not another book on the religious new right, its
organizations, personalities, and tactics. My purpose, rather, is to
address some of the major questions raised by the phenomenon and by the
reactions to it. Some of the questions are perennials; in different forms
they have been debated in decades and centuries past. They are not likely
to-nor should they-go away any time soon. It is possible that five years
from now the personalities and campaigns of the religious new right will
largely be forgotten. The questions will remain.
I should say something about the term 'religious new right.' Among other
terms used are the new religious right or just the new Christian right.
From the start we should stipulate, as the lawyers say, that the 'new'
will soon be made obsolete by the sheer passage of time. A decade ago
there was a new left that wanted to distinguish itself from the Stalinist
left of the 1930s and the liberal left of the post-World War II period. Of
course each of those lefts was, in its time, the new left. So also the new
right today wants to distinguish itself from the old right of the past.
The old right is associated with people like William Buckley, founder of
National Review and premier publicist of conservative viewpoints, people
like Russel Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind and champion of
patrician virtues, and people like the late Senator Robert Taft, who was
the epitome of probity in affairs foreign and fiscal. The new right is
represented by Richard Viguerie, mogul of direct mail politics, and people
such as Phyllis Schlafly, Jesse Helms, Howard Phillips, and Paul Weyrich,
who have built an organizational network of interlocking directorates.
They speak about the old right of the northeastern establishment (one word)
in tones of deepest disdain.
When discussing the religious new right, then, one begins with the new
right. 'Religious' is the modifier of 'new right.' In the beginning was
the new right. The usage 'new religious right' is in danger of getting
things backward. Defined in terms of the cardinal points of
fundamentalism, there has for almost a century been a religious right.
Religiously speaking, the new religious right is not new. The argument can
be made that the new thing is the political activism of the religious
right. But even that is only partially accurate. The religious right, as
we shall see, has been politically activistic in the past. The difference
now is its apparent political effectiveness. 'New religious right' is also
misleading because it implies that the whole of the religious right, the
many worlds of fundamentalism, is engaged in that newly effective
political activism. That is definitely not true. Talk about the 'new
Christian right' compounds the problem by suggesting a limitation that
does not exist. Groups such as the moral majority insist that they are not
Christian in any limiting sense. They reach out to Jews and, at least in
theory, even to nonbelievers, so long as these people agree on the 'moral
agenda' of the new right.
The new right is the base phenomenon and the religious new right is its
division in charge of marshaling the troops around what are defined as the
moral issues. In many hours of conversation with the religious and secular
leaders of the new right, this way of stating the division of labor is not
challenged. It is usually declared quite explicitly and without
embarrassment. An objection sometimes raised to the term 'religious new
right' is that it is not really right. In, for example, its populist
passions in pitting ordinary people (The People) against the several
establishments, it very much resembles what used to be called the left. By
the 1980s the gyrations of the left-right metaphor were fevered. But the
metaphor has almost never been stable. Going back several centuries, as it
does, to where representatives sat in a French assembly, it is hardly
capable of accommodating the ever shifting alignments of quite different
political worlds. Nonetheless, the new right calls itself that and, for
reasons of courtesy if not accuracy, we go along with it.
Describing the religious new right as a division of the new right carries
the odious implication that religion is being 'used' for partisan
purposes. That is undoubtedly the case. Similarly, it is charged that, for
instance, the National Council of Churches is 'used' for the partisan
purposes of the left. Generally speaking, that too is the case. Viewed
from within these different worlds of politicized religion, however, the
accusation is not so odious. It does not call into question the motives or
sincerity of the actors. There are obviously different agendas for social
and political change in America. If committed believers favor one agenda
over another-as publicly concerned folks inevitably do-then they marshal
whatever resources they have, including religious resources, to advance
that agenda. They are criticized for employing religion to give their
agenda the character of a holy crusade. They respond that their agenda
does in fact engage questions of ultimate right and wrong and therefore
warrants a panache of holiness. The issue is not one of religion 'being
used' for politics, but of whether one thinks the left or the right is
right. It is not a matter of being used but of being of service. What to
one person is exploitation of religion is to another the exercise of
responsibility.
Of course this is not a very satisfying explanation. We persist in
believing that the public engagement of religion should be more than a
matter of placing your money and making your choice. It should not be as
arbitrary and divisive as that. Surely God's purpose-which, after all, is
to have priority in Christian thinking-cannot converge so conveniently
with any political agenda. Religion should not be capturable by any
partisan program. The transcendent dimensions of religious faith should
provide, even make mandatory, a critical distancing from all temporal
movements. Se we persist in believing, and not without reason. And yet, as
with the injunction to be in the world but not of the world, the mastery
of critical engagement is forever eluding us. Just when we think we have
gotten the hang of it in one situation, the situation changes and we have
to start all over again. This is not only true of Christianity and
politics in America; it has been true everywhere for two millennia now.
And, of course, it is not true only of Christian religion.
Wherever in the world there is freedom for political engagement, the
Christian community will provide a constellation of engagement models. In
America that constellation is being moved dramatically by the emergence of
the religious new right. Already the religious new right as an
identifiable movement may have peaked. Clearly there are many who hope
that is the case, and some have hastened to write its obituary. Reports of
its death are, I believe, greatly exaggerated. At most by the middle of
the 1980s we were witnessing an end of the beginning. Even if the initial
surge is over, the impact of the religious new right will be echoing
around the corridors of American religion for years to come. Among both
those who have cheered it and those who have jeered it, the emergence of
the religious new right is forcing a first-principle reexamination of the
role of religion in American life. Perhaps more important, it is forcing
to the forefront the question of 'religious America' - the ways in which
the American experiment is appropriately conceived as a sacred enterprise.
Of direct importance to electoral politics, the religious new right has
given entrance to the political arena to millions of people who, correctly
or not, thought they had been excluded heretofore.
For those who do not share its vision, the religious new right has been
both new and frightening. Like true believers of other movements, its
leaders are possessed by a crusading mentality that invokes the fear of
fanaticisms once presumed to be past. Several years before the phenomenon
came to general attention, H. Edward Rowe set forth its vision in Save
America! With eerie prescience that little book foretold much of what has
come to pass. It is prefaced by this passage from I Samuel:
Jonathan said to the young man who bore his armor, 'Come, let us cross
over to the garrison of these uncircumcised; perhaps the Lord will work
for us; for nothing can hinder the Lord from saving by many or by few.'
... And there was a trembling in the camp of the Philistines, in the
field, and among all the people. Even the garrison and the raiders
trembled, and the earth quaked so that it became a great trembling.
The great trembling, or at least profound misgiving, is upon us. To those
who cherish the democratic process, the model of politics as warfare
cannot help but seem threatening. To be sure, politicians such as Alfred
Smith and Hubert Humphrey exulted in being called 'happy warrior,' but the
note of happiness is absent in Rowe's vision of the battle. There was of
course a kind of happiness, bordering on smugness, in the religious new
right's declarations about its initial electoral successes. But it is not
the democratic happiness of being immersed in a political process of
give-and-take, of gamelike confidence that the rules will survive
momentary wins and losses, of knowing today's opponents may be tomorrow's
allies. When it is the Lord's battle you are fighting, politics takes on
an aura of deadly earnestness.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Naked Public Square
by Richard John Neuhaus
Copyright © 1993 by Richard John Neuhaus.
Excerpted by permission.
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