Guest Post by Morbo
The April 3 edition of The New Republic has an interesting cover story on [tag]Richard John Neuhaus[/tag], a Roman Catholic priest who runs a right-wing journal about religion and public life called First Things.
The TNR article is a review of Neuhaus’ new book Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy and the Splendor of Truth. For nine pages, writer Damon Linker methodically deconstructs Neuhaus’ philosophy and exposes the theocratic vision that lies beneath it. What’s even more remarkable is that Linker used to work for Neuhaus; he was once the editor of First Things.
I don’t know what happened between Linker and Neuhaus. Either they had one hell of a falling out, or Linker experienced the mother of all changes of heart. Linker has a book coming out in the fall called The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege. I take it from the title it is a defense of secular government. This is amazing, as the secular state is perhaps Neuhaus’ biggest bogeyman.
Linker’s review contains a fair share of inside baseball about the Catholic right, but the final paragraph is stirring. Linker writes that Neuhaus’ goals
should serve as a potent reminder — as if, in an age marked by the bloody rise of theologically inspired politics in the Islamic world, we needed a reminder — that the strict separation of politics and religion is a rare, precious, and fragile achievement, one of America’s most sublime achievements, and we should do everything in our power to preserve it. It is a large part of what makes America worth living in.
Linker touches on another aspect of Neuhaus’s approach that has annoyed me for many years: his faux intellectualism.
Neuhaus is often described as a leading conservative intellectual and assumed to be an erudite and deep thinker. Even some progressives who ought to know better fall for this. He was once lauded in the Utne Reader, of all places, as a visionary.
Alas, Neuhaus’ vision is of the 14th Century, and at the end of the day he is little more than Torquemada in modern dress.
Neuhaus is no intellectual. In fact, his argument in favor of Catholic supremacy eventually boils down to the following points:
1. This is my theology. I have a lot vested in it. I really wish it were true, so it must be.
2. The pope is always right. Everyone should do what the pope says.
3. The bishops should tell people to do what the pope says.
These are not intellectual arguments. They are little more than wishful thinking. In Neuhaus’ case, he backs them up with bellicose rhetoric and crude attacks on anyone who dares to think differently. In one controversial First Things essay from 1991, Neuhaus opined that an atheist can be American citizen but never “a good citizen.” Who are the good citizens? According to Neuhaus, only “those who believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus….”
So, according to Neuhaus, not only are atheists not good citizens, neither are Buddhists, Hindus, Unitarians, followers of Confucius, Jains and so on. Neuhaus, of course, sees himself as a good citizen – despite the fact that his defense of his favored religion is based on the most facile arguments. As Linker points out, Neuhaus blithely insists that Catholic dogma is true because it has always been true. This is circular reasoning, but it does not bother Neuhaus.
In fact, anyone who has done even cursory reading of the history of Catholicism knows that today’s familiar doctrines were hammered out by church councils that met long after the time of Christ. Many of these were organized by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century. Constantine’s goals were explicitly political, and he simply stacked the church councils with bishops who agreed with him to make sure things broke his way. Thus, Arianism, an early belief held by many Christians that taught that God the Father and Jesus were not co-equal and the same entity, was labeled heresy and the doctrine of the Trinity adopted. As Linker notes, the opposite outcome could have occurred had enough Arian bishops escaped Constantine’s henchmen and made it to the Council of Nicea.
Neuhaus has an interesting way of dealing with this uncomfortable fact: He resorts to intervention by a magical being. The Arians, you see, could not have triumphed because they were wrong, and the Holy Spirit saw to it that they were defeated.
To sum up, Neuhaus’ main argument is that Catholicism is true because an invisible ghost, who is also co-god with two other deities who are father and son yet still one, guided the whole process. Furthermore, these three gods are really one god, so the religion in question isn’t really polytheistic.
Oh, and by the way, this multi-faceted but still unitary god does not want you to use birth control, have sex before marriage, be gay, vote for the Democrats, look at porn or belong to any religious body other than the Roman Catholic Church. We know this because the pope said so.
You can call that lots of things — but an intellectual argument is not one of them.