During the 1990’s and the first decade of the 2000’s, Richard John Neuhaus was the editorial powerhouse behind First Things, a Christian journal dedicated to thinking through matters of religion, culture, and politics. It was unusual in the sense that it brought together some of the best thinkers from Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox traditions in one place. An issue might contain essays by names such as Albert Mohler, Robert George, Peter Berger, and Michael Novak. As time goes by, some of the names become less well known, but suffice it to say, First Things was crackling with intellectual and spiritual energy. The journal is still published today and continues to provoke discussion under the editorship of R.R. Reno.
For most of his time at First Things, Neuhaus was a Missouri-Synod Lutheran who had converted to Catholicism. These were the days of cooperation with Chuck Colson in the Evangelicals and Catholics Together campaign, which was largely driven by friendships built through pro-life activism. Readers of the journal, as engaged as they were by the content of the articles and essays inside, very often rushed to read the back of the book, which was exclusively written by Neuhaus in a blog-type of style even before blogs really existed. His observations there were sharp, insightful, sometimes funny, and sometimes cutting. “Attention must be paid,” he would write just before shredding some pompous figure or argument.
Long before First Things, Neuhaus was a man of the left. He was a Lutheran priest in the Inner city who was heavily involved in civil rights and Vietnam activism. Notably, he’d marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. He was seen by some, supposedly including Reinhold Niebuhr, as the next Niebuhr. But there was a complication. Neuhaus saw the pro-life movement as a natural extension of his stand for civil rights and against the Vietnam war. The rest of the left didn’t, which led to a slow alienation and marginalization of the Lutheran pastor. The whole affair serves as a kind of origin story for Richard John Neuhaus’s transformation into a great public intellectual of the Christian faith standing on the side of orthodoxy while the mainline drifted further and further away. Neuhaus famously warned that whenever orthodoxy is made optional, it will eventually be proscribed.
The event that marked Neuhaus’s emergence into a new kind of role in American Christianity was the publication of The Naked Public Square in 1984 forty years ago. That book was a major inspiration for my The End of Secularism and surely spurred the writing of several others in the decades that have followed since his groundbreaking book arrived on the scene. What Neuhaus did with tremendous skill was to point out a simple truth, which is that secularism cannot serve as a replacement for a Christianity ejected from its place in the public square. Secularism ends up being a largely empty concept. There must be a “there” there, which secularism cannot actually provide.
Core to Neuhaus’s argument is the idea that while Americans did not want a theocracy acting in oppressive ways, they probably really did want a Christian “sacred canopy” providing a general moral frame and a sense of purpose. Writing in 1984, he thought most Americans resented the extent to which Christianity had been and was being evacuated from that position via the actions of overzealous courts, commentators, and academics.
Obviously, that part of the analysis is historically located and may not wear well today. After decades of pushing Christianity to the margins and educating the public in a secularistic understanding of church-state separation rather than a more classically Christian one, the case for re-centering Christianity culturally probably faces a much tougher climb. But the rest of Neuhaus’s case continues to apply with great force.
What he recognized was that Christianity would not be pushed out simply to replaced with some kind of neutral nothing featuring no set of authoritative values. Instead, he accurately intuited and argued that empty space will be filled. It will be filled and one might look up and find that what has filled it is highly undesirable.
In retrospect, I think it is easy to see that there are many contenders seeking to fill the void at the heart of the American experiment in 2024. These contenders exist both left and right. On the left, we have the partisans of identity politics who press for a view of race that seeks to deconstruct the entirety of the American story in favor of a Marxian twist that redefines the struggle from one of economic class to one of races. There are others who would do the same thing working from the standpoint of gender or sexuality, thus setting loose the bizarre set of circumstances (such as biological men towering over their female competitors in athletic events) that bedevil our modern existence. On the right, we see more and more young men hoping to recapture something like the national church-state arrangements of the 18th century (Catholic and Protestant). In addition, we see the rise of other postliberal nationalistic programs.
All in all, we see that Neuhaus was prescient in seeing that democratic constitutionalism would not be self-supporting when the influence of Christianity was removed. Thus, we move into a kind of chaos among the postmodern seekers of power.
Consider the following, published four decades ago:
The case can be made that the great social and political devastations of our century have been perpetrated by regimes of militant secularism, notably those of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. That is true, and it suggests that the naked public square is a dangerous place. When religious transcendence is excluded, when the public square has been swept clean of divisive sectarianisms, the space is opened to seven demons aspiring to transcendent authority.
As we enter another period of erosion for the Christian sacred canopy, it may be a good time to revisit Neuhaus and to try to find a way to apply his thinking to this next turn of events. His fertile mind can inform us still.
Hunter Baker, J.D., Ph.D. is the provost and dean of faculty at North Greenville University. He is a fellow of the Land Center.