Richard addresses the relationship of religion and democracy with a steadiness and vitality rare in such discussions... The Naked Public Square challenges us to consider afresh the relationship of religion and public life. This book is elegant in execution and sweeping in scope.

The Naked Public Square

Religion and Democracy in America

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By Richard John Neuhaus

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Copyright © 1988 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8028-0080-7

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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...)

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Excerpted from The Naked Public Square by Richard John Neuhaus Copyright © 1988 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Excerpted by permission.
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