Who are these theocons? Three receive close scrutiny in Linker’s first chapter—George Weigel, biographer of Pope John Paul II and expositor of a take on Catholic “just war” theory tailored to support Bush’s foreign policy; Michael Novak, the Catholic radical turned outspoken champion of “democratic capitalism”; and Linker’s bête noire and former boss (for whom he insists he has no ill will), Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. If Neuhaus commands more of Linker’s attention than the other two, it isn’t just because he knows him better. Even Novak’s transformation from advocate of a “revolution in consciousness” and “religionless Christianity” to thoroughly bourgeois democratic capitalist can hardly compare with Neuhaus’ political odyssey.
Early in the 1960s, Neuhaus, then a Lutheran minister, was pastor at Brooklyn’s inner city St. John the Evangelist church, which under his leadership was a center for civil rights and antiwar activism. In 1965, he founded Clergy Concerned About Vietnam with Catholic Fr. Daniel Berrigan and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Neuhaus grew more radical with the times, in one sermon describing the Vietnamese as “God’s instruments for bringing the American empire to its knees.”
He also, Linker writes, “began to reflect on whether he should advocate an armed insurrection to overthrow the government of the United States,” reluctantly concluding that the time was not yet ripe. Thirty years later, he would again entertain the idea of revolution—only by then, he had become a Roman Catholic priest, and the causes stirring his passions were not Vietnam and segregation but abortion, euthanasia, and a lack of religiosity in public life—what Neuhaus terms “the naked public square.”
Because of their left-wing backgrounds, Neuhaus and Novak, the latter now ensconced at the American Enterprise Institute and serving as the War Party’s semi-official envoy to the Vatican, are often designated Catholic neocons. But Linker points out an important difference between his subjects and neoconservatives like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz: “In the late 1960s, the men who went on to become the first neocons were moderate liberals who opposed the revolutionary ambitions of the counterculture. The proto-theocons, on the other hand, were leftist revolutionaries who proposed (in the title of one of their books) ‘a theology for radical politics.’ ” Linker understates the radicalism of some of the original neoconservatives—some started their careers as Trotskyists—but he has a point. The theocons were the sort of people the neocons had fled the left to get away from.
In any event, as the theocons tacked right they soon found common interests with the neocons, who indeed became Neuhaus and Novak’s patrons. “The theocons piggybacked on [the] neocon network; they also used neocon connections to begin the long and arduous process of building their own independent infrastructure of influence,” Linker writes. His second chapter traces the history of this neo-theo alliance, which paved the way for the creation of First Things—the journal in part grew out of an earlier publication, This World, that Irving Kristol turned over to Neuhaus in the 1980s.
Relations with the neoconservatives soured temporarily over First Things’ “End of Democracy?” symposium of 1996. Neuhaus’ old revolutionary rhetoric and his invocation of the Nazis led neocon eminentos Midge Decter, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Walter Berns to sever ties with the magazine. Yet “political expediency eventually led that rift to be healed,” and whatever strain the “End of Democracy?” placed on Neuhaus’ relations with neoconservatives, the brouhaha only boosted his and First Things’ standing with the Protestants of the religious right. Focus on the Family’s James Dobson lauded the symposium in all its zeal.
But Neuhaus has had his differences with evangelicals as well. Indeed, Linker finds the genesis of Neuhaus’ theoconservative project in his belief, formed while still a Lutheran, “that Falwell and his followers were being unrealistic in supposing that their idiosyncratic faith, based on highly subjective ‘born again’ experiences, could serve as the religiously based public philosophy the country so desperately needed.” Catholicism, on the other hand, had the natural law tradition, with its claims to objectivity and rationality. As well, in Linker’s words, “there was the Church’s long history of theological and political reflection, which made Catholics far more competent than evangelicals and other Protestants to take the lead in pressing religiously based moral arguments in the nation’s life.”
For Linker, these qualities make the theocon ideology more potent than that of the rest of the religious right. He points to the current or recent presence of several theocons on the President’s Council on Bioethics as evidence of how respectable theocon arguments—against human cloning and embryonic stem-cell research, for example—are becoming. But Linker may be overestimating Neuhaus’ success at shaping policy by shaping the world of ideas. The President’s Council on Bioethics has had so little influence on the stem-cell debate, for example, that theocon arguments failed even to keep the Senate majority leader from the president’s own party (Bill Frist, a bona fide religious rightist himself) from approving federal funding of stem-cell research. And Bush’s use of vaguely Catholic rhetoric did not stop him from approving the “morning after” contraceptive pill (and potential abortifacient) Plan B for over-the-counter sale in the face of theocon objections. On the electoral level: Rick Santorum, the theocons’ poster child on Capitol Hill, is the Senate’s most endangered incumbent this year. Linker’s book is an engaging and invaluably informative account of the roots of theoconservatism, but its author could stand to borrow some of Patrick Hynes’ political acumen.
All that is not to say the theocons have had no effect on the nation’s politics. Perhaps ironically, considering Neuhaus’ background, where they have been most successful is in shoring up conservative Catholic support for President Bush’s foreign policy. Linker devotes a chapter to the “distinctive theocon approach to just war reasoning—ridiculing antiwar clerics for having forgotten the Catholic tradition and praising Republican administrations for keeping it alive.” After the initial success of the Iraq invasion, Neuhaus wondered in print whether in the future it might be possible to consider “military action in terms not of the last resort but of the best resort.” There’s a curiously Jacobin streak in this now-conservative priest. In the ’60s, in the ’90s, and in Iraq today, Neuhaus has called for uprooting the established order in the name of justice and democracy. The results, as far as the rest of us can see, have not been encouraging.
So long as Catholics and Protestants were at odds, Linker concludes, both sides had a vested interest in minimizing the mixture of doctrine and state power. But now, “to the extent that they come to consider each other allies and to recognize their potential combined political clout, they will be tempted to view the separation of church and state as something less than a bargain—as an unacceptable sacrifice of their freedom to do everything they can to bring the country’s public life into conformity with what they believe to be the truth proclaimed by Jesus Christ.”
The religious right’s ecumenical unity might not be as great as Linker, or Hynes, imagines. Bush lost the Catholic vote in 2000, and while much has been made of the fact that he won it in 2004—against a Catholic opponent—he did little better among Catholics than among the population at large. Churchgoing evangelicals are an overwhelmingly Republican bloc, but Catholics are only gradually being co-opted, beginning with those who attend services most often.
By themselves, the theocons may not be much of a threat to Americans’ liberties. But together with the organized power of evangelical Protestants, they’re a mighty force for the Republican Party, even if what they get in policy terms is not more morality in public life but merely more war.
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
nfl jerseys|11.6.10 @ 4:12AM|#
vhncjhg