"We have to see that the priest as priest is a public person, that he is a political person"
Richard John Neuhaus, 1967
Like George Higgins, Richard Neuhaus loved good conversation. Neither avoided people with whom they disagreed. Beyond that, there were many dissimilarities.
Born 20 years after Higgins, on May 14, 1936, Richard John Neuhaus had an upbringing quite different from his friend and erstwhile sparring partner. His parents had migrated from the United States to Pembroke in Ontario, Canada three years before when Clemens Neuhaus, his father, accepted a position at St. John’s Lutheran Church in that lumber town along the Ottawa River. Richard was the seventh of eight children, and was known to preach from a homemade pulpit to his sister and her doll when he was 5 years old. In fact, one Saturday morning when Pastor Clem had been called elsewhere, he sent his ten year old son to teach Sunday school rather than calling on one of the older children to perform the duty. One of Richard’s buddies from those years claimed that young Neuhaus “was a professor at that point,” and rated his teaching “three, four times better than Pastor Neuhaus” himself![1]
[1] Randy Boyagoda, Richard John Neuhaus, A Life in the Public Square (New York: Image Books, 2015), Epigraph, 31.
Young Neuhaus’ interest in matters of religion became more pronounced as he grew older. He began attending a Lutheran boarding school in Nebraska called Concordia Seward College, in 1951. His rebellious behavior caused authorities to ask him to leave that school, which he did. He subsequently found his way South to Texas, where he operated a gas station for a brief period. Returning to school at Concordia Lutheran College in Austin Texas, he graduated in 1956. He then moved to St. Louis Missouri and attended Concordia Seminary, where he received his B.A. and MDiv in 1960.
Neuhaus’ early ministry was spent in New York, first upstate, then, in 1961 he was called to serve as pastor at St. John the Evangelist Lutheran Church in Brooklyn, New York. He remained pastor of the predominantly working class African American and Hispanic congregation until 1978. Because he was unable to collect a pastor’s salary at St. John’s, he took a job as a chaplain at King’s County Hospital in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn. As Neuhaus biographer Randy Boyagoda notes, “the chaplaincy proved profoundly affecting to the young Neuhaus, exposing him to some of the darkest realities of urban life and human suffering, while also revealing the surprising dignities of birth and death in a place where a great deal of both took place.”[1] In one instance, a woman close to death was brought into the hospital with shards of glass still in her face from an unknown trauma. Neuhaus and a hospital intern picked the shards of glass from the woman’s face, “I put the diamonds in a small plastic bag and kept them for years,” he later wrote.[2]
It was during this time that Neuhaus became involved in civil rights activities, the antiwar movement, and other liberal political activities of the 1960s. In 1965, Neuhaus responded to a comment by President Lyndon Johnson expressing surprise that anyone “would feel toward his country in a way that was not consistent with the national interest.” Johnson’s comment was made as a criticism of the antiwar protests that were spreading throughout the nation as he escalated the war in Vietnam. A few days later, Neuhaus was attending a conference of religious leaders from various denominations who met to discuss foreign policy in Vietnam and stated “It concerns us that the President should be amazed by dissent.” When the comment was reprinted in the New York Times, Neuhaus gained national prominence in the growing antiwar movement as he was also becoming increasingly involved in the civil rights movement. He became increasingly engaged in ecumenical and interfaith work, more involved with prominent figures in the media and in policy and political circles. He also began writing and publishing at a remarkably rapid and voluminous pace. Neuhaus praised in particular the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., and sought to interpret the civil rights movement in light of Christian teaching. He preached from the pulpit on the importance of supporting civil rights. He attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 and become involved with the Lutheran Human Relations Association of America, a group advocating integration.[3]
[1] Randy Boyagoda, Richard John Neuhaus, A Life in the Public Square (New York: Image Books, 2015), 95.
[2] Quoted in Boyagoda, Richard John Neuhaus, 96.
[3] Boyagoda, Richard Neuhaus, chapter 8.
Amid all of this activity, Neuhaus met Michael Novak, another public intellectual whose work would become associated with his own in the future. He also became involved with the Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam (CALCAV) a group of Protestants, Catholics and Jews opposing the war. He attended the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago on behalf of CALCAV and as a delegate for Eugene McCarthy and against the eventual nominee, Hubert Humphrey, who had Lyndon Johnson’s stamp of approval. The convention ended up being a critical moment for Neuhaus. Neuhaus, who replaced the ailing theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in addressing the party’s national committee on behalf of conscientious draft resisters and army deserters. He argued that the Democratic Party should adopt amnesty for these dissenters in its platform. The requested was declined. Reflecting the general atmosphere of tension and anger at the convention, Neuhaus found himself shepherding the author Norman Mailer to his hotel room after Mailer had tried to punch a police officer. He himself was physically removed from the convention floor during an argument over a delegate’s credentials. When he led a peace march across a line he’d been warned by police not to cross, he was arrested and spent a night in jail. He was charged with disorderly conduct as a result.[1]
The combination of events in Chicago that summer demoralized Neuhaus. At the close of the summer, he went to visit his friend, the Lutheran sociologist Peter Berger, with whom he would later co-author or co-edit several books. At this time, Neuhaus’ lifelong friend, the scholar Robert Wilken, introduced him to Avery Dulles, the son of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Dulles, himself a convert to Catholicism, a member of the Jesuits, and later, a Cardinal, became good friends with Neuhaus and eventually served as Neuhaus’ seminary instructor when Neuhaus prepared for ordination as a Catholic priest in 1991. Neuhaus continued his antiwar and civil rights activities, but his views were changing. At an antiwar rally with Norman Thomas, the Presbyterian minister and six-time candidate for the Socialist Party of America, the two watched antiwar protesters burn an American flag. Thomas commented that the object was not to “burn” the flag, but to “cleanse” it.[2] He viewed his protest of the Vietnam War as patriotic. Flag burning came to seem to him less patriotic than anti-American. In fact, Neuhaus was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the American political left’s activities by the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Berger and Neuhaus published their book Movement and Revolution in 1970. Though Neuhaus was on his way to becoming a political conservative, he took the position of the radical in the book, while Berger took the position of the conservative. Neuhaus unsuccessfully ran for a house Congressional seat representing Brooklyn in 1970. He ran as an anti-Vietnam War/pro-peace radical Democrat. He later claimed the run was “a fit of vocational absentmindedness.”[3]
Both Movement and Revolution and his run for Congress established Neuhaus as a radical liberal Democrat, but this was soon to change. With the January 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, Neuhaus began to see his belief in the rights of the unborn on par with his commitment to the poor and racially oppressed, as biographer Randy Boyagoda notes.[4] Indeed, this would eventually become a point on which he criticized Catholics whom he felt were not strenuous enough in their opposition to the Roe v. Wade decision.
By the early 1970s, Neuhaus became increasingly engaged in public intellectual life, becoming associate editor of Worldview magazine, a monthly of the Carnegie-endowed Council on Religion and International Affairs. He had traveled to Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, and had formed opinions on global affairs that would find their way into his voluminous writings. Between 1970 and his death in 2009, Neuhaus authored, co-authored and edited more than two dozen books and published hundreds if not thousands of articles.
Neuhaus fully broke with Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam in 1974 over many of his fellow clergy’s refusal to condemn the new Communist government in Vietnam due to its human rights abuses. He had been heavily involved with the group’s activities and when he abandoned the group he began to recast his political views.
[1] Boyagoda, Richard Neuhaus, 128-130.
[2] Boyagoda, Richard Neuhaus, 134.
[3] Boyagoda, Richard Neuhaus, 154.
[4] Boyagoda, Richard Neuhaus, 163.
The Hartford Appeal for Theological Affirmation publicly marked Neuhaus’ theological and political break with left politics and liberal Christianity. The appeal was written by Neuhaus and his friend Peter Berger in 1974 as a critique of mainline Protestantism. A group of theologians of Christian background were then convened at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut to debate the list of criticisms. The Appeal asserted that there was “an apparent loss of a sense of the transcendent” among the contemporary Church’s leaders and members, and that this was “undermining the Church’s ability to address with clarity and courage the urgent tasks to which God calls it in the world.”[1]
Berger and Neuhaus’s 13 themes comprising the Appeal amounted to a series of statements about modern Christianity that they rejected. The list included the following:
* That modern thought was superior to all past forms of understanding reality
* That Jesus could only be understood in terms of contemporary models of humanity
* That all religions were equally valid
* That the sole purpose of worship was to promote individual self-realization and human community
* That human institutions and historical traditions repressed true humanness, and liberation from them was required for an authentic existence and authentic religion
* That the world should set the agenda for the church
* Social, political and economic programs to improve the quality of life are normative for the Church’s mission in the world.
* The struggle for a better humanity will bring about the kingdom of God.
In fact, the themes outlined above, among others, would be those he would work to oppose in the decades after the Appeal was written.
Neuhaus was already a national public figure at this time. But the Appeal immediately generated publicity and controversy because it suggested a rift inside of American Christianity. Neuhaus looked to “the Roman Catholics, the evangelicals, and the Lutherans” to help revitalize Christianity at the time, viewing other mainline Protestant denominations as incapable of such.[2] He increasingly saw mainline Protestant churches as capitulating to conformist mainstream culture. His writings over the next decade, in Worldview and in his books, further honed his positions on modern politics and religion. But it was the publication of The Naked Public Square, Religion and Democracy in America in 1984 that catapulted him to lasting fame and influence in national politics.
The book’s premise was that modern political doctrine and practice sought to exclude religion and religiously grounded values from the conduct of public business, leaving a “naked public square,” or one devoid of religiously-based values that would morally guide it.[3] Neuhaus argued that a “moral majoritarian” movement in opposition to the doctrine of secularism that informed the current state of affairs had been building for decades. Though many of the ideas in the book had been articulated by Neuhaus previously, this book’s timing was impeccable. Ronald Reagan was reelected that month in a landslide victory wherein he appealed to Christian voters who felt that their values were being marginalized in public life. Indeed, as a television interviewer joked to Neuhaus in reference to the book in the run up to the 1984 presidential election, “I’ve known authors to go to great lengths to promote their books. But arranging a presidential campaign, isn’t that a bit much?”[4] With the book’s publication, Neuhaus became an influential spokesperson and advisor on the role of religion in political life, particularly within Republican circles. As Neuhaus biographer Randy Boyagoda notes, where Neuhaus had prior to 1984 sought to influence public life through Democratic Party politics, after that, he “consciously and actively aligned his plans for the very same with the Reagan administration and the Republican Party, and alignment that would continue for the rest of his career.”[5] Indeed, Neuhaus believed that the support given Reagan by Christians amounted to a significant challenge to the naked public square and he would continue to focus on encouraging it through his writings and media appearances.
Around the time of the publication of The Naked Public Square and Neuhaus’s political realignment, the pastor formed a relationship with Archbishop John O’Connor, appointed episcopal leader of the archdiocese of New York in 1984 by John Paul II. The two men would admire each other until O’Connor’s death in 2000, bonding especially over their public opposition to abortion. When Neuhaus decided to convert from Lutheranism to Roman Catholicism in 1990, then to become a Catholic priest in 1991, it was O’Connor who directed him, though Avery Dulles, another convert to Catholicism, who oversaw his instruction and preparation. He was received into the church in 1990, then ordained as a priest a year later, in 1991.[6]
By 1992, Neuhaus, along with Robert Novak and George Weigel, were part of an influential group of Catholic conservatives one commentator in Europe, Lucio Brunelli referred to as a "Star Spangled Trinity." As Brunelli saw it, “they have no hesitation in describing democratic capitalism in its moralizing American version” as “the social system ‘nearest perhaps to the gospels that has ever been developed by the human race.”[7] By 1998 and 2004, in American political circles, Neuhaus’ ideas were gaining more attention from political leaders such as George W. Bush and his advisor Karl Rove. Neuhaus specifically advised Bush on his abortion stance, and offering him suggestions on historical figures to quote in support of his military positions.[8]
[1] Boyagoda, Richard Neuhaus, 182.
[2] Boyagoda, Richard Neuhaus, 182-286.
[3] Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square, Religion and Democracy in America (Eerdmans Publishing, 1984).
[4] Boyagoda, Richard Neuhaus, 231.
[5] Boyagoda, Richard Neuhaus, 242.
[6] Boyagoda, Richard Neuhaus, chapter 19, 299.
[7] Lucio Brunelli, “Star Spangled Trinity, 30 Days, no. 7, 1992.
[8] See, for example, Neuhaus to Bush, May 28, 2004, Higgins Papers, ACUA
From these years, until his death in 2009, Neuhaus reached the height of his influence, offering advisement to conservative leaders in American politics.