|
Institutional
Affiliations
Institute
on Religion and Democracy: Member of the Board of Directors
(2)
Institute
on Religion and Public Life: President (1)
The Foundation
for Community and Faith-Centered Enterprise: Member of Board
of Visitors (2002) (1)
First Things:
A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life: Editor-in-Chief (1)
Archdiocese
of New York: Priest (1991) (1)
National
Review: Religion Editor (4)
Becket Fund Advisory Board: Member
Government
Posts/Panels/Commissions
Presidential
Appointments in Carter, Reagan and Bush I Administrations (1)
Books (5)
The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America
Appointment in Rome: The Church in America Awakening
Doing Well & Doing Good: The Challenge to the Christian Capitalist Education
Concordia
Theological Seminary: Degree not specified (3)
|
Highlights
& Quotes
Richard Neuhaus--together with Michael Novak, Peter Berger, and George Weigel—has been a key figure in spearheading the neocon initiative to seize ideological control of the culture wars against liberalism and secularism. Neuhaus is the founder of the Institute for Religion and Public Life and editor-in-chief of its journal First Things. As a central figure in neocon’s infrastructure of culture war institutes, Neuhaus and his Institute for Religion and Public Life have benefited from funding by the major right-wing foundations, most prominently the Bradley, Olin, and Scaife foundations. (6) Neuhaus, who became a Roman Catholic priest in 1991 after having previously been a Lutheran minister, currently serves on the board of directors of three prominent neocon institutes: Institute on Religion and Democracy, Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Foundation for Community and Faith-Centered Enterprise. He is also a director of the right-wing World Youth Alliance, which promotes a “culture of life” at the United Nations among other activities. In a survey of national leadership, U.S. News and World Report named Father Neuhaus one of 32 "most influential intellectuals in America." (3)
Like many neocon polemicists—from neocon godfather Irving Kristol to second generation ideologues like Michael Novak—Neuhaus came to neoconservatism after becoming disillusioned with the left.
In the 1960s Neuhaus was an activist pastor at St. John the Evangelist Lutheran Church, whose parish extended into the largely black ghetto of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. From the pulpit, Neuhaus preached against the war and for social justice.(7) Neuhaus took his antiwar and other progressive beliefs—which he grounded in Christian theology—out of the church and into the streets. In the late 1960s Neuhaus gained national prominence as the cofounder of the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. Peter Berger, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College who like Neuhaus later became a neocon ideologue, joined Neuhass on the national steering committee of the antiwar group. In 1970 Berger and Neuhaus published Movement and Revolution, a collection of essays on the progressive movement. Included in the volume was an essay by Neuhaus titled “The Thorough Revolutionary.” “A revolution of consciousness, no doubt,” wrote Neuhaus in his defense of the Movement, “A cultural revolution, certainly. A non-violent revolution, perhaps. An armed overthrow of the existing order, it may be necessary. Revolution for the hell of it or revolution for a new world, but revolution, Yes.” (8)
Neuhaus’ fellow revolutionary enthusiast Berger soon became disillusioned with the “Movement,” and by the mid-1970s both Neuhaus and Berger had dropped revolution for the reactionary politics of the ascendant neoconservative camp. Neuhaus, Berger, and Michael Novak (another former proponent of liberation theology) had all undergone a personal revolution of their own, having sharply shifted their ideological fervor, academic endeavors, and political activism to the right. All became leading advocates of “democratic capitalism” and harsh critics of liberalism, and became associated with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). One of the oldest right-wing think tanks, AEI in the 1970s underwent a political make-over—changing from being a conservative think tank associated with traditional conservatism and Main Street capitalist values to becoming a neoconservative think tank that embraced corporate capitalism and Wall Street. Neuhaus and Berger in 1975 joined an ambitious AEI project to investigate the negative social impacts of the New Class—the “megastructures” of government, the academy, trade unions, and corporations created by the liberal establishment—and to promote policies supporting the “mediating structures” of the family, the church, and communities. Among the main recommendations, published in Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy, were school vouchers and an end to affirmative action policies. (9)
When AEI published Empower People, the neoconservative social and economic ideology was only half-formed. Berger and Neuhaus, along with AEI, quickly distanced themselves from the implicit critique of corporate capitalism as part of the liberal establishment’s New Class. In AEI’s follow-up conference on “Democracy and Mediating Structures,” which was organized by Michael Novak, the definition of mediating structures was expanded to include business and financial corporations, and even trade unions. As Gary Dorrien observed in his book The Neoconservative Mind:
AEI “treated such ‘human scale’ enterprises as General Dynamics and Exxon as mediating institutions. A former executive of Mobil Oil defended AEI’s definitional revisionism and argued that multinational corporations practiced an ethic of “altruistic egoism” that was first expressed “some two thousand years ago, by Jesus of Nazareth.” (10)
But why the concession to trade unions? In the 1970s and through the 1980s, the AFL-CIO and particularly its International Operations Department were also in the neocon orbit of influence. Most of the leading members of the Social Democrats/USA (SD/USA), a neocon group founded in 1972 as a right-wing spin-off of the Socialist Party, had secured high positions in the AFL-CIO and played a key role in turning AFL-CIO leaders like Lane Kirkland into Reagan Democrats. Tom Khan, a SD/USA member who worked in the federation’s international operations, told the AEI conference on “Democracy and Mediating Structures” that the AFL-CIO’s conservative business-unionism functioned as a mediating structure between workers and the New Class. As Dorrien concluded: “The communitarian character of the mediating structures idea was sacrificed to protect corporate capitalism from criticism. The only megastructure worth worrying about, it turned out, was the state.” (10)
Neuhaus, like Novak, became an outspoken advocate of “democratic capitalism” in which corporations have a virtuous role in public life. Neuhaus is best known for his thesis that the secular New Class and big government have crowded religion out of “the public square.” (11) Since the late 1970s Neuhaus has argued that Judeo-Christianity should be reasserted back into the public square. He was an early proponent of faith-based policy initiatives and government intervention to promote Judeo-Christian values. During the 1980s, Neuhaus operated the Center on Religion and Society, which was a project of the Rockford Institute and which produced the quarterly journal This World. The Rockford Institute is firmly entrenched in the right’s Old Guard, which from the mid-1970s through the 1980s were locked in an uneasy political alliance with the neoconservatives.
Mark Gerson, a young neoconservative who has chronicled the rise of neoconservatism, observed that Neuhaus is “a great philo-Semite, having written since his days as a radical in the 1960s of his reverence for the Jewish people and for Judaism.” (12) After the Rockford Institute published several articles that Norm Podhoretz and Midge Decter criticized as anti-Semitic and questioned why Neuhaus continued his association with Rockford, Neuhaus joined the fray, charging that the institute’s publication Chronicles was “xenophobic, racist, and nativist.” (13) After he sided with the neoconservatives at the Commentary and Ethics and Public Policy Institute, the Rockford Institute locked Neuhaus out of his office and tossed his belongings into the street. Fortunately for Neuhaus, the Bradley Foundation was also increasingly embracing the neocon ideology and rechanneled its funding to Rockford to the new institute that Neuhaus founded on the rebound.
The Institute on Religion and Public Life is a neocon institute dedicated to projecting its view of Judeo-Christian values into domestic and international affairs. The institute’s main activity in the publication of First Things, a monthly journal. Neuhaus had maintained an increasingly difficult balance between keeping his Old Guard sponsors content and running with the neocons.
Neuhaus, the former antiwar activist who opposed the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam as an unjust war, has since the 1980s routinely provided theological backing for U.S. militarist ventures. Weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Neuhaus published an op-ed in the conservative National Catholic Register that cast the war on terrorism as part of the “clash of civilizations.” According to Neuhaus, ‘the West is now being compelled to recognize itself more clearly for what most Muslims perceive it to be—the Christian West, or Christendom.” Neuhaus, a self-declared “moralist” and “theologian,” asserted: “Just war, aimed at establishing just peace, is the mandatory course of charity.” (14)
On March 10, 2003, just prior to the Iraq invasion, Neuhaus provided his blessing to the preventive war. Invoking the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas, Neuhaus said that the planned invasion would be a “just war” because “war is sometimes a moral duty in order to overturn injustice and protect the innocent.” After elaborating the theological foundations that he said makes preventive war “justified and necessary,” Neuhaus gave his imprimatur to the Bush administration’s attacks on the credibility and value of the United Nations, while taking antiwar Catholics to task for unduly backing the flawed multilateral institution. “In view of the U.N.'s frequent hostility to the Church on family policy, population, the sacredness of human life, and related matters,” advised Neuhaus, “some Catholic leaders may come to regret their exaggerated and, I believe, ill-considered statements about the moral authority of the U.N.”
Echoing the neocon dogma about the liberalism and anti-U.S. sentiment of the United Nations, Neuhaus concluded that the UN’s failure to support “the coalition of the willing” would discredit the institution. “But in its absence,” he speculated, “I expect that new institutions more attuned to the nexus of power and responsibility would emerge in order to coordinate national interests in the service of peace, never forgetting that peace as ‘tranquillitas ordinis’ will always be sadly deficient short of Our Lord's return in glory.” (15)
The Institute for Religion and Public Life and its journal First Things routinely proclaim the superiority of Judeo-Christian values and the American political and economic system. Nevertheless, Neuhaus cautioned that the “Church cannot bless this military action as though it were a Christian crusade.” He then went on to explain that the Catholic Church needed to maintain its position as a moral arbiter. “After the war, if there is to be a war, the Church, and the Holy Father in particular, will be indispensable as a dialogue partner in moving Islam away from the most ominously destructive possibilities of a "clash of civilizations," predicted Neuhaus, thereby suggesting that the responsibility for the clash lies largely with the Muslim world. (15)
Since the late 1970s Neuhaus has been a leading cultural warrior in the neocon camp. As Neuhaus has written: “Politics is chiefly a function of culture, at the heart of culture is morality, and at the heart of morality is religion.” (16)
|
