Richard John Neuhaus

Together with Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the sociologist Peter Berger, and George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), Neuhaus has helped lead the effort to roll back the influence of liberalism and secularism in public affairs. In addition to being IRPL founder, he is also editor-in-chief of its journal First Things. Serving on the editorial board of First Things are Weigel, Novak, Midge Decter, and others. As central figures in the neoconservatives' infrastructure of war-on-culture institutes, Neuhaus and the IRPL have benefited from funding by the major right-wing foundations, most prominently the Bradley, Olin, Carthage, and Scaife foundations, receiving some $9 million from these foundations between 1989 and 2005 (see MediaTransparency.org).

Neuhaus, who became a Roman Catholic priest in 1991 after having previously been a Lutheran minister, has served on the boards of several prominent institutes, including the Institute on Religion and Democracy, the EPPC, and the Foundation for Community and Faith-Centered Enterprise. He has also been a director of the rightist 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 Neuhaus one of 32 "most influential intellectuals in America" (see Neuhaus biography, World Youth Alliance).

In his regular columns for the First Things magazine and website, Neuhaus discusses issues ranging from theological disputes between Protestants and Catholics and the impact of progressive ideologies on youths, to the application of just war concepts in foreign policy and the politics of abortion and "freedom to die" proponents. In a September 2006 column, Neuhaus warned against those who seek to "moderate" Islam, pointing to what he called the tremendous influence of violent jihad over many of the faith's adherents. He wrote: "To purify Islam by ridding it of the current rulers who are declared to be apostates and no better than infidels, to compel the submission of the Christian West (meaning mainly America), and to achieve eternal bliss by sacrificing one's life (if necessary, in suicide attacks)—these are the driving motivations behind Jihadism. Such is the appeal, not to the poor and disenfranchised of the 'Arab street' but to the brightest and best of the relatively well-educated and well-off of young Muslims, both at home and abroad, who are seething with resentment over centuries of what they view as humiliation by the West and are bent upon vengeance to the glory of God."

Instead of trying to moderate radical Islamists, wrote Neuhaus, the United States needs to develop a new containment strategy, one modeled on that designed by George Kennan after the end of World War II. He wrote: "After September 11, First Things worried editorially about the meaning of an open-ended conflict and the applicability of just-war doctrine when it may be impossible to specify the meaning of victory. That is a continuing worry. Perhaps it is forever, or at least as far as we can see into the future, and the best we can hope for is containment of the threat. To clear our minds of cant and prepare for the future, we need a new but very different 'Letter X' such as that written by George Kennan in 1947, preparing us for the long contest with the Soviet Union."

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 Vietnam War and for social justice. Neuhaus took his anti-war 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. Berger, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College who, like Neuhaus, later became a neocon ideologue, joined Neuhaus on the national steering committee of the anti-war 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 entitled "The Thorough Revolutionary" written by Neuhaus. "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" (The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology, p. 282).

Neuhaus' fellow revolutionary enthusiast Berger soon became disillusioned with the Movement, and by the mid-1970s both Neuhaus and Berger had dropped revolution—and progressivism—for the reactionary politics of the ascendant neoconservative camp. Neuhaus, Berger, and Novak (another former proponent of liberation theology) had all undergone personal revolutions, 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 AEI.

One of the oldest right-wing think tanks, AEI in the 1970s underwent a political makeover itself, 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 AEI's Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy, were school vouchers and an end to affirmative action policies.

When AEI published Empower People, the neoconservative social and economic ideology was still in its formative stages. 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 followup conference on "Democracy and Mediating Structures," which was organized by 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'" (p. 311).

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 neoconservative orbit of influence. Most of the leading members of the Social Democrats/USA (SD/USA), a 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.

Neuhaus, like Novak, became an outspoken advocate of "democratic capitalism," in which corporations are considered to have a virtuous role in public life. Neuhaus is perhaps best known for his thesis that the secular New Class and big government have crowded religion out of "the public square." Since the late 1970s, Neuhaus has argued that Judeo-Christianity should be reasserted back into this 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 was locked in an uneasy political alliance with the neoconservatives.

In his sycophantic account of the rise of neoconservatism, The Neoconservative Vision, Mark Gerson (a director at the Project for the New American Century) writes 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" (p. 285). Gerson recounts how, after the Rockford Institute published articles that some neoconservatives like Weigel criticized as anti-Semitic, Neuhaus split with the institute (pp. 309-312). With funding from Bradley and other conservative foundations, Neuhaus then established the Institute on Religion and Public Life, which he billed as "an interreligious, nonpartisan research and education institute whose purpose is to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society." The institute's main activity is the publication of First Things.

Neuhaus, the erstwhile 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."

On March 10, 2003, just prior to the Iraq invasion, Neuhaus gave 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 UN'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 UN" (ZENIT, March 10, 2003, cited in First Things, October 2005).

Echoing the neocon dogma about liberalism and anti-U.S. sentiment at 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" (ZENIT, March 10, 2003, cited in First Things, October 2005).

Despite his support for going to war, Neuhaus nevertheless 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 (ZENIT, March 10, 2003, cited in First Things, October 2005).

Neuhaus' books include Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy, and the Splendor of Truth (2006); The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (1997); Appointment in Rome: The Church in America Awakening (1998), and Doing Well & Doing Good: The Challenge to the Christian Capitalist (1992).

Government Service

Education

Jason Weaver, "Neocon Catholics Target Mainline Protestants," MediaTransparency.org, August 11, 2006.

MediaTransparency Profile: Institute on Religion and Public Life, http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientgrants.php?recipientID=175.

First Things, Masthead, FirstThings.com.

World Youth Alliance: Neuhaus Biography, http://web.archive.org/web/20030609085825/http://www.wya.net/events/wyd2002/neuhaus_john.html (Web Archive).

Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).

Richard J. Neuhaus, "The Thorough Revolutionary," in Peter L. Berger and Richard J. Neuhaus, Movement and Revolution (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970).

Mark Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold Wars to the Culture Wars (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1997).

Richard John Neuhaus, "Just War is an Obligation of Charity," National Catholic Register, October 7, 2001.

Richard John Neuhaus, "Iraq and the Moral Judgment," First Things, October 2005, (reprinting ZENIT, March 10, 2003), http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=235.

Richard John Neuhaus, "RJN: Jihadism and Jihadists," First Things, September 29, 2006.

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