Friendship and the Intellectual

Over the past week or so, some of the most respected intellectual historians working today gave us wonderful  remembrances of Henry May and Eugene Genovese.  Through these brief portraits we get a sense of the significance of May and Genovese to their profession, their fields, and to the craft of writing.  We also heard about the way friendship played a role in making these academic stars truly great people.   May and Genovese were more, far more, than merely their published works.

Recently, I spent a day looking through the papers of Richard John Neuhaus, a Catholic priest, editor and founder of the journal First Things, and a important force in the Culture Wars of the 1990s.  My concern was for an earlier period, before the

founding of First Things, before the Culture Wars redefined Neuhaus and the people around him.  One of those people was Stanley Hauerwas, a theologian who initially attracted attention as a young professor at the University of Notre Dame and a long-time friend of Neuhaus.  In the last two decades of Neuhaus's life, he and Hauerwas battled over two different wars in the Persian Gulf as well as over an issue that first brought them together in the mid-1970s, the role of religion in ordering American society.

I sifted through the as-of-yet unorganized collection of Neuhaus's personal papers (on this note, I must thank Randy Boyagoda for giving this collection some order), looking through the years in between Neuhaus's transition from an actor in CALCAV to a religious writer gravely concerned about what he identified as a crisis of authority in the debate over the American promise.  In short, I looked at the period from the Hartford Appeal (published in 1976) and the founding of First Things in 1990.  During that period, folders of correspondence that appeared thickest and most numerous included those people we would suspect: George Weigel, Michael Novak, Peter Berger, and William F. Buckley--people who helped Neuhaus shape a new conservative position on American culture.  But Hauerwas was also there in dozens and dozens of letters, papers, conference presentations, and, of course, published work.

What struck me time and again about the exchanges, both published and unpublished, between Neuhaus and Hauerwas was the genuine affection they had for each other.  They were good, loving, caring friends.  I know this might not sound earthshaking to many of those who work on the relationships between intellectuals of earlier periods.  And clearly those portraits of May and Genovese I mentioned earlier were suffused with affection.   Clearly, it seems to me, the strong friendship between Neuhaus and Hauerwas made them better intellectuals.  Their grave disagreements in later years, primarily over war and the partisanship that infected their intellectual stands, I think has largely overshadowed the way their love for one another helped to form one another into the intellectuals they became to the rest of us.

Reading through such correspondence made me wonder what examples we have of such intellectual friendships today.  Although I am not an intellectual, my genuine affection for my colleagues at S-USIH--something that might come through occasionally in the posts I write--has helped us run the society and the conferences.  I have no doubt that my time with this group has made me a better historian.  I also like to think that such relationships have made me a happier and better person.*

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Minority Report: Update on the Christian Left

In the Sunday NYTimes Book Review, David R. Swartz's new book, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism is reviewed by Molly Worthen (who will be a member of a panel at the S-USIH conference in a month).  Overall, Worthen finds much to praise about Swartz's book, not least that it is one of the few books to ask what happened to the religious left following the Vietnam War.  Readers of this blog know I am interested in this question as well and having ordered Swartz's book look forward to seeing how he addresses it.

Of particular interest to the ongoing discussion over Andrew's forthcoming book on the culture wars is where the evangelical left found itself.  According to Worthen, Swartz provides valuable discussions of the internal disputes that fractured the evangelical left (politics of identity as well as theology) and the political platform of the Democratic Party which made support of abortion rights a difficult position for Christians on the left to accept.  Certainly Christian Left leaders such as Jim Wallis and a few American Catholic bishops and priests devised a strategy that used the "consistent ethic of life" as a rallying call.  But then, as Andrew will probably tell us, such theological consistency was no match for culture war issues that pitted the dire warnings from the left against apocalyptic pronouncements about the end of the American family, American freedom, and American education that came from the right.

Worthen takes issue with Swartz's claim that actions by the Evangelical Left both pushed Christians into the conservative movement AND provided a strategy that conservatives used to solidify support for their culture war positions.  As many folks have written and debated here, such strategies came from a plethora of sources: the New Left, the Civil Rights Movement, William F. Buckley's minions, and the cold war.  Worthen insists that (as Swartz also intimates) the "evangelical left was too divided...to offer a competing grand narrative that would resonate with ordinary evangelicals and transform scattered sympathetic student gatherings into a national movement."  In other words, "the evangelical left was a casualty of the radical polarization of American politics after 1970s."

What I find somewhat confounding as an intellectual problem is what happened to religion in the radical polarization of American politics.  In a way, both left and right accepted the message in the sign above--they both believed that Vietnam, Watergate, and the drift of the cold war in the late 1970s presaged a day of reckoning for Americans.  The two sides differed (so I argue in God and War) over their theological interpretation of the United States.  Wallis and others on the Christian Left appeared to advocate a post-American era (the title of the first magazine he published); this was not merely a counter exceptionalist narrative but an scathing critique of the foundations of the nation itself.  The Christian Right also believed the nation was in peril, but were more than willing to defend it and find a great deal of righteousness is the foundations of America itself.  On this point, Richard John Neuhaus's reflections on asking fellow clergy to sign the Hartford Appeal are instructive--the upshot was that he began to see a growing schism among clergy between those who believed the nation could be saved and those who seemed to believe it was hopeless and lost.  One can see this conflict in sharp relief in the days just before the First Gulf War when Wallis went to the Middle East to stop the war, and Neuhaus wrote a long editorial in the Wall Street Journal defending it.  The bottom line was this: the right would defend going to war for the nation; the left believed killing in the name of the nation perpetuated a tragedy made evident in Vietnam.  For me, this is where the culture wars literally bled into real war.

The Challenge of Catholic Thought

What studies have followed Patrick Allitt's excellent 1993 book, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics?  I admire the work of Kristin Heyer who continues to write very interesting stuff on the prophetic witness of the Catholic Church since the mid-1980s.  And there are collections of books, many of them filled with essays on law and natural law, on Catholic critiques of liberalism.  But has there been a book that takes the straight-up intellectual history approach of Allitt's volume to the period after 1983?

I ask because I am working through questions about the kind of vacuum that Richard John Neuhaus's The Naked Public Square seemed to fill.  In searching for studies that consider the infighting among Catholics in the mid-1980s and the stark difference that appeared to grow between Catholic intellectuals over issues of war and peace; poverty and wealth; and justice and rights, I have yet to find a volume that does what Allitt's did for the period from Buckley to Michael Novak.  Novak is a case in point: has there been a good study of his transition from the left to the right to the halls of political power?

I pasted a photo of John Courtney Murray in this post because it seems that all post-1945 Catholic thought touches upon his influence in moving Catholics intellectuals toward a new understanding of their relationship to the nation.  Neuhaus seemed to position himself as Murray's successor, but here again, I can't find much on this particular connection.

Like my post proposing a bibliography for the New Christian Left, I wonder if we might consider a list on either the New Catholic Right or the schism in Catholic thought.

The Golden Cage

Thanks to Lora for extending the discussion on my last post.  I relish exchanges with my colleagues here at S-USIH.

I have an extension of my own: if Bellah and Kennan felt trapped by their own eloquence, can the inverse happen?  Can the golden cage of a term or concept release the author and entrap the culture?

The example I have in mind here is Richard John Neuhaus's use of the term, "the naked public square."  His 1984 book by that name, appearing in an election year and at a moment of impasse for the Religious Right, captured a transition in perils from the cold war to, perhaps, the culture wars.  Among the most remarkable features of the book is the limited discussion of communism--the specter that had provoked calls-to-arms of all kinds, secular and religious, since the late 1940s. But that peril had faded as a new peril was identified, manufactured, and endlessly debated. Neuhaus defined that new peril, Mary Ann Glendon asserted in a retrospective on Neuhaus's book: "Richard Neuhaus correctly saw that the chief threat to our republic was not communism (as many people thought at the time), but 'a collapse of the idea of freedom and of social arrangements necessary to sustaining a liberal democracy.'"

Before the publication of The Naked Public Square, Neuhaus had been a fascinating but not necessarily influential public intellectual.  As many know, he started his adult life as a Lutheran minister and pastor of a church in Brooklyn; a man of the religious left who marched with Martin Luther King and joined other religious leaders in opposing the Vietnam War.  By the mid-1970s he had begun to migrate away from the radical critique of the United States as a hopeless nation--fallen, perhaps, but Neuhaus argued it was redeemable.  By the early 1980s, he made an ill-fated alliance with a group of "paleocons" and in the aftermath of a minor fiasco founded the Institute for Religion and Public Life and the journal First Things.  In less than a decade he would enter the Roman Catholic Church as a priest and take up a place squarely at the center of the culture wars that defined the decade prior to 9/11.  At various times, Neuhaus expressed surprise that his book and the metaphor he used struck such a vibrant chord with so many people.  His fellow religious and conservative intellectuals had already come to admire him by 1984 but his presence at debates about the fate of American life undoubtedly grew more essential after the publication of his book.

Yet, one of the questions I wrestle with is whether his metaphor trapped the discussion about American life in a way that concepts launched by Bellah and Kennan had trapped them.  Neuhaus's public life benefited from the reception of his metaphor, but what did that metaphor do to the culture it attempted to describe?  Both Bellah and Kennan lamented the fact that their professional careers became defined by terms that they felt ambivalent about.  Their ambivalence seemed to come from finding the world around them too complex for simplification by terms such as civil religion and containment.  I don't know if Neuhaus had similar misgivings, but it seems to me that the golden cage that Bellah and Kennan felt trapped within did not prompt similar misgivings with Neuhaus. What "the naked public square" did as a concept was set the terms of a debate Americans have been having one way or another every since Neuhaus introduced it.  The 2007 issue of American Quarterly entitled "Is the Public Square Still Naked?" stands as a decent example of that.  Likewise the well-regarded religious historian Steven P. Miller recently took up the iconic metaphors of Neuhaus and James Davison Hunter in a paper at the 2012 AHA.  Is there significance in the different ways Bellah, Kennan, and Neuhaus (and perhaps Hunter) related to their iconic concepts?

Faithful to What?

The Time cover of April 8, 1966 became the most notorious in the magazine's history. A Harris Poll taken around that time found that while 97% of Americans polled said they believed in God, only 27% declared themselves "deeply religious." In the mid-1960s, a group of theologians advised churches to "accept God's death, and get along without him. Princeton ethicist Paul Ramsey put it this way: "Ours is the first attempt in recorded history to build a culture upon the premise that God is dead."

During this period, Harvey Cox had a best-seller with The Secular City; Robert Bellah earned academic fame with his essay "Civil Religion in America"; and the Catholic Church shook the religious landscape with declarations on religious liberty in the Second Vatican Council.

Fast-forward to the next generation to the mid-1980s. Robert Wuthnow publishes his landmark study of recent American religious history, The Restructuring of American Religion capturing the two trends that emerged from the 1960s: a religious awakening around the Religious Right and the spinning out of faiths in everything from new age spirituality to a civil religion of technology. The book that came closest to capturing this moment was Richard John Neuhaus's The Naked Public Square. While ostensibly a collection and expansion of themes Neuhaus had been writing on in a variety of publications, the book seemed to suggest a debate that would shape the future of American politics as well as the future of America's churches.

Recently, our moment has been punctuated by debates over health care, access to contraception, and the murky term of religious freedom. For a sliver of conflicted opinions expressed among Catholics see Cardinal Timothy Dolan's letter and an editorial in America. We've had ambiguous results from the Republican primary in the bellwether state of Ohio. Only 25% of those eligible to vote actually did, and of those who voted, half supported technocratic candidate Mitt Romney and half supported Catholic fundamentalist Rick Santorum. The primary results indicated both a split among the Republican electorate and the lukewarm feelings the candidates generate.

My question for this week regards the moment we seem to be in: have we reached another impasse of faith? Is there a book or topic that might capture this moment as had Cox's The Secular City and Neuhaus's The Naked Public Square? What's the new tagline?