The Catholic Mind Of Rick Santorum

While I've been engrossed in other minor matters over the past few days, I've been fascinated with the sudden rise of Rick Santorum's Republican presidential bid over the past few weeks. As a Catholic I'm supposed to be treating Santorum's campaign with respect because of his pro-life credentials, his general family values, and his espousal of subsidiarity. Although I attend to these issues and more when I evaluate my candidates, as an intellectual historian I also look at their long arc of development---the things that seem to occupy their minds and hearts as well as their public political personae. With that, today I want to meditate on the Catholic mind of Rick Santorum, as well as what one might call the "Romanization of the American culture wars." As our new contributor LD perceptively quipped at our Facebook page yesterday, "Come for the current events; stay for the history." Indeed.

One could do worse in analyzing Santorum's thinking than starting with a primary source: an essay penned by the candidate himself and published on January 20, 2012 (hat-tip to Ethan Schrum for pointing me to this). These two pieces have a lot of meat in them (both containing deeper issues on which to ruminate), but I'm going to stick to Santorum himself today. What follows is an interlinear, but non-exhaustive, breakdown of the ten-paragraph piece (links, bolds, and underlines mine):

In 1977, Peter Berger and the late Richard John Neuhaus published a now-famous essay, “To Empower People,” which argued that “mediating structures” such as family, church, charities, and neighborhood associations are essential for a healthy civil society.* I entirely agree, and as those who have followed my career will know, I attempted to develop these ideas throughout my time in the United States Senate and in my own 2005 book, It Takes a Family. I believe passionately that the family is the basic building block of society, and that in contrast to President Obama’s immense sums of borrowed money being spent on entitlement programs and his undermining of charities and religious liberty, we can and must do far better—here in South Carolina and throughout the country.

Neuhaus is of course famous for many things, not the least for being a confidant of, or at least an inspiration to, President George W. Bush. Here Santorum is trying to go a little deeper---trying to capture something of the spirit Tocqueville observed about American society. The first sentence of this piece, however, has been cribbed from the publisher's blurb for a collection of essays edited by Michael Novak titled To Empower People: From State to Civil Society (not coincidentally promoted at the American Enterprise Institute's website). As a post-World War II emigrant intellectual from Austria, Berger is someone who ought to get more attention here at USIH, especially since James Davison Hunter was apparently one of Berger's students.

My problem with this paragraph is its maxim that "the family is the basic building block of society." It's true---as far is it goes---and Catholics return to this principal over and over again, but many treat it as if it's the end of the story. Even conservatives, especially politicians, who espouse "mediating structures" often de-emphasize those structures in favor of talking about "family values" in the context of the Culture Wars. I agree with Andrew Hartman that this talk is sincere and not merely a Republican political canard. The language captures something fundamental---that it is related to an identity crisis, instigated by own ongoing lack of adjustment to modernity, that underlays so much of the late twentieth-century's incarnation of the Culture Wars. Even so, the Catholic overlay given by Santorum, as well as by Cathoolic intellectuals, is that we can solve the question of the meaning of America by simply communicating better with our fathers (heavenly and earthly), mothers (ditto), sisters, and brothers. The rhetorical focus is on blood family and our Church-going compatriots rather than our self-made tribes, ethnic groups, and, strangely enough, larger forms of identity that bind together America as a nation. Indeed, if we followed Santorum's, Neuhaus's, and Berger's advice to an extreme, American culture would be more Balkanized and local than it already is---perhaps more than it ever was in the nineteenth century. It's this anti-globalism that differentiates Santorum from Romney as much as anything. ...Returning to the essay...

I am running for President because I believe in practical, constitutional, and limited government that respects the rights of ordinary citizens and makes room for local communities to thrive because real people who know one another support one another. In my tradition we call this the principle of subsidiarity: the idea that whenever possible, reform should happen locally because people closest to the need have the most invested in the solution. From its first day in office my presidency will restrain the overreach of Washington by giving space for civil society institutions like congregations, families, businesses, charities and community organizations to flourish—acknowledging that the kind of solidarity that exists in local communities is far stronger and more effective than taxpayer-funded subsidies from Washington bureaucrats.

Two historians, Michael Kazin and Thomas Sugrue, have tackled the issue of subsidiarity in recent pieces about Newt Gingrich, Saul Alinsky, and President Obama. Just last week I referenced those pieces (point #4) at USIH. Gingrich accidentally and indirectly denigrated subsidiarity by trashing Saul Alinsky. Apparently Gingrich was unaware of the Alinsky's links to one of the great Catholic cosmopolitan thinkers of the twentieth century, Jacques Maritain. Maritain found a way to support both subsidiarity and international human rights, while also respecting personhood and the political process. I don't foresee Santorum referencing Maritain anytime soon in campaign speeches (despite the former's enthusiasm for natural law, which as Molly Worthen reminded us does connect with Thomas Aquinas). But at least Santorum has not rhetorically ruled out the connection, the possibility, for liberal Catholics who lean right and may be unhappy with Obama.

Wikipedia offers two entries for subsidiarity---one with a kind of secular bent, and oriented toward European politics, and the other focused on the Catholic teaching of subsidiarity. I linked to the secular one in the excerpt above, but the Catholic one applies as well. Here are the first few lines from the Catholic-oriented entry:

"The principle of subsidiarity was developed by German theologian Oswald von Nell-Breuning.[2] His work influenced the social teaching of Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno and holds that government should undertake only those initiatives which exceed the capacity of individuals or private groups acting independently. Functions of government, business, and other secular activities should be as local as possible. If a complex function is carried out at a local level just as effectively as on the national level, the local level should be the one to carry out the specified function. The principle is based upon the autonomy and dignity of the human individual, and holds that all other forms of society, from the family to the state and the international order, should be in the service of the human person."

The best discussion I've seen of Catholic subsidiarity in intellectual history is Jay Corrin's excellent transnational study, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (Notre Dame Press, 2002). I first wrote about Corrin's book here (about two-thirds down the page), and have long had plans for an extended retrospective review. In the post you get a taste---Corrin's book receives just a summation in a single paragraph. [Two asides: (a) If someone from Notre Dame Press is reading this, get that book out in paperback! (b) On my long-planned review, I have twenty-some note cards filled, front and back, with thoughts on the book.]

Returning to Santorum...

In the last three years, the current President has added more to America’s deficit than the collective total of all prior presidents—and this comes at tremendous cost to our children and grandchildren, and it is not working. Unemployment continues to exceed the promised “8 percent” he told us his whopping $787 billion stimulus package would guarantee. But even more problematically, Mr. Obama’s policies have made far too many of us less resilient, less responsible and less free. Food stamps usage has increased by 41 percent since the President took office. More than 1 in 7 U.S. adults—and an astonishing 1 in every 4 children—today receive food stamps. The Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program received billions in additional annual spending. Subsidized housing, the Women, Infants and Children program (WIC) and the numbers of children born out of wedlock—are all up. As a father this breaks my heart. This should not be.

This is, to say the least, a very one-sided definition of freedom. First, it is not the assistance that makes people "less resilient, less responsible and less free." Indeed, this assertion is inconsistent with existential Christian theology and philosophy which would assert that freedom begins with a state of consciousness about one's own responsibility for her/his relationship with God. Not that Catholicism has ever been exceedingly friendly to Christian existentialism. Is there, by the way, a historical theological-philosophical study out there of Catholic existentialism, or of Soren Kierkegaard's influence on Catholic thought? My point here is that there is nothing in Catholic theology, including the principal of subsidiarity, that necessitates an inverse relationship between government assistance and less resilience, responsibility, or freedom. Only Catholic ideologues like Father Coughlin assert this absolutely.

Returning to Santorum's essay (though the intellectual returns are diminishing)...

I will address this issue of father-absence and family-strengthening head-on, because doing so makes sense both culturally and economically. Today, more than 25 million American children, at least 64% of African Americans and 36% of Hispanics, live in father-absent homes. Research tells us that low-income children without a father at home are five times more likely to remain poor. Children growing up without a dad are 2-3 times as likely to become teen parents and engage in criminal behavior: for these young people, economic realities follow cultural-relational realities, not the other way around. We need courageous fathers; that’s what moms want and America’s children need.

I'm not qualified to speak about this point in relation to social science and American intellectual history. I wonder if Santorum is working from research within the conservative tribe, by Charles Murray no less, on the so-called breakdown of the working-class male work ethic over the past 30-40 years? Anyway, it's clear that Santorum prioritizes culture over economic drivers. It's a very Catholic way of seeing the world. Santorum sees a conservative-liberal dichotomy: liberals believe that work availability engenders a work ethic, conservatives believe people are the way they are (e.g. working-class whites are now lazy and overprivileged, won't accept retraining, and jobs hence should be outsourced). But Catholic conservatives like Santorum believe that if we can change the culture, the economy will grow again. Hence conservative Catholics believe that the Culture Wars will literally pay in the long run for America. ...Returning to the essay.

As president I will support state and local funding options that strengthen marriage and support for low-income families so that dads are incentivized to support their children and be involved in their lives. I will not attempt to “transform” faith-based and community organizations into bureaucratic arms of the federal government, but will instead look to devolve resources to states, much as I did in 1996 in reforming welfare. And put wind behind the back of great charities like the Salvation Army and Catholic Charities which have been discriminated against by liberal courts, regulators, and now the Obama Administration.

So, Santorum doesn't want to make "faith-based and community organizations into bureaucratic arms of the federal government," but he'd be happy to make them arms of the state government to recreate America's Christian "moral establishment" at a more local level? He needs to read David Sehat's study of what happened when that was the case. Check out the four reviews in our round table on David's book (here, here, here, and here), as well has his response. ...Back to Santorum's essay.

The Obama Administration only makes it harder for generous Americans to help those in need, even though Obamanomics has resulted in 1 in 6 Americans being in poverty. Obama has proposed limiting deductions for charitable giving, for those Americans who are large givers which United Way estimates could cost charities between more than $4 billion a year, larger than the operating budgets of of the American Cancer Society, World Vision, St. Jude's Children's Hospital, Habitat for Humanity, and the American Heart Association combined. President Obama has also worked to define “religious employers” in ObamaCare so narrowly that it’s doubtful that Jesus Christ’s ministry would even qualify.

It's hard to take seriously a paragraph anchored by the incendiary political rhetoric of "Obamanomics" and "Obamacare," but I'll give it my own Catholic analysis. Whether one agrees the his reasoning or not, Santorum's political point about the religious employers-contraception debate must have had political legitimacy because the Obama administration modified their policy. I don't think it's wrong to measure that kind of legitimacy in relation to actual actions. There were many religious leaders who feared the long-term implications of religious institutions being forced to deliver health care that conflicted (potentially or really) with moral teachings. The administration therefore gave way (though some Catholic bishops, and probably Santorum, felt the administration's move is still inadequate).

Beyond that I'll make only one observation: Isn't it interesting how Santorum has made our economic and cultural situation dependent on long-range cultural and political problems (i.e. family breakdown and federal overreach), but also largely blamed those same problems on policies enacted over only three years by a Christian president who supports responsible fatherhood (and with one full year, and counting, of those policies refracted by a Republican House and gridlocked Senate)? ...Back to the essay.

Moreover, his Administration stopped Catholic Charities from their long-standing partnership with government to help women who are victims of sex trafficking because they do not support abortion, just vulnerable women being abused. Is that caring for the least of these, respecting the free exercise of religion, or is that playing to the extreme left to the detriment of women? Many on the left care more about being politically correct and imposing their agenda than caring for those with HIV or kids that need adopted. They didn’t stop there. They told a positive marriage program to help teenage girls that they could talk about marriage just not abstinence. So marriage is OK just not fidelity.

I'm not qualified to speak on either the Catholic Charities-sex trafficking or teen abstinence program issues. But I can say anecdotally that I've not seen any poll numbers that support the notion of raped and abused women being forced to keep the resultant babies. On this point abolitionist pro-lifers, Catholic and otherwise, are strongly at odds with American culture.

I was the best advocate for private sector charitable activity and giving incentives in Congress for many years, taking on those who wanted to restrict freedom and civil society, and successfully passing several provisions into law that enabled the donation of food to the hungry, good equipment to volunteer firefighter companies, and large IRA contributions to faith-based groups, education, and other charitable groups. I will continue to be an advocate for the little platoons of faithful servants who help their neighbors all around our country.

Now for the big finish...

It is time to stop rewarding bad behavior via government handouts that have unintended consequences, and to instead respect hard work, family, and local civil society institutions (like the hundreds of congregations, private hospitals, and grassroots community organizations throughout South Carolina) that make our country truly great. When the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville visited our land 200 years ago, he said that our political associations “form only a detail in the immense picture that the sum of associations presents here”—and that those associations are “essential for defending liberty from State tyranny.”

Saturday's primary election is an opportunity to send a clear message to the current president that freedom is back. We do not want a European-style welfare state; we want freedom to be neighbors to our neighbors. We want the federal government to focus on keeping us free and standing for our values and interests around the world. With your help, I will defend our country, restrain federal spending, restore the honor of marriage and family, while respecting civil society which forges local solutions to the challenges we face in America.

Line one from the first paragraph above is a standard talking point of the post-1960s New Right. It is also one of the three points from Albert O. Hirschman's 1991 book, The Rhetoric of Reaction: the perversity thesis. In a nutshell, the helpful hand of the mid-century welfare state only results in a decrease in the real welfare of the recipient via spiritual degradation. I don't get the pivot here to Tocqueville beyond the association already made above to subsidiarity. It is an anachronistic association in that Tocqueville was unaware of how voluntary associations would work in a post-industrial, globalized industrial-financial state.

I don't mean to say that references to Tocqueville in 2012 are useless, but rather that they have to be done carefully. And that care must also be used in relation to romantic medieval visions of village subsidiarity that dominated the thinking of late nineteenth-century thinkers like Chesterton, Belloc, and others who influenced early twentieth-century American Catholicism. - TL

War and the 'We'

Recently, Andrew picked up on Charles Taylor's view of the theological crisis at the center of the culture wars. I have been looking at the same sort of thing from a slightly different angle and thought I might join Andrew in the historical accounting. To get a grip on what I see as a theological crisis of Amerian civil religion in the post-Vietnam era, I used a debate between Richard John Neuhaus and Stanley Hauerwas precipitated by the Gulf War.

President Bush knew that Vietnam had shocked many churches, Catholics in particular and some evangelical Protestants, into taking up positions that were at least very suspicious of American military policy and operations, and that during the Gulf War, such suspicion was apparent. Even the Bishop of his own church remained “unconvinced” by Bush’s moral argument. The war also raised a broader question that addressed both Bush’s traditional use of the just war doctrine and his hope for a new world order. Pacifist and influential theologian John H. Yoder believed the question was not whether a war was just or not, but whether the system Bush employed, let’s call it moral unipolarity, could “foster restraint.” In short, could Bush’s moral vision “say no to a particular war?”

The role churches played in the debate over Gulf War turned on a discussion involving civil religion that had emerged early in cold war. Yoder’s question suggested that there were two competing realms of moral thought about the war: the first was Bush’s system of beliefs that he used to take action; the second was the larger system of judgment under which Bush’s actions would fall. In other words, who or what would judge the actions that flowed from Bush’s moral vision?

In the early cold war, Eisenhower, in particular, made it clear that he believed the United States was indeed a nation under God, but not necessarily beholden to any one religious or church-based interpretation of that judgment. As President, Eisenhower called upon churches and religious leaders to help Americans make sense of the existential struggle against communism, but he understood that moral authority could not be the province of churches alone--the nation had its own repository. Thus American civil religion was a source of moral authority useful for dealing with the imperative that Ike believed emerged during the cold war, including, if necessary, going to war. Yoder wrote in the Christian Century that he saw the moral debate over Bush’s actions “as a test of whether the entire just war mode of moral discourse is adequate to guide the responsible citizenship of people who claim that their first moral obligation is to the God whom Jesus taught them to praise and obey, and their second to the neighbor, including the enemy, whom Jesus taught them to love.”


Richard John Neuhaus attacked that position in a long editorial in the Wall Street Journal that both defended Bush’s application of just war theory to the Gulf, and dismissed religious leaders who disagreed with the impending action there. Neuhuas explained: “The council's condemnation of allied action in the Gulf was entirely predictable. The council and the bureaucracies of its chief member churches were thoroughly ‘radicalized,’ as it used to be said, in the Vietnam era.” From that time forwarded, mainline Protestants and a few Catholic Bishops had become as Neuhaus and his First Things colleague George Wiegel had said functional pacifists. Neuhaus pointed out, though, that few of these leaders possessed the intellectual rigor to subscribe to philosophical pacifism. Rather, “in their view, justice is typically on the side of whatever force is hostile to the U.S., whether in Latin America, Africa, Asia or the Middle East.”

Neuhaus had captured the conflict at the heart of this debate—what was the proper relationship was between Christian intellectuals and the nation? Stanley Hauerwas had an answer. As a Protestant theologian with strong preferences for John Howard Yoder’s views on pacifism, Hauerwas was a somewhat unlikely figure to be a rising start in the debate over religion in America. But he did more than merely express pacifist views, like Neuhaus, he too thought civil religion was a great game, only he believed its success was destroying Christianity. Hauerwas sat on the editorial board of the conservative religious journal First Things. Neuhaus was the founding editor of the journal and, by 1991, had converted to Catholicism and been ordained a priest. In a letter to the journal Hauerwas took issue with Neuhaus’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Cleary he had picked up a conversation that the two theologians had engaged in previously.



While Hauerwas argued that Neuhaus had mischaracterized pacifism, a broader issue surrounded this exchange. Hauerwas challenged Neuhaus on the legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr. It had been a few years since Niebuhr’s ideas had played a role in public debates. He died in 1971 a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War amidst profound doubts about the legitimate prosecution of the war by the United States. But during the Gulf War, Niebuhr’s thought—especially his critique of pacifism during World War II--was used to defend the war. In other words, Niebuhr became an intellectual crutch for those employing World War II analogies. For religious intellectuals like Weigel and Neuhaus, it was time to stand up to the Hitler of 1990s and decry pacifism in a way that echoed Niebuhr’s stand in the mid-1930s. And yet, as Niebuhr surely would have pointed out, his thought had limited application in 1991--after all he made his arguments about pacifism at a time when the real Hitler threatened millions of people.

The key to understanding why both Hauerwas and Neuhaus called upon Niebuhr can be reduced to one word: “we.” Niebuhr employed the universal “we” in one of his most famous essays, when he declared that the Christian church was not pacifist in the face of Hitler—why “we” needed to defend Western civilization in the midst of the great totalitarian threats of the 1930s and 1940s. Niebuhr played the part of a great public theologian in times a grave crisis. Hauerwas and Neuhaus had emerged by the last decade of the twentieth century as candidates to succeed Niebuhr. In his Wall Street Journal essay, Neuhaus had used a construction that resembled Niebuhr’s exclamation against pacifism; Hauerwas pounced on this. “The crucial question is,” Hauerwas argued, “who is the ‘us’? Your rhetoric,” he told Neuhaus, “mixes ‘we Christians’ with ‘we Americans’ in a way that I think compromises our ability as Christians to be a people with habits necessary to help our non-Christian fellow citizens realize that the story of righteousness they associate with being Americans is deeply problematic.”

For Hauerwas, the “we” or “us” in the debate over the application of Christian doctrine starts and largely ends with those who profess devotion to the church, not those who are needed by the nation to help make sense of secular actions with religious language. To make this point plainly, Hauerwas told Neuhaus, “you continue to presume that Christian ethics is to be written in a manner that makes it accessible to those in power...In contrast, I assume that Christian ethics is to be written first and foremost for Christians in the church, some of whom may find themselves in political office.” To Hauerwas, Niebuhr and Neuhaus grew too close to those in power and by doing so compromised the power of the one who sat in judgment over them all. Hauerwas challenged Neuhaus and his allies: “Consider...the difference between your [Neuhaus’s] application of the [just war] theory and its use to inform penitential practice by Christians for the examination of conscience. The latter use requires the presumption that when Christians kill their souls are in jeopardy. In contrast, your use of the theory does not presume that salvation is at stake or that the church exists as part of that salvation. All you assume is the nation-state in a system of nation-states.” Hauerwas lumped Neuhaus in with his general critique of Niebuhr—neither spoke as Christian theologians but as American theologians who were Christian. The distinction was crucial.

By the early 1990s, Neuhaus had developed an intellectual trinity of sorts between himself, his church, and his nation. This trinity had started on the left and had drifted rightward politically over time toward what might be called an anti-anti-Americanism in the late 1970s and 1980s. Neuhaus had presented a clear alternative to Jim Wallis in the late 1970s and by the 1990s, it seemed that Hauerwas had become the next sparing partner. Wallis had offered a fairly consistent reading of America’s sins stemming from the nation’s behavior in Vietnam through to its consumerist ethos of the 1980s. Hauerwas, though, pushed Neuhaus to articulate a different kind of understanding of the relationship between a theologian and the nation. Whereas it was relatively easy for Neuhaus to dismiss Wallis because Wallis stood opposed to almost everything Neuhaus was, Hauerwas considered himself a conservative theologian like Neuhaus. And for this reason Hauerwas tested Neuhaus’s public theology from the inside. That was why Neuhaus took particular exception to Hauerwas’s argument that a Christian ethics is first and foremost for Christians and not necessarily accessible to all Americans unless those Americans follow Christ. In response to this challenge, Neuhaus spoke about a notion fundamental to American civil religion--that America was a nation under God. As such, this view “assures a certain correspondence, albeit disordered by sin, between His will and human reason and the laws of nature. As a result, ethics grounded in and thoroughly compatible with Christian faith is ‘accessible’ also to non-Christians. It is, in other words, a public ethic.”

In the 1990s, Neuhaus waged battles on many fronts in the culture wars. But one that I find especially significant was his attempt to use the Gulf War as an occasion to recreate the 'we' he believed had disappeared. Neuhaus and Haerwas would retunr to this debate over 'we' a decade later, but would come to an impasse that, as far as I know, they never repaired.

War and the 'We'

Recently, Andrew picked up on Charles Taylor's view of the theological crisis at the center of the culture wars. I have been looking at the same sort of thing from a slightly different angle and thought I might join Andrew in the historical accounting. To get a grip on what I see as a theological crisis of Amerian civil religion in the post-Vietnam era, I used a debate between Richard John Neuhaus and Stanley Hauerwas precipitated by the Gulf War.

President Bush knew that Vietnam had shocked many churches, Catholics in particular and some evangelical Protestants, into taking up positions that were at least very suspicious of American military policy and operations, and that during the Gulf War, such suspicion was apparent. Even the Bishop of his own church remained “unconvinced” by Bush’s moral argument. The war also raised a broader question that addressed both Bush’s traditional use of the just war doctrine and his hope for a new world order. Pacifist and influential theologian John H. Yoder believed the question was not whether a war was just or not, but whether the system Bush employed, let’s call it moral unipolarity, could “foster restraint.” In short, could Bush’s moral vision “say no to a particular war?”

The role churches played in the debate over Gulf War turned on a discussion involving civil religion that had emerged early in cold war. Yoder’s question suggested that there were two competing realms of moral thought about the war: the first was Bush’s system of beliefs that he used to take action; the second was the larger system of judgment under which Bush’s actions would fall. In other words, who or what would judge the actions that flowed from Bush’s moral vision?

In the early cold war, Eisenhower, in particular, made it clear that he believed the United States was indeed a nation under God, but not necessarily beholden to any one religious or church-based interpretation of that judgment. As President, Eisenhower called upon churches and religious leaders to help Americans make sense of the existential struggle against communism, but he understood that moral authority could not be the province of churches alone--the nation had its own repository. Thus American civil religion was a source of moral authority useful for dealing with the imperative that Ike believed emerged during the cold war, including, if necessary, going to war. Yoder wrote in the Christian Century that he saw the moral debate over Bush’s actions “as a test of whether the entire just war mode of moral discourse is adequate to guide the responsible citizenship of people who claim that their first moral obligation is to the God whom Jesus taught them to praise and obey, and their second to the neighbor, including the enemy, whom Jesus taught them to love.”


Richard John Neuhaus attacked that position in a long editorial in the Wall Street Journal that both defended Bush’s application of just war theory to the Gulf, and dismissed religious leaders who disagreed with the impending action there. Neuhuas explained: “The council's condemnation of allied action in the Gulf was entirely predictable. The council and the bureaucracies of its chief member churches were thoroughly ‘radicalized,’ as it used to be said, in the Vietnam era.” From that time forwarded, mainline Protestants and a few Catholic Bishops had become as Neuhaus and his First Things colleague George Wiegel had said functional pacifists. Neuhaus pointed out, though, that few of these leaders possessed the intellectual rigor to subscribe to philosophical pacifism. Rather, “in their view, justice is typically on the side of whatever force is hostile to the U.S., whether in Latin America, Africa, Asia or the Middle East.”

Neuhaus had captured the conflict at the heart of this debate—what was the proper relationship was between Christian intellectuals and the nation? Stanley Hauerwas had an answer. As a Protestant theologian with strong preferences for John Howard Yoder’s views on pacifism, Hauerwas was a somewhat unlikely figure to be a rising start in the debate over religion in America. But he did more than merely express pacifist views, like Neuhaus, he too thought civil religion was a great game, only he believed its success was destroying Christianity. Hauerwas sat on the editorial board of the conservative religious journal First Things. Neuhaus was the founding editor of the journal and, by 1991, had converted to Catholicism and been ordained a priest. In a letter to the journal Hauerwas took issue with Neuhaus’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Cleary he had picked up a conversation that the two theologians had engaged in previously.



While Hauerwas argued that Neuhaus had mischaracterized pacifism, a broader issue surrounded this exchange. Hauerwas challenged Neuhaus on the legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr. It had been a few years since Niebuhr’s ideas had played a role in public debates. He died in 1971 a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War amidst profound doubts about the legitimate prosecution of the war by the United States. But during the Gulf War, Niebuhr’s thought—especially his critique of pacifism during World War II--was used to defend the war. In other words, Niebuhr became an intellectual crutch for those employing World War II analogies. For religious intellectuals like Weigel and Neuhaus, it was time to stand up to the Hitler of 1990s and decry pacifism in a way that echoed Niebuhr’s stand in the mid-1930s. And yet, as Niebuhr surely would have pointed out, his thought had limited application in 1991--after all he made his arguments about pacifism at a time when the real Hitler threatened millions of people.

The key to understanding why both Hauerwas and Neuhaus called upon Niebuhr can be reduced to one word: “we.” Niebuhr employed the universal “we” in one of his most famous essays, when he declared that the Christian church was not pacifist in the face of Hitler—why “we” needed to defend Western civilization in the midst of the great totalitarian threats of the 1930s and 1940s. Niebuhr played the part of a great public theologian in times a grave crisis. Hauerwas and Neuhaus had emerged by the last decade of the twentieth century as candidates to succeed Niebuhr. In his Wall Street Journal essay, Neuhaus had used a construction that resembled Niebuhr’s exclamation against pacifism; Hauerwas pounced on this. “The crucial question is,” Hauerwas argued, “who is the ‘us’? Your rhetoric,” he told Neuhaus, “mixes ‘we Christians’ with ‘we Americans’ in a way that I think compromises our ability as Christians to be a people with habits necessary to help our non-Christian fellow citizens realize that the story of righteousness they associate with being Americans is deeply problematic.”

For Hauerwas, the “we” or “us” in the debate over the application of Christian doctrine starts and largely ends with those who profess devotion to the church, not those who are needed by the nation to help make sense of secular actions with religious language. To make this point plainly, Hauerwas told Neuhaus, “you continue to presume that Christian ethics is to be written in a manner that makes it accessible to those in power...In contrast, I assume that Christian ethics is to be written first and foremost for Christians in the church, some of whom may find themselves in political office.” To Hauerwas, Niebuhr and Neuhaus grew too close to those in power and by doing so compromised the power of the one who sat in judgment over them all. Hauerwas challenged Neuhaus and his allies: “Consider...the difference between your [Neuhaus’s] application of the [just war] theory and its use to inform penitential practice by Christians for the examination of conscience. The latter use requires the presumption that when Christians kill their souls are in jeopardy. In contrast, your use of the theory does not presume that salvation is at stake or that the church exists as part of that salvation. All you assume is the nation-state in a system of nation-states.” Hauerwas lumped Neuhaus in with his general critique of Niebuhr—neither spoke as Christian theologians but as American theologians who were Christian. The distinction was crucial.

By the early 1990s, Neuhaus had developed an intellectual trinity of sorts between himself, his church, and his nation. This trinity had started on the left and had drifted rightward politically over time toward what might be called an anti-anti-Americanism in the late 1970s and 1980s. Neuhaus had presented a clear alternative to Jim Wallis in the late 1970s and by the 1990s, it seemed that Hauerwas had become the next sparing partner. Wallis had offered a fairly consistent reading of America’s sins stemming from the nation’s behavior in Vietnam through to its consumerist ethos of the 1980s. Hauerwas, though, pushed Neuhaus to articulate a different kind of understanding of the relationship between a theologian and the nation. Whereas it was relatively easy for Neuhaus to dismiss Wallis because Wallis stood opposed to almost everything Neuhaus was, Hauerwas considered himself a conservative theologian like Neuhaus. And for this reason Hauerwas tested Neuhaus’s public theology from the inside. That was why Neuhaus took particular exception to Hauerwas’s argument that a Christian ethics is first and foremost for Christians and not necessarily accessible to all Americans unless those Americans follow Christ. In response to this challenge, Neuhaus spoke about a notion fundamental to American civil religion--that America was a nation under God. As such, this view “assures a certain correspondence, albeit disordered by sin, between His will and human reason and the laws of nature. As a result, ethics grounded in and thoroughly compatible with Christian faith is ‘accessible’ also to non-Christians. It is, in other words, a public ethic.”

In the 1990s, Neuhaus waged battles on many fronts in the culture wars. But one that I find especially significant was his attempt to use the Gulf War as an occasion to recreate the 'we' he believed had disappeared. Neuhaus and Haerwas would retunr to this debate over 'we' a decade later, but would come to an impasse that, as far as I know, they never repaired.