Richard John Neuhaus
A Life in the Public Square
Randy Boyagoda
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480 pgs; $35
No aroused citizenry, it seems, stood in the way of the recent Supreme Court of Canada decision legalizing assisted suicide. Moral opposition to this profound change in our laws and culture simply collapsed.
By contrast, an Ottawa Valley Lutheran boy who became, first, a Roman Catholic priest and, second, “the most influential clergyman in America,” according to one commentator, caused a widespread furor with his militant response to a United States Federal Court of Appeals decision in 1996, making assisted suicide an individual right.
Richard John Neuhaus had a platform, a journal he founded, First Things, and his call to arms was an editorial he wrote raising the possibility of a “morally justified revolution.” Judiciary rule, Neuhaus argued, had sapped democracy in America, and Americans had the right to take to the streets in protest. Even some of Neuhaus’s friends were nervous about his clarion call. Norman Podhoretz, well known editor of the neo-conservative journal Commentary, accused Neuhaus of giving “aid and comfort … to the bomb throwers among us.”
But that was Neuhaus for you. He wasn’t an influence on American politics because he soft-pedalled his opinions. Now, Canadian novelist Randy Boyagoda has written a thoroughly researched and lucid biography, Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square, detailing the career of this remarkable preacher.
Born in Pembroke, Ont., in 1936, Father Neuhaus was one of eight children in the family of a Lutheran pastor, Clem Neuhaus and his wife Ella. From the beginning it seemed the boy had an urge to vocalize his opinions, especially in opposition to his father. Boyagoda portrays the two arguing at the kitchen table long after dinner on a point of doctrine or church practice. (In later years, his enemies dismissed Neuhaus’s radical views as merely a lingering Oedipal drama.) At the age of 15, Neuhaus was sent to a Lutheran boarding school in rural Nebraska. Here Neuhaus, known as the “campus brain,” continued to dominate conversation, whether involving his fellow students or his teachers. Neuhaus proved too much for the school to handle. He was sent home after a year.
Still, throughout his formative years, there was never any doubt that Neuhaus had any other vocation than preacher. His gifts were too obvious. Nor were his Christian convictions ever outwardly challenged, as far as Boyagoda can tell, with temptations posed by alien creeds; instead, he found plenty of quarrels among his co-religionists.
Neuhas, Boyagoda writes, had an “incomparable talent, if not genius, for intervening in an involved, occasionally abstract discussion with a rapidly formulated statement that articulated the common understanding in the room.”
After graduation from a Missouri Lutheran seminary in 1960, he was assigned a parish in a backwater town, Massena, N.Y. That lasted about a year before Neuhaus became pastor of an inner-city church in Brooklyn, serving a poor and mainly Black and Hispanic congregation. Thus began Neuhaus’s period of civil rights and anti-Vietnam war agitation, a form of activity congenial to his talents. It drove him further from his father’s theological conservatism — and also from his father’s ingrained prejudice. (Obliged to put up a Black pastor travelling through Pembroke in the early 1950s, Ella ate in the kitchen and Clem made sure the bedsheets were washed immediately after the visit.)
As if to make up for his parents’ racial squeamishness, Neuhaus delivered sermons that were, according to parishioners, “real thigh-thumpers” — an expression I’ve never heard of before, but evidently one that suggests he had them rocking in the pews. Neuhas, Boyagoda writes, had an “incomparable talent, if not genius, for intervening in an involved, occasionally abstract discussion with a rapidly formulated statement that articulated the common understanding in the room.”
At the high point of his activism, during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Neuhaus held a press conference with Paul Newman and, as Boyagoda has it, “helped get a drunken, riled Norman Mailer back to his hotel room after he tried to punch out a couple of Chicago cops.”
The war, which seemed endless, did finally come to an end, and so did much of the political fervour of the time. Boyagoda records his subject’s gradual movement away from left politics in the ’70s — Neuhaus didn’t become less political but more strictly religious in the traditional sense of the word. There was a lot more room in his thinking for God and Heaven and Hell, and less patience for liberal secular politics, not to mention Marx and Lenin. Those who once marched with Neuhaus will probably never forgive him for his later support of Reagan and Reagan’s anti-Communist crusade in Central America. For the Catholic Left, in particular, the Sandinistas of Nicaragua were the greatest things since the 12 apostles. While he undoubtedly found this point of view irritating, Neuhaus also seemed insufficiently aware that the anti-Communist rulers of places such as El Salvador were far from innocent. The political currents of the region were not so simple.
Boyagoda’s luminously intelligent study of the man makes clear that Richard John Neuhaus — however one regards his politics — deserved his place in a long line of memorable American preacher politicians.
What then is the legacy of Neuhaus, who converted to Catholicism, was ordained a Catholic priest in 1990, and died of cancer in 2009? He left behind a body of work, most notably his bestselling book The Naked Public Square, published in 1984, which cogently argued for an informed religious presence in public life — an argument meant to keep both secular humanists and the likes of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell at bay. He also left behind a political legacy with the alliance he forged between Catholics and evangelical Protestants. The alliance was solidified by the formation of Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT), co-founded by repentant Nixon aide and born again Christian, Charles Colson. It remains focused particularly on issues such as abortion and euthanasia. What influence the organization will continue to exert, after the demise of its founders, Colson and Neuhaus, is anyone’s guess.
Boyagoda makes no sweeping pronouncements on this unresolved issue of Neuhaus’s legacy. Certainly things were not as they once were when Neuhaus could claim intimacy with President Reagan and Pope John Paul II. But Boyagoda’s luminously intelligent study of the man makes clear that Richard John Neuhaus — however one regards his politics — deserved his place in a long line of memorable American preacher politicians.
