Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square by Randy Boyagoda (review)

Richard John Neuhaus (1936– 2009) was not a regional man and had few affinities with the Midwest. But this is often a characteristic of clergy for whom the vocation of ministry invariably priests and pastors from family and place. This dislocation can be more pronounced in the case of pastor’s children who grow up to be pastors, which was true of Neuhaus— a double dislocation as it were. His father was from the Lutheran heartland of Missouri, and his mother was from Texas, but this American couple lived most of their lives in Pembroke, Ontario, where they reared Richard, their seventh child. Training for the ministry took Neuhaus to Lutheran schools first in Texas and then Missouri. But his stint at Concordia Seminary— St. Louis was Neuhaus’s longest stop in the Midwest. For most of his professional life he lived in New York City, first in Brooklyn while ministering at a predominantly African American congregation, and then in Manhattan from where Neuhaus ran what was in effect his think tank, the Institute on Religion and Public Life (which publishes the journal, First Things). For a while before starting this Institute, Neuhaus received support from Illinois’ Rockford Institute for the Center on Religion and Society (a relationship that ended with the so-called “Rockford Raid,” a highly publicized 1989 incident that saw Neuhaus and other staff evicted from the Center’s New York City offices).

Both for professional and residential reasons, Neuhaus was a cosmopolitan. After the publication of his 1984 book, The Naked Public Square, he became one of the foremost voices for recovering Christian convictions in American public life, though even during the 1960s and 1970s he was part of Christian activist organizations on the left that supported the civil rights movement and opposed the Vietnam War. Only in his more conservative phase did the American public come to know him as a neoconservative, or after his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1990 as a “theo-con,” as some critics dubbed him. All along, this Canadian-turned-American and Lutheran-turned-Roman Catholic was an American patriot who did not waver in his loyalty to the United States even if he criticized its policies. Randy Boyagoda opens his biography of Neuhaus with a scene that illustrates well the pastor’s attachment to America, as well as his lifelong hesitancy about identifying too closely with any single polity. In 1967 during a meeting of the Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam activist group, Neuhaus did the unthinkable and asked these protestors to sing “America the Beautiful.” As Boyagoda acknowledges, this was comparable to having Bob Hope or Billy Graham lead Americans in singing Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” And yet, as much as Neuhaus loved the country he adopted, he also warned his audiences repeatedly that “there is a danger that we confuse our political policy judgments with the judgments of God.”

To his credit, Neuhaus used the warning implicit in such dangers as a caution throughout his life. As editor and author, he was never reluctant to criticize the United States from a distinctly Christian outlook. From his first breakout book, Naked Public Square (1984) to his last, American Babylon (2009), Neuhaus was keenly aware of the tensions between secular society and Christian identity. Boyagoda shows that in most instances when forced to choose between nation and church, Neuhaus remained loyal to his faith. At the same time, the author cannot help but notice the many times that Neuhaus sought access to influential religious and political officials with what seemed to be a motive mixture of doing good and being noticed. Boyagoda’s design is to explain how a Lutheran political activist on the left became a Roman Catholic priest of the Christian right. He is generally successful even if the resulting life has less drama than that pilgrimage might suggest.

Boyagoda observes that in his last book Neuhaus wrote that he expected...