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A few days ago, Wendy and I were in upstate New York for a literary festival at Houghton College. I shared the program with the poet Julia Kasdorf, author of two excellent collections from University of Pittsburgh Press, Sleeping Preacher and Eve's Striptease; Tim Stafford, who spoke both about journalism and about historical fiction and read from his first-rate novel about the abolitionist movement, Stamp of Glory; Justin Niati, an African journalist who was forced to flee the Congo more than a decade ago after he exposed corruption in his native land and who currently is an assistant professor of French at Houghton; and a number of student writers.
At one session I spoke to students about "The Role of the Journal in Culture." That may sound rather grandiose, but it's a subject that anyone who edits a publication resembling BOOKS & CULTURE needs to keep in the back of his mind. And now and then, something occurs to move it up to the front burner.
In its issue of April 3, The New Republic featured as its cover story an essay-review by Damon Linker, "Without a Doubt: The Christianizing of America," ostensibly occasioned by Richard John Neuhaus' Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy, and the Splendor of Truth (Basic Books). Linker was until recently an editor at First Things, where Neuhaus is famously editor-in-chief. The essay, posted on TNR's website on March 24, is very long—16 pages in the printer-friendly version I read—and very strange.
Some of its constituent parts, to be sure, are all too familiar. Linker's fevered warnings against the "offense that Neuhaus' political theology gives to American pluralism and civility" are of a piece with Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (Viking) and dozens of other exercises in apocalyptic huffing and puffing. Linker tells us again and again how "radical" Neuhaus' program is, but he never gets around to saying what terrible things will happen when theocracy is established. The excommunication of Garry Wills?
Then there are the staples of anti- Catholic propaganda—above all the notion that Catholic faith entails a blind submission to the authority of the Church, a "comprehensive and hermetically sealed religious ideology that will definitively insulate [the believer] from doubt." Evidently Linker has not read, for example, the Introduction to Christianity written by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in the late 1960s, in which Ratzinger observes that
both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief, if they do not hide from themselves and from the truth of their being. Neither can quite escape either doubt or belief; for the one, faith is present against doubt; for the other, through doubt and in the form of doubt. It is the basic pattern of man's destiny only to be allowed to find the finality of his existence in this unceasing rivalry between doubt and belief, temptation and certainty.
And certainly we've heard, ad nauseum, about the need for "traditionalist believers" to "adapt to modernity by embracing at least some degree of liberalization," though unlike some more forthright players in this conversation—John Shelby Spong comes to mind—Linker never makes clear precisely what adaptations are required.
What makes the essay odd, even a little creepy, is its personal dimension. Here is a piece by a man who was until very recently in the bosom of First Things, portraying Richard John Neuhaus as the Cardinal Richelieu of the Religious Right, a megalomaniac whose machinations imperil American society with "the threat of sacralized revolutionary violence." (Students of rhetoric may want to ponder the way in which Linker suggests that Neuhaus suffers from pathological delusions about his own world-historical significance even as the essay is casting him as a Catholic version of Osama bin Laden.)
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