2 of 3

I happen to agree with much of Linker's critique of the November 1996 First Things symposium, "The End of Democracy?" But Linker's essay is as intemperate as anything in that symposium. I've never met Linker, nor have I talked with anyone at the magazine about his article, but it seems to be driven by a personal animus that has little to do with the issues at stake.

If the primary theme of Linker's essay is "The Catholicizing of America" (not, as the subtitle has it, "The Christianizing of America"), evangelicals play a part in his narrative as well. You may recall a TNR piece by Franklin Foer, apropos the Alito nomination, published shortly before Foer was named as TNR's new editor ("Brain Trust," November 14, 2005). "In 1994," Foer begins, "the eminent evangelical historian Mark Noll wrote a scorching polemic about his own religion called The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind." Pause there for a moment to note Foer's utter cluelessness. Noll's "religion"—my religion, Richard John Neuhaus' religion—is Christianity. Evangelicalism is not a religion, and no one with more than a journalist's crash-course briefing on the subject would think otherwise. Remind me to write a piece sometime about the scandal of Franklin Foer's mind, taking Foer as representative of the very bright people who routinely pontificate these days about evangelicals and religion in America. The scandal is that such intelligent, generally well-educated folk are as ignorant of the subject as they are confident in their pronouncements.

It was in that piece that Foer laid out the relationship between Catholics and evangelicals for the benefit of TNR's readers, describing what he called "the reality of social conservatism: Evangelicals supply the political energy, Catholics the intellectual heft." And again: in the culture wars, "evangelicals didn't just need Catholic bodies; they needed Catholic minds to supply them with rhetoric that relied more heavily on morality than biblical quotation."

Now here is Linker on the same topic:

Countless press reports in recent years have noted that much of the religious right's political strength derives from the exertions of millions of anti-liberal evangelical Protestants. Much less widely understood is the more fundamental role of a small group of staunchly conservative Catholic intellectuals in providing traditionalist Christians of any and every denomination with a comprehensive ideology to justify their political ambitions. In the political economy of the religious right, Protestants supply the bulk of the bodies, but it is Catholics who supply the ideas.

And later in the essay we hear of "Neuhaus' first tentative attempt"—in Naked in the Public Square—

to solve the problem of the evangelicals by developing an alternative way for them to talk about religion in public. Instead of referring to their personal religious experiences, they would adopt a nondenominational "public language of moral purpose," as well as learn to make more sophisticated, intellectually respectable arguments about American society and history, democracy and justice, culture and the law.

next page... |  2 of 3

share this page

April (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50