The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America

by Richard John Neuhaus

Underlying the many crises in American life, writes Richard John Neuhaus, is a crisis of faith. It is not enough that more people should believe or that those who believe should believe more strongly. Rather, the faith of persons and communities must be more compellingly related to the public arena. "The naked public square"--which results from the exclusion of popular values from the public forum--will almost certainly result in the death of democracy. The great challenge, says Neuhaus, is the reconstruction of a public philosophy that can undergird American life and America's ambiguous place in the world. To be truly democratic and to endure, such a public philosophy must be grounded in values that are based on Judeo-Christian religion. The remedy begins with recognizing that democratic theory and practice, which have in the past often been indifferent or hostile to religion, must now be legitimated in terms compatible with biblical faith. Neuhaus explores the strengths and weaknesses of various sectors of American religion in pursuing this task of critical legitimation. Arguing that America is now engaged in an historic moment of testing, he draws upon Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish thinkers who have in other moments of testing seen that the stakes are very high--for America, for the promise of democratic freedom elsewhere, and possibly for God's purpose in the world. An honest analysis of the situation, says Neuhaus, shatters false polarizations between left and right, liberal and conservative. In a democratic culture, the believer's respect for nonbelievers is not a compromise but a requirement of the believer's faith. Similarly, the democratic rights of those outside the communities of religious faith can be assured only by the inclusion of religiously-grounded values in the common life. The Naked Public Square does not offer yet another partisan program for political of social change. Rather, it offers a deeply disturbing, but finally hopeful, examination of Abraham Lincoln's century-old question--whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Religion, Christian, Philosophy, Theology, Cultural

295 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1984

About the author

Richard John Neuhaus was a prominent Christian cleric (first as a Lutheran pastor and later as a Roman Catholic priest) and writer. Born in Canada, Neuhaus moved to the United States where he became a naturalized United States citizen. He was the founder and editor of the monthly journal First Things and the author of several books, including The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (1984), The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World (1987), and Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy, and the Splendor of Truth (2006). He was a staunch defender of the Roman Catholic Church's teachings on abortion and other life issues and an unofficial advisor of President George W. Bush on bioethical issues.

Reviews

[Drew Norwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. The Naked Public Square was written for a specific cultural moment, which has long since passed, yet it is still relevant in all its essentials. The moment was the rise of the "religious new right" or the "moral majoritarians" of the 70s-80s. Richard John Neuhaus was not sympathetic to their movement, but he was very interested in the "tripwire" they set off. The religious new right, Neuhaus said, "kicked a tripwire alerting large sectors of the society to the absurdities and dangers of the naked public square." Their movement forced "a first-principle reexamination of the role of religion in American life." While our context is different, the "first-principle reexamination" has only become more recognizable since this book was written.

Neuhaus foresaw the reexamination bringing with it a "legitimacy crisis," and he called on Christians to reclaim their role as “leading actors in voicing the positive side of freedom's question." The foundation of legitimacy that democracy requires, if it is to last, has cracked: "There is in store a continuing and deepening crisis of legitimacy unless a transcendent moral purpose is democratically asserted by which the state can be brought under critical judgment, unless it is made clear once again that the state is not the source but the servant of the law."

Though he vigorously opposed the idea of a naked public square, Neuhaus was no postliberal. He put all his weight behind a religiously grounded, liberal democracy as the best form of government. Agree or disagree, he had a clear vision. He wrote with balance and articulated his position well.

There are many memorable passages, but the following are ones I found to be particularly noteworthy:

Transcendence abhors a vacuum: "Such a religious evacuation of the public square cannot be sustained, either in concept or in practice. When religion in any traditional or recognizable form is excluded from the public square, it does not mean that the public square is in fact naked. This is the other side of the 'naked public square' metaphor. When recognizable religion is excluded, the vacuum will be filled with ersatz religion, by religion bootlegged into public space under other names. Again, to paraphrase Spinoza: transcendence abhors a vacuum."

The impossibility of libertarian freedom: "Negative freedom is dangerous to ourselves and others if it is negative freedom alone. As [John Courtney] Murray argued, it is not only dangerous but it is 'impossible.' It is most dangerous because it is impossible. . . The question is not whether the questions of positive freedom will be addressed. The question is by whom--by what reasonings, what traditions, what institutions, what authorities--they will be addressed."

Secularism's lie: "The conflict in American public life today then, is not a conflict between morality and secularism. It is a conflict of morality in which one moral system calls itself secular and insists that the other do likewise as the price of admission to the public arena. That insistence is in fact a demand that the other side capitulate. By divesting ourselves of authoritative moral referents that are external to ourselves, such as religion proposes, we have acquiesced in the judgment that there is no moral appeal beyond the individualistic pursuit of interests."

Civility without substance: "[O]ur much talk about civility will, with some justice, be looked upon as evasion unless we go beyond questions of style to substantive affirmations of the civitas."

Secularism and totalitarianism: "[T]he notion of the secular state can become the prelude to totalitarianism. That is, once religion is reduced to nothing more than privatized conscience, the public square has only two actors in it--the state and the individual. . . The prelude to this totalitarian monism is the notion that society can be ordered according to secular technological reason without reference to religious grounded meaning."

Judgment by means of success: "Perhaps the apparently inexorable logic that would divorce law from religiously grounded morality is in fact inexorable. Perhaps it cannot be arrested. Perhaps this is the price to be paid for secular liberation from religious authoritarianism--a liberation from which we have all benefited in myriad ways. Perhaps it has called to us to pay the piper for all his merry tunes along the way to modernity. Freedom, as they say, does not come cheap. Perhaps this is the meaning of Psalm 81:11-12: 'And yet my people did not hear my voice, and Israel would not obey me. So I gave them over to the stubbornness of their hearts, to follow their own devices.' To follow their own devices. In his loving anger, God corrects, scourges, and afflicts. But if it could ever be that divine love and anger are exhausted, then comes the most awesome judgment: 'I gave them over to their own devices.' God need not invent new punishments to fit hell with horror; hell is man abandoned, man on his own."

The "servant church" versus the militant church that serves: "These then are some of the problems encountered by the idea of ‘the servant church.’ For the idea to be effective, the church must be clear about the service it has to render. . . [What’s needed then is] recovering the metaphor of ‘the church militant.’ A metaphor almost entirely absent form mainline religious thought today. Against the world for the world; the church’s significant contribution is to significantly challenge. . . Current talk about the servant church smells of rationalization. It betrays a yearning to play in the big arena of the secular world, to be useful to somebody, somehow.”

Judging the law by a righteous standard: "It can be argued that [Christian moral] sentiments are not truly universal [i.e., not universally accepted] and therefore cannot be made necessary to the foundation of the law. And, to be sure, there may be people unacquainted with guilt or shame or pride, just as others may be incapable of love. But in our communal conversation about meaning of law we should not give veto power to the handicapped. Musicians do not defer to the tone deaf, nor painters to the color blind. Moral sentiments may not be universally distributed, they certainly are not evenly distributed, but then, neither is anything else of value.”

Decadence: "At the heart of our communal discontent is that which is most aptly described as decadence. Decadence is the decay that results form the hollowing out of meanings. When decadence is in full swing, meanings are not simply hollow but we exult in the gutting of them. This we call autonomy, liberation, freedom. We are liberated from duty, from honor, from country. It is the freedom of the naked public square."

Rehabilitating Christendom: "Silence, antique tales, utopian dreams in the public square; but mainly silence. Yet surrounding the square, pressing to get in, jostling the officials who patrol its borders, threatening to invade, are those who sing the songs not of Athens nor of Havana but of Jerusalem. They say they represent the future, and at the same time they say they represent the American past. More insistently, they say they represent the majority of us. And, to an extent, for better and for worse, their claims are true. The defenses against them, to keep them and their story out, are very unsure. It may be that the only alternative to civil war is to engage them in civil discourse. For that to happen, our definition of civil discourse cannot exclude what they want to talk about. They want to talk about God in public. Given the choice, many of us might prefer to talk about the politics of orgasm. But these invaders of the public square insist that they are not interest in the 'problematicizing' and the 'politicizing' of their private interests. They are not asking for favors, they do not look to this present establishment to bestow 'meaning' upon their lives. They would enter the pub like square in order to challenge the meaning-bestowing powers of those who preside over the public square. They are, in the name of religion's truth, challenging the modern state. If they persist, if they refine their purpose in a manner reassuring to the legitimate interests of others, if they refuse to be pacified by lesser benefits that the state can offer--then these despised moral majoritarians may turn out to be the first wave of the democratic renewal of the twenty-first century. They might even rehabilitate the idea of Christendom. But there are so many ifs."

[William Randolph · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid case for a Christian democratic liberalism, written to convince Christians who believe in a strong version of church-state separation. If a book like this had come along a decade earlier, perhaps the mainline would have had time to absorb its lessons. It's also an interesting look at the author in a time of transition, before he converted to Catholicism and seemingly gave up on the mainline.

Since the book seems to be written for those who fear that the church poses a threat to the state, Neuhaus doesn't really address those who fear that the state will poison the church. But Neuhaus, Stanley Hauerwas, and others have debated these issues in First Things. Suffice it to say that I think the matter is far from settled on that side of things.

[Dwayne Hicks · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a demanding, nuanced work on a deep topic. It deserves a reviewer who has familiarity with the relevant literature. I'm not that reviewer. I need to mull over these ideas, by which I mean I need to read more on the topic and see if an image appears that accords with Biblical positions. That's not to say I learned nothing from Neuhaus - the basic idea is clear enough.

That idea is that government and law must draw their authority from something. A democratic society adds the further requirement that the source of authority must be something around which a general consensus can form. (If there is no consensus on a source of legitimization, then politics become civil war by other means.) This source of authority is the stuff that fills the "public square."

From his vantage point in the 1980s, Neuhaus observes that Judeo-Christianity has performed this role in the United States from colonial times. He further observed an evacuation of Judeo-Christianity (and religion generally) from the public square by a variety of means - principally the courts. Hence the "naked" public square. Secularism promises to fill the role of religion, but historically and theoretically it proves unable to do so, as Neuhaus demonstrates. Only something like religion, with its assertion of moral absolutes, can serve as the foundation for public discussion and debate.

Neuhaus was not part of the New Religious Right of the late 1970s and early 1980s, but he credits them with drawing attention to this vacuum in public life. He looks to the future and anticipates totalitarianism - of an American democratic variety - as an inevitable result of ignoring the warning of the NRR and prolonging the nakedness of the public square. But he did not see anything in the NRR that could meet the criteria of a religion for the public square.

He hoped instead that more intellectual, less theocratic minds could use the NRR's ideas to make a third way suitable for pluralist democracy. After spending some time enumerating the history of the liberal mainline's complicity in secularizing/evacuating the public square, Neuhaus writes them off as hopeless and looks to moderate evangelicals, Roman Catholics, and Lutherans as candidates for this synthesis.

This is just an abbreviated outline of what I took to be the main thrust of the book. There are entire chapters that flesh out this argument or meditate on relevant but secondary issues.

Some thoughts on the passing pages...

- Given the advantage of a vantage point of 2018 versus 1984, it is plain that no one stepped forward with a synthesis suitable for the public square. Furthermore, it seems possible (by many of Neuhaus' own signposts and criteria, including the criterion of general nominal Christianity) that the window of opportunity has closed. This may be hysteria, since it suggests that American democratic totalitarianism is imminent. A vantage point further down the timeline will determine whether is this so. Neuhaus' book will, in any case, continue to be relevant.

- There are parallels between historic mainline Protestantism and "big-E" evangelicalism in 2018. Neuhaus describes in detail the long process by which mainline Protestantism - aghast at the prospect of losing relevance in the changing society of the early 20th century - farmed itself out to liberation causes, only to suffer demoralization when the secular city it helped build turned sour with the Black Panthers, Vietnam, drug culture, Charles Manson, and Watergate. Some elements of the mainline fell into self-righteous self-laceration, excoriating the sins of the past chiefly as a way to remind themselves that "we" had not made the mistakes "they" had. I wish that influential thinkers in modern evangelicalism would consider these parallels - and their own motives - before burdening the church and Christian conscience with responsibility for political causes and blame for historical wrongdoing.

-Was this collapse baked into liberal democracy from the beginning? Neuhaus suggests it in passing, almost sotto voce, before moving on. But as R.R. Reno has recently observed, the combination of a liberal order and democratic governance is a novel thing. There is no guarantee that it will endure.

There's more to say, but enough for now. I'll continue studying in this area as I'm able, and hope soon to bring more explicitly Biblical perspectives into play. My main complaint with Neuhaus was that in all this there's not a scripture to be found.

[Matt Tyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, written in 1984, is not only still relevant today, it continues to provoke important conversations and debate.

The basic idea is that as America has secularized and the Christian Left (traditionally the group that has identified America as a Christian Nation) became more identified with the Democratic Party, there has been an increasing tendency to assume that religion has no place in the public square. This distortion of the first amendment has left the public square naked and it’s not sustainable. In its place the moral majority arose and many on the Christian Left abandoned the mainline denominations. Still, the argument that religion doesn’t belong in the public square continues to carry weight. Neuhaus argues that something must take it’s place, and if it isn’t religion liberal democracy will collapse and the State will take over.

While Neuhaus’ writing can be convoluted and meandering, the book was and remains a vital part of the conversation about American democracy. Though written 40 years ago, most of the book seems like it was just written.

[Terrance Lively · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good book that is very dense. Neuhaus has some insights that have aged well and are still particularly insightful and meaningful today. Overall, it is a good book that looks at the interaction of religion and government through the years.

[Nicky · Rating 2 out of 5]

Directed at Christians, The Naked Public Square argues something like this: Political disputes can only be resolved by appeal to transcendent or religious principles. Appeal to religious principles need not violate the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution. Therefore, American Christians should use their religion to inform their decisions about politics and public policy.

The book has some good points, but the author frequently rambles and goes off-topic so much that the potency of his main argument is lost. It also seems odd that there is no mention of Kierkegaard anywhere in the discussions of so-called Christian society and culture.

[Ashley Cale · Rating 4 out of 5]

This review pertains to only parts of this book! Specifically chapters 1,2,5,& 16.
I personally enjoyed Neuhaus' ideas on religion, authority, and the public square. A great line:
"The legitimacy of law in a democratic society depends upon the popular recognition of the connections between law and what people think life is and ought to be."
I think he also correlates this to a Judeo-Christian understanding of history which is really interesting to explore. The idea that laws are continually reaching towards a "rightness" and slowly self-correcting themselves.

Interesting, nuanced, and deep.

[Nanosynergy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm posting this book in honor of Richard John Neuhaus who passed away this morning (Thurs. Jan. 8, 2009) a little before 10 a.m.

[Jose Luis]

I pick this book up every so often. Very interesting. Very dense.

I recommend it. But it requires lots of thinking.

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent read on the topic of religion, culture, and politics. Despite its age, it remains as current today as ever; indeed, one thinks Neuhaus would likely have understood the rise of Donald Trump better than many contemporary pundits, for instance. Neuhaus does not hide his own position (a left-wing Lutheran), but he takes care to be as objective as possible, giving each side its due with respect. While the event that triggered the writing of the work was the rise of the religious new right, his discussion of religion, culture, and politics is primarily abstract enough to rise above the tides of change. He notes that all law must have a source of legitimacy outside of itself to avoid being arbitrary; all politics involve subjective value judgments; the public square cannot be left "naked" by simply taking religion out of it, as some other value system will simply replace it, often with religious attributes. On the other hand, he does not advocate theocracy or even religious heavy-handedness in politics. He opposed the evangelical/fundamentalist movement that drove the religious (then) new right, and he was not especially favorable toward the right generally, but he certainly knew how to appropriately criticize his own side as well. If there is any disappointment in the work, it is that he highlights the problems far more brightly than he shows the way to potential solutions, but at least he does inspire confidence that there may be a road we can all walk uneasily together on toward a closer approximation of a solution.

Neuhaus' own approach, one that prods him to dig deeper and see issues from multiple view points, is "In principle, we should be suspicious of explanations for other people's beliefs and behavior when those explanations imply that they would believe and behave as we do, if only they were as mature and enlightened as we are." (p 16) Further, "It is not possible to enter fully into the experience and beliefs of others...Even if we take a rigorously phenomenological tack that is careful to attend to the described experience of others, we can attain only a tentative and approximate understanding of what is going on in the sphere in which others believe they encounter the divine...It is a curious conceit that leads us to claim greater confidence about the religious dynamics experienced by others than we would claim for our knowledge of our own spiritual journeyings." (p 17)

More on his self-awareness and his rigorous approach:

those who are most facile in category-casting are often the same people who think they are in a position to know what is best for those whom they have categorized. In this way, what begins with empathy, compassion, and imagination ends up with the advancement of totalist solutions. Since we are in solidarity with the oppressed, it is thought, we have the right to advance such solutions and our solutions must be benign. Thus for the more powerful, "identifying" with the victim becomes a disguise for what is only another establishment of the governors and the governed. (p 68)

Neuhaus takes to task the idea that politically quietist religious people really disagree with others taking their religion to the public square; instead, he shows their quarrel is substantive on the underlying theological issues, as the truth claimed by any religion is public, insofar as it exists. When Neuhaus talks of the inevitable intersection of religion with politics, he takes the branding and name calling out of the equation and looks at the substance of things as they are:

There are obviously different agendas for social and political change in America. If committed believers favor one agenda over another--as publically concerned folks inevitably do--then they marshal whatever resources they have, including religious resources, to advance that agenda. They are criticized for employing religion to give their agenda the character of a holy crusade. They respond that their agenda does in fact engage questions of ultimate right and wrong and therefore warrants a panache of holiness. The issue is not one of religion "being used" for politics, but whether one thinks the left or the right is right. It is not a matter of being used but of being of service. What to one person is exploitation of religion is to another the exercise of responsibility. (pp 6-7)

Neuhaus does not underestimate the difficulty in walking the line between one extreme and the other, and the risks of both:

When politics is conflicted by putatively divine revelations, there is little room for reasonable argument and compromise. The case can be made that the great social and political devastations of our century have been perpetrated by regimes of militant secularism, notably those of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. That is true, and it suggests the naked public square is a dangerous place...Nonetheless, the awareness of this truth does not alleviate our anxiety about forces that, no matter how much they deny it, seem bent upon establishing something like a theocracy. (pp 8-9)

Still further:

most who share the intuition that the dogma that our is a secular society is at best a dangerous half-truth recognize that the screaming outrage of the moral majoritarians may be a necessary alert and perhaps a corrective...Whatever may be the alternatives to secularistic views of American society, they cannot be permitted to violate the imperatives of pluralism or to undo the great constitutional achievement represented by the "free exercise" and "no establishment" clauses of the First Amendment. If the alternative to the naked public square means a return to a polity in which those who do not share a particular religious covenant are excluded from the civil covenant of common citizenship, it is not acceptable. (p 52)

Neuhaus flirts briefly with Jacques Ellul, but dismisses him almost summarily. This seems unusual to me, as Neuhaus comes close to embracing Ellul's in-the-world-but-not-of-the-world approach to being both Christian yet practically active. As Neuhaus himself states, "Truth-telling and the quest for power are incompatible." (p 236) Yet he spends the entire book doing the dance, trying to square the circle, without ever seeming to come up with a complete answer of his own.

Neuhaus points out one of the unending sources of conflict between religion and politics, particularly democratic politics, is that democracy deliberately leaves all questions open; "In truth, short of war ending in unconditional surrender, no movement for change is ever completely or securely triumphant." (p 24) One the one hand, religion invariably makes absolute claims to truth, to questions closed and completely answered. But having "a transcendent point of reference to which we as a people are accountable" permits both protest and patriotism, while "In the naked public square there is no agreed-upon authority that is higher than the community itself. There is no publically recognizable source for such criticism nor check upon such patriotism. Therefore criticism becomes impossible and patriotism unsafe." (p 76) Disappointingly, Neuhaus fails to address the simple fact that we don't all agree on a publically-recognizable source; he even explicitly limits most of his discussion to the Judeo-Christian tradition, only further highlighting the trouble with adopting his main argument uncritically in our increasingly diverse country.

However, whether we can agree on a single transcendent source or not, denying a particular religion or religions in general also doesn't lead to any easy solutions: "In a democratic society, state and society must draw from the same moral well...Because government cannot help but make moral judgments of an ultimate nature, it must, if it has in principle excluded identifiable religion, make those judgments by 'secular' reasoning that is given the force of religion." (p 82) Further, "When particularist religious values and the institutions that bear them are excluded, the inescapable need to make public moral judgments will result in an elite construction of a normative morality from sources and principles not democratically recognized by the society." (p 86)

He also explores the fact that the public square is not synonymous with the government square, but includes all manner of civil society and community, therefore the intersection of religion with the public square is not strictly limited to questions of church and state. However, various elements of this multifaceted public square are badly out of sync with on another, leaving people in an almost constant state of alienation, which opens the door to "politicians build[ing] political careers upon being anti-politics. Even governments are formed on the platform of being anti government." (p 29)

Even in saying all of that, Neuhaus does not underestimate the importance of government in this equation. "It is in the interest of politicians and the hordes of people who make their living by talking about what politicians do to disguise the stark and simple truth that they are engaged in getting and keeping power. Power, in turn, is the ability to get other people to do what you want, and not to do what you do not want...Attention must be paid to the political, then, not because politics bestows meaning upon our lives but because, if we do not, others will pay attention." (p 30)

What that government might be capable of, in terms of solving the riddle of what/whose values to employ, is leaving the question open. This permits accommodation, without requiring the parties to compromise principle in making accommodations (p 53). This accommodation may be practiced within religious circles so long as it concerns "ephemeral political issues that should not qualify as ultimate concerns" and not "gospel fidelity." In other words, "A degree of flexibility on questions of penultimate moment or less is not a vice." (p 58) Still, temporary accommodation promises to be the permanent state of affairs without a transcendent point of reference, which leaves procedures for this temporary accommodation in lieu of resolving conflicts of values. (p 110) But perhaps this is not the worst possible outcome: "Democracy is the appropriate form of governance in a fallen creation in which no person or institution, including the church, can infallibly speak for God. Democracy is the necessary expression of humility in which all persons and institutions are held accountable to transcendent purpose imperfectly discerned." (p 116)

In today's heated arguments about "privilege," "appropriation," identity politics, etc., Neuhaus provides some cool, rational analysis that folks on any side of these arguments might benefit from considering:

In my case, and I assume in the case of most of the readers of this book, whatever modest achievements and successes we have are not knowingly at the price of failure or deprivation for others. "Knowingly" is the important qualifier. Most of us would claim, correctly, that we have not deliberately or calculatedly deprived others in order to benefit ourselves. Nobody else would be better off were we worse off. That having been said, it remains the case that we may have benefited from arrangements--social, economic, political--that are unfair to others who are less favorably situated. In that sense, is not our advantage at the price of their disadvantage...Given the embarrassment that the sensitive rich tend to feel in the presence of the misery of others, there is an understandable desire to "identify with" the others. Such identification, however, can be a form of evasion. We tell ourselves that we do not really belong to the community of which we are a part; in fact we condemn that community; we are one with the putative victims of that community's privilege...By various devices we seek to be shed of that identity and clothed in another that is less ambiguous, that may even betoken a certain moral dignity, such as identification with the poor and oppressed. Such devices, however, preclude the link of civility that is required to move from confrontation to a beginning of conversation between the right and the left. (pp 68-69)

In fact, many of those sorry for the abuses of some social category or even the whole country are not so much making "a confession of sin but an exercise in self-righteous congratulation for being ever so morally superior to 'them.'" (p 243)

Taking this self-loathing of the "privileged" to the national level, Neuhaus analyzes the international order, saying, "On balance and considering the alternatives, the influence of the United States is a force for good in the world." (p 72) He proceeds to deeply explore the way religious communities in the United States feel about this proposition and what effect that has on their activities impacting policy. He especially notes how the traditional "mainline" Protestants at that time were ambiguous or opposed to his statement and frequently supported Marxist revolutionary movements in the third world and condemned U.S. policy and action as basically harmful. This provided the religious new right a target to tilt against and win the sympathy of vast numbers of Americans, relatively few of which really felt the U.S. was a force for evil. Indeed, "Today, getting any agreement on whether America has a purpose, or on what that purpose might be, or even on whether it makes any sense to ask the question, is, to say the least, highly problematic." (p 196)

Zeroing in on moral frames of reference in terms of policy and even war:

The final obscenity is not war but the dehumanizing of war that reduces it to an animal fight over interests, particularly over that sleaziest of interests which the modern world mistakes for a moral value, survival. It is tragically possible that moral discourse gives way to mortal conflict. It is even more tragic when we come to believe that the cure for conflict is the abandonment of moral discourse. (p 221)

The frequently repeated criticisms of those who openly advance non-secular moral ideas in public concerns the hypocrisies of those individuals, it being claimed that any moral failings in such people plainly indicate that they are not sincere or perhaps even using morality as a cover for some other agenda. While that may in some cases be true, Neuhaus points out how most such people understand these moral ideas are those by which they are themselves judged, and therefore neither they nor their ideas can merely be dismissed out of hand, even in their breach.

Neuhaus recognizes those believers who uncompromisingly insist they have and know the eternal revealed truth and will brook no compromise concerning it. However, he points out "We are subject to the truth we possess, and therefore do not possess it in the sense of mastery...In this light, modesty and provisionality are not the result of weak-kneed accommodationism but are required by fidelity to the claims of the gospel." (p 123) "Of course democracy is unsatisfactory. All orders short of the kingdom of God are unsatisfactory." (p 124)

Neuhaus at least partially recognized the redefining and reorganizing of what was "liberal" and "conservative" when he wrote this book: "How can the most vulnerable--minorities, the handicapped, the aged--be protected if there is no moral consensus about what is right and just, if we no longer affirm the virtues of fairness and caring. For liberal reasons, therefore, there is an appreciative reexamination of conservative premises about politics and society." (p 140) And again, "When in our public life no legal prohibition can be articulated with the force of transcendent authority, then there are no rules rooted in ultimacies that can protect the poor, the powerless, and the marginal, as indeed there are now no rules protecting the unborn and only fragile inhibitions surrounding the aged and defective." (p 153)

In examining the pendulum swings of American culture, religion, secular elites, and so on, Neuhaus makes an observation as useful in analyzing Donald Trump's electoral victory as that of the religious new right of his own day: "One need not be an enthusiastic populist to note that elite contempt for popular sensibilities has, again and again, played into the hands of leaders who are not above exploiting the consequent popular resentments. When that happens, of course, the elites feel they are vindicated in their initial contempt, failing to recognize that they have played a critical role in producing the result that they interpret as their vindication." (p 178)

Being from the left wing, Neuhaus accepts Leviathan as unchangeable fact, and faces the problem of addressing its scope and power and synchronizing this with the will of the people: "With the expansion of the modern state, government inescapably encroaches upon spheres previously thought to be outside the authority of government. In sum: we cannot at the same time have government that is expansive, religiously sanitized, and democratic." (p 180)

One of the high points of Neuhaus' thinking is when he shows stages of development from authoritarian to autonomous to recognizing the authoritative; that is, those who insist on blind obedience, in the first instance, to those who almost knee-jerk rebel against it in the second, to those who discern the appropriate situations to trust those or that which is authoritative, and when to be autonomous, in the third case. Along these lines, he shows the weakness of strict secularism: "'By what authority?' The question has been met by the ominous secular silence of the naked public square." (p 248) Neuhaus separates the Law from laws and notes that people appeal to common ideas of right and wrong, justice and injustice, which cannot all be relativized away: "That some people lack a moral sense no more negates the existence of morality and what it implies than does the frequent lack of clear reasoning negate the existence of rationality." (p 252)

Indeed, when it comes to law, "if courts persist in systematically ruling out of order the moral traditions in which Western law has developed and which bear, for the overwhelming majority of American people, a living sense of right and wrong...The result, quite literally, is the outlawing of the basis of law." (p 259)

In short, it is a tremendous work, and not a terribly long read. It is not necessarily written at the popular level, and some background in theology and politics is helpful, though one need not be a PhD candidate to profit from it. Neuhaus does an excellent job in putting the reader through beneficial mental exercises, exploring numerous arguments and counterarguments. He certainly places some important boundaries on the way forward, and points in a direction toward which we might move, but he does not provide a simple road map or any pat answers. If nothing else, we agree to keep trying and to maintain respect for one another.