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

Reviewed by: Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square by Randy Boyagoda Peter Steinfels Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square. By Randy Boyagoda. New York: Image Books, 2015. 460 pp. $30.00. Richard John Neuhaus marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., and lunched with Ronald Reagan. He was a leading religious figure on the anti-Vietnam War and social activist Left in the 1960s. He became a leading religious figure on the neoconservative Right in the 1980s and remained so until his death, at age 73, in 2009. His 1984 book The Naked Public Square played an important part in framing discourse about religion and politics, and First Things, the journal he created, remains an important site for religious thinking about American public life. I was one of Neuhaus’s editors (at Commonweal), a supporter, and a sympathetic acquaintance in his early years – and one of his critics, an intellectual sparring partner, and finally an opponent in his latter phase. We maintained a friendly relationship during both phases until his public rudeness to my wife made that difficult. Reading this biography was a little like seeing my life flash before my eyes, especially when a number of stories I wrote for the New York Times flashed by in the endnotes. The author interviewed me along with many of Neuhaus’s close friends and collaborators. From them he garnered valuable insights and information. Whatever I told him was understandably left on the cutting room floor. Boyagoda is a novelist, literary critic, and professor in Canada of American Studies. He has carefully read and reflected on Neuhaus’s books and major essays. He has not stalked Neuhaus’s running commentary on current events, first in his one-man Religion and Society Report and then in First Things. (The man was a natural blogger avant la lettre.) But Boyagoda has registered the caustic, highly partisan tone of that commentary. The Neuhaus portrayed here is very much like the one I knew: extraordinarily smart, charismatic, energetic and shrewd in convening other smart people and finding the monetary resources to do so, a brilliant polemicist, if not necessarily a scrupulous one, and a deeply religious man. [End Page 78] Unlike many other Neuhaus watchers, Boyagoda does justice to this last fact. Neuhaus was the son of a conservative Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor; he himself became the pastor of a largely African-American Lutheran church in Brooklyn. He was always liturgical in outlook and convinced that Lutheranism’s calling was to bring about reforms in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church rather than to exist as a separate body. Once Vatican II authorized many of those reforms, and with the bulk of Lutheranism continuing to see itself as a separate denomination, it was not illogical for Neuhaus to become a Catholic, which he did in 1990. He was ordained a priest a year later. He agreed with, indeed amplified, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s criticism of post-conciliar “excesses.” Despairing of mainline Protestantism’s theological permissiveness and liberal politics, he went on to promote theological conversation and political cooperation between Catholics and Protestant evangelicals. Political passions were never absent from any of these developments. But to reduce his actions and theological arguments to political power-seeking, as many of his critics do, is to misunderstand the man, badly. Boyagoda knows this and gives due attention to Neuhaus’s “Catholicizing” mentor, Arthur Carl Piepkorn, at Concordia seminary; to Neuhaus’s struggle with Lutheran “Two Kingdoms” theology; and to his convergence with Catholic thinking, whether on abortion or on the views of John Courtney Murray about religion and politics. Boyagoda does not stint, of course, in tracking Neuhaus’s politics; but he remains strikingly neutral. Neuhaus’s larger ideas about the relationship of religion to democratic politics in a pluralist society were relevant right across the political spectrum, but a lingering question has been whether these ideas were well served or instead discredited or trivialized by his intense partisanship. Boyagoda takes no stance. Is that the Canadian in him? About Neuhaus’s exuberant, combative, self-referential personality, on the other hand, Boyagoda is forthright. That is, no doubt, the novelist in him. Having...

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