Christians in the American Public : Notes on Neuhaus

As a loyal subject of Her Britannic Majesty's Canadian Dominion who is also a permanent resident of these United States of America, I find myself writing between Dominion Day (July 1) and Independence Day (July 4th) in the midst of another election campaign, with more and more Christians reporting a feeling that America is no longer a hospitable place for the faith, and with Eastern Christians in particular still struggling how to relate to the various states in which they find themselves. In such a context, let us consider for a moment how Christians, Eastern and Western, can engage the public square in this country by considering how one very prominent Christian did just that.

I just finished reading the wonderfully written biography by Randy Boyagoda, Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square (Image Books, 2015), 480pp. For those interested in the figure of Neuhaus, or the questions of how one Christian chose to engage the public square and such issues as racial relations in the south, the Vietnam war, the Iraq wars, abortion, and much else, this book will be fascinating. It also contains much on American Lutheranism (in which Neuhaus was a pastor for many years) and American Catholicism (to which Neuhaus converted in 1990 and in which he was ordained a priest in 1991) in the critical years from 1960 until the end of the last decade. It is, finally, a splendid example of how to write a critically intelligent biography of a controversial figure. (In a personal conversation I had last year at Baylor with Robert Louis Wilken, who was Neuhaus's oldest and closest friend for half a century, Wilken told me the biography was simply first-rate not only for its treatment of Neuhaus but also for the accuracy with which it rendered any number of controversial issues, episodes, and personages.)

Neuhaus grew up in the Ottawa Valley in Pembroke, Ontario, the son of a manse, his father being a pastor in Lutheranism's Missouri Synod. He would go on to bounce around the US in Texas and Missouri, inter alia, before spending his entire adult life in New York as a pastor and writer, where he got to know such Orthodox figures at Fr. Alexander Schmemann. He was a life-long registered Democrat and a man of the left in the 60s and 70s, opposing the Vietnam War and marching for Civil Rights, before gradually coming to be thought a "neoconservative" from the 1980s onward. Neuhaus died in New York in January 2009 after a second battle with cancer.

He was the founder of the journal First Things (which published my review of Olivier Clement's book You Are Peter in 2004), which I read first with fascinated horror in the mid-90s, and then with increasing appreciation after that, far less for its politics than for the dashing verve with which Neuhaus wrote. He was a witty, incisive "blogger" avant la blogdom with his "While We're At It" pieces. 

First Things did, however, begin to get a bit tiresome even before Neuhaus died. You could almost invariably find articles in every issue from a small circle of people (Avery Dulles, George Weigel, Mary Ann Glendon, Michael Novak) whose writings all grew rather predictable. And then, the closer we got to the Iraq war, the more the magazine became a mouthpiece for Weigel and Novak to argue that the war would be just. Boyagoda's biography shows that Neuhaus, behind the scenes, was at least a little bit uncomfortable with this novel argument if not unconvinced.

After Neuhaus died, the magazine's new editor had a dilettantish approach and the magazine's chaotic skittering all over the place made it almost unreadable, and I never again renewed my subscription. That said, Neuhaus was himself never dull, and I still regularly refer to at least one of his essays from that time, "The Unhappy Fate of Optional Orthodoxy." It is more than a little staggering that, nearly 2 decades after he penned that piece, the forces of intolerance he describes there are even more aggressive and hostile than they were. Consider just one passage:

With the older orthodoxy it is possible to disagree, as in having an argument. Evidence, reason, and logic count, in principle at least. Not so with the new orthodoxy. Here disagreement is an intolerable personal affront. It is construed as a denial of others, of their experience of who they are. It is a blasphemous assault on that most high god, “My Identity.” Truth-as-identity is not appealable beyond the assertion of identity. In this game, identity is trumps. 

Part of this essay was an extensive commentary on a fascinating book I have discussed on here before: John Shelton Reed's Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism. (Speaking of Anglo-Catholics, permit me to intrude here with an unrelated but delightful set of memoirs by Colin Stephenson, Merrily On High, documenting a type and moment in Anglo-Catholicism that is surely long dead now, alas.)

In his peroration, Neuhaus, writing in 1997, proved to be more influential than he could know in my own move out of Anglicanism and into Catholicism that same year when he wrote:

Almost five hundred years after the sixteenth-century divisions, the realization grows that there is no via media. The realization grows that orthodoxy and catholicity can be underwritten only by Orthodoxy and Catholicism. Perhaps more than any other single factor, the influence of Anglo-Catholicism among Protestants obscured this reality for a long time. It is a considerable merit of John Shelton Reed’s Glorious Battle that it contributes to our understanding of why movements of catholic restoration, posited against the self-understanding of the communities they would renew, turn into an optional orthodoxy. A century later, an illiberal liberalism, much more unrelenting than the Victorian establishment, will no longer ­tolerate the option. It is very much like a law: Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed. 

Obviously Neuhaus could certainly turn a phrase.

In addition to such delightful essays, I did also enjoy other of Neuhaus's books, including his most famous 1984 book, still of great relevance today, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America. That book had great timing in that it landed during the Reagan re-election campaign of 1984, and would afterwards be read by and discussed within his White House appreciatively as Boyagoda's biography shows.

In addition, I found even more interesting and stimulating Neuhaus's 1987 book (written while he was still a Lutheran), The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World. There Neuhaus memorably and amusingly spoke of those type of Catholics who "exult in the freedom to submit to authority with wild abandon," referencing, if memory serves, Wilfrid Ward--he of the desire for a papal encyclical every morning at breakfast along with his Times of London. (Speaking of Wards and their descendants, and speaking also of biographies, Frank and Maisie: A Memoir With Parents is a rollicking good read by their son, documenting an hilarious mid-century couple engaged in Catholic apologetics.)

Anyway, back to Neuhaus and the public square: whatever one thinks of his politics and of the increasingly discredited "neoconservative" project with which he was associated (especially its boosterism for the disastrous second Iraq war, which has not just decimated but virtually destroyed ancient Eastern Christian communities all across the region), he did at least try not just to think through what it means to be a Christian engaging the public square of what he called an "incorrigibly, confusedly religious America," but also actively to engage it with vim and vigor. With some, perhaps many, Eastern Christians today pining for lost "symphonias" of Byzantium that never existed, or fatuously idealizing Putin's "Russkiy mir," or calling for confused if not superfluous "Benedict options,"  or perhaps equally romanticizing and idealizing Western liberal democracies, there is still crying need to consider the questions of how the Church ought to relate to "that dangerous and unmanageable institution" (MacIntyre) of the modern state. It is the considerable merit of Boyagoda's charming biography that he reminds us of a figure who did that with great force for many decades.

Anglicans and Orthodox

It is sad to think of what has become of the Anglican Communion, which seems to have been engaged in a decades-long, slow-motion suicide. It once held such promise, and was looked up to by Catholics and Orthodox alike who saw in Anglicanism (as the pre-1845 Newman did) a great deal of the Christianity of the Ecumenical Councils and Church Fathers. (The patristic influences have been studied in some welcome detail in Benjamin King's recent book, Newman and the Alexandrian Fathers: Shaping Doctrine in Nineteenth-Century England.) Even as late as October 1970, Pope Paul VI could speak of the "legitimate prestige and the worthy patrimony of piety and usage proper to the Anglican Church" and look hopefully to the day when "the Roman Catholic Church—this 'humble Servant of the servants of God'—is able to embrace her ever beloved Sister in the one authentic Communion of the family of Christ, a communion of origin and of faith, a communion of priesthood and of rule, a communion of the saints in the freedom of love."

Those days seem long gone now; but one of the "counter-factuals" of the last forty years that I like to entertain is: how different--which is to say, how much better--would the reform of the Latin liturgy after Vatican II have been if Roman Catholics and Anglicans had united, and the latter had influenced the liturgical life of the former, at least in the anglophone world. Would that Catholic liturgists had even a scintilla of the inspiration of the poets and musicians who have bequeathed to us Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer, the King James Bible, and of course the great beauty of the Anglican choral tradition as exemplified in such splendid institutions as the King's College Choir of the University of Cambridge.

Today so much of that beautiful legacy is rapidly disappearing. The dissolution of the last several decades, however, has long roots, as the historian John Shelton Reed made clear more than forty years ago in his deeply fascinating book Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism. The "ritualists" and Tractarians, inter alia, simply pleaded to be left alone, arguing that Anglicanism should be wide enough to accommodate all manner of belief or disbelief and attendant liturgical practice. In so doing, they were sowing the seeds of their communion's demise, which was already glimpsed at the time by some beyond Newman, whose shadow, of course, looms large over everyone. But David Newsome's elegiac and wonderfully written book The Parting of Friends: The Wilberforces and Henry Manning does great justice to some of the other large figures apart from Newman who were so prominent in the Church of England, and later the Catholic Church, of the nineteenth century. (For Newman, of course, one must simply read the magisterial John Henry Newman: A Biography by Ian Ker, the world's leading Newman scholar whom I met in 2004 and who could not have been kinder or more gracious to me, a complete nobody writing a doctoral dissertation which, for a time, included a chapter on Newman.)

At the turn of the twentieth century, as the ecumenical movement began to take shape, there was for a time a great deal of goodwill between Anglicans and Orthodox. Some of the groundwork for that had been laid a considerable time earlier by an active interest that the Church of England took in Eastern Christianity through "missions" from England to places like Syria, and through the erection in England of institutions for the study of Eastern Christianity. Peter Doll's fine 2005 book Anglicanism and Orthodoxy 300 years after the 'Greek College' in Oxford documents one such institution.


As the ecumenical movement got off the ground following the famous 1910 Edinburgh mission conference, some Anglicans thought they might be able to secure from some Orthodox recognition of Anglican ordinations, whose validity was denied by the Catholic Church  in the 1896 papal bull Apostolicae curae. For a time, it was thought that the Ecumenical Patriarch had recognized Anglican orders though that opinion is held by few today and was never widespread.  One of the best books I have read on Anglican-Orthodox relations remains Bryn Geffert's Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans: Diplomacy, Theology, and the Politics of Interwar Ecumenism (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 536pp.

One of the fruits of the ecumenical movement was the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, which brought Anglicans and Orthodox together, including some well known figures of the time. A recent erudite essay by Brandon Gallher looks at Sergius Bulgakov's role in the Fellowship. That essay was recently published in Church and World: Essays in Honor of Michael Plekon, whose editor I interviewed here. The Plekon volume also features an essay by Rowan Williams, recently retired archbishop of Canterbury and an important scholar in his own right of Eastern Christianity. 

Now another book has been released treating relations in the period before Geffert's book, and focused on one church in particular: William Taylor, Narratives of Identity: The Syrian Orthodox Church and the Church of England 1895-1914 (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013), 275pp.

About this book we are told:

The relationship between the Syrian Orthodox Church in the Ottoman Empire and the Church of England developed substantially between 1895 and 1914, as contacts between them grew. As the character of this emerging relationship changed, it contributed to the formation of both churches' own 'narratives of identity'. The wider context in which this took place was a period of instability in the international order, particularly within the Ottoman Empire, culminating in the outbreak of the First World War, effectively bringing this phase of sustained contact to an end. Narratives of Identity makes use of Syriac, Garshuni, and Arabic primary sources from Syrian Orthodox archives in Turkey and Syria, alongside Ottoman documents from the Basbakanlik Osmanli Arsivi, Istanbul, and a range of English archival sources. The preconceptions of both Churches are analysed, using a philosophical framework provided by the work of Paul Ricoeur, especially his concepts of significant memory (anamnesis), translation, and the search for mutual recognition. Anamnesis and translation were extensively employed in the formation of 'narratives of identity' that needed to be understood by both Churches. The identity claims of the Tractarian section of the Church of England and of the Ottoman Syrian Orthodox Church are examined using this framework. The detailed content of the theological dialogue between them, is then examined, and placed in the context of the rapidly changing demography of eastern Anatolia, the Syrian Orthodox 'heartland'. The late Ottoman state was characterised by an increased instability for all its non-Muslim minorities, which contributed to the perceived threats to Ottoman Syrian Orthodoxy, both from within and without. Finally, a new teleological framework is proposed in order to better understand these exchanges, taking seriously the amamnetic insights of the narratives of identity of both the Syrian Orthodox Church and the Church of England from 1895 to 1914.

Further details and excerpts are available here in this PDF.  

Changing Churches

One of the most influential essays I read in the late 1990s was by the priest Richard John Neuhaus of blessed memory: "The Unhappy Fate of Optional Orthodoxy." Using John Shelton Reed's book Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism as his point de départ, Neuhaus, with his usual wonderful style, made many good points, but his central thesis was that in the liberal realignment of Christianity at the end of the twentieth century, orthodoxy and catholicity were no longer viable in Lutheran and Anglican traditions especially: they could only be underwritten by Orthodoxy and Catholicism. Projects of "traditionalist" Lutherans or "continuing" Anglicans were doomed to incoherence, schism, infighting, and failure. As anyone who has followed the unhappy agonies of the Anglican Communion in the last decade and more must admit, Neuhaus was right. 

Such unhappy developments in many Protestant traditions have often led to the growth in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy in recent years as many people leave for either Rome or Constantinople in search of apostolic Christianity. (Amy Slagle treats converts to Orthodoxy in her recent splendid book, which I discussed here.) In the coming weeks, I hope to feature an interview with the two authors of a new book detailing their own exodus from Lutheranism: one for Catholicism and the other for Orthodoxy. New from Eerdmans we have Mickey Mattox and A.G. Roeber, Changing Churches: An Orthodox, Catholic, and Lutheran Theological Conversation (February 2012), 368pp.


About this book the publisher tells us:

Sharp controversies — about biblical authority, the ordination of women, evangelical "worship styles," and the struggle for homosexual "inclusion" — have rocked the Lutheran church in recent decades. In Changing Churches two men who once communed at the same Lutheran Eucharistic table explain their similar but different decisions to leave the Lutheran faith tradition — one for Orthodoxy, the other for Roman Catholicism.

Here Mickey L. Mattox and A. G. Roeber address the most difficult questions Protestants face when considering such a conversion, including views on justification, grace, divinization, the church and its authority, women and ministry, papal infallibility, the role of Mary, and homosexuality. They also discuss the long-standing ecumenical division between Rome and the Orthodox patriarchates, acknowledging the difficult issues that still confront those traditions from within and divide them from one another.

As I say, stay tuned for an interview with Mattox and Roeber.