Some critics have said of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ pastoral letters on nuclear weapons and on the U.S. economy that they conform too closely to reigning ideologies; e.g., to the reigning ideologies at the New York Times.
Everyone these days seems to want to be in opposition, playing David to Goliath. To be “adversarial” to “reigning ideologies” is taken to be the privileged rhetorical position.
For example, David Hollenbach, S.J. (one of the drafters of the economics pastoral) and Monsignor George G. Higgins, the much loved and honored senior adviser of the U.S. Catholic Conference, have attempted to turn the above accusation against Richard John Neuhaus (The Catholic Moment) and George Weigel (Tranquillitas Ordinis). The relevant citations, in what may well turn out to be a creative and highly civil debate, include Hollenbach’s reviews of Weigel and Neuhaus in Theological Studies (vols. 48 and 49) and an article by Msgr. Higgins in America (July 2, 1988).
Hollenbach, in particular, accuses Pastor Neuhaus of preaching Christianity in such a way as not to interfere “with the exercise of power or the making of money.” He accuses Tranquillitas Ordinis of being “more a treatise on the politics of ethics and theology than a treatise on the ethics and theology of politics.” He even has the chutzpah, then, to accuse Weigel of “polemical excesses.”
Simultaneously, Hollenbach praises the U.S. bishops for their decision “not to confine their recent social teachings to the level of moral vision and general moral principles.” Despite the fact that these are explicitly pastoral letters, intended for a pluralistic Catholic community quite divided in their political and practical judgments, he praises the bishops for descending into partisan and concrete political specificity, “not simply” as “a way of gaining public attention,” but as “an attempt to contribute to the very possibility of public moral argument.”
So there we have it. When bishops, in their pastoral role, move from general principles to specific prudential recommendations, that is sound “public moral argument,” but when those Hollenbach calls—without definition—”neoconservatives” do so, the latter are subordinating theology to politics.
Perhaps the air needs to be cleared.
First, Neuhaus and Weigel have been preeminent among theologians who distinguish sharply between the transcendent claims of Christian faith and the ambiguities and ironies inherent in all concrete political judgments. Indeed, the U.S. bishops were obliged to state this very distinction much more carefully in their final, as opposed to their first, drafts of both pastoral letters, in part because theologians such as Neuhaus and Weigel had insisted upon the necessary changes.
Just who determines “the reigning ideology” of our national life, if not the articulate elites on our college campuses and in our communications elites, such as Dan Rather, Bill Moyers, and the New York Times? Who are the “ideological guardians” of intellectual culture? Among theologians and philosophers, what courage does it take at Harvard or at Stanford to maintain a “critical edge,” as long as one supports feminism, gays, Democratic candidates for the presidency and their general positions on the issues of the day, and in opposition, say, to the positions of Ronald Reagan? Among those who write and think, the reigning ideologies of our day are “progressive.”
Moreover, in an age of mass communications, ideas are perhaps the greatest form of power. “Making money” (which Samuel Johnson once remarked is the most innocent of employments) is not the spoken coin of intellectuals, who more commonly feign contempt for “greed.” “Exercising power” over what is to be thought and said among “the best and brightest” is what the intellectual guardians of power do.
Attacking this cultural establishment is what neoconservatives spend all their working hours doing. In fact, they received the supposedly disparaging name “neoconservative” from Michael Harrington for daring to challenge the “progressives,” a no-no.
Neoconservatives such as Weigel and Neuhaus are, by definition, former “progressives” who at some point became critical of “progressivism.” They are not conservatives. They are not traditionalists. They are not the religious Right. They are not libertarians. They rejected progressivism both because of discrepancies between progressivism and reality, and because they could not stand the fallacious ways in which progressives “always blame America first.” In theology, the neoconservatives are a tiny band, nearly always facing large odds. Notwithstanding those odds, these few have had uncommon success in putting the large body of progressives on the defensive—and, indeed, in making room for a new public policy agenda.
Before Carter, if I may now declare my own allegiance, we few neoconservatives argued for the primacy of human rights in foreign policy. Before Reagan, we argued for the centrality of democratic institutions and democratic habits in the effective protection of human rights. Before Reagan, we argued for the rebuilding of American defense, for arms reductions rather than arms control, for enterprise as the way to bring unemployment down from 9 percent (under Carter’s “stagflation”) down to 5.3 percent With latest level); and, in general, for a national political agenda based upon “work, family, and neighborhood.” Before Reagan did, this magazine (in the lay Catholic letter on the nuclear age) argued for the moral superiority of a strategic defense initiative.
Neoconservatives were among those who wrote first about ethnicity and “mediating structures.” We were the first intellectuals to champion “the family.”
Indeed, on yet another level, it was a tiny band of neoconservatives who deepened our roots in Reinhold Niebuhr, Jacques Maritain, and John Courtney Murray, S.J., when our colleagues on the left were busy debunking giants such as these. Neoconservatives claim not a little credit for obliging our “progressive” brothers to rush back to reclaim some portion of these giants for themselves.
As of 1988, we have not yet finished challenging in the name of biblical realism the reigning ideologies of intellectual elites in this country and abroad.
Neuhaus and Weigel have been leaders in these lonely struggles during long years, when our former colleagues on the left were the unchallenged principalities and powers in nearly every religious magazine and religious establishment in sight. It was the left that owned the ideological arms of the National Council of Churches, the U.S. Catholic Bishops, most academic departments of religious studies, and the mainstream of religious publishing. We know what efforts have been made to censor us, to speak ill of us privately and publicly, and to prevent us from publishing in places where our criticism (“as long as it did not interfere with reigning ideologies”) once was welcome. We have had of necessity, simply to be heard, to create a “counterculture,” of which Crisis, This World, and American Purpose are humble examples.
Yet heard we have been. (Let no one again ever doubt that in the world of ideas, it is not numbers that count.) To us, it is a source of wry amusement to be described as subservient to the powers that be. Not long ago, when Richard Neuhaus was under false and malign attack, I telephoned him to ask if other friends had offered comfort. “Only five or six,” he said. “Hell, Richard,” I exclaimed. “Then you’ve heard from everybody. That’s all of us there are.”
“We few, we happy few.” I sometimes think that our advantage is that we have more fun than others. It is so much easier to be free of the cant of the progressives, always protecting their credentials within the clan, bowing to reigning prejudices, afraid to be excommunicated. Let them, when they wish to challenge reigning orthodoxies, look around them at their allies, veritable legions daring them to disagree.
Were it not for faith in the transcendent, being “neoconservative” would be a thankless and an empty lot. Even our errors and weaknesses we entrust to Him.