The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege

A book review of The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege from the Sunday New York Times. In full ...

So much for the power of prophecy. If the great prophets of the 19th and early 20th centuries agreed on anything, whether they were utopians like Marx or pessimists like Weber, it was that God was on his deathbed. Religion was a fading force; society was secularizing; and theology, once the queen of the sciences, was headed for irrelevance.

Six years into the 21st century, fanatics are strapping on suicide belts and blowing themselves to smithereens in the name of God. The onward march of religion is not confined to Islam or the left-out bits of the globe. In much of the developing world, Christianity is doing a much better job of harvesting souls than Islam. In the only remaining superpower, the United States, hot religion is triumphing at the expense of cool religion (the mainline has long since passed to the sideline); and the religious revival is spreading from the masses to the intelligentsia.

“The Theocons” is a study of a group of Roman Catholic thinkers who, by their own lights at least, have been at the heart of this intellectual revival — Michael Novak, George Weigel, Robert P. George and, most important of all, Richard John Neuhaus, a former Lutheran pastor who converted to Catholicism in 1990. Damon Linker clearly wants to capitalize on the infamy of the neocons — a groupuscule that is recognized and reviled the world over — and he has half a point. The theocons come from a different generation from Irving Kristol and company: they reached maturity in the 1960’s rather than the 1950’s. But the parallels are striking.

They started life as left-wing radicals: Neuhaus looked forward to a social conflagration, and Novak called for the destruction of “the idol of inhibition, repression and shame.” They broke with their radical past, dismissing the 1960’s as what Neuhaus calls a “slum of a decade,” feuding with their former friends and moving smartly to the right. And they eventually found a comfortable home in the bosom of the conservative establishment. Novak is a cardinal in the papal college of neoconservatism, the American Enterprise Institute.

Linker is a disillusioned theocon who cut his journalistic teeth working for Neuhaus’s magazine, First Things. But his tone is admirably restrained, dispassionate and scholarly when it could so easily have been rank and recriminatory, and he uses his insider’s knowledge to build up a detailed account of the movement. The result, for anybody who wants to understand the growing public role of American religion, is a book to reckon with.

Linker tells the story of how the theocons advanced on several fronts at once: establishing links with conservative foundations, forging an alliance with evangelicals and trying to redirect Roman Catholicism (Novak’s “Spirit of Democratic Capitalism” remains the most ambitious attempt to reconcile Catholicism with Reagan-style capitalism). He argues that these maneuvers involved convolutions and compromises. As Americans, the theocons were treated with some suspicion in Rome; as Roman Catholics, they were treated with suspicion by both the evangelicals, who dominated the religious right, and the secular Jews, who wielded growing influence on the intellectual right.

In telling his tale Linker scores some good points against his former bedfellows, without abandoning his dispassionate tone. First Things, he reminds us, once ran an issue seriously discussing the case for resisting the American “regime” because of its support for abortion. He also convicts the theocons of cafeteria Catholicism — as strict as you can get when it comes to contraception and euthanasia but willing to second guess the Vatican when it comes to war in the gulf. The best passages in the book deal with a schizophrenia that has them demonizing “the people” when they vote for Bill Clinton and sanctifying them when they vote for George W. Bush. “This is the permanent theocon dynamic,” Linker writes, “hurtling wildly from theological affirmation of the country to theocratic denunciation and back again.”

But Linker overestimates the importance of his subject matter: the theocons are pale imitations of the neocons and the evangelicals when it comes to exercising influence in the Earthly City. The evangelical movement is the engine of the Republican majority, after all. The bearer of the Republican standard has talked about Jesus changing his heart. (Neuhaus deeply dislikes the evangelicals’ “overly confident claims to being born again,” as well as their “forced happiness and joy” and their “awful music.”)

In the end, the theocons are just too eccentric to exercise the sort of influence on America that Linker ascribes to them. Again and again — in their deference to papal authority, in their belief that American ideals and institutions derive from Catholic principles, in their willingness to sanction civil disobedience — the theocons come across not as harbingers of a conservative revolution but as a rather eccentric intellectual clique. Secular America has more potent enemies to worry about than the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus and his colleagues.