Are Catholics The Brains of Religious Right ? Thoughts on Father Neuhaus Part I

I got held up yesterday and was not able to do a few posts I wanted to get out. This is part I of three shorts post dealing with the passing of Neuhaus and his influence on Catholic and Evangelical relations and other matters.

The death of Father Neuhaus has sparked a great deal of commentary in the media. I think one reason is not only was his passing important but he was well known in the media and gave great quotes.

Still I do get a sense that some reporters even those that cover religious beat don't get the full picture and often are falling into stereotypes.

An example of this can be found in U.S. News and World Reports article Richard Neuhaus's Death and the Catholic–Evangelical Tension in Politics

I think the article has several problems including his perception of the whole Harriet Miers episode. But this struck me:

The foot soldiers in the American Christian right have always been evangelical, but the movement's intellectual armature is undeniably Roman Catholic, a dynamic personified by the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, the Catholic theologian and polemicist who died yesterday at 72.
In a 2004 session with faith-based media, George W. Bush cited Neuhaus more than any other living authority: "Father Richard helps me articulate these [religious] things............

That's true. But Neuhaus's death also reminds us that Catholics remain the brains of a conservative movement built on evangelical brawn. This played out during the Bush years in Supreme Court nominations. John Roberts, Bush's first Supreme Court appointment, was embraced by conservative evangelicals, largely because his Catholicism assured them that he was a pro-lifer at heart, despite his thin judicial record.

This strikes me as a very in the belt side view and in the instance the beltway is very important.

It is no doubt that there are some leading Catholics that have a voice and and indeed are consulted by Evangelicals and others in the so called religious right.

It is worth posting a large excerpt of what a reviewer at Christianity Today said as to Damon Linker's unfortunate 2006 New Republic piece that also made a similar claim

If the primary theme of Linker's essay is "The Catholicizing of America" (not, as the subtitle has it, "The Christianizing of America"), evangelicals play a part in his narrative as well. You may recall a TNR piece by Franklin Foer, apropos the Alito nomination, published shortly before Foer was named as TNR's new editor ("Brain Trust," November 14, 2005). "In 1994," Foer begins, "the eminent evangelical historian Mark Noll wrote a scorching polemic about his own religion called The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind." Pause there for a moment to note Foer's utter cluelessness. Noll's "religion"— my religion, Richard John Neuhaus' religion—is Christianity. Evangelicalism is not a religion, and no one with more than a journalist's crash-course briefing on the subject would think otherwise. Remind me to write a piece sometime about the scandal of Franklin Foer's mind, taking Foer as representative of the very bright people who routinely pontificate these days about evangelicals and religion in America. The scandal is that such intelligent, generally well-educated folk are as ignorant of the subject as they are confident in their pronouncements.

It was in that piece that Foer laid out the relationship between Catholics and evangelicals for the benefit of TNR's readers, describing what he called "the reality of social conservatism:

Evangelicals supply the political energy, Catholics the intellectual heft." And again: in the culture wars, "evangelicals didn't just need Catholic bodies; they needed Catholic minds to supply them with rhetoric that relied more heavily on morality than biblical quotation."

Now here is Linker on the same topic:

Countless press reports in recent years have noted that much of the religious right's political strength derives from the exertions of millions of anti-liberal evangelical Protestants. Much less widely understood is the more fundamental role of a small group of staunchly conservative Catholic intellectuals in providing traditionalist Christians of any and every denomination with a comprehensive ideology to justify their political ambitions. In the political economy of the religious right, Protestants supply the bulk of the bodies, but it is Catholics who supply the ideas.

And later in the essay we hear of "Neuhaus' first tentative attempt"—in Naked in the Public Square—
to solve the problem of the evangelicals by developing an alternative way for them to talk about religion in public. Instead of referring to their personal religious experiences, they would adopt a nondenominational "public language of moral purpose," as well as learn to make more sophisticated, intellectually respectable arguments about American society and history, democracy and justice, culture and the law.

The problem of the evangelicals! Is that really how They talk about Us? There's too much confusion here, as Bob Dylan said; it's hard to know where to begin. In general, the figures most readily identified with the Religious Right—Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Tim LaHaye, et al.— have been negligibly influenced by Catholic thought. Among evangelical intellectuals, Catholicism is much more influential than it was a generation ago, but it is only one stream among many shaping public discourse among evangelical élites, and certainly not on a par with the Reformed tradition represented by thinkers such as Nicholas Wolterstorff, Richard Mouw, and many others. Hard as it may be for Foer and Linker to grasp, evangelicals are not entirely dependent on crumbs from the Catholic table.

So true. As I mention earlier the beltway plays a role. There is no doubt that there is very well established Conservative Catholic circle in D.C. That is partly because of history. D.C. was one of the early Catholic populations centers of the Nation at the founding. They have know each other families for generations. Sometime I get the impression Conservative Catholics are the main part of such important groups like the Federalist Society up there. It is a clubby group and a close knit one. They exert a good deal of influence. Evangelicals are of course making up for lost time and also developing a similar network.

So I think it is easy to see why many reporters make this error at times.

While Catholics have made important contributions we are hardly the only brains. Though Dr Francis Beckwith has returned to the Catholic Faith of his youth he was one of the leading lights (and still is) in areas of the pro-life movement and matters related to other social concerns as to Evangelicals. Perhaps these reporters never made it down to Baylor or picked up CHRISTIANITY TODAY where they could find other repeated examples. Do they know places like Wheaton College exist?

One problem is despite attempts to make Evangelicals all one big group they are not. There are numerous sub groups that all have someone that is contributing . It is far easier to point out and label a Catholic figure for obvious reasons. As to Evangelicals there is quite a difference in lets say the Southern Evangelical and l the very reformed, very calvinist ones in Michigan. The media I think sees a one size fits all. To them their lexicon is perhaps the son Billy Graham (Franklin) to Rick Warren.

Part II on another related matter coming up