The Christian Right: Catholic version

The current print issue of the New York Review of Books carries a thoughtful and thought-provoking article by Gary Wills that looks at the influence of the Catholic Right on the Bush administration: Fringe Government 09/08/05. (The Web link is unfortunately subscription only.)

Wills is a liberal Catholic writer who has published, among his numerous books, a biography of St. Augustine and a translation of Augustine's Confessions from the Latin. Okay, I hear Wills say some dorky things about Thomas Jefferson at a conference several years ago. But generally I like his writing.

His article could have been titled "How the Christian Right can promote authoritarian government." Regarding the conjunction of the Rovian Republican Party and rightwing Catholics, he writes:

This presents a difficult problem. How do you govern an apostate nation? When the entire culture is corrupted, the country can only be morally governed in spite of itself. A collection of aggrieved minorities must seize the levers of power in every way possible. One must govern not from a broad consensual center but from activist fringes of morality. That has, in fact, been Karl Rove's strategy. He cultivates the extreme groups that are out of step with the broad consensus of the nation, since they supply the hard workers in primaries and general elections. Acting in accord with Rove's priorities, the President instantly flew back to Washington and got up in the middle of the night to sign the bill calling for further intervention in the Schiavo case. The fringe was calling the tune.

It has been noted by others that Dear Leader Bush's sense of urgency about the hurricane and flood in New Orleans was considerably less intense.

Wills makes a comparison of the strategy of Pope John Paul II in governing the Catholic Church by relying on hard right factions like Opus Dei and the Communication and Liberation group and Dear Leader's approach to government. Wills makes it clear that, so far, Pope Benedict XVI, who I still call Ratzinger I, is relying even more heavily on the same strategy in the Church. But speaking of the Bush style, Wills writes:

Most American administrations at least try (or pretend) to govern by compromise, to speak for "all the people." The Bush presidency has not even put on a show of doing this. It secretly meets with its business and religious supporters; it favors lobbyists who hold extreme views on education, the environment, the family, gun control, regulation of any kind. Its officials make appearances on extremist talk shows and in far-right-wing publications. On issue after issue, this administration is out of touch with the majority of the American people.

Wills' analysis provides some very helpful glimpses at the way that the Christian Right dogma can facilitate authoritarian government and promote the authoritarian mentality that dominates today Republican Party to an extent that surprises even me. And I'm not known for heaping praise on the Republican Party.

Wills gives short sketches of four Catholic Rightists who are influential in the Bush administration. In Wills ascending order of influence, they are Michael Novak, George Weigel, Joseph Fessio and Richard John Neuhaus. Novak was a left-leaning radical in his younger days; he published A Theology for Radical Politics in 1968. Converts from the radical left to the radical right can be exceptionally tiresome, David Horowitz being probably the most notorious example right now.

Wills gives this background on Fessio, who is known to be very close to Ratzinger I in theology and politics:

Fessio, who knows how dear to Pope Benedict liturgical retrenchment is, began an institute called Oremus, to bring back Latin in the Mass, the altar faced away from the people, adoration of the Host, and Gregorian Chant (all favored by then Cardinal Ratzinger). These positions move partway toward the more-papal-than-papalist Latin liturgies of Mel Gibson in his private chapel. Fessio is himself super-papalist. In a television interview, he told me that if the Catholic authorities ever changed their stand on contraception, their church would go out of business. Because of Fessio's close ties with the current pope, the author of an article on him in the UK journal The Tablet called Fessio "The Priest Who Bestrides America."

Neuhaus, a Catholic priest like Fessio (the other two are laypeople), is a special favorite of born-again Christian George W. Bush, who says that Neuhaus "helps me articulate these religious things." Wills writes of him:

Richard John Neuhaus was a Lutheran pastor opposed to the Vietnam War who became a Catholic priest in 1991, after he had published The Naked Public Square (1984) advocating the reinjection of religion into politics. He is the founding editor of First Things, in every issue of which he writes an extensive summary of points he thinks relevant to the interplay of religion and politics during the month. Why do I think him the key figure in this "gang of four"? Well, for one thing, he is a favorite of Karl Rove, who would gladly talk with any of these men but who singled out Neuhaus as a helpful adviser even before Mr. Bush became president. Neuhaus was asked to come see Governor Bush, which began a long relationship.

With a good sense of history, Wills sees a real irony in Bush's brand of creeping (and creepy) theocracy:

We see at last a realization of evangelicals' worst nightmare when they opposed the election of John F. Kennedy—the sight of an American priest relaying papal dogma to the ears of a president of the United States. The ironic thing is that evangelicals are now cheering Neuhaus on while he does what no priest would have dared to do in the 1960s. Neuhaus favors religious intervention in politics which far outruns anything Catholics could have envisaged in the past—as we saw in the last presidential election. Some American hierarchs, especially Archbishop Raymond Burke of St. Louis, threatened at that time to deny communion to political candidates like John Kerry, who voted for legalized abortion.

I think too many analysts of the Christian Right tiptoe around one of the central facts about them: that they are decisively influenced by the legacy of Southern racial segregation. Wills doesn't ignore it:

Of course, the convergence of evangelicals and Catholics was not begun or completed by Neuhaus's ECT. Old animosities had been disappearing for many political reasons. The Protestant objection to public support for private (read: Catholic) schools was broken down by the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Private schools were set up in the South to avoid integration, and then religious schools developed from these to protest the ban on school prayer, the teaching of evolution, and sex education in public schools. Home schooling, religious schools, and right-wing colleges are now a principal seedbed of the religious right—as The New Yorker pointed out in its June 27 article on Patrick Henry Community College, in Martinsville, Virginia, whose students flow into congressional and White House internships. (my emphasis)

I should mention here that while home-schooling is more popular among conservative Christians than among the general population in America, not all home-schoolers come from that outlook. Some people of a distinctly liberal or left orientation, influenced by alternative educational ideas like those of Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society (1971), also practice home schooling. Not many supporters of the Christian Right among Illich fans.

And what would the spiritual heirs of Southern segregationism be without "moderates" to defend their antidemocratic ideas in mild tones? Wills sees Neuhaus playing such a role:

In his 1984 book, The Naked Public Square, he argued that the removal of religion from public life had undermined the historical identity of America. He praised evangelicals for the anger with which they recognized this fact. Liberals, he said, are theoretically impersonal and cold as they go about what he describes as "sterilizing" or "sanitizing" or "neutralizing" public discussion. The hot gospelers, by contrast, speak as people who have "experienced assault" on their values and identity. While posing as a moderator of their excesses, he feeds the fires of their outrage. By "invoking the nightmares we fear," according to Neuhaus, the religious right is returning to the theological origins of democracy (which he derives from Oliver Cromwell, of all people). (my emphasis)

Wills has provided a very helpful insight into how the Christian Right and the Corporate Right function as partners. The phrase "alliance of the country church and the country club" has a nice literary ring to it. But this is more like an alliance of the big city First Baptist Church that caters to wealthy bigwigs with like-minded Catholic intellectuals and cynical corporate lobbyists.

And the authoritarian potential is in the fact that the real interests served here are those of a minority. And the strategists on both the political and religious sides of the movement are very aware of that. As Wills puts it:

The illegitimacy Neuhaus and others attack is not just an aberration of the courts, or of the federal government more generally. The problem is a Godless culture, one that accepts wholesale murder in the form of abortion. The new religious right does not claim to be speaking for a moral majority. It knows it is a minority - in fact, it asks for protection of believers as a matter of minority rights.