OPINION:
AMERICAN BABYLON: NOTES OF A CHRISTIAN EXILE
Basic, $26.95, 288 pages
Right at the start of the present year - a year that, by many accounts, gets more depressing each day - the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus died suddenly. Lucky him, one could say, given the historical circumstances, and poor us, meaning the many who have benefited from his shrewd appraisals of the challenges facing Christianity, to say nothing of civilization.
Hold that thought, but not too tightly.
Whether or not “American Babylon” should be counted as Father Neuhaus’ literary will and testament, it contextualizes with grace and customary insight his approach to the varied anxieties of Today: “today,” that is, viewed not just as 2009; rather as the whole modern era. Sure, we’re bone-tired. Sure, we feel astray and abandoned. That’s what it means to live Today. Jesus is coming, nevertheless - if not Today, soon enough to accomplish the sovereign purposes of God. “Babylon,” affirms Father Neuhaus, “is not forever.” Exile without end, Amen, isn’t what it’s all about, and never has been.
“[T]he proposal here,” Father Neuhaus says, in summation, “is that the whole creation groans for the glory that is to be revealed. With the resurrection of Jesus, a genuinely new world order has been inaugurated, and we are on the way, out from exile and on the pilgrim way toward the City of God. … We are moving toward our destination, and our destination is moving toward us.” It doesn’t get better than that.
That Father Neuhaus, in his last book, would seek to explain why Christians feel like exiles could hardly be called the stunning surprise of our times. The Neuhaus oeuvre, starting with “The Naked Public Square,” could be called a plucky yet entirely rational attempt to make sense of modern confusions as to what God expects and what, human expectations notwithstanding, will happen. The book is about life in a place that is neither the kingdom of heaven nor the offramp to hell; rather, a special place crafted by God for the special needs of His special people.
“Yes, a new world has begun with the resurrection of Jesus, but the ’principalities and powers’ still rage against the new order that has been inaugurated.” Of which the “new atheism” of Richard Dawkins and the like is just one marker. Another: the difficulties, to put it mildly, confronting those who attempt to assert any kind of moral or spiritual authority. “The barbarians” - I pause to commend the bold use of a nice, nonpolitically correct noun - “refuse to be limited by what we know, by the wisdom we have received, about good and evil, right and wrong.”
The lot of God’s people, it seems, is to live in successive Babylons: citizens of a world designed for their accommodation and yet somehow not quite … right. There was the original Babylon, where for a time the Jews languished in captivity. There is the present Babylon, the one Father Neuhaus refers to as “American.” For all its religious distinctives and large worshipping population, the America of 2009 often feels like a place of exile.
Which isn’t to call the world evil, rotten, debased, horrible, a total mess, because, on any proper Christian showing, it isn’t that at all. The earthly city has its moments, wherein the presence of God may be discerned. It is merely that such moments fail to cancel out the sense, the understanding, of our limitedness, our provisionality, our inability to realize that, by divine design, Earth isn’t the last stop on the bus line. We’re to wait and see - ever hopeful. (There’s a wise chapter here on hope and hopelessness.)
Father Neuhaus isn’t among the large and growing fraternity that expects any day now to see the end of all things. He understands, nevertheless, that the end is coming some time. It’s all in the Bible.
En route to the finish, he accomplishes some useful tasks that feed into his explanatory purposes. He shows how the idea of moral progress in human affairs has taken a back seat to the loose and callous formulations of people like Princeton University’s Peter Singer, who sees nothing wrong with phasing out, so to speak, babies who appear likely to burden the larger society. Mr. Singer - “the philosopher from nowhere,” Father Neuhaus calls him - couldn’t be less interested in cold, old moral reasonings that don’t match up with his own.
Father Neuhaus sees atheists as capable of citizenship in a republic generally sympathetic to God; he simply doesn’t think them qualified for good citizenship, as they can’t give any persuasive account of why a regime of liberal democracy and republican self-governance is worthy of respect and emulation. “Those who adhere to the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus turn out to be the best citizens.” They understand that the attributes of our society derive from the Christian way of understanding government and governed alike, both as to rights and duties.
Father Neuhaus thought longer, and more constructively, than most Americans about the relationship between government and religion. He wasn’t for baptizing the American Founding in evangelical holy water, nor was he for playing down the Founders’ genuine appreciation of religion.
That public square of which he wrote so eloquently for so long need not bristle with crucifixes in order to be a place where God receives due recognition of His authority. No “comprehensive” account of reality is necessary for the creation of a “a sustainable measure of political equilibrium.” The less work democratic government invests in defining “reality,” the better, perhaps, for all.
Tributes to Father Neuhaus since his death have framed his long career - from civil-rights-marching Lutheran pastor to Roman Catholic promoter of orthodox ecumenism - as a career marked by persistent witness to the urgency of informed religious understanding. The publication of his last book inevitably raises the question: Who next to take on the job? No answer is either indicated or essential. The late Father Neuhaus carved out his own role - essayist, author, editor of distinguished religious journals - in accordance with the needs of those whose exile he shared. In Babylon, as new needs arise, we’ll see who responds. It’s all, seemingly, part of the Plan - a larger one than anyone can know.
William Murchison’s “Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity” will be published by Encounter Books April 14.
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