American Babylon: Notes of a Christian
Exile
By Richard John Neuhaus
(Basic Books, 270 pages, $26.50)
The death of Father Richard John Neuhaus last January coincided
with the posthumous publication of his last book, American
Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile, a short, dense meditation
on what it means to live “our awkward duality of citizenship,” as
both Christians and Americans, with integrity.
Father Neuhaus spent a lifetime passionately debating issues of
politics and culture as both a patriot and a faithful Christian. He
tirelessly sustained his arguments through books, articles,
speeches, media appearances, and, most remarkably, his monthly
column “The Public Square,” reliably 12,000 words in length, which
appeared at the back of his journal of opinion, First
Things.
First Things is an ecumenical, nonpartisan publication
of intelligent, faithful, orthodox opinion, featuring the writings
of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. It is published by the
Institute on Religion and Public Life, another Neuhaus enterprise,
which served as a forum and incubator of ideas “to advance a
religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of
society.”
Father Neuhaus’s “The Public Square” offered in-depth commentary
on the passing cultural, religious, and political scene as well as
reviews of whatever stimulating books, magazines, or journal
articles he was reading at the time — it was always a tour de
force. He would debate issues, settle scores, and engage
intellectual adversaries, many of whom were friends, with vigor and
civility. He displayed a breadth and depth of opinion and
conversation to rival that of Boswell’s Dr. Johnson.
American Babylon can be read as a kind of valedictory
or summation of many of the intellectual arguments that have
preoccupied Father Neuhaus in his previous writings. In The
Naked Public Square (1984), he expressed the view that, at the
very founding of America, religion was viewed as an integral part
of the American political system and not its antithesis. Church and
state are separate and distinct spheres, but the latter does not
work to the exclusion of the former in shaping public policy. No
religion or denomination is given a privileged place in America,
but neither is religion to be banished from the public square in
which citizens debate how a democratic society ought to govern
itself.
There is a strong emphasis on eschatology — the
ultimate, last or final things — in American Babylon, no
doubt reflecting the author’s heightened sense of mortality at this
late stage of his life. Its title, which makes Neuhaus “somewhat
uneasy,” is not meant to convey a salacious image of a decadent
America. Rather, America is a Babylon “by comparison with that
radically new order sought by all who know love’s grief in refusing
to settle for a community of less than truth and justice
uncompromised.” In other words, America is our beloved home but not
a utopia on earth. It is not the Kingdom of God, and as Christians
we are always in exile in this and every other country on
earth.
Neuhaus cites the prophet Jeremiah, writing in the sixth century
BC. Given that the God of Israel had sent his people into exile
from Jerusalem to Babylon, Jeremiah counseled the Jews to “seek the
welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to
the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your
welfare.” He also cites the First Letter of Peter, in which ancient
Rome is viewed as the functional equivalent of Babylon, and
Christians are described as “exiles of the Dispersion” and “aliens
and exiles.”
The Letter to the Hebrews also notes the tension between exile
and citizenship: “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the
city that is to come.”
Neuhaus embraces the tension or dialectic since, for Christians
and other believers, “All time is time toward home, the time toward
our true home in the New Jerusalem.” This places upon them “the
burden of pilgrimage,” which also brings with it the grace to bear
it.
While embracing Abraham Lincoln’s observation that America is
“the last, best, hope of man-kind,” Father Neuhaus is quick to
recognize the error in a certain “strong current of Christian
patriotism” in which “God and country are sometimes conflated in a
single allegiance that permits no tension, never mind conflict,
between the two.”
Neuhaus writes, “To say that we are a nation under God is to
say, first and most importantly, that we are a nation under
transcendent judgment.” “Judgment and promise are
inseparable…America is, too, a Babylon.”
And again, “Exaggerated patriotism is checked and tempered by
the awareness that, while this is a homeland, it is, at the same
time, a foreign country.”
FATHERE NEUHAUS EXPLORES the fault lines of American religious
and political thought, introducing the reader to the Puritans,
Transcendentalists, “American Gnosticism” (Harold Bloom’s term),
and relatively recent Supreme Court decisions that built a wall of
separation between not just church and state, but the public square
and religion generally. He describes this as “the enforced
privatization of religion and religiously informed morality,” a
concept totally foreign to the likes of John Locke, James Madison,
George Washington, and the Founders.
American Babylon includes several chapters of vintage
Neuhaus writing: one examines of the idea of moral, as opposed to
technological, progress; one expounds Jesus’s teaching that
salvation is from the Jews; and another demolishes the thought of
the late American philosopher Richard Rorty, academic purveyor of
“liberal irony,” relativism, and post-modernism. While some of
these chapters depart somewhat from the theme of the book, all are
well worth reading as freestanding essays, excellent contributions
to the canon of American letters.
A most illuminating chapter bears the provocative title “Can an
Atheist Be a Good Citizen?” There are atheists and then there are
atheists. Father Neuhaus distinguishes between those who are
“without God” (per the Greek, a-theos), i.e.,
those intellectually honest people who simply cannot prove or come
to apprehend the existence of the Deity, and the “new atheists, who
exult in publicly assaulting the religiously grounded foundations
and aspirations” of the American political order.
This question of atheism is not without political ramifications.
John Locke, the philosopher revered by the Founders, certainly
argued for religious toleration but not for irreligion. “Promises,
covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can
have no hold upon an atheist,” said Locke in A Letter
Concerning Toleration (1689). “The taking away of God, though
but even in thought, dissolves all.”
James Madison, in his Memorial and Remonstrance of
1785, opined that “It is the duty of every man to render to the
Creator such homage, and such only, as he believes to be acceptable
to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree
of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.”
In a passage guaranteed to drive the ACLU over the edge, Madison
pushes this point even further:
Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society,
he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the
Universe; And if a member of Civil Society, who enters into any
subordinate Association, must always do it with a reservation of
his duty to the General Authority; much more must every man who
becomes a member of any particular Civil Society, do it with a
saving of his allegiance to the Universal Sovereign.
Neuhaus believes that “an atheist can be a citizen, but he
cannot be a good citizen” since citizenship is more than simply
abiding by the laws.
A good citizen is able to give an account, a morally compelling
account, of the regime of which he is a part — and to do so in
continuity with the constituting moment and subsequent history of
that regime. He is able to justify its defense against its enemies,
and to convincingly recommend its virtues to citizens of the next
generation so that they, in turn, can transmit the order of
government to citizens yet unborn. This regime of liberal
democracy, of republican self-governance, is not self-evidently
good and just. An account must be given. Reasons must be given.
They must be reasons that draw authority from that which is higher
than ourselves, from that which transcends us, from that to which
we are precedently [sic], ultimately, obliged.
Believers “are now the most persuasive defenders…of the good
reasons for this regime of ordered liberty” because “it makes a
sharply limited claim upon the loyalty of its citizens,” argues
Father Neuhaus. “The ultimate allegiance of the faithful is not to
the regime or to its constituting texts, but to the City of God and
the sacred texts that guide our path toward that destination. We
are dual citizens in a regime that, as Madison and others
underscored, was designed for such duality.”
THE PARAMOUNT POLITICAL question of our day, the one that
illustrates, most vividly, the tension of being a Christian,
citizen, and exile in American Babylon, relates to “what
it means to be a human being.” These “life questions” raise the
matter of who is “a bearer of rights that we, as a society, are
obliged to respect.” It is “the dignity of the human
person,” the individual human person, in a society that claims
to be a community, which vexes Americans today.
Says Neuhaus: “…the dignity of the human person is affirmed
not in the assertion of autonomy but in attending to our duties to
protect those who lack autonomy, or whose autonomy is gravely
limited.” Viewed from this perspective, the 1973 Supreme Court
decisions, Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, are
“the most consequential political event of the past half-century in
the United States.” The key question is not about when human life
begins. On that there is no dispute. “The crucial question is: At
what point in its existence ought we, and for what reasons ought
we, to recognize that a human life should be protected in law?”
Father Neuhaus believes the moral question of abortion and other
life issues are unavoidably a political question: “If politics is
deliberating how we ought to order our life together, there can
hardly be
a more basic question than this: Who belongs to the we?”
If a principle is established by which some indisputably human
lives do not warrant the protections traditionally associated with
the dignity of the human person — because of their size, location,
dependency, level of development, or burdensomeness to others — it
would seem that there are numerous candidates for the application
of the principle, beginning with the radically handicapped, both
physically and mentally, not to mention millions of aged and
severely debilitated in our nation’s nursing homes.
People of faith must continue to heed Jeremiah and “seek the
welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to
the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your
welfare.” Father Neuhaus reminds us, consoles us, that we will only
return from our exile in “the personal encounter and eternal
dwelling with one who is no stranger, for we knew him in his
humility and will then see him in his triumph.”
