Richard Neuhaus

WHILE the rest of the world fawned on Barack Obama, Richard Neuhaus took no joy in him. If Mr Obama truly meant, as he said, to liberalise abortion rules from his first day in office, Father Neuhaus foresaw an intensification of the culture wars at every level of American life. But he was ready to fight his side. For 30 years he had done so in books, manifestos, studies for the American Enterprise Institute and 12,000-word columns in First Things, the journal of his own Institute on Religion and Public Life. He fought his conservative corner in fluent, fervent, gossipy conversations, smoothed with bourbon and cigars and interrupted by immersion in Bach. George Bush, among many others, found talking to “Father Richard” on cloning, or same-sex marriage, superb for clearing the head. And he made his point even as, day by day, he raised Christ’s body at his church on the lower East Side of Manhattan. For the Eucharist, too, was a “call to commitment”, an “evangelistic” act.

Without Father Neuhaus, the religious right might still have enjoyed its 20-odd years of ascendancy in American politics. But it would have lacked much of its intellectual spine. Father Neuhaus, a Lutheran-turned-Catholic fearsomely well read in both the Church Fathers and the Protestant dissenters, encouraged evangelicals and Catholics to join forces to fill, with a new moral philosophy, the empty space at the core of modern American public life. There was, he wrote in 1984, a “naked public square” from which religion had been banished, and which “seven demons”, all secular, now competed to control. …