Baxter on Neuhaus

My friend Michael Baxter is an inspiration, to me and to many others.  He is truly the real deal -- like Dorothy Day, he is both radical and orthodox.  I'm told his courses -- like "A Faith Worth Dying For" and "The Dynamite of the Church" -- change students' lives.  Because I'm not a pacifist, and think capitalism is (pretty much) a good thing, and think the United States is (pretty much) a force for good in the world, I'm sure it's only Mike's charity that keeps him from being quite disappointed with me.

In any event, here is a provocative essay of his, published in "The New Pantagruel" (a fascinating new electronic journal), called "Why Catholics Should be Wary of 'One Nation Under God':  Richard Neuhaus in a Time of War."  The essay is full of bracing contentions and suggestions.  For example, Baxter writes:

While it would be a dreadful mistake to treat the United States and al-Qaeda as moral equivalents, it is also a mistake to overlook the possibility, as Neuhaus seems to do, that neither the United States nor al-Qaeda may be on the side of freedom and justice (properly understood) or that both may be given to spreading cruelty and fear. Possibilities such as these do not appear when the world is viewed through the simplistic lens of Neuhaus and President Bush. For another thing, after identifying the cause of the United States with the cause of freedom and justice, Neuhaus employs a flawed argument to align both of these causes to the purposes of God. The argument is flawed because while it is true, as Neuhaus argues, that God is not neutral when it comes to freedom and justice, it is also true that God’s purposes may well be aligned with a form of freedom and justice that is represented neither by the United States nor by al-Qaeda, but rather by some other political body or by the church itself.

Baxter (here as elsewhere) never lets any particular ideological "camp" get too comfortable.  Consider this:

[T]he most obvious problem in Neuhaus’s claim that America is a Christian nation is that it does not account for the fact that Americans in large numbers engage in practices that run clearly counter to the Christian way of life, practices related to marrying and having children. If the United States is a Christian nation, what are we to make of the fact that roughly fifty percent of all marriages in America end in divorce? Further, if the United States is a Christian nation, what are we to do with the fact that each year in America there occur more than one million abortions?

There's a lot more to the piece -- these two quotations don't begin to capture the argument -- and I strongly encourage MOJ readers to check it out.

I should emphasize my own view that, with all due respect, Baxter gets Neuhaus wrong.  To use Baxter's own word, his "take" on Neuhaus strikes me as a bit "simplistic."  I'm not a trained theologian, but I've been reading Neuhaus for a long time, and I do not think it is fair to Neuhaus to suggest that he is blind or indifferent to America's failings.  Particularly with respect to the issue of abortion, cited quite rightly by Baxter, it should be emphasized that few in public life have spoken as eloquently and forcefully as Neuhaus has against the abortion license.  Nor do I think it plausible or fair to build an argument on the claim that Neuhaus is blind to the possibility that God's purposes might not be, or might go beyond, America's.  Yes, I take Neuhaus to believe that America can serve, and has, at times, served, a providential purpose, and helped to promote justice, properly understood.  But I don't think that, read carefully and completely, Neuhaus has ever lost sight of the facts that America is not the Church, and that God has bigger plans and aims than America's. 

Now, in terms of the present conflict between America and Islamic terrorism, and certainly not for all purposes and times, I am -- like Neuhaus, I suppose -- comfortable "identifying the cause of the United States with the cause of freedom and justice."  This strikes me -- again, with all due respect to Baxter -- as neither idolatrous or "simplistic."  Still, Baxter sounds, as he so often does, an important warning.

Rick