Baumann on Linker

Commonweal's Paul Baumann has this review of Damon Linker's "Theocons" book, in the Washington Monthly.  Here is a bit:

Named by Time in 2005 as one of the nation’s 25 most influential evangelical leaders, a thinker who has the ear of President George W. Bush on moral and cultural issues, Father Richard John Neuhaus remains little known in secular liberal circles. According to his former protégé, Damon Linker, that’s a serious problem. In The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege, Linker portrays Neuhaus (a Lutheran pastor who converted to Catholicism in 1990) as the charismatic leader of an extremist movement bent on saving the nation from its headlong descent into decadent relativism by remoralizing politics and returning America to its Christian—perhaps even its unsuspected Catholic—roots. 

That’s exaggerated and alarmist, like much else in this tendentious book; yet Linker gets the basic political outlines right. If you are perplexed about why George Bush and so many other Republicans can’t stop extolling “Almighty God” in public, you need to inform yourself about Neuhaus and his decades-long campaign to put religion back into the center of American politics.

In his influential 1984 book, The Naked Public Square—Linker calls it the theocon “manifesto”—Neuhaus argued that the American “experiment in ordered liberty” is premised on religious assumptions about the freedom and dignity of the human person. In his view, freedom of religion is the first freedom, and the effort by liberal elites to strip the public square of religious language and advocacy is an assault on every American’s freedom of conscience. According to Neuhaus, government, because it must inevitably order aspects of our common life that touch on our ultimate moral concerns, cannot turn a deaf ear to the religious aspirations of the governed. Nor, he argues, can the fundamental values of democracy be sustained outside of a larger religious context. . . .

. . . Linker is right about Neuhaus’s political ambitiousness, but his movement is hardly the ideological colossus this book would have us believe. . . .  Nor is it plausible that the theocons’ ultimate goal is the destruction of the nation’s democratic political order. Linker sees inordinate peril in Neuhaus’s insistence that democracy be grounded in metaphysical, and ultimately religious, claims about the transcendent nature of the human person. The “liberal bargain” Linker extols, on the other hand, explicitly rejects the need for democratic societies to come to any comprehensive agreement about first principles. In the liberal bargain, we can disagree about the ultimate good, about “first things,” and still order our political life in a fair and peaceful way.

The theocons reject this conception of liberalism, insisting that only a political order based on absolute moral “truth” can protect human dignity and freedom. Such an insistence appears hard to square with our society’s inability to agree on the moral truth about such issues as abortion or same-sex marriage. Emphasizing such shortcomings, Linker is too quick to dismiss the appeal of the theocon position. (Neuhaus would argue, for example, that the law’s failure to protect unborn life is a far greater threat to democratic values than his protests against Roe v. Wade.) In a time when science presents excruciating dilemmas about when human life begins or ends—and about who should make such determinations—it is not just conservatives who balk at the idea that individual autonomy trumps all other moral values. Nor can Linker’s strictly secular “liberal bargain” account for the role religious convictions have played, for example, in the triumph of democracy in Poland’s Solidarity movement or America’s own abolitionist and civil-rights struggles.

There's more.  Check it out.