TNR debate: "American Catholicism"

The New Republic's web site is hosting an online debate between Damon Linker, of "Theocons" fame, and Ross Douthat, of Atlantic Monthly.  (Douthat reviewed the current raft of anti-"theocon" books recently, in First Things.)  Here is a blurb from Douthat's opening entry:

"The guarantee of religious liberty" in the Constitution, you write, "institutionalizes the perpetual political impotence of religion." Maybe in Lilliput or or Never-Never Land, but not in real-life America, where an endless variety of religiously inspired political movements have jostled and competed for influence under the umbrella of government neutrality. Hence abolitionism and the Social Gospel; hence the religious populism of William Jennings Bryan and the eschatological politics of Martin Luther King Jr.; hence ... well, just pick up a history book. A lot happened between the Federalist Papers and the publication of The Naked Public Square--some of it good, some of it bad, and nearly all of it affected by precisely the kind of religion-infused politics that you see as a mortal threat to the American experiment.

Because you don't discuss this history in any detail, it's somewhat difficult to tell whether you think that previous irruptions of faith into American politics were just as dangerous to the health of our secular republic as the "theocons" and their sinister agenda--or whether you think there's something particularly un-American about Neuhaus and company. At times, you seem to be arguing that, any time faith influences government or vice versa, the results are "pernicious" for politics and religion alike. (You even chide the distinctly unzealous Christianity of midcentury mainline Protestantism for having "endorsed New Deal liberalism" and thereby succumbed to Christianity's "incarnational temptation.") But, for the most part, I suspect that you believe that the attempt to link the American Founding to the Catholic natural-law tradition--which is at the heart of the "theoconservative project," insofar as there is one--marks a greater departure from America's supposed secular ideal than did the God-soaked politics of, say, Bryan or King. (This is how your friend Russell Arben Fox interprets your argument, at least, in an exegesis of your thesis that's somewhat more interesting than the thesis itself.)

If this is what you mean, I wish you had been gutsy enough to take your argument to its logical conclusion and to say outright what you repeatedly imply--namely that orthodox Catholicism is essentially incompatible with the American liberal order, and that Neuhaus (like John Courtney Murray before him) is wrong to tell his co-believers that there's no great tension between Rome and the United States. You spend a great deal of time talking about the "authoritarian" political inclinations of Neuhaus and company and how they threaten liberalism, but your evidence is nearly always that they believe in accepting the Catholic magisterium's religious authority on matters of faith and morals--with the implication being that, if you let the magisterium tell you what to think about birth control or the Virgin Birth, you aren't fit for the responsibilities of democratic self-governance.

This argument --that American Catholics need to choose between the Pope and the republic--has a long pedigree in our political life, and it's far from an absurd interpretation of the relationship, or lack thereof, between liberalism and Catholicism: It is held, for instance, by Neuhaus's critics on the Catholic right, who accuse him of choosing the republic over Rome. So I put it to you--is this your opinion on the matter? Is the dissenting, the-Pope-can't-tell-me-what-to-think Catholicism of Garry Wills the only form of Catholicism that's acceptable in the American context? You accuse Neuhaus of hinting that Jews and atheists can't be good citizens; do you think that Neuhaus, given what he believes, can be a good citizen himself?

Or put another way: As someone who believes in what the Roman Catholic Church believes and teaches--and as someone who thinks that our laws should be just and that the ultimate source of this justice is God--can I be a good American? Is there a place for me at the table of your idealized secular state?

Tune in tomorrow, for Linker's response . . .