Unto the Father: Fr. Richard Neuhaus may have midwifed the religious right--but that doesn't mean Karl Rove always returns his phone calls.

• Author: Baumann, Paul
• Position: The Theocons - Book review

The Theocons By Damon Linker Doubleday, $26

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 protege, 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 fight. 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. Politically, Neuhaus is a master of dire prognostication. Divorced from its religious foundations, he warns, democracy is doomed.

From 2001 to 2005, Linker worked side by side with Neuhaus as an editor at the latter's monthly journal, First Things, and presumably shared his boss's enthusiasm for mixing prophetic religion and radical politics. But Linker seems now to have been born again as a strict secularist. Belatedly, he has come to the conclusion that nearly everything Neuhaus stands for is inimical to the freedoms Americans cherish. "Loyalty to the truth and devotion to the good of the nation," the author grandiloquently announces, have prompted this expose, the inside story of a "cultural counterrevolution" that has commanded millions from right-wing foundations, won the allegiance of the conservative religious community, and gained the attention of popes, powerful evangelical ministers, presidential speechwriters, Supreme Court justices, and politicians alike. The Theocons offers a frequently damning, but unfortunately also frequently cartoonish, portrait of "a tightly knit group of ambitious and deeply conservative writers who set out over thirty years ago to devise a comprehensive political program that would reverse the secularizing direction of the country since the 1960s."

That group, as Linker describes it, comprises little more than a handful of major players. In addition to Neuhaus, they are: the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Novak, a contemporary of the 70-year-old Neuhaus who made a similar pilgrimage from the political left in the 1960s to the right wing of the Republican Party; Pope John Paul II's biographer George Weigel, long associated with Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center; and two scholarly advocates of natural-law reasoning, Robert P. George of Princeton University and Hadley Arkes of Amherst College.

Novak and Weigel have no more than walk-on parts in The Theocons, while George and Arkes get even less ink. This is really a book about Neuhaus, and Linker makes little effort to widen the lens beyond the pages, Manhattan office, posh watering holes, and esoteric controversies of the First Things crowd. It seems unlikely that this puny cast of characters could place "secular America under siege." Nor is it likely that either Novak or Weigel see themselves as somehow secondary figures to Father Richard. At the very least, a serious study of contemporary conservative Catholic intellectuals would need to delve into Novak and Weigel's work in much more detail. In short, Linker is prone to exaggerate his former employer's influence.

Still, this chaste kiss-and-tell story should hold considerable fascination even for readers unfamiliar with the somewhat circumscribed world of religious opinion journalism, where Neuhaus is a prominent and polarizing figure. (Note: I once wrote a book review for First Things, and on occasion...