Enemies within?

The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege, by Damon Linker (Doubleday, 272 pp., $26)

OF the making of conspiracies to undermine the political well-being of the United States, it seems, there is to be no end. In the past couple of years, of course, considerable attention has been paid by the press to the neoconservatives, alleged to be a group of hardened warmongers originally brought together under the auspices of a long-dead refugee professor named Leo Strauss, whose tentacles reached first into the bowels of the American university and from there, through a group of intellectuals and public officials, into the topmost reaches of the U.S. government. From the White House itself, it is alleged, this conspiracy has been able to produce its most dangerous effect so far, namely, to grind the faces of the poor while driving the country into an illegitimate and unwinnable war in Iraq. Now the neocons, who to begin with were not all bad--at least in the view of Damon Linker, the author of this new book--are in danger of losing out to a newer conspiracy: that of a group he calls the theocons.

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As Doubleday announces on the book's cover, the author exposes the presence in our midst of "a few determined men" who have all too successfully sought "to inject their radical religious ideas into the nation's politics." This new gang of conspirators happens to center around an organization known as the Institute on Religion and Public Life, whose leader is a Catholic priest named Father Richard John Neuhaus and one of whose main instrumentalities is a monthly magazine called First Things.

Now, though there was considerable amusement to be found in watching certain members of the press try to wrap their minds around the relation between the rather thorny philosophical works of Professor Strauss and the Iraq War, Damon Linker's connection to his subject has, at least for a time, been very much firsthand. Though he does not mention it in the body of the book, and in his two-page acknowledgments makes no more than a brief mention of Richard Neuhaus's "unfailing generosity," Damon Linker did actually serve as the editor of First Things--indeed, very close to, or perhaps precisely until, the very moment that he sat down to write his expose. It is somewhat difficult, then, to decide whether he had caught on to what he clearly feels is the nefarious nature of the enterprise, and had been entertaining disloyal thoughts about it, from the start; or whether he had experienced a massive sea-change in attitude in a rather short span of time. (Full disclosure: I served as an editor--not the editor--at First Things from 1990 to 1995; and I now serve on its editorial board.)

Unfailingly generous or not, in Linker's account Richard Neuhaus is primus inter pares of those "who propose to sanctify and spiritualize the nation's public life, while also eliding fundamental distinctions between church and state, the sacred and the secular." If successful, he observes, such efforts "would not be fatal to the nation, but they would cripple it, effectively transforming the country into what would be recognized around the world as a Catholic-Christian republic."

In this account of their power to cripple the nation, the theocons surprisingly appear not to be so very numerous: Joining Neuhaus in the Catholic triumvirate are Michael Novak, author of The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, and George Weigel, author of the official biography of Pope John Paul II. These three get important support from two academics: Robert P. George, director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton and co-author of the Federal Marriage Amendment endorsed by President Bush in 2004, and Hadley Arkes, a passionate opponent of abortion and a believer in the principle of natural rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. (Arkes, who is Jewish, might be said to embody the unity of the two conspiracy theories, connecting the Catholic cabal and the one that originated in the work of Leo Strauss.)

The Linker-designated leaders of the cabal are people who had in the 1960s been radically pro-civil rights and anti-Vietnam War but who by the 1970s came to believe that the country was in an ever-deepening cultural--for which read also religious--crisis, a crisis, indeed, to which some of their more careless earlier position-taking may even have contributed. As Linker tells it, Neuhaus's ambition was and remains a massive and dangerous one: the Catholicization of American political and social thought.

For while Neuhaus had briefly entertained the hope that in Protestant groups like the Moral Majority the new theocon conspiracy had found natural allies for its ambition to stir up a populist insurrection against the secularism of America's cultural elites, he soon discovered that these hoped-for allies would not serve his purpose. Except for some of the more radically evangelical, with whom he would indeed succeed in making common cause, too much of American Protestantism had in his view grown servile beneath the heel of the liberal culture. And thus--in Linker's account, when it comes to Neuhaus, there is to be no damned nonsense about something called "faith"--the cabal's leader decided to create theoconservatism both in the image, and through the spread, of Roman Catholicism. Moreover, the Catholicism he had in mind was not that of just any Catholic but rather that of the most powerful conservative forces within the Church: the papacies of John Paul II and latterly Benedict XVI, along with such Europe-based lay organizations as Opus Dei and the Legionaries of Christ. Thus it was that in 1990, the Lutheran pastor Neuhaus gave up on his earlier faith and, by 1991, would be ordained a priest of the Church of Rome.

Linker frets that while some of the theocons' ambitions, such as the criminalization of abortion and amendment of the Constitution to restrict the rights of homosexuals, are more or less familiar to the general public, others seem more ominously to have gone unrecognized. There was, for instance, the theocon role, evidently played in darkest secret, in President Bush's intervention in the right-to-die case of Terri Schiavo. There was the continuing theocon effort to sow skepticism about Darwinian evolution and to teach the scientifically groundless theory of "intelligent design" in the public schools. Above all, along with the promotion of a return to patriarchy in the family, there was the many-pronged effort to establish a future America "reconstituted as an emphatically Catholic-Christian nation."

Linker warns that a number of these ambitions are all too dangerously being shared by the Republican party. For instance, while the theocons are realistic enough to recognize that their hopes for a reversion to what he calls a "premodern family structure" presently seem farfetched, they can at least begin to further them--do one's eyes deceive?--"by standing with the Republican party in its opposition to such policies as government support for day care and paid maternity and paternity leave."

To be sure, not all of the book's analysis attains to this level of risibility. But it might have seemed a difficult task to warn the country about a conspiracy to drag it back into that dark world "of religiously inspired social and political strife," when the actual instrumentalities of so nefarious a plot are an institute that occupies no more than eight rooms of a New York City office building, and that sets out to influence the national culture by issuing an occasional public statement, holding public discussions and lectures, and publishing a monthly magazine of serious intellectual discourse. (Nor is that discourse, which so disturbs Linker, by any means all doctrinally Catholic, or even indirectly influenced by Catholicism--although probably the magazine's most popular feature is Neuhaus's own searching and witty column, "The Public Square.")

The author of this polemic against Neuhaus, Novak, Weigel, and their allies fails to understand that the story of the "theocons"--like that of the "neocons"--is a story of conversion. Some would call their conversion an intellectual one; many more would call it a religious one. However characterized, these conversions took place with fear and trembling in the face of what was in some respects perhaps the deepest cultural and spiritual crisis their country had ever been through. There was nothing, the young were saying, worth dying for. There was nothing, the old were saying, worth living for. Our existence, said the poor, is not in our hands but yours. Our crime, said the criminals, is not our responsibility but yours. And meanwhile all the institutions of the culture--schools, universities, churches, synagogues, the press, the arts, the prize-givers--seemed to be united in celebration of the onrushing tides of social disintegration.

And this, as they say, is where Richard Neuhaus and company came in.

It took no conspiracy with Rome to bring the country back at least a somewhat safer distance from that brink; all it required was the growing recognition among growing numbers of Americans that freedom doesn't come free, and that it is based in a belief in the kind of personal responsibility that liberalism has long forgotten and that atheism could never understand in the first place. That such a recognition now depends so much on Catholics and evangelicals speaks not to what this book calls "an eschatological longing for the radical transformation of the nation" but rather to the failure of mainline Protestants and liberal Jews to uphold the wisdom of their respective faiths.

There is still a long way to go on America's journey back from the brink; and to the extent that the people Damon Linker wants to warn us against are helping to keep the country on that path, it is they, and not the advocates of such necessities to a fulfilled life as day care and paid maternity and paternity leave, on whom American security and well-being must ultimately depend.

Midge Decter is the author most recently of Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait.