Will Herberg, pluralist.

WILL HEREBERG, PLURALIST

I SIT IN Will Herberg's chair, so to speak, for he was the first religion editor of this journal. Being religion editor mainly means writing this column. It does not mean--although I've been asked about this--serving as Bill Buckley's confessor. Just as well. Hearing Mr. Buckley's confession would probably be a time-consuming task, and he would not be likely to trust absolution from a Lutheran in any case. No, the job is, as it was for Will Herberg, mainly a matter of writing. And how well and how much he wrote! Hundreds and hundreds of Herberg's articles are listed in the bibliography at the end of Harry J. Ausmus's Will Herberg: From Right to Right [see Paul Gottfried, "Other Battles to Fight," NR, Dec. 31].

Ten years after his death there is something like a Herberg renascence, sparked in part by the Ausmus biography. People are now taking another look at a most remarkable autodidact, who furiously thought his way from Marxism to Judaism. The books that are still read are Judaism and Modern Man (1951) and, better remembered, Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955). The latter is an essay in what would later come to be called the American civil religion, and much of the analysis holds up well--although the resurgence of religious particularisms and of publicly aggressive evangelicalism would have taken Herberg by surprise. Ausmus's subtitle--"From Right to Right" --refers to his contention that Herberg was always an essential conservative, searching for a "metaphysical certainty" that he first found in Marxism and then in Biblical faith. In his conclusion Ausmus argues that Herberg was deluded because he failed to see that his Judaism was as much as idol as his Marxism had been. Herberg would have made short and devastating work of such a superficial criticism. Fortunately, Ausmus's conclusion is brief and his book is long. Its great value is not in its analysis but in the abundance of information it provides about the man and the intellectual and political worlds through which he thought his way to sanity.

Almost alone among Jewish thinkers in his time, Herberg was a pluralist in his understanding of the connections between religion, moral judgment, and the social order. Granted, one of his later essays for this journal was "The Limits of Pluralism." But I think it fair to say that the pluralism he protested was the pseudo-pluralism that pretends our differences make no difference. That in fact is not pluralism but the monism of indifference to difference. Such pluralism is the open-mindedness of the empty-headed. Its proponents claim that there are not answers to moral questions; they thereby terminate the debate as surely as do those who claim there is only one answer to moral questions. Herberg was all for public moral debate, both lusty and civil. He therefore disagreed strongly with those sectors of Jewish organizational leadership that had been sold Leo Pfeffer's prejudice that the "separation of church and state" means the separation of religion and religiously grounded morality from public life.

Three decades ago, Protestants had such as Reinhold Niebuhr exploring the linkages between religion, morality, and public life, Roman Catholics had John Courtney Murray, and Jews had Herberg. Niebuhr was lionized, although liberal Protestants have largely forgotten him today. Murray, censured for a time, was vindicated by Vatican II. Herberg is yet to be discovered by most Jews. I said that Herberg was "almost alone" among Jewish thinkers. Milton Himmelfarb, formerly with the American Jewish Committee, has been making arguments similar to Herberg's over the years. More recently, neoconservatives such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, and theologians such as David Novak, have been pressing the case that the American democratic experiment cannot be sustained apart from its warrants in religious belief and tradition. But, for the most part, Jewish leadership is in thrall to the now aged Leo Pfeffer. A self-confessed "absolutist for strict separationism," Pfeffer succeeded in enlisting not only the major Jewish organizations but the Supreme Court itself in his crusade to sterilize American public life of the "taint" of religion. For four decades his litigious crusade rolled on without effective challenge. In a recent autobiographical sketch Pfeffer expresses some surprise that he was able to win so much, and acknowledges that the tide may now be turning.

'Like a Knife'

WILL HERBERG'S time may be coming around at last. This journal, then deemed to be outrageously right-wing and suspiciously Catholic (it still is deemed by some to be both), gave refuge to one who may now be reclaimed by his own, and by all of us. Jay Lovestone, the renegade Marxist, said Herberg "was like a knife--all blade--very sharp, very keen, but you can't use him, you can't get a handle on him." Widely dismissed in his later years as a hopeless reactionary, Herberg turns out to have been in the avant garde of a rebirth of vibrant pluralism. His sharp blade cut through the platitudes of mere tolerance to open the way toward an understanding of politics that is worthy of moral agents. With Aristotle, he insisted that politics is civil deliberation about how we ought to order out life together, and is therefore an inescapably moral enterprise. And he knew that that enterprise must engage the ultimate meanings by which reality is ordered. It is not comfortable, this chair of Will Herberg's, but it is a place of honor.