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The Naked Public Square

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No one writes like Neuhaus on current issues of religion and politics. A former Lutheran minister and now a Catholic priest, he has been on both sides of the Protestant/Catholic divide. This gives him a unique perspective on issues of common concern to all, and has placed him in the forefront of ecumenical efforts. I highly recomend this book as an investigation of how religion has been marginalized by the modern misinterpretation of the First Amendment's "no establishment" clause, thus leaving our Public Square bereft of foundational values

Richard Neuhaus' The Naked Public Square can be summed up no better than the quote that is on the front of the book: "The book from which further debate about church-state relations should begin."

The book's contents are not for the young or those with short attention spans: however, his point is excellent, and twenty years after the writing of this book, Richard Neuhaus appears to have hit the nail square on the head.

The primary purpose of The Naked Public Square is to alert the reader to the coming of a new era in the United States. The era is not good or new: instead it is an evil that, here, now, sweeps across portions of the world. Europe, Russia and China seem to have already fallen victim to it, and the United States is the last great world power to meet it.

The terror is, of course, this naked public square. It is naked because it is without overarching belief, consensus, personal morality, or real, organized religion. It's a place where God cannot be mentioned, where vicious revenge is taken on any individual or group that may attempt to bring their religion or worldview into the mainstream. It's a place where the law needs only the justification of power to hold it's place, where the authority of the Bible, the church, God, and all other things that lay claim to authority not of this world are scorned as "intolerant." This naked public square indoctrinates every man to believe everything spiritual is relative, and that it is wrong, pointless, rude or all three to convince another individual to think his way. Religion is prevented from becoming solidly organized as a force that could challenge the moral legitimacy of the government or the culture-forming, powerful elite of society. Neuhaus says it would be enforced by the least likely of people: libertarian judges.

Though all of this seems rather depressing, Neuhaus reminds us that this naked public square is not unavoidable. This is a time of turmoil and a time when this country can choose a direction, and we must choose before someone else chooses for us.

The Naked Public Square is thought provoking, deep, interesting, and packing a huge dose of truth. I would recommend that every American or European read it to enlighten themselves and to remember its message every time they go to the polls.

For $ 1 in a clearance bin I found a signed copy of Richard John Neuhaus' famous 1986 book The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (2d. ed.). This is one of those books I had seen cited hundreds of time in legal scholarship on religious freedom but hadn't actually read until now, though I enjoyed reading (and completely disagreeing with) Neuhaus' work in First Things until his recent death.

The central thesis of the book is that liberal democracies cannot survive with a "public square" (i.e., public debate and discourse about political and social issues) that is divorced from religion. According to Neuhaus, the shared conception of morality and values is what binds disparate people together and provides legitimacy to the results of the democratic process. In the absence of this shared morality, something else will step in to fill the void: the state as a totalitarian project.

I think what I like most about the book is that Neuhaus really strives to be fair. The book is not a polemic against liberalism and Neuhaus has a great sense of the internal debates that go on within liberalism, fundamentalism, and mainstream Christianity. The book is also deeper and more encompassing than you might think from citations made to it: it's as much a warning about the rise of the "new religious right" as it is about secularism.

It's definitely worth reading, even if you can't find it for a buck. The only disclaimer I'll make is that some chapters show an ugly anti-gay sentiment and (from my post-Cold War perspective) a surprising paranoia about Communism.

The late Richard John Neuhaus published this seminal work on religion and democracy in 1986 to disprove the myth of a "secular America" that leaves no room for religion or religious values in the public square. Considered by many to be Neuhaus's magnum opus, The Naked Public Square argues that America's values will not stand when they are divorced from religion.

Contemporary secularists, believing that the Constitution erects a wall of separation between the Church and State, argue that religion must be removed from the American public square in order to respect the intentions of the founders. If such a path of action is undertaken, an "ominous secular silence" will according to Neuhaus arise whenever we ask by what authority new laws are enacted (p. 248). The removal of religion from American public life will further undermine those absolute truths that have kept society together over the centuries, for "The assertion that binds together otherwise different causes is the claim that only a transcendent, a religious, vision can turn this society from certain disaster and toward the fulfillment of its destiny" (p. 79).

Neuhaus argues that the reforms that have been undertaken in America since the war for independence, including the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement, have been rooted in the religious thinking of leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Abraham Lincoln, the "foremost theologian of the American experiment" (p. 61). America could not be where it is today, and we would not enjoy the freedoms that we have today, without the inspiration of religion in the public square.

The Naked Public Square, together with the Institute on Religion and Public Life and its ecumenical journal First Things, which Neuhaus founded, is a seminal work that has advanced the place of religion in American public life.

This book put my faith to the test: Can I be in the world, but not of it? Neuhaus' "naked public square" refers to the public spaces in American life, which are naked or empty because religion and religious values have been systematically excluded from the public arena and from determination of public policy. This book should be given to every politician-does anyone have a few hundred thousand dollars so we can do that? Get the book and learn how you can clothe the naked public square.

I do not agree with everything that Neuhaus says, but when you read what he writes you will see his perspective laid out clearly and can make up your own mind.

John Richard Neuhaus is one of the leading intellectuals in the United States today, specially concerning issues of religion and state. The argument he makes in this book is the one he has been defending since the 90's in the journal he edits, First Things. This argument has become the mainstream in the agenda of the neoconservative movement and the Republican Party, as much as it has been adopted by the religious right.

That argument can be synthesized as it follows: the secular state has pushed religion out of the public square, depraving it of the only element capable of giving meaning and morality to what he calls "the American experiment". While the founders of the nation were for this separation between religion and politics, Neuhaus contends, they also expected that government role was limited, and that religion itself could work to provide that sense of morality (or what is called the "republican virtue"). But since the state has grown and invaded spheres where it had no jurisdiction initially (like education or courts), to promote a secular view of morality - which Neuhaus claims is incompatible with the will of most of the American people-, it is necessary to rethink the state of things concerning the debate of Church and State in the US. This new "civic religion" based on pure secular principles not only goes against the will of the people, not also is an attempt to purge religions from the public square (living it "naked"), but at the end will push the state to become totalitarian (since Neuhaus claims that the essence of totalitarism, resides in the absolute power of the state, which is the result of removing religion out of the competing powers in a society, and creating a government based on pure utilitarian reason, without the support of transcendent based morality).

In this context, the appearance of the new religious right in the US must not surprise us. Only certain aspects of the secular elite - the media, the academia and the politicians- can be surprised with this, because they have become elitist and learned to despise the importance of popular movements. Nor the furious rhetoric of the religious right should scare us: it may have horrible anti-intellectual anti democratic tone but the essence of their demands is what we should look. And that is, the demand that religion is included back into the discussion in the public square, that religion is part of citizens more cherished convictions and that it cannot be ignored by the elites that rule the country; it is anti democratic. To illustrate his point, Neuhaus uses the cases of slavery, civil rights and abortion. All of this disputes that are political, are disputes about distinct moral positions that require the discussion of religious values mixed in the debates. In this sense, Neuhaus call is not only a criticism of the "secularists" that want to imagine a country is a secular country when it is not, but also of the members of the religious right, who have voiced their demands in a language that is essentially private, when those demands demand that they are made in a language that must be public (since they are made in the public square).

The criticism of Neuhaus in this instance is very sharp, since it goes around to see the way the church has assumed church and state relations. It finds that many churches have decided to simply go into exile to show their repulsion of the world, or when they try to participate in politics, they do it with the conviction of imposing their own view of Christianity to others (theocracy). Nuehaus calls for a more "modest" approach, based on an amillenialist understanding of the coming back of the kingdom of God. The idea is that while it is true that Christians now for a fact that the kingdom of God will be set on earth, and thus a Christian order of the world, Christians don't know when this is going to happen; and not only they don't know, but the imperfection of the church prior to the advent of the Kingdom of God, sure make em more humble. They know the truth, but they should not have the right to impose it on others. For that reason Neuhaus calls to Christians to participate in the political world, in the sense of compromise with the "American experiment", which was initially a Christian intend to create a new community of believers. For this Nuehaus revises Christian thought on the matter, and finds that while it is true that Christians are right to be suspicious of the state - it was the state that killed Jesus- and there are biblical references to the state as a source of evil - Revelations 13-, there is also a tradition of Christian thinking that gives legitimacy to the "terrene powers". From Paul (Romans 13) to Origins and Eusebius, there is a line of thought to the church to compromise with earthly affairs.

My main objection to Neuhaus is, as an atheist, the validity of his claim that "moral claims require the existence of God in which to base them". If this premise does not hold water, and thinkers since Plato (see the Eutrypho) don't think it holds, the whole building of the argument father Neuhaus is making crumbles. That is the main problem, but there are others. If it is true that the church makes authoritive claims about the world, which are believed to be true, then there is no true space for the compromise a democracy demands. True cannot be negotiated: it is or it is not. Despise all the efforts of Neuhaus, I don't see how he can resolve this problem. Finally, one of the things that bothers me most, is the way Neuhaus tries to excuse the rhetoric of the religious right, that is not simply offensive or not polite, but simply it's a call for aggression with anybody who disagrees with their agenda.