Irreplaceable

Richard John Neuhaus was an irreplaceable man. Few public intellectuals ever have expressed themselves with the same warmth, wit, and verve, and few have had the range of experience, interest and insight. How many inner city pastors could also mount a withering attack on Richard Rorty? We will have to go through the Obama years without his help, and that is a great loss.

The uniqueness of his mind is only half of it. He was irreplaceably placed. President Bush wasn’t indulging post-morten politeness when he called Neuhaus his “dear friend” and counsellor, but Neuhaus had friends on the other side of the aisle as well. Who else has counted Bush and Martin Luther King among his friends? Who else had such close associations with Popes and with Charles Colson?

There are a lot of smart people about, but only Neuhaus could have launched First Things and made it the standard of Christian journalism that it is.

I disagreed with some of Neuhaus’s most cherished principles. Long ago, I wrote a critique of The Naked Public Square challenging Neuhaus’s advocacy of an American civil religion, and I’ve also attacked the natural law theory of Neuhaus’s beloved John Courtney Murray. I did not find Neuhaus’s defenses of Roman Catholicism convincing either.

But on many of the major battles of his lifetime he was not only on the right but in the right. He was right in marching for racial justice and right again in opposing affirmative action, right in defending the unborn, right in opposing the wide-ranging post-1960s movement for sexual liberation, right in defending freedom in politics and economics, right in attacking the naked public square, right in striving to ground it all in the gospel proclamation of the kingdom of Jesus. He changed collars and traditions, but he retained the evangelical heart of his Lutheran heritage.

I met him only once, back in the early 1990s. I had written a couple of pieces for First Things and got an undesered invitation to a conference sponsored by the magazine. I’m sure Neuhaus said more to me, but what I remember him saying, when I introduced myself, is, “I thought you were older.” I have always suspected that my occasional presence in First Things is a case of mistaken identity.

I have also surmised from a distance that Neuhaus remained above all a pastor. The world was his parish, though in a different sense than John Wesley. Yet, he also seems to have attended to small things. I have only one piece of concrete evidence, but it is telling. Shortly after Emma, my second daughter and seventh child, was born, I received a brief letter from Neuhaus. Somehow he had caught wind of Emma’s birth, and wrote to commend me for being part of the reproductive revolution and to suggest whimsically that with a name like “Emma Christine Leithart,” my daughter should be a heroine of a romance novel.

I’ll remember Neuhaus’s entertaining writing, always informative and challenging even when I disagreed. I am grateful for the massive contributions Neuhaus and his circle have made to the formation of American public culture, especially among Christians.

But my main impression of Neuhaus will be of a public man, busy with Presidents and Popes, who took a moment to celebrate the birth of a child he never knew.