Father Richard John Neuhaus spoke last Thursday at the Memorial Chapel on the topic of “Religionized Politics, Politicized Religion.” Neuhaus believes it is impossible to make an absolute separation between religion and politics.
“[The separation] is contrived,” he said. “In a thousand different times and a thousand different ways, you cannot separate politics from religion.”
The difference between the two, according to Neuhaus, is that religion represents the ultimate, and politics the penultimate.
“[Religion is] a comprehensive account of how reality really is and how our lives should be,” he said.
The talk focused on the First Amendment separation of church and state. Neuhaus claimed people mean radically different things when they talk about such a separation. He argued that the First Amendment does not mandate a separation; instead it calls for the protection of the right to exercise religion.
“[The point is] not to protect the State from the Church, but the Church from the State,” he said.
Neuhaus maintained that religion has shaped American public life.
“The abolition of slavery was powerfully driven by Christian understandings of dignity,” he said.
Neuhaus also mentioned how civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., with whom Neuhaus worked for four years before King’s death, often puzzled over why the portrayal of the civil rights movement was sanitized of its religious substance.
Neuhaus argued that the field of politics is essentially a moral enterprise. In his opinion, while politics may not always be morally edifying, it deals with moral questions and consequences. He stated that politics is a function of culture, that morality is at the heart of culture, and that religion is at the heart of morality.
The talk also addressed current high-profile issues. Roe v. Wade, Neuhaus said, has produced, along with other issues such as euthanasia, capital punishment and eugenics, a polarization between politics and religion.
He stressed that there must never be a situation where a religious answer is imposed on a political question, especially in regard to the aforementioned issues.
“One of the greatest failures of religious leaders is to pronounce on things on which they have no legitimacy or warrant,” he said, citing the National Association of Evangelicals who he sees as using its power to serve preferred political ends.
The talk also examined the boundaries Christianity and Islam draw between religion and politics. Neuhaus said that there is a very clear difference between what is sacred and profane or political and apolitical in Christianity. He questioned Islam’s capacity to make the distinction between the ultimate and the penultimate, between politics and religion.
Neuhaus ended his talk by stating that society is constantly in the process of being tested and that ideals are unfortunately often compromised by political coalitions.
Audience members then posed questions on several topics including the state’s relation to marriage and Christianity’s position on homosexuality.
“Neuhaus is a very provocative thinker,” said Gabe Tabak ’06. “Although I don’t agree with his rationale, his views on where to draw lines between religion and politics were well-reasoned. I was also glad to hear him express his views on religion’s role in capital punishment and the relationship between American Christians and Israel.”
Neuhaus is the President of the Institution on Religion and Public Life and editor of “First Things,” a conservative journal of religion, culture, and public life. He was recently named one of the world’s most influential religious thinkers by Time magazine, and one of the 32 most influential intellectuals in the United States by the U.S. News and World Report.
His lecture was the third and final lecture in the “Evangelicalism, Conservatism, and the Future of American Politics” series organized by the Christian Studies Cluster, and supported by the Edward W. Snowdon Fund, the Catholic Chaplain, American Studies Program, and the Departments of Government, History, Religion, and Sociology.
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