I recently stumbled across a piece by Damon Linker—one not related to the burning question “Would you like your daughter to be a whore?”†—that intrigued me to the point of tracking down and reading his little book The Theocons, published back in 2006, telling the tale of Richard John Neuhaus and the First Things gang, with a fair amount of attention given to Michael Novak and George Wiegel, both linked, though not exclusively, to the National Review. Linker describes the efforts of a handful of religious enthusiasts to reshape the American political scene relying on concepts explicitly drawn from traditional Catholic theology, and if you have half my appetite for political backstory, you’ll probably like Linker’s book.
When Linker wrote his book, the influence of the theocons had reached its peak under George Bush and in fact was starting to decline, tied as they were to the Bush Administration, which was entering what was to be one of the most spectacular declines in recent history. Linker subtitled his book “Secular America under siege,” which, even in the salad days immediately following Bush’s re-election, was a bit of a stretch. Eight years later, we secular types are entitled to a snigger or two, and I won’t hesitate to indulge myself.
The sheer/mere existence of a theocon “movement” was due almost entirely to the limitless energy of Neuhaus, but I was never impressed by his arguments. First Things struck me as what happens when people have too much time on their hands. I recall reading a piece by Neuhaus struggling to say something positive about Mormonism. If Neuhaus had been the orthodox Catholic he pretended to be, he would have said that Mormonism was a ludicrous and damnable heresy and nothing more. But of course he couldn’t say that. And so he hemmed and he hawed until I stopped reading.
I saw Michael Novak speak when I was a student at Oberlin College in the late sixties. The first thing that anyone who met Novak would notice, and the last thing that they would mention, was that he was strikingly effeminate. He had the highest pitched voice I have ever heard on a man. Back in the Dub-ya years, manliness was very much the fashion on the right, and to read Novak’s lush effusions on such two-fisted topics as the Super Bowl was always good for a snicker or two. The last thing I read by Novak was a passionate defense of disgraced Penn State football coach Joe Paterno. He seems to have lapsed into silence since then, or else I’m just not bothering to pay attention.
Unrepentant secular humanists like me can only chuckle at the plight of the theocons since Linker published his little book. The theocon dream of Catholicizing America has gone about as well as the neocon dream of Americanizing the Middle East. Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, the theocon pope, who in fact was very closely linked to the theocons, was basically forced out of office. His replacement, Pope Francis, is very much the opposite of a theocon, downplaying the Church’s brief enthusiasm for capitalism, aggressively pushed by Novak in particular, in favor of the Church’s traditional emphasis on charity.
In the U.S., the Catholic Church has stumbled from one sex scandal to the next. I strongly suspect that in a generation or two the Catholic Church in the U.S. will become entirely Hispanic. European ethnics will discover they have more in common culturally with their secularized Protestant and Jewish neighbors than they do with their brothers and sisters in Christ.
*Unless you’re Orthodox, you’re probably not getting this. The Dormition of the Theotokos, literally “the Sleep of the Mother of God,” refers to the Death and Salvation of Mary, what the Catholics call the Assumption (of Mary into heaven). The feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos occurs on August 15.
†Netiquette requires that I link to this, but, frankly, I just don’t give a damn.
