I spent all day yesterday with a good group at the office of First Things magazine in New York City. It was a seminar put together by editor Rusty Reno to discuss the future of religion in the public square in what everybody agrees is a meaningfully different era from the one in which the ministries of the late Richard John Neuhaus and Chuck Colson rose to prominence. It was hard to be in that room today and not feel the presence of those two men, if only because their passing came at the end of a hopeful era for socially conservative Christians. The overall sense I got from the conference today is that everybody is intensely concerned and pessimistic about the future, though there were significant differences of degree in the pessimism (more on which in a moment).
It was an important conference, I think, and I’m encouraged that First Things hosted it. The magazine was the flagship intellectual journal for engaged religious conservatives in Neuhaus’s day, and if it hasn’t quite had that stature in the post-Neuhaus era, it is mostly, in my view, because the disaster of the Iraq War and the failed Bush administration, in both of which the magazine was implicated, as well as the overwhelming cultural tide in favor of same-sex marriage, has left all of us on the religious and social right dazed and confused about the best way forward. I am encouraged to see First Things moving to regain its position. The challenges we face now are very different from the challenges Team Neuhaus faced, and the answers are much less clear.
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