The raging debate about the religious underpinning of Islamic State, and the president’s divisive habit of invoking Christianity in other misdeeds along the way, reminds us that Catholic thinker Richard John Neuhaus was basically right when he said in 2000 that the U.S. is “an incorrigibly and confusedly religious nation.” Through decades of preaching, writing and marching, he had explored religion’s permanently controversial place in American life.
Neuhaus is best remembered as a prominent Catholic priest, neoconservative intellectual, personal counselor to George W. Bush and influential ally of Pope John Paul II. In 1990 he converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism amid Cold War-era changes in American Christianity, U.S. party politics and society, including differing stances on the value of religious liberty and the role of churches in domestic and international affairs. He took up these matters in the pages of First Things, the magazine he founded the year he converted, for which he wrote a 10,000-word monthly column until his death in 2009.
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