Richard John Neuhaus had a way of putting things. His phrase "the naked public square," for example, somehow became indispensable as soon as he coined it, jumping from his pen onto the lips of nearly everyone engaged in the American conversation about religion and politics. Of course, it was more than merely a way of putting things. Fr. Neuhaus had also a way of seeing things, of surveying landscapes and drawing connections with a logic so elegantly sharp and far-sighted that you couldn't help but see things the way he did, even if you wound up disagreeing with one or another of his conclusions.

In his last book, American Babylon, Neuhaus gives us an imaginative vision of how to be a faithful and hopeful Christian witness in American politics—a vision that will, I believe, be with us for years to come. We are in exile, Neuhaus reminds us; like Daniel and the conquered Israelite children, we disciples of Christ in America are strangers in a land that is not our home. And yet, like those Old Testament exiles, we too have a sure and certain hope that goes far deeper than any defeat or disappointment: we look toward our true home, the New Jerusalem. Even now, we catch glimpses of the coming Kingdom—in the church, in the surprising work of the Spirit throughout creation, and especially in the Eucharist. And so for as long as we dwell here, in the land of our exile, we are freed to live in hope and work without despair for the peace of our American Babylon, because we know that in the end it does not depend on us—it is all simply time toward home.

In a sense, the entire book is a drawing-out of the meaning of that vision. It is, of course, far from original to Neuhaus to speak of the Christian as homo viator, man-on-the-way caught up in the tension between the now and the not-yet, and that is just as Neuhaus wants it. His vision draws deeply from the wells of Scripture and the early church, particularly from Augustine's City of God. What American Babylon does is to gather the insights of this tradition as only Neuhaus could and, with his signature clarity and boldness, bring them to bear on the church in American public life today.

Perhaps of first importance is the warning of the book's title itself—that American Christians must recognize that they are in fact in exile; that America is far more like Babylon than the kingdom of God. It is very important, he argues, to get straight on this point. Historically, American Christians have suffered from what he calls an "ecclesiological deficit, leading to an ecclesiological substitution of America for the church through time." And from this has come all manner of trouble—the misadventures and excesses of the old Puritan "errand into the wilderness" (an ongoing temptation for a "redeemer nation" that tends to exchange God's work of salvation for the idea of "progress"), and the various and sundry ways in which Americans have sought to worship the spirit of their wondrous selves, summed up best of all in Emerson's self-reliant religion and Whitman's song of himself.

The antidote to our gnosticism, Neuhaus claims, is a fuller and richer understanding of the Church as the body of Christ, not simply the spirit. The Church (with a capital C) must be viewed as not notional but real, as the "contrast society" to the secular world around us, claiming our first allegiance and supplying the primary narrative in which we make sense of our lives. Mainline Protestants and evangelicals alike, Neuhaus argues, all too often stand indicted on this count. Whether our flags are planted on the political right or left, to place America first in our hearts is to corrupt both Christian faith and authentic politics, and to forget that "we have here no abiding city."

At this point, some less careful readers of Neuhaus might be surprised. After all, wasn't he a cheerleader for the American right, enamored of militarism and state power? As Ross Douthat has noted, we may hope that this distorted picture of Neuhaus will come to be seen as a product of the irrational spasms of the Bush years. Neuhaus' longtime friend Stanley Hauerwas, in an excellent and generous review of American Babylon in First Things, wrote that their admittedly sharp disagreements never ran as deep as their commonalities. "If Richard was ever forced to choose between his loyalty to Church or America," Hauerwas explained, he was in no doubt that Neuhaus "would choose the Church," even though Hauerwas believed that choice should come sooner than his friend thought. Throughout his work and no less in American Babylon, Neuhaus put his Church and his Lord before his country, and for Hauerwas that was enough to issue a sharp "challenge to those who too quickly dismiss Richard Neuhaus as a propagandist for the American right."

Of course, Hauerwas and Neuhaus certainly had their differences, and readers of American Babylon will not find them difficult to discern. While Hauerwas' vision of Christians in American public life centered on the phrase "resident aliens," Neuhaus preferred the locution "alien citizens"—an emphasis that fell more on our citizenship in the city of man than Hauerwas liked. If one side of the book warns against substituting America for the church, the other side warns against dismissing our country as simply the Babylonian whore, full stop.

Neuhaus had long claimed that he planned to "meet God as an American." The point of this provocation wasn't to prop up an uncritical jingoism. In American Babylon, as elsewhere, Neuhaus simply argues that our national identity is an inescapable and not insignificant part of who we are, and that certain responsibilities go along with our citizenship. Neuhaus and Hauerwas agreed that the "first responsibility of the Church is to be the Church," but Neuhaus was always more ready to think aloud about what we owe as Christians to communities other than the Church.

He was also much more willing to think about the place of such communities in the "story of the world," meaning the story of God's providence. While ever wary of the dangers to which providential thinking about America has led in the past, Neuhaus argues that such discernment is a necessary and unavoidable part of thinking theologically about what it means to be not only a Christian but also an American, or a New Yorker, or a member of this school board or this family. Done rightly, such thinking does not lead to hubris but rather to a properly humble wisdom about our vocation, national and otherwise.

How then should we Christians participate in the public life of our American Babylon, the land of our exile? The chief political contribution of the Church, Neuhaus claims, is "to provide a transcendent horizon for our civil arguments, to temper the passionate confusions of the political ultimate with the theological ultimate, and to insist that our common humanity and gift of reason are capable of deliberating how we ought to order our life together."

The first part here is crucial. Without the sense that we as a nation are answerable to a higher judgment than our own, we are all too apt to fall prey to the sin of national hubris. What's more, we lose the prophetic language that has stood behind so many of our national reforms—it's no accident that black Americans like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke as Christians calling the nation to account for their sins. America is not now and never has been merely a "secular nation," bound by no more than the Lockean social contract. More than that, our Puritan heritage has always reminded us of our compact with God, who "created equal" all men and women and is the transcendent source of human dignity.

If we go wrong on the foundational question of human dignity, Neuhaus thinks, we're likely to go wrong on much else as well. Abortion had long been Neuhaus' first political concern, and in American Babylon he warns of what it means to have forgotten the basic dignity of the smallest and weakest among us. As manifested most famously in the 1996 "End of Democracy" forum in First Things, Neuhaus worried deeply about the anti-political implications of an imperial judiciary voiding both the deliberative decisions of the states and the right to life of the unborn. We desperately need to renew a sense of the transcendent dignity of every human person, Neuhaus thought, as well as the knowledge that America is not its own ultimate arbiter but instead stands finally "under God." Neuhaus knew his Tocqueville: both the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of the minority are dangers into which a secular totalism can otherwise fall.

Beyond the transcendent horizon it offers for civil engagement, the Church's next great contribution is to insist that our commonly held "gift of reason" enables us to deliberate together about politics. Here, Neuhaus draws upon the Catholic natural-law tradition and figures like C.S. Lewis to argue that since we are all fashioned in God's image, we can all converse together about how to order our lives, regardless of religious or moral background. For Neuhaus, public enemy #1 was the pragmatic liberal ironist Richard Rorty, who (along with Alasdair MacIntyre's "barbarians") rejects both God and public reason.

Of course, Neuhaus thought that all atheists, not just Rorty, have a harder time accounting for where the gift of reason comes from, as well as the sense of transcendent judgment, human dignity, and our compact with God that are so central to American identity. What's more, Neuhaus rightly points out that most Americans, when asked about the source of their morality, will point to religion, and most often to Judaism or Christianity. Hence Neuhaus argues that the public philosophy by which American politics is guided should be "religiously grounded" in the Judeo-Christian moral tradition—otherwise, given the religious beliefs of most Americans, it simply will not be democratic.

That might sound frightening to non-believers, and there have been more than a few critics who have accused Neuhaus of advocating "theocracy." In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Drawing on Catholic teaching documents such as Dignitatis Humanae and Redemptoris Missio, Neuhaus consistently maintained that "the Church always proposes, never imposes." He not only applauded but actively promoted the Catholic Church's support of liberal democracy after Vatican II, especially as found in Pope John Paul II's encyclical Centesimus Annus. One weakness of American Babylon is that Neuhaus does not give here a fuller account of why Christians ought to support liberal democracy. Readers will likely want to go back to past essays for a richer portrayal of Neuhaus' politics (as listed below). For Neuhaus, theocracy was out of the question due to the nature of Christian truth itself, which always comes in the form of a gracious invitation addressed to the free human person. Political liberalism, because of its respect for human freedom, is thus the form of government that accords best with Christian faith.

Another weakness of the book, perhaps, is the conflict between Neuhaus' insistence on the importance of natural law and his claims about the place of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the American experiment. To what extent are the truths of "Nature and Nature's God" really self-evident to all Americans, and to what extent do they become clear only by catechesis and formation in a communal tradition, like that of the Church? Additionally, to what extent does the free-wheeling nature of liberalism itself eat away at the transcendent truths on which Neuhaus argues liberalism depends? It might be argued that the insouciant and self-worshipful nihilism of Richard Rorty is, in fact, the natural outcome of liberal democracy.

Neuhaus of course was well aware of such concerns; indeed, they were at the heart of some of his deepest disputes with figures such as MacIntyre and Hauerwas. At one point during the book, he considers the troubling question as to whether or not America is genuinely a polis capable of communal deliberation, only to set the question aside. Neuhaus knew well that although his politics and religion genuinely had not changed much since the beginning of his career, America's had. His work to build bridges between Catholics and evangelicals stemmed in part from a concern that the vital place in American public life once held by orthodox religion was being displaced by a secular élite, guided by the public philosophy of the likes of Richard Rorty and Peter Singer. America, Neuhaus thought, had always subsisted on the moral capital provided by Judaism and Christianity, which for a time had genuinely been the "mainline" of the nation. But when the "mainline" of American public life—Protestant, Catholic, and Jew—became the sideline, what would become of the American experiment?

Hence, perhaps, the title of his book, American Babylon, and its subtitle Notes of a Christian Exile. Neuhaus was more and more an exile toward the end of his life, and looking into the future he may have seen a Church that would find itself to be more and more like Daniel and the Israelite children, singing the songs of Zion in a foreign land.

That, of course, would not have dimmed the hope that sustained Neuhaus one bit. The last chapter of his last book is a beautiful, profound, and deeply moving meditation on the nature of Christian hope, beyond all hopelessness and despair. No matter where we find ourselves, Neuhaus assures us, our job is simply to propose to all the world the reason for the hope that is within us—the resurrected Lord of lords and King of kings, Jesus Christ.

I cannot pretend that this is an impartial review. In the year I worked at First Things until his death, Fr. Neuhaus became my mentor, spiritual guide, and friend. I proudly count myself among the many, many lives that he touched, and I know that I will carry around his wisdom and his example for the rest of my life. There is a passage from this book that I believe I will never forget:

"It has been said that there are no permanently lost causes because there are no permanently won causes, and the reverse is also true. The young person starting out will, in due course, be the old person ending up, and the success of a life will be measured by whether it is lived in, and courageously contended for, the continuing community claimed by truth beyond our sure possession except by the faith, hope, and love that require nothing less than everything."

I do not think it could be better said. Not only with this book but with his life, Richard John Neuhaus showed us how to contend faithfully for life, truth, justice, and hope in a world that all too often looks like Babylon. May we follow his example in this land of our exile, until one day we are reunited in the New Jerusalem that we seek.

Jordan Hylden, a former junior fellow at First Things, is a graduate student at Duke Divinity School.

For Further Reading:

"The Liberalism of John Paul II" (FT, May '97).

"Christianity and Democracy" (FT, Oct. '96).

"Why We Can Get Along" (FT, Feb. '96).

"Why Wait for the Kingdom? The Theonomist Temptation" (FT, May '90).

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