The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege by D Linker - Review

[applegrove]

God Squad

The Theocons:
Secular America Under Siege

by Damon Linker

Doubleday. 288 pp. $26.00

Reviewed by

Joshua Muravchik

"If you find the neocons—that much-talked-about Jewish conspiracy—scary, you will be downright terrified to learn about their Catholic cousins, the “theocons.” Although this latter cabal is almost ridiculously compact, consisting essentially of three individuals—Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, and George Weigel—the “stealth campaign” it has waged to “build . . . institutions and form . . . alliances” has been so insidiously effective as to “propel ideas into the White House.”

So argues Damon Linker after spending several years in the very belly of the beast at the theocons’ flagship journal, First Things. Ideologically, Linker informs us in this exposé, the theocons are like neocons, but with a twist. They think not only about politics but also about God, and about the relation between the two. Thus, Neuhaus, a Catholic priest and the founder and editor-in-chief of First Things, has not only worked tirelessly to infuse religious sensibilities into debates about public issues but, in Linker’s words, wishes us “to believe that God is watching and judging every act we make as individuals and as a nation.” Similarly, Novak, a Catholic thinker best known for The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1980), believes that social systems should be viewed as matrices of mutually reinforcing political, economic, and “moral-cultural” planes, in which religious ideas do and should play a big part. Weigel, the biographer of Pope John Paul II, works the foreign-policy side of the street by proposing Catholic “just war” doctrine as a framework for evaluating contemporary American decisions to employ military might.

Slavishly advancing the dictates of the Vatican, the theocons, in Linker’s judgment, already endanger the free practice of science and of birth control. If they have their way, things will become far worse. They will saddle us with “a future in which American politics and culture have been systematically purged of secularism,” in which “the separation of church and state as we have known it will cease to exist,” in which “anti-Judaism be reborn in America,” and in which “the Constitution of the United States into conformity with the moral and sexual worldview of the Vatican.” Even if they do not succeed in all this, the theocons will surely “lead us back to a world of religiously inspired social and political strife from which the American founders worked so hard to liberate us.”


..........SNIP"

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=12204080_1