The April issue of First Things is entirely a tribute to the late Richard John Neuhaus, who passed away on January 8th of this year, and it contains many wonderful pieces about him and about his legacy. You would need to be a subscriber to read the entire issue right now, but available free online are great pieces by Maria McFadden Maffucci and Midge Decter.

And then there’s also an article available online by Robert P. George which isn’t in the print issue, but is an especially fine article, called, “He Threw It All Away.” In addition to being a perceptive piece on RJN, it is a concise and profound reflection on why the terms liberal and conservative don’t necessarily mean what they used to mean, in America; that is, if they ever meant what they used to mean.

In the early 1970s, Lutheran pastor Richard John Neuhaus was poised to become the nation’s next great liberal public intellectual—the Reinhold Niebuhr of his generation. He had going for him everything he needed to be not merely accepted but lionized by the liberal establishment. First, of course, there were his natural gifts as a thinker, writer, and speaker. Then there was a set of left-liberal credentials that were second to none. He had been an outspoken and prominent civil rights campaigner, indeed, someone who had marched literally arm-in-arm with his friend Martin Luther King. He had founded one of the most visible anti-Vietnam war organizations. He moved easily in elite circles and was regarded by everyone as a “right-thinking” (i.e., left-thinking) intellectual-activist operating within the world of mainline Protestant religion.

[...]

If the pro-life position is to be counted as the “conservative” position on the question of abortion, then fidelity to the cause of the unborn is how Neuhaus became the conservative that he was. He didn’t change. His principles didn’t change. He believed in 1984 and beyond what he had believed in 1974 and 1964. For him, justice, love, and compassion all pointed to protecting every member of the human family, however young, small, and dependent. What society owed to pregnant women in need was not the ghoulish compassion of the abortionist’s knife, but the love, moral and spiritual support, and practical assistance they needed to take care of themselves and their children. As Fr. Neuhaus’s great friend, and fellow Lutheran convert to Catholicism, Fr. Leonard Klein, put it in a beautiful tribute, “Richard’s politics changed precisely because his principles did not change.”

On some issues, Neuhaus’s political views shifted because he came to doubt the wisdom and efficacy of programs and policies he had once believed in. The liberal movement’s capitulation to the abortion license and the conservative movement’s resolution to fight it opened him up to a reconsideration of where he should be—which for him meant a reconsideration of where the truth was to be found—on a variety of questions. He grew more skeptical of the bureaucratized big-government programs by which liberals sought to fight poverty and other social ills. He began to see that most of these programs were not only ineffective, but counterproductive. For a variety of reasons, statist solutions to poverty tended to increase and entrench rather than diminish it. And not unrelatedly, governmental expansion tended to weaken the institutions of civil society, above all the family and the church, on which we rely for the formation of decent, honest, responsible, civic-minded, law-abiding citizens—citizens capable of caring for themselves, their families, and people in need.

I recommend reading it all.

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