| The aim of this dissertation was to examine the relevance of arguments made by Richard John Neuhaus in terms of the contemporary debate involving American church-state relations. Central to Neuhaus's work was his thesis regarding the implications of a completely secular public square in which particularist religion was excluded explicitly from public affairs-- "the naked public square." Neuhaus believed that a naked public square could not be maintained either in theory -- given the essential connection between religion and politics -- or in practice -- because the vacuum created by the absence of traditional religion would be filled by an ersatz religion which ultimately was a recipe for totalitarianism in which the state became all-in-all. In such a condition, the very tenets of democracy such as freedom, civility, and tolerance lacked any substantive foundation.;The primary conduit through which the public square was becoming "naked," according to Neuhaus, was the judiciary whose jurisprudence had denuded religion's public influence as well as divorced the law from it proper mooring (a morality grounded in biblical religion). By 1996, Neuhaus's dissatisfaction with the courts culminated in a movement calling into question the viability of the American regime. Thus, what started in the 1980s as a movement to re-establish American democratic liberalism to its proper religious footings by the 1990s had evolved to openly questioning whether the democratic experiment itself had failed.;In assessing the relative success of Neuhaus's project, the conclusion reached was that while Neuhaus seemed to have had an influence within elite levels (of academic thought and to some extent within government), his project was largely unsuccessful in harnessing a popularly-based insurgency movement given that the characteristics of the "incorrigibly-religious" populace he counted upon undermined his efforts.;Neuhaus's solution to the naked public square entailed a first-principle re-examination of the role of religion in American public life. What was needed was the re-instantiation of a theonomous civil public square inclusive of a substantive religious voice that was (1) transcendently-based, (2) ecumenical in nature, and (3) grounded in natural moral law. Only this kind of voice could reassert itself as the value-bearing aspect of culture. |
