Richard John Neuhaus

Compelling piece in the New Republic about who exactly is behind the push to replace reason with Middle Ages superstition:

Whether or not the recent prominence of religiosity in the nation's public life signals that America is undergoing a new Great Awakening, it is undeniable that the rise of the Republican Party to electoral dominance in the past generation has been greatly aided by the politicization of culturally alienated traditionalist Christians. Countless press reports in recent years have noted that much of the religious right's political strength derives from the exertions of millions of anti-liberal evangelical Protestants. Much less widely understood is the more fundamental role of a small group of staunchly conservative Catholic intellectuals in providing traditionalist Christians of any and every denomination with a comprehensive ideology to justify their political ambitions. In the political economy of the religious right, Protestants supply the bulk of the bodies, but it is Catholics who supply the ideas.

Several Catholic writers have contributed to fashioning a potent governing philosophy for traditionalist Christians, but the one who has exercised the greatest influence on the ideological agenda of the religious right is Richard John Neuhaus--a Catholic convert from Lutheranism, and a priest who for the past two decades has attempted to lead an interdenominational religious insurgency against the secular drift of American politics and culture since the 1960s. In his voluminous but remarkably consistent writings, Neuhaus has sought nothing less than to reverse the fortunes of traditionalist religion in modern America--to teach conservative Christians how to place liberal modernity, once and for all, on the defensive. Any attempt to come to terms with the religious challenge to secular politics in contemporary America must confront Neuhaus's enormously ambitious and increasingly influential enterprise.

If it gains enough political power, of course, we can count on this absolutist political force once again focusing on its first and undying priority: the suppression of heresy.