Religion: Again, God's Country

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"When I meet God, I expect to meet him as an American." Though that may sound like a boast by Babbitt, it comes from the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, an outspoken critic of the Viet Nam War and America's indifference to the poor. But Neuhaus, 39, a white pastor of a largely black Lutheran church in Brooklyn, has always kept everyone off balance. When he led his parish in an antiwar protest service in 1967, he insisted that the youths who were turning in their draft cards join in a lusty chorus of America the Beautiful.

To Neuhaus, it is only natural to think of meeting God as an American, since nationality is part of one's identity. In his new book, Time Toward Home: The American Experiment as Revelation (Seabury; $9.50), he goes well beyond that. He thinks Americans must accept moral responsibility for their citizenship, and if they do, "America may yet prove to be, as the founders hoped, a blessing and not a curse to the nations of the earth." Neuhaus believes "God has a hand in the American experiment." Such thinking in the past has led to cocksure identification of God's will with whatever the U.S. happened to be doing. But Neuhaus explains that God's "covenant" with America is only a part of his involvement with all of history. The idea of an American covenant dates from the New England Puritans, who combined the biblical teaching of God's covenant with Israel with an assertion of America's special role in preparing for the millennium.

Belief in God's covenant with America, Neuhaus thinks, leads not to arro gance but to humility, since the nation is continually held accountable to judgment by the Almighty. The covenant idea can also restore the faith in the future that once characterized the U.S. Neuhaus contends that if Americans lose the belief that God is working toward a culmination, history is seen as purposeless. He worries that America's intellectual leaders are so "emancipated" from religion that spiritual questions are cloaked in secular terms like "national purpose." Thus discussion of public policy is "floundering in moral evasiveness and mendacity." Neuhaus scorns the "vulgar anti-Americanism" of many intellectuals and says that because they are divorced from the American experience, they feel no need to repent personally of the nation's sins.

Besides the secular intellectuals, Neuhaus has little regard for those religious intellectuals who are still "obsequiously accommodating to cultural moods" rather than asserting "religious truth claims." A dramatic protest against such cultural entrapment of theology was fashioned by a group that Neuhaus and his friend, Sociologist Peter Berger, assembled in Hartford, Conn., last winter (TIME, Feb. 10). Neuhaus and his Hartford colleagues last month concluded a second meeting, at which a book of essays was planned to follow up their "Hartford Appeal." As he has done in his current book, Neuhaus will call for a "reconstruction" of American theology, which he considers essential to the moral cohesion without which a nation eventually collapses.