Richard John Neuhaus, writing at First Things:
Among the models laid out by H. Richard Niebuhr in his book Christ and Culture is the “Christ without culture”—meaning Christianity indifferent to culture. That would seem to produce a circumstance in which religion is impervious to culture and culture impervious to religion. But, in fact, it results in religion’s acquiescing to the culture’s demand that religion confine itself to the sphere of privacy. Gnosticism may not be the right word for the result, but the word is the one Harold Bloom uses in The American Religion for a religion of the self. It is a seductive way of accommodating differences by declaring a truce in contentions over truth . . .
If, as I suggested last week, we are heading into a greatly intensified public clash of state power and religious freedom, something not entirely unlike the Kulturkampf attempted by Bismarck in the nineteenth century, Christian leadership is ill prepared for the battles ahead . . .
