Politics & Power Quote by Richard John Neuhaus

Neuhaus is drawing a hard line between a church that merely echoes and a church that risks saying something costly. The jab lands because it name-checks two editorial pages that symbolize rival secular orthodoxies: the New York Times on one side, National Review on the other. By pairing them, he flattens the culture war’s supposed polarity into a single category: ambient opinion. If your pulpit is just a sanctified version of whatever tribe you already read, the church becomes redundant, a lifestyle brand with hymns.

The intent is not anti-intellectualism; it’s anti-substitution. Neuhaus spent his career arguing that modern public life tries to treat religion as either private sentiment or political accessory. Here he’s warning churches against accepting that demotion by competing as one more commentator in the marketplace of takes. “Truth” in his framing isn’t fresh messaging or better vibes; it’s a claim that arrives from outside the culture’s permission structure, something you can’t reliably derive from elite institutions, however persuasive.

The subtext is also a critique of clerical anxiety: the temptation to stay respectable by mirroring the educated consensus, whether progressive or conservative. Neuhaus is daring religious leaders to be unpopular in a specific way - not by reflexively contrarian posturing, but by speaking from a theological center of gravity that can judge both the Times and National Review rather than audition for either. In late-20th-century America, when churches were increasingly sorted into partisan lanes, that’s a provocation with teeth.