For all his writings and public interventions, Neuhaus will be most remembered for The Naked Public Square. Twenty-five years after its publication, arguments for and against his conclusion—that what’s needed to revive American public life are the rightly ordered roles of both church and state, correcting each other’s tendencies to exert influence beyond their respective writs—are amply evident in the sharply divided contours of current American politics and culture. He takes up this situation in American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile. Though not as substantial as The Naked Public Square, it complements the earlier book’s concerns and approach. Once again, he criticizes the religious right, less for being religious or right wing than for being crude and self-defeating in its efforts to inform politics with Christian principles, which, he contends, has frequently led to “the political corruption of Christian faith and the religious corruption of authentic politics.” He recognizes that his own signal work has influenced these efforts by inspiring conservative Christians in the wrong direction—to demand that American political and cultural life reside in an emphatically sacred public square. He argues instead that “the sacred public square is [only] located in the New Jerusalem,” heaven itself, while “the best that can be done in Babylon is to maintain, usually with great difficulty, a civil public square” where the role of religion is neither rejected on principle nor overwhelming in its own presence.

Making a case for a healthy, thoughtful relationship between religion and public life, he offers commentaries on the writings of America’s founding fathers and Biblical passages, analyses of progressive and conservative political movements, autobiographical observations, and critical readings of various post-Enlightenment thinkers, particularly the late American philosopher Richard Rorty. Indeed, Neuhaus sets his vision of what it means to live meaningfully in the here and now in contradistinction to Rorty’s. Through a detailed commentary on Rorty’s thought, he reveals a witty, sophisticated, absolute emptiness at its core: “Nothing is loved for itself except the self; there is no good beyond the self, never mind a summum bonum. All is instrumental to self-creation.” To Rorty’s call for a self-consciously radical post-religious individualism—which, Neuhaus contends, enjoys great traction among both contemporary secular elites and an increasingly secularized general population—he responds, “A self that has only instrumental relations to other selves would seem, however, to be a pitiably shriveled self.”

Neuhaus’s own sense of self proceeds from a religious account of the human person. Invoking in its subtitle Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, his final book is likewise concerned with the situation of someone who’s intensely conscious of being apart from his society, in this case because he regards himself, first and last, as a Christian. He simultaneously recognizes that he’s a citizen, which carries expectations, challenges, and responsibilities that do not immediately or easily align with his religious identity, nor should they. And so the question is, how does someone live out these distinct but inevitably related identities? This carries even more weight because of the stakes: how we live out the time of our earthly exile matters because of our spiritual responsibility to do right unto others, and because our actions in this mortal life will be judged in eternal life. At the end of the book, Neuhaus draws together our daily duties as citizens and our eternal expectations through an extended treatment of hope—not as a vague political term, but as a theological virtue. For Neuhaus, and countless other Christian thinkers, including Pope Benedict, whose thought he draws on here, to hope is to “live forward in time, radically entrusting ourselves to the Power of the Future who is God, and who holds together past, present, and future in the constancy of his love.” To live otherwise, he believed, is to live in hopelessness, regardless of whether you dress it up with cheap patriotism or all your secular smarts and irony.