His 1984 book, “The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America,” was “one of the most important, debate-changing books in the history of modern conservatism,” said Peter Wehner, a former Bush White House staffer.
William McGurn, Bush’s former chief speechwriter and longtime contributor to First Things, said “His theses nailed to the wall would be that nature and politics abhor a vacuum, and that without access to transcendent truth, democracy will degrade into relativism….”
Neuhaus himself seemed to define his role in his 1975 book, “Time Toward Home: The American Experiment as Revelation.”
“Intellectuals are, broadly understood, those people who mint and market the metaphors by which a society understands itself,” Neuhaus wrote.
Brilliant man, but never quite was able to get a handle on the nature of a commercial society.