As I write, the last days of spring training are upon us, and I wish I had a better reason for waiting until the eve of Opening Day than mere procrastination. Perhaps it was the World Baseball Classic that held me in its grip, except that I barely know what happened, other than the Netherlands making a move on the rest of the baseball world with a drubbing of the conflicted Dominican team. Or maybe my delays this spring were rooted in the distractions of following my local teams in the newspaper, and that would smack of at least a half-truth. I have read daily cryptic statements in the Grand Rapids Press from Tigers manager Jim Leyland about the woes of his physically and psychologically brittle pitching staff and, more recently, of his dismay at the release of veteran slugger Gary Sheffield, with whom Leyland has carried on a close mentorship over the years. Can baseball manager spring training quotes get any better than Leyland’s rumination about his troubled night before breaking the news to Shef? “It’s not good when you light up two Marlboros at 3 a.m. You know you’ve got something on your mind.” Furthermore, my beloved local minor league team, the West Michigan Whitecaps (low-level A ball in Tigers system) have made national news with the unveiling of a massive, 4,800 calorie, $20, “meant for a family of four but if you eat one yourself you get a T-shirt” ballpark burger, to be served at the home park this summer. My 11-year-old son already has sought approval for the purchase and consumption of one—do tweens ever undergo bypass surgery? Bill Veeck and all the baseball showman-entrepeneurs of yore would be proud; the shtick of baseball is alive and well, if only in the minor leagues.

The Yankee Years

Joe Torre (Author), Tom Verducci (Author)

Doubleday

512 pages

$6.90

The Postwar Yankees: Baseball's Golden Age Revisited

David George Surdam (Author)

University of Nebraska Press

438 pages

$49.99

Ed Barrow: The Bulldog Who Built the Yankees' First Dynasty

Daniel R. Levitt (Author)

University of Nebraska Press

456 pages

$35.75

Alas, to glance at the major leagues these days is to see a more somber landscape, and perhaps that’s at the root of my dawdling. I’ve become anxious that this grandest of all games has a damaged heart, of a sort and severity comparable to what a steady diet of four-pound cheeseburgers could do to a person’s cardiac health. The heart disease of baseball is a loss of respect for the game—its history, its scrappy brand of battling, its demands and grudging rewards. And steroid injections and growth hormone creams and amphetamine-boosted coffee urns and astronomical salaries and interstellar-style distances between fans and players are all part of this problem, but none is the root of the problem. There’s a worldview crisis even deeper down. But how does one locate this dark force? It is somewhere in the tension, the bifurcation, the duality of baseball as sport nonpareil, but also as economic and business construct ad nauseum. And, as much as I hate to admit it, the most obvious place to ponder this tension is in a place very close to my own heart—in the history and character of my team, the New York Yankees.

For years, I’ve figured that John Wilson allowed me to do this preview each season in spite of the fact that I was a self-professed Yankees fan. But this year, he seemed to be offering me a genial favor by asking me to review not one, not two, but three books about the Yankees, all at once, an embarrassment of riches! Alas, the experience has been far from exhilarating for me; indeed, it has been troubling, stirring up forebodings rooted in baseball’s past and lurking in the present and future. Even if we could set aside A-Rod’s apparent wooing of Madonna, about which I will withhold all comment (except Why????!!!), and his inexplicable willingness to allow a cousin from the Dominican to inject into his buttocks a mysterious island concoction called boli—even if we could forget that circus, the Yankees would still be under a particular spotlight this spring, because of the publication of The Yankee Years, a quirky book by former manager Joe Torre, now with the Dodgers, and Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated. I approached this text with the proverbial mixture of horror and fascination that any tell-all book invites, but the shape of it took me by surprise. Oddly written not as an autobiography but with Torre referred to in the third person, the text feels very historical, a document of a team’s rise and fall, and of the travails of baseball as a whole.

And the first hundred pages are, to the Yankee fan, elegiac indeed—anecdotes of the grind-it-out championship teams of ’96, ’98, ’99, and ’00 provide the paradigm by which Torre and his first wave of players succeeded: “A desperation to win.” Paul O’Neill ‘s throwing of bats when he left men on base, Derek Jeter refusing to get X-rays or take a day off with a broken hand, David Cone pitching best at the end of the season, beat up and worn down and fearless—these are the players that Torre learned to trust and love, his warriors. Indeed, “trust” is crucial in the Torre vocabulary, just as “warrior” and “fighter” and “grinder” are his highest words of praise. Of O’Neill, Torre says, “he was a great soldier.” Cone makes Torre think of “fire and brimstone, the stuff that kept their furnace burning at peak capacity.” Speaking collectively of those core players who brought home the four world championships, Torre says, “They were good and they knew it and they worked at it. They worked at it. They were a bunch of grinders.” The occasional bad apple, like the slovenly leftie David Wells, could be tolerated in such a context, could even be challenged to achieve, precisely because the ethos of the team created an undergirding for fragile egos. Even Torre’s dealing with the infamous Boss, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, is cast in a surprisingly sentimental light, and not just in the years of World Series glory. Whether because of Torre’s candor or his unflappability, he seems to have forged with this most demanding and fickle of employers an odd measure of mutual respect and, yes, trust. Only in recounting the later years, the period of Steinbrenner’s declining health and the oligarchic rule of his sons and sons in law, does Torre wearily acknowledge an utter breach of trust, enacted in spite of the Boss than because of him.

This latter phase of Torre’s career with the Yankees, which takes up the lion’s share of this book, makes for a story as disheartening as the first part is inspiring. Verducci offers a lengthy transition section on the explosion, first under the radar and then in ugly exposure, of the Steroid Era. Of course, figures such as Roger Clemens and his personal assistant (and hence Yankee employee) Brian McNamee played a huge role in this scandal. I’ve pondered why this section of the book depressed me so sharply. It’s not just the rampant performance enhancement (we’ve all know about that for awhile) but also the disingenuous naivete offered up by so many players in the midst of this bastardization of the game. Verducci captures well the implications for us as fans, and does so with Torre’s key phrase in mind, when he notes that “The Steroid Era was baseball’s Watergate, a colossal breach of trust for which the institution is forever tainted.” Seeing the truth there, feeling the weight of the analogy, I want to resist and resurrect the baseball of yore, the integrity of Roy Campanella and Phil Rizutto and Preacher Roe. But the stain won’t go away.

Despite all the scandal and censure of the performance enhancers, that alone didn’t take the shine off of Yankee baseball in the second half of Torre’s run in New York. Deeper issues, having to do with increasingly fragile player psyches, increasingly selfish player behavior, increasingly rationalistic and statistical GM work—all of these forces chewed away at the legacy Torre helped to foster, until he himself was chewed up and all but spit out in the process.

The tragedy played out in the bulk of this book is against the backdrop of that early trust and those early grinders and warriors. The parity in the league brought about by the “think-tank culture” of high-tech, sabermetric baseball executives like the A’s Billy Beane and the Red Sox Theo Epstein (and eventually the Yankees own Brian Cashman) is cast as a dehumanizing, even despiritualizing force in the game. Sure, Epstein helped construct a Red Sox team that finally tore down the Yankee mystique, but he did so with a good measure of imitation thrown in—he picked up a foundering David Ortiz and made him an everyday grinder, and found in Curt Schilling the warrior ace who could own a post-season. Ironically, Cashman’s decision to increasingly imitate the statistically savvy modes of Beane and Epstein led to the dissolution of his tight and fruitful relationship to Torre.

The jettisoning of Bernie Williams, one of Torre’s original warriors and a cog in all four Yankee championship teams, finds Torre playing Plato to Cashman’s Aristotle: ” ‘Cash, listen,’ Torre said. ‘I don’t know how long we’re going to be together. But do yourself a favor: never forget there is a hearbeat to this game.’ ” The heartbeat—yet another heart allusion, and it won’t be the last!—pinpoints the emotional, intuitive, simple but not simplistic style of baseball which Torre embodies throughout the book, in his earthy rebukes of players, his bluntness with Steinbrenner, his fierce trust and loyalty. By contrast, the new wave of Yankee free-agent acquisitions after the final World Series win in 2000 reveals a set of players who, amidst their many technical and interpersonal flaws, suffer from an endemic lack of heart. Torre makes this clear especially with the pitchers who become his bane. Of the talented, tantrum-prone Kevin Brown, a high-paid bust: “He never was a fighter. He never wanted to fight you. Neither was Randy Johnson, for that matter.” Johnson gets a further, more nuanced critique from Torre late in the book: “He never took the ball and said, ‘All right, guys. Follow me.’ You never had the feeling that was what you were going to get” (330). Of Carl Pavano, he of the four-year, $40 million contract that produced exactly 26 starts, Torre could barely mask contempt: ” ‘The players all hated him,’ Torre said. ‘It was no secret.’ ” Mike Mussina, who pitched for the Yankees through this same era, and who comes across as pleasantly candid in the book, says that the term “the 15 Day Pavano” had come to replace “the 15 day disabled list” in Yankees parlance! Not all problematic players receive such censure from Torre; for instance, he says of Gary Sheffield, with whom he clashed many times, “He was a team player. He finished a couple of games at third base for me, when we had to take guys out and move people around. He was willing to do anything. He’d even catch. ‘I’ll do anything,’ he told me. He came in one day and brought in a VHS tape of when he caught in Little League. He was a great teammate. He was just inconsistent with his moods.”

The archetype would thus be the grinder with the even keel, the warrior with the zen persona, and Torre had two such players (who incidentally brought along Hall of Fame talent) in Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera, players who bridged the two halves of Torre’s run, both the feast and the famine. Verducci sets the table when he says that “Jeter’s talent and confidence helped make him a great player right out of the box. It was his humility and desire to win above all else that made him a great teammate and a manager’s dream.” Indeed, Torre found in Jeter many of the central virtues by which the heart of the warrior might be measured: ” ‘Jeter was such a big part of what we established,’ Torre said. ‘I filled him in on what we needed to have done. He would literally commit to it. I wouldn’t say buy in. He would commit to do something. He trusted me to the point where he knew what was important.” What emerges in Torre’s encomium to Jeter is a sketch of the inner quality of the warrior-player, the deep moral quality, if you will. If this is augmented by tremendous ability, it is a unique confluence, but ability alone can never mimic it. Hence, Alex Rodriguez’s confusion, mentioned many times in the book, about why Jeter is revered more highly when he, A-Rod, has the superior talent, statistics, and even work-ethic. Torre pinpoints A-Rod’s myopia with characteristic bluntness: ” ‘His goal was to be the best player in baseball,’ Torre said. ‘He was very much aware of what was going on elsewhere in baseball. He seemed cluttered up with these things.” In the hierarchy, such motivational clutter is clearly better than self-serving absenteeism or moody dysfunction, but it can never be enough to make one a warrior, and ultimately a champion. It can never replace heart.

If I’ve skipped over some of the details of Torre’s contract disputes with the Steinbrenner entourage, it is only to avoid tediousness, since there, too, the variations are all on the theme of trust. The same Joe Torre appears to have been at work in all 12 seasons with the Yankees, his approach rooted in a mingling of respect and professional accountability and trust among his players and coaches and with the organizational administrators. The turning of comedy into tragedy would indicate that the offer of trust is not enough—it must be embraced and reciprocated, by the right sort of players, the right sort of owner (yes, even the Boss!), in the right sort of sublimation of parts to the whole, of individual wills to the collective will to win. If the Yankees of the Torre era are a test-case, then we might have to grudgingly and grievingly admit that all of baseball suffers from a breach of trust that will be long-lived and hard to heal. Grinders of the world unite, or at least sign up for tee-ball and Little League—we need you!

By way of clarification, some of the forces that Torre and Verducci identify in their diagnosis of the diseases afflicting baseball are not of recent invention. True, HGH kits in the lockers and $10 million signing bonuses and 24/7 media coverage weren’t part of the fabric of the game half a century ago, but David G. Surdam’s The Postwar Yankees: Baseball’s Golden Age Revisited reveals disconcerting trends afoot five and six decades ago, with ramifications reaching right into the contemporary game. If Torre’s narrative of the recent Yankee juggernaut is a roller-coaster of laudatory praise and sharp rebuke, Surdam (a professor of economics at Northern Iowa) offers a sharp downward gaze at the supposed Golden Age of baseball (1946-1964), and the deleterious role of the Yankees in that illusory world. Like A.N. Wilson’s deconstruction of the seemingly cohesive Victorian Age in God’s Funeral, Surdam’s revisionist account reveals in occasionally murky economist’s prose that baseball was troubled in its structures and business habits even in the midst of its supposed finest hour. This book is not for the faint of heart; the writing is thick with statistics and particulars, culled in spheres as obscure as average concession incomes at the various stadiums through the era (this and other charts grace the massive statistical appendices). It is a quirky narrative, but the connections between the issues facing baseball now and those of a half century ago are startlingly clear. Surdam outlines the challenges at mid-century, such as competition with the rising NFL for fans, aging stadiums with inadequate parking, the mixed blessings of revenue sharing, the controversy and covetousness involved in franchise relocation, the crap shoot known as the amateur draft, and the cartel philosophy by which baseball owners ruled their unique and politically protected business interests. Not much seems to have changed. Not only have baseball’s economic riddles not been solved, but they’ve escalated and proliferated. One strand of Surdam’s copious research that took me—a supposed devotee of baseball history!—totally from the blindside was his account of the attempts by Branch Rickey and William Shea (both of estimable National League fame, before and after this cabal) in the late 1950’s to form a “Continental League” as a third wheel on the major league machine, taking advantage of a prospering cities passed over by the tight MLB clique. Though the league never formed (and was indeed blocked by Congressional hearings and MLB harping about a dearth of playing talent), its aspirations to move into cities like St. Paul, Dallas, Houston, Denver, Miami, San Diego, and Toronto proved prescient. The shrewd MLB owners began their expansion into such markets , and managed to find the players whose absence they had lamented in derailing the new league. (Sadly for all Upstate New Yorkers—I am one by birth and upbringing—Buffalo remains to this day among those cities named oft and anon as bridesmaids, never to become the bride of a Major League Baseball franchise.)

Surdam’s final sections ponder why the Yankees declined so steeply after the 1964 World Series, and I couldn’t help comparing his observations with the second half of the Torre book—did these Yankee falls from glory have any similarities? Yes and no. In both cases, it seems, the tremendous success of the Yankees spoiled the competitive edge to which up-and-coming teams cling. The public perception of a cold and impersonal machine seems to have plagued the Yankees in both eras, and a lack of innovation (represented in the late Fifties by the failure to sign black players, and in the last decade by the failure, until recently, to groom young, homegrown players) allowed other teams to catch up. What is Surdam’s final observation, then, in his deconstruction of the Golden Age and his case study in the Yankees incipient decline? His conclusion would likely get a world-weary nod from Joe Torre: “The Yankees may continue to win a disproportionate share of titles, but past experience suggests that it may not be in their interest to overdo it.”

One other book to mention, stepping back yet another generation in the annals of Yankees lore, is Daniel R. Levitt’s Ed Barrow: The Bulldog Who Built the Yankees’ First Dynasty. Like Surdam’s book, this is a product of that devoted source of all-things-baseball, the University of Nebraska Press. Raised in the Wild West context of late 19th-century baseball, Barrow was more like P. T. Barnum than like Billy Beane for the first half of his career, as he ran diverse and sundry independent league teams. (Anticipating Bill Veeck, Barrow once featured a female pitcher, and heavyweight champ John L. Sullivan served as a guest umpire in several 1898 Atlantic League games.) With characteristic verve, Barrow ended his run with the 1902 Toronto Baseball Maple Leafs by dealing a faulty umpire (not the heavyweight champ, thankfully!) “a thump on the jaw and a solar plexus blow,” after which “the fans surged onto the field.”

From these this rough-and-tumble forays at borders of the baseball establishment, extending to the ill-fated Federal League of the World War I era, Barrow emerged as the somewhat over-the-hill manager of the powerful 1918 Boston Red Sox, featuring a 23-year-old pitching ace named Babe Ruth. It was Barrow who began Ruth’s transition to an everyday position player, in order to maximize his obvious skill with the bat. But it was only after he followed Ruth to the Yankees that he reached his true calling, creating our modern conception of that crucial baseball role, the general manager.

Torre’s warnings to his own GM—”don’t forget that this game has a heartbeat”—echoed in my mind as I read Barrow’s story. If you get below the surface of the pre-Golden-Age-Golden Age of the Twenties and Thirties, you start to feel that Machiavelli might have fit in as a GM, perhaps working for the Faustian Connie Mack with the Athletics. We hear of Barrow that, “To pressure players into signing, [he] worked his newspaper contacts to portray holdouts to the club’s advantage.” He wasn’t alone in the shady stuff, as we find out that “A possible rival for the Yankees’ financial and on-field dominance in the 1920s and 1930s, the New York Giants were forestalled by the legal troubles of New York Giants owner Charles Stoneham, a backroom operator who today would almost surely be in jail.” But were these tactics any different from the hectoring by Brian Cashman and the Steinbrenner entourage that Torre laments? Could it be that there has always been a tension in baseball between the business side and the game side, between the head and the heart, between money and meaning? For Ed Barrow, the man who developed Babe Ruth into an everyday player, who signed Gehrig and DiMaggio and Casey Stengel and a host of Yankee legends, perhaps the heartbeat still sounded, albeit dimly in the GM’s, then the team president’s, office. If Branch Rickey could say of him, “That fellow sitting across the table is the smartest man who ever was in baseball … . He knows what a club needs to achieve balance, what a club needs to become a pennant winner. I, perhaps, can judge the part, but Mr. Barrow can judge the whole,” well, it’s hard to argue with the Mahatma. Yet, one would perhaps prefer the “inferior” Branch Rickey—the man who dared defy all the logic and pressure of the cartel to sign Jackie Robinson and change the very heart of baseball and of America—to the great Ed Barrow, architect of a dozen world champion teams.

But my quarrel with the game must end for now, at least at the philosophical level, because I need to turn to the pragmatic realm, and predict the outcome of the 2009 season. At this moment, at the cusp of the new year on the greensward diamonds of thirtyodd cities, anything is possible. The Phillies are the reigning champions, for crying out loud! And the lowly Devil Rays still own the American League pennant for a few months more. I have been singularly unsuccessful in my picks the past few years, but we must not give up hope. Instead, I will move away from logic in my choices, and allow my baseball heart to lead me. So, starting in the NL West, I cannot help but pick the Joe Torre-led Dodgers, and hope that somehow, someway my longtime nemesis Manny Ramirez becomes the grinder and warrior he was always meant to be. San Francisco will lose 90 games, and still the aged New Yorkers who rushed across the Polo Grounds in anguish in 1958 will not be assuaged. San Diego and Colorado will just have to be happy that their cities were once part of the Continental League master plan. As for the Diamondbacks, it’s time for a pendular downswing. Let’s talk NL Central—my heart, formed in the crucible of love for the 1970s Yankees, says follow Lou Pinella and his Cubs all the way to the Promised Land, even though Lou refused to look up in the stands when my big brother’s Little League team visited the Stadium 35 years ago and shouted to him incessantly. Wait, my heart says that will cost the Cubs in a tight race—and hence I like the Reds here, if they end up signing an aging warrior who will enjoy a surprising comeback. If you say Houston Astros to me, or St. Louis Cardinals, or Milwaukee Brewers, well, my heart isn’t leaping (though I wouldn’t mind seeing Rick Ankiel, the Cardinals version of Babe Ruth in his power-hitting outfielder converted from pitcher role, hit 59 dingers and drive in 171 runs, as Ruth did in 1921). I follow the Pirates only to find out how their young center fielder/grinder Nate McLouth, a local boy from Grand Rapids, is doing. Out NL East way, I say the Phillies have another run in them, and hence the Dodgers/Reds/Phillies thing makes it seem like the mid-Seventies in the National League again, which has the hue of boyhood and baseball idealism for me. My heart feels no twitter for the Washington or for Florida. The Mets, where Gary Sheffield landed—well, my wife’s heart leaps for them, or at least used to, when, in her Long Island girlhood, she once wrote a love letter to Ron Darling—but I digress. Well, for Linda’s sake, I’ll give the Mets the wildcard. The Dodgers will tilt with the Mets in the divisional round, in a redux of the wild 1988 playoff series, and again the Dodgers will prevail. We’ll call the Phillies-Reds series the Pete Rose-Joe Morgan reunion tour, with the Reds stunning everyone by a sweep, both here and against the Dodgers in the NLCS.

The American League is my psychic dwelling place, but I find it hard to care about the AL West. I like none of the teams out there, and a quick heart-check tells me Seattle, Oakland, and Anaheim raise not a single jolt of excitement. The Angels are dangerous—Vladimir Guerrero isn’t finished—and they had a great spring. On the other hand, they’ve lost K-Rod and their glue player, Garrett Anderson. I guess that leaves the Rangers, so … I’ll go with Angels to take the division. In the AL Central, I’d love to go with my adopted home team, the Tigers, but I know too much about their struggles to put a starting rotation together (though watch 20-year-old Rick Porcello, who’s made the team as the fifth starter—there’s nothing like a young gun to fire up a staff). The White Sox are good, the Twins are good, the Indians are really good. But I’m registering nothing toward them in the heart category, even with a stethoscope. So, I’ll go with Kansas City, the little guy, the scrapper, the city abandoned by the diabolical Charlie Finley, the team with a batch of young speedsters and slap hitters, who can torment opponents, but alas, without solid pitching, can’t win much. This year, the pitching solidifies and they win 90 games. The Tigers get a best-case-scenario from their pitchers, and take the wildcard. Now, out in the AL East, a big ugliness is brewing. The Yankees need a year or two more of rest and recovery (as per Surdam’s final advice in his book), and the Devil Rays will find the grind of another long race too taxing on the young roster. Somehow, Theo Epstein’s reign of Benthamite empiricist terror will implode in Boston, but his indie-rock band will flourish and Epstein will remain in the public eye. Toronto—again, wasn’t the Continental League mention enough? That leaves Baltimore, a city once mocked by White Sox demagogue Charlie Comiskey—”Baltimore is a minor league city and not a hell of a good one at that”—but a sanctuary for the fugitive St. Louis Browns in one of the most successful relocations in major league history. It’s the St. Louis Browns my heart leaps for, the lowly Browns, the team that the Yankees used as a glorified farm squad during the Golden Age. The Baltimore Orioles have had their successes in each of the past four decades, but it will be the Browns this year who are the ultimate victors. Orioles management, if you’re reading this, follow my advice and immediately create St. Louis Browns throw-back uniforms to work into your seasonal attire! The Orioles/Browns will survive a brutal challenge from the Tigers in the divisional round, then take on the Royals, who will have squeaked out 3 one-run wins against the Angels. And here the Brownie magic dies out, as the Royals grind out a six-game ALCS victory.

The Royals, like last year’s Devil Rays, will confound baseball analysts and anyone who has a stake in large market teams succeeding, but who cares. It will be Royals-Reds, the World Series that should have been back in the mid-Seventies, if the Royals hadn’t lost several pennants in a row at the hands of the Yankees. Reds vs. Royals, a Fox TV revenue nightmare, a series with literally no household names, with George Brett and George Foster getting more recognition in the luxury boxes than the players on the field. But we will get to see some grinders in action, some young warriors on the field, low-budget players, castaways, rookies, journeymen. With the absence of stars and “stories,” we’ll get to concentrate on baseball being played with urgency, with desperation, with a heartbeat—and that’s why we still love the flawed and finicky game. And, oh yeah, the Royals in seven. When logic is suspended, anything can happen!

Michael R. Stevens is associate professor of English at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. With his Cornerstone colleague J. Matthew Bonzo (assistant professor of philosophy), Stevens is the the author of Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader’s Guide, recently published by Brazos Press.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Richard John Neuhaus had a way of putting things. His phrase “the naked public square,” for example, somehow became indispensable as soon as he coined it, jumping from his pen onto the lips of nearly everyone engaged in the American conversation about religion and politics. Of course, it was more than merely a way of putting things. Fr. Neuhaus had also a way of seeing things, of surveying landscapes and drawing connections with a logic so elegantly sharp and far-sighted that you couldn’t help but see things the way he did, even if you wound up disagreeing with one or another of his conclusions.

In his last book, American Babylon, Neuhaus gives us an imaginative vision of how to be a faithful and hopeful Christian witness in American politics—a vision that will, I believe, be with us for years to come. We are in exile, Neuhaus reminds us; like Daniel and the conquered Israelite children, we disciples of Christ in America are strangers in a land that is not our home. And yet, like those Old Testament exiles, we too have a sure and certain hope that goes far deeper than any defeat or disappointment: we look toward our true home, the New Jerusalem. Even now, we catch glimpses of the coming Kingdom—in the church, in the surprising work of the Spirit throughout creation, and especially in the Eucharist. And so for as long as we dwell here, in the land of our exile, we are freed to live in hope and work without despair for the peace of our American Babylon, because we know that in the end it does not depend on us—it is all simply time toward home.

In a sense, the entire book is a drawing-out of the meaning of that vision. It is, of course, far from original to Neuhaus to speak of the Christian as homo viator, man-on-the-way caught up in the tension between the now and the not-yet, and that is just as Neuhaus wants it. His vision draws deeply from the wells of Scripture and the early church, particularly from Augustine’s City of God. What American Babylon does is to gather the insights of this tradition as only Neuhaus could and, with his signature clarity and boldness, bring them to bear on the church in American public life today.

Perhaps of first importance is the warning of the book’s title itself—that American Christians must recognize that they are in fact in exile; that America is far more like Babylon than the kingdom of God. It is very important, he argues, to get straight on this point. Historically, American Christians have suffered from what he calls an “ecclesiological deficit, leading to an ecclesiological substitution of America for the church through time.” And from this has come all manner of trouble—the misadventures and excesses of the old Puritan “errand into the wilderness” (an ongoing temptation for a “redeemer nation” that tends to exchange God’s work of salvation for the idea of “progress”), and the various and sundry ways in which Americans have sought to worship the spirit of their wondrous selves, summed up best of all in Emerson’s self-reliant religion and Whitman’s song of himself.

The antidote to our gnosticism, Neuhaus claims, is a fuller and richer understanding of the Church as the body of Christ, not simply the spirit. The Church (with a capital C) must be viewed as not notional but real, as the “contrast society” to the secular world around us, claiming our first allegiance and supplying the primary narrative in which we make sense of our lives. Mainline Protestants and evangelicals alike, Neuhaus argues, all too often stand indicted on this count. Whether our flags are planted on the political right or left, to place America first in our hearts is to corrupt both Christian faith and authentic politics, and to forget that “we have here no abiding city.”

At this point, some less careful readers of Neuhaus might be surprised. After all, wasn’t he a cheerleader for the American right, enamored of militarism and state power? As Ross Douthat has noted, we may hope that this distorted picture of Neuhaus will come to be seen as a product of the irrational spasms of the Bush years. Neuhaus’ longtime friend Stanley Hauerwas, in an excellent and generous review of American Babylon in First Things, wrote that their admittedly sharp disagreements never ran as deep as their commonalities. “If Richard was ever forced to choose between his loyalty to Church or America,” Hauerwas explained, he was in no doubt that Neuhaus “would choose the Church,” even though Hauerwas believed that choice should come sooner than his friend thought. Throughout his work and no less in American Babylon, Neuhaus put his Church and his Lord before his country, and for Hauerwas that was enough to issue a sharp “challenge to those who too quickly dismiss Richard Neuhaus as a propagandist for the American right.”

Of course, Hauerwas and Neuhaus certainly had their differences, and readers of American Babylon will not find them difficult to discern. While Hauerwas’ vision of Christians in American public life centered on the phrase “resident aliens,” Neuhaus preferred the locution “alien citizens”—an emphasis that fell more on our citizenship in the city of man than Hauerwas liked. If one side of the book warns against substituting America for the church, the other side warns against dismissing our country as simply the Babylonian whore, full stop.

Neuhaus had long claimed that he planned to “meet God as an American.” The point of this provocation wasn’t to prop up an uncritical jingoism. In American Babylon, as elsewhere, Neuhaus simply argues that our national identity is an inescapable and not insignificant part of who we are, and that certain responsibilities go along with our citizenship. Neuhaus and Hauerwas agreed that the “first responsibility of the Church is to be the Church,” but Neuhaus was always more ready to think aloud about what we owe as Christians to communities other than the Church.

He was also much more willing to think about the place of such communities in the “story of the world,” meaning the story of God’s providence. While ever wary of the dangers to which providential thinking about America has led in the past, Neuhaus argues that such discernment is a necessary and unavoidable part of thinking theologically about what it means to be not only a Christian but also an American, or a New Yorker, or a member of this school board or this family. Done rightly, such thinking does not lead to hubris but rather to a properly humble wisdom about our vocation, national and otherwise.

How then should we Christians participate in the public life of our American Babylon, the land of our exile? The chief political contribution of the Church, Neuhaus claims, is “to provide a transcendent horizon for our civil arguments, to temper the passionate confusions of the political ultimate with the theological ultimate, and to insist that our common humanity and gift of reason are capable of deliberating how we ought to order our life together.”

The first part here is crucial. Without the sense that we as a nation are answerable to a higher judgment than our own, we are all too apt to fall prey to the sin of national hubris. What’s more, we lose the prophetic language that has stood behind so many of our national reforms—it’s no accident that black Americans like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke as Christians calling the nation to account for their sins. America is not now and never has been merely a “secular nation,” bound by no more than the Lockean social contract. More than that, our Puritan heritage has always reminded us of our compact with God, who “created equal” all men and women and is the transcendent source of human dignity.

If we go wrong on the foundational question of human dignity, Neuhaus thinks, we’re likely to go wrong on much else as well. Abortion had long been Neuhaus’ first political concern, and in American Babylon he warns of what it means to have forgotten the basic dignity of the smallest and weakest among us. As manifested most famously in the 1996 “End of Democracy” forum in First Things, Neuhaus worried deeply about the anti-political implications of an imperial judiciary voiding both the deliberative decisions of the states and the right to life of the unborn. We desperately need to renew a sense of the transcendent dignity of every human person, Neuhaus thought, as well as the knowledge that America is not its own ultimate arbiter but instead stands finally “under God.” Neuhaus knew his Tocqueville: both the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of the minority are dangers into which a secular totalism can otherwise fall.

Beyond the transcendent horizon it offers for civil engagement, the Church’s next great contribution is to insist that our commonly held “gift of reason” enables us to deliberate together about politics. Here, Neuhaus draws upon the Catholic natural-law tradition and figures like C.S. Lewis to argue that since we are all fashioned in God’s image, we can all converse together about how to order our lives, regardless of religious or moral background. For Neuhaus, public enemy #1 was the pragmatic liberal ironist Richard Rorty, who (along with Alasdair MacIntyre’s “barbarians”) rejects both God and public reason.

Of course, Neuhaus thought that all atheists, not just Rorty, have a harder time accounting for where the gift of reason comes from, as well as the sense of transcendent judgment, human dignity, and our compact with God that are so central to American identity. What’s more, Neuhaus rightly points out that most Americans, when asked about the source of their morality, will point to religion, and most often to Judaism or Christianity. Hence Neuhaus argues that the public philosophy by which American politics is guided should be “religiously grounded” in the Judeo-Christian moral tradition—otherwise, given the religious beliefs of most Americans, it simply will not be democratic.

That might sound frightening to non-believers, and there have been more than a few critics who have accused Neuhaus of advocating “theocracy.” In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Drawing on Catholic teaching documents such as Dignitatis Humanae and Redemptoris Missio, Neuhaus consistently maintained that “the Church always proposes, never imposes.” He not only applauded but actively promoted the Catholic Church’s support of liberal democracy after Vatican II, especially as found in Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Centesimus Annus. One weakness of American Babylon is that Neuhaus does not give here a fuller account of why Christians ought to support liberal democracy. Readers will likely want to go back to past essays for a richer portrayal of Neuhaus’ politics (as listed below). For Neuhaus, theocracy was out of the question due to the nature of Christian truth itself, which always comes in the form of a gracious invitation addressed to the free human person. Political liberalism, because of its respect for human freedom, is thus the form of government that accords best with Christian faith.

Another weakness of the book, perhaps, is the conflict between Neuhaus’ insistence on the importance of natural law and his claims about the place of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the American experiment. To what extent are the truths of “Nature and Nature’s God” really self-evident to all Americans, and to what extent do they become clear only by catechesis and formation in a communal tradition, like that of the Church? Additionally, to what extent does the free-wheeling nature of liberalism itself eat away at the transcendent truths on which Neuhaus argues liberalism depends? It might be argued that the insouciant and self-worshipful nihilism of Richard Rorty is, in fact, the natural outcome of liberal democracy.

Neuhaus of course was well aware of such concerns; indeed, they were at the heart of some of his deepest disputes with figures such as MacIntyre and Hauerwas. At one point during the book, he considers the troubling question as to whether or not America is genuinely a polis capable of communal deliberation, only to set the question aside. Neuhaus knew well that although his politics and religion genuinely had not changed much since the beginning of his career, America’s had. His work to build bridges between Catholics and evangelicals stemmed in part from a concern that the vital place in American public life once held by orthodox religion was being displaced by a secular élite, guided by the public philosophy of the likes of Richard Rorty and Peter Singer. America, Neuhaus thought, had always subsisted on the moral capital provided by Judaism and Christianity, which for a time had genuinely been the “mainline” of the nation. But when the “mainline” of American public life—Protestant, Catholic, and Jew—became the sideline, what would become of the American experiment?

Hence, perhaps, the title of his book, American Babylon, and its subtitle Notes of a Christian Exile. Neuhaus was more and more an exile toward the end of his life, and looking into the future he may have seen a Church that would find itself to be more and more like Daniel and the Israelite children, singing the songs of Zion in a foreign land.

That, of course, would not have dimmed the hope that sustained Neuhaus one bit. The last chapter of his last book is a beautiful, profound, and deeply moving meditation on the nature of Christian hope, beyond all hopelessness and despair. No matter where we find ourselves, Neuhaus assures us, our job is simply to propose to all the world the reason for the hope that is within us—the resurrected Lord of lords and King of kings, Jesus Christ.

I cannot pretend that this is an impartial review. In the year I worked at First Things until his death, Fr. Neuhaus became my mentor, spiritual guide, and friend. I proudly count myself among the many, many lives that he touched, and I know that I will carry around his wisdom and his example for the rest of my life. There is a passage from this book that I believe I will never forget:

“It has been said that there are no permanently lost causes because there are no permanently won causes, and the reverse is also true. The young person starting out will, in due course, be the old person ending up, and the success of a life will be measured by whether it is lived in, and courageously contended for, the continuing community claimed by truth beyond our sure possession except by the faith, hope, and love that require nothing less than everything.”

I do not think it could be better said. Not only with this book but with his life, Richard John Neuhaus showed us how to contend faithfully for life, truth, justice, and hope in a world that all too often looks like Babylon. May we follow his example in this land of our exile, until one day we are reunited in the New Jerusalem that we seek.

Jordan Hylden, a former junior fellow at First Things, is a graduate student at Duke Divinity School.

For Further Reading:

“The Liberalism of John Paul II” (FT, May ’97).

“Christianity and Democracy” (FT, Oct. ’96).

“Why We Can Get Along” (FT, Feb. ’96).

“Why Wait for the Kingdom? The Theonomist Temptation” (FT, May ’90).

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