I definitely agree that Neuhaus and Novak are, in effect, mirror images of the secular interpretation of America.

On the use of theological language in politics, however, you’re not right to say that Lincoln introduced it. Mark Noll has charted the role that evangelicals after the Second Great Awakening played in defining America as a Christian nation before the American Civil War. He even suggests that they were all too successful, much to the detriment of their theological principles. Definitely make some time to read “America’s God.”

I also agree that all these attempts to fit the Catholic Church to American democracy reflect an odd sort of insularity. Have people like Neuhaus and Novak thought seriously about persecutions of the Catholic Church in France and Germany? A Dutchman I knew when I did a summer stint at AEI was baffled by the need of some Americans to interpret the founding of the country in certain ways. Who ever heard of the Dutch doing that, or the French, or the Germans (who might have a leg to stand on because of Adenauer)? Part of the problem with the Catholic Church in France was that it took sides so decidedly and gave anti-clericals all sorts of ammunition. I wonder if Neuhaus and FT are doing American Catholics any favors by connecting them so closely to one political party. Making Catholic arguments the tool of one political party would seem to make it impossible for those arguments to also serve as a public philosophy.

Thinking about it now, I can only recall one French Catholic effort, Cardinal Lustiger’s attempt to claim the French Revolution as an event rooted in Catholic principles but it’s significant that he made that claim in First Things (in the late 1990s, I believe).