“FIRST THINGS” is its name. And Religion & Public Life is its game.  Now six years old, FIRST THINGS is published monthly by The Institute on Religion and Public Life.  Its creator and Editor-in-Chief  is Richard John Neuhaus.  You can read current and back copies in libraries of Montreat College and elsewhere.   Its 50 to 100 pages per issue cover the landscape where private belief and conscience interact with governments and publics.  Generally calm and scholarly, the journal sometimes produces fireworks.

Most if not all of the eleven writers would agree that

--power shifts massively from time to time among the three branches of the U.S. Federal government and between the government in Washington and the 50 States;

-- the United States Supreme Court currently has no serious institutional challenger as the unique decider of questions of ultimate value;

--the Supreme Court virtually amends the Constitution at will ;

-- some recent Supreme Court decisions license objectively evil behavior and may in the future compel it;

- big questions in a democracy  are best left  to the rough and tumble of public debate and  legislative compromise.

• in theory, the court’s members can restrain themselves and stop acting like elected legislators. But even Presidents err in their assessment that they are nominating “strict constructionists” to the bench. 
• Secondly, Congress can act by statute to limit the court's jurisdiction--something rarely done. 
• As a practical third possibility, Bork sees only a constitutional amendment as likely to rein in the court.

Law Professor Russell Hittinger of the University of Tulsa and others  focused on opinions by Justices Kennedy, Souter and O’Connor which might capture  future Supreme Court majorities. Those opinions, cumulatively, brand all belief in objective morality as “religious.” And already some judges, if they detect  “religious” motives or “animus” behind any legislation,  ask for no more before striking down such legislation. What some writers feared was a future America where there is no law but man-made law and where the most important laws will be made in the courts, not by legislatures.

Public uproar followed the November issue of FIRST THINGS,  but not because of  any of the analysis sketched above.  The uproar was over whether the people and their elected leaders would allow the court to make so many bad laws that irate fuure consciences might lead to

• --passive resistance by officials and /or private citizens,
• --active civil disobedience (like the Boston Tea Party or the Underground Railroad,
• --armed rebellion. Charles Colson wrote that “this point, I believe, we have not yet reached.”  But he called for  a  role for churches before  any future  justified decision to take up arms. 

In the follow-on January 1997 issue of FIRST THINGS,  William Bennett  conceded that the High Court both by awful decisions and by worse reasoning “is contributing to America’s widespread social chaos.” He and others saw an immediate need first to educate publics on what the court is doing and then to mobilize public opinion in sufficient mass to influence legislatures and the courts.  

Harvard Law Professor Mary Ann Glendon thought that the growing official contempt for human life might eventually make itself the public-mobilizing issue.  Watch what happens, she suggested,  if people ever see a  likely  coming “right” to suicide some day becoming a “duty.”  

“When you can’t tell whether the doctor in the doorway has arrived to kill you or cure you, you’ll know the culture of death has come to your house.” 

Whatever else FIRST THINGS is, it is never insipid or trivial.   Read it and judge for yourself. 
 

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