New Republic Writer: Supreme Court Pick Shows Evangelicals Relying on Heft of Catholic Intellectuals

In a provocative article at The New Republic Online, Franklin Foer looks at the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito, the potential Catholic majority his confirmation would create, and speculates: "...the emergence of the Court's Catholic bloc reflects the reality of social conservatism: Evangelicals supply the political energy, Catholics the intellectual heft. " I don't have enough data to agree or disagree with Foer's idea on a lack of intellectuals among evangelicals, but I toss it our here because it seems to tie in with something Rick (the evangelical half of the Detente blog) wrote during a discussion a few posts back. I post it here, and apologize for not recreating the entire context of his statement. (You can read that here.)

Rick wrote: "There are a number of reasons why there might be more intellectual or scholarly converts from Evangelical camp to the R.C. People tend to grow more conservative and authority-focused as they age. The average intellectual would tend to quickly soak up all the literary oxygen in the typical E. church, simply because it's not an intellectual body. It's more based in community, emotions and instincts. Birds of a feather flock together. Bookish Christians will be attracted to the church with the biggest and oldest books. "

Now back to what Foer argues, which he refines later in the story: He says that evangelicals looking to build political coalitions to advance socially conservative agendas "didn't just need Catholic bodies; they needed Catholic minds to supply them with rhetoric that relied more heavily on morality than biblical quotation."

Finally, Foer concludes by pointing out that there are some problems that arise for Catholics out of this recruitment by socially conservative evangelical politicians ... "At the same time Catholic conservatives joined the evangelicals in battle, they have simultaneously waged a war against their co-religionists in an attempt to alter the Church's traditional preference for a strong state--a preference that led Catholics en masse to FDR's party and yielded a generation of Democratic politicians (see the Kennedys and Tip O'Neill). Led by Neuhaus and the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Novak, these conservatives want to realign papal teaching with support for an unrestrained market. As Neuhaus, the editor of First Things, has put it, 'Capitalism is the economic corollary of the Christian understanding of man's nature and destiny.' Of course, this requires some impressive intellectual gymnastics, since the last Pope and many of his predecessors were potent critics of capitalism. "

Thoughts on intellectual experience in either or both faith traditions?