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Remembering the American Century: George Weigel’s Not Forgotten

Not Forgotten: Elegies for, and Reminiscences of, a Diverse Cast of Characters, Most of Them Admirable. George Weigel. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2020.

 

Eerily debuting almost immediately before the COVID outbreak, HBO’s haunting 2019 series Chernobyl was rightly met with tremendous critical and popular acclaim. With impeccable acting by Jared Harris and Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård, Chernobyl chronicles the terrible 1986 failure of a Soviet power plant in the Ukraine and the subsequent communist efforts to clean up the literal physical as well as political fallout. Although a riveting drama, the HBO series is fundamentally an indictment of the layers of lies and deception that were needed to maintain the Soviet state apparatus. It is also, like all great works of art, a transcendent artefact that serves as a universal indictment of the malfeasance present in the human condition.

At the same time, Chernobyl is not a nihilistic creation; it is, rather, a story of the brave men and women who worked to save lives and to expose the corruption that made the tragedy possible. Indeed, there is something comforting and admirable about the stoic Slavic resolve to confront extreme danger and suffering for the good not only of “Mother Russia,” but of the people of the world.

Chernobyl is thus, like most period pieces, a window into another world in which men and women at least appeared to be more virtuous, tougher, and honest than the “Walking Dead” of the postmillennial era (the series, unlike most of streaming TV, is remarkably “clean,” albeit with one strange “nude miners” scene).

Curiously, as little as a decade ago, such a description of 1980s Soviet workers and bureaucrats would seem outrageous. Even during the fall out of the 2008-2009 stock market crash and the confusion and disarray of the Obama era, in America there was largely the sense that the future was still full of soon to realized dreams and potential. Moreover, there was also the sense that the “stiff upper lip” mentality of the Cold War area was at best a humorous and antiquated way of being or, at worst, a nasty reactionary and oppressive personality mold that was best done away with.

However, after over a year of lock downs and mask mandates in which it is difficult to distinguish between YouTube conspiracy videos and the nightly news, many people around the world are looking for the order, stability and certitude that was abandoned in the heady days of the fall of Eastern Bloc Communism and the advent of the twenty first century.

Tapping into the current desperate need for nostalgia, Catholic neoconservative pundit and papal biographer George Weigel’s recent work, Not Forgotten: Elegies for, and Reminiscences of a Diverse Cast of Characters, Most of Them Admirable, is thus a work very apropos for our current collective global mood.

Although primarily known for his clashes with both the Catholic left and traditionalists as well as his frequent support for American military intervention, George Weigel’s Not Forgotten is full of much warmth and humility.

It is the work of a man at the twilight of his career, who, like Hegel’s famous “Owl of Minerva,” is able to look back at forgotten era with relative clarity.

The collection of short essays is also especially curious, for in it, Weigel, in effect ruminates through three levels of nostalgia.

The first and most critical is the Cold War era in which America rose to prominence as the world’s cultural, military, and economic leader.

During this period ,sports were sports and not a venue for social justice warriors to post their vanity. It was also the period of the great ethnic Catholic professional athlete whom Weigel memorializes in a host of (literally) largely than life figures whom Weigel frequently identifies by their player numbers in his chapter titles. “Number 89” is Gino Marchetti, who played pass rushers for the University of San Francisco as well as Weigel’s own hometown Baltimore Colts. In a clear contrast to the controversial contemporary “kneelgate,” Weigel celebrates Marchetti for allegedly standing up for his black USF teammates when it was suggested that they stay at home if the Dons were to play a bowl game in the South.

Weigel’s vision of race as largely a black and white issue in which the historic black American population could successfully be integrated into a liberal and culturally Protestant American middle class just as many Catholics and Jews had been able to do is central to his own religious and political weltanschauung.  Thus, Weigel, like many of his generation, sees racial issues through the lens of the Civil Rights movement, which was about absorption of America’s black and immigrant population, not about the deconstruction and eventual destruction of the America and the West.

This view, however noble, and however at least informed (if not necessarily identical with) the Christian understanding of human social formation, seems especially out of place in the third decade of the twenty first century in which ethnic identity has become one of the most important political issues. Indeed, there is tremendous burden on contemporary American Christians to address this issue in a manner that is faithful to the teaching of the Gospel.

Not Forgotten also presents a vision of an earlier and seemingly more peaceful era of religious dialogue among conservative Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Weigel himself oversaw the melding of conservative Catholics, Evangelicals, and Jews into a potent political alliance. However, as the American Catholic landscape is increasingly marked by the division between traditionalists and Left Caths, so too are Evangelicals splitting into progressive “post-Evangelicals” and small but increasing reactionary fundamentalism more akin to the Protestantism of their great grandparents. Moreover, the American Jewish community, feeling increased hostility from the left as well as the right (including the Christian right) has responded with a reaffirmation of a strong ethnic and religious identity of its own.

Weigel’s work, on the other hand, presents a window into a time when a very potent political alliance was formed among Catholics, Jews, and Protestants.

As he mentions in Not Forgotten, many of Weigel’s mentors and friends such as former US Ambassador Max Kampelman, who helped Weigel obtain a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; neoconservative journalist Charles Krauthammer, and one of Weigel’s most important mentors, Robert Pickus, were Jewish.

In Not Forgotten, Weigel also memorializes Evangelical power broker Chuck Colson with whom Weigel helped to craft one of the most powerful political movements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century: “Catholics and Evangelicals Together,” which would help ignite the culture wars that would initially seem to be won but then tragically (and perhaps temporarily) lost during the Obama and Trump eras.

Joined together with allied conservative Jews and Protestants, Weigel became one of the most prominent American Catholic figures of the early twenty first century. This prominence was largely due to Weigel’s crafting of his 1999 biography of Pope John Paul II, Witness to Hope.

Indeed, the Church of the latter twentieth century was dominated by the personality of John Paul II for whom Weigel has written two (some would argue, technically thee or even four) biographies and to whom he dedicates two chapters of Not Forgotten. Weigel’s allies who helped to craft the JPII generation of American Catholic neoconservatives such as Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Novak are likewise memorialized.

Both Fr. Neuhaus and Novak began, like many neoconservatives, began as men of the left, and like their other neoconservative counter parts, never abandoned liberal (if not necessarily leftists) notions of human identity, and the human community, and even, to a certain extent, “liberal” notions of the Church state relationship. While such views were the very mainstream of American and wider Western conceptions of self, community, and even Church in the late twentieth century, such views are now becoming increasingly marginalized in a heavily radicalized world.

Not Forgotten is also about Weigel’s own childhood memories of ethnic German Baltimore and thus reaches into the murky history of the early twentieth century. Weigel’s reminisces include a tribute to his mother Betsy as well as his father George, both of whom were members of what Weigel’s own Baby Boomer cohort has considered the “Greatest Generation.” In his tribute to his mother, Weigel notes that she was born during a time when many European powers were monarchs and the allegedly arch conservative Pope St. Pius X sat on the throne of Peter. Thus, Weigel’s own immediate family saw the dissolution of the old order (of which Weigel largely thought poorly of) as well as the totalitarian right and left-wing regimes which temporarily replaced the failed status quo of the 1815 treaty of Vienna only to pass from this world before the seeming twenty first century collapse of the once triumphant Anglo-American world order.

It is thus fitting that this work is so much concerned with the past that has faded away. Much of Weigel’s life has been dedicated to shaping the American empire that had triumphed over German National Socialism, Soviet Communism, and, it was anticipated, Islamic fundamentalism.

In Not Forgotten, Weigel commemorates the life of two victims of the Nazi regime: Sophie Scholl and Blessed Franz Jägerstätter. These figures who died for Christian resistance to the brutality and injustice of German National Socialism are critical for Weigel who spent his life crafting the narrative that American liberal democracy was ultimately the proper fruits of the Gospel working in the intellectual and spiritual soil of Western civilization.

Finally, Weigel’s work is a vision of the golden moment of neoconservative Catholic and Evangelical ascendency in America from the 1994 “Gingrich Revolution” to George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 presidential election victories. While the neoconservatives have been routinely pilloried from the right and left ever since John McCain’s 2008 loss, even this period, during our current pandemic milieu, at least seems like a period of relative calm, stability and clarity.

Ultimately, despite the strong critiques from both the right and left that have pilloried neoconservativism in general and neoconservative Catholicism in particular, George Weigel’s Not Forgotten does not necessarily stir up the level of polemic intensity that his other works might. Even with the ridicule and dismissal directed at George Weigel’s Baby Boomer generation, there is still, among those of Generation X, the millennials, and now, the “Zoomers,” a bitterness that the world that the Baby Boomer’s inherited (and which, some argue, they let slip from their hands) is now almost completely gone.

However, the future is yet to be written, and a new generation of American conservatives tutored by the mistakes of the past as well as being schooled in the genuinely positive qualities of their parents and grandparents’ generations can themselves becomes witnesses to a hopeful future.

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Jesse Russell is an Assistant Professor of English at Georgia Southwestern State University. He has contributed to a wide variety of academic journals, including Political Theology, Politics and Religion, and New Blackfriars. He also writes for numerous public journals and magazines, including University Bookman, Law & Liberty, and Front Porch Republic. He is the author of The Political Christopher Nolan: Liberalism and the Anglo-American Vision (Lexington Books, 2023).

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