Dueling legacies on church and state

Two of the English-speaking world’s most influential political intellectuals died late this week. Their legacies, however, are as contradictory as they are relevant, which makes their respective lives worth a few moments of reflection.

Paul Weyrich, one of the primary architects of contemporary American conservatism, was 66 when he died Thursday in Fairfax, Va. His comrade Richard Viguerie -- the direct-mail genius of the American right -- said that Weyrich deserved to be ranked alongside Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan as a pillar of modern conservatism.

Indeed, Weyrich’s role in fusing social conservatism and traditionalist religiosity into what we now call the religious right was absolutely crucial. As James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, one of that movement’s largest organizations, said this week: “Had there been no Paul Weyrich, there would be no conservative movement as we know it.”

Conor Cruise O’Brien, who died Thursday in Dublin at the age of 91, was a protean figure not simply in the political life of his native Ireland but also in the Third World, particularly Africa, where he served as a United Nations diplomat, and in the newspapers, journals and universities of his own country, the United States and Britain.

His death notice in the Observer, which he edited for a time, called him “the leading Irish intellectual of his generation, though he assumed so many guises -- diplomat, historian, literary critic, proconsul, professor, playwright, government minister, columnist and editor -- that he defies further categorization.”

The paper went on to recall him as “a man of great personal charm, courteous and humorous at once. Although he was a true citizen of the world, he remained in many ways profoundly Irish, as demonstrated by his sometimes excessive conviviality and by a strain of Celtic melancholy. He poured scorn on the concept of the ‘Irish mind,’ but he may himself have illustrated it. His best writings have a puckish wit and a liveliness which sets off their intelligence and erudition.”

In the U.S., he probably will be best recalled for “Passion and Cunning,” his stunning essay on Yeats’ politics, and for two utterly engrossing and iconoclastic political biographies: “The Great Melody,” a study of Edmund Burke (which Paul Johnson described as “a book by the greatest living Irishman on the greatest Irishman who ever lived”) and “The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution.”

The leitmotif of O’Brien’s work, both as a politician and a literary/cultural critic, was the malevolent consequence of unexamined piety, particularly when it existed at the confluence of religion and politics. In his own case, that led to an antipathy to both contemporary Irish Republicanism, which he identified with a contempt for democratic institutions, and to the traditional Catholic religiosity that he believed infused that movement with a predilection for “blood sacrifice.” Though he would disdain Yeats’ late-in-life flirtation with fascism, he was as one with the poet when he declared, “Odour of blood when Christ was slain/Made all Platonic tolerance vain/And vain all Doric discipline.”

Weyrich, by contrast, labored ceaselessly for the introduction of sectarian religion into American political life in a manner that was neither traditional nor conservative, but truly radical. He himself -- an ordained deacon in the Melkite Church -- acknowledged that, and, unlike so many contemporary religious conservatives, was fond of pointing out that what he advocated was novel in the American system -- a politics in which what he and his confreres regarded as virtue would take precedence over what the majority of Americans regarded as liberty.

As he once said: “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our [conservative] leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Viguerie said Thursday that Weyrich “was a throwback to an earlier age of people in politics, people who prized free-market economics, old-fashioned traditional values.”

There is, however, nothing traditional in the American sense about the theocratic pretensions that Weyrich and the rest of the religious right he helped to create advocate. Nothing in our recent history has been as divisive or as destructive.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com