William F. Buckley, Rest in Peace

I watched Firing Line on and off for many years, admiring the wit and ferocious intellectuality its host was able to bring to argument, but it wasn’t until sometime after my own conversion I learned William Buckley was a devout Catholic.

This repeated itself several times, as the admiration of many others among my friends, once I began revealing my conversion, I came to learn were Catholic

There is something about the work in the world of devout Catholics that often cause admiration from those who know them, which I have discovered is part of the often quiet work of the cross and of trying to live by the revealed truth of the faith.

There are many remembrances of him, but this 1997 interview, excerpted here, regarding Buckley’s book about his faith, "Nearer, My God", is among the best:

Buckley on Belief
By Michael Cromartie
Posted: Saturday, November 1, 1997
ARTICLE
Books & Culture
Publication Date: November 1, 1997

William F. Buckley says he has never been tentative about his faith. But then, he's never been talkative about it either.

Buried in the middle of this interview with William F. Buckley, Jr., is an extraordinary statement. Buckley, who has given hundreds of addresses on college and university campuses, remarks that "I've never been invited in my life to give a college speech or a seminar about which the subject of religion was discussed. It's like a subtle sequestration that religion is something that you do on your own, and it's disruptive to bring it up."

That datum, which at first strikes the reader as incredible, confirms the diagnosis offered in George Marsden's The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief and Stephen Carter's The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion. But it also says something about Buckley himself. As an editor, columnist, tv host, novelist, and the pre-eminent spokesman for conservatism in his generation, Buckley has never made a secret of his strong Christian faith, yet he confesses to a temperamental reticence. "I am not trained in the devotional mode, nor disposed to it," he writes--nor, one might add, the evangelical mode.

That is precisely what makes his new book, Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith (Doubleday, 313 pp.; $24.95), unique: Here, for the first time, Buckley writes at length about his faith, about some of the principal obstacles to Christian belief (despite self-deprecating comments concerning his lack of theological training, he displays considerable powers as an apologist), and about the distinctive experience of a Roman Catholic in the twentieth century.

In September, Michael Cromartie met with Buckley in New York at the offices of National Review to talk about his book and to get his sense of the state of Christendom at the end of the millennium.

Q. Many years ago Garry Wills said this of you: "Being Catholic always mattered more to him than being conservative." Is he right?

A. If he meant he has a higher loyalty to God than to civil society, then the answer is obvious: God has to be pre-eminent.

Q.Why did you write this book?

A. It was the idea of a publisher. I undertook it, and after a year or so despaired of doing the reading I thought necessary to consummate it, so I gave it up. Then two years later, I got that little itchy feeling that one ought not give up the occasional challenge to do service to one's Maker, so I undertook to return to it. Three or four years later, that is what materialized.

Q. You say in your book, "I grew up in a large family of Catholics without even a decent ration of tentativeness among the lot of us about our religious faith." Were you really never tentative about your faith? Never?

A. No, I never was. I know one brother who was, but he lay down and got over it.

Q. How do you explain your own steadfastness?

Grace. I understand the nature of temptation, and I understand that the reach of temptation gets to almost everybody. But to the extent that one anticipates that possibility, in my case one has to reaffirm the postulates. And I never found any problem or conflict with these postulates and Christian doctrine. Which is a subject that I touch in this book. Therefore, I was never won over to skepticism, though skepticism can be very alluring. The Devil can be very alluring.