Born in Canada in May 1936 he was sent by his Lutheran minister father to study in the United States while still a teenager. As with many now in the neoconservative movement, he did not start out as a mainstream liberal but from a more radicalized position on the Left. Active in the anti-Vietnam war movement, the then-Lutheran minister was a pastor in Brooklyn's predominately African-American Bedford-Stuyvesant.  Always politically active, one of Neuhaus's calling card -then as is now-is a flirtation with violent overthrow when his agenda stalls by peaceful means. As Right Web pointed out:

In 1970, [Peter] Berger(i)  and Neuhaus published Movement and Revolution, a collection of essays on the progressive movement. Included in the volume was an essay entitled "The Thorough Revolutionary" written by Neuhaus. "A revolution of consciousness, no doubt," wrote Neuhaus in his defense of "the Movement." "A cultural revolution, certainly. A non-violent revolution, perhaps. An armed overthrow of the existing order, it may be necessary. Revolution for the hell of it or revolution for a new world, but revolution, Yes" ( The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology, p. 282).

Neuhaus began drifting rightward in the early 1970s.  Many who have studied him mark the Roe vs. Wade decision as the turning point in his political life. Damon Linker,, who worked with Neuhaus in putting out his magazine First Things, observed that even as a Lutheran minister Neuhaus always wanted an American society devoted to Judeo-Christian morality, one where faith would greatly influence the greater secular society. As Linker noted, by the early 1970s Neuhaus saw the counterculture of the 1960s as no longer being the vehicle for the change he envisioned. Linker also noted how Neuhaus was revolted when many of his fellow activists refused to sign a petition condemning Hanoi for political persecutions it undertook after the fall of South Vietnam. He believed it reflected a sense of anti-Americanism among the "elites" of the anti-war Left.

The evolving Neuhaus concluded that the more revolutionary part of the anti-war movement never enjoyed popular support among ordinary Americans. He embraced the darker side of American politics: paranoid populism. He claimed that America was being ruined by unnamed "elitists."

But Neuhaus may not have considered that most people didn't see it as he did, and that most people who opposed the Vietnam War were not interested in revolution but simply in ending an unjust war and creating a more just society within the frameworks that already existed.  Neuhaus seemed to want a revolution and if he could not get it from the Left, then he would try it from the Right -- and in the increasingly socially conservative Republican Party. The once progressive minister began embracing positions on economics and American foreign policy he once would have denounced as unjust. Neuhaus was on his neoconservative road to Damascus with many others of the harder Left with whom he had also eschewed tolerance and compromise.

His journey took him across the religious as well as the political spectrum; converting to strident form of Catholicism in the early 90s and soon thereafter, became a priest who embraced the faith in its most neo-orthodox form. The former rigid radical Left man of the cloth had now become the equally rigid radical Right man of the cloth, throwing out bombastic statements to his new co-religionists such as "I think the barbarity of the English language currently used in the liturgy is cause enough for sorrow without further fiddling in terms of feminist inclusiveness."

In his book The Theocons, author Damon Linker explained Neuhaus's personal "Catholic Moment":

"...Neuhaus believed that the promise of uniting the theoconservative movement with the Catholic Church was so great that the effort had to be attempted. Catholics were, first of all, the single largest religious group in the country, making it exceedingly difficult if not impossible to launch a successful program for political and religious reform in the country without significant support from within the ranks of the Catholic faithful.  Then there was the church's long history of theological and politica