Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . WEB EXCLUSIVE. Reinhold Niebuhr and the Political Moment . September 7, 2007, 2007

Reinhold Niebuhr and the Political Moment
by Benedicta Cipolla

Midway through Rinde Eckert's play "Horizon," the main character, an ethics professor loosely based on Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, flashes back to a childhood scene. "What is original sin?" his father asks. "The understanding that we are by nature selfish creatures. That all action is rooted in desire. That we are not innocent and can never be innocent," the boy responds, in a fair summation of Niebuhr's view on the matter.

Thirty-six years after his death, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) is making a comeback. Perhaps not since President Jimmy Carter acknowledged Niebuhr's influence--his 1976 campaign book WHY NOT THE BEST? cited the theologian's observation that to establish justice in a sinful world is "the whole sad duty of the political order"--has the name Reinhold Niebuhr been on so many people's lips.

Niebuhr is widely regarded as one of the most significant Christian intellectuals of the 20th century. Born in Missouri to German immigrant parents, he became an ordained pastor in the German Evangelical church, a Protestant denomination in the Reformed tradition that eventually became part of the United Church of Christ. He taught for many years at Union Theological Seminary in New York, served as an editor of the left-liberal magazine Christianity and Crisis, and was among the founders of the liberal anticommunist lobbying organization Americans for Democratic Action. In 1948 he appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

Niebuhr had misgivings about the New Deal, but his ideas, according to sociologist of religion Mark Jurgensmeyer, provided its philosophical justification and offered a critique of idealistic foreign policies. Over the years Niebuhr has been admired by political figures on the left and the right, including the neoconservative Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served as the Reagan administration's UN ambassador.

Actor and playwright Eckert's homage to Niebuhr ran for a month this summer off-Broadway, not long after presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) was quoted by conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks as saying Niebuhr is "one of my favorite philosophers." Brooks himself quotes Niebuhr consistently and has described him as "one of America's most profound writers on war and international conflict," a thinker we could use today "to police our excesses" in foreign policy.

In August, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer drew heavily on Niebuhr in a speech at the Chautauqua Institution about passion and humility in politics. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne's forthcoming book on religion and politics takes note of the current longing for a new Reinhold Niebuhr to inspire the next generation of religious liberals. As political theorist William Galston put it recently in an essay about doubt in American politics in the journal "Democracy," "after a period of neglect, Reinhold Niebuhr is the man of the hour."

Peter Beinart, editor-at-large at THE NEW REPUBLIC and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, advocated a Niebuhr-inflected American humility cum muscle in his recent book THE GOOD FIGHT: WHY LIBERALS--AND ONLY LIBERALS--CAN WIN THE WAR ON TERROR AND MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.

"He became more the focus of the book than I expected," said Beinart. "I began to realize Niebuhr more than [historian and liberal partisan Arthur] Schlesinger was the key to it, at least intellectually. If there was a Kevin Bacon figure in Cold War liberalism, it was him," Beinart said, referring to the party game whereby the actor can be connected to nearly any other star in six steps or less.

Niebuhr's focus on morality in international affairs could not be more relevant today, four years into a war that has become fraught, for many, with doubt and uncertainty. His unrelenting gaze inward, at a United States he refused to herald as the world's unquestioned savior, diverges from the renewed sense of American exceptionalism that followed in some quarters after September 11, and it highlights the distinction between the acknowledgment of evil's existence and America's own involvement in that evil. "As Niebuhr famously said, we always use evil to prevent greater evil," said Beinart. "The recognition that America is capable of evil has been brought home to a new generation, in things like Abu Ghraib, in the most topical way since Vietnam."

While it may be impossible to know where Niebuhr would stand on Iraq, his reasoning can serve as a resource in addressing current moral and ethical issues, and his perspective may help shape public debate ahead of next year's presidential election. "He's perennially relevant at the general level," said Richard Wightman Fox, author of REINHOLD NIEBUHR: A BIOGRAPHY and a professor of history at the University of Southern California. "The more specific you get, the more you can take a position on either side."

Arizona senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain, in his new book HARD CALL: GREAT DECISIONS AND EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE WHO MADE THEM, wonders openly what the prominent theologian and critic of pacifism during World War II would say today about Iraq: "Would [Niebuhr] have perceived in the Iraq war a realistic response to injustice and a threat to our own security, or just pretentious idealism? And if the latter, would he argue we should withdraw from the country, after our many mistakes in the prosecution of the war, if doing so would lead to a humanitarian catastrophe and even greater threat to our own security interests? One could ask the same questions about the appeals to our moral superiority that summoned Americans to battle after the attacks of September 11. Would he deplore them as a milder form of the arrogance and absolutism claimed by the terrorists who hate us? I doubt it. As Niebuhr argued in his criticism of pacifism, there are moral distinctions in history, and we have a responsibility to defend the right against the wrong…Both sides claims Niebuhr for their own. Which is right?...The best we can hope for in this life, he would tell us, is a proximate justice."

Niebuhr's last teaching assistant, Ronald Stone, now professor emeritus of Christian social ethics at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, credits Niebuhr's resurgence in part to a reaction against attempts to create a democratic Middle East. "To many of us, neoconservatism has run its course," said Stone, "and the foreign policy of the neoconservatives hasn't worked, so realist prudence and reluctance to involve the U.S. in a war seems to be the wisdom of the day."

"Where there is freedom, there is sin," Niebuhr wrote in his 1943 book THE NATURE AND DESTINY OF MAN. It is a sentiment that stands in sharp contrast to George W. Bush's second inaugural address, which spoke of the ideal of human freedom and declared that U.S. policy would actively "seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture." Niebuhr's Christian realism--his recognition of the persistence of sin, self-interest, and self-righteousness in social conflicts--rejected absolutism and argued that overarching moral principles must adapt to changing times and circumstances. Rejecting idealism, he argued that the unbridled social optimism of early 20th-century liberal Protestants was misguided, because the kingdom of God could never come to pass on Earth. History, he believed, was about struggle more than progress.

"In his desire to improve liberalism, he said let's not try and make this a utopian process," according to Eckert. "Utopianism is blasphemous because it imagines perfection through history, and we have to recognize that's not in the cards. We are grounded in our condition, our original sin, if you will."

Though not strictly biographical, Eckert's character, Reinhart Poole, captures Niebuhr's spirit. An ethics professor at an unnamed seminary, Poole struggles to reconcile his ivory tower academic post with his role as a preacher, his teaching with his political action. While Niebuhr himself may not have felt so torn in opposite directions, he often wrote about bridging the gap between these two poles.

Eckert also takes up Niebuhr's notion that pride represents mankind's great temptation. In another flashback scene, Reinhart Poole argues with his brother Richard about Socrates. Reinhart chastises the ancient philosopher for his arrogance toward the Athenians, calling his death a result of his own vanity, while Richard finds Socrates a heroic defender of truth. Reinhart recounts the exchange to his mother, explaining that he helpfully demonstrated his brother's "interpretation was trite, knee-jerk stuff." In her response, she points out what Niebuhr once called the "monstrous pretension of egoism":

Ah yes, the sting of truth.
What? You mean I'm Socrates and he's the Athenian mob?
No. You are his brother. Go find him and apologize.
Apologize for what?
The limits of your understanding-- your ignorance.

For Niebuhr, the sin of pride infected not just individuals but politics and society. While firmly rejecting communism, he also rejected the good/evil dichotomy of the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Cold War relationship, reminding Americans that "we are more like our enemies than we think," as Fox wrote in his biography.

"There have been events that have made Niebuhr's point very powerfully in Iraq," said Beinart. Bush's "this is not America" response to the Abu Ghraib scandal "runs precisely counter to the grain of Niebuhr's thinking. The whole Niebuhrian point," according to Beinart, "is this is America freed of moral and legal constraints."

A year away from the Democratic and Republican conventions, Obama has emerged as perhaps the most visibly Niebuhrian of the presidential candidates. At a June forum on faith for Democratic candidates, he spoke of the peril inherent in seeing America's actions as always virtuous: "The danger of using good versus evil in the context of war is it may lead us to be not as critical as we should about our own actions."

When David Brooks asked him what he took from Niebuhr, Obama replied, "the compelling idea that there's serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things."

In his keynote address in June at the general synod of the United Church of Christ (Obama is a member of a UCC church in Chicago), he called the challenges of poverty, racism, war, and unemployment "moral problems rooted in societal indifference and individual callousness, in the imperfections of man, the cruelties of man towards man" -- in other words, the inescapable fact of sin.

But his UCC speech, using almost identical phrasing as his summary of Niebuhr for Brooks, also captured the theologian's insistence that neither sin's inevitability, nor the idea that worldly justice can only ever approximate divine justice, should give rise to a "Christian pessimism which becomes an irresponsibility toward all those social tasks which constantly confront the life of men and nations."

"We shouldn't use the obstacles we face as an excuse for cynicism," Obama said. "We have to do what we can, knowing it's hard and not swinging from a naïve idealism to a bitter defeatism."

University of Virginia religious studies professor Charles Mathewes sounds a similar note. Niebuhr, he suggests, "is the best theologian to think about things if you want to think about sin without being cynical." Mathewes says he sees in Obama "the complexity of the Niebuhrian outlook," but he also believes Hillary Clinton possesses "theological depth I think people don't pick up on." Both Clinton and Obama, he says, "are prepared to become Niebuhrians."

Stone, too, sees Clinton as a Niebuhrian candidate because of her pragmatism and willingness to reach across ideological divides, exemplified by her bipartisan work in the Senate. As a teenager in Park Ridge, Illinois, she read Niebuhr and other theologians such as Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer with her Methodist youth minister, Don Jones. Jones's "University of Life" program took suburban high schoolers into Chicago to meet black and Hispanic gang members and to hear Martin Luther King Jr. speak, giving Clinton, as she once said, "a sense of social mission." In a 1993 profile of the then-First Lady, Jones told the Washington Post, "She is both idealistic and pragmatic. Really, she embodies that dialectic."

According to Fox, Niebuhr wrote and thought quite a lot in his final years about Abraham Lincoln, someone Obama has repeatedly quoted in speeches and in his book THE AUDACITY OF HOPE.

"Obama's discussion of Lincoln is exactly what Niebuhr would think," Fox said. "He sees how Lincoln's God is a transcendent God. He's no one you can mosey up to and say he's mine…. What you get is not a blueprint of what to do to be on God's side but a challenge to take responsibility for human problems and social justice."

Hence one of Niebuhr's great paradoxes: Even if God's judgment lies beyond history, we cannot ignore that challenge within history. Beware, though, the conviction that rising to the challenge always derives from personal faith--a warning voters may find useful as they weigh their options in the run-up to November 2008.

Niebuhr's own grounding of his political beliefs in his Christian faith may serve as another factor in the increased interest in him. While Republicans have long cloaked their programs and policies in the language of faith, since the 2004 election Democrats too have turned to a religious vocabulary to publicly undergird their views on domestic and foreign policies and to attract voters who may feel more welcome as people of faith by conservatives. At debates and forums, current presidential candidates from both parties have spoken about how faith has informed both their public policies and personal lives with a pietistic emphasis some believe would have discomfited Niebuhr.

Max Stackhouse, professor emeritus of reformed theology and public life at Princeton Theological Seminary, said the individualistic piety some politicians display, including President Bush, lacks a compatible social or political theory and thus runs counter to Niebuhr's thought. "The particular form of piety that probably saved the president from addiction does not seem to have that quality" in a corresponding political sense, Stackhouse observed.

Stone, who says he walked with Niebuhr every afternoon for three years toward the end of his life, found him to possess a deep personal religiosity. At the same time, he disdained discussion of personal beliefs in the public square. "Far better to have good political ideas and a way to carry them out pragmatically than to win votes through pious protestations," Stone said. "Religious language should be inspired by love but translated through the vocabulary of justice into the political realm."

"A presidential election year once again brings into focus the problem of how Christians should relate their religious commitments to their political opinions and decisions," Niebuhr wrote in 1952. "All men are naturally inclined to obscure the morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity. This is why religion is more frequently a source of confusion than of light in the political realm. The tendency to equate our political with our Christian convictions causes politics to generate idolatry."

Future global threats, Mathewes says, are going to require collaboration across religions, national boundaries, and ideologies, and our response will need to be "infused with moral urgency, but also moral humility." The 21st century, he predicts, will be a Niebuhrian century.

If the current political moment is any gauge, he just may be right.

Benedicta Cipolla, a writer in New York City, has also reported for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on ethics and the Iraq war and on torture.

[Photos: Time & Life Pictures/Getty]