Sept 18, 2005
Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr
By ARTHUR SCHLESINGER Jr.
THE recent outburst of popular religiosity in the United States is a
most dramatic and unforeseen development in American life. As Europe
grows more secular, America grows more devout. George W. Bush is the
most aggressively religious president Americans have ever had. American
conservatives applaud his "faith-based" presidency, an office heretofore
regarded as secular. The religious right has become a potent force in
national politics. Evangelicals now outnumber mainline Protestants and
crowd megachurches. Billy Graham attracts supplicants by the thousand in
Sodom and Gomorrah, a k a New York City. The Supreme Court broods over
the placement of the Ten Commandments. Evangelicals take over the Air
Force Academy, a government institution maintained by taxpayers'
dollars; the academy's former superintendent says it will be six years
before religious tolerance is restored. Mel Gibson's movie "Passion of
the Christ" draws nearly $400 million at the domestic box office.
In the midst of this religious commotion, the name of the most
influential American theologian of the 20th century rarely appears -
Reinhold Niebuhr. It may be that most "people of faith" belong to the
religious right, and Niebuhr was on secular issues a determined liberal.
But left evangelicals as well as their conservative brethren hardly
ever invoke his name. Jim Wallis's best-selling "God's Politics," for
example, is a liberal tract, but the author mentions Niebuhr only twice,
and only in passing.
Niebuhr was born in Missouri in 1892, the son of a German-born
minister of the German Evangelical Synod of North America. He was
trained for the ministry at the Synod's Eden Theological Seminary and at
the Yale Divinity School. In the 1920's he took a church in industrial
Detroit, the scene of bitter labor-capital conflict. Niebuhr's
sympathies lay with the unions, and he joined Norman Thomas's Socialist
Party. Meanwhile, New York's Union Theological Seminary, impressed by
the power of his preaching and his writing, recruited him in 1928 for
its faculty. There he remained for the rest of his life. He died in
1971.
Why, in an age of religiosity, has Niebuhr, the supreme American
theologian of the 20th century, dropped out of 21st-century religious
discourse? Maybe issues have taken more urgent forms since Niebuhr's
death - terrorism, torture, abortion, same-sex marriage, Genesis versus
Darwin, embryonic stem-cell research. But maybe Niebuhr has fallen out
of fashion because 9/11 has revived the myth of our national innocence.
Lamentations about "the end of innocence" became favorite clichés at the
time.
Niebuhr was a critic of national innocence, which he regarded as a
delusion. After all, whites coming to these shores were reared in the
Calvinist doctrine of sinful humanity, and they killed red men, enslaved
black men and later on imported yellow men for peon labor - not much of
a background for national innocence. "Nations, as individuals, who are
completely innocent in their own esteem," Niebuhr wrote, "are
insufferable in their human contacts." The self-righteous delusion of
innocence encouraged a kind of Manichaeism dividing the world between
good (us) and evil (our critics).
Niebuhr brilliantly applied the tragic insights of Augustine and
Calvin to moral and political issues. He poured out his thoughts in a
stream of powerful books, articles and sermons. His major theological
work was his two-volume "Nature and Destiny of Man" (1941, 1943).
The evolution of his political thought can be traced in three
influential books: "Moral Man and Immoral Society" (1932); "The Children
of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a
Critique of Its Traditional Defense" (1944); "The Irony of American History" (1952).
In these and other works, Niebuhr emphasized the mixed and ambivalent
character of human nature - creative impulses matched by destructive
impulses, regard for others overruled by excessive self-regard, the will
to power, the individual under constant temptation to play God to
history. This is what was known in the ancient vocabulary of
Christianity as the doctrine of original sin. Niebuhr summed up his
political argument in a single powerful sentence: "Man's capacity for
justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice
makes democracy necessary." (Niebuhr, in the fashion of the day, used
"man" not to exculpate women but as shorthand for "human being.")
The notion of sinful man was uncomfortable for my generation. We had
been brought up to believe in human innocence and even in human
perfectibility. This was less a liberal delusion than an expression of
an all-American DNA. Andrew Carnegie had articulated the national faith
when, after acclaiming the rise of man from lower to higher forms, he
declared: "Nor is there any conceivable end to his march to perfection."
In 1939, Charles E. Merriam of the University of Chicago, the dean of
American political scientists, wrote in "The New Democracy and the New
Despotism": "There is a constant trend in human affairs toward the
perfectibility of mankind. This was plainly stated at the time of the
French Revolution and has been reasserted ever since that time, and with
increasing plausibility." Human ignorance and unjust institutions
remained the only obstacles to a more perfect world. If proper education
of individuals and proper reform of institutions did their job, such
obstacles would be removed. For the heart of man was O.K. The idea of
original sin was a historical, indeed a hysterical, curiosity that
should have evaporated with Jonathan Edwards's Calvinism.
Still, Niebuhr's concept of original sin solved certain problems for
my generation. The 20th century was, as Isaiah Berlin said, "the most
terrible century in Western history." The belief in human perfectibility
had not prepared us for Hitler and Stalin. The death camps and the
gulags proved that men were capable of infinite depravity. The heart of
man is obviously not O.K. Niebuhr's analysis of human nature and history
came as a vast illumination. His argument had the double merit of
accounting for Hitler and Stalin and for the necessity of standing up to
them. Niebuhr himself had been a pacifist, but he was a realist and
resigned from the antiwar Socialist Party in 1940.
Many of us understood original sin as a metaphor. Niebuhr's
distinction between taking the Bible seriously and taking it literally
invited symbolic interpretation and made it easy for seculars to join
the club. Morton White, the philosopher, spoke satirically of Atheists
for Niebuhr. (Luis Buñuel, the Spanish film director, was asked about
his religious views. "I'm an atheist," he replied. "Thank God.") "About
the concept of 'original sin,' " Niebuhr wrote in 1960, "I now realize
that I made a mistake in emphasizing it so much, though I still believe
that it might be rescued from its primitive corruptions. But it is a red
rag to most moderns. I find that even my realistic friends are inclined
to be offended by it, though our interpretations of the human situation
are identical."
The Second World War left America the most powerful nation in the
world, and the cold war created a new model of international tension.
Niebuhr was never more involved in politics. He helped found Americans
for Democratic Action, a liberal organization opposed to the two Joes,
Stalin and McCarthy. He was tireless (until strokes slowed him up) in
cautioning Americans not to succumb to the self-righteous delusions of
innocence and infallibility. "From the earliest days of its history to
the present moment," Niebuhr wrote in 1952, "there is a deep layer of
messianic consciousness in the mind of America. We never dreamed that we
would have as much political power as we possess today; nor for that
matter did we anticipate that the most powerful nation on earth would
suffer such an ironic refutation of its dreams of mastering history."
For messianism - carrying on one man's theory of God's work - threatened
to abolish the unfathomable distance between the Almighty and human
sinners.
Niebuhr would have rejoiced at Mr. Dooley's definition of a fanatic.
According to the Irish bartender created by Finley Peter Dunne, a
fanatic "does what he thinks th' Lord wud do if He only knew th' facts
iv th' case." There is no greater human presumption than to read the
mind of the Almighty, and no more dangerous individual than the one who
has convinced himself that he is executing the Almighty's will. "A
democracy," Niebuhr said, "cannot of course engage in an explicit
preventive war," and he lamented the "inability to comprehend the depth
of evil to which individuals and communities may sink, particularly when
they try to play the role of God to history."
Original sin, by tainting all human perceptions, is the enemy of
absolutes. Mortal man's apprehension of truth is fitful, shadowy and
imperfect; he sees through the glass darkly. Against absolutism Niebuhr
insisted on the "relativity of all human perspectives," as well as on
the sinfulness of those who claimed divine sanction for their opinions.
He declared himself "in broad agreement with the relativist position in
the matter of freedom, as upon every other social and political right or
principle." In pointing to the dangers of what Justice Robert H.
Jackson called "compulsory godliness," Niebuhr argued that "religion is
so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently
dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into
the realm of relative values." Religion, he warned, could be a source of
error as well as wisdom and light. Its role should be to inculcate, not
a sense of infallibility, but a sense of humility. Indeed, "the worst
corruption is a corrupt religion."
One imagines a meeting between two men - say, for example, the
president of the United States and the last pope - who have private
lines to the Almighty but discover fundamental disagreements over the
message each receives. Thus Bush is the fervent champion of the war
against Iraq; John Paul II stoutly opposed the war. Bush is the fervent
champion of capital punishment; John Paul II stoutly opposed capital
punishment. How do these two absolutists reconcile contradictory and
incompatible communications from the Almighty?
The Civil War, that savage, fraternal conflict, was the great
national trauma, and Lincoln was for Reinhold Niebuhr the model
statesman. Of all American presidents, Lincoln had the most acute
religious insight. Though not enrolled in any denomination, he brooded
over the infinite mystery of the Almighty. To claim knowledge of the
divine will and purpose was for Lincoln the unpardonable sin.
He summed up his religious sense in his second inaugural, delivered
in the fifth year of the Civil War. Both warring halves of the Union, he
said, read the same Bible and prayed to the same God. Each invoked
God's aid against the other. Let us judge not that we be not judged. Let
us fight on with "firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the
right." But let us never forget, Lincoln reminded the nation in
memorable words, "The Almighty has His own purposes."
Thurlow Weed, the cynical and highly intelligent boss of New York,
sent Lincoln congratulations on the inaugural address. "I believe it is
not immediately popular," Lincoln replied. "Men are not flattered by
being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the
Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that
there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed
to be told and as whatever of humiliation there is in it, falls
directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me to tell it."
"The combination of moral resoluteness about the immediate issues,"
Niebuhr commented on Lincoln's second inaugural, "with a religious
awareness of another dimension of meaning and judgment must be regarded
as almost a perfect model of the difficult but not impossible task of
remaining loyal and responsible toward the moral treasures of a free
society on the one hand while yet having some religious vantage point
over the struggle."
Like all God-fearing men, Americans are never safe "against the
temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we
most fervently desire." This is vanity. To be effective in the world, we
need "a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom and power available
to us" and "a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and
foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy's demonry and our
vanities." None of the insights of religious faith contradict "our
purpose and duty of preserving our civilization. They are, in fact,
prerequisites for saving it."
The last lines of "The Irony of American History," written in 1952,
resound more than a half-century later. "If we should perish, the
ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the
disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation
was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle;
and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or
history but by hatred and vainglory."
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is the author, most recently, of "War and the American Presidency."
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