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ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT

“Obama’s Favorite Theologian? A Short Course on Reinhold Niebuhr”

Dr. Wilfred M. McClay University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

E.J. Dionne The Washington Post; Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life

May 2009

MICHAEL CROMARTIE: You may be wondering: “Why Reinhold Niebuhr?” E.J. Dionne and David Brooks have been saying we must do a session on Reinhold Niebuhr. But we didn’t have a hook. We used to say we think you all should know about Niebuhr. But then David had an interview with Barack Obama and David said, “Well, what do you think of Reinhold Niebuhr?” And Obama went on for 25 minutes about his admiration for Reinhold Niebuhr. So our session is really not about President Obama; it’s about Reinhold Niebuhr. Bill McClay is an intellectual historian who’s taught at Tulane and Georgetown universities and now is an endowed chair at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Bill has, if you look at his bio, written some very important books. One is called The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, which was the winner of a best-book award — the Merle Curti Award in intellectual history — in 1995. DR. WILFRED M. McCLAY: Thanks. Mike’s right. The occasion for this is this discussion between David Brooks and then-Senator Obama, which was in 2007. It was at a time when his candidacy was beginning to look very plausible. And it’s interesting—he said that Niebuhr was one of his favorite philosophers, not one of his favorite theologians. So that may or may not have any significance. Obama’s not the first American president to declare his fondness for Niebuhr. Jimmy Carter notably did, and both before and after his election. Some people think that the famous “malaise” speech had some Niebuhrian input.

http://select.nytimes.com/2007/04/26/opinion/26brooks.html?_r=1

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_crisis.html

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Obama’s Favorite Theologian? A Short Course on Reinhold Niebuhr”

Dr. Wilfred M. McClay and E.J. Dionne May 2009

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In any event, I’m not really going to talk very much about Obama. Instead, what I really want to do is lay out his vision, his worldview.

There is a core to Niebuhr that carries through some three decades of concentrated work. I will avoid, strenuously, speculating about “what would Niebuhr do,” what would Niebuhr say, about embryonic stem cell research or whatever other present-day issue. I think there’s plenty to talk about, just with respect to what he did say and think.

Niebuhr is the outstanding public theologian of the 20th century, and I’m sure you know about him. You may not know much about him. He has become a figure of obscurity in recent decades, and that’s partly because the term “public theologian” has come to represent something of a null set in recent times. But Niebuhr had an unusually long and productive career. He turned out many books, many articles; wrote journalistically; wrote highly, densely scholarly works. He was engaged. He was involved in the politics of the day, from World War I all the way to the Vietnam War. So he was not only a theologian of great distinction, but also a public intellectual who addressed himself to the full range of public concerns and had an enormously capacious mind that really could take in all kinds of issues that he wouldn’t necessarily have discussed in his books. His importance in his time tells you something about his time. It was a time when theologians were important people.

As a general observation, Niebuhr is something of a counterpuncher as an intellectual. In short, it’s hard to know what he thinks about somebody or about some subject unless he’s reacting to them. That’s when he truly discloses himself--in taking exception to or responding to other thinkers, which is why I think it’s very important to see him in context and be very careful about what we can extract and use for all occasions.

One thing about the context is, I think it’s impossible to imagine him operating in anything other than a modern, Western, liberal environment, where there’s a strong tradition of science, of belief in the idea of progress—a society that is in some ways poised on the cusp of a transformation into secularity, or at any rate a world in which a secular option



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exists. He was very much a creature of that historical moment and a critic of liberalism from within liberalism, a breed that flourished particularly in the late ’40s and ’50s, and doesn’t seem to exist, at least in the same form, today.

The issues that he struggled with are quintessentially related to problems of advanced modernity, and science is one of them. Niebuhr upholds the idea of progress and remorselessly critiques it at the same time. I might add something else that you may know Niebuhr for — what’s called the “serenity prayer,” which goes something like “God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things that can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other.” But the interesting thing is what he leaves out, and that is preserving the things that need to be preserved. It’s a striking omission! But it shows how thoroughgoing a progressive he was.

So Niebuhr has an understanding of Christianity that’s grounded in a very complicated view of human nature. Let me give you a little background biography. He was born in 1892, not in a log cabin, but in rural Missouri, the son of a German immigrant pastor, Gustav Niebuhr. Gustav Niebuhr was a member of a tiny Protestant group called the German Evangelical Synod, which was an immigrant group. He really grew up in a German-speaking enclave, which was actually common in that part of the Midwest—Missouri and Illinois in late 19th- or early 20th-century farm communities. Reinhold inherited from his father this sense of pastoral vocation and a keen interest in social and political affairs. He built on this with two years at Yale Divinity School, and so he began his career as a theologian and pastor as an advocate of what was called the “social gospel.” The social gospel was a movement within liberal Protestantism which located the meaning of the Christian Gospel in its promise as a blueprint for progressive social reform, rather than its assertions about supernatural reality. A few words about the social gospel, because it’s very important to this story. It arose out of a crisis within, particularly, Protestantism, in response to industrialization and urbanization. In the Protestant case, particularly salient were the challenges to biblical authority rising out of these things, but more so out of Darwinism—Darwin and Darwinism.

http://bartleby.com/73/1472.html

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/monkeytrial/peopleevents/e_gospel.html



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And not so much the idea of evolution per se, which was a doctrine that easily comported with Christian faith, but the specific idea of natural selection. It was the randomness of the process of natural selection that was viewed as particularly threatening. And an equally powerful threat came from the so-called “higher criticism” of the Bible, which deconstructed the Bible, for all intents and purposes, into a collection of redactions of successive texts by multiple authors over long periods of time, and therefore not a text that should be regarded as having any kind of organic or authorial unity.

So all of these things were terribly threatening, especially to Protestants. Why Protestants? Because the whole basis of the Protestant Reformation, to oversimplify grandly, was to see the authority of the Bible as overriding—as superseding—the authority of the historical institutional church. There are some qualifications you’d need to make to that statement, but basically that is a fair assessment. So that tremendous weight is placed on the authority of that text, and if its authority falls into question, then the entire foundation of Protestantism is threatened.

So the social gospel was one way of responding to this problem. Social gospelers were modernists. They had dismissed the notion that the Bible should be read authoritatively in the way that, say, fundamentalists—the fundamentalist movement was just getting going at this time—read the Bible, or even the historical creeds. But the social gospelers insisted that what they thought of as the heart of the Christian Gospel was very much valid and alive and worth preserving. It could be preserved by dispensing with these supernatural problematic elements and instead socializing the Gospel, i.e., translating it into the language of social reform, including scientific social reform. They saw very little sense of antagonism between science and reform. And in the general optimism of the period, there were seen to be very few limits on what could be achieved.

Walter Rauschenbusch, who was perhaps the leading figure in the social gospel movement, put it this way: “We have the possibility of so directing religious energy by scientific knowledge that a comprehensive and continuous reconstruction of social life in the name of God is within the bounds of human possibility.” So this idea of progress, the idea of perfectibility of the human condition, of man himself, to use that term in a generic sense, is very much at the core of it all.



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Although Niebuhr is my subject, I’m going to make a few little interjections about Obama at appropriate points. And certainly one of the things one could speculate on is the degree to which Obama has been influenced by the social gospel, as I think his pastor Jeremiah Wright was. There is a lot of evidence. For example, there was the famous speech that Obama gave in South Carolina, during the campaign, in which he declared his desire to be an “instrument of God” — and declared, “I am confident that we can create a kingdom right here on Earth.” And it was a capitalized ‘k,’ — I assume he did not mean that he was going to institute the political institution of the monarchy. So echoes of the social gospel were there.

So Niebuhr initially bought into this. He bought into the social gospel movement. It fit with his upbringing. It fit with his reformist inclinations. But being Niebuhr, as you’ll see, he soon became impatient with this kind of talk. He became uneasy with the progressive movement. He found it and the social gospel to be utterly naïve about human nature, about the intractability of human nature, and inadequate to the task of explaining the nature of power relations as they existed in the real world. Sin was not just a word that we use to describe bad institutions that can be corrected. Sin, he thought, was something much deeper, an intrinsic part of the human condition, something that social reform was powerless to do much about. And in 1939 he says, “Liberalism is little more than faith in man, exemplifying that perversion of the will, that betrayal of divine trust, which is called sin.” Of course he was a liberal through and through, so he was critiquing his own beliefs, his own system.

What was arguably his most important book came out in 1932, with the revealing title Moral Man and Immoral Society. 1932 is the depths of the Depression, so it’s a propitious moment to publish a rather hard-hitting book, which this was. Niebuhr turned the social gospelers’ view on its head or on its feet and argued that in fact there was a disjuncture between the morality of individuals and the morality of groups. And that the morality of groups was generally inferior to the morality of individuals. This was, he thought, a fixed condition, a fixed dynamic of human life. Individuals could, once in a while, in rare instances, transcend their self-interest for the sake of a larger good. But groups of individuals, especially groups like nations, never could. So in fact,



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groups made individuals worse rather than better because the work of collectives was invariably governed by a logic of self-interest.

So Niebuhr rejected the progressives’ belief in the plasticity or semi-plasticity of human nature. He thought sin was a better explanation. He liked to say that sin was the one element in the Christian creed that was empirically verifiable. And he also took aim—and I think this is more radical than people appreciate —at the very concept of socialization, which for the progressives was so central.

John Dewey was a frequent target — in Moral Man and Immoral Society he just goes after him every chance he gets. John Dewey argued that “The lost individual will re-find inner wholeness … by subduing himself to the forces of organization at work in externals.” Niebuhr thought almost the opposite was true. As I said before, men have little enough goodness in themselves and socialization makes them worse because the reason for being, for all social groups, is to pursue the shared self-interest of the members. So that self-interest is triumphant. He dismissed as sentimentality the progressive hope that the wages of individual sin could be overcome by intelligent reform and that there we could transform into a loving fellowship of like-minded comrades holding hands beside the campfire. Instead, the pursuit of good ends in the arenas of national and international politics had to take full account of the un-loveliness of human nature, and the un-loveliness of power. The implications for Christians who wanted to do good in the world were fairly stark in his view. They had to be willing to get their hands dirty, for existing social relations were held together by coercion and only counter-coercion could change them.

Social change was brought about not by persuasion, diplomacy, pedagogy, intelligence or sweetness, but by — to use a term that he uses repeatedly in the book — “emotionally potent oversimplifications.” Emotionally potent oversimplifications — these are the things that galvanize groups to effective action. You see why I say this is a rather depressing outlook, and it doesn’t get any better.

A quotation: “Our contemporary culture fails to realize the power, extent and persistence of group egoism in human relations.” So the idea of solidarity — the campfire — is an illusion. Quote: “Society is a perpetual state of war between different self-interested



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groups.” Jesus Christ, meet Thomas Hobbes. Quote: “The only way a society can maintain itself is by the coercion of dominant groups who go on to invent romantic and moral interpretations of the facts, and the peace lasts only as long as the underdogs are kept down. Then when they are able to successfully challenge and coerce a new peace, they impose another set of romantic and moral interpretations of the facts.”

So only power can counter power in his view. His conclusion was that the exercise of power was always morally dangerous, but also always morally necessary. You had to act in the world. You couldn’t take the option of opting out. Hence, the need for a dualism in morals, since — and I quote again — “The selfishness of human communities must be regarded as an inevitability and can only be countered by competing assertions of interests.” But in none of this is there a release from the moral requirements of Christianity.

This rather stark view extends very much to the nation-state. And this was a response on his part to the social gospel, to the progressive movement and to a rather long strain in American ideas — progressive ideas — about solidarity. Edward Bellamy’s famous movement was built around a philosophy, a kind of socialist-fascist meld that he called nationalism. So on the reform — I won’t necessarily call it the left, but on the progressive side of things, nationalism was not a bad thing. But to Niebuhr it was.

Niebuhr wrote an article in 1916 in The Atlantic called “The Nation’s Crime Against the Individual.” And the idea was, and this is before American entry into the first world war, which he strongly supported, that the nation cheats the soldier because it takes his loyalty, his willingness to die and sacrifice, for its own purposes without being able to hallow that sacrifice. Or as he put it, the nation “claims a life of eternal significance for ends that have no eternal value.” Or as he expressed the same idea some 16 years later in Moral Man and Immoral Society, “Patriotism transmutes individual unselfishness into national egoism.” It is “the unselfishness of the individuals [that] makes for the selfishness of nations,” which “is why the hope of solving the larger social problems of mankind, merely by extending the social sympathies of individuals, is so vain.” So much for empathy.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/191611/niebuhr-individual

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/191611/niebuhr-individual



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But there’s an interesting twist here; it is that all of this rejection of the social gospel, affirmation of original sin and so on, did not mean that he gave up on social reform. And Niebuhr was a man of the left and he remained a man of the left always. Maybe not enough left to suit some people, but he certainly was never a conservative. And he believed Christians were obligated to work actively for progressive social causes, for the realization of justice and righteousness, but they had to do this in a way that, as he characteristically put it, abandoned their illusions, not least in the way they thought about themselves.

The pursuit of social justice would involve them in acts of sin and acts of imperfection. Even the most surgical action, one might say, involves collateral damage. But the Christian faith, just as inexorably, called its adherents to a life of perfect righteousness, a calling that would seem to give no quarter to dirty hands. So we’re left with the feeling that Niebuhr is calling Christians to the impossible and, in a sense, he is. He insists original sin is true. He insists that its probative value is confirmed every day. Yet he insists at the same time that human beings are splendidly endowed by their Creator, still capable of acts of nobility and generosity or truth, still able to advance the cause of social improvement. All of these things he insisted are true at the same time and all have an equivalent claim. So he’s correcting the social gospel. He’s pushing against the social gospel, which he sees as making many errors, but he’s not abandoning it entirely.

These ideas would continue to develop. In 1938, he was invited to give the Gifford Lectures at St. Andrews University, very prestigious lectures in natural theology. These were later published as what is arguably his magnum opus, a book called The Nature and Destiny of Man. And that appeared in 1943. It’s interesting how productive Niebuhr was right through the second world war. This book is really a grand tour of the entire intellectual history of the West and ultimately it’s really a book about the idea of progress itself and the question of whether human history can be meaningful. I want to stress that last point. One of Niebuhr’s great antagonists was Henry Ford. He hated Henry Ford, loathed him for his treatment of his workers. And actually his hatred for Henry Ford was a formative influence in his life. But Henry Ford had one of the great sayings about history: that history is “one damn thing



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after another.” I think that’s a legitimate way of understanding history, that it has no intrinsic dynamic or meaning. But Niebuhr wanted to struggle with that.

And as a thinking Christian he had to see some meaning in history. Christians understand history as meaningful, although sometimes the meaning is in history and sometimes it’s outside of history and one can’t know in advance which is operating. So it’s another one of these hazardous but necessary operations. What he felt had happened, however, in modern times, was that there was a secularized idea of progress that saw an immanent order, or as he called it, “an immanent logos,” that was no longer related to a transcendent meaning, but was inherent in history itself. And this idea of progress was something that had emerged out of Christianity, that was in some sense an outgrowth of Christianity’s worldview and ethos, but that had threatened to negate Christianity. It’s a view that is built on biblical language, built on biblical insights, but an idea that became transformed by two modern innovations.

First, there was the elimination of the notion that grace, meaning the supernatural intervention of divine power to give meaning to history, was necessary. And second, the thinkers who laid the foundation of modernity — and this I think is really where you get to the heart of Niebuhr — failed to see that the dynamism of history was a double-edged thing. These thinkers assumed that all development means the advancement of the good, but in so assuming, they failed to recognize — and this I think he sees as characteristic of all modernity — that, and I quote, “every heightened potency of human existence may also represent a possibility of evil.” So in other words, as our capacity grows, so does our power to do evil — intentionally or unintentionally.

Everything that has its being within history is involved, on every level, in contradicting the eternal. And so the tendency is, as he says, to complete the system of meaning falsely in a way that makes either the individual or the group the center of the system. And then Niebuhr goes on and says, “It’s not possible for any philosophy to escape this error … but it is possible to have a philosophy, or at least a theology, grounded in faith, which understands the error will be committed and that it is analogous to all these presumptions of history which defy the majesty of God.”



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So he sees progress as a factor of history, a facet of history. He sees that it’s right to conceive of history dynamically. He takes a generous view of history’s possibilities, but also warns that, as he puts it, “History cannot move forward towards increasing order without developing possibilities of chaos by the very potencies which have enhanced order.” In other words, we’re never out of the woods. And the danger only increases as we progress.

Man’s capacity for evil advances with his progress towards the good. Hence, the greater the progress, the greater the need for vigilance, the greater the need for some metaphysical check on human pride. The image I like to use to describe this is of a tightrope, one that is always going higher and higher and, as you know, with a tightrope, you have to keep moving forward. You can’t stop moving. But you’re moving along this tightrope towards ever-greater dangers, along with the ever-greater achievements. And that I think is the vision that he’s operating with.

Let me move on to the book that has really gotten attention in the last 10 years, The Irony of American History, published in 1952. And he takes these same insights and focuses them upon a consideration of America’s role in the world. Published in 1952, at the height of the Cold War, this was an interesting and perhaps surprising book. It was a stinging attack on communism and at the same time a stinging attack on America, on the moral complacency of America, a warning against the moral failings that would make America vulnerable. That’s Niebuhr — typically, as always, fighting on two fronts at once. Nobody can top Niebuhr for his anticommunism, but he also believed the United States resembled its antagonists more than it cared to imagine. And much of the book is devoted to making that case. He criticizes the communists for their philosophical materialism, but then points out that Americans are guilty of the same thing in practice. Here’s a statement that I think rings just as true today as in 1952: “Despite the constant emphasis upon the ‘dignity of man’ in our own liberal culture, its predominant naturalistic bias frequently results in views of human nature in which the dignity of man is not very clear.”

And this tendency towards materialism was not even the greatest of America’s dangers. Even more perilous, he thought, was one of our principal points of pride, the entrenched



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idea that America has a providential mission in the world and our nation’s rendered uniquely virtuous and innocent by the blessings of that history. And he goes through a discussion of this, locating the beginnings of it in the Calvinist Puritan tradition, and then the Jeffersonian tradition, which saw America’s as nature’s nation, free from the encumbrances of the old world. It was the place of the new man, of the democratic future.

America was, so to speak, the land of the great reset button. Abraham Lincoln, who was not a dewy-eyed fellow, called America “the last best hope of mankind,” words that certainly, if nothing else, convey a kind of cosmic significance to American history.

Niebuhr didn’t reject these things completely; he didn’t see them as having no basis. He did not reject the greatness of America, but he insisted that the American belief that America had turned its back on history and made a new beginning for humankind was naïve and dangerous, laying America open to the sins of spiritual pride. It was a source of strength that turned into a source of weakness. And that is what he meant by the irony of American history, the tendency of American civilization to allow decent motives and noble intentions to blind it to the sins and errors to which it’s prone and thereby let its virtue become the source of its vice.

It was an irony because it was unintended, inadvertent, unconscious and a consequence of good intentions, rather than doing evil for the sake of a larger good, which he called tragedy, not irony. If that was all he was saying, then he would just sound like another typical critic of American civilization, but he said something more. He said America had to act in the world and do so effectively. It had no choice but to do so. In the same way that the sinful imperfect Christian is required to act in the world and get his or her hands dirty in working for the cause of good, so a morally imperfect America was obliged to employ its power in the world.

Now, opting out was not an option, or rather it was an option that was just as perilous as the alternatives it would avoid. And let me just read you a couple of passages that illustrate this, and then I’ll stop: “Our culture knows little of the use and abuse of power; but we have to use power in global terms. Our idealists are divided between those who would renounce the responsibilities of power for the sake of preserving the purity of our soul and those who are ready to cover every ambiguity of good and evil in our actions by



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the frantic insistence that any measure taken in a good cause must be unequivocally virtuous.” Fairly timely words, I think.

Needless to say, he rejects both of these options and continues this way: “We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimated.” And I will stop there.

MR. CROMARTIE: Everybody here knows E.J. Dionne. I know you’ve spoken on Niebuhr a lot and we’re delighted to have you respond to Bill. Thank you. E.J. DIONNE: I ran across how Robert McAfee Brown described Niebuhr as a pessimistic optimist. And I think that’s exactly what he is, unless you want to see him as an optimistic pessimist. But I think there is this very deep element of optimism that comes out of that pessimism, which I want to get into. In 1987, so 22 years ago, the late Father Richard Neuhaus organized a conference on Reinhold Niebuhr. It was funded — you will be surprised — by the Pew Charitable Trusts. It is written that the Pew Trusts will always be with us. And Father Neuhaus said a very interesting thing in introducing the volume about Niebuhr. He said, “In recent years, there has been something of a Niebuhr renaissance. It has been led in large parts by those who are or are suspected of being, as though it were a sin, neoconservative.” And then he adds — and this part I very much agree with — “Attempting to capture Niebuhr for any partisan agenda, however, would be a great disservice both to Niebuhr and to what he can help us do today.”

And I think it says something about Niebuhr that this new Niebuhr revival, which I think we are seeing right now, is not being led primarily by neoconservatives, but actually by liberals and certain dissident conservatives like our friend David Brooks. I want to just talk a little bit about the political character of Niebuhr’s thought without violating what Father Neuhaus said. I do think in the end he is unmistakably, or if you have the other view, irredeemably, a liberal in the end. I wouldn’t use the word “irredeemably,” but it is



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something worth talking about because it’s very much a question of how his view of original sin fits in with a liberal worldview.

How do you sort of get at what being a Niebuhrian is? A Niebuhrian hockey player tries to win the game, but does not assume victory renders him superior to his opponent and would admit that he may have won unfairly when he high-sticked Clare Duffy and got away with it. A Niebuhrian wagering in Vegas plays the odds intelligently and tries to win, but always admits that perhaps luck or God’s grace, not his system, is why he won.

A Niebuhrian will get into a fistfight if it’s absolutely necessary, but would be acutely conscious of the pain his blows are inflicting on his opponent and know that the very fact the fight is happening is proof of the fallen nature of both himself and the person he is fighting. And a proper Niebuhrian will have a sense of humor about all of these things, understanding the profound ironies involved in trying to act effectively in the world and trying to act morally at the same time. And that’s why I love Reinhold Niebuhr.

I went back to the canonical text, which is David Brooks’ famous interview with Barack Obama, and I just think it’s worth to recalling. It was actually just a short statement by Obama, but it’s worth quoting to provide a context for the headline that Mike put on our discussion. David asked, “Have you ever read Reinhold Niebuhr?” Obama replied, “I love him. He’s one of my favorite philosophers.” And David asked what Obama took take away from Niebuhr. And here’s what Obama actually said. “I take away 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 that we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.”

That is actually a pretty good description of Reinhold Niebuhr. And whether Barack Obama, the politician, was pandering to David Brooks’ well-known love for Niebuhr or whether he was reflecting something deep in him, it sounded pretty deep and I think it’s actually not a bad description of the way Obama views the world. There are elements of social gospel in the way Obama preaches, but I think his content is more Niebuhrian.

Niebuhr — and this is probably why I like him — is much more a “both/and” guy. He’s a “yes, but” guy. His favorite words are “paradox” and “irony.” He is a 1940s liberal and



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that’s why there is the big debate between liberals and neocons because a lot of neocons say they are 1940s liberals. I think Niebuhr, later in life, suggested that he did not take the same path as some of his neoconservative friends, particularly with his very early support for the civil rights movement — although a lot of them supported the civil rights movement — but also with his strong opposition to the Vietnam War. But that’s just a piece of history that we can talk about. What I like about him is that he believes what he believes passionately, but with a sense of humility. I got some Niebuhr in Francis Collins’ presentation today.

Why are there Niebuhr revivals? Niebuhr is the person we turn to for balance. We turn to him when things get out of hand. He is a critic of the left’s utopianism and he’s a critic of the right’s tendency to deify our own country. His critique of original sin I think applies neatly at different times to both the right and the left in our politics. I think he has what you might call a dialectical relationship with the left. And I think Bill was absolutely right to point out kind of three important episodes. He reacted against the social gospel not because he opposed the economic or social programs of the social gospel but because he had a different understanding of human nature. He thought liberals had too optimistic a view of human nature.

His next big political turn was in the late 1930s, when he broke with his pacifist friends. The Christian Century, as you know, is still around, but he broke with The Christian Century and formed another magazine called Christianity and Crisis to argue that we needed to go to war against Hitler and Nazism. And then he made his mark again in politics, with a liberal anticommunism that made him one of the founders of Americans for Democratic Action with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. And I’m going to cite Schlesinger before I close. Niebuhr never stopped being a liberal, but he was a liberal critic.

I read The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness as someone who broadly shared the left’s views on economic justice and social reform, but I was impatient with a certain utopianism I saw on the left, which I thought was destructive. And I was also impatient with some parts of the left that seemed not to believe in the disciplines and limits placed upon our aspirations by the need to persuade majorities and to build consensus in



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democratic societies. I was and still am turned off by self-righteous moralism disguised as morality. Mike Novak is someone who’s written very well on that over the years and I think that tendency to be moralistic rather than moral afflicts the right, the center, the left and even parts of the self-satisfied center. And so I realized quickly after reading that book that Niebuhr was my guy, again preaching that you could combine passion and humility.

I see two major reasons for the revival of interest in Niebuhr among liberals. One, I think some of the criticism by Christian moderates and liberals of what we would see as a hyper-politicized Christian right square very much with some of Niebuhr’s criticism of a certain style of Christianity, a kind of revivalism that he was critical of in his own time. Niebuhr enjoined the believer to understand that “the worst corruption is a corrupt religion.”

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. Americans, Niebuhr argued, were never safe against the temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we most fervently desire. One great Niebuhrian quote should hang over all seminars. Niebuhr once said that “we must always seek the truth in our opponents’ error and the error in our own truth.” And that is also classic Niebuhr.

I think one of the paradoxes is that Niebuhr encourages us to doubt and the kind of doubt that Niebuhr encourages is the kind of doubt that faith ought to encourage. If faith is defined solely as a demand that everyone assent, without reservation, to a long and particular list of propositions, that’s an odd idea. But I think this is an inadequate understanding of the Christian and Jewish traditions, which always call us to a form of moral doubt that calls upon us to question our motivations and pretensions to special virtue.

Niebuhr said, “No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint.” He argued that some of the greatest perils to democracy arise from the fanaticism of moral idealists who are not conscious of the corruption of self-interest. And in his assertion, which might usefully have guided us during our debate



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over the war in Iraq, Niebuhr warned, “A nation with an inordinate degree of political power is doubly tempted to exceed the bounds of historical possibilities, if it is informed by an idealism which does not understand the limits of man’s wisdom and volition.”

It is not surprising that Niebuhr really came to popularity in a period when he was writing about Nazism and Stalinism, which were ideologies that justified despotic pretensions in the name of creating new human beings and perfect societies. Niebuhr had a strong sense of human nature as a constant. He was very skeptical of projects designed to create a new humanity and was very aware of how terrible these projects could become. This is religion’s essentially moderating role, which is far removed from ideology and from many claims that religion can provide a detailed textbook for creating the perfect society here on Earth. Even the religious left’s talk of our obligation to build the kingdom of God’s justice on earth emphasizes a constant act of creation — building — not a final outcome that human beings can achieve on our own.

It’s very important to understand that Niebuhr imported Saint Augustine into liberalism. And a friend of many of ours, Jean Elshtain, captured this very well. She wrote — and this is a totally Niebuhrian thought on Jean’s part — that if Augustine is “a thorn in the side of those who would cure the universe once and for all, he similarly torments critics who disdain any project of human community or justice or possibility.” “Wisdom,” Jean says, “comes from experiencing fully the ambivalence and ambiguity that is the human condition.”

One of Niebuhr’s favorite public statements is Lincoln’s second inaugural address. You all remember the key passage in Lincoln’s second inaugural, when he said: “Both sides read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully.”

Niebuhr said that this passage puts the relationship of our moral commitments in history to our religious reservations about the partiality of our own commitments more precisely



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than any statement or theologian has put them. Think about it. If anybody could have claimed that he was on the right side of history or even that he was on God’s side, it was Abraham Lincoln fighting slavery during the Civil War. Yet, Lincoln himself refused in this extreme instance to presume an identification of his will with God’s will. And I think that Lincoln demonstrated as clearly as any statesman, which is why he is a Niebuhrian figure, that it is possible to undertake great tasks in politics with firmness, commitment, principle and courage and still not pretend to absolute certainty about one’s course, one’s intentions or the purity of one’s motives.

I just want to close with this thought. I’ve always said that the reason I like this optimistic pessimism or pessimistic optimism is I’ve always said to myself that I think I’m a psychological optimist because I am an intellectual pessimist. I am not shocked when people do bad things. I’m actually amazed at how well people do under the circumstances, so perhaps it’s worth noting Gene Debs’ great line that there should be another beatitude: Blessed are they who expect nothing for they shall not be disappointed.

But I think a Niebuhrian view of the world insists that you can hold on to hope, that good Obama word, even with a realistic view of the capacity of human beings to make mistakes, and even, at times, to perform great acts of evil. It is possible, as Jesse Jackson likes to say, to keep hope alive. So this is my concluding prayer, really from Reinhold Niebuhr.

He wrote in The Irony of American History: “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.” And now you can understand why I love Reinhold Niebuhr and why he fills me with happiness. Thank you very much. DAVID VAN BIEMA, Time: If I understand you correctly and he believed in the necessity of acting, and getting one’s hands dirty and exerting power, while at the same time believing that inevitably there would be problems with pride and that the state was



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particularly apt to fall into the sin of delusion of special virtue, where would he come down in the torture debate? DR. McCLAY: Part of what I was getting to in this overlong talk that I’ve prepared was the list of things that I think are wrong with Niebuhr, or are inadequate, and one of them may address this. And I actually think of E.J.’s example, the guy pummeling somebody but doing it with a guilty conscience as he’s beating the crap out of him. It’s awfully hard to tell whether a leader is acting in a Niebuhrian way or just in an unscrupulous way. You know, a lot of it has to do with an inner disposition that’s not visible to us. And that’s a problem, especially in political life where you have to deal with external standards and principles that, particularly in a democratic society, ought to be open to general scrutiny. So a great example of this is more general issues of war. For obvious reasons pacifists don’t like Niebuhr. But they see the doctrine of “realism” as a kind of wild card that allows you to do whatever you want in the name of realism.

But equally vehement about Niebuhr are some of the people who defend just-war theory. Their argument is, look, we have a whole set of criteria that often are hard to nail down in particular instances, but at least as principles they are worth observing and worth trying to follow as a way of taming and legitimizing warfare in a civilized world. And in their view Niebuhr chucks all that, and says, well, you are going to get your hands dirty, bad things have to happen, but you’ve got to exercise power and innocents have to die, and eggs have to be broken to make omelets. He would never say that in that way, of course.

But you get my point, that there is some way in which what he writes can be very powerful in dealing with this way that power is just inescapable. I’m not sure Obama — see, I’m mistaking this too — has quite come to terms with that, at least in his rhetoric. But that’s where I think the real test will come. But back to this issue of torture and war. I think that the problem with Niebuhr is he doesn’t give you clear standards by which to make judgments and have it legitimated in the public arena.



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MR. DIONNE: I can’t prove this, although I do have a quotation that suggests it. If you look back at some of the things Niebuhr said about the Vietnam War, they suggest that he would have opposed waterboarding. I think he would have ended up on the side of those who said, we must fight the terrorists but we can’t use every method and those methods demean and hurt us. And my support for that are the very last words of The Irony of American History. He says: “For 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.” If you want to make a case against waterboarding, that’s a pretty good text to cite. DR. McCLAY: Since we’re going to play this “what would Reinhold say” game, I want to go in with all four limbs. I think that, certainly, if you were updating The Irony of American History, there would be a discussion of the ways in which the jihadists have elements of truth in their critique of American culture. Astonishing as it may sound, I think he would raise that issue. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. ROSS DOUTHAT, The New York Times: I wonder what you think of the idea that maybe what Niebuhr would say is that the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 2003 is the kind of forgivable excess that you expect from governments, but that the torture memos of 2005 are the kind of thing that shouldn’t be forgiven. What do you think about that kind of distinction, the sort of institutionalization versus the sort of crisis mentality, getting your hands dirty with an individual case? MR. DIONNE: First of all, Bill is fundamentally right. The “what would Niebuhr say and do” debate is pretty tough to carry out. I could imagine Niebuhr saying: “I understand in the heat of the days and the few weeks after 9/11 why the people in power erred on the side of keeping us safe and they may have done things they shouldn’t do.” I still think he would have ended up on the critical side because what’s so fascinating about Niebuhr is the neocons have always sort of liked him because he always talked about the legitimacy of using American power in the world. And there were moments



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when the people on the left were seen as always declaring that American power in the world is wrong and illegitimate. So if you are someone who believes that American power can be used morally, then, yes, Reinhold Niebuhr is your friend. But, he was also always very wary of jingoism, of our tendency not to look at our own flaws, the danger of overreach, the danger of doing things that were immoral in a moral cause.

And those are two sides of Niebuhr, and in some ways, you can say it’s an ambiguity, but I think fundamentally it actually holds together: American power can be used morally but it should be used with fear and trembling and we have to be very careful about how we use it.

DR. McCLAY: One of the fundamental building blocks of the argument in The Irony of American History is that Americans are utterly bedazzled by this notion of innocence. I think he might react to the current kind of orgy of interest in this subject that has to come up on every occasion. There has been a lot of this, I think, in the early months of this administration, this pushing the reset button, this desire to kind of scapegoat and exorcise the past. This is contrary to the spirit of Niebuhr. There’s no basis in Niebuhr for thinking that America was ever innocent, that any administration is innocent or that there’s any reset button that any administration can ever push to make itself innocent. So that doesn’t answer the specific question about this one issue, but I think it’s reasonable to deduce from his work that he might think that the emphasis on whether sending John Yoo and Jay Bybee to prison is going to atone for our national sins, over a war that began as a very broadly popular undertaking but later became a great burden to the national psyche, is a morally misplaced emphasis. MICHAEL GERSON, The Washington Post: Let me defend the social gospel against the Niebuhrians. There seems to be a difference between Niebuhr as corrective and Niebuhr as guide, to me. It seems like you wouldn’t necessarily want a nation of Niebuhrs. It seems like the history of American justice, social inclusion was propelled by believers, not by Niebuhrians. I would want a Niebuhrian to do the navigation in my car, but he doesn’t provide the fuel to get us there. The fuel is a belief in justice and truth in American history. So I’m wondering how you combine that kind of respect for Niebuhr as corrective with a



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recognition that that has not been the motivating principle of either the founding of our country or the progress of justice?

MR. DIONNE: I think you shortchange Niebuhr in terms of his own passion for justice. Richard Fox talks about how well into the 1950s Niebuhr could be very passionate in his critique of how capitalism actually works. In 1954, he wrote that capitalism had again become too complacent. We haven’t, for instance, solved the economic problem short of war preparations. There was a passion in him for justice. His critique of the social gospelers was not against their mission. And he certainly did not lack for a willingness to fight for labor, or for Social Security, or for all kinds of corrections to a system of unfettered capitalism.

He was critical of social gospelers on two grounds. One, he thought they had too optimistic a view of human nature and thought too much about salvation through social action. They forgot about sin along the way. And that in turn led to a politics that didn’t work. He was not against the original motives.

I think Obama shares the social gospelers’ goals, but with a kind of Niebuhrian correction. You know, in that famous speech at Sojourners, he talked a lot about social injustice, but then, he also talked about individual accountability and responsibilities. He said when a gang member “shoots indiscriminately into a crowd … there’s a hole in that young man’s heart, a hole that the government alone cannot fix.” Contraception could reduce teen pregnancy rates, he said, but he also talked about faith and guidance, which “help fortify a young woman’s sense of self, a young man’s sense of responsibility, and a sense of reverence that all young people should have for the act of sexual intimacy.” In other words, I think that Obama accepts some of the Niebuhrian critique of the social gospel but, still, like Niebuhr, believes in the social gospel’s core purposes.

DR. McCLAY: One of the things Niebuhr insisted on, and it was another source of his criticism of the social gospel because it was so subservient to the idea of the nation, was the idea that an emphasis upon the collectivity over the individual could easily lend support to a kind of quasi-totalitarianism.

http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=news.display_article&mode=C&NewsID=5454



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And he says explicitly in his later book The Self and the Dramas of History that you have to have some source of value standing above the values inherent in history in order for those values to have validity. And even though he was himself very much of a theological liberal, he worried that the social gospel dispensed unwisely with the entire supernatural element of faith, which not only was necessary as a driving force for reform, but kept that balance, serving as a corrective to the tendency of all social aggregates to tyrannize the individual.

LAUREN GREEN, Fox News: One of the things that is obvious is that his understanding of morality appeared in the context of the time: communism, the Nazis. What would he view as the evil today? What would his position be on the economic crisis? But also, is his effect on policy quantifiable? Did he have access to presidents like a Billy Graham did? Is there any quantifiable effect of him on American policy in any kind of administration? MR. DIONNE: When you think about his impact on policy over the whole period — his work in the labor movement, his support for the civil rights movement and all the work around Americans for Democratic Action — he was engaged in all of the core social reform movements of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. And he was an activist—he started life as an activist pastor in a poor neighborhood. He wasn’t a community organizer, but he almost was. I don’t know how much he went in and out of the White House, but I think he had a real impact on the direction of American politics as a New Dealer and a Fair Dealer. DR. McCLAY: Well, one area in which I think you can document influence is in the way that the doctrine of containment came to be formulated. Containment was really a Niebuhrian halfway between a kind of appeasement, on the one hand, and what John Foster Dulles called “rollback,” on the other hand. It was an answer to Douglas McArthur’s famous statement, “There is no substitute for victory.” You know, it was this notion that containing the expansion of communism, not rolling it back, would eventually lead to the internal unraveling and destruction of the system. Containment is a very difficult doctrine because it forswears those big victories and upbeat parades that wars generally have been about. George Kennan, who arguably played a major role in the formulation of the doctrine, was directly influenced by Niebuhr,

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/cwr/17601.htm



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knew Niebuhr, read Niebuhr. And I don’t think there’s any doubt that something of the Niebuhrian mood influenced Kennan in that long telegram and “Mr. X” article and these other documents that ended up becoming formative to containment — the way those policies and perspectives became formulated. So that’s a big influence. MS. GREEN: But what would he see as the great evil today? DR. McCLAY: That I just don’t know. He’d be very concerned about biotechnology, I suspect. He already was. In The Irony of American History there are already passages about it. NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY, The Wall Street Journal: I wanted to press you more on his views on economics. And then, the second half of that question is, if he saw institutions as so inherently sinful, even more so than individuals, I wonder what he thought about the potential for institutions to solve economic problems like poverty as opposed to individuals bringing themselves out of it. DR. McCLAY: I think his instincts were socialist. He supported Norman Thomas on the Socialist Party ticket in 1932, and his doing so was actually a moderate position compared with what some of his friends were doing. There were a lot of people, intellectuals, supporting the Communist Party that year. However, I do think you can deduce some support for free market principles, simply because really, by the time he writes The Irony of American History, he’s completely sold on the structure and dynamics of the U.S. Constitution, on the idea that it’s important to divide and disperse power as much as possible. I think economics is one area in which he could be a little formulaic and weak and just kind of go with the journalism of the day rather than thinking and reading deeply into it, and thinking independently. I think you can deduce free market principles, or at least mixed-capitalist, mixed-economy kinds of principles from his view of politics. But I think it would be anachronistic to go too far with that. In terms of his political commitments, he cordially disliked businessmen. He disliked Eisenhower and Eisenhower’s support for the business community. He was much more of an Adlai Stevenson kind of guy.



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CARL CANNON, PoliticsDaily.com: I was interested in what other presidents thought of Niebuhr. Bill mentioned Jimmy Carter. Three presidents have mentioned Reinhold Niebuhr, but Jimmy Carter spoke about Reinhold Niebuhr on three separate occasions. In May of 1978. Carter was talking to the Los Angeles Bar Association and he said he’d learned that “as Reinhold Niebuhr said, it is the sad duty of politics to establish justice in a sinful world.” In March 1978, he said, “From the experience of the urban renewal program of the 1950s, we learned to be skeptical about what Reinhold Niebuhr called ‘the doctrine of salvation through bricks’ — the idea that we can bulldoze away our urban problems.” And then, in June, he said that Niebuhr “pointed out the difference between a society and people. The expectations and demands on a person are a much higher standard. A person should have as our goal complete agape love. The most we can expect from a society is to institute simple justice.”

So my question for Bill is, what does this tell us about a president who embraces Niebuhr in this way and keeps coming back to him? And then, I would ask you, E.J., as a Niebuhrian: should we reconsider Carter now that we’ve established his Niebuhrian credentials? Carter was Mike Gerson’s candidate in 1976, it should be pointed out.

DR. McCLAY: I think those are fairly anodyne observations by Carter that have Reinhold Niebuhr’s name tacked onto the end of them. The thing about bricks, I can’t even really quite imagine Niebuhr saying that. But he wrote so much that it’s quite possible he did. I think Carter may have at some point been a serious student of Niebuhr. I just don’t know. But there’s a kind of Niebuhr line that you can embrace which is to say, well, you can’t expect the same things of institutions that you do of individuals. True, but that seems fairly obvious. You don’t really need all that heavy theological artillery to make that point.

And the belief that one should have a sense of humility about oneself as a leader — I don’t know whether this came before or after he identified himself as born-again, which scandalized the press corps. Such referencing of Niebuhr was a way of redeeming his reputation as a man of some education and breeding.



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I don’t want to be too harsh about it. But if you look at Carter’s presidency, I think, in fact, many of the criticisms that Niebuhr makes of the children of light — that they have a kind of conviction about their virtuousness and the virtuousness of their cause, and that by being virtuous and showing their virtue they will sway the opinions of others — this just doesn’t work in Niebuhr’s view.

MR. DIONNE: Jimmy Carter is an intellectually serious believer and he’s an intellectually serious believer of a certain age. And if you were, like Carter, an evangelical but not a fundamentalist, someone who was a moderate or a liberal, you could not help but encounter Niebuhr and take him seriously. You can debate, as Bill suggested, exactly how he applied Niebuhr. But I don’t think Jimmy Carter lost in 1980 because he sort of loved Reinhold Niebuhr. I don’t think it changes our view of him. I think we knew that he was a thoughtful Christian. He lost because of stagflation and the hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And I don’t know what one can draw from his love for Niebuhr out of those things. I don’t mean to be glib about it. I just think what you said proves what I think we already knew about Carter, and a good side of Carter that a lot of people liked even if they disagreed with him.

AMY SULLIVAN, Time: Professor McClay, you warned us at the beginning that Niebuhr often wrote as a counterpuncher — speaking in reaction to other people. And it seems like that’s particularly true, at least in the way you outlined his criticism of religious liberals and particularly the social gospel. You could be excused for coming away from that thinking that he wasn’t that different and that he believed Christians still should be engaged in efforts to make the world a better place and progress in social causes. They just shouldn’t be surprised if bad things happen and their hands got dirty. But there must be more to it than that. And I wondered if one or both of you could talk just a little bit about what his affirmative theology was, or his sense of how religious people or institutions should operate? DR. McCLAY: I think that Niebuhr wanted to stress — and yes, he is counterpunching when he does this — that there is no resolution to the problems of politics in this life. You can ameliorate suffering here and there, and you are obliged to try to do so. But the notion that history is somehow moving towards some sort of omega point where



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frictionless social relations will come into being, where the self-realization of individuals is going to occur in an unimpeded way, that it’s possible to imagine that the interests of different individuals and different groups are not going to clash, and clash in a way that’s more or less permanent in character, that those interests may shift around in complexion but will not clash — that’s an illusion. MR. DIONNE: He was anti-utopian. DR. McCLAY: Yes. But you know, anti-utopian doesn’t just mean having moderate expectations. It doesn’t mean that perfection can only be approached asymptotically, and is not achievable for us here below. For Niebuhr, it is something much more disturbing. It’s the notion that the more we progress, the more we put ourselves in danger. That’s a very scary but very powerful principle. And I think that’s very different from the kind of progressive view that the social gospelers, by and large, took. But there’s an argument to be made that he oversimplifies people like Walter Rauschenbusch, who are not quite as blithe and naïve as he makes them out to be. MS. SULLIVAN: What do Christians then do with that? MR. DIONNE: I think that he assumed that Christians — it was a deep assumption reflected in the way he lived his life and the way he was a pastor —would be, should be engaged in social action. When you were a minister in a poor parish in Detroit at a time of union organizing, low wages and all the struggles going on. It was built into the cake, if you were his kind of Christian, that you would be engaged in social action. What he was about was trying to think through not only what was the most effective form of social action, but also how should one think about that social action as a Christian. He started out as a socialist, and still maintained some of the socialist aspirations — nonetheless he came to see utopianism as both theoretically flawed and also as ineffectual in politics.

All political systems are imperfect, so you have to just keep fighting. And you shouldn’t give up because you don’t win a final victory. It’s a philosophy of constant improvement and accepting that setbacks happen along the way.



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DR. McCLAY: Niebuhr lived in a time when you could count on Christian culture as a propulsive force, when your real task was how to channel that, how to correct it, how to keep it from its worst excesses and make it more self-aware and self-critical. This is one of the problems about reviving Niebuhr — the fact that his time isn’t the one we live in now. Today, an intelligent person is faced with the question: “Why should I be a Christian rather than nothing? Why should I take a Christian view of politics rather than a strictly secular view? What does the Christian modifier contribute to all of this?” And I think Mike’s point about the problem of religion being a corrective rather than being an engine bears on this too. These are questions that Niebuhr didn’t really have to face. DAN GILGOFF,U.S. News & World Report: It struck me that so far, a lot of the conversation about Niebuhr has centered on his enduring, or perhaps not-so-enduring, influence on American politics and on policymakers both current and past. And I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about whether that influence is discernable at all in American Christianity today, given that that was the realm in which he was operating. And also, looking at Obama, his public statements, the degree to which he invokes the Bible, or religion, or father, or morality, do you see any other specific figures besides Niebuhr and traditions like the social gospel shining through his words?

MR. CROMARTIE: Professor Putnam, if you could tell us your perception of what Niebuhr is, say, in Cambridge, Mass. Or at least, if you know, in the divinity school or in the political science world in which you work. DR. ROBERT PUTNAM, Harvard University: In my own field, political science, when I was growing up, which was actually a long time ago in the ’60s, Niebuhr was a major figure. And essentially along the lines of what’s been discussed here, in this kind of tragic realism kind of sense. So, probably, most political scientists of my generation know a little bit about Niebuhr. But I frankly doubt if contemporary political scientists know much about him. And maybe they should, I think, from a political-science point of view, not from a theological point of view.



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This recent Niebuhr revival is actually quite interesting because I do think it reflects a little bit of what’s happening religiously, but mostly what’s happening sociologically, in America: don’t start pushing grand plans and distant ideals because you’re almost certain to get it wrong. That part, along with the hope part. I don’t know if that fits theologically or not now, but I think I see it as a little bit of the ethos of our times.

MR. DIONNE: It seems to me that Niebuhr went out of fashion somewhere in the 1960s and that was partly a product of the anti-war movement, which saw him as more of a realist. And, you know, there was a rebellion against realism. He wasn’t left-wing enough. I think that the journalistic and political comeback of Niebuhr has some parallels now in the academy. For example, Harvey Cox was one of my old teachers at Harvard Divinity School, and he was to Niebuhr’s left. And he had a very interesting little letter in The New York Times that I think was probably friendlier to Niebuhr than Harvey would have been circa 1969 or 1970. I want to ask Cox about this. I think it reflects Niebuhr’s resurrection and the new engagement with Niebuhr that’s going on now. DR. McCLAY: One of the appeals of Hauerwas, and I think one of the concerns —Niebuhr really was in his heyday in the ’30s through the ’50s. Living in those years, it is not surprising that individualism and what might be called the sort of defense of the integrity of the individual over against collectivities and groups of any kind became one of his greatest themes. That is not, it seems to me, so large a concern now. To take it to a theological level, one sees a lot of concern, particularly among the young, that our churches are not organizations in which people really are experiencing community, being bound together. And I think there is a lot more interest, particularly among the younger people, with finding a more vibrant and vital form of community than Niebuhr really has to offer, because Niebuhr is very guarded. He offers a very low level of social trust, Niebuhr. He’s always looking out for the ways the individual can be captured and co-opted by groups, and trying to maintain that individual’s independence.

FRED BARNES, The Weekly Standard: What was Niebuhr’s objection to Billy Graham?



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DR. McCLAY: I think it was part of this critique that people like Will Herberg made of American religion in the ’50s: that it was too culturally complacent, too adapted to American life. I mean, Billy Graham was, in a sense, the quintessence of the emphasis on individual conversion and nothing else, at least in Niebuhr’s view. And it’s true that Graham didn’t challenge social structures. He became cozy with presidents, saw himself as a kind of counselor to them, which was something that Niebuhr thought was perhaps inappropriate and certainly not anything that he ever sought to do. ADRIAN WOOLRIDGE, The Economist: I wonder if [Niebuhr] had much influence in Britain or Europe? And I wondered what sort of influence Niebuhr had on Jeremiah Wright, if anything? DR. McCLAY: Niebuhr was part of this transatlantic group of liberal anticommunists, membership in which ended up being part of what counts for a decline in his reputation, too. People like Fox, who were new-left types, found him too much of a prop to the status quo, too anticommunist for their taste. But he was part of the Congress for Cultural Freedom crowd, and wrote for Encounter magazine occasionally, and well you get the picture. So he was part of that world and was read all over Europe, not just in Great Britain. And there’s a bit of a revival of Niebuhr going on in the U.K. now. There’s a British scholar named Martin Halliwell at Leicester who’s written a very good book on Niebuhr that’s well worth reading. MR. DIONNE: I agree with what Bill said in terms of the transatlantic influence of his liberal anticommunism and his view of foreign policy. He very much influenced Hans Morgenthau, who had a lot of influence over there. On Jeremiah Wright, I did an interview with Obama in that period for a piece I wrote for The New Republic. Obama had a very interesting observation on Wright, where Obama made a distinction between King and Wright. He noted that in his early stage King had the combination that was all about — publicly, especially — reconciliation, but that King was angrier toward the end of his life, particularly about the Vietnam War, and that Wright came along in that late stage and was much more influenced by the period of disillusionment at the end of the civil rights years than by the spirit of hope at the beginning of the civil rights years.



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And so my hunch is that, just as Bill said, Wright clearly was influenced by James Cone and his black liberation theology, which was part of all those post-liberal theological developments in divinity schools that led to more radical forms of theology. But I’m sure Wright had to have some contact with the ideas of Niebuhr. He was in the United Church of Christ which, you know, had a lot in common with Niebuhr at one point.

DAN HARRIS, ABC News: Beyond Niebuhr, who are the theologians, religious figures, religious traditions that you see, you know, embodied in some of Obama’s rhetoric or perhaps beyond that, if you’re daring enough to read it into his actual policies. MR. DIONNE: I have tried to figure out who has influenced him. If you read the Sojourners speech, he’s clearly spent some time, or somebody has, looking at the whole debate around John Rawls: what are the obligations of the religious person in the public square in making arguments that are accessible to those who do not share the same religious commitments? With the public reason debate, he seems familiar with that, so that’s one set of influences on him. I think the formative influences, both rhetorically and to some degree substantively, are all the traditions of civil rights Christianity. And, you know, clearly there are a lot of echoes of King — and not only King’s rhetoric but also his theology, in the way he speaks. And in some ways, what I see in Obama is an effort to go back to civil rights Christianity as part of his way of reformulating a sort of progressive gospel — to make a link between that and Niebuhr, which is quite a natural link since King himself was influenced by Niebuhr in a lot of his language.

MR. GERSON: If you look at the history of American rhetoric, Niebuhrian rhetoric is pretty rare. What does it say that it isn’t even a rhetorical option in American history? You call people to grand purposes and moral missions and American exceptionalism and a lot of other things…maybe one of the reasons that Niebuhr’s influence waned in the aftermath of [the Cold War or World War II] is that he was talking about the ironies of American history just at the point that America was on the verge of some of the greatest moral achievements in human history.



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MR. DIONNE: I think the very notion of containment, as opposed to rollback, was in fact full of Niebuhrian ambiguity. I think what’s important is that Niebuhr was unambiguous about the morality of the struggle. This combination — a moral resoluteness — about the immediate issues 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 civilization on the one hand, while yet having some religious vantage point over the struggle on the other. Niebuhr was at his high tide in the ’40s and ’50s because he believed in the struggle against the Nazis, the liberation of death camps and anticommunism. But he was not a jingoist. He did not believe America was automatically moral or always right. And the very idea that he was in favor of containment as opposed to rollback says that we can behave in the world in a way that is responsible in confronting communism but does not carry all the risks that rollback would entail. I think some of Kennedy’s rhetoric had some of that in it. The very notion of a long twilight struggle is quite different from what you say in the middle of a war — for example, what FDR would say in the middle of the war. Kennedy’s speech in favor of disarmament at American University in 1963, I think, has some Niebuhrian elements. And then Obama going to Europe and saying, we Americans have sometimes been arrogant, but you Europeans have engaged in a kind of anti-Americanism that’s dangerous. That struck me as a very Niebuhrian sort of balance. I thought it was a good thing to say. Others didn’t think it was a good thing to say. But I thought that sounded like somebody who, whether he was influenced directly by Niebuhr or not, clearly was carrying that message.

JOHN SINIFF, USA Today: I wondered if you see anything Niebuhrian in Obama’s re-casting of the office of faith-based initiatives. MR. DIONNE: As far as I can tell Niebuhr has no direct influence or indirect influence on Obama’s thinking on the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. I think what Obama is trying to do is walk a line between not wanting to overturn it and thinking there is good work done here; and in fact, partnerships between

http://www1.media.american.edu/speeches/Kennedy.htm



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government and faith-based groups pre-date President Bush. I think that it distorts the debate on both sides if liberals say, this is a Bush creation and we’re against it. Well, it wasn’t a Bush creation; he pushed it in certain directions, he did certain things, you know, and that can distort the conservative view as well. And I think Obama is trying to figure out, “How can I be true to things I say or believe about church-state separation and religious liberty and still keep this thing going?” So I think they’re still struggling toward resolving that, and he’s clearly kicked down the road the hardest question, which is the religious hiring issue, and he’s clearly tried to fudge that for a while, and my impression is that he’s going to fudge it for a while longer.

I think he’s going to have to confront it, but the shrewd thing I think he did — shrewd because I thought he did the right thing — was to say we don’t want this whole effort to get blown up immediately in a debate over this hiring issue when we know there is quite a lot of common ground on these partnerships. Bill Clinton had some of the first faith-based offices at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and other parts of the administration. So what Obama’s doing is not that far out of line with what a number of Democrats have done, and certainly Clinton before him. And so I think they’re still figuring it out, is the short answer.

MR. CROMARTIE: Join me in thanking both these gentlemen for their time.

END

The Faith Angle Forum is a program of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. For more information visit our website: www.faithangle.org

or contact Michael Cromartie at [email protected]

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