Niebuhr takes his starting point for Christian realism as “the facts of experience,” the willingness to “take all factors . . . into account, particularly the factors of self-interest and power.”[11] This starting point has significant implications for the question of race. When one begins with the facts of experience and not, as in Karl Barth’s theology, with God’s revelation, the conversation must confront the brutal realities of racial injustice: slavery, segregation, and lynching.
