An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story

by Jeremy L. Sabella

As the Allied powers drew closer to victory, Niebuhr foresaw the need for a democratic theory that would foster the responsible exercise of American power in a radically altered postwar world. He maintained that the democratic system of checks and balances was uniquely effective at harnessing the human potential for good and restraining the human potential for evil. Yet past variants of democratic theory had proven too naïve in their assessments of evil to calibrate these checks and balances properly. Building a more stable world order required democracies to take seriously the deeply problematic aspects of human nature that the chaos of the early twentieth century had revealed so starkly.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a liberal Christian movement called the Social Gospel had transformed American Christianity. The Social Gospel called on Christians to establish the kingdom of God on earth by reforming oppressive economic systems. Social Gospel leaders took an optimistic view of human nature, focusing less on human fallibility than on the ability of good-hearted individuals to work for social justice.

The Social Gospel movement had far-reaching cultural impact: it energized liberal Protestantism, instilled and deepened social consciousness at various levels of American society, and helped catalyze some of the most important social reform efforts and organizations of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Progressive Era, including women’s suffrage and Prohibition, Alcoholics Anonymous, and the YMCA. Indeed, some scholars have described the Social Gospel movement as the Third Great Awakening, similar in scope and impact to the colonial-era religious revivals of the Great Awakening and the frontier-transforming religious revivals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Niebuhr’s pacifism aligned nicely with the increasing number of Social Gospelers who came to view nonviolence as the only stance toward war that could be reconciled with the teachings of Jesus. Niebuhr also became a staunch advocate of Prohibition, a trademark Social Gospel cause.

While Niebuhr did not question the sincerity of Ford’s self-perception as a benevolent philanthropist, he no longer saw good intent as an adequate basis for withholding criticism. Sincerity, Niebuhr came to believe, could coexist with and even enable self-deception.

In Niebuhr’s eyes, Ford wasn’t simply another greedy industrialist; he was also an idealist who portrayed himself as a humanitarian invested in the nation’s spiritual as well as its material well-being. Through this combination of cutthroat capitalism and idealism, Ford embodied the virtues and vices of the American psyche more broadly.

Ford instituted a drive to hire sixteen to twenty year olds, ostensibly to “keep them out of mischief.”21 The Ford Corporation promoted this as a philanthropic move to reduce crime. Yet the net effect was to replace older workers no longer capable of keeping up with the frenetic assembly-line pace with strong, young bodies. Those muscled out of their jobs had no recourse but to seek help from the city. As Niebuhr observed, “unemployed Ford workers are the heaviest charge upon Detroit charities of any class of citizens.”

He noted, “It is difficult to determine whether Mr. Ford is simply a shrewd exploiter of a gullible public in his humanitarian pretensions, or whether he suffers from self-deception. My own guess is that he is at least as naive as he is shrewd, that he does not think profoundly on the social implications of his industrial policies, and that in some of his avowed humanitarian motives he is actually self-deceived.”

In a Leaves entry, Niebuhr noted wryly that a “minister I have suspected of cowardice for years because he never deviated a hair’s breadth from the economic prejudices of his wealthy congregation” had recently gone on a “tirade against women who smoke cigarettes and lost almost a hundred of his fashionable parishioners.”25 These pastors simply did not see structural injustice as meriting the same sort of attention as personal vices. They seemed to presume that personal transformation was key to social transformation: get enough people to live in a morally upright way, and social transformation would follow. Yet Niebuhr’s time on the Interracial Committee had taught him that personal morality was not enough. His polemic against Ford was premised on the idea that, even though Ford was exemplary from the standpoint of personal morality, he deployed structurally unjust business practices.

“Insofar as this treatise has a polemic interest,” Niebuhr wrote in his introduction, “it is directed against the moralists, both religious and secular, who imagine that the egoism of individuals is being progressively checked by the development of rationality or the growth of a religiously inspired goodwill and that nothing but the continuance of this process is necessary to establish social harmony between all human societies and collectives.”

As Niebuhr saw it, both religious and secular variants of liberalism presume that the trajectory of human civilization is one of continual progress: from ignorance to knowledge, from superstition to enlightenment, from brutishness to civilization. The engine driving the forward march of progress is the power of reason. Human beings, the thinking goes, are rational animals. The more they cultivate and apply the tools of reason, the better their societies will become. For Niebuhr this view was not only dangerously naïve; it was also based on a fatally flawed understanding of how reason operates in human relations.

If Niebuhr’s contention that reason is “always, to some degree, the servant of self-interest” is correct, then it is necessary to rethink the liberal understanding of human nature and human relations.

The vast majority of people behave morally toward those within their immediate networks, but self-interestedly toward those outside of their networks.

First, there is no clear trajectory of moral progress in human affairs: peace between groups is the result of a balance of power, not an increase in morality.

Second, in order to advocate on behalf of a particular group, one must resort to coercion: there is no other way to obtain concessions from the powerful on behalf of the powerless. As Niebuhr states, “when collective power, whether in the form of imperialism or class domination, exploits weakness, it can never be dislodged unless power is raised against it.”

The Social Gospel, according to Niebuhr’s reading, presumed that implementing the ethical precepts of Jesus in society was a straightforward process. This presumption ignored, however, that while the ethics of Jesus are governed by the law of love, the political realm is governed by the law of power.

Moral man had to be willing to engage immoral society on society’s own power-driven terms. By failing to understand this, the Social Gospel had proved to be too heavenly minded to be of earthly good.

“Liberal theologians were claiming that we were on the road to progress, that human beings were perfectible, that there was a possibility of some utopian society in history. It was a kind of captivity to a highly fashionable, secular claim about what the future could be. Niebuhr comes in with this tragic sensibility. . . . He says no, we all have fallen, we all are finite, we all are fallible. There will never be a utopian society in human history, there will never be paradise in space and time.”

Niebuhr injected a keen sense of the tragic into Christian social ethics, which subsequent thinkers would find difficult to ignore regardless of whether they agreed with him.

“God,” he intoned, “give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”

The product of his efforts, which came to be known as Christian realism, wielded considerable influence once the outcome of the war started to come into focus.

H. Richard argued that they had not gone far enough: “You are free from the liberal interpretation of morality — but not quite — and from the liberal interpretation of religion — but not quite. And in that not quite your conflict is based.”7 As H. Richard saw it, the issue was neatly summarized in the book’s title. As tough as Reinhold had been on “immoral society,” he still held out belief in “moral man.” Consequently, he remained “too romantic about human nature in the individual,” and thus, was still tethered to the naïve liberalism from which he sought to break free.

H. Richard’s overarching point was that Reinhold needed to be as tough in his analysis of the individual as he was in his analysis of society. To do this effectively he would need to draw on the vocabulary and insights of theology, particularly the language of sin and grace as Augustine and Reformation-era thinkers such as Luther and Calvin had deployed it. The fourth-century Christian thinker Augustine, as well as those who were influenced by him, argued that the human will was broken, and that outside of the grace of God, humans could do nothing fully good. Although often dismissed as too pessimistic in their assessments of human nature, these thinkers provided the conceptual resources necessary to break definitively with the naïve elements of Social Gospel liberalism.

But while Bonhoeffer found the academic culture of Union wanting, he did learn from its sensitivity to issues of social ethics. On a paper on Martin Luther that Bonhoeffer had written for one of Niebuhr’s seminars, Niebuhr reportedly wrote, “There are no ethics here. Where is the ethical dimension in your account? A concept of faith without ethics is an empty concept.”

According to biographer Charles Marsh, Bonhoeffer was “mortified” by the critique. Yet it foreshadowed a momentous shift in Bonhoeffer’s life and thought. A classmate took him to Abyssinian Baptist Church, a historically black congregation in Harlem. Under the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the church brought together religious feeling, social justice, and biblical teaching in a way that left a profound impression on the young German. Five years later Bonhoeffer would write The Cost of Discipleship, one of the classic texts in Christian ethics. It is perhaps best remembered for its distinction between a “cheap grace” that requires no substantive change in the individual and the “costly grace” that demands life-transforming obedience to the Christian gospel.

But Bonhoeffer was determined. As he wrote to Niebuhr, “I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.”12 He would pay the ultimate price for practicing the costly grace that he preached: he was arrested for participating in a foiled assassination attempt on Hitler and was hanged on April 9, 1945, at Flossenbürg concentration camp.

In Moral Man, Niebuhr had made it clear who was on the “right” and “wrong” sides of the struggle; in Reflections, he pointed out the way that good and evil intermingle in both sides of any given conflict.

As Healan Gaston observes, Niebuhr was aware of God as “transcendent, as potentially inscrutable, as possibly unknowable in certain ways.”

From the day we are born, we are implicated in the exploitative patterns and structures that pervade all human societies. For that reason alone, we deserve judgment.

Reflections on the End of an Era is the only major book of Niebuhr’s to never be reprinted. This was, in part, because its account of a world fraying at the seams did not resonate in subsequent decades the way it did at the height of the Great Depression. But as Cornel West points out, this is also why Reflections is so important: “It’s really about the decline and the demise of Capitalist civilization as we know it, owing to escalating levels of corruption, and greed, and cronyism, and nepotism, and narcissism. That could have been written today.”

The term “myth” is often used as a synonym for fable, or to describe a story as untrue or unreal. For Niebuhr, however, “myth” describes language that relates the time-bound to the eternal and the finite to the infinite. Myth, in other words, was that category of language that enabled us to understand God and humanity as related. For language to accomplish this purpose, it had to take us beyond the rules of rational consistency.

In a Christian context, we need stories such as the account of the fall of humanity in Genesis, dense symbols such as the cross of Christ, and Gospel depictions of a cosmic final judgment to articulate the ecstasies and agonies of our inner lives, account for the human experience of good and evil, and cultivate an ethical vision of a just society. Without access to mythic language capable of relating the finite to the eternal, this sort of robust description of human experience would be impossible.

“Niebuhr believed in cooperative movements and energetically worked with them but he knew that wasn’t where the rubber hit the road. . . . If you were going to reform that agricultural system or racial relations . . . you need to enlist the power of government.”

Given the worsening political conditions on the European continent, this article was striking in how it emphasized theological concepts of sin, divine judgment, and divine mercy over incisive political commentary. Niebuhr, however, had grown to realize that these concepts brimmed with political implications.

As Stone points out, Niebuhr “would’ve agreed with Aristotle: If you’re not political, you’re either an idiot or a god.”

“True religion [displays] a profound uneasiness about our highest social values. Its uneasiness springs from the knowledge that the God whom it worships transcends the limits of finite man, while this same man is constantly tempted to forget the finiteness of his cultures and civilization and to pretend a finality for them which they do not have. Every civilization and every culture is thus a Tower of Babel”

As spirit-animal hybrids, human beings are perched precariously between the realm of nature and the realm of spirit. On the one hand, humans are subject to the same basic strictures as other mammals: they eat, drink, sleep, copulate, defecate, and eventually die. On the other hand, they are spiritual beings made in God’s image. They possess powers of reason, fertile imaginations, hopes, and dreams that push them to transform the world as they find it. Human beings, therefore, are both radically limited and radically free. In a basic sense, all moral questions consist in bringing our animal needs and spiritual capacities into balance.

Niebuhr argued that we find this balance when we take responsibility over that which we can control and trust God with the things that we cannot.

The account of the Fall in Genesis demonstrates that we inevitably cope with this anxiety by taking matters into our own hands. Just as Adam and Eve partook of the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil on the false promise that once they did they would “be as gods,” we grasp for a degree of control over our own fate that our creaturely limitations simply cannot sustain. Original sin describes the inevitability with which we seek to control what God alone can.

He broke with pacifist politics in a 1940 article fittingly titled “An End to Illusions.” In it, he made public his decision to resign from the Socialist Party because he refused to toe the neutralist party line. “The Socialists have a dogma that this war is a clash of rival imperialisms,” he wrote. “Of course they are right. So is a clash between myself and a gangster a conflict of rival egotisms.”

While this article was political in content, the theology underpinning it was clear: the world is fallen, and human beings are sinful. Under such conditions, we are sometimes forced to make decisions between the lesser of two evils.

The two variants relevant to the present discussion are theological realism, as exemplified by Christian realism, and what Niebuhr called a “too consistent political realism”2 — what we might refer to as ultrarealism. Scholar David Halberstam coined the term “ultrarealism” to describe the approach to world politics that came into vogue under the Kennedy administration and shaped US foreign policy through the end of the Vietnam War. Historian Peter Beinart observes that the ultrarealists “started with the reasonable insight that evil would never be eradicated and that the currency of world affairs would always be power — and forgot that there are limits to these truths as well.”

While considerations of self-interest supply a valuable starting point for political analysis, final decisions should take into account certain ideals of love and justice. Consequently, the Christian realist approach to political issues often differs substantially from the ultrarealist approach.

Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. — The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness

Barth emphasized the chasm separating God and humanity, and the utter inability of sinful human beings to bridge this chasm using the tools of reason. When human beings attempt to portray God using human categories, Barth argued, they end up with an elaborate projection of themselves.

In Barth’s framework, we can avoid remaking God in our image only by renouncing the temptation to make God intelligible to ourselves and to others. Instead, we must accept God’s revelation by faith and obey it without seeking to make it respectable by human standards.

Barth asserted: “We ought to give up, even on our first day of deliberations, every thought that the care of the church, the care of the world, is our care. Burdened with this thought we should straighten out nothing; we should only increase disorder in church and world still more. For this is the root of all human disorder: the dreadful, godless, ridiculous opinion that man is the Atlas who is destined to bear the dome of heaven upon his shoulders.”

For Barth the good news of the Christian message was that this triumph was already complete. In light of this, the task of Jesus’s followers was to bear witness to the victory that has already been achieved. This witness exposed the futility of evil and helped to open human beings to the healing and transformative work of grace. For Niebuhr the good news of the Christian message was that Jesus’s death and resurrection inaugurated God’s triumph over evil, which would be completed at the final judgment. In the meantime, the task of followers of Jesus was to become participants in the process of God’s unfolding work of redemption, finding the strength to face present evils without despair in their hope that history would be redeemed.

In Niebuhr’s view, Barth’s arresting portrait of sin and redemption was spiritually edifying in times of great upheaval, but supplied little guidance over the ethical terrain of everyday life. Barth’s approach to ethics could, in Niebuhr’s words, “fight the devil if he shows both horns and both cloven feet. But it refuses to make discriminating judgments between good and evil if the devil shows only one horn or the half of a cloven foot.”

Bacevich argues that Niebuhr was a “profoundly countercultural figure” in the way he took on illusions of innocence and exceptionalism.