An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story

by Jeremy L. Sabella

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.