Reinhold Niebuhr (1902-1971) was one of the most influential political and religious thinkers in the United States in this century. His influence spread just as widely in political circles as in religious ones through his work as a leftist pastor and activist in the '20s; a professor at New York City's Union Theological Seminary; an author of many articles and books, including Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932); the founder in 1940 of the liberal Protestant journal Christianity and Crisis; and as an adviser to policy-makers during the creation of the post-World War II international political system. Niebuhr's "Christian realism" provided a religious justification and framework for the Cold War foreign policy of the United States, a policy that emphasized "containment" of the Soviet Union and utilized the tactic of intervention in the Third World when necessary.
Not long ago, we asked Sojourners contributing editor and United Methodist pastor Bill Kellermann to review two recent significant books on Niebuhr: Reinhold Niebuhr, by Richard Wightman Fox (Pantheon Books, New York, 1986), and The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, edited by Robert McAfee Brown (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1986). That review quickly - and appropriately, in our view - grew into a feature-length treatment and critique of Niebuhr and his influence on U.S. Christians and policymakers. -- The Editors
Reinhold Niebuhr is a hot topic these days. A major religious publishing house turned down the manuscript of Richard Fox's definitive new biography on the "father of Christian realism," (Reinhold Niebuhr) because its editors thought that no one would be interested. "Boy," said one of the editors recently, "were we wrong."
The interest is there. Also published recently was a collection of Niebuhr's shorter theological writings, edited by Robert McAfee Brown under the title The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr. These books are already being made companion volumes to course texts in seminary ethics classes.
The interest flourishes in part because the liberals and the conservatives are squabbling over Niebuhr's theological legacy. Michael Novak and friends of the Institute on Religion and Democracy persuasion claim him as the model of a repentant and chastened radical who came to be a democratic capitalist - the first neo-conservative. Robert McAfee Brown, on the other hand, holds that Niebuhr, for all his well-aimed attacks on sentimental and self-righteous liberalism, stayed firmly in the progressive camp.
Richard Fox, the biographer, never met the erstwhile mentor of Novak and Brown but studied at Stanford under both. As the rift between his two teachers widened, he set out to research his book in a "quest for the historical Niebuhr...an attempt to probe beneath the conflicting Niebuhrs of faith."
Nonetheless, who can rightly use Niebuhr's emeritus status on letterhead appeals for their political causes is not the issue. "Liberal vs. conservative" is not the issue (though one does have to guess that Niebuhr would choke to be marshaled on behalf of the Reagan agenda).
The import of these books is not with the invocation of the Niebuhr name, but in the way his ideas have penetrated the church. He casts a long and abiding shadow. The man whose portrait graced the 25th anniversary cover of Time magazine in 1948 has been the unrivaled political ethics teacher to several generations of pastors.
More than a decade ago, when liberation theology hit the U.S. scene with full force, it ran smack into - you guessed it - Niebuhr's "Christian realism," which had some advice for the Latin upstarts: "Read Reinhold Niebuhr." There ensued in the journals for some weeks a theological brouhaha wherein supporters and detractors alike took a Niebuhrian measure of the new theology. Reinhold Niebuhr effectively remains, 15 years after his death, political gatekeeper to North American Christendom.
Now squarely to the point: Any movement which advocates nonviolent resistance, nuclear abolitionism, and marginality with the poor, which puts faithfulness before effectiveness, which takes seriously the Sermon on the Mount, or which believes there is a politics of the cross - that movement will bump heads over and over (most likely without knowing it) with Reinhold Niebuhr's legacy.
I am a pastor and not a scholar. I could arguably be accused of being more opinionated than well-read. And I am biased. When I read these two laudatory books it is from the perspective of precisely the movement I have just described. I say: Let's bump heads and know it.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR HAD been a pacifist, if perhaps a naive one in the '20s, but he came to be the most articulate and influential religious voice leading the charge into World War II and banishing biblical nonviolence from the church as naive, heretical, and ethically irrelevant. At one time a Marxist and Socialist Party candidate, he came, especially in the McCarthy period of the early 1950s, to be a vehement anti-communist and a theological interpreter of the U.S. imperial vocation, making the Cold War comprehensible to the "Christian on the street." If he recoiled at first from the horror of atomic and nuclear weapons, he nonetheless quickly sanctioned deterrence, the arms race, and the "tragic necessity" of living with these weapons.
Biblically, Niebuhr could find nothing in the scriptures to support an ethic of nonviolent resistance. The Sermon on the Mount he thought absolute, uncompromising, even normative in some sense, but not practical or immediately applicable to the struggle for peace and justice.
The cross of Christ revealed the "tragic irony" of human history. It might signal a moment of transcendence, but it was not to be "taken up" by ordinary Christians. He found no transforming power in the cross. Self-sacrifice was for "mothers, martyrs, mystics, and monastics," not for the morally responsible.
In simple or sophisticated form, these ideas are deeply entrenched in the church. By and large, to my mind, they signify its conformity to the world. To what extent is that due to Niebuhr's influence? And how did the man come to be so influential? By sheer force of mind, personal charisma, and a frenetic activism in speaking and writing, if Richard Fox's book is to be believed.
Raised in an itinerant parsonage family of the German Evangelical Synod, Niebuhr studied, and well, at Yale Divinity School, despite a shortage of entrance credentials. For more than a decade, he served a parish in Detroit, where he met up with Henry Ford's version of industrial America and, to a lesser extent, the plight of blacks in church and nation. (His congregation, Bethel, never had any black members during Niebuhr's pastorate, and Fox reports a crisis over integration which split the church after his departure.)
By 1928, Niebuhr was teaching Christian ethics in New York City at Union Theological Seminary (located these days at the corner of Broadway and Reinhold Niebuhr Place). For some 30 years, it was to be his home base and literally so. From there he made his forays into the political arena, shifting gradually from Socialist Party campaigns to New Deal Democratic politics and coming to inhabit the corridors of power, a paid consultant to the likes of the State Department, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and Time/Life magnate Henry Luce.
From Union he undertook, it seems, a perpetual whirlwind preaching itinerancy, primarily in pulpits up and down the East Coast, but ranging to Europe for big events like the First General Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam.
Also from his teaching base at Union, Niebuhr cranked out voluminous writings, controversial and landmark theological works like Moral Man and Immoral Society and The Nature and Destiny of Man, but even more so the short articles and editorials commenting on events. He founded several journals, including Radical Religion and later Christianity and Crisis, a competitor to The Christian Century, with which he broke editorially over pacifism and the Second World War. The sheer volume of material is staggering, and a bibliography of Niebuhr's work is a small book in and of itself. As far as I can tell, Niebuhr only sat still for the pulpit or the typewriter.
IN HIS PRIME NIEBUHR was counted a heavyweight in Protestant theological circles. Karl Barth and Paul Tillich were foremost among the others. Fox cites Niebuhr: "If Karl Barth is the Tertullian of our day, abjuring ontological speculations for fear that they may obscure or blunt the kerygma of the Gospel, Tillich is the Origen of our period." He demurred just then to list himself among the "Big Three," but Niebuhr later confided to a friend: "About Barth and Tillich and myself. I wouldn't want to be Tertullian. He was too obscurantist. I would rather emulate Augustine."
The comparison is apt in certain respects. For one, Augustine wrote in the post-Constantinian Christian Roman Empire and was architect of the famous just war theory. In The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, which, rather than being excerpts from his major works, is in the main a selection of shorter theological essays previously uncollected or now out of print, is an article on "Augustine's Political Realism." Niebuhr begins with a definition: "In political and moral theory 'realism' denotes the disposition to take all factors in a social and political situation which offer resistance to established norms, into account, particularly the factors of self-interest and power." These factors, and even the benevolent pretensions behind which they hide, are sin for Niebuhr. Above all, Christian realism is the taking into account of the reality of Sin (with a capital "S") in individuals and in collectivities, in others and especially in ourselves. Original sin, Niebuhr once wrote, is the one empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith. And around it he built his theology.
Against the sunny and sentimental optimism of 19th-century liberalism, against the "cult of inevitable progress," against the we-can-build-the-kingdom-of-God-on-earth-with-our-bare-hands-naivete, sin was just what the doctor ordered, and Niebuhr brought it on like gangbusters, hell-bent on a holy vocation.
It was, in fact, a service and a needed corrective, a contribution which must not be underestimated. His recognition of sin in human collectivities - institutions, economic entities, and nation-states - effectively presaged and laid the groundwork for a biblical understanding of the fallenness of the principalities and powers that is now more and more comprehended.
Niebuhr saw sin everywhere. Perhaps he even made a cult of inevitable sin. It was his view that sin could be overcome in principle but not in fact. The best we are left with is to know our sin and act in spite of it, knowing the act is fallen and fraught with self-interest.
Richard Fox records that after a 1939 student conference in England, where Niebuhr held forth on sin and doubt, a young seminarian penned the following limerick:
At Stanwick, when Niebuhr had quit it
A young man exclaimed, "I have hit it!
Since I cannot do right
I must find out tonight
The right sin to commit - and commit it."
Reinhold Niebuhr was the one who made the "lesser of two evils" a Christian commonplace in moral discernment. It is only a step further to the tragic necessity of "doing evil to achieve good" or "using evil to limit evil" - which are also standard ethical fare among the Niebuhrian circle.
NIEBUHR'S VIEW OF SIN meant, on the one hand, that individuals, movements, and nations should be properly disabused of any self-righteousness. They confess their self-interest, the sinful ambiguity of even their best actions. On the other hand, to sin is, in effect, justified (I choose the word carefully) by the universality of sin. Where sin abounds, presumably, the best you can do is know you're sinning.
That's practically Niebuhr's definition of grace. Robert McAfee Brown is at great pains in his preface to stress the ultimate primacy of grace in Niebuhr's theology (methinks he doth protest too much). But the essay he includes, "The Assurance of Grace," essentially limits grace to a kind of solace. Niebuhr writes, "The holiness of God thus creates both the consciousness of sin and the consolation which makes the consciousness of sin bearable."
Politically this means that the morally responsible are to be freed from their arrogant pretensions, but also from the squeamishness that holds them back from the exigencies of, say, military necessity. Fox writes a telling description of Niebuhr's import to the inner circle policy-makers of the Kennedy administration: "He helped them maintain faith in themselves as political actors in a troubled - what he termed sinful - world. Stakes were high, enemies were wily, responsibility meant taking risks: Niebuhr taught that 'moral men had to play hardball.'" Call it justification.
Niebuhr's view of the cross is pertinent here. For him the sinless love of Christ there revealed is the refusal to participate in the struggles of human life, human history, human existence. In Niebuhr's view, Jesus does not enter into the claims and counterclaims, the rivalries of human life; he is in essence apolitical. He does not impose his will on the situation in any respect. Jesus, in Niebuhr's eyes, is perfectly passive; everything happens to him. And he takes it all with head bowed. The cross, for Niebuhr, is a moment of transcendence in human history because it reveals the possibility of disinterested, selfless love. History is "illuminated" because the sinful self-interest of all human rivalries, however just, are revealed by contrast.
Should Christian disciples take up the cross and follow their Lord? Not really, says Niebuhr. Or perhaps, but only an isolated few. In an essay on "The Power and Weakness of God," which Brown does well to include, Niebuhr allows how "some of his followers" may emulate the powerless love of Christ, but that the usefulness of their stance is strictly limited. "They are not able by this strategy to guarantee" (now that's a loaded word!) "a victory for any historical cause however comparatively virtuous. They can only set up a sign and symbol of the Kingdom of God...."
IN THE PERENNIAL DEBATE among Christians over faithfulness vs. effectiveness, Niebuhr is the advocate and champion of effectiveness. That, in short, is the drift of Christian realism. The cross, however, is not effective. According to Niebuhr it has no real transforming power in this world. Within history, it would be a "bogus promise" to believe otherwise. The cross is revelation, not method, means, or way. Any suggestion that the cross of Christ calls us to a way of life is relegated to the laudable but obscure lifestyles of sectarian purists, Utopians, anabaptists, and medieval perfectionist-types.
With this I disagree. Faithfulness is the first question for Christians. Any transforming power that Christians evince is ultimately by the grace of God. Actions, even modest ones, or those apparently foolish, may have enormous and unforeseen consequences when offered in simple faithfulness to the gospel. Our confidence rests in the healing action of an incarnate and resurrected Lord. This is not to pour contempt on thoughtful reflections about effectiveness or calculated action, but merely to trust God and put first questions first. Not incidentally, a number of commentators have noticed that Niebuhr had little or no doctrine of the resurrection.
Interestingly enough, he conceded that the cross and the ethic of Jesus as proclaimed in the Sermon on the Mount were "absolute and uncompromising," even "finally and ultimately normative," but simply "not immediately applicable to the task of securing justice in a sinful world...." It was a mere ineffectual legalism. Later in life he took comfort in the implication of certain biblical scholars that the Sermon on the Mount was a late construction of Matthew to prove that Jesus was a more rigorous law-giver than Moses.
At the same time, Niebuhr found laughable the suggestion that Gandhi's experiments with nonviolence had any root or foundation in this ethic of Jesus. In "Why the Christian Church is Not Pacifist," perhaps the single most influential essay which Robert McAfee Brown has included in the anthology, Niebuhr writes: "There is not the slightest support in Scripture for this doctrine of non-violence. Nothing could be plainer than that the ethic uncompromisingly enjoins non-resistance and not non-violent resistance."
As chronicled by Richard Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr's personal odyssey on the question of pacifism has a certain intriguing interest. Seeing Europe, especially the horrors of the Ruhr Valley after the First World War, turned his stomach and determined him to be "done with the war business." For a number of years thereafter he was president of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Subsequently, in 1933, he broke with the FOR over economics, which is to say over the notion of class war. He'd become a Marxist and was convinced that violence was a needed tactic in the arsenal of social struggle, however suicidal it might be on the international scale.
Ironically, he later broke with the Socialist Party precisely over its stance against U.S. intervention in World War II. Norman Thomas and friends regarded the gathering storm in Europe as a clash between rival imperialisms that would obliterate any real distinctions between Allies and Fascists.
For Niebuhr, however, the clash was between a gangster and a citizen. Christians needed to toughen up and adapt to "the rough stuff of politics." And besides, he thought with typical realism, Hitler would jeopardize our world markets if he held sway in Europe.
For many church people, World War II remains "The War to Justify All Wars." And Reinhold Niebuhr laid the groundwork for Christian participation. He may well be thought of as the religious pointman for the interventionist movement. When he published Christianity and Power Politics in 1940, it was his attempt to deliver the church, or at least U.S. Protestantism, on behalf of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's war agenda. "Why the Christian Church is Not Pacifist" was the lead chapter, the opening salvo, of that book.
In his more critical comments, Fox observes in Niebuhr's writing a tendency to set up straw opponents, characterizing positions with oversimplification and then knocking them down with an easy and devastating accuracy. There may be a good bit of that in "Why the Christian Church is Not Pacifist." Indeed the fury of that attack may be toward the straw man of his own former illusions, his naive and sentimental liberalism.
But swept along effectively in the attack are varieties of Christian nonviolence with greater depth and range. There is no indication that he really comprehended the revolutionary pacifism of A.J. Muste, whose biography and collected essays cover the same period and issues and provide a perfect parallel and corrective to Niebuhr's, or the spiritual resources of a Gandhian approach which undertook truth-force as far more than a tactic or technique. Moreover, as we have seen, with a single sweeping sentence Niebuhr shrugs off non-violent resistance as patently unbiblical.
THERE IS A STORY that Fox does not tell. It's a story of Niebuhr, Gandhi, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, of pacifism and pre-war Germany. It bears recounting here with a little detail.
Bonhoeffer, according to his biographer, was drawn to Gandhi and India as early as 1928. He was exposed to him further during his study at Union Seminary, where he also came to know Professor Niebuhr. But it was when the German church struggle with Hitler began heating up that the young German pastor became serious about arranging a visit to the Mahatma.
Bonhoeffer was convinced, as he wrote to Niebuhr, that the Sermon on the Mount would mark "the dividing line" in the resistance. His own book on the sermon, The Cost of Discipleship, was a veiled polemic setting a choice before the church and parting company with Nazi culture.
Bonhoeffer was just then preparing to take responsibility for the underground seminary at Finkenwald, where the new pastors of the outlawed Confessing Church would train. First, however, he wanted to see Gandhi to learn what he knew about the Sermon on the Mount. It is clear that he envisioned something like "Nonviolent Direct Action 101" as a core curriculum in the new seminary. Imagine a German Confessing movement equipped for battle with the resources of Gandhi.
Bonhoeffer acquired a letter of introduction and in turn received an invitation from Gandhi himself to come live for a period at the ashram. Arrangements were hastened. Bonhoeffer had everything but his shots. He wrote to Niebuhr of his plans.
Niebuhr wrote back that he was wasting his time.
Reinhold Niebuhr was no stranger to Mohandas Gandhi. In 1931, Fox reports, Niebuhr was frustrated in his attempt to gain an audience with the "prophet-statesman" to ask about resistance and non-resistance for a book he was writing on social change. Bonhoeffer, it happens, was just then reading that book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, when he wrote the American professor of his plans. Niebuhr, indeed, devoted an entire chapter to Gandhi and his techniques. However, by a twist of logic, he appropriated Gandhi in an argument against pacifism. Since Gandhi employed coercion by nonviolent resistance, and had even endorsed violence on occasion, he was a pragmatist. Niebuhr considered nonviolent resistance to be on a continuum with violence and to differ from modern war only in a matter of degree.
In writing to Bonhoeffer, Niebuhr apparently did not mention their differences concerning the Sermon on the Mount, but he straightforwardly discouraged the India trip, as he recalled, for several reasons: first, Gandhi was an ethical liberal and had little to offer a sophisticated German theologue; second, Gandhi's success in India was attributable to the civilized benevolence of the British; and third, it would never work in Nazi Germany. (Notice the currency these three points have to this very day.)
It is not to be implied that Niebuhr dissuaded Bonhoeffer. He met opposition to the idea from many quarters, including his own church superiors, to whom the plan was incomprehensible. Bonhoeffer went forward nevertheless. In the end it was the press of events that forced a choice between the seminary and the trip which would be preparation for it.
Larry Rasmussen, who has written about these events in Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Reality and Resistance, sums up:
Bonhoeffer was not convinced by Niebuhr's argument that Germany was no place for non-violent resistance because he expected no different treatment from the Nazis than Niebuhr did! Suffering would indeed come. But only by suffering would evil be overcome.
Rasmussen concludes finally that Gandhi and not Niebuhr offered the clearest political articulation of the gospel for the German Christians. Bonhoeffer's theology-of-the-cross pacifism was not easily affected, he argues, by purely pragmatic political considerations, even when he sought a workable political form for discipleship. I would only add that the consequences, by grace, might have been wonderful to see.
THERE ARE THOSE WHO SAY, and I agree with them, that Hitler won the war. His spirit prevailed. His enemies imitated and outdid him. By such discernments Hiroshima is the measure and proof. Hitler's weapon was brought to fruition, built and used.
Reinhold Niebuhr joined 21 theologians of the Federal Council of Churches (predecessor to the National Council of Churches) in a public condemnation: "The surprise bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are morally indefensible....As the power that first used the atomic bomb under these circumstances, we have sinned grievously against the law of God and against the people of Japan."
Biographer Richard Fox is quick to point out, however, that Niebuhr's own published statements were more equivocating, and in private correspondence he positively back-pedaled. The bombing was the quintessential revelation of "how much evil we must do in order to do good." Because the Germans were working on the bomb, we were compelled to follow suit. Once we built it, we were bound to use it. Moral culpability of our leaders? Niebuhr writes, "The question is whether they were not driven by historic forces more powerful than any human decision."
Notice the logic, which prevails to this day in every weapons technology innovation from the think-tank stage to deployment: "If it can be made, it must be made." Or: "If we can make it, they can make it, so we'd best make it first." The possible becomes the inevitable.
Christian realism bows to the logic of necessity. The necessary sin may occasion guilt (and for Niebuhr, Hiroshima implied monstrous guilt); it may require repentance but remain a compelling necessity nonetheless.
To the contrary, and this is a crucial theological and political question, it seems to me that the freedom and judgment of God imply precisely the non-necessity of any given order, any given power arrangement, and any given moral decision. Moreover, Christian freedom, the freedom of a renewed humanity in Christ may mean nothing less than freedom from the bondage of necessity. However, we speak here of active divine grace in human history and community - and that never was a big topic, theoretical or practical, with Reinhold Niebuhr.
When the hydrogen bomb appeared in 1949, it too was a fact, a reality, a tragic necessity to be lived with. Fox stresses that Niebuhr had no doubt about its being made; after all, the Russians would surely make one. They did. The moral goal was to make it "only to prevent its use and our subjugation."
Fox then adds, in understated tones, that Niebuhr was instrumental in bringing a special Federal Council of Churches Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction around to his viewpoint!
Recently the United Methodist bishops have issued a pastoral letter titled "In Defense of Creation," in which they aver that "deterrence must no longer receive the church's blessing, even as a temporary warrant for the maintenance of nuclear weapons." That is indeed a penitential and confessional statement, for the churches have blessed the ideology of deterrence for nigh unto four decades. It was the FCC Commission which set the direction, secured ecumenical approval, and conferred the blessing for years to come.
The doctrine of "deterrence" has served to cover a multitude of sins: everything from the bare necessities to counterforce and first-strike weapons such as the MX and Trident, or now Strategic Defense Initiative. The churches' assent, once granted, was not easily taken back.
U.S. Christians, let it be acknowledged, generally and massively supported deterrence. Not that Niebuhr convinced them so. He was simply the brilliant religious philosopher in whose thoughtful analysis they could take comfort, rest assured, and be justified.
Niebuhr's thought is sophisticated and nuanced, but it comes down to a nuclearized revision of just war theory. The bomb is accepted as given. Hard Reality - with a capital "R" as in Realism.
The dilemma, in Niebuhr's view, is that we cannot use nuclear weapons without destroying the moral fabric of our nation, and we cannot renounce them without risking surrender. Niebuhr was aware that nuclear weapons violate a number of classical just war criteria such as: acts of war must not cause massive death and injury to non-combatant populations; and they must offer reasonable hope of victory (according to which measures many Christians have lately become nuclear pacifists). However, in Niebuhr's estimation, it was not that the criteria judged the weapons, but that the reality of the weapons demolished the criteria and made them useless and irrelevant. They were "more likely to confuse than illumine the conscience." In other words, it was an archaic theory better suited to archaic wars.
Overall, the risk of destroying civilization in order to save it was worth taking. Niebuhr's thought moved from necessary balance of power to necessary balance of terror. There was no fundamental critique of the weapons or the system (in a sense their givenness put them beyond question) though one might tinker with certain policies, intentions, or prudential limitations.
Up until the early '60s, Niebuhr had argued it was unreasonable even to disavow the first use of nuclear weapons. When, after the Berlin crisis of 1948-49, he joined his friend John C. Bennett in shifting his views, especially with respect to the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, it prompted a flap among the ranks of his own disciples. Publicly, he wrote, "The first use of the nuclear weapon is morally abhorrent and must be resisted." Privately, he confessed to a friend, "There must be some limits to moral ambiguity. I don't know where they are but this may be the limit."
IT IS TEMPTING BUT UNFAIR to speculate about where Niebuhr would stand today. Closer to nuclear pacifism? Firmly withdrawing his blessing, like the bishops, from deterrence? Or venturing a defense of Star Wars technology "lest the Russians build it first"? Speculations are equally vain, 15 years after his death, as to how he might view current U.S.-Soviet relations, but in his life he contributed to the ideological armor of the Cold War.
Before World War II was over, Niebuhr was already applying his uneasy balance of power social approach to a vision of the postwar world. He foresaw the United States moving in to fill a power vacuum, divvying up spheres of influence and generally taking lead responsibility for rearranging the world.
Not that he was cynically Machiavellian, by any means, but he did feature an unabashed imperial vocation for the United States, a role in world affairs in which the young empire needed tutoring. Niebuhr had always been a big fan of British colonialism, at least for its humane responsibility in raising the cultural level of subject peoples and bringing them to "independence" within the British Commonwealth, as evidenced in his understanding of Gandhi's success. He thought the British empire a suitable model for the exercise of the new U.S. "hegemony" - a word he practically brought into popular parlance. It wasn't exactly "the white man's burden," but being a great power did bestow great responsibility.
With respect to Europe, for example, even before Secretary of State George C. Marshall proposed his famous plan of massive postwar reconstruction aid, circumventing any role for the United Nations and securing European markets under U.S. influence, Niebuhr was publicly urging exactly that. "What is really important," he wrote, "is to prevent France and Germany from becoming Communist."
Niebuhr had a shrewd and enduring insight that at the core of Marxism was a profoundly religious impulse. He noticed the messianic glorification of a class, an "eschatology" which granted meaning and direction to history, a materialism which operated with the force of a divine spirit, and an unrivaled missionary zeal. He recognized in this even "a secularized version of Jewish prophecy."
Coupled with the totalitarian extremes of Stalinism at its worst, Niebuhr beheld not just an idolatry but a demonic religion. In the postwar period, he wrote popular essays on communist tyranny that were featured in Time, Life, and Reader's Digest, serving to educate ordinary citizens to the necessary perspectives of the Cold War era.
Fox is remarkably frank about Niebuhr's seething anti-communism during the height of McCarthyism in the early '50s. In that period he publicly criticized Sen. Joseph McCarthy not for his violation of civil rights but for his ineffectiveness in rooting out Communists. Though he eventually relented, Niebuhr clamored for the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union and executed in June 1953. And his strongest rhetorical writing was translated and broadcast worldwide by the State Department.
Meanwhile, government agencies investigated him for past associations and held up, on suspicion, his wife's citizenship application. Fox notes an "irony" in these contradictions and coincidences, but I have a different view: To be simultaneously courted and investigated seems more akin to a de facto carrot-and-stick approach on the part of the authorities. Fox doesn't see it so, but Niebuhr toed the line.
IN KEEPING WITH HIS OWN sense of irony and moral ambiguity, Niebuhr, it must be granted, never lost an awareness of the U.S. temptation to arrogant self-righteousness, and he did warn against a hysterical anti-communism that would rigidify policy. But these cautions always remained in service of the imperial hegemony.
Of the North-South struggle as viewed from the Third World, he understood little and wrote less. He brooked no real independence for "the so-called 'uncommitted' nations." And, as Fox points out, he came to believe "that the mere absence of Communist rule was a significant form of freedom," a view which presaged the distinction now touted between "authoritarian" and "totalitarian" regimes.
Against that general drift, and demonstrating his freedom to change, there is Niebuhr's shifting position on the Vietnam War. One thinks, first of all, of the Kennedy New Frontiersmen who, taught by Niebuhr to play hardball politics, charted the course toward the quagmire. In 1962, reserving some doubts about South Vietnamese Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, he backed them up. But during Lyndon Johnson's presidency, as the troops flew and the bombs fell, his doubts increased and he became more and more a "dove."
It caused him some inner confusion because, Fox writes, "he was not accustomed to preaching against American military adventures." Fox neglects to mention that by 1967, when Martin Luther King Jr. came out publicly against the war, enduring a hail of criticism, the pamphlet publication of his controversial speeches was prefaced by Reinhold Niebuhr who hoped they would enjoy a wide reading.
Fox includes in the biography a striking quotation from Andrew Young to the effect that King claimed to have been more influenced by Niebuhr than by Gandhi. It may in fact be true for Young, but not for Martin Luther King. There is evidence to the contrary.
King certainly read Niebuhr, studied him, and wrestled through his thought. It may even be fair to say that Niebuhr was a foil against which King's theology and philosophy of nonviolence were tested. King encountered Niebuhr in his seminary days and admitted to becoming "so enamored of his social ethics that I almost fell into the trap of accepting uncritically everything he wrote."
King read Moral Man and Immoral Society, which effectively shook him from Protestant liberalism and challenged his emerging pacifism. Moral Man includes the Niebuhrian appropriation of Gandhi and also a remarkable passage that proved positively prophetic: "The emancipation of the Negro race in America probably waits upon the adequate development of this kind of [tactical nonviolent] social and political strategy."
Dr. King did acknowledge the debt and further credited Niebuhr with disabusing him of a superficial optimism and helping him to recognize the complexity of human sin, especially the reality of collective evil such as institutionalized violence and racism. In his "Letter From A Birmingham Jail," he even cited Niebuhr to this effect, and properly so. There's no denying that Martin King took Reinhold Niebuhr seriously.
However, when he chronicles his own "Pilgrimage to Non-violence," King confides that although Niebuhr's critique of pacifism first drove him to confusion, he "came to see more and more the shortcomings of his position." Dr. King rejected the "serious distortion" that Niebuhr did to pacifism by reducing it to a legalism of passivity and non-resistance to evil. For Martin Luther King, Gandhi critiqued Niebuhr, not vice versa. He came finally to the conclusion that Niebuhr had overemphasized the corruption of human nature without presenting the hope of divine nature. "He was so involved in diagnosing [ humanity's] sickness of sin that he overlooked the cure of grace," King wrote.
THIS IS ULTIMATELY THE theological and political crux of the matter. For all the gifts of Niebuhr's thought - his comprehension of the complex ambiguities of every human decision, his contagious biblical appreciation of irony and paradox, his identification of collective sin, his relentless critique of self-righteousness, and his passion for justice - not to mention his lucid rhetoric and epigrammatic one-liners - he lacks one thing: a faith that begins and ends in divine grace.
When we talk about Christian realism, does reality include the kingdom of God, the resurrection of Christ, the power of the Spirit? Or are these mere lovely thoughts relegated to the realm of naive idealism, without political import? When true realists of faith take into account all the factors in a social and political situation that offer resistance to established norms, these are the very things that will be noticed first. They go against the grain like nothing else. But because, for Reinhold Niebuhr, they are not realities of practical and livable substance, he became - Fox and Brown notwithstanding and even against his own best wishes - less a prophet than a priest of the present order.
Bill Wylie-Kellermann was a Methodist pastor and author when this article appeared.
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