The great American 20th-century theologian was a conservative among liberals, and a liberal among conservatives.
Reinhold Niebuhr might not be a familiar name to today’s younger Americans, but Journey Films is hoping to change that with a documentary to be released next month. An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story, a poignant, hour-long documentary, encapsulates the life and thought of an American theologian whose extensive writing and public work contributed to nearly every cultural and political debate in the middle decades of the 20th century.
Niebuhr chose to wrestle with a wide swath of issues that plagued the country and the world during his lifetime — the First World War, racism and segregation in the inner cities of the American North, the rise of fascism and U.S. involvement in the Second World War, and the growing Communist threat. His example remains valuable today, not least because he demonstrated that one can maintain one’s intellectual integrity while engaging actively in the rough-and-tumble of political debate.
Over the course of his engagement in public life, Niebuhr’s political and social thought evolved almost constantly, always as the result of his openness to reexamining his beliefs in the context of a changing world. He began his career as a committed pacifist — a stance that stemmed from his deep discomfort with what he saw as the unjustified horrors of the “Great War” — and he served as vice president of the U.S. Socialist party in the 1930s, even running for office in New York on the party’s ticket.
But as Hitler rose to power in Germany, Niebuhr rethought his stance and renounced pacifism as unrealistic in light of the evils of which man was evidently capable. Though he never became a “hawk,” he came to believe that war was permissible as a last resort to preserve justice, and, in the case of the Second World War, he believed that engaging in conflict could be morally necessary.
Similarly, Niebuhr abandoned his socialist beliefs after he witnessed the dysfunctionality of Soviet Communism and the harsh way in which its adherents imposed their ideology on the reluctant. Indeed, Niebuhr eventually came to see Communism as an evil grave enough to justify military engagement, though he didn’t support the use of preemptive nuclear force. At the same time, he remained staunchly pro-worker, and often lamented the problems that arose from the unequal distribution of power in society.
“He was willing to risk his popularity in the name of integrity,” says public intellectual Cornel West, currently of the Harvard Divinity School. Niebuhr’s willingness to reconsider his stances, despite the prospect of losing public support, makes him a powerful model for modern politicians, who often vacillate from one position to the next, following the direction in which the winds of public opinion seem to be blowing.
Though he was immersed in the political world of his day, Niebuhr’s insights were all rooted in the Christian tradition, and his eventual rejection of pacifism and socialism stemmed from his view of human nature as inherently sinful and imperfectible. This philosophical perspective came to be known as Christian Realism, and Niebuhr is widely regarded as its father. This school of thought emerged, in part, in opposition to the Social Gospel movement, led by thinkers such as John Dewey, who held that man was perfectible and that therefore a properly ordered society could lead to an earthly utopia.
Niebuhr thoroughly rejected the notion that men could construct their own paradise, and he believed that the best they could do is generate democratic possibilities. “Democracy is a proximate solution to insoluble problems,” he wrote. His opposition to the Social Gospel established him as a critic also of modern progressivism, which emerged from the thought of Dewey and others in the early 20th century.
Niebuhr’s philosophy is particularly valuable today. Believing that humans can be perfected, modern progressives view politics as a means of “immanentizing the eschaton” and see the government as an effective means by which the citizenry can be improved and a utopian society built. But Niebuhr, like the conservatives of his day, understood that politics is incapable of permanently solving the problems posed by man’s inherent fallibility. Though he believed in the power of democracy and activism, he didn’t believe that any earthly power could “fix” mankind’s evil tendencies. Witnessing the flaws of Soviet Communism, in particular, helped him to see the dangers inherent in establishing the government as the savior of its people.
This is not, of course, to say that Niebuhr was indifferent to injustice. He served as a pastor in Detroit, where he worked for over a decade to integrate migrant black Americans into the social fabric of the city, and he went on to teach for over 30 years at Union Theological Seminary on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he made significant contributions to theology and continued to comment on social and political developments over the course of the mid century. Even though he was on the FBI watch list, likely because of his early socialist sympathies, Niebuhr advised the State Department on policy at the start of the Cold War. President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, seven years before his death.
Niebuhr’s wide-ranging beliefs undoubtedly provoke both admiration and distaste on each side of the modern political aisle, just as they did in his own time. “Barack Obama, a pretty progressive Democrat, [and] Jimmy Carter, could draw on Niebuhr,” says New York Times columnist David Brooks. “Some of the Reaganites liked Niebuhr. Some of the George W. Bush people like Niebuhr. Everyone picked something they liked.”
The reason for this shouldn’t be hard to understand. Though he loved his country, he refused to ignore the many social ills afflicting the U.S.; though he believed war could be necessary to prevent evil, he refused to condone unjust uses of violence; though he believed that man is ultimately imperfectible, he refused to forgive the many evils that filled the 20th century. This documentary reveals how Niebuhr’s dedication to the truth — wherever it led him — makes him the perfect intellectual figure for today’s political climate, which often favors party over principle and ideology over integrity.