Portrait of Reinhold Niebuhr by Ernest Hamlin Baker, from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery
God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.
Who has not needed to hear those words? They were written, elegantly, by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1930s. He was born near here, in Wright City, Missouri, and like his father, he attended Eden Theological Seminary before going on to Yale Divinity School. He became the best-known Christian intellectual in the twentieth-century U.S.
I never paid him much attention, probably because he wrote so emphatically about sin. (He teased that it was the one element in the Christian creed that was empirically verifiable.) Now, I am surprised to learn how many leaders have read Reinhold Niebuhr with care: Martin Luther King Jr., Hubert Humphrey, policy makers in the John F. Kennedy administration, Jimmy Carter, John McCain, James Comey…. “He’s one of my favorite philosophers,” presidential candidate Barack Obama told David Brooks, also a Niebuhr fan, in 2007.
Brooks immediately tested Obama’s sincerity by asking what he had taken away from Niebuhr’s book The Irony of American History.
“I take away the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world,” Obama answered without hesitation, “and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief that we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction.”
Brooks must have given a grudging nod. Obama had gone straight to the central tension in Niebuhr’s thought, the delicate balance he urged us to keep. How do we deal with the painful limits of a nation we like to think exceptional? How do we control the damage that can be done by idealism? How do we trade moral conceit for humility?
Niebuhr was pronounced America’s conscience. He preached workers’ rights after seeing the inhumane treatment of factory employees at Ford plants. “Their sweat and dull pain are part of the price paid for the fine cars we all run,” he wrote. “And most of us run the cars without knowing what price is being paid for them.”
Watching the workers’ exploitation, Niebuhr decided that “a purely liberal Protestant ethic” was only “relevant for martyrs, mothers, and saints, but not for collective relationships.” Watching Nazis rise to power in Germany, he set aside his pacifism and urged military action. He called the Ku Klux Klan “one of the worst specific social phenomena which the religious pride of peoples has ever developed.” He opposed Communism but pointed out that Americans, in their behavior as consumers, were just as guilty of philosophical materialism.
We could use his clear-eyed criticism again—and his warning that social change is not brought about by persuasion or diplomacy, but by “emotionally potent oversimplifications.” The irony of the American experiment is only intensifying. Immigrants become politicians who then engage in vitriolic rhetoric against other immigrants. A nominee for vice president mocks childless women and urges wives to stay with abusive husbands, presenting these as the family values that will resurrect men’s dignity. Niebuhr would not have been fooled.
I rail regularly about the sharply unchristian behavior behind the current push for Christian hegemony. But Niebuhr acknowledged that tension years ago, pointing out the wide gap between political ruthlessness and Jesus’ radical teachings. “The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism,” he once remarked.
In 2015, a book was published with the title Democratic Humility: Reinhold Niebuhr, Neuroscience, and America’s Political Crisis. “The political process is driven by people who support their own ideologies so strenuously that they cannot brook criticism, let alone compromise for the sake of democratic action,” summarized one reviewer. “Niebuhr’s theory of human nature anticipates such gridlock, arguing that humans are finite, free, and thoroughly fallible—and enough aware of their condition to be both anxious and defensive about it.”
We are wired for “striking opponents defensively” rather than calmly discussing differences—that is the neuroscience part of our crisis. Niebuhr sees us as possessing free will yet being vulnerable to sin, which does seem to be the obvious, disconcerting conclusion. If our brains lean toward antagonism rather than reason, how do we form ourselves into a civic (and civil) union? We did so, with varying degrees of success, for decades, but much of that was self-interest and the shared glow of prosperity. Today’s self-interest sees American prosperity as scarce, dwindling, and endangered. Now what do we do?
We divide. Niebuhr wrote about Children of Light (naïve, idealistic, altruistic) and Children of Darkness (willing to let the competing powers of self-interest ruthlessly determine social outcomes). Our left/right, Democrat/Republican, liberal/MAGA poles overlap those traits. Which makes sense, because Niebuhr saw sin as extending beyond individuals to social institutions. Take the cumulative force of all that individual sin and gather it into a group, giving its members the comforting sense of impunity derived from belonging to something larger and stronger than themselves. You have just increased the chance for folly, cruelty, and injustice exponentially. Individuals are at least still capable of unselfishness. Societies tend to gather up only the selfish impulses, creating a collective egoism far harder to restrain. Niebuhr’s conclusion? “All social co-operation on a larger scale than the most intimate social group requires a measure of coercion.”
No doubt I would have recoiled from the word “coercion” as fast as I recoiled from mentions of “sin,” had I read him twenty years ago. Now, I have a hard time arguing against the need for laws, ethics, restraint, even censure, if that is how he was defining coercion. Political power is inevitable, Niebuhr said, but it must be wielded with an awareness of human nature’s flaws, vulnerabilities, and corruptibility. Sail along with blithe optimism, trusting people to do what is best for all, and you can sail right into fascism.
“Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible,” he wrote, “but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” A Christian realist, he knew reason was bent by self-interest. Liberal Christianity was far too optimistic about humans’ ability to make themselves behave morally. And its opposite was far too cold, uncaring, and punitive.
For Niebuhr, the only way to overcome extreme political partisanship was to forgive one’s opponents—but temper that forgiveness with justice. Justice alone could be harsh; forgiveness alone could be so permissive, it let morality slide. He sought, always, the reconciliation of opposites, a meeting in the middle that blunted both extremes.
“There ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other,” he once teased. “That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.”
Today’s polarization feels like a torture rack, pulling us apart. How can we be so far divided? How can those people think that? But Niebuhr stayed true to that elegant little prayer he penned. “The final wisdom of life,” he wrote, “requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.”
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
