[Oe List ...] Moyers' speech

[Terry Bergdall]

This piece about Reinhold Niebuhr by Arthur Schlesinger, which appears in 
today's New York Times, is another interesting take on the same issue.  Terry
------------------------------------------------

NYT, September 18, 2005:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/books/review/18schlesinger.html

Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr

By ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR.

THE recent outburst of popular religiosity in the United States is a most 
dramatic and unforeseen development in American life. As Europe grows more 
secular, America grows more devout. George W. Bush is the most aggressively 
religious president Americans have ever had. American conservatives applaud 
his "faith-based" presidency, an office heretofore regarded as secular. The 
religious right has become a potent force in national politics. 
Evangelicals now outnumber mainline Protestants and crowd megachurches. 
Billy Graham attracts supplicants by the thousand in Sodom and Gomorrah, a 
k a New York City. The Supreme Court broods over the placement of the Ten 
Commandments. Evangelicals take over the Air Force Academy, a government 
institution maintained by taxpayers' dollars; the academy's former 
superintendent says it will be six years before religious tolerance is 
restored. Mel Gibson's movie "Passion of the Christ" draws nearly $400 
million at the domestic box office.
In the midst of this religious commotion, the name of the most influential 
American theologian of the 20th century rarely appears - Reinhold Niebuhr. 
It may be that most "people of faith" belong to the religious right, and 
Niebuhr was on secular issues a determined liberal. But left evangelicals 
as well as their conservative brethren hardly ever invoke his name. Jim 
Wallis's best-selling "God's Politics," for example, is a liberal tract, 
but the author mentions Niebuhr only twice, and only in passing.

Niebuhr was born in Missouri in 1892, the son of a German-born minister of 
the German Evangelical Synod of North America. He was trained for the 
ministry at the Synod's Eden Theological Seminary and at the Yale Divinity 
School. In the 1920's he took a church in industrial Detroit, the scene of 
bitter labor-capital conflict. Niebuhr's sympathies lay with the unions, 
and he joined Norman Thomas's Socialist Party. Meanwhile, New York's Union 
Theological Seminary, impressed by the power of his preaching and his 
writing, recruited him in 1928 for its faculty. There he remained for the 
rest of his life. He died in 1971.

Why, in an age of religiosity, has Niebuhr, the supreme American theologian 
of the 20th century, dropped out of 21st-century religious discourse? Maybe 
issues have taken more urgent forms since Niebuhr's death - terrorism, 
torture, abortion, same-sex marriage, Genesis versus Darwin, embryonic 
stem-cell research. But maybe Niebuhr has fallen out of fashion because 
9/11 has revived the myth of our national innocence. Lamentations about 
"the end of innocence" became favorite clichés at the time.

Niebuhr was a critic of national innocence, which he regarded as a 
delusion. After all, whites coming to these shores were reared in the 
Calvinist doctrine of sinful humanity, and they killed red men, enslaved 
black men and later on imported yellow men for peon labor - not much of a 
background for national innocence. "Nations, as individuals, who are 
completely innocent in their own esteem," Niebuhr wrote, "are insufferable 
in their human contacts." The self-righteous delusion of innocence 
encouraged a kind of Manichaeism dividing the world between good (us) and 
evil (our critics).

Niebuhr brilliantly applied the tragic insights of Augustine and Calvin to 
moral and political issues. He poured out his thoughts in a stream of 
powerful books, articles and sermons. His major theological work was his 
two-volume 
<http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/niebuhr-nature1.pdf>"Nature and 
Destiny of Man" (1941, 
<http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/niebuhr-nature2.pdf>1943). The 
evolution of his political thought can be traced in three influential 
books: "Moral Man and Immoral Society" (1932); "The Children of Light and 
the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its 
Traditional Defense" (1944); 
<http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/niebuhr-nature2.pdf>"The Irony 
of American History" (1952).

In these and other works, Niebuhr emphasized the mixed and ambivalent 
character of human nature - creative impulses matched by destructive 
impulses, regard for others overruled by excessive self-regard, the will to 
power, the individual under constant temptation to play God to history. 
This is what was known in the ancient vocabulary of Christianity as the 
doctrine of original sin. Niebuhr summed up his political argument in a 
single powerful sentence: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy 
possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." 
(Niebuhr, in the fashion of the day, used "man" not to exculpate women but 
as shorthand for "human being.")

The notion of sinful man was uncomfortable for my generation. We had been 
brought up to believe in human innocence and even in human perfectibility. 
This was less a liberal delusion than an expression of an all-American DNA. 
Andrew Carnegie had articulated the national faith when, after acclaiming 
the rise of man from lower to higher forms, he declared: "Nor is there any 
conceivable end to his march to perfection." In 1939, Charles E. Merriam of 
the University of Chicago, the dean of American political scientists, wrote 
in "The New Democracy and the New Despotism": "There is a constant trend in 
human affairs toward the perfectibility of mankind. This was plainly stated 
at the time of the French Revolution and has been reasserted ever since 
that time, and with increasing plausibility." Human ignorance and unjust 
institutions remained the only obstacles to a more perfect world. If proper 
education of individuals and proper reform of institutions did their job, 
such obstacles would be removed. For the heart of man was O.K. The idea of 
original sin was a historical, indeed a hysterical, curiosity that should 
have evaporated with Jonathan Edwards's Calvinism.

Still, Niebuhr's concept of original sin solved certain problems for my 
generation. The 20th century was, as Isaiah Berlin said, "the most terrible 
century in Western history." The belief in human perfectibility had not 
prepared us for Hitler and Stalin. The death camps and the gulags proved 
that men were capable of infinite depravity. The heart of man is obviously 
not O.K. Niebuhr's analysis of human nature and history came as a vast 
illumination. His argument had the double merit of accounting for Hitler 
and Stalin and for the necessity of standing up to them. Niebuhr himself 
had been a pacifist, but he was a realist and resigned from the antiwar 
Socialist Party in 1940.
Many of us understood original sin as a metaphor. Niebuhr's distinction 
between taking the Bible seriously and taking it literally invited symbolic 
interpretation and made it easy for seculars to join the club. Morton 
White, the philosopher, spoke satirically of Atheists for Niebuhr. (Luis 
Buñuel, the Spanish film director, was asked about his religious views. 
"I'm an atheist," he replied. "Thank God.") "About the concept of 'original 
sin,' " Niebuhr wrote in 1960, "I now realize that I made a mistake in 
emphasizing it so much, though I still believe that it might be rescued 
from its primitive corruptions. But it is a red rag to most moderns. I find 
that even my realistic friends are inclined to be offended by it, though 
our interpretations of the human situation are identical."

The Second World War left America the most powerful nation in the world, 
and the cold war created a new model of international tension. Niebuhr was 
never more involved in politics. He helped found Americans for Democratic 
Action, a liberal organization opposed to the two Joes, Stalin and 
McCarthy. He was tireless (until strokes slowed him up) in cautioning 
Americans not to succumb to the self-righteous delusions of innocence and 
infallibility. "From the earliest days of its history to the present 
moment," Niebuhr wrote in 1952, "there is a deep layer of messianic 
consciousness in the mind of America. We never dreamed that we would have 
as much political power as we possess today; nor for that matter did we 
anticipate that the most powerful nation on earth would suffer such an 
ironic refutation of its dreams of mastering history." For messianism - 
carrying on one man's theory of God's work - threatened to abolish the 
unfathomable distance between the Almighty and human sinners.

Niebuhr would have rejoiced at Mr. Dooley's definition of a fanatic. 
According to the Irish bartender created by Finley Peter Dunne, a fanatic 
"does what he thinks th' Lord wud do if He only knew th' facts iv th' 
case." There is no greater human presumption than to read the mind of the 
Almighty, and no more dangerous individual than the one who has convinced 
himself that he is executing the Almighty's will. "A democracy," Niebuhr 
said, "cannot of course engage in an explicit preventive war," and he 
lamented the "inability to comprehend the depth of evil to which 
individuals and communities may sink, particularly when they try to play 
the role of God to history."

Original sin, by tainting all human perceptions, is the enemy of absolutes. 
Mortal man's apprehension of truth is fitful, shadowy and imperfect; he 
sees through the glass darkly. Against absolutism Niebuhr insisted on the 
"relativity of all human perspectives," as well as on the sinfulness of 
those who claimed divine sanction for their opinions. He declared himself 
"in broad agreement with the relativist position in the matter of freedom, 
as upon every other social and political right or principle." In pointing 
to the dangers of what Justice Robert H. Jackson called "compulsory 
godliness," Niebuhr argued that "religion is so frequently a source of 
confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, 
precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative 
values." Religion, he warned, could be a source of error as well as wisdom 
and light. Its role should be to inculcate, not a sense of infallibility, 
but a sense of humility. Indeed, "the worst corruption is a corrupt religion."

One imagines a meeting between two men - say, for example, the president of 
the United States and the last pope - who have private lines to the 
Almighty but discover fundamental disagreements over the message each 
receives. Thus Bush is the fervent champion of the war against Iraq; John 
Paul II stoutly opposed the war. Bush is the fervent champion of capital 
punishment; John Paul II stoutly opposed capital punishment. How do these 
two absolutists reconcile contradictory and incompatible communications 
from the Almighty?

The Civil War, that savage, fraternal conflict, was the great national 
trauma, and Lincoln was for Reinhold Niebuhr the model statesman. Of all 
American presidents, Lincoln had the most acute religious insight. Though 
not enrolled in any denomination, he brooded over the infinite mystery of 
the Almighty. To claim knowledge of the divine will and purpose was for 
Lincoln the unpardonable sin.

He summed up his religious sense in his second inaugural, delivered in the 
fifth year of the Civil War. Both warring halves of the Union, he said, 
read the same Bible and prayed to the same God. Each invoked God's aid 
against the other. Let us judge not that we be not judged. Let us fight on 
with "firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right." But let us 
never forget, Lincoln reminded the nation in memorable words, "The Almighty 
has His own purposes."

Thurlow Weed, the cynical and highly intelligent boss of New York, sent 
Lincoln congratulations on the inaugural address. "I believe it is not 
immediately popular," Lincoln replied. "Men are not flattered by being 
shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and 
them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God 
governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told and as 
whatever of humiliation there is in it, falls directly on myself, I thought 
others might afford for me to tell it."

"The combination of moral resoluteness about the immediate issues," Niebuhr 
commented on Lincoln's second inaugural, "with a religious awareness of 
another dimension of meaning and judgment must be regarded as almost a 
perfect model of the difficult but not impossible task of remaining loyal 
and responsible toward the moral treasures of a free society on the one 
hand while yet having some religious vantage point over the struggle."

Like all God-fearing men, Americans are never safe "against the temptation 
of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we most fervently 
desire." This is vanity. To be effective in the world, we need "a sense of 
modesty about the virtue, wisdom and power available to us" and "a sense of 
contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the 
foundation of both the enemy's demonry and our vanities." None of the 
insights of religious faith contradict "our purpose and duty of preserving 
our civilization. They are, in fact, prerequisites for saving it."

The last lines of "The Irony of American History," written in 1952, resound 
more than a half-century later. "If we should perish, the ruthlessness of 
the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary 
cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too 
blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be 
induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory."

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is the author, most recently, of "War and the 
American Presidency."