“Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr” … And Ignoring Him, Too

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the eminent scholar/Democratic activist (or perhaps Democratic activist/scholar) has an impressive essay in today’s New York Times Book Review lamenting the current neglect of Reinhold Niebuhr, probably the most impressive American theologian since Jonathan Edwards. The essay should be read by anyone who is unfamiliar with Niebuhr and his now-lapsed influence, as well as by anyone who is familiar with it.

Niebuhr’s great influence on American liberalism (he was a founder of Americans for Democratic Action in the late 1940s), and specifically on Schlesinger, is well-known among historians and others of my generation, and Schlesinger’s essay provides an admirable overview for those not familiar with this story.

I don’t want to summarize the article, much less Niebuhr, but it may not be too simple to say that he revived the notion of sin as relevant to politics and nations, that we are all — nations as well as individuals — sinners, that we should “judge not that we be not judged.” One part of Niebuhr’s genius was his ability to justify firm resistance to tyranny while at the same time cautioning against hubris and absolutist fervor.

As Schlesinger puts it,

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 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….

….

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.”

Schlesinger’s essay is quite good at summarizing the power and depth and continuing relevance of Niebuhr’s theology, but it also quite unwittingly reveals some of the blind spots of many Niebuhrians, including Schlesinger himself. Indeed, the more of it I read the harder it was for me to push out of my mind the old injunction against glass house-dwellers from throwing stones, or its biblical equivalent from Matthew 7:3:

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Schlesinger’s essay, like so much of contemporary liberalism, is filled with ill-disguised contempt for George Bush — “the most aggressively religious president Americans have ever had,” for the “religious right,” and for “religiosity,” by which Schlesinger seems to mean the religious views and behavior of people of whom he disapproves.

When I read Schlesinger qua Niebuhr asserting, accurately enough, that “[t]he self-righteous delusion of innocence encouraged a kind of Manichaeism dividing the world between good (us) and evil (our critics),” what springs immediately to my mind, based on my own personal experience and my reading of current political debates, is not some zealously nationalistic religious patriot but rather the contemporary American liberal — sublimely, unselfconsciously convinced of his own moral superiority, and of the evil or stupidity those who reject his own obviously just and true world views.

There was a time when I was highly critical of Niebuhr. Now I think he was more than wise, and it is the Niebuhrians like Schlesinger who bother me. Schlesinger is right, however, to lament the passing of Niebuhr’s influence — a passing of which he himself unintentionally provides such a good example.