“The President’s Favorite Theologian:
The Wisdom of Reinhold Niebuhr”

By the Rev. Dr. James Kubal-Komoto

Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church

Des Moines, Washington

September 20, 2009

Reading

Quotations by Reinhold Niebuhr

“No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint.”

“We must always seek the truth in our opponents’ error and the error in our own truth.”

“I think 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. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.”

“Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.”

“The ministry is the only profession in which you make a virtue of ignorance.”

“The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.”

“The worst corruption is a corrupt religion.”

“Society is a perpetual state of war between different self-interested groups.”

“Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.”

“Every heightened potency of human existence may also represent a possibility of evil.”

“Patriotism transmutes individual unselfishness into national egoism.”

 “We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise, not become complacent about particular degrees of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimated.”

“A nation with an inordinate degree of political power is doubly tempted to exceed the bounds of historical possibilities, if it is informed by an idealism which does not understand the limits of man’s wisdom and volition.”

“Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

“Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.”

“God grant me the serenity to accept those things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Sermon

            Here’s the story…

            It was April 2007 and in the midst of the presidential campaign. David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, was interviewing Senator Barack Obama about his candidacy one evening.

            The interview, Brooks said later, seemed to be going nowhere. The senator seemed tired, even cranky, which was understandable after another long day of campaigning, so out of the blue, Brooks asked Obama, “Have you ever read Reinhold Niebuhr?”

            Obama’s tone changed. He perked up. “I love him. He’s one of my favorite philosophers,” Obama said. Obama then proceeded to give a 20-minute point-by-point summary of Niebuhr’s 1952 book The Irony of American History, probably not something many other U.S. senators could do.

            I suppose for a lot of people, this short exchange between a newspaper columnist and a presidential candidate, which Brooks later wrote about, may seem like a tidbit of trivia about our current president’s admiration for a figure now faded into relative obscurity, arcane and even irrelevant to most of our lives.

            But, reading about it, I found it fascinating, revealing, and quite relevant.

            Why? A topic I have always found interesting is the religion of U.S. presidents. It’s a topic I’ve explored with you before many times - - from the faith of the Founding Fathers, to the beliefs of Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and most recently, George W. Bush.

            However, despite having written two best-selling autobiographical books, like many occupants of the White House, President Obama is rather circumspect about his own religious beliefs, particularly the particulars.

            Of course, he says he is a Christian, but so has almost every other U.S. president, so this doesn’t tell us very much about how his faith might affect his decisions as president. However, to say that Reinhold Niebuhr is one of his favorite philosophers or theologians - - the dividing line between philosophy and religion is a very thin one and Niebuhr was certainly both a philosopher and a theologian - - this tells us, I think, a great deal about this president who many of us are still trying to figure out.

           So this morning, I want to try to explore three questions with you. First, who was Reinhold Niebuhr? Second, what does it mean that he is one of Obama’s favorite theologians? And third, what wisdom, if any, does Niebuhr still offer to the rest of us?

            Now I know a lot of you are probably still scratching your heads and saying, “Reinhold who?” so here are the very basics.

            Reinhold Niebuhr was born in 1892 in a rural town in Missouri. He was born into a German-American family and grew up speaking both German and English. His father was a minister of the German Evangelical Synod, a small, ethnic denomination that later became part of the United Church of Christ. From an early age, Niebuhr planned to follow his father into the ministry.

            After completing his academic preparation for the ministry, Niebuhr served as the pastor of a middle-class congregation outside of Detroit made up of a lot of autoworkers and their families.

            Then in 1928, he became a professor at Union Theological School in New York City, a seminary mostly for liberal Protestants. While there, he taught, wrote books, and scores of articles, not only for scholarly journals but also for the mainstream media. He was also a tremendously popular lecture around the country and was very politically active in left-wing and liberal organizations. He died in 1971 at the age of 78.

            More generally, though, Niebuhr played a role in American life that hardly exists anymore, that of a “public intellectual” - - somebody who wrote about serious topics but for a general audience, was widely read, and had tremendous influence outside the walls of academia. Furthermore, among all the public intellectuals of the day, Niebuhr was among the most influential. He was on the cover of Time Magazine. As the Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne once said, “Reinhold Neibuhr was to 20^th century theology what Michael Jordan was to basketball.”

            What is Niebuhr’s philosophy - - his theology - - all about?

            Frankly, he’s not an easy guy to understand. His favorite words are words such as ambiguity, irony, and paradox. It was once said that flowing through all of his writings is the theme of “pessimistic optimism.” How’s that for having it both ways?

            He also shifted positions throughout his career. He began his career as a socialist and a pacifist, though he later became disillusioned with socialism and became a Roosevelt New Dealer, advocated for the use of military force against Nazism, was a fierce critic of Soviet communism under Stalin, and supported the development of nuclear weapons, though at the end of his life, he vociferously opposed the Vietnam War.

            However, Niebuhr is most often described as a “Christian realist.”

            What is that? In short, Christian realism was a reaction against the Social Gospel Movement that flourished at the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century. What was the Social Gospel movement?

            A little history here…

            The late 1800s were a time of tremendous change in this country caused by three major social forces - - industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, and so cities were seeing social problems that they had never seen before. Some churches - - mostly liberal and Mainline Protestant churches - - were also beginning to ask questions they had never quite asked before: Do churches have a role in addressing these social problems? Is it possible to apply the teachings of Jesus to modern social life?

            The churches’ answer was yes. Ministers from many different traditions started talking about the “Kingdom of God” not as “pie in the sky when you die” but as a possibility for a compassionate, just, peaceful human community here on earth, and they saw the teachings of Jesus as a blueprint for progressive social reform.

            Many religious people became very involved in various social reform movements, and the country saw a proliferation of religiously-based social service agencies. The Unitarians and the Universalists, by the way, were right in the middle of all this.

            The dominant mood of the Social Gospel movement was one of optimism, hope, and a strong belief in progress. Social Gospelers had a positive view of human nature, and some even believed in the perfectibility of human society. They believed were no limits to human progress. As the Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke once said, “onward and upward forever.” Human ignorance and unjust institutions were seen as the only obstacles to a more perfect world, and as the historian Arthur Schlesinger said of the belief of the Social Gospelers, “If proper education of individuals and proper reform of institutions did their job, such obstacles would be removed. For the heart of man was OK.”

            Niebuhr’s theology was a reaction against the ideals of the Social Gospel movement. It wasn’t that he didn’t think that religion had a role to play in making the world more compassionate, just, and peaceful. He certainly did, but he thought that the Social Gospelers were hopelessly naïve about many things.

            It’s easy to understand why. Like all of us, Niebuhr was a product of his time. As the pastor of a congregation, he was a firsthand witness to Henry Ford’s mistreatment and  exploitation of his workers despite Ford’s relentless self-promotion to the contrary. More than that, the first half of the 20^th century was perhaps the most brutal period of all human history - - two world wars, a genocidal holocaust, and the start of a cold war.

            As a result, Niebuhr took a more pessimistic view of things.

            He took a more pessimistic view of human nature, and talked a lot about original sin, though not in a literalistic way, believing that more traditional Christians were wrong to take Christian myths literally, but more liberal Christians were wrong not to take the myths seriously. For Niebuhr, original sin was the innate human tendency toward selfishness, toward seeing not only ourselves in the best possible light but toward seeing all situations from a point of view that is generally in our favor. As he famously said, “No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint.”

            Niebuhr didn’t think overcoming this innate tendency was impossible for individuals. To the contrary, he believed that people were capable of self-transcendence, of overcoming their tendencies toward selfishness to act out of love and for justice.

            However, he didn’t believe that such acts of self-transcendence were possible for larger social groups. This idea is captured in the title of Niebuhr’s 1932 book Moral Man and Immoral Society, though ever the pessimist, later in life Niebuhr thought he should have titled it Not so Moral Man and Even Less Moral Society.

            To further explain this, let me offer a quote about Niebuhr’s thinking from Gary Dorrien, the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary:

While individuals are occasionally capable of self-transcending virtue or altruism, human groups never willingly subordinate their interests to the interests of others. Morality belongs to the individual sphere of action; individuals occasionally act of self-disregarding compassion or love…but groups never overcome the power of self-interest and collective egoism that sustains their existence.

            It was this idea that really set Niebuhr apart from the Social Gospelers.

            He once said that “Liberal Christian literature abounds in the monotonous reiteration of the pious hope that people might be good and loving.” In other words, he thought that liberal Christianity was just too sappy. In other words, he thought that no matter how many heart-felt teary-eyed sermons ministers gave about how loving Jesus was and how loving the rest of us should be and no matter how much time people spent sitting around campfires singing “Kumbaya,” it wasn’t going to do much to convince Henry Ford to treat his workers better, or do much to convince the well-off to treat the less-well-off better, or do much to convince racial majorities to treat racial minorities better, or do much at all to convince Hitler and Stalin to start playing nice.

            Instead, Niebuhr believed the only thing that made any real difference in this world was the use of power, sometimes the use of coercion, sometimes the use of force, sometimes even the use of violence. Lord Acton said famously, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and Niebuhr thoroughly agreed with this but added, “Pure love without power is destroyed.”

            Let me give an example of how Niebuhr’s influential ideas played out in the real world.

            At the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, many white northern clergy thought that if only white southerners could be educated and enlightened about the immorality of the Jim Crow laws, then they would just naturally see that the unequal treatment of African Americans was immoral and treating all people equally, regardless of race, was the right thing to do and start doing it.

            The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on the other hand, was extremely influenced by Niebuhr, and King, as well as other African-American religious leaders, believed that something more than simply moral suasion would be necessary, and while King eschewed the use of violence, he didn’t eschew the use of power, saying himself that “love without power is sentimental and anemic.”

            This isn’t to say that Niebuhr liked the idea of people using power, coercion, force, and even violence against one another. He didn’t. He deplored violence, thinking it repugnant and still even sinful, but for Niebuhr, life was often about choosing lesser evils in order to act for the greater good, even if this meant getting your hands dirty.

            At the very same time - - there is always a push and pull in Niebuhr’s thought - - he was ever wary of believing too much in the goodness of one’s own acts and demonizing one’s enemies. He was ever aware of the possibility of fooling oneself into thinking that one was acting for the good, when really one was acting out of one’s own self interest.

            He thought this was a possibility for individuals, but he thought this was an even greater possibility for nations. For example, he thought it was very easy for nations to think too highly of themselves, to go to war believing that they were fighting for democracy or world peace when in reality they were going to war for their own economic and political interests. That, Niebuhr says, is the “irony of American history.”

            Though he was very critical of Soviet Communism, he warned his American readers, “Don’t get too smug. Don’t be too proud of yourselves. Don’t go strutting around. Those other guys are pretty bad, but you’re not so perfect yourself. You’ve got problems too.”

            Let me add one more important point about Niebuhr. He was, in a word, anti-utopian. He believed in the possibility of progress, in the possibility of creating a society that was more just and peaceful, but he never believed there would be an end to human conflict and political struggle. In other words - - and I hope this isn’t pushing a metaphor too far - - he believed that one day, we might all sit at the welcome table, but we’ll still fight over the coleslaw.

            But again, he didn’t see this as any kind of an excuse for not being involved in the struggle for making this world a better one.

            To sum it all up, Niebuhr thought individuals aren’t great and groups of people were worse; to make a difference in the world, you have to jump in and sometimes get your hands dirty, though you might unintentionally make things worse; you should always be suspicious of your own motives, even if you think you’re acting for the good; and  no matter what you do, things will never be perfect; but none of that is an excuse for doing nothing.

            And, my friends, this is one of our president’s favorite theologians. But what does that mean?

            I have to say that I see a lot of Niebuhr in President Obama, and having a greater understanding of Niebuhr does help me to understand Obama more.

            His presidential campaign was one of the most optimistic in living memory. “Change we can believe in,” he said, and yet his inaugural address had a wintry tone, speaking in Niebuhrian fashion of our country’s excesses and shortcomings.

            When Obama gave his speech last year in Berlin - - admitting the United State’s past arrogance but also warning of a dangerous anti-Americanism in Europe, that had a very Niebuhrian tone, a refusal to see too much virtue in anybody’s position.

            Obama is well known for trying to see his opponents’ point of view, and sometimes when I hear him speak, I can hear Niebuhr’s words, “We must always seek the truth in our opponents’ error and the error in our own truth.” On the other hand, Niebuhr had a rather hardball understanding of politics, and I think it is yet to be seen whether Obama does too.

            Obama, too has a reputation for being a pragmatist, reflecting the Niebuhrian idea of politics being about creating “proximate solutions to insoluble problems,” and I suspect we will see more proximate solutions discussed as the president and congress battle over healthcare this fall.

            How will Niebuhr influence, say, how Obama responds to the possibility of an Iran with nuclear weapons? It’s hard to say. Niebuhr was critical both of what he saw as the political left’s sentimentality and what he saw as the political right’s willingness to see the United States as carrying out God’s will.

            But perhaps I should let the president speak for himself. In his interview with David Brooks, Obama said of reading Niebuhr, “I take away…the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away ... the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.”

            With those words in mind, let me finish with these.

            Here in this religious community, a community devoted to making this world more loving, more just, and more lasting for generations to come…

            May we face here with honesty both our frailties and our potential.

            May we never underestimate those who oppose us in our quest for a better world.

            May we never confuse sentimental hopes with necessary action, nor be afraid of our own power in its many forms.

            May we always act with both passion and humility in our quest to do good.

            And may we never use the use the impossibility of being able to make things perfect as an excuse for doing nothing at all.

             So may it be. Amen.