An American Conscience – The Reinhold Niebuhr Story

I first read Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society in May 1979, and thereby hangs a tale. I was teaching in Edinburgh at the time, and took some naval cadets out in a dinghy on the Firth of Forth, when a squall blew up, the boat capsized and down went on expensive camera and pair of binoculars. However, the book floated and survived the incident. Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) is rightly characterised as an American conscience, although he is perhaps best known for the serenity prayer – "God give us grace to accept with serenity things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other." This prayer is also a good commentary on his life of spiritual activism, beginning as a young pastor in Detroit, where he attacked Henry Ford for his hypocrisy and poor treatment of his workers.

As indicated above, this is both a book and a DVD describing Niebuhr's influence, and incidentally how his approach different from his theologian brother H. Richard Niebuhr, a professor at Yale. Perhaps his essential parameters are the relationship between love, justice and power, applied in a variety of situations and contexts. He was an early advocate of an engaged social gospel appealing to conscience but also recognising human limits and incapacities. Moral Man and Immoral Society was the first book to bring him into prominence – it was widely read as well as fiercely criticised, especially by liberals 'who imagine that the egoism of individuals is being progressively checked by the development of rationality or the growth of a religiously inspired goodwill and that nothing but the continuance of this process is necessary to establish social harmony between all human societies and collectives.' The problem arises when the selfishness of the individual is sublimated into national or group egoism, so moral people can behave immorally within a group. Later, Niebuhr said he would have adjusted the title along the lines of immoral man and his even less moral society – all of which points to the limitations of the human, what Christian theologians would call sin, or the fallen state, and other more secular thinkers egoism. As we have seen only too clearly in the history of the 20th century, reason is insufficient for us to progress from ignorance to knowledge, from superstition to enlightenment, from brutishness to civilisation. This was clear even as early as 1790 in France with the reason-inspired reign of terror.

Ironically, when Niebuhr became involved in government policy issues in the late 1940s, he also had a 600-page FBI file, which itself is indicative of the ambivalent nature of power. He realised the implications of atomic power developed by science, but also the danger of naive American exceptionalism that justified violence against a supposed evil enemy, in this case communism that had to be resisted by force, even nuclear. Niebuhr, however, was not a pacifist, and changed his approach towards intervention during the First World War and later with respect to Hitler - Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent a year at the Union Theological Seminary, where Niebuhr was teaching. Interestingly, he regarded the theology as rather thin, and merely the handmaid of social ethics. One should note, though, that Paul Tillich also taught there, with his theology of Being. During the 1950s, Niebuhr found that US leaders no longer wanted to hear about the corrosive character of power or the moral peril of hubris as the CIA took an increasingly subversive international role with government distancing itself through the tactic of plausible denial. At the same time, Niebuhr's thinking had an influence on Martin Luther King, and later on President Carter, who appears on the film. Such people are concerned with the relationship between means and ends and the role of political power, intervention and coercion. Rather than the US image as a crusader for freedom and justice, Niebuhr suggested that a better image would be the bumbling knight from Don Quixote, which did not go down well.

A stroke slowed Niebuhr down in his late 50s, but he continued to work at the central themes of love, justice and power. He formed a close friendship with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and they spent many hours walking and talking together, sharing their 'vision of social justice, their withering condemnation of injustice, and their clarion call to hope'. Niebuhr asked his friend speak his funeral, hence a Jew was giving the eulogy for one of America's greatest Christian theologians. Heschel remarked on his purity of heart, disgust with intellectual falsehood and with spiritual sham, the strength given to our faith and the wisdom imparted to our minds. For many in the film, his inspiration was one of moral courage and audacity, speaking truth to power and not flinching from the consequences of being true to one's conscience. In fact, putting the Serenity Prayer into practice.