The Niebuhr Society

Reinhold Niebuhr: Justice and the Death Penalty

The New Republic has another Reinhold Niebuhr essay from the 1950s available on their site. This one is Niebuhr's reflection on justice and the death penalty. Excerpt:

While this exhaustive analysis of the whole problem of capital punishment achieves its interest primarily because of the light it throws upon one of the most curious ironies of Anglo-Saxon justice, it should have the additional attraction to American readers, that it may sensitize their conscience in regard to a moral problem in which our nation has adapted the standards of the “mother” country without realizing that these standards were the dubious by-products of a great legal tradition.

Niebuhr at The New Republic: "Our Stake In the State of Israel"

The New Republic has posted another of Niebuhr's articles for the magazine online. This is a reprint of his 1957 piece, "Our Stake in the State of Israel." Here's an Excerpt:

The history of the new state of Israel is thrilling in many respects. It represents a remarkable co-operation of ‘‘capitalistic’’ Europeans and American Jews with the essentially socialistic Jews of Israel. For the prevailing political ideology of Israel was determined by the Polish Jewish socialists, turned Zionists, so completely typified by the robust Prime-Minister of today, Ben-Gurion. The collective farms or ‘‘kibbutzim’’ are, in fact, based upon rather doctrinaire socialist principles of the 19^th Century, and are probably too consistently collectivist in their attitude toward family life to satisfy our robust individualism. A witty Jewish Oxford don, a friend of Chaim Weizmann, has given it as his opinion that Israel is served by the German Jews, who became honest and skillful ‘‘bureaucrats’’ and scientists, and by the Polish Jews who furnish the ideology and the political skill of the new state. Certainly the effective leadership of the state is divided between the German and the Polish Jews.

The co-operation between the religious Jews and the essentially secular idealists in the new state is equally worthy of note. Zionism is a political dream of religious origin, and before the Nazi period it was nourished only among those who were poor and orthodox, rather than among the ‘‘liberal’’ and assimilated and prosperous Jews. Hitler’s persecutions changed all this and made Zionism popular in the congregations of liberal Judaism. From a religious standpoint one might say that it became too popular because the liberal rabbis were as preoccupied with Hitler for two decades as they are now with Nasser, so that even a Christian, with sympathies for Zionism, such as the present writer, can appreciate the protests of the anti-Zionist ‘‘Council for Judaism,’’ which believes that political and nationalistic preoccupations of the rabbis imperil the religious substance of Judaism as a monotheistic faith.

 

 

Vindicating Democracy

Slacktivist, a blogger who is best known for his incredibly extended review of the Left Behind series of novels (brief recap: They're horrible), invokes Niebuhr in response to majoritarian arguments made by religious leaders last week in response to the Obama administration's announcement that they would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court:

I would also point MacArthur toward good old Reinhold Niebuhr, the great 20th-century theologian of human nature, and particularly to The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defense. There, as throughout all of his thinking, the central idea for Niebuhr is sinful human nature.

The basic idea for Niebuhr is that people are sinful and therefore not to be trusted with unchecked power. Talk of "theocracy" won't do for anyone who accepts this Pauline/Augustinian/Calvinist/Niebuhrian view of human nature. Every theocracy will be run by sinful, prideful, fallible, corruptible humans and sinful, prideful, fallible and corruptible humans cannot be trusted with the power to speak or act on behalf of God. Give a sinful human that kind of unchecked power and you've created a monster. For Niebuhr, unchecked power was an invitation to evil.

Given that belief, and his view of human nature, Niebuhr concludes that something like Madisonian democracy -- government of the people, by the people and for the people, restrained by a bill of rights and with a built-in system of checks and balances -- is the best form of government.

Reinhold Niebuhr in Hell

At the blog Religiousleftlaw.com Clark West makes the following provocative statment, responding to aspects of Niebuhr's theology:

A theology born out of hell? It may be even less obvious than the Niebuhrian recovery of original sin,  but it is my own sense  that  just such a politics of spirituality  is needed in our day, when hell on earth is all too real for so many, and thus where people of faith most need to abide- in solidarity and in fighting, hopeful love. And hell born by the merciful heart of love may prove to be far more hospitable a place to wrestle with God than any orthodox or neo-orthodox dream of heaven has ever imagined. Certainly no one has ever been turned away from approaching and even entering through hell's gates! And oddly enough, as the great Algerian writer Hélène Cixous noted after time spent in a Cambodian refugee camp, this 'hospitality of hell' may be the very ground of a new political hope for those on the left and for those left behind.

Read the whole post at the link above.

Non-Violence, Religion and Politics: King, Gandhi, and Niebuhr -- MLK Day at St. Olaf College

St. Olaf College recently sponsored a Martin Luther King Day event relating to the theme of nonviolence in the work of King, Gandhi, and Reinhold Niebuhr. You can watch the entire panel here.

New Niebuhr Related Article

Niebuhr Society board member Scott Paeth has recently published an article on the contemporary relevance of Reinhold Niebuhr in the online journal Politics and Culture. "The Need for an Augustinian Left" appears in the December issue of the Journal.

Obama, the State of the Union, and "Semi-Niebuhrianism"

Ira Chernus at Religion Dispatches argues that Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday was a mixture of American exceptionalism and "semi-Niebuhrian" realist rhetoric:

Whether the president truly believes his Niebuhrian rhetoric no one will ever know. But if he is deploying words merely to win political victories, he is proving himself just as much a disciple of Niebuhr, who assumed that every political leader would do the same. 

What the great theologian did not foresee when he first baptized the ascendant political “realism” was that every president from FDR to Obama would go out to political battle armed with semi-Niebuhrian words, praising America as exceptional both because it is a sinless nation threatened by sinners (thus entitled to slay those sinners) and because it is mired in its own sin, yet uniquely able to transcend that and come together “civilly” in a domestic harmony of natural interests.  

In sum, Obama’s SOTU was a deft combination of centuries-old American exceptionalism and a decades-old consensus that can best be called “semi-Niebuhrianism.”

 

Niebuhr and Park 51

The controversy over the construction of an Islamic community center in proximately to Ground Zero in New York has provoked a great deal of discussion. Alan Bean at Friends of Justice brings Niebuhr into the conversation:

Reinhold Niebuhr, incidentally, had a profound influence on the practical theology of Martin Luther King.  In the first book of his trilogy on the King years, Taylor Branch devotes an entire chapter to King’s discovery of Niebuhr during his years at Crozer seminary.  “After Niebuhr,” Branch writes, “King experienced for the first time a loss of confidence in his own chosen ideas rather than inherited ones.  The Social Gospel lost a good deal of its glow for him almost overnight, and he never again fell so completely under the spell of any school of thought, including Niebuhr’s.”

Niebuhr taught King that dispensing pleasant bromides from the liberal pulpit would change nothing.  If “the race problem” was as deeply rooted as the Union Seminary professor suggested, it would take radical measures to overcome it.

The current agitation over the Ground Zero mosque isn’t an isolated moment of corporate madness.  The mosque issue is just a contemporary version of “never in a thousand years” resistance to the civil rights movement or, a generation later, the Republican “southern strategy” that parlayed fear and bigotry into amazing success at the ballot box.

Niebuhr is dead right.  We despise and reject the “other” because we have transformed our privileged place in America into an idol.  We seethe with racial resentment because, deep down, we know we stand indicted before a God who is satisfied with nothing short of perfect justice.

Michael Cromartie on Augustine, Niebuhr, and Obama

Michael Cromartie, Vice President of the Ethics and Public Policy Institute, is interviewed on the website Patheos:

What do you mean when you say that we need to adopt an Augustinian sensibility?

I mean that we need to adopt a form of Christian realism that recognizes that, because of the Fall, we live in a world that will remain sinful and broken until the end of time. While living in a broken world, our task, if it's political, is to help the state curb that brokenness and that sinfulness in a way that aims toward justice. I use the phrase "Augustinian sensibility" to lean against a Utopian temptation for people on the Right or the Left who give the political realm more significance than it should be given.

So it's a chastened view of politics, but it's not anti-political. People should have firm, clear political convictions on what justice means, without becoming so ideologically wired that they have over-expectations for what can happen in the public policy realm. It's a Christian cast of mind. Having that cast of mind can help nurture a form of Christian civility that is really important in these times, when we have a culture that is more shrill than ever.

One of the great representatives of political realism, in the 20th century, was Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr is often cited as one of the current President's favorite thinkers and inspirations. Is President Obama practicing what Niebuhr preached?

The President seems to have a great admiration and respect for Niebuhr. People all over the political spectrum claim Niebuhr as their mentor. The question is: What part of Niebuhr has the President bought into?

That's a debatable proposition. When there's a problem, the President's instinct is clearly that the state needs to solve it. So there seems to be a lack of appreciation for mediating institutions and the roles they play, as the first instinct is to have government solve all of the many problems that we have. So it's not clear to me what part of Niebuhr he appreciates.
It is clear that Niebuhr's thinking on foreign policy has not influenced President Obama. Niebuhr knew the nature of totalitarianism and critiqued it constantly; he was anything but an advocate of moral equivalence. There's a tendency with President Obama, because he thought Bush bellicose, to believe that he ought to do the opposite. So rather than talking about the virtues of living in a free and democratic society, he has spent a lot of time apologizing for America's problems.