Obama's Favorite Theologian? A Short Course on Reinhold Niebuhr
Speaker: Wilfred M. McClay, SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Respondent: E.J. Dionne Jr., Columnist, The Washington Post; Senior Advisor, Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life
Moderator: Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics & Public Policy Center; Senior Advisor, Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life
In the following excerpt, ellipses have been omitted to facilitate reading. Find the full transcript, including audience discussion, at pewforum.org.
MCCLAY: The occasion for this -- the hook -- is an interview between David Brooks and then-Sen. Obama in 2007 [in which David noted] that Obama gave a sort of perfect description of the book in perfect sentences and perfect paragraph structure for 20 minutes, which does suggest that he knew the book in question, The Irony of American History, one of the books I'm going to talk about.
Obama's not the first American president to declare his fondness for Niebuhr. Jimmy Carter notably did, both before and after his election. Some people think that the famous"malaise" speech had some Niebuhrian input. I'm not going to get into the question of whether Obama really understands Niebuhr or not. What I really want to do is to lay out [Niebuhr's] vision, his worldview in a kind of short course. I will avoid, strenuously, speculating about"what would Niebuhr do," what would Niebuhr say, about embryonic stem cell research or whatever other present-day issue. I think there's plenty to talk about, just with respect to what he did say and think.
Niebuhr is the outstanding public theologian of the 20th century, [but he] has become a figure of obscurity in recent decades, and that's partly because the term"public theologian" has come to represent something of a null set in recent times. But Niebuhr had an unusually long and productive career. He turned out many books, many articles; wrote journalistically; wrote densely scholarly works. He was engaged in the politics of the day, from World War I all the way to the Vietnam War. So he was not only a theologian of great distinction, but also a public intellectual who addressed himself to the full range of public concerns and had an enormously capacious mind that really could take in all kinds of issues that he wouldn't necessarily have discussed in his books. His importance in his time tells you something about his time. It was a time when theologians were important people. And it was a time when there was that great vitality in the mainline of Protestantism.
Niebuhr is something of a counterpuncher as an intellectual; it's hard to know what he thinks about somebody or about some subject unless he's reacting to them, taking exception to or responding to other thinkers, which is why I think it's very important to see him in context. One thing about the context is, I think it's impossible to imagine him operating in anything other than a modern, Western, liberal environment, where there's a strong tradition of science, of belief in the idea of progress -- a society that is in some ways poised on the cusp of a transformation into secularity, or at any rate a world in which a secular option exists. He was very much a creature of that historical moment and a critic of liberalism from within liberalism, a breed that flourished particularly in the late '40s and '50s -- and doesn't seem to exist, at least in the same form, today
The issues that he struggled with are quintessentially related to problems of advanced modernity, and science is one of them. Niebuhr upholds the idea of progress and remorselessly critiques it at the same time. [Y]ou may know Niebuhr for what's called the"serenity prayer," which goes something like"God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things that can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other." I'm reciting from memory. But the interesting thing to me anyway, as someone of conservative disposition, is what he leaves out, and that is preserving the things that need to be preserved. [I]t shows how thoroughgoing a progressive he was.
Niebuhr has an understanding of Christianity that's grounded in a very complicated view of human nature. Actually, a lot of his persuasiveness derives from the fact that this view is more complicated and adequate than its secular equivalents. But first, let me give you a little background biography. He was born in 1892, not in a log cabin, you'll be happy to know, but in rural Missouri, the son of a German immigrant pastor, Gustav Niebuhr, a member of a tiny Protestant group called the German Evangelical Synod. Reinhold inherited from his father this sense of pastoral vocation and a keen interest in social and political affairs. He built on this with two years at Yale Divinity School, and so he began his career as a theologian and pastor as an advocate of what was called the"social gospel."
The social gospel was a movement within liberal Protestantism which located the meaning of the Christian Gospel in its promise as a blueprint for progressive social reform, rather than its assertions about supernatural reality. It arose out of a crisis within, particularly, Protestantism -- although Catholicism had its own version of this -- in response to industrialization and urbanization. In the Protestant case, particularly salient were the challenges to biblical authority rising out of these things, but more so out of Darwinism. Not so much the idea of evolution per se, which was a doctrine that easily comported with Christian faith, but natural selection. It was the randomness of the process of natural selection that was viewed as particularly threatening. An equally powerful threat came from the so--called"higher criticism" of the Bible, which deconstructed the Bible, for all intents and purposes, into a collection of redactions of successive texts by multiple authors over long periods of time, and therefore not a text that should be regarded as having any kind of organic or authorial unity. All of these things were terribly threatening, especially to Protestants, because the whole basis of the Protestant Reformation, to oversimplify grandly, was to see the authority of the Bible as superseding the authority of the historical institutional church. So that tremendous weight is placed on the authority of that text.
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