Niebuhr, Reinhold

Niebuhr, Reinhold (1892–1971), theologian.The most influential American theologian of the twentieth century, Niebuhr spoke authoritatively about politics and culture as well as the Christian Gospel. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James, he believed that religious vitality was ebbing in the churches and could be revived only by an energetic encounter with the wider world. Like Emerson and James, too, he developed his thinking in tension with secular currents of thought, but unlike them he was also a man of action. He was a gifted political journalist and a tireless political activist from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Born in Missouri to a German immigrant preacher and his second‐generation German immigrant wife, Niebuhr was ordained at the age of twenty‐one into his father's German Evangelical Synod of North America. But he sought a larger sphere, and soon departed for Yale Divinity School, where he received a master's degree in 1915. Yale deepened the liberal Protestant convictions he had inherited from his father: the critical study of the Bible, the Social Gospel, God as forgiving companion rather than irascible judge. As minister of a small middle‐class German Evangelical Synod church in Detroit (1915–1928), he turned it into a thriving liberal institution. By 1928, when he became a professor of ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, he had become, thanks to his masterful oratory and biting essays in the Christian Century magazine, a leading voice of liberal Protestantism.

At Union, Niebuhr moved to the center of the national political and intellectual debate. His Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) argued that Christians must engage the world of power politics, and resist evil with force, and even violence, rather than merely preach love and goodwill as the all‐purpose solution to social conflict. His “realism” profoundly influenced Protestant opinion, which moved during the 1930s and 1940s toward support for organized labor at home and for military intervention against fascism abroad. A Socialist party member in the 1930s (and twice a candidate for office), Niebuhr moved in the 1940s toward the political center, from which he lambasted both the communists and the business‐dominated Republicans. His masterpiece, The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941–1943), laid a theological groundwork for the chastened liberalism of the Cold War Era: Human progress was still open‐ended, since men and women were creative beings made in God's image, but they were also sinners who undermined their own achievements through pride and self‐aggrandizement. Democratic, interest‐group politics offered the right combination of freedom and restraint for beings so demonstrably divided against themselves. In this spirit, in 1947, he helped launch Americans for Democratic Action to mobilize the noncommunist left. In the 1960s, however, he sharply criticized the Lyndon B. Johnson administration's escalation of the Vietnam War.
See also Anticommunism; New Deal Era, The; Pacifism; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Charles W. Kegley, ed., Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought, rev. ed., 1984.
Richard Wightman Fox , Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography, 1985; reprint, 1996.

Richard Wightman Fox