Without question, there is a need for social action. The injustices and the needs in the world around us call us to action. At the same time, social action is daunting. The social realm is a place of conflict and intense drama. Progress in the social realm does not come cheap.
So, how can we think about this extremely important yet extremely challenging field of endeavor while at the same time keeping our heads and not sliding into injustice ourselves? Reinhold Niebuhr believed that the Christian faith offered the perspective that we need in order to keep us involved, keep us from despair, and keep us from being consumed. Here is a summary of Niebuhr’s theological vision for social action. Under each point, I have offered a suggestion for its benefit for social action.
[Read a longer version of this article here]
1.1. The Proper Way for Humans and Society to Function
God did not create human beings to exist in their current state of individual and social disfunction. God created human beings good and in a good society. This goodness was rooted in acknowledging their place as creatures in God’s universe. Humans are able to see a long way off but limited in their ability to change what they see. By a faith trusting God with what they could not change, they would be able to exist in tranquility, creativity, harmony, and productivity.
This trust in God would serve as a foundation for community. God created humans as social creatures. Freed from the need to establish their own significance or security, they could serve their communities. As they served others, they would be “drawn out of themselves to become their true selves” (The Children of Light & the Children of Darkness, 56).
Benefit: understanding we are social beings at root and created for social harmony.
1.2. Anxiety Tempts Humans to Sin
Humans are amazing creatures in that they can see far beyond their current situation, but they can only effect a small portion of it. Seeing this gap produces anxiety. The question is, what will they do with this anxiety? Will man be able to “accept his finiteness and to admit his insecurity”? (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 1.150). Or, will he attempt to “regard himself as the go around and about whom the universe centers”? (ibid., 1.124). Humans’ great abilities and yet their limitations tempt them to seek a greatness that is beyond them in order to overcome their limitations. This is a temptation to give themselves an outsized place in the universe that manifests itself in seeking an outsized place in the human community. This is the temptation of the human situation, but there is always “the ideal possibility that faith would purge anxiety of the tendency toward sinful self-assertion” (ibid., 1.182).
Benefit: understanding that social problems are not simply rooted in recalcitrant wills. They are also rooted in the anxiety of the human situation.
1.3. Pride of the Ego Destructive of the Social Order
Human beings feel their insecure position, and they commit sin when they seek an outsized place in the universe and the social order. This is the pride of power. “The ego does not feel secure and therefore grasps for more power in order to make itself secure” (ibid., 1.189). This even leads humans to take from others what belongs to them in order to gain security. All humans are involved in this to a degree. This is the root of the injustice we see all around us.
This pride not only leads us to unjust social arrangements, it also leads us to value everything that is “ours” far more than we should. We may avoid injustice in the political realm but claim it in the area of knowledge, claiming too much for our own intellectual viewpoint. “All human knowledge is tainted with an ‘ideological’ taint. It pretends to be more true than it is. It is finite knowledge, gained from a particular perspective; but it pretends to be final and ultimate knowledge” (ibid., 1.194).
Similarly, religion is not an unalloyed good in this sinful world. The human ego readily makes use of religion to enhance its position in the world. “The worst form of self-assertion is religious self-assertion in which under the guise of contrition before God, He is claimed as the exclusive ally of our contingent self. . . .” (ibid., 201). The transcendent glory of religion tempts humans to claim that glory as in some way their own in their battle for supremacy against other egos.
One interesting fact about the hypocrisy of human pride is that it is easy to see in others but difficult to see in ourselves. Thus, Jesus’ dictum, “Judge not, lest ye be judged” is applicable to the social realm. It is easy to see the speck in our neighbor’s eye even while missing it in our own. We can easily observe the pride of other egos and groups that oppose us while completely ignoring the pride in our ego and groups.
Benefit: understanding that the social problem is rooted in every human being and their pride. This gives us hope that it can change but also explains why social problems are so intractable.
1.4. The Pride in Withdrawal Destructive of the Social Order
When human beings encounter society and find that it does not fit with their pretensions, they are tempted to withdraw from it into a smaller world where they can be the “god” of their lives. Niebuhr calls this “sensuality.” It inevitably results in “unlimited devotion to limited values” (ibid., 1.185). This may be sex, drugs, work, a person, religion, etc. What it always entails is an abandonment of broader responsibilities in order to find a world that is safe, secure, and controlled under one’s own direction. It is important to note that the Christian community has often directed itself against such “sensuality,” but it has not always recognized that “[t]he pride of a bishop, the pretensions of a theologian, the will-to-power of a pious business man, and the spiritual arrogance of the church itself are not mere incidental defects, not merely ‘venial’ sins” (ibid., 2.137).
Benefit: awareness that sinful pride is not merely about active injustice. Withdrawal may be as destructive of a just social order as an unjust engagement with it.
1.5. The Idolatry of Community Pride Destructive of the Social Order
Humans have developed a rather clever way to get around the implausibility of their own prideful pretensions. They simply claim more for the communities of which they are a part than these communities deserve. Niebuhr explains:
. . . this worship of the collective self as if it were ultimate and not finite, is not merely due to the limits of a primitive imagination. It corresponds to a perennial desire in the human heart to eat one’s cake and have it, too; to subordinate the finite self to something greater than it but not so great that the self may not participate in the exaltation of the finite value (The Self & the Dramas of History, 63).
Giving a certain loyalty to one’s own community is a God-ordained and created response to our communities, but humans clothe these communities with a sanctity they do not deserve. The kickback is that they get to share in this sanctity as an individual. The result in the social order is the unjust assertion of one community at the expense of another. Out of this flow many of the worst tragedies of human history.
Benefit: awareness of the potential danger to society from the exaltation of a national or political group.
1.6. The Terrible Result
The result of the pride of man is the misery that we see around us. The problems of the social sphere are rooted in our anxiety and our pride solutions to it. On an individual level, the result is greater anxiety and all that accompanies it. Because the individual refuses to “accept his finiteness and to admit his insecurity,” he becomes involved in “the vicious circle of accentuating the insecurity from which he seeks escape” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 1.150). As anxiety and pride of individuals encounters other humans, the result is conflict, oppression, recrimination, and injustice. The larger the group the worse it gets. As Niebuhr says, “The common members of any national community, while sentimentally desiring peace, nevertheless indulge impulses of envy, jealousy, pride, bigotry, and greed which make for conflict between communities” (Moral Man & Immoral Society, 16). What can be done? History is “not its own redeemer. The ‘long run’ of it is no more redemptive in the ultimate sense than the ‘short run’” (ibid., 2.206). The solution is the grace of God which comes from outside history.
Benefit: this helps us see the origin of human misery in human anxiety and pride. Awareness of the true nature of our problem opens the door to consider its real solution.
2.1. God’s Confrontation with Sin
God does not let human society go on with its problems. He intervenes. The first thing He does is confront human sin. Unlike the Greek philosophy, “Prophetic religion had its very inception in a conflict with national self-deification” (The Self & the Dramas of History, 214). What is astonishing about the prophets is that they do not spare anyone (even themselves!) in their denunciation of sin. According to Niebuhr, this demonstrates that it was the actual “word of the Lord.” Thus, the way to distinguish the true “word of the Lord” is that it “punctures all human vanities” (ibid., 86). Of course, this simply raises another question. “The problem of the meaning of history according to prophetism is how history can be anything more than judgment, which is to say, whether the promise of history can be fulfilled at all” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.27).
Benefit: it equalizes society by declaring all to be under sin and in need of the grace of God.
2.2. God’s Messiah & the Atonement
The true Christ is not expected. All human wisdom seeks to complete itself from the basis of its partial perspective (ibid., 2.62). As Niebuhr says,
The new Biblical faith of Christianity enters into history with the affirmation that the drama of Christ’s life is in fact a final revelation, in which this problem is clarified by the assurance that God takes the demand of His justice upon Himself through Christ’s suffering love and therefore “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself” (The Self & the Dramas of History, 65–66).
This reconciliation with God becomes the foundation for humans’ reconciliation with teach other.
Benefit: This perspective explains how humans are reconciled to God and by extension with each other.
2.3. Man’s Response to God’s Redemption
Christ has come, but humans must respond. the first thing they need to do is to agree with God’s judgment of themselves. As Niebuhr says, “The sick are preferred to the healthy, as the sinners are preferred to the righteous, because their lack of health prompts them to an humility which is the prerequisite of every spiritual achievement” (The Irony of American History, 161). The first step to salvation is to see one’s need of it. Once a person sees their need, they must accept the gifts of power and acceptance that God offers:
Christ as “power” and as “grace” can be mediated to the individual only if the truth of the Atonement is appropriated inwardly. In that case the alternate moods of despair and false hope are overcome and the individual is actually freed to live a life of serenity and creativity (
The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.57–58).
Anxiety makes us focus on ourselves in a way that blocks any care for others. Faith in the good news about Jesus offers us a security that enables us to set aside our anxieties and move forward. “This element of ‘grace’ may be defined as the ‘gift’ of security, without which the self is incapable of becoming free of preoccupation with its own security so that it might relate to others and achieve true fulfillment of the self” (Man’s Nature & His Communities, 108).
Benefit: it explains to the individual what characteristics he needs in order to participate in the positive transformation of society.
2.4. Justification & Sanctification: The Two Benefits Given to Faith
Justification is the first benefit that God gives to faith. “The Christ who is apprehended by faith, i.e., to whom the soul is obedient in principle, ‘imputes’ his righteousness to it. It is not an actual possession except ‘by faith’” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.103). The result is that the individual human being is acquitted before God’s throne. This acceptance answers the concern of anxiety and so relieves the need for the pride solution. In addition, God gives the power to live a new life of love. “I am crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” This indicates, as Niebuhr says, that there is a new life that “is a power not our own” and “power beyond the self” (ibid., 2.115). Justification frees man from his guilty anxiety, and sanctification empowers him to live a life of love.
2.5. Basic Mistakes in Societal Transformation
There are several ways that humans can go wrong in seeking to transform society. They correspond to the main theological errors that people have made in regard to individual transformation. The first is perfectionism. Any time someone perceives that they have arrived or believe that they can arrive, there will be trouble. For example, Nieburh says, “It must be understood that the children of light are foolish not merely because they underestimate the power of self-interest among the children of darkness. They underestimate this power among themselves” (The Children of Light & the Children of Darkness, 11). Sin is out there, but it is still here, in us. We do not get to a point in this life that is beyond the taint of sin.
Some who recognize the imperfection of this life at all levels make a different mistake. They believe that since there is no perfection that therefore there is no distinction in the relative righteousness of individual people. Niebuhr says:
It is no easy task to do justice to the distinctions of good and evil in history and to the possibilities and obligations of realizing the good in history; and also to subordinate all these relative judgments and achievements to the final truth about life and history which is proclaimed in the gospel (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.198).
We must not lose sight of the fact that all are under sin, but we must not fail to distinguish between the relative righteousness of different societies and situations.
Because things can never be perfect, it is easy to believe that things can never be better. However, that is a mistake. Niebuhr says that there will not “be a perfect peace. But it can be more perfect than it is” (Niebuhr, Moral Man & Immoral Society, 256). We need to recognize that
[t]here is no limit to either the sanctification of individual life, or social perfection in collective life, or to the discovery of truth in cultural life; except of course the one limit, that there will be some corruption, as well as deficiency, of virtue and truth on the new level of achievements (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.156).
In other words, there is no specific sin or sinful situation where we can say, this cannot be better. Change is real, and progress is possible, though never perfect.
Benefit: this perspective counsels optimism without illusions and caution without despair.
2.6. Means for Societal Transformation
How can society make progress? Niebuhr suggests three means: politics, education, and religion. Politics and coercion is, of course, a dangerous instrument. As Niebuhr writes, “Conflict and coercion are manifestly such dangerous instruments. They are so fruitful of the very evils from which society must be saved than an intelligent society will not countenance their indiscriminate use. . . .” (Moral Man & Immoral Society, 238). It is important, then, that “such types of coercion as are most compatible with the moral and rational factors in human society” be used. There must be a careful “discriminating between the purposes and ends for which coercion is used” (ibid., 234).
Education is the second means for transformation. Reason and justice are closely connected. We have to look beyond our own situation and think about what other people’s interests are. The more people that are involved, the more we need a “rational estimate of conflicting needs and interests” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.248).
The third means is religion. Religion teaches humility before the divine. Closely related is the way that religion teaches the brotherhood of all human beings. This gives us a foundation for interacting with others in a way that causes social flourishing. “The transcendent perspective of religion makes all men our brothers and nullifies the divisions, by which nature, climate, geography, and the accidents of history divide the human family” (Moral Man & Immoral Society, 71). Religion helps mitigate the common causes of social conflict and provides a motivation for social cooperation.
Benefit: it demonstrates to us a variety of methods for making society better.
2.7. Hope for Human Society
The Christian faith also presents a Christian hope. The hope is not rooted in this world. It is a hope that will be completed by God’s intervention in history. This does not mean that we should be passive. The Christian hope is that God will intervene to fulfill history not create something completely contrary to it. This is the meaning of the resurrection. As Niebuhr explains, “Against utopianism the Christian faith insists that the final consummation of history lies beyond the conditions of the temporal process. Against other-worldliness it asserts that the consummation fulfills rather than negates, the historical process” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 2.291).
Benefit: it shows our ultimate hope is in God’s transformation without leading to passivity