Reinhold Niebuhr

October 20, 2022

7 Principles for Christian Social Engagement

As Christians, we want to see the world be a better place. Jesus has taught us to love our neighbor and to be concerned for the least of these. The problem is that when we try to get involved, we do not know what to do. We find it harder than we supposed. This can lead us to give up, but then what of our obligation to love the world?

In my view, few Christians have thought about this issue with as much clarity as the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. I have learned much from him. What I have learned has enabled me to keep going in big and small ways with outreach to the communities of which I am a part. Here I want to summarize seven principles that continue to be sources of wisdom, challenge, and encouragement to me when social engagement gets hard. I will not quote Niebuhr here. You can see my summary of his views on Christian political engagement here. I am just writing these in my own words, but my thought owes much to him.

1. There is no limit to human anxiety, insecurities, and ambitions. One reason it is so tough to engage with people is because we are filled with anxiety. Anxiety is part of human life. It arises from the fact that we can see all sorts of problems that we can do little or nothing about. We are anxious about our survival, our life, our possessions, our money, our kids, our nation, our significance, and on and on.

And there is no point where this stops. No matter how much we succeed there are always new problems. We have anxiety that we will lose the things we have gained or not reach the next level. In America and the West, we have solved a lot of problems that were huge issues for our ancestors, but we have simply run into bigger problems. Anxiety explains why people accept even bad situations. They fear that if they change them, they will encounter something much worse. In engaging with society, we are dealing with anxious people.

2. Human pride is born out of anxiety. Why do people exalt themselves at the expense of others? Why do they act in selfish ways? It is in part because of their anxiety. They are worried about their survival and the survival of the things they enjoy, and they will fight for their position and prestige as much as if it were their very life. Why does a nation invade others? It is in part out of the anxiety over the prosperity, prestige, or survival of their own nation. Why do people amass goods and not worry about others? It is in part anxiety over their own position. Why does a parent think they can continually make their child happy? Some of it is anxiety about their child, but it is also pride in their own ability to solve every problem for someone else.

Pride born of anxiety is a factor in human life. We stubbornly cling to our own position and power and exalt ourselves, our things, our people, and our ideas above others, even at the expense of truth and justice. This deserves our condemnation, but it also calls for compassion because it is born out of an attempt to solve the basic problems of life, relationships, meaning, and security that we all deal with. This can take some of the edge off of the opposition of others because it is born in part out of trying to solve the same problems that we ourselves are trying to solve.

3. Religion is not a pure quest for God, and reason can be just as fanatic as religion. Religion and reason should mitigate our anxiety and humble our pride. However, religion can easily become a tool of our pride. Thinking on the absolute, we identify ourselves with the absolute. We borrow the sacredness of the holy and apply it to our own faulty and sinful ideas and actions. We use it to exalt ourselves at the expense of others. Even the idea of grace, which should humble us, can become a way of looking down on others who don’t get it and baptizing all our ideas because we “understand” God’s grace. Continue reading “7 Principles for Christian Social Engagement”

September 10, 2022September 10, 2022

Christianity & Social Life: 15 Quotes from Reinhold Niebuhr to Help Us Engage

How do we engage in our polarized national life? There seems to be so much bitterness and so little progress. It can divide families, friends, and communities. How do we as Christians engage well in this division?

American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) believed that Christianity was about more than just the individual and the life to come. He believed that the Christian view of man could give us a perspective that would enable us to understand the challenges of the modern world and hope that they could be changed. I believe that Niebuhr had a lot of wisdom on how to engage in American society (and any society), and his insights are just as relevant as when he wrote them over the course of middle decades of the 20th century. Here are 15 quotes that illustrate the wisdom of Niebuhr in applying the Christian faith to modern society: 5 on the problem, 5 on the solution, and 5 on the hope we can have to make things better.

The Problem
1. “Actually the history of religious fanaticism proves that it is fairly easy to claim identity between the absolute and the contingent value, and thus to claim divine validity for a ‘Christian’ civilization despite all of its moral ambiguities, and to use the Christian faith as a weapon against the foe in all kinds of historic encounters” (The Self & the Dramas of History, 149).

2. “The ultimate sin is the religious sin of making the self-deification implied in moral pride explicit. This is done when our partial standards and relative attainments are explicitly related to the unconditioned good, and claim divine sanction. For this reason religion is not simply as is generally supposed an inherently virtuous human quest for God” (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 200).

3. The rise of science in Western culture “gave modern culture a special animus against ‘dogma.’ But unfortunately it was not prepared to deal with the hidden dogmas in prescriptions of science itself” (The Self & the Dramas of History, 114). “In short, reason may be as obedient a servant of particular interests as religion” (ibid., 153). Continue reading “Christianity & Social Life: 15 Quotes from Reinhold Niebuhr to Help Us Engage”

August 24, 2022

The Intractability of Racism: Niebuhr on Race Problems and Solutions

Introduction
When Reinhold Niebuhr considered the ordeals of school integration in the 1950s, he pointed to an important lesson: “This whole chapter in our national history is instructive because it reveals that the group pride of men is one of the most ineradicable of human weaknesses” (Christianity & Crisis XVI, October 1, 1956, p. 122). This intractability was all the more surprising because the Western tradition contained so many elements that would commend a universalist perspective on human nature. “Despite all traditions of human universalism inherited from Stoic, Prophetic, and Christian sources, Western man—in common with all men—remains an unregenerate tribalist” (Christianity & Crisis, XXIV, no. 12, July 6, 1964, p. 133). Niebuhr believed that events like Southern resistance to integration could demonstrate the “intractability” of race problems. However, Niebuhr also believed that an understanding of human nature, particularly as set forth in the Christian faith, could help illuminate why racial problems were so difficult and point toward real though imperfect solutions to the problems.

In Niebuhr’s thinking, there are four important aspects of human nature that can illuminate the intractability of the race problem: the created tendency to value those closest to us, the anxiety over their maintenance and survival, the excessive pride and overvaluing of our groups, and the aggravation of individual sinful tendencies in group dynamics.

Christian Faith and the Illumination of the Race Problem
The first element is a created tendency to value those closest to us. The Christian view of human beings is that they are not created evil but that they become evil by the misuse of created good. Thus, in all evils there is an element of good. Valuing our own countries and families is good. This is seen most obviously in the care that parents have for their children and their desire that they would live, survive, and thrive. Thus, the race problem is to some degree rooted in our nature as biological and ethnic beings.

What smacks up against our desire for the survival of our families or races is our tenuous and finite position. Other groups oppose ours. Disasters can overtake us. We are small, but we can to some degree see the whole. In other words, “man is a finite spirit, lacking identity with the whole, yet [he is] capable in some sense of envisaging the whole. . .” (The Nature & Destiny of Man [NDM 1], Vol. 1, p. 181). This includes potential pitfalls, struggles, and disasters. The gap between what we want to see happen and the many challenges to making it happen is anxiety. Continue reading “The Intractability of Racism: Niebuhr on Race Problems and Solutions”

January 6, 2021January 20, 2026

A Theology of Social Action

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]

Part 1 – Human Social Potential and the Human Social Problem

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. Continue reading “A Theology of Social Action”

January 4, 2021January 4, 2021

Amazingly, Our Democracy Works . . .

Amazingly, our democracy works. It works somewhat like the free market. The free market employs the profit interest of human beings to get goods where they want to be. Amazingly, this process is better at getting goods and services where I want them than any central planning could be. It’s messy, competitive, and random, but it works. Democracy works in a similar way.

Democracy is a rough and tumble process that gradually moves nations in a better direction. This progress is not because the side that wins is competent and good. It is because each faction watches the other like a hawk ready to pounce on its prey. This keeps each side on their toes and gradually removes the dross.

People like to hear that we are all in this together and above power politics, but we all know this is not true. Each side loves to claim a purity for themselves, even though they are enmeshed in the fray. Each side sees very clearly the hypocrisy of the assertion of this purity . . . in the other side. Continue reading “Amazingly, Our Democracy Works . . .”

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