You’d probably be safe in dismissing his younger brother, H. Richard, whose work was learned and heartfelt, but is by now mostly either outdated or discredited. But any Christian with interest in the issues of ethics and politics will still learn a great deal form Reinhold. If nothing else, his work is full of aphorisms and zingers that will be useful to have in your Moleskine. Since I first read him, I have always maintained that Reinhold Niebuhr is absolutely brilliant. In spite of the fact that I am in fundamental disagreement with him about the possibilities of Christian faithfulness in the world, he is, for my money, better than anyone in describing the world in which that faithfulness must take place. He is a genius in the peculiarly American sort, of the same sort as Mark Twain: a man who never earned more than a bachelor’s degree, notorious for not citing sources, and who was as popular with the American reading public as he was fiercely critical of it.
For all those who have learned at the feet of John Yoder, Niebur’s lack of any real ecclessiology will disqualify him from being a credible source for a constructive social ethic. Yet like Hauerwas, those who disagree with him should not fail to do so through thorough engagement with him. He is absolutely essential for understanding anything about American ethical thought in the 20th century. The sources of M.L.K. Jr.’s strategies for engaging injustice in American society, for instance, stem directly from Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society. His call for a leader after the fashion of Ghandi to rise up from among the Black American community is downright prophetic, and pretty accurately predicts the tone and trajectory of the civil-rights movement. Read:
Non-violence is a particularly strategic instrument for an oppressed group which is hopelessly in the minority and has no possibility of developing sufficient power to set against its oppressors.
The emancipation of the Negro race in america probably waits upon the adequate development of this kind of social and political strategy. It is hopeless for the Negro to expect complete emancipation from the menial social and economic position into which the white man has forced him, merely by trusting in the moral sense of the white race. It is equally hopeless to attempt emancipation through violent rebellion.
…[Liberals] have the usuall faith in the power of education and moral suasion to soften the heart of the white man. This faith is filled with as many illusions as such expectations always are….The white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so. Upon that point one may speak with a dodmatism which all history justifies. (Moral Man and Immoral Society, 252-3)
One of the greatest strengths of Niebuhr is his ability to cut through the optimimistic anthropology of liberalism. What Hauerwas calls his “no bullshit style” comes through in the way that he cuts through classical liberal pacifist sentiments, pointing out that non-violent social strategies are no less coercive just for their not involving what we might call subjective violence. With our ears still ringing with chants of “Yes, we can,” I can’t think of a better check on the present wave of idealism sweeping over the country than the following passage, which, every bit as cogently as Zizek in his recent book, identifies the coercion and violence that are inherent in every system:
[The moralist] believes…that nothing but an extension of social intelligence and an increase in moral goodwill can offer society a permanent solution for its social problems. Yet the moralist may be as dangerous a guide as the political realist. He usually fails to recognize the elements of injustice and coercion which are present in any contemporary social peace. The coercive elements are covert, because dominant groups are able to avail themselves of the use of economic power, propaganda, the traditional processes of government, and other types of non-violent power. By failing to recognise the real character of these forms of coercion, the moralit places an unjustified moral onus upon advancing groups which use violent methods to disturb a peace maintaned by subtler types of coercion….A too uncritical glorification of co-operation and mutuality therefore results in the acceptance of traditional injustices and the preference of the subtler types of coercion to the more overt types. (Moral Man and Immoral Society, 233)
In short, you are not exempt from implication in the violence that upholds the position of America in the world simply because you have an Endthisless War sticker on your Volvo.



