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Reinhold Niebuhr

1892–1971 · 79 years Tier II

The Detroit pastor who decided pacifism was a luxury

Portrait of Reinhold Niebuhr — Unknown author — 1927-12-04 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Niebuhr was born in Wright City, Missouri, one of four children of a German Evangelical pastor who insisted the family speak German at the dinner table. He followed his father into the ministry by the only path available to him — Elmhurst College, then Eden Theological Seminary, then a divinity degree from Yale in 1914 — and never earned the doctorate he later said he regretted skipping. Ordained in 1915, he was sent to a struggling Detroit congregation of 66 members. The city was becoming the assembly line's capital, and Niebuhr spent 13 years watching what Henry Ford's factories did to the men in his pews, which is where the theology that made him famous actually started.

He preached against Ford's speed-ups and against the Klan during Detroit's 1925 mayoral race, then left the pulpit in 1928 for Union Theological Seminary, where he taught for 32 years. Moral Man and Immoral Society, in 1932, argued that groups behave worse than the individuals inside them and that believing otherwise gets people killed. The Nature and Destiny of Man, in 1943, made original sin — human beings as permanently, structurally self-interested — the most realistic argument for democracy over any utopian politics, left or right. He had started the decade a pacifist and a socialist. By the war he was arguing for American intervention on the grounds that refusing to use power is also a use of power, and the label stuck to him as Christian realism. Cold War planners in Washington read him as doctrine.

His wife Ursula, an Oxford-trained theologian who chaired Barnard's religion department, left papers at the Library of Congress showing she co-authored parts of his later writing — work that ran under his name alone, from a man whose entire theology rested on the argument that no one should trust their own righteousness. In March 1965 Martin Luther King invited him to march at Selma. Niebuhr wired back that a severe stroke made it impossible, and said he hoped for a demonstration by everyone whose conscience was still free to attend. It became one of the last public statements of a career spent insisting that good intentions were not enough, delivered by a man who could no longer put his own body where his convictions were.

Niebuhr died in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on June 1, 1971, having already received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. His influence sagged through the 1970s and 1980s, pushed aside by liberation theology and Vietnam-era distrust of anyone who had once made peace with American power. Then it came back. Barack Obama named him his favorite philosopher in 2007, and John McCain claimed him too, for the opposite argument. Historians and columnists on both sides have spent the years since arguing over which one of them actually understood him — roughly the argument about power and self-righteousness that Niebuhr spent his career making.

Lifespan

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Reinhold Niebuhr's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Moral Man and Immoral Society book
His breakthrough argument against political utopianism 1932
The Nature and Destiny of Man book
Two volumes, his fullest statement of Christian realism 1943
Union for Democratic Action company
Co-founded, later reorganized as Americans for Democratic Action 1941
Christianity and Crisis other
Magazine he founded and edited until 1966 1941
The Irony of American History book 1952

Life in brief

with age at each point

June 21, 1892 aged 0 Born in Wright City, Missouri
1915 aged ~23 Ordained and sent to Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit
1928 aged ~36 Joins the faculty at Union Theological Seminary
1931 aged ~39 Marries Ursula Keppel-Compton
1932 aged ~40 Publishes Moral Man and Immoral Society
1941 aged ~49 Co-founds the Union for Democratic Action and edits Christianity and Crisis
1964 aged ~72 Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom
March 19, 1965 aged 72 Declines Martin Luther King's invitation to march at Selma, citing a severe stroke
June 1, 1971 aged 78 Dies in Stockbridge, Massachusetts