[1]Reinhold Niebuhr
This week NPR’s Morning Edition [2] has run back-to-back interviews [3] with Newsweek editor Jon Meacham discussing the memoirs of Barack Obama and John McCain. The idea is to get beyond sound bites and offer an analysis of the major people and events that have shaped the two men, at least according to their own published work.
The fascinating conclusion is that this country’s two major-party presidential candidates have both been strongly influenced by the same theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr [4].
My initial question is about the way it seems that Niebuhr was seized upon as a hidden, explanatory link between the characters of Obama and McCain. Is this just another example of an almost obsessive fascination with the interplay of politics and religion during this election cycle? Or is something else going on here?
In one sense, there’s nothing surprising about finding references to Reinhold Niebuhr in the writings of both candidates. Niebuhr is generally regarded as one of the most influential Protestant theologians of the twentieth century–if you’re an an adult American who is going to be influenced by a theologian, there’s a statistical likelihood that it’s going to be Niebuhr. Nonetheless, I don’t recall the policies and perspectives of George Bush or John Kerry or even Al Gore (who studied at Vanderbilt’s Divinity School) being discussed in light of a major theologian who influenced their thinking, at least on a mainstream national radio broadcast (and no, I guess I don’t count Bush’s famous remark about Jesus Christ being his favorite philosopher)
There’s a local angle to all this, of course, since Niebuhr was from Missouri and began his theological training at Eden Seminary [5] in Webster Groves.
But it’s the potential philosophical implications that are really striking. Is Niebuhr’s work really so broad that two very different men with utterly divergent backgrounds could both find compelling guidance there, or is it a case of two people reading the same thing and coming to entirely different conclusions? Meacham seems to think the candidates’ references to Niebuhr mainly show that Obama and McCain share a basically tragic view of life. But that suggests only that both of them found in Niebuhr’s work a world view that resonated with their prior experience and perhaps their innate personalities, not that their particular world views were in fact shaped by his thinking. The latter, I think, is the larger claim, with more far-reaching implications, although I don’t have a clear sense of how accurate it is.
To that end, I know I’ll be spending some of my weekend reading this Atlantic article [6], this New York Times piece [7], and maybe even digging out my old copy of Moral Man and Immoral Society to see if anything occurs to me. Just to take one famous Reinhold Niebuhr quote, one wonders how a President Obama or McCain would act on the insight that, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” Would agreement with that proposition, for instance, incline one to “spread democracy” abroad or to work harder to ensure that democracy is being upheld here at home? Seeing humanity as fundamentally sinful is a classic Protestant formulation; not every Protestant, though, takes the same view of how that theological stance should influence public policy. Niebuhr was renowned for bridging the gap between academic theology and political reality, so how is it that both the right and the left have since used his writings as justifications for their actions?
In a September 2007 article [8] about the renewed public and political interest in Niebuhr during the early stages of the campaign, Benedicta Cipolla of the Religion News Service wrote:
Niebuhr’s unrelenting gaze inward — at a United States he refused to herald as the world’s unquestioned savior — runs counter to the renewed sense of American exceptionalism that followed the 9/11 attacks.
Niebuhr’s Christian realism — his recognition of the persistence of sin, self-interest, and self-righteousness in social conflicts — highlights the distinction between the acknowledgment of evil’s existence and America’s own involvement in that evil.
Whichever man wins the election, it will be fascinating to see if we can discern the traces of Niebuhr’s influence in how they govern.