Christian Realism in an Age of Ideology

Reinhold Niebuhr trained at Yale Divinity School and served for over a decade as a pastor in industrial Detroit before moving into academic life at Union Theological Seminary in 1928, an experience of ministering among factory workers that shaped his lifelong suspicion of theology written without regard for economic and political power. His 1932 book Moral Man and Immoral Society argued that individuals are capable of a degree of unselfishness that groups, nations and classes essentially are not, so that political ethics has to reckon with collective self interest as a permanent fact rather than a problem moral persuasion alone can solve. He developed this position further across the following decade, culminating in his 1939 Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, published as The Nature and Destiny of Man, which set out what came to be called Christian realism, a position that took human sinfulness seriously as a check on utopian politics of both the political left and right without abandoning Christian hope altogether.

Richard Wightman Fox's biography traces how this stance made Niebuhr an influential voice in American public life well beyond seminary walls, read and consulted by politicians and journalists who did not share his theology but found his account of power, self interest and moral limitation useful for thinking about depression era economics, fascism and, later, the Cold War.