If public intellectuals in the United States had ever ceased discussing Reinhold Niebuhr's work, the conversation was surely reignited by David Brooks's celebrated interview in 2007 with then-presidential candidate, Barack Obama, who acknowledged Niebuhr as “one of my favorite philosophers.” Since that time, Niebuhr's work has served as an important point of reference for many trying to get a handle on Obama's religious identity. Obama, of course, is not alone in his admiration for Niebuhr. The ranks of those invoking Niebuhr's Christian realism range across the American political spectrum from the neoconservative intellectuals who dominated Washington during the Reagan-Bush years through the partisans of liberation theology in its various permutations, who achieved a measure of perhaps more lasting influence in academia and the churches. Niebuhr's work thus stands not so much as an authority whose texts can be used to settle disputes among these public intellectuals, but as a common ground marking out the arena in which their struggles—and ours—will continue.
Daniel F. Rice, the editor of this collection of essays, believes that as long as Niebuhr remains “an American original”—that is, the kind of protean thinker whose influence grows with every refutation of his work—we will need some guidance in orienting ourselves to the conversation. With that in mind, he apparently invited what he regarded as a spectrum of authoritative voices whose work qualifies them to help a new generation of students to explore what Rice aptly characterizes as “the lost world of Reinhold Niebuhr.” The result is as tragically flawed as it is promising.
Perhaps Rice does not realize just how lost Niebuhr's world, and that of his students and professional interpreters, really is. I find it astonishing that a collection on Niebuhr would be presented without a single contribution from Niebuhr's significant critics and admirers among African American theologians and Christian feminists. A survey of the footnotes scattered throughout the collection reveals only Robin Lovin's passing nod to Catherine Keller, and Eyal J. Naveh's reference to a brief response piece by Beverly Harrison. It is as if, despite its intentions to the contrary, this collection were itself conceived in the lost world of 1950s America—like some strange theological mirroring of the New York ethos so vividly evoked by AMC's hit television series, “Mad Men.” The only piece in the collection that fully breaks out of this lost world is Mark Hulstetter's somewhat idiosyncratic and emphatically postmodernist riff, “After Niebuhr.”
Criticizing a book for what it does not do, obviously, affords only limited insight. Nevertheless, I consider the omissions—however they may be explained—as tragic, since it may ensure that this remains a closed book, especially in the circles where it was meant to do the most good. It would be tragic if the essays that demonstrate new thinking by important authors identified with Niebuhr's Christian realism were to go unnoticed. Chief among these, in my view, is Ronald H. Stone's “Reinhold Niebuhr's Perspectives on Middle East Foreign Policy,” which distances itself from the “Pro-Zionism” that is an increasingly problematic dimension of Niebuhr's mixed legacy. As Stone observes, “Niebuhr regarded the emergence of Israel ‘as a kind of penance of the world for the awful atrocities committed against the Jews’” (188). But when doing penance turns out to involve granting an indefinite carte blanche to the Israeli government, as well as billions of dollars in military aid, in support of its policies against the Palestinians and its other enemies real or imagined, then one must, as Stone urges, show a properly Niebuhrian “courage to change.” To be sure, Stone is not advocating a total withdrawal of support for Israel, but he does show how Christian realism can and ought to promote a critical and evenhanded approach to the United States' responsibilities in and for the Middle East.
The essays by Larry Rasmussen on “Empire or Global Community?” as well as Robin W. Lovin's “Prophetic Faith and American Democracy” and Rice's own “Reinhold Niebuhr on Democracy” expand upon the resources within Niebuhr's own writings for a complete and thorough reassessment. In one way or another each of the authors represented in this collection writes in the properly chastened atmosphere afforded by the failure of U.S. foreign policy in Iraq and the Middle East, as well as the severe contraction in America's hegemonic role in the global economy thanks to the collapse on Wall Street. To their credit, they recognize that the “faith-based” approach to public policy championed by Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld is inspired by the kind of distorted interpretation of Christianity that Christian realism was meant to challenge and overcome.
Whatever its shortcomings, Christian realism cannot be blamed for the weirdly postmodernist Christian fundamentalism that served as a cover for Bush's misbegotten dream of imposing democracy in the Middle East, and privatizing the social safety net. Recent events in Egypt, so far from demonstrating the wisdom of Bush's policies, prove just the opposite. But if Christian realism is readily distinguishable from the receding wave of Christian fundamentalism, it is less so from the neoconservative analyses that frequently invoke Niebuhr's legacy to legitimate their support of Bush's agenda. Of the authors represented in the collection, only Eval J. Naveh's “Beyond Illusion and Despair: Niebuhr's Liberal Legacy in a Divided American Culture” specifically addresses the writings of an important Niebuhrian neoconservative, Michael Novak, and seeks to clarify this Niebuhrian outlier from the other more decisive influences shaping neoconservative ideology.
The plausibility of neoconservative readings of Niebuhr ought to prompt further discussion among Christian realism's professional interpreters. Niebuhr wrote a lot of things over many years, and often changed his mind, not just about public policy, but also about the meaning of biblical faith. His way of achieving relevance by offering nuanced and usually insightful perspectives on current events carried with it the risk of persistent ambiguity; witness his predilection for irony and paradox. No longer having Niebuhr himself around to clarify what he did and did not mean by such deep readings, we are left with only the texts to inform speculation as to what Niebuhr might have said, for example, about Obama's approach to health care reform or the Egyptian revolution. As the contributors to this collection ably demonstrate, the texts do provide some general guidelines, an identifiable perspective for public intellectuals engaged with America's ongoing culture wars. But in the end, as Mark Hulstetter observes, Niebuhr's enduring legacy for our students may be “the way he lived out his vocation . . . as a religious intellectual and activist” (351). Seen in that light, revisiting Niebuhr may yet inspire—rather than risk distracting—future generations of socially aware Christians who also have been burdened with the call of prophetic witness and public responsibility.
