In August 1947, a few months after President Harry S. Truman pledged the United States to fight communism around the globe, Time magazine delivered a stern warning to its wide readership from Reinhold Niebuhr, the nation's best-known theologian: “The new idolatry in the U.S. may be a blind, uncritical worship of democracy.” The Time article excerpted a Christianity and Crisis piece on “Democracy as a Religion” in which Niebuhr stressed the hidden dangers of the increasingly ubiquitous paeans to democracy in postwar America. That spring's commencement addresses, he noted, would give any sensible observer the distinct impression that “Americans have only one religion: devotion to democracy. They extol its virtues, are apprehensive about the perils to which it is exposed, pour maledictions upon its foes, rededicate themselves periodically to its purposes and claim unconditional validity for its ideals.”Footnote 1
Though clear on democracy's superiority to totalitarianism, Niebuhr lamented that too many American democrats joined their communist foes in recognizing “no other dimension of existence except the social one.” What's more, he continued, they often conflated “our particular brand of democracy with the ultimate values of life.” Here, said Niebuhr, lay the “peril of democracy as a religion,” for even the strongest institution would be corrupted by “a too uncritical devotion.” As Americans defended their prized values, he insisted, they would need to “view such struggles in another dimension,” from a vantage point uniquely available through “our Christian faith.” Such a perspective would allow for a robust defense of democracy while guarding against the temptation to attribute all the ills of the world to America's enemies. It would sensitize Americans to “the tragic character of the human drama” and lead them to “call upon the mercy of God to redeem us not from the predicament of democracy but from the human predicament.”Footnote 2
Why did Niebuhr react so sharply against the idea of “democracy as a religion” in the dawning moments of the Cold War, and who were the primary targets of his critique? Daniel F. Rice has proposed that Niebuhr singled out naturalists such as John Dewey, whom he accused of seeking a “common faith” for America in democracy itself.Footnote 3 Biographer Richard Wightman Fox instead cites the 1947 article as evidence of Niebuhr's hostility toward uncritical, nationalistic forms of anti-communism.Footnote 4 Recently catalogued archival evidence at Harvard Divinity School's Andover-Harvard Theological Library, however, suggests a provocative new interpretation: that Reinhold Niebuhr's 1947 argument evolved in direct response to the criticisms of his younger brother and fellow theologian H. Richard Niebuhr.Footnote 5
Substantial evidence shows that H. Richard raised the cry against the cult of democracy several years earlier than Reinhold, on the eve of World War II. H. Richard's biographer contends that he originally targeted secular liberals such as Dewey on the left and later took aim at staunch anti-communists such as Joseph McCarthy and Billy Graham on the right.Footnote 6 But the newly unearthed correspondence at Harvard Divinity School suggests that the critique of democracy as a religion first appeared in H. Richard's criticisms of his brother Reinhold, who subsequently took up the charge and redirected it toward his own ends. These new sources highlight a central preoccupation of the Niebuhr brothers’ generation—the defense of democracy in an age of totalitarianism. At the same time, they open a fascinating window onto the complex relationship between two of America's greatest theologians and identify democracy as a central theme in the brothers’ dialogue.
Considerable scholarly attention has been devoted to Reinhold's classic works on democracy, especially The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944), in which Reinhold defined democracy as “a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems” and famously characterized it as a necessary evil: “Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”Footnote 7 Reinhold's more historically oriented writings, especially The Irony of American History (1952), likewise explored democracy's strengths and limitations.Footnote 8 Less well known are H. Richard Niebuhr's views on democracy, a concept he defined more narrowly than his brother. For example, in a 1953 essay, “The Relation of Christianity and Democracy,” H. Richard identified democracy as “the political device of rulership by the people,” although he left open the question of where political authority ultimately resides.Footnote 9
This article draws on the newly discovered archival material and the better-known correspondence and published writings to trace the deep theological roots and far-reaching political implications of the Niebuhr brothers’ views on the specter of democracy religionized. Although their respective critiques of democracy as a religion coalesced within their private communications, their collective thinking on the subject eventually became part of a broader public conversation about religion and politics in America that also featured the Jewish thinker Will Herberg and the Catholic theologian John Courtney Murray, among many others. In this way, the Niebuhr brothers powerfully shaped discourses of pluralism, secularism, and civil religion that remain salient today.
A House Divided
The intellectual relationship between the German-American brothers Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr has long fascinated scholars.Footnote 10 Reinhold, who spent the bulk of his lengthy career at Union Theological Seminary in New York, became one of the most revered public intellectuals of his generation. H. Richard Niebuhr made his mark as a pioneering Christian sociologist, ethicist, and theologian from his perch at Yale Divinity School. Both men figured centrally in the American articulation of neo-orthodoxy, a broad movement within Western Protestantism whose advocates challenged the reigning forms of theological liberalism for their accommodation to prevailing cultural elements. The Niebuhr brothers joined other “neo-orthodox” thinkers in stressing the sinful nature of man and the radical otherness of a judging God upon whose grace humanity's salvation depends.Footnote 11
Although Reinhold dismissed progressive views of history as naïve, his defense of Christianity's value in the modern world inclined him to identify religion closely with considerations of social efficacy and visions of social change that suggested a relatively high degree of human control over history. In a sense, God always stood at one degree of remove in Reinhold's thought, because he was ultimately most interested in what neo-orthodoxy implied about the possibilities for, and responsibilities of, human action. By contrast, H. Richard focused squarely on the question of what it would mean to make God “the center of value,” a project that attuned him to the dangers of portraying religion as too thoroughly connected with human ends.Footnote 12
These dynamics figured prominently in a widely cited 1932 Christian Century debate between Reinhold and H. Richard over the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.Footnote 13 That debate turned most immediately on the legitimacy of pacifism: Could Christians stand by and watch as one nation engaged in a brutal act of aggression against another? In “The Grace of Doing Nothing,” H. Richard argued that they could. In this case, he declared, inaction represented a legitimate form of Christian action, because human beings could not know God's will.Footnote 14 Reinhold responded by ascribing to H. Richard an ethical perfectionism that rendered action impossible.Footnote 15 H. Richard then accused Reinhold of a man-centeredness that left no place for God. Reinhold, he wrote, portrayed history as nothing more than “the clash of self-interested individuals”—as pure “tragedy” untouched by God's grace. For his part, H. Richard understood God very differently, as “the structure in things, the source of all meaning . . . the rock against which we beat in vain, that which bruises and overwhelms us when we seek to impose our wishes, contrary to his, upon him.”Footnote 16
Reinhold Niebuhr. Photograph by Guy Gillette, 1961. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington D.C.
Reinhold resisted H. Richard's characterization of his theology as man-centered, but the insight pinpointed a key difference between the brothers. Although the two were both pioneering theologians and Christian ethicists, H. Richard gravitated toward classical theological debates about the nature of God and the church. Self-identified as a professional theologian and attuned to the capacity of Christianity to help believers cope with their limitations through God's grace, he insisted that assertions of human will, however well-intentioned, threatened to discount God's work in the world. Reinhold, by contrast, concerned himself first and foremost with the possibility of morally informed social action given the sinfulness of human nature. Unlike H. Richard, Reinhold positioned himself as a public intellectual who sought to convince secular thinkers of the unique value of the Christian perspective on human nature, especially in a democratic context.Footnote 17
The debate over the Manchuria crisis was the first and last of the brothers’ openly acknowledged print exchanges.Footnote 18 But the newly available correspondence makes it abundantly clear that many of their other writings represented installments in their long-running and otherwise largely private dialogue. Reinhold and H. Richard wrote indirectly to one another in print throughout their careers, a fact that those closest to them surely recognized.Footnote 19 From H. Richard's vantage point, Reinhold's activist streak made him reckless in his judgments and too quick to usurp the place of God. From Reinhold's perspective, H. Richard's cautious intellectualism countenanced inaction and a paralyzing perfectionism. Both brothers accepted the basic neo-orthodox tenet that liberal Protestantism had lost sight of the full extent of human sinfulness and the primacy of God's judgment. But they disagreed about the relative balance of human and divine agency in history, and thus they drew out different dimensions of the neo-orthodox critique of liberalism. This divergence raised pressing questions about God's action in the world and the extent of human control over both the natural world and the social and political order.
As this article shows, the mounting pressures of World War II brought to the surface these latent tensions between the brothers. In a 1939 letter to Reinhold, H. Richard noted the amicably combative nature of their relationship, deeming “argument” with his brother “much more fruitful” than “agreement with others.” “With those whose fundamental interests we share,” he observed, “we can afford to fight.”Footnote 20 And a newly catalogued 1942 letter from H. Richard to Reinhold indicates that the brothers discussed in writing what they candidly referred to as their “differences in temperament.”Footnote 21 By the early 1940s, it seemed that the Niebuhr brothers had come to accept their disagreements in the wake of the Manchuria crisis. However, as the decade wore on, pressing questions about the nature of democracy and the conditions required for its maintenance once again roiled the relatively calm surface of their relationship, challenging their resigned accommodation to the differences between them. World War II accentuated Reinhold's “restless activism,” writes Fox, transforming him into one of the most widely heralded intellectuals in modern America. For H. Richard, by contrast, the war produced an anguish—Fox calls it “a despairing passivity”—that ultimately threatened to become immobilizing.Footnote 22 As Reinhold's star rose on the national and international stage, H. Richard struggled to keep the demons of depression at bay. It is little wonder, given how differently the war figured in the lives and psyches of the two brothers, that it also brought their long-standing intellectual disagreements out into the open.
The Birth of a Critique
The roots of the wartime tension between the Niebuhr brothers over what they called “utilitarian” conceptions of religion stretched back to the early 1930s, when their differing views of God's role in history first surfaced. H. Richard's private response to Reinhold's Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) exposed the gulf.Footnote 23 In that instance, H. Richard pointedly rejected what he saw as his brother's tendency to value religion for its practical usefulness.Footnote 24 “You think of religion as power,” he charged, “dangerous sometimes, helpful sometimes. That's liberal. For religion itself religion is no power, but that to which religion is directed, God.” H. Richard went on to say that he regarded “an activism which stresses immediate results” as “the cancer of our modern life. It is betraying us constantly,” he continued, “into interfering with events, pushing, pulling, trying to wriggle out of an impassable situation, and so drawing the noose tighter around our necks. We want to be saviors of civilization and simply bring down new destruction.” As Fox emphasizes, Reinhold spent the better part of the 1930s trying to answer his brother's objections but ultimately refused to “renounce the liberal view of religion as power, as energy for the social struggle.”Footnote 25
The differences between the Niebuhr brothers persisted and perhaps deepened during the remainder of the 1930s. Although the attentiveness of both brothers to the terrifying developments in Nazi Germany led each of them to articulate a sophisticated critique of “political religion” during that decade, H. Richard became particularly concerned about the potential for democracy itself to become a political religion.Footnote 26 Thus, notes biographer Jon Diefenthaler, H. Richard resolved to challenge “all who sought to identify democratic institutions with Christianity.”Footnote 27 For example, a newly catalogued letter reveals that H. Richard violently opposed the equation of Christianity and democracy within the ecumenical movement. In January 1939, Samuel McCrea Cavert, General Secretary of the Federal Council of Churches, proposed to the members of the FCC's Committee on the State of the Church that they add to their report a paragraph on religion and democracy written by the committee chairman, John Mackay of Princeton Theological Seminary. The paragraph read:
Our faith in God and the Gospel has also an important bearing upon forms of government. While no form of political or social order can be regarded as ultimate or be equated with the Kingdom of God, there are some forms of government which Christian faith and life tend to create and in which alone their freedom of expression is secured. This is particularly true of democracy, which, with all of its weaknesses, is a product of Christianity and whose purity and permanence are bound up with Christianity. For a common loyalty to God and a mutual respect for one another are inseparable. It becomes, therefore, a duty of all Christians, as they prize religious and intellectual freedom and respect for the inalienable rights of personality, to strive, individually and collectively, to purge from all taint and to preserve inviolate the democratic institutions which are our heritage.Footnote 28
In short, Mackay's draft posited a strong, mutually reinforcing relationship between the Christian faith and democracy.
Appalled by this claim, H. Richard minced no words in his response to Cavert:
I see in this paragraph as in so many contemporary utterances a return to that equation of democracy and Christianity which I believed with many fellow-Christians that the American church had forsworn after 1919. Then we equated for the sake of extending democracy, now we do so for the sake of defending it. This is the confounding of church and world, of the law and the gospel.
H. Richard noted with great alarm the “increasing tendency” within the Christian church “to turn from the work of repentance and faith in culture to defense and self-justification.” He discerned in American political culture a “turning away from the task of reforming our democracy, of making it an effective instrument of service to our neighbors, to the task of defending it.” Worried that “faith in God is being supplanted by faith in the power of democratic institutions to save us,” H. Richard charged that “the church is once more showing its dependence on the world by its joy over any gracious words the leaders of society may say about religion.” While agreeing that “Christians must protest against the barbarous desecration of humanity practiced by certain groups in Europe under the flag and with the false faith of nationalism,” H. Richard nevertheless hoped that they would “make their protest not in the name of their idol, democracy, but in the name of Jesus Christ who died to save men, not institutions, and who promised them not civil liberties but the liberty of the sons of God.” On these grounds, he rejected Mackay's proposed text with “a vigorous NO.”Footnote 29
H. Richard Niebuhr. Office of Public Affairs, Yale University, photo-graphs of individuals, 1870–2005 (inclusive). Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University.
H. Richard took a more public stand against the contemporary “temptation to make a religion out of democracy” in a speech before the Institute of Human Relations in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in August 1939. There, he asserted that, just as “democracy ceases to be democracy when it makes itself the highest object of devotion,” so too “religion ceases to be religion when it begins to reverence itself and call itself the savior of men.”Footnote 30 Although H. Richard cautiously ventured that democracy “comports well” with the basic tenets of the Jewish and Christian faiths, in its insistence on “the relative character of all finite power” and its “rejection of every human absolutism,” he was ultimately unwilling to posit a more direct relationship between the two.Footnote 31 Similarly, in his Earl Lecture at the Pacific School of Religion in October 1940, H. Richard characterized the relation between Christianity and democracy as historically contingent rather than logically necessary. Declaring that “democracy is a gift which is added to men who seek first the Kingdom and its righteousness,”Footnote 32 he underscored that the “emotional and valuation character of both terms” generated more concern “with the values than with the facts.”Footnote 33 As a result, he argued, believers became “so devoted to Christianity that we do not inquire too diligently into its character; we love democracy so dearly that we do not ask too many questions about its heredity, its religion, its vices and virtues.” These loyalties, he wrote, make us want “to show how valuable [our churches] are for democracy” and likewise to try “to prove that democracy is good by proving that it is Christian.” H. Richard warned that “in such defensive use the words become ever more general and vague.”Footnote 34
In a striking passage that encapsulated his understanding of faith as practice rather than belief, H. Richard observed,
Faith requires of us neither the defense of itself by reference to its worth for democratic institutions, nor yet the defense of the latter by reference to their worth for faith. Insofar as faith is loyalty to a living God rather than a belief that some being corresponding to our idea exists, it cannot be defended. It is like love, a wholly active thing which either exists as an outgoing energy or does not exist at all. Faith that is act cannot be possessed but only acted. All we can possess are the ideas in which faith clothes itself and hides itself and which it must cast off again to assume other garments. So also with the character we call democratic and the habits of participating in government, of limiting the self and all human absolutes, of practicing regard for every man before the law and outside the law, of giving liberty rather than seeking to impose our patterns on other individuals and nations. Such virtues also exist, under the rule of God, in act or not at all. We can as little defend the democratic virtue of respect for minorities as we can defend the Christian virtue of love thy neighbor. The only way to retain the latter is to love thy neighbor; the only way to defend the former is to defend minorities.
Rejecting the strategy of “mutual defense” of religion and democracy, H. Richard concluded that it was “always an illusion to believe that we can retain our inheritance from the fathers in any other way than by active use.”Footnote 35
Even as H. Richard wrote these words, Reinhold vigorously embraced the cause of American intervention in World War II, going so far as to contribute to an uncharacteristically crass statement of religious nationalism entitled The City of Man: A Declaration on World Democracy (1941). In that instance, Reinhold joined Herbert Agar, Van Wyck Brooks, William Y. Elliott, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Alvin Johnson, Hans Kohn, Thomas Mann, Lewis Mumford, Gaetano Salvemini, and several other prominent public intellectuals in issuing a manifesto for democracy against fascism, “the most sacrilegious of all creeds.” The authors called upon “all men of good will” to tear down “the absurd architecture of the present world” and create a global “total democracy” that the document also termed “a wholly Christian society,” “a community of persons,” and even a “dictatorship of humanity,” ruled by a fundamental “law for the protection of human dignity.” Genuine democracy, wrote the authors, meant “humanism in theocracy and rational theocracy in universal humanism,” not “the conflicting concourse of uncontrolled individual impulses.” It entailed “heart-service to a highest religion embodying the essence of all higher religions.” Against what they saw as the libertarianism and hedonism of “a corrupted liberalism, with its claim of unrestricted liberty for each one to think and act as he pleased,” the authors insisted that there was truly “no liberty but one, which is a duty, of making oneself and others free through absolute allegiance to the final goal of man.”Footnote 36
Finding in modern liberalism both “a precursor to tyranny and a prey to it,” the City of Man authors declared repeatedly that “the democratic concept of freedom can never include the freedom to destroy democracy and freedom.” They insisted that society should treat as dangerous criminals not only those who would extend civil liberties to homegrown fascists but also those who “threaten the divine spirit in man and above man.” Before the recent rise of an absolutist understanding of freedom, wrote the authors, all Westerners had endorsed both “written and unwritten laws” to suppress “obscene and sanguinary cults” and “even milder heresies such as Mormon polygamy”: “The pillars of family and property were held unshakable and holy.” Indeed, the authors found a perfect model for the discussion of civil liberties in Christ's refusal to grant forgiveness to “blasphemy against the Holy Ghost,” whose “ultimate sacredness” had defined the “limit to all tolerance and charity.”Footnote 37
As the latter passage suggests, the City of Man authors formulated their proposals in terms of a Christian universalism. They found in the New Testament a “universal religion” that had been “anticipated by sages and saints of all ages,” including Asian prophets and even Renaissance and Enlightenment humanists. They refused to extend “an undiscriminating freedom of worship” to other faiths, finding this prospect utterly unprecedented in Western history:
The democratic freedom of worship was never valid beyond the limits of the common faith. It hardly ever extended beyond the Jewish and Christian confessions or those more unusual cults of exotic origin whose essence was akin to that of the Jewish and Christian creeds. . . . None of these particular creeds reached the universality of the religion of the Spirit, to which all men are witnesses.
At the same time, the authors argued that no single faith could be given official status in a democracy because none could fully express the universal religion underlying all partial approximations. Although democracy “interprets and justifies the separate creeds as its own vernaculars,” they explained, none of these creeds could replace “the universal language which expresses the common belief of man.” Yet the United States, as the only nation where human beings were “granted the right and duty of being Christian and human,” stood in a unique relationship to this global project, for it represented “the shrine of whatever is human, the ark of life.” The City of Man closed with a ringing call for the United States to take up its appointed task of saving the world for democracy by spreading the universal religion of the New Testament through “a reformation of the Reformation” and “a restatement of Democracy” itself.Footnote 38
Given the supercharged ideological climate of the intervention debate and the early war years, it is no wonder that Reinhold and H. Richard found themselves returning to the same issues raised in their Manchuria exchange. A newly available 1940 letter from Reinhold to H. Richard indicates that reading the galley proofs of H. Richard's The Meaning of Revelation heightened Reinhold's sense of the differences in orientation and tone between his brother's work and his own.Footnote 39 H. Richard's manuscript left Reinhold feeling self-conscious about his Gifford Lectures, soon to be published as The Nature and Destiny of Man.Footnote 40 “I'm not so sure that you will like my Giffords,” he confessed. Despite being “more from the standpoint of the church” than his last book (Christianity and Power Politics), he wrote, “they are after all a type of apologetics.” Reinhold then characterized his own intellectual project with great insight. “What I am always trying to prove,” he observed, “is that man can't understand himself without the presuppositions of the Christian gospel,” because “all other alternatives lead to a misunderstanding of himself.”Footnote 41
Just as Reinhold had predicted, H. Richard bristled at the apologetic tenor of The Nature and Destiny of Man when it appeared in print. In a letter about the second volume on Human Destiny, he apparently accused Reinhold of taking an overly assertive tone. Carefully parsing the content of H. Richard's criticism, Reinhold replied,
You say “you tend to assume a finality in your judgments about error and truth, about right and wrong which is not there.” You add “as we all do.” I don't know how to react to that. I know very well that my judgments are puny things about which men will laugh either tomorrow or day after tomorrow. But I can't put the consciousness of that in every sentence or mitigate criticism by strewing the text with “it seems to me” and “in my opinion.”
Stylistic matters aside, H. Richard's critique raised deeper theological issues for Reinhold:
I do worry about the fact that my stuff seems arrogant to you as I worry about the fact that all the proponents of the Reformation doctrine who understand this matter in principle seem to be more arrogant than those who do not understand it in principle. That is to me the final mystery of sin.Footnote 42
Noting that he surely displayed “a special degree of arrogance” himself, Reinhold attributed this to his “special degree of insecurity in what I know and don't know about theology,” as compared with his better educated and more credentialed younger brother.Footnote 43 But while “the knowledge that one sins in all these judgments ought to produce a few more fruits mete [sic] for repentance,” he reflected wistfully, “the fruits seem to be evident only in prayer and never in action. I don't know anything that brings one so close to despair as that.” In closing, Reinhold thanked H. Richard for his comments, which had reminded him of “how much I have learned from you and how laggard I still am in learning the whole of it.” But Reinhold added, in their now customary refrain, “I suppose differences in temperament will always make some difference of emphasis inevitable.”Footnote 44
Reinhold's meteoric rise to public prominence during the early 1940s stemmed largely from his impassioned defense of Western democracy in terms of prophetic faith both before and after the United States entered the war in December 1941. In the inaugural issue of his journal Christianity and Crisis, founded in February 1941 as an alternative to the pacifist-friendly Christian Century, Reinhold championed the interventionist cause. In a lead article entitled “The Christian Faith and the World Crisis,” he accused “modern Christian perfectionism” of having “contributed to the tardiness of the democracies in defending themselves against the perils of a new barbarism.” According to Reinhold, the perfectionists were correct “in their conviction that our nation stands under the judgment of God.” However, they were “wrong in assuming that we have no right or duty to defend a civilization, despite its imperfections, against worse alternatives.”Footnote 45 Ultimately, Reinhold regarded “the task of defending the rich inheritance of our civilization” as “imperative,” no matter how much “we might desire that our social system were more worthy of defense.” He dedicated Christianity and Crisis to the task of reforming the culture of the Western world by making its “technical capacities . . . fruitful rather than suicidal” and to “the tragic duty of saving the present world from tyranny”—endeavors that would, he emphasized, “require resources of understanding and resolution that are inherent in the Christian faith.”Footnote 46 A year later, in a 1942 article in Fortune entitled “A Faith for History's Greatest Crisis,” Reinhold lambasted moderns for believing that the needed “cultural reconstruction” would flow from “the mere extension of scientific knowledge.” In fact, he emphasized, it would require a return to “the Hebraic-Christian tradition, which underlies our Western culture.”Footnote 47 During the war years, Reinhold increasingly used such terms as “only,” “requires,” “adequate,” and “necessary” to describe the relationship between prophetic faith and democracy.Footnote 48
For his part, H. Richard rejected the assumptions of both interventionists and isolationists about the political implications of Christianity, much as he had during the Manchuria crisis. In a 1941 address to the Fellowship of Socialist Christians, he took aim at what he termed “two misconceptions of the Christian life.” The first held “that religious faith calls for specific sorts of domestic, economic, or political action, so that Christianity as such calls for the defense of democracy, or the adoption of socialism, or the policy of isolation, or conscientious objection to participation in war, or obedience to political authority, or marriage, or celibacy, or any one of a hundred similar specific actions.” The second and opposing misconception, wrote H. Richard, held “that since religious faith does not require specific political or other social actions, therefore it appears only in peculiarly religious actions.” H. Richard rejected the dichotomizing of Christians into “activist” and “contemplative” camps, arguing that such a split produces a “fatal dilemma” wherein Christians feel compelled “to confess their Christianity either by choosing sides in some confused political struggle or by retiring from the political and social life.”Footnote 49
H. Richard continued to stress the dangers of a politically motivated approach to religion in a 1942 article for the Christian Century on “War as the Judgment of God.” Lamenting the overemphasis on “human action” rather than “God's action” in the conflict, he recommended as an antidote Judeo-Christian monotheism, with its God-centered view of both history (“that God is at work in all events”) and ethics (“that man's action ought always to be a response to divine rather than to any finite action”). In a thinly veiled critique of Reinhold's position, H. Richard took issue with those he termed “di-theists,” who believed that “the war requires the double response of contrition for common sin and of confident assertion of the relative rightness of democracy in opposition to totalitarianism.” According to H. Richard, this “dualism of double response . . . makes us ‘double-minded men, unstable in all our ways,’ di-theists who have two gods, the Father of Jesus Christ and our country, or Him and Democracy, or Him and Peace. Democracy and Peace are surely values of a high order, if they are under God,” he added, “but as rivals of God they are betrayers of life.”Footnote 50
H. Richard took issue with Zionism on similar grounds. Another newly catalogued letter suggests that the Niebuhr brothers’ divergent views on the relationship between religion and democracy lay behind their diametrically opposed positions on the Zionist question late in the war. Whereas Reinhold championed the Zionist cause, H. Richard rejected “nationalization” as a strategy for addressing “the plight of the Jews.”Footnote 51 In response to a letter from the Jewish writer Morris Lazaron, a self-proclaimed “non-nationalist,” H. Richard wrote, “Christians cannot be loyal to what is greatest in Judaism”—namely, its adherents’ “loyalty to one kingdom of God above all the nations”—“by encouraging Jewish nationalism.” Therefore, said H. Richard, he would prefer measures “which tend to give the Jew relief from persecution in the places where he now lives or through migration to countries where he can have freedom to carry on his great religious work of reminding men that they are first of all members of the one universal society, subject to the one universal law and moving toward the one common destiny.” “You seem to differ somewhat from your brother Reinhold,” Lazaron observed in reply.Footnote 52
As H. Richard steadfastly opposed the mobilization of the Christian faith for the defense of democracy, Reinhold doggedly worked to safeguard democracy by wedding it to the resources of the Christian tradition. The subtitle of Reinhold's 1944 book The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defense neatly captures the essence of his political-theoretical project during these years. In the book's preface, he described “a Christian view of human nature” as “more adequate for the development of a democratic society than either the optimism with which democracy has become historically associated or the moral cynicism which inclines human communities to tyrannical political strategies.”Footnote 53
Yet, even as he argued for a redefinition of democracy in terms of prophetic faith, Reinhold reminded his readers that “no society, not even a democratic one, is great enough or good enough to make itself the final end of human existence.” The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness demonstrates Reinhold's deep ambivalence about the implied Christian parochialism of his apologetic approach. In a fascinating passage, Reinhold defined a prophetic form of fallibilism as an ideal toward which all religions could and should strive. Reconciling democracy with “religious diversity,” he wrote, “demands that each religion, or each version of a single faith, seek to proclaim its highest insights while yet preserving an humble and contrite recognition of the fact that all actual expressions of religious faith are subject to historical contingency and relativity.”Footnote 54 In a healthy, pluralistic democracy, Reinhold continued, every religion would serve as “a constant fount of humility” by teaching its adherents “that their religion is most certainly true if it recognizes the element of error and sin, of finiteness and contingency, which creeps into the statement of even the sublimest truth.”Footnote 55 Yet throughout the book, Reinhold's fallibilism clashed with his apologetic insistence that the Judeo-Christian tradition was the primary source, and perhaps even the only reliable source, of that spirit of contrition and humility upon which the survival of democracy ultimately depended.
“Utilitarian Christianity” and Democracy's Defense
In 1946, as the dust from the war began to settle, the long-simmering differences between the Niebuhr brothers finally erupted on the pages of Christianity and Crisis. In an article on “The Religious Level of the World Crisis,” Reinhold used the concept of “political religion” to defend the relevance of the Christian faith to the modern predicament. Surveying the “spiritual situation of the western world,” Reinhold observed that long before the war “most of the so-called Christian nations had ceased . . . to take the Christian faith seriously.” This had created a “vacuum” into which “various forms of political and social religion”—specifically, liberalism, Marxism, and fascism—had rushed. Reinhold described liberalism and Marxism as “quasi-Christian versions of political religion” that had “pretended to be religious faiths which could give ultimate answers to the ultimate issues of human existence.”Footnote 56 Their clear failure to do so presented Christianity with an “opportunity”:
The charity and forbearance which are required to solve our domestic and international problems must come from the sense of a divine majesty which stands over and against all the pretentious majesties of human existence, mitigating their pride; and of a divine judgment more final than all historic judgments, thus restraining their false claims to finality; and of a divine fulfillment of life which offers us peace when we see that all human fulfillments and realizations have new touches of evil in them.Footnote 57
As Reinhold was the first to admit, however, Christianity had created much “cultural obscurantism” in its graceless efforts to deal with the challenges posed by modern science. These impediments would need to be overcome in order to achieve “a new synthesis between the proximate and the ultimate issues of life.”Footnote 58 Reinhold emphasized that “such a synthesis must take place if the Christian faith is to reclaim a sadly confused quasi-Christian culture.”Footnote 59 He concluded thus:
Only a faith which understands all the complexities of human existence can avoid the cynicism to which political realism is tempted and the sentimentality into which the purely moral approach to politics so easily degenerates. Only a faith which understands both the historical and the eternal dimensions of life can guide men in this era, in which fear of mutual destruction must prompt us to significant achievements in building a broader and more bro-therly community, and in which we will also meet the limits of all historical achievements and be tempted to despair by the failure of history to realize its true goals.Footnote 60
Throughout the spring of 1946, Reinhold remained preoccupied with the “spiritual vacuum in the Western world” and the question of how it might be filled by the prophetic faith he deemed so vital to democracy.Footnote 61
Perhaps it was the grandiose tenor of Reinhold's postwar soul-searching or his stark juxtaposition of the so-called “political religions” with authentic prophetic faith that induced H. Richard to state bluntly his own opposition. The moment arrived in the spring of 1946, when Reinhold, in his capacity as the editor of Christianity and Crisis, solicited an article from his brother on “some aspect of the relationship of the Christian faith to the world crisis.” In response, H. Richard sent a piece entitled “Utilitarian Christianity” that pointedly dismissed efforts such as Reinhold's to harness the resources of the Christian faith for the defense of democracy. H. Richard took issue with the recent upsurge of what he termed variously “the utilitarian spirit,” “theological utilitarianism,” or “Christian pragmatism,” by which he meant the tendency to use religion “in the service of non-religious ends” such as democracy's defense.Footnote 62
Calling this approach understandable but theologically “dubious,” H. Richard insisted that history offered no evidence “that faithful adherence to the Christian faith reduces suffering” or contributes to “the peace of the world.” To his mind, the utilitarian “method” of “qualifying the social struggle by means of some Christian love” entailed “making Christian love an ambulance driver in the wars of interested and clashing parties.” Ultimately, he concluded, “man's task is not that of building Utopias but that of eliminating weeds and tilling the soil so that the kingdom of God can grow.” It was not a matter of “striving for perfection” or “acting perfectly,” but simply of “clearing the road by repentance and forgiveness.” H. Richard hastened to add that he was not counseling political quietism. His point was not “that Christian faith has no social applications” or “relevance to the crisis of our days,” but rather that such outcomes “must stem from [the Christian faith's] own imperatives and not from the wishes and desires we entertain apart from the faith.” While “repentance” would certainly “bear social fruits,” H. Richard explained, “repentance practiced for the sake of such fruits is a bad kind of magic.”Footnote 63
As we have seen, scholars have generally assumed that H. Richard's 1946 critique was directed at secular liberals, religious nationalists, and rabid anti-communists. However, the newly available correspondence suggests that when H. Richard invoked “the peril that in defending ourselves we will forget to limit ourselves” and “make a new absolute out of our own relativity,” he spoke as much to his brother Reinhold as to democracy's less subtle defenders. Among the recently catalogued materials at Harvard Divinity School is Reinhold's note of thanks for H. Richard's piece, which indicates that he recognized himself in his brother's portrait of the theological utilitarian: “All of us who deal with the stuff of politics are in danger of justifying the faith pragmatically in the way you castigate,” he wrote. “Knowing that things will be added if we seek first the kingdom, we tell people to seek the kingdom in order that these things may be added. I suppose that this is really the ultimate form of sin.”Footnote 64 When Reinhold penned “Democracy as a Religion” the following year, he redirected his brother's critique outward toward a nation poised on the brink of a titanic struggle with a godless foe.
Historical Ironies and Shifting Alliances
Yet, even as Reinhold recognized the power of H. Richard's critique and sought to heed it, his fundamentally apologetic stance continued to shape his thinking on religion and politics after World War II. Reinhold and H. Richard joined forces with their allies to condemn the Supreme Court's decisions in the Everson (1947) and McCollum (1948) cases for interpreting church-state separation too strictly and thus facilitating the secularization of American culture. But soon thereafter, deepening Cold War fears of “godless communism” caused Reinhold to soften his anti-secular polemics. Over the course of the 1950s, he moved haltingly away from robust assertions of anti-secularism. Still, the logic of his intellectual project led him to insist that modern society could not survive without insights about human nature derived from the Christian faith. Although Reinhold ultimately sought to heed his brother's warnings by tempering his strong wartime assertion of a causal link between religion and democracy, he always held that Christianity played a central role in the maintenance of a democratic culture. Thus, in this instance, Reinhold's efforts to incorporate H. Richard's critiques created a tension, or perhaps even an outright contradiction, at the heart of his postwar thought.
By the summer of 1947, when “Democracy as a Religion” appeared in Christianity and Crisis, Reinhold had already begun to incorporate H. Richard's objections into his own thinking. Between 1947 and 1952, Reinhold sought to further qualify his call for a prophetic defense of democracy. For example, in the wake of the controversial Everson and McCollum decisions, Reinhold went out of his way to highlight the dangers of democracy religionized. Participating in an “off-the-record meeting” facilitated by the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) in the spring of 1948, Reinhold came together with the Jesuit John Courtney Murray and other Catholics, Protestants, and Jews to discuss church-state relations.Footnote 65 After the meeting's conclusion, a group of the Protestants, including Reinhold's colleagues John C. Bennett and F. Ernest Johnson as well as John S. Bonnell and Harry M. Taylor, prepared a statement to be signed by “moderate Protestant leaders.” That statement, which was released on June 17, 1948, and published soon thereafter in Christianity and Crisis, was signed by Reinhold and H. Richard, among others. It embraced a “neutralist” interpretation of the First Amendment holding that it allowed aid to all religious groups equally. The statement also warned that the Court's “hardening of the idea of ‘separation’” would foster “the secularization of our culture” and undermine “the religious foundations of our national life.”Footnote 66 In an accompanying editorial, Bennett argued that the Court's position favored “aggressive secularism,” in the form of a “tendency to make the institutions and assumptions of American democracy into a religious faith or into a substitute for religious faith.”Footnote 67
Documents in the archives of the NCCJ and the National Catholic Welfare Conference highlight Reinhold's acceptance of what the Christian Century termed “the Catholic line” on church-state separation.Footnote 68 The sources also show that Murray and Reinhold reinforced one another's thinking about church-state issues. United by a common desire to combat secularism, the two thinkers worked to bring Catholics and Protestants into closer alignment. This effort, which has been largely ignored by historians, represented a decisive shift in Protestant-Catholic relations.Footnote 69 At the meeting, Murray and Reinhold delivered prepared remarks on the recent decisions and church-state matters more broadly. According to the minutes of the meeting, Murray not only described McCollum as fostering “the secularization of education” and making “the child a creature of government” but also warned of the decision's tendency “to make an idol out of democracy.”Footnote 70 He proclaimed elsewhere,
I am concerned about the rising religion of democracy, whose church would be the public school. The Supreme Court exists in order to protect the U.S. citizen from any establishment of religion in our democracy; it would be a curious irony if it somehow assisted the establishment of the religion of democracy.Footnote 71
At the NCCJ gathering, Murray expressed fear that “the schools might be exploited to build up secularized democracy as an end in itself,” against a proper understanding of democracy as merely “a means for the realization of spiritual and moral ends.” As for Reinhold, the NCCJ minutes indicate that he, too, warned of the danger of “a ‘religion of democracy’” and described it as “either a vacuum or a pseudo-religion.” He also argued that “the Constitution does not require the absolute separation of Church and State” and echoed Murray's claim that the McCollum decision advanced the cause of “secularism in education.”Footnote 72
Reinhold's comments at the 1948 meeting probably resembled his published writings on church-state relations from the spring and summer of that year. Concerned about both the tendency of secular commentators to blame democracy's ills on religion in general and the tendency of Catholics to target secularism,Footnote 73 Reinhold nevertheless joined Catholics in worrying that the Court's decisions would advance further the “secularization of our education.” Criticizing the concurring opinion of his good friend, Justice Felix Frankfurter, in the Everson decision, Reinhold challenged the elevation of the “wall of separation” metaphor into “a constitutional principle” and questioned whether singling out children who did not participate in voluntary religious observances undermined the school community. In “trying to preserve our unity at the expense of the vitality of our culture,” he contended, Americans were creating a “spiritual vacuum” that would prove more perilous than would disunity. Reinhold noted ominously that “modern secular surrogates for historic religions have a free course in our public schools” and “do not have to worry about the ‘wall of separation,’” since they were “only implicitly and not explicitly religious.”Footnote 74
Reinhold sought to distinguish himself from Catholic critics of secularism such as Murray by suggesting that “the true test of the Christian faith is not so much whether we believe in God” as whether we know God to be “our Judge as well as the Judge of our enemy.” For all of its faults, Reinhold observed, secularism also registered “a protest against the simple identification of God with, let us say, Franco's social system, or any other relative political idea which the church cherishes.” Of course, he emphasized, the secularist belief that “the best way of getting rid of religious fanaticism is to get rid of religion” produced a “vacuum” that gave rise to “even more pagan idolatries” such as “the worship of a state, or a nation or of some relative value such as freedom or democracy.” Reinhold hoped that Protestants would carve out a position of their own, fighting “with equal fervor” against the tendency of “all traditional religion” to claim “the majesty of God or the sanctity of Christ” for secular ideals and “a secularism which empties life of meaning” and makes an idol of man. He argued that a “genuinely Biblical faith” could “render a greater service to ‘democracy’” than either Catholicism or secularism, because it could “penetrate through all the pitiful pretenses which men practice in the name of both religion and irreligion.” According to Reinhold, the secularist view “that all men should have the right to believe anything or nothing” would turn a vibrant democracy into “a culturally empty association of empty individuals.”Footnote 75
Preoccupied with secularism in the months after the McCollum decision, Reinhold spelled out his view of the problem in no uncertain terms: secularists believed that tolerance could be sustained “only if old, and in their opinion outmoded, religious loyalties are destroyed and a modern ‘scientific’ faith in ‘progress’ and in ‘democracy’ or possibly in ‘goodwill’ is substituted for them.” Reinhold characterized secularism as morally bankrupt and “wrong in its belief that it can establish a solid basis for ethical conduct through a scientific analysis of life.” Insisting that “all moral judgments are religious judgments in the sense that they presuppose a faith in some system of meaning for life,” Reinhold declared that “modern secularists who imagine that they are scientific and irreligious actually have certain articles of faith which determine their sense of life's meaning.” These tenets, however, which could not compete with the more “profound” visions of human nature and destiny chronicled in “the historic faiths of the Western world,” were “constantly refuted by our actual experience.” Although it was idolatrous for Christians to believe that “faith in God” assured moral conduct or that “God is their ally against every competitor and opponent,” only the Judeo-Christian faiths could sustain a “religious humility which recognizes God as our Judge as well as the Judge of our opponent and competitor.” Reinhold called upon Protestants to reject “the illusions of modern secularism” while remaining vigilant “against the sins which are the characteristic corruptions of religion.”Footnote 76 Yet, at every turn, Reinhold concluded that religion's shortcomings paled in comparison to the threats posed by secularism.
Cold War Legacies
H. Richard's warnings about the dangers of utilitarian Christianity took on greater urgency for both brothers as the Cold War deepened. At the same time, their mid-1940s standoff over utilitarian religion had led them to a new awareness of the impact of their respective professional identities and audiences on their argumentative strategies. Thus, in a 1949 essay on “Reinhold Niebuhr's Interpretation of History,” H. Richard conceded that some of his frustrations with his brother's work could be attributed to the nature of Reinhold's “particular task”—namely, “to speak to the secular mind of today about the Christian interpretation of history.”Footnote 77 For his part, Reinhold, hard at work on The Irony of American History, had obviously internalized his brother's critique and incorporated it into his own intellectual project. In a 1950 article entitled “Utilitarian Christianity and the World Crisis,” Reinhold rehearsed the content of his private exchange with H. Richard over the latter's 1946 piece on the dangers of “theological utilitarianism.” Seizing on what he termed an “ironic” dimension of the “present world situation,” Reinhold observed that “the more Christians seek to commend their faith as the source of the qualities and disciplines required to save the world from disaster, the less does that kind of faith prove itself to have the necessary resources.” In other words, he asserted, “a purely utilitarian justification of Christianity tends actually to produce a type of religious idealism which is more likely to become a source of confusion to the conscience of the nation than a spiritual resource.”Footnote 78
Reinhold now proposed a caveat to his wartime refrain about the Christian faith's attributes in a democratic context: namely, that an attitude of overweening pride toward the resources of the Christian faith would actually lead to diminishing political returns. Echoing both H. Richard's reasoning in “Utilitarian Christianity” and the specific wording of their private exchange about the piece, Reinhold made the case thus:
Christ admonished us “to seek first the Kingdom of God and its righteousness” and assured us “that all these things would be added.” But if we place our main interest upon the things that will be added; if we seek to justify Christianity because it preserves democracy, or inspires hatred of dictatorship, or makes a “free enterprise system” possible, or helps us to change such a system into something better, or creates a “third force,” our utilitarian attitude debases the Christian faith to the status of a mere instrument of the warring creeds from which the world suffers.
Reinhold surmised that the “utilitarian attitude destroys the real power of the Christian faith because it creates a type of piety” wherein there are “no longer any genuine engagements between the soul and God, or between the nation and God, but merely the accentuation of various forms of ethical and political idealism.”Footnote 79
The Irony of American History, published in 1952, features this new version of Reinhold's argument, holding that faith uniquely buttressed democracy only if it was faith in God's judgment rather than faith in man's capacities. Remembered for both its “sharp attack on communism” and its “vindication of pragmatic democracy,”Footnote 80 the book garnered warm responses from several different constituencies. But it also had its detractors. One was the Harvard University philosopher Morton White, who accounted for the book's popularity by identifying a group of so-called “Atheists for Niebuhr” among secular scholars. Other critics chafed at Reinhold's dismissive portrayal of the social scientist as arrogant, manipulative, and utopian, along with his clear admiration for what he deemed the more realistic—and thus implicitly Christian—attitude of the businessman and the practical statesman. Although The Irony of American History deemed the prevailing forms of American nationalism insufficiently self-critical and frankly idolatrous, it still framed the emerging Cold War as a spiritual struggle between the false religion of atheistic communism and the potentially genuine prophetic faith on display in the United States.Footnote 81
After publishing The Irony of American History, Reinhold retreated more fully from his wartime defense of democracy in terms of prophetic faith. Several factors likely influenced this shift, including the cumulative force of H. Richard's critiques, the anti-communist hysteria generated by Joseph McCarthy, and the debilitating stroke that Reinhold suffered in February 1952. Reinhold was also troubled by the reception of the book, which many of his former liberal allies regarded as a dogmatic Cold War text. But a final factor deserves mention as well: the vehemence and increasing conservatism of Reinhold's admirer, the Jewish theologian and sociologist Will Herberg. Herberg was arguably the most ardent postwar defender of Reinhold's wartime stance on religion and democracy. After declaring his allegiance to Niebuhrian neo-orthodoxy in the 1947 article “From Marxism to Judaism,” Herberg summed up its political import as follows: “Only an authentically Judaic (or Judeo-Christian) theology can serve as an adequate metaphysical foundation” for core democratic values, which “possess neither meaning nor enduring power outside their proper religious context.”Footnote 82 Stripping away all of the nuances and qualifications from Reinhold's analysis of religion and democracy, Herberg ratcheted up his Cold War rhetoric in the early 1950s. During the same years, however, Reinhold retreated more decisively from his wartime position and sought to further mitigate his claims on behalf of religion's political benefits. The emerging Cold War context forced Reinhold to grapple more openly with a troubling question raised by the claim that only prophetic faith could adequately ground and sustain democracy: What was the political status of those who did not share a biblical view of human nature? Could they serve as reliable defenders of democracy?
For his part, Herberg insisted that non-believers could not be good democrats. Journeying rightward across the political spectrum during the 1950s, he eventually became the religion editor of William F. Buckley, Jr.'s National Review in 1961. Along the way, Herberg worked diligently to infuse the logic of Reinhold's brand of anti-secularism into the burgeoning discussion of American civil religion and then into Buckley's emerging New Right.Footnote 83 Herberg's interpretation of the political meaning of neo-orthodox theology highlighted the ease with which Reinhold's writings could be placed in the service of a forthright—and increasingly conservative—religious nationalism. Indeed, Herberg repeatedly insisted that Reinhold himself was a conservative. In response to such provocations, Reinhold foregrounded the fundamentally liberal elements of his intellectual project.Footnote 84
A former Marxist, Herberg had undergone a religio-political conversion in 1940 after reading Reinhold's Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932). By 1946, he had come to define his democratic socialism as an extension of classical liberalism, which he traced, both philosophically and historically, to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Drawing on Reinhold's concepts of “biblical realism” and “prophetic faith,” Herberg defined democracy as “the institutionalization of permanent resistance to human sinfulness in politics.”Footnote 85 As Herberg saw it, Reinhold's most enduring insight involved the unique capacity of “prophetic religion” to protect democracy “from inner corruption as well as from external attack.” Prophetic religion, Herberg explained, offered an “ultimate” or “total commitment,” above and beyond the values of everyday experience, and thereby revealed “that nothing in this world is absolute and worthy of worship, that everything stands under the judgment of a holy God.”Footnote 86
By 1952, Herberg had come to frame the Cold War as a spiritual conflict. Writing in Reinhold's journal Christianity and Crisis, Herberg posed a stark choice between “faith in God” and “faith in Man and his works,” whether in the form of communism or modern liberalism. “Only the prophetic faith of Judaism and Christianity can confront and conquer the demonic idolatry of Communism,” he declared. Positing a tight link between theological and political philosophies, Herberg drew a conclusion Reinhold had always resisted: that both non-believers and those whose theological leanings led them to endorse strict church-state separation were threats to democracy, and indeed harbingers of totalitarianism. In the case of naturalists, he contended, “the logic of their secularist philosophy” far outweighed their personal commitment to democracy, which was merely a lingering remnant “of the religious tradition, whose moral values they have absorbed but whose spiritual foundations, which alone can give power and meaning to these values, they have rejected.” Likewise, those religious believers who supported strict separationism—“militant protagonists of secularism,” Herberg called them—opened the door to “the apotheosis of secularism—which is communist totalitarianism.” Herberg insisted that all Americans needed to choose between genuine democracy, with its biblical basis, and a secular public sphere.Footnote 87
Herberg repeatedly offered such formulations throughout the 1950s. In a 1954 speech on “The Biblical Basis of American Democracy” delivered to the militantly anti-communist Foundation for Religious Action in the Social and Civil Order (FRASCO), he described democracy as the political expression of a set of bedrock biblical claims shared by Jews and Christians, especially “the Prophetic conviction of the sovereignty of God and His continuing judgment upon man and all his works.” By contrast, wrote Herberg, even the most anti-communist of secular thinkers undermined democracy by turning it into a false idol. “Every attempt to establish an equalitarian ethic in exclusively nonreligious, humanistic terms must fail,” he asserted, “since aside from their God-relationship there is literally nothing in which all men are ‘created equal.’” In Herberg's view, modern liberalism, with its “atomistic individualism” and “self-sufficient, self-divinizing” tendencies, was just as “demonic and idolatrous” in its outcome as totalitarian state-worship.Footnote 88
Indeed, Herberg's massively popular sociological account Protestant-Catholic-Jew (1955), which is typically read as a staunch defense of liberal tolerance, actually incorporated his ferocious critique of secular liberalism as a threat to democracy. Herberg accused liberal scholars of “proceed[ing] from ‘the religions of democracy’ to ‘democracy as a religion’” by “erect[ing] ‘democracy’ into a super-faith above and embracing the three recognized religions.” To his mind, this “civic religion” made “a radical break with the fundamental presuppositions of both Judaism and Christianity” and amounted to “a particularly insidious kind of idolatry.” Herberg always insisted that the Judeo-Christian faiths stood in a unique relationship to democracy, and that strict church-state separation would undermine the national project.Footnote 89
Just a few years after Protestant-Catholic-Jew appeared, Herberg's fierce anti-secularism and anti-liberalism, coupled with his distaste for centralized power, propelled him into Buckley's orbit. Ironically, Herberg's first piece for the National Review, which was consciously designed to test Buckley's tolerance for a Niebuhrian brand of conservatism, cautioned readers against constructing a “religion of democracy” to counter the “dynamic para-religion” of communism. After all, Herberg insisted, sounding very much like both of the Niebuhr brothers, “democracy ‘religionized’ ceases to be democratic at all.” To make an idol of democracy would be to absolutize the relative and thereby to undermine the religious authenticity of the conservative witness against communism. At the National Review, Herberg also continued his campaign of the mid-1950s to define Reinhold as a conservative, primarily on the basis of his occasional expressions of admiration for Edmund Burke.Footnote 90
But Reinhold resisted Herberg's brand of anti-communism and found the mobilization of his own writings by conservatives exasperating. He worked to counter Herberg's aggressive anti-secularism by highlighting the nuances of his anti-communist message from The Irony of American History. Reinhold criticized conservatives for valuing religion primarily as a source of social stability and stressed that, as individuals, secularists often proved better than their philosophies. As early as 1953, Reinhold also began to experiment with a considerably looser framing of the relationship between religion and democracy. In March of that year, he surveyed the longstanding debate as to “whether democracy is the product of the Christian faith or of a secular culture” and answered with an unequivocal “both.” Whether one looks at “political institutions” or “cultural resources,” he wrote, one finds that “free societies” emerged from “the confluence of Christian and secular forces.” In the case of American political thought, for example, Reinhold credited “New England Calvinism and Jeffersonian deism” equally for their contributions. It was true, he wrote, that the “totalitarian regimes to the left of free societies” proved “that secular doctrine can, under certain circumstances, furnish grist for the mills of modern tyrannies.” Yet he also stressed “that the Christian faith does not inevitably yield democratic fruits,” as evidenced by the existence of “traditional non-democratic Christian cultures to the right of free societies.” Neither side had the market cornered on democracy, Reinhold insisted, and the secular roots of democracy were as important as its religious roots.Footnote 91
Still, Reinhold's writings continued to give as much ammunition to the anti-secularist, increasingly right-wing Herberg as to the political progressives he hoped to inspire. By the early 1950s, Reinhold routinely qualified his characterizations of the relationship between religion and politics. For instance, in July 1952, he declared it wrong “to regard every political decision as simply derived from our faith,” because “political issues represent various grades and levels which range all the way from clear moral issues to problems of strategy and means.”Footnote 92 Elsewhere that month he wrote, “Every political decision requires dozens of subordinate and relative judgments which cannot be derived from, or sanctioned by, our faith.”Footnote 93 Yet, despite these qualifications, Reinhold continued to insist that Christianity offered insights unavailable to secular thinkers. For instance, in a 1953 article, he admitted that democracy's special capacity “to avoid and negate conflicting ideologies, based on interest,” could be “the result of experience rather than of special Christian insights.” But, at the same time, he reiterated that “Biblical faith,” alone among formal intellectual systems, offered the compelling “insights into the human situation” that had proven “indispensable to democracy.”Footnote 94 Such statements did little to challenge Herberg's conviction that an explicitly Judeo-Christian definition of democracy was the logical end point of Reinhold's constructive project.
By contrast, H. Richard's 1954 piece on “The Idea of Covenant and American Democracy” offered a poignant illustration of the gulf that still separated the Niebuhr brothers. There, H. Richard tackled the role of religion in American politics, the question that had motivated so much of Reinhold's intellectual work and that now preoccupied American thinkers in an age of global conflict. Offering a series of seemingly rhetorical questions, H. Richard asked whether “the covenant idea forms the chief unconscious background of American democracy as we know it,” and
whether it can endure without the presence of the conviction that we live in a world that has the moral structure of a covenant and without the presence in it of men who have achieved responsible citizenship by exercising the kind of freedom that appears in their taking upon themselves the obligations of unlimited loyalty, under God, to principles of truth-telling, of justice, of loyalty to one another, of indissoluble union.
In other words, he continued, phrasing the question more pointedly,
Can freedom of religion be maintained on a contract basis, i.e. on the basis of tolerating one another? Or does it presuppose the presence in men of a sense of responsibility to a cause that goes beyond all limited causes and their acceptance of explicit loyalty to a community of faithfulness that is eternal and inclusive? Is freedom of speech a right that could have been maintained in [a] society where there was no prior and implicit and unlimited promise among the members that they would be loyal to truth as they saw it and not bear false witness against their neighbor?
Despite the obvious implications of these formulations, H. Richard backed away from offering concrete answers. Eschewing the more strident claims typical of his brother's writings, he concluded awkwardly that only one thing was certain: “Without Christianity . . . our democracy would be something quite different from what it is.” Beyond this cautious historical insight, H. Richard seemed to suggest, only the mind of God could go.Footnote 95
It would be far too simple to say that Reinhold's thought fueled the modern conservative movement or that Herberg identified the correct implications of his writings. But it seems clear that Reinhold's tough-minded activism did lead, in a way that H. Richard's tender-minded introspectiveness did not, toward a utilitarian position on the meaning of religion for democracy that, no matter how subtly formulated, courted the twin dangers of religious nationalism and nationalized religion. Although the recently catalogued letters between the two brothers shed light on the character of this difference, they do not definitively establish its source. Perhaps the contrasting sensibilities of the Niebuhr brothers were primarily a matter of temperament, as they themselves believed and as Fox and other interpreters have suggested. Alternatively, the Niebuhr brothers may have spoken languages tailored to the needs of their respective audiences. But there were also telling differences of emphasis in their readings of Ernst Troeltsch's church-sect dynamic, a major conceptual resource for them both. For Reinhold, the Troeltschian account suggested that Christianity could provide the spiritual energy needed to break through existing social forms and move beyond the status quo, whereas H. Richard focused on the fragility of the sect impulse, the danger that institutionalization posed to the precious gifts of grace.
Whatever the source of the divergence, H. Richard consistently trained his eye on the dangers of politics for religion, whereas Reinhold always focused more squarely on the resources of religion for politics. Long before Robert Bellah put the term “civil religion” on the map in a 1967 essay, then, the specter of democracy religionized brought the Niebuhr brothers into conversation with one another and the likes of Will Herberg and John Courtney Murray about the place of religion in American public life.Footnote 96 For a generation that had witnessed the rise of “political religions” around the globe, the paeans to democracy on display during World War II and the early Cold War years could appear vaguely sinister. They posed troubling questions: How could religion maintain its prophetic witness in relation to a secular state? How could it avoid becoming the state's handmaiden and fostering noxious forms of Christian nationalism? The robust conversation about the character of American civil religion that erupted in the 1960s emerged from this postwar conversation about the relationship between religion and politics in America. In this manner, the Niebuhr brothers’ distinct understandings of the threat of democracy as a religion inspired not only a fruitful intellectual dialectic that profoundly shaped the tone and content of their own writings but also a wider public discourse about the character of American religion and its place in democratic life.
By the mid-1950s, Reinhold had assimilated the implications of H. Richard's critiques, yet he continued to see things differently from his brother. In a poignant April 1955 piece entitled “About Christian Apologetics,” Reinhold grappled openly with his own apologetic approach and qualified his earlier denunciations of secularism. Meditating on the pitfalls of the apologetic task of “commending the Christian faith to those who do not believe,” Reinhold observed that, all too often, Christians simply trumpeted “the superior virtues of Christians” while “holding ‘secularism’ responsible for every moral failure of our culture.”Footnote 97 Indeed, Reinhold now suggested that those who advocated religion without sufficient humility could be worse in certain respects than non-believers. He also conceded that, through experience, secularists could achieve greater virtue than hypocritical defenders of religion, a sentiment that mirrored his habitual caveat that secularists often proved better than their philosophies.
In the end, Reinhold retained the apologetic framework that structured all of his thought. He believed that Christians in a secular world were responsible for bringing the message of the faith to the unbelievers.Footnote 98 Thus, his 1955 reflections on the apologetic task culminated in the classic Niebuhrian admonition that “more humility on the part of Christians would make way for the witness to Christ to our unbelieving friends.” Reinhold could never fully abandon the invidious comparison of secularists to Christians. For all their insights, he wrote, secularists “have not confronted in any ultimate way the judgment and mercy of God,” and therefore lacked the “saving grace” needed to accompany the “common grace” arrived at through collective experience.Footnote 99 This was as much as Reinhold would distance himself from Herberg's assertion that Christian fallibilism meant secularists could never fully appreciate the true nature of humanity or the genius of democracy. Ultimately, Reinhold eschewed H. Richard's strategy of seeking to persuade by example rather than by argument. To Reinhold, such a style of leadership would have amounted to no leadership at all.
