Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr

Essay by ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR.

The recent outburst of popular religiosity in the United States is a most dramatic and unforeseen development in American life. Why, in an age of religiosity, has Reinhold Niebuhr, the supreme American theologian of the 20th century, dropped out of 21st-century religious discourse? Maybe Niebuhr has fallen out of fashion because 9/11 has revived the myth of our national innocence. Niebuhr was a critic of national innocence, which he regarded as a delusion.

Niebuhr emphasized the mixed and ambivalent character of human nature - creative impulses matched by destructive impulses, regard for others overruled by excessive self-regard, the will to power, the individual under constant temptation to play God to history. Niebuhr summed up his political argument in a single powerful sentence: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/books/review/18schlesinger.html?8bu&emc=bu

Completely changed my outlook on the Christian faith.