NIEBUHR, REINHOLD

Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr (June 21, 1892–June 1, 1971) was the most significant American-born Protestant theologian of the twentieth century, and during the Depression an important political activist, thinker, and writer. Son of an immigrant minister of the German Evangelical Synod of North America, Niebuhr grew up in Missouri and Illinois and attended the Synod's Eden Seminary (Bachelor of Divinity, 1913) and Yale Divinity School (B.D. 1914, M.A. 1915). His studies confirmed him as a liberal and a modernist in theology—both anti-Calvinist and anti-supernaturalist. During World War I he was an ardent supporter of Woodrow Wilson's liberal internationalism and a militant Americanizer within the German-American community. In the 1920s, while serving as pastor of the middle-class Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit, he became a leading voice of liberal Protestantism. A determined foe of Henry Ford's labor policies, he preached social justice and racial tolerance from pulpits around the country and in the pages of the national weekly magazine The Christian Century.

Even before leaving Detroit in 1928 for a professorship in Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York, Niebuhr had embraced a gradualist socialism. Once in New York he became a main contributor to the socialist weekly The World Tomorrow. In 1930 he ran for the state Senate on the Socialist Party ticket, and in 1932 he was a Socialist candidate for Congress (both were "educational" campaigns that garnered few votes). But with the rise of fascism Niebuhr moved toward the New Deal coalition, voting for Roosevelt reluctantly in 1936, and enthusiastically thereafter. During the Depression he wrote his most influential books, while also laboring tirelessly as a political organizer and journalist. Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), Beyond Tragedy (1937), and The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941) were pivotal works in the rethinking of American reform politics in relation to Protestant theology. He blended the liberal hope for expanded justice and equality with "the tragic sense of life," a sensibility usually associated with conservatism. Niebuhr effected the same ideological merger in founding the Fellowship of Socialist Christians (1931), the Union for Democratic Action (1941), and Radical Religion (1935) and Christianity and Crisis (1941) magazines. By the time he appeared on the cover of Time's twenty-fifth anniversary issue in 1948, the word Niebuhrian had come to mean a persistent commitment to social responsibility in a world of chastened expectations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beckley, Harlan. Passion for Justice: Retrieving the Legacies of Walter Rauschenbusch, John A. Ryan, and Reinhold Niebuhr. 1992.

Fox, Richard Wightman. Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography. 1997.

Lovin, Robin. Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism. 1995.

Meyer, Donald B. The Protestant Search for Political Realism, 1919–1941, 2nd edition. 1988