Obama's Favorite Theologian? A Short Course on Reinhold Niebuhr

June 26, 2009

Ever since then-Sen. Barack Obama spoke of his admiration for Reinhold Niebuhr in a 2007 interview with New York Times columnist David Brooks, there has been speculation about the extent to which the 20th-century theologian has influenced Obama's views on faith, politics and social change. At the Pew Forum's biannual Faith Angle Conference in May 2009, Wilfred McClay, a historian specializing in American intellectual history, offered an overview of Niebuhr's unique form of progressive Christianity and its influence on 20th-century American politics and international affairs. E.J. Dionne, columnist for The Washington Post, remarked on the recent revival of interest in Niebuhrian thought and the role Niebuhr played as a public intellectual active during the worldwide political upheavals of the 1930s, '40s and '50s.

Speaker: Wilfred M. McClay, SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Respondent: E.J. Dionne Jr., Columnist, The Washington Post; Senior Advisor, Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life
Moderator: Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics & Public Policy Center; Senior Advisor, Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life

In the following excerpt, ellipses have been omitted to facilitate reading. Find the full transcript, including audience discussion, at pewforum.org.

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MCCLAY: The occasion for this -- the hook -- is an interview between David Brooks and then-Sen. Obama in 2007 [in which David noted] that Obama gave a sort of perfect description of the book in perfect sentences and perfect paragraph structure for 20 minutes, which does suggest that he knew the book in question, The Irony of American History, one of the books I'm going to talk about.

Obama's not the first American president to declare his fondness for Niebuhr. Jimmy Carter notably did, both before and after his election. Some people think that the famous "malaise" speech had some Niebuhrian input. I'm not going to get into the question of whether Obama really understands Niebuhr or not. What I really want to do is to lay out [Niebuhr's] vision, his worldview in a kind of short course. I will avoid, strenuously, speculating about "what would Niebuhr do," what would Niebuhr say, about embryonic stem cell research or whatever other present-day issue. I think there's plenty to talk about, just with respect to what he did say and think.

 Niebuhr is the outstanding public theologian of the 20th century, [but he] has become a figure of obscurity in recent decades, and that's partly because the term "public theologian" has come to represent something of a null set in recent times. But Niebuhr had an unusually long and productive career. He turned out many books, many articles; wrote journalistically; wrote densely scholarly works. He was engaged in the politics of the day, from World War I all the way to the Vietnam War. So he was not only a theologian of great distinction, but also a public intellectual who addressed himself to the full range of public concerns and had an enormously capacious mind that really could take in all kinds of issues that he wouldn't necessarily have discussed in his books. His importance in his time tells you something about his time. It was a time when theologians were important people. And it was a time when there was that great vitality in the mainline of Protestantism.

Niebuhr is something of a counterpuncher as an intellectual; it's hard to know what he thinks about somebody or about some subject unless he's reacting to them, taking exception to or responding to other thinkers, which is why I think it's very important to see him in context. One thing about the context is, I think it's impossible to imagine him operating in anything other than a modern, Western, liberal environment, where there's a strong tradition of science, of belief in the idea of progress -- a society that is in some ways poised on the cusp of a transformation into secularity, or at any rate a world in which a secular option exists. He was very much a creature of that historical moment and a critic of liberalism from within liberalism, a breed that flourished particularly in the late '40s and '50s -- and doesn't seem to exist, at least in the same form, today

The issues that he struggled with are quintessentially related to problems of advanced modernity, and science is one of them. Niebuhr upholds the idea of progress and remorselessly critiques it at the same time. [Y]ou may know Niebuhr for what's called the "serenity prayer," which goes something like "God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things that can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other." I'm reciting from memory. But the interesting thing to me anyway, as someone of conservative disposition, is what he leaves out, and that is preserving the things that need to be preserved. [I]t shows how thoroughgoing a progressive he was.

Niebuhr has an understanding of Christianity that's grounded in a very complicated view of human nature. Actually, a lot of his persuasiveness derives from the fact that this view is more complicated and adequate than its secular equivalents. But first, let me give you a little background biography. He was born in 1892, not in a log cabin, you'll be happy to know, but in rural Missouri, the son of a German immigrant pastor, Gustav Niebuhr, a member of a tiny Protestant group called the German Evangelical Synod. Reinhold inherited from his father this sense of pastoral vocation and a keen interest in social and political affairs. He built on this with two years at Yale Divinity School, and so he began his career as a theologian and pastor as an advocate of what was called the "social gospel."

The social gospel was a movement within liberal Protestantism which located the meaning of the Christian Gospel in its promise as a blueprint for progressive social reform, rather than its assertions about supernatural reality. It arose out of a crisis within, particularly, Protestantism -- although Catholicism had its own version of this -- in response to industrialization and urbanization. In the Protestant case, particularly salient were the challenges to biblical authority rising out of these things, but more so out of Darwinism. Not so much the idea of evolution per se, which was a doctrine that easily comported with Christian faith, but natural selection. It was the randomness of the process of natural selection that was viewed as particularly threatening. An equally powerful threat came from the so--called "higher criticism" of the Bible, which deconstructed the Bible, for all intents and purposes, into a collection of redactions of successive texts by multiple authors over long periods of time, and therefore not a text that should be regarded as having any kind of organic or authorial unity. All of these things were terribly threatening, especially to Protestants, because the whole basis of the Protestant Reformation, to oversimplify grandly, was to see the authority of the Bible as superseding the authority of the historical institutional church. So that tremendous weight is placed on the authority of that text.

[T]he social gospel was one way of responding to this problem. Social gospelers were modernists. They had dismissed the notion that the Bible should be read authoritatively in the way that, say, fundamentalists read the Bible. [T]he social gospelers insisted that what they thought of as the heart of the Christian Gospel could be preserved by dispensing with these supernatural problematic elements and instead socializing the Gospel, i.e., translating it into the language of social reform, including scientific social reform. They saw very little sense of antagonism between science and reform. And in the general optimism of the period, there were seen to be very few limits on what could be achieved.

One of the ways American sociology differed dramatically from, say, German sociology is that from the very beginning it had an astonishingly religious content to it. Albion Small, who was president of the American Sociological Association, and so on, wrote that social science was "the holiest sacrament open to men," devoted to ensuring that "we live, move, and have our being as members of one another." In other words, the kingdom of God is not reserved for the beyond or the end of time, but can be created in the here and now by social scientists and ministers working hand-in-hand together.

I think that certainly one of the things that one could speculate on is the degree to which Obama has been influenced by the social gospel, as I think his pastor Jeremiah Wright very clearly was. There is a lot of evidence that he has been. For example, there was the famous speech that Obama gave in South Carolina, during the campaign, in which he declared his desire to be an "instrument of God" -- and declared, quote, "I am confident that we can create a kingdom right here on Earth." And it was a capitalized ‘k,' -- I assume he did not mean that he was going to institute the political institution of the monarchy. So definitely, echoes of the social gospel were there.

Niebuhr initially bought into the social gospel movement. It fit with his upbringing, with his reformist inclinations. But being Niebuhr, he soon became uneasy with the progressive movement. He found it and the social gospel to be utterly naïve about the intractability of human nature, and inadequate to the task of explaining the nature of power relations as they existed in the real world. Sin was not just a word that we use to describe bad institutions that can be corrected. Sin, he thought, was something much deeper, an intrinsic part of the human condition, something that social reform was powerless to do much, if anything, about. And in 1939 he says, "Liberalism is little more than faith in man, exemplifying that perversion of the will, that betrayal of divine trust, which is called sin." Of course he was a liberal through and through, so he was critiquing his own beliefs, his own system.

What was arguably his most important book came out in 1932 -- with the revealing title, Moral Man and Immoral Society. [It was] the depths of the Depression, a propitious moment to publish a rather hard-hitting book, which this was. Niebuhr turned the social gospelers' view on its head or on its feet -- whichever Marxian analogy you like -- and argued that in fact there was a disjuncture between the morality of individuals and the morality of groups. And the latter -- the morality of groups -- was generally inferior to the morality of individuals. Individuals could, once in a while, in rare instances, transcend their self--interest for the sake of a larger good. But groups of individuals, especially groups like nations, never could. So in fact, groups made individuals worse rather than better because the work of collectives was invariably governed by a logic of self--interest.

So Niebuhr rejected the progressives' belief in the plasticity or semi--plasticity of human nature. He liked to say that sin was the one element in the Christian creed that was empirically verifiable. And he also took aim -- and I think this is more radical than people appreciate -- at the very concept of socialization, which for the progressives was so central. John Dewey was a frequent target. Dewey argued that "The lost individual will re-find inner wholeness ... by subduing himself to the forces of organization at work in externals." Niebuhr thought almost the opposite was true -- men have little enough goodness in themselves and socialization makes them worse because the reason for being, for all social groups, is to pursue the shared self--interest of the members. He dismissed as sentimentality the progressive hope that the wages of individual sin could be overcome by intelligent reform and that we could transform into a loving fellowship of like-minded comrades holding hands beside the campfire.

Instead, the pursuit of good ends in the arenas of national and international politics had to take full account of the un-loveliness of human nature and of power. The implications for Christians who wanted to do good in the world were fairly stark in his view. They had to be willing to get their hands dirty -- very dirty, for existing social relations were held together by coercion and only counter-coercion could change them. Social change was brought about not by persuasion, diplomacy, pedagogy, intelligence or sweetness, but by "emotionally potent oversimplifications." A quotation: "Society is a perpetual state of war between different self-interested groups." [M]eet Thomas Hobbes. "The only way a society can maintain itself is by the coercion of dominant groups who go on to invent romantic and moral interpretations of the facts, and the peace lasts only as long as the underdogs are kept down. Then when they are able to successfully challenge and coerce a new peace, they impose another set of romantic and moral interpretations of the facts."

His conclusion was that the exercise of power was always morally dangerous, but also always morally necessary. You couldn't take the option of opting out. Hence, the need for a dualism in morals, since -- and I quote again -- "The selfishness of human communities must be regarded as an inevitability and can only be countered by competing assertions of interests." So that's James Madison along with Hobbes. But in none of this is there a release from the moral requirements of Christianity. This rather stark view extends very much to the nation-state. And this was a response on his part to the social gospel, to the progressive movement and to a rather long strain in American ideas -- progressive ideas -- about solidarity. Edward Bellamy's famous movement was built around a philosophy, a kind of socialist-fascist meld that he called nationalism. So on the progressive side of things, nationalism was not a bad thing. But to Niebuhr it was.

Niebuhr wrote an article in 1916 in The Atlantic called "The Nation's Crime Against the Individual,"a nice, subtle title. And the idea here was, and this is before American entry into the first world war, which he strongly supported, that the nation cheats the soldier because it takes his loyalty, his willingness to die and sacrifice, for its own purposes without being able to hallow that sacrifice. Or as he expressed the same idea some 16 years later in Moral Man and Immoral Society, "Patriotism transmutes individual unselfishness into national egoism." It is "the unselfishness of the individuals [that] makes for the selfishness of nations," which "is why the hope of solving the larger social problems of mankind, merely by extending the social sympathies of individuals, is so vain." So much for empathy.

But there's an interesting twist here; it is that all of this rejection of the social gospel, affirmation of original sin and so on, did not mean that he gave up on social reform. Niebuhr remained a man of the left always. Maybe not enough left to suit some people, but he certainly was never a conservative. And he believed Christians were obligated to work actively for progressive social causes, for the realization of justice and righteousness, but they had to do this in a way that abandoned their illusions, not least in the way they thought about themselves. The pursuit of social justice would involve them in acts of sin and imperfection. Even the most surgical action, one might say, involves collateral damage. But the Christian faith, just as inexorably, called its adherents to a life of perfect righteousness. So he's pushing against the social gospel, but not abandoning it entirely.

These ideas would continue to develop. In 1938, he was invited to give the Gifford Lectures at St. Andrews University, very prestigious lectures in natural theology. These were later published as what is arguably his magnum opus, The Nature and Destiny of Man, about which David Brooks once said, as I recall, "If you write a book with a title like that, you really feel like you have nothing else left to say." [T]his book is really a grand tour of the entire intellectual history of the West and ultimately, a book about the idea of progress itself and the question of whether human history can be meaningful.

As a thinking Christian he had to see some meaning in history. What he felt had happened, however, in modern times, was that there was a secularized idea of progress that saw an immanent order, or as he called it, "an immanent logos," that was no longer related to a transcendent meaning. This idea of progress was built on biblical language, on biblical insights, but became transformed by two modern innovations. First, there was the elimination of the notion that grace, meaning the supernatural intervention of divine power to give meaning to history, was necessary. And second, the thinkers who laid the foundation of modernity -- and this I think is really where you get to the heart of Niebuhr -- failed to see that the dynamism of history was a double-edged thing. These thinkers assumed that all development means the advancement of the good, but in so assuming, they failed to recognize that, and I quote, "every heightened potency of human existence may also represent a possibility of evil." In other words, as our capacity grows, so does our power to do evil -- intentionally or unintentionally.
Niebuhr takes a generous view of history's possibilities, but also warns that, as he puts it, "History cannot move forward towards increasing order without developing possibilities of chaos by the very potencies which have enhanced order." In other words, we're never out of the woods. And the danger only increases as we progress. Man's capacity for evil advances with his progress towards the good. Hence, the greater the progress, the greater the need for vigilance, the greater the need for some metaphysical check on human pride.

[L]et me move on to the book that has really gotten attention in the last 10 years.The Irony of American History takes these same insights and focuses them upon a consideration of America's role in the world. Published in 1952, at the height of the Cold War, this was a stinging attack on communism and at the same time a stinging attack on the moral complacency of America. That's Niebuhr -- typically, as always, fighting on two fronts at once. Nobody can top Niebuhr for his anticommunism, but he also believed the United States resembled its antagonists more than it cared to imagine. He criticizes the communists for their philosophical materialism, but then points out that Americans are guilty of the same thing in practice. Here's a statement that I think rings just as true today as in 1952: "Despite the constant emphasis upon the ‘dignity of man' in our own liberal culture, its predominant naturalistic bias frequently results in views of human nature in which the dignity of man is not very clear."

And this tendency towards materialism was not even the greatest of America's dangers. Even more perilous, he thought, was one of our principal points of pride, the entrenched idea that America has a providential mission in the world and [that] our nation is rendered uniquely virtuous and innocent by the blessings of history, locating the beginnings of it in the Calvinist Puritan tradition, and then the Jeffersonian tradition, which saw America's as nature's nation, free from the encumbrances of the old world. America was, so to speak, the land of the great reset button, presumably labeled in the correct manner. Even Abraham Lincoln, who was not a dewy-eyed fellow, called America "the last best hope of mankind," words that certainly, if nothing else, convey a kind of cosmic significance to American history.

Niebuhr didn't reject these things completely, but he insisted that the belief that America had turned its back on history and made a new beginning for humankind was naïve and dangerous, laying America open to the sins of spiritual pride. It was a source of strength that turned into a source of weakness. And that is what he meant by the irony of American history, the tendency of American civilization to allow decent motives and noble intentions to blind it to the sins and errors to which it's prone and thereby let its virtue become the source of its vice.

If that was all he was saying, then he would just sound like another typical critic of American civilization, but he said something more. In the same way that the sinful imperfect Christian is required to act in the world and get his or her hands dirty in working for the cause of good, so a morally imperfect America was obliged to employ its power in the world. Let me read you a couple of passages that illustrate this: "Our culture knows little of the use and abuse of power; but we have to use power in global terms. Our idealists are divided between those who would renounce the responsibilities of power for the sake of preserving the purity of our soul and those who are ready to cover every ambiguity of good and evil in our actions by the frantic insistence that any measure taken in a good cause must be unequivocally virtuous." Fairly timely words, I think.

Needless to say, he rejects both of these options and continues this way: "We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimated."

 
DIONNE: Can you think of a talk show that would book Reinhold Niebuhr now? I was thinking about that. "Tell us, Reinhold, what do you mean by the irony of American history?" "Well, Larry, as I was saying the other day to Abraham Heschel and Paul Tillich ..." It just wouldn't happen. And I think it suggests a certain hole in our discussion of this. Colbert would have him on; absolutely, absolutely.

In 1987, 22 years ago, the late Father Richard Neuhaus organized a conference on Reinhold Niebuhr. It was funded -- you will be surprised -- by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Father Neuhaus said a very interesting thing in introducing the volume about Niebuhr. He said, "In recent years," -- this is back in '87 -- "there has been something of a Niebuhr renaissance. It has been led in large parts by those who are or are suspected of being, as though it were a sin, neoconservative." And then he adds -- and this part I very much agree with -- "Attempting to capture Niebuhr for any partisan agenda, however, would be a great disservice both to Niebuhr and to what he can help us do today."

I think it says something about Niebuhr that this new Niebuhr revival is not being led primarily by neoconservatives, but actually by liberals and certain dissident conservatives like our friend David Brooks. I want to just talk a little bit about the political character of Niebuhr's thought. How do you sort of get at what being a Niebuhrian is?

A Niebuhrian hockey player tries to win the game, but does not assume victory renders him superior to his opponent and would admit that he may have won unfairly when he high-sticked and got away with it. A Niebuhrian wagering in Vegas plays the odds intelligently and tries to win, but always admits that perhaps luck or God's grace, not his system, is why he won.
A Niebuhrian will get into a fistfight if it's absolutely necessary, but would be acutely conscious of the pain his blows are inflicting on his opponent and knows that the very fact the fight is happening is proof of the fallen nature of both himself and the person he is fighting. (And a proper Niebuhrian will have a sense of humor about all of these things, understanding the profound ironies involved in trying to act effectively in the world and trying to act morally at the same time.) And that's why I love Reinhold Niebuhr.

I went back to the canonical text, which is David Brooks' famous interview with Barack Obama. It was actually just a short statement by Obama, but it's worth quoting. David asked, "Have you ever read Reinhold Niebuhr?" Obama replied, "I love him. He's one of my favorite philosophers." And David asked what Obama took away from Niebuhr. And here's what Obama actually said. "I take away the compelling idea that there's serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief that we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn't use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism."

That is actually a pretty good description of Reinhold Niebuhr. And whether Barack Obama, the politician, was pandering to David Brooks' well-known love for Niebuhr or whether he was reflecting something deep in him, it sounded pretty deep and I think it's actually not a bad description of the way Obama views the world. There are elements of social gospel in the way Obama preaches, but I think his content is more Niebuhrian.

Niebuhr is a "yes, but" guy. His favorite words are "paradox" and "irony." He is a 1940s liberal and that's why there is the big debate between liberals and neocons because a lot of neocons say they are 1940s liberals. What I like about him is that he believes what he believes passionately, but with a sense of humility.

Why are there Niebuhr revivals? Niebuhr is the person we turn to for balance. We turn to him when things get out of hand. He is a critic of the left's utopianism and he's a critic of the right's tendency to deify our own country. His critique of original sin I think applies neatly at different times to both the right and the left in our politics. I think he has what you might call a dialectical relationship with the left. He reacted against the social gospel not because he opposed the economic or social programs of the social gospel but because he had a different understanding of human nature. He thought liberals had too optimistic a view of human nature.
His next big political turn was in the late 1930s, when he broke with his pacifist friends [at] The Christian Century and formed another magazine called Christianity and Crisis to argue that we needed to go to war against Hitler and Nazism. And then he made his mark again in politics, with a liberal anticommunism that made him one of the founders of Americans for Democratic Action with Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Niebuhr never stopped being a liberal, but he was a liberal critic. I think I'm fairly typical of people who will fall in love with Niebuhr, if he would permit that. I'm not even sure he would. I read The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, which is the first Niebuhr I read, in the early-to-mid-‘70s. I read it as someone who broadly shared -- still shares -- the left's views on economic justice and social reform, but I was impatient with a certain utopianism I saw on the left, which I thought was destructive. And I was also impatient with some parts of the left that seemed not to believe in the disciplines and limits placed upon our aspirations by the need to persuade majorities and to build consensus in democratic societies. I was and still am turned off by self-righteous moralism disguised as morality.

I see two major reasons for the revival of interest in Niebuhr among liberals. One, I think some of the criticism by Christian moderates and liberals of what we would see as a hyper-politicized Christian right square very much with some of Niebuhr's criticism of a certain style of Christianity, a kind of revivalism that he was critical of in his own time. Niebuhr enjoined the believer to understand that "the worst corruption is a corrupt religion."

We need a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom and power available to us and a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy's demonry and our vanities. Americans, Niebuhr argued, were never safe against the temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we most fervently desire. One great Niebuhrian quote should hang over all seminars. Niebuhr once said that "we must always seek the truth in our opponents' error and the error in our own truth." And that is also classic Niebuhr.

[O]ne of the paradoxes is that Niebuhr encourages us to doubt and the kind of doubt that Niebuhr encourages is the kind of doubt that faith ought to encourage. If faith is defined solely as a demand that everyone assent, without reservation, to a long and particular list of propositions, that's an odd idea. But I think this is an inadequate understanding of the Christian and Jewish traditions, which always call us to a form of moral doubt that, as Bill Galston has said, calls upon us to question our motivations and pretensions to special virtue. Niebuhr said, "No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint."

Niebuhr argued that some of the greatest perils to democracy arise from the fanaticism of moral idealists who are not conscious of the corruption of self--interest. And in his assertion, which might usefully have guided us during our debate over the war in Iraq, Niebuhr warned, "A nation with an inordinate degree of political power is doubly tempted to exceed the bounds of historical possibilities, if it is informed by an idealism which does not understand the limits of man's wisdom and volition."

David Brooks and I did a session on Niebuhr recently, and one point that emerged clearly is that it is not surprising that Niebuhr really came to popularity in a period when he was writing about Nazism and Stalinism, which were ideologies that justified despotic pretensions in the name of creating new human beings and perfect societies. Niebuhr had a strong sense of human nature as a constant. He was very skeptical of projects designed to create a new humanity and was very aware of how terrible these projects could become. This is religion's essentially moderating role, which is far removed from ideology and from many claims that religion can provide a detailed textbook for creating the perfect society here on Earth.

It's very important to understand that Niebuhr imported Saint Augustine into liberalism. And a friend of many of ours, Jean Elshtain, captured this very well. She wrote -- and this is a totally Niebuhrian thought on Jean's part -- that if Augustine is "a thorn in the side of those who would cure the universe once and for all, he similarly torments critics who disdain any project of human community or justice or possibility." "Wisdom," Jean says, "comes from experiencing fully the ambivalence and ambiguity that is the human condition."

One of Niebuhr's favorite public statements by any politician is Lincoln's second inaugural address. And you all remember the key passage in Lincoln's second inaugural, when he said: "Both sides read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully."
Think about it. If anybody could have claimed that he was on the right side of history or even that he was on God's side, it was Abraham Lincoln fighting slavery during the Civil War. Yet, Lincoln himself refused in this extreme instance to presume an identification of his will with God's will. And I think that Lincoln demonstrated as clearly as any statesman, which is why he is a Niebuhrian figure, that it is possible to undertake great tasks in politics with firmness, commitment, principle and courage and still not pretend to absolute certainty about one's course, one's intentions or the purity of one's motives.

Arthur Schlesinger wrote in The New York Times magazine in 2005, an essay in which I think Schlesinger successfully claims Niebuhr back for the liberals. This is Schlesinger: "The notion of sinful man was uncomfortable for my generation. We had been brought up to believe in human innocence and even in human perfectibility. This was less a liberal delusion than an expression of an all-American DNA." Yet, Schlesinger said, this notion became absurd for liberals when they confronted the evils of both Nazism and Stalinism. "The belief in human perfectibility had not prepared us for Hitler and Stalin. The death camps and the gulags proved that men were capable of infinite depravity. The heart of man is obviously not OK. Niebuhr's analysis of human nature and history came as a vast illumination. His argument had the double merit of accounting for Hitler and Stalin and for the necessity of standing up to them." And I think that is at the heart of The Irony of American History.

[P]erhaps it's worth noting [labor organizer Eugene] Debs' great line that there should be another beatitude: "Blessed are they who expect nothing for they shall not be disappointed." But I think a Niebuhrian view of the world insists that you can hold on to hope, that good Obama word, even with a realistic view of the capacity of human beings to make mistakes, and even, at times, to perform great acts of evil. So this is my concluding prayer, really from Reinhold Niebuhr. 

Read the full transcript, including audience discussion, at pewforum.org.