Gregory Moore discusses Christian Realism, Reinhold Niebuhr, and American foreign policy.

All right. Surprise speaker is right. It was a surprise to me too. So we’re all in the same boat. As a master’s degree student, I was a brand-new Christian. I grew up in the Lutheran Church, which I now call the liberal Lutheran Church. My Mom’s in the Missouri Synod, more conservative Lutheran Church now. I got good training but was never challenged to be a follower of Jesus, as I understood it. Or maybe it was me, not them. I became a Christian in 1989, and that Fall I went to the University of Virginia to do a master’s degree in government and foreign affairs and had a professor, Michael Joseph Smith, who was a good Episcopal. I knew he was a Church guy.

So I said, I’m a Christian and I’m studying politics, international relations. What should I read? How does my faith relate to what I study? He said, you should read Niebuhr. So I did and began reading Niebuhr and ended up doing my master’s thesis on Reinhold Niebuhr, mostly just for my own curiosity to figure out what I did believe and what does this mean. How do I connect my faith to my work?

Thirty years later, I have a book with Oxford University Press on my master’s thesis. So you never know. Your undergraduate thesis or your master’s thesis could actually become a book someday. Do it well. But remember, as one of my professors told me, the best thesis or the best dissertation is a done dissertation. So don’t do it too well. I’ve written a book about Niebuhr, but it’s not his theology, so I don’t think I would go to his Church. I look to Niebuhr, not for his theology, I look for his political philosophy and how he takes a Christian worldview and projects it into politics and into foreign policy. I find that brilliant. He had some quirks.

I’ve heard some people say they weren’t sure he’s Christian. I feel pretty sure he is a Christian. He believed in Jesus, he believed Jesus was the only way. He had some weird hang-ups about miracles. I never quite got that, but I think he has a small Orthodox view of Scripture. He starts with human nature, as I do, and projects out from there. So that’s what I’m going to present to you. He wrote so much stuff, it’s so disparate. It’s really hard to find what he did write well. You could go out and read Moral Man in an Immoral Society, which is famous. But that was him in the early 30s, which is very different than him in the 50s.

You could read The Irony of American History, a brilliant book. The best I would recommend for you if you want to understand him on foreign policy. I would recommend that book, but my book tries to sift through all that stuff and bring it together in one place. We get to see the biography of Niebuhr, the intellectual development of his thinking, and his application to politics and collective life into foreign policy.

I kind of apply it to some modern things like the rise of China, the Iraq War, R2P, stuff like that. That’s what I do in the book. For those of you who don’t know much about him, he was a Lutheran pastor first, then became a professor at Union Theological Seminary. I would not recommend going there. It’s very liberal now. It probably was kind of liberal then, but at least a little more Orthodox. He was a professor most of his life, but he became a public intellectual, and that’s the Niebuhr that most of us came to know.

He was on the cover of Time Magazine at least twice as the man of the year. He had an audience with presidents, foreign ministers, and heads of state, kind of like Billy Graham in his later years where people would call him and say, I need to bounce some ideas off you. He was brilliant. He’s worthy of study as a man of faith, a Christian who articulates politics. That’s the interest I have in him. In 1948, there was a movement for him among the Democratic party. Eleanor Roosevelt was pushing him to run for president, so he was a Democrat. Now I’m a Republican, but funny thing about him is, he was attractive to left and right because he’s a man of nuance. He’s not a man of category. He’s hard to categorize.

Around right after 9/11, Michael Novak, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and others began to write in popular media sources. We really need Niebuhr now because of the way the world has gone. Schlesinger, a historian and a democrat, said in an age of religion, religiosity, Niebuhr, the supreme American theologian of the 20th century, dropped out of 21st-century religious discourse. Evil was back. Niebuhr wrote about evil, and many people on the left just didn’t think evil was a thing. As recently as January of this year, if you traveled around Europe and talked to IR people and the foreign policy establishment types, they did not believe Putin was going to attack Ukraine. We know now that was naive. But that’s the way a lot of thinking was, and 9/11 serves that purpose back then, to wake people up and say no, there’s evil in the world, and we have to deal with it.

That’s something Niebuhr really spoke to. What he’s most notable for, I think, is his Christian realism or human nature realism as it’s sometimes called in IR theory circles. It’s not realism driven by structures or balances of power. It’s not a structural theory. It’s a human nature theory. It’s old school, but it’s become new school again. I don’t know if anybody here is studying theory these days. Rockstar constructivist Alex Wendt wrote a book called Quantum IR, which is about cognitive neuroscience. He’s talking about human nature, and Steven Rosen at Harvard University is talking about human nature. They’re not my co-religionists, but they recognize human nature matters.

As a Christian, I think human nature is where I start. Are humans born good? Are they born evil? Or are they born somewhere in between? That’s where Niebuhr started, and I learned that from Niebuhr. Niebuhr’s conclusion is, I think as Christians should conclude, that humans are evil. Before the fall, God made them good, and then the fall happened, and we’ve been in that cycle of evil and sin ever since. Starting with that view of human nature, Niebuhr draws the conclusion that realism is the only conclusion that makes any sense at all.

He started as a liberal Protestant, as a Lutheran and a pacifist. In the 20s and very early 30s, he saw human nature as good. It was the excesses of World War I and Stalinism that began to shake his worldview. He was attracted to socialism, and the excesses of Fordism, industrial America. He got a pastorate in Detroit, and a lot of his flock were workers at Ford, and he thought they weren’t always treated well, so he became a socialist. As Stalin’s purges kicked in more in the 1930s, he began to see this also was not the answer he was looking for, and Stalinism became worse than the disease it was meant to address.

That’s when he began to move into Christian realism. He’s one of the most, if not the most famous examples of that. He rejected liberal Protestantism and its idealism. He rejected pacifism. He rejected Marxism. During the Cold War, he became the arch hawk. I don’t know, is hawk right-wing? There are hawks on the left as well as the right. People who believe that the world’s dangerous. So we need to use force. He became a hawk in the Cold War and an anti-communist. Human nature is where he starts. You start at the micro, and human nature is where we start. Then you move up to the level of the group.

He observed that groups were more difficult to manage than individuals. Individuals might have the capacity to overcome their selfishness and their self-interested behavior in Christ. You could teach someone, you could, if they become Christians, then the chances go way up that they can rise above that. Sometimes, as Romans 7 reminds us, even Paul’s a worm of a man. If he’s a worm of a man, then I’m a grub or I’m an amoeba. We’re sinners. Christ can help us rise above that on occasion. The light of Christ comes through, and praise God for every good thing we can eke out of this otherwise dark world.

But he observes there’s a kind of moral dualism so that you might turn your other cheek to your fellow. You might decide I’m not going to hit back. But if you’re dealing with groups or if you’re a policeman or if you’re a president, a head of state, you don’t have the option to turn the other cheek if you’re going to risk the safety of others. If you want to sacrifice yourself on the altar of pacifism or cheek-turning, that may be brilliant. That may be what God calls you to do. But as I read John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus, I was really challenged by that book. It’s an anabaptist pacifist treatise, and I shared that with my wife, and she looked at me and said, so if you and I are walking in the park and I’m attacked by a mugger or a rapist, you’re going to stand there and tell the guy that Jesus loves me and you’re not going to do anything?

I said, well, I guess that’s the end of my pacifism because that’s not love. That’s the lesson Niebuhr learned: love means…

A shepherd carries a staff as well as the little hook to hold the sheep back. He also has to whack bears and lions and wolves. So a shepherd has to have a weapon. That’s the conclusion Niebuhr reached. Group egoism is more intense and more dangerous than individual egoism, and that’s why IR, international relations, is always going to be violent. Peace is… we can hope for peace, we can work for peace, but as Niebuhr says, for peace sometimes you must risk war. That’s the Christian realism.

He brings the Christian view of human nature, leads him to the conclusion that war is always possible, and you always have to be ready because humans are evil. They’re selfish. They’re going to try to get what they can. The strong will do what they can, the weak will have to accept what they must if they’re not ready. That’s why he argued for a strong defense, and though he was liberal politically, when it came to these things he was a conservative and a hawk. I find it helpful as we think about the world today.

The concept of responsibility to protect, ironically, is not always appreciated as much on the right as on the left. But I think it should be. Niebuhr, R2P as it’s called now, was not around when he was alive. But in the 30s he was arguing against, famously, his brother H. Richard Niebuhr. Don’t get them confused. Christ and Culture is H. Richard. All the other stuff is Reinhold. Reinhold wrote a lot more, but in Christian seminaries, probably his brother H. Richard is more famous because of Christ and Culture, a great book. But Niebuhr and Richard had an argument about the war of the Japanese invasion of China, and H. Richard wrote a book called The Grace of Doing Nothing, a pacifist argument, and Niebuhr wrote back, we can’t do nothing. We have to stand up, because if we let this happen, what’s next? A domino idea, really. If we let this go, what’s next is morally wrong to stand by and do nothing.

The Good Samaritan story comes to mind. All these people walked by, and then somebody helped the guy, and Jesus praised that person. He was an early supporter of the Civil Rights Movement. A white, middle-class guy from the Midwest, he reached out to the black community and other places, and racism really bothered him. Martin Luther King Jr. was very inspired by Niebuhr. They were both pastors and both realized racism was an evil, horrendous sin. He was an early civil rights guy. Niebuhr was, perhaps because his wife was British, and the British saw Hitler earlier as a danger than Americans did. In the mid-30s, he was already arguing the United States has to get more engaged, Hitler’s dangerous, he’s very dangerous, and he was arguing for U.S. intervention in the war early. He was a Zionist, arguing before the Holocaust that the Jews needed a homeland. He was very close to a lot of the Jewish intellectual leaders on the East Coast and played an important role after World War II in pushing the World Council of Churches, the British government, and others to recognize the need for a Jewish homeland. Those are all the kinds of things he stood for.

Moving on to the question of just war. I argue in my book that he is a just war guy. I know, someone who was actually a teacher to me in a program. I was part of this Pew thing that I did as a PhD student. Keith Pavlochek—some of you may know Keith. Keith argues that Niebuhr was not a just war person, that he was an anything-goes kind of guy. I don’t think that is right, and I talk about that in the book. I argue that Niebuhr was very much in the just war tradition. He clearly wasn’t too pacifist, so what’s left if you’re a Christian? Just war, but there can be different ways to articulate just war. I think Niebuhr was pretty consistent.

He didn’t write as much about the jus in bello part, which is part of the reason I think Pavlochek rightly in some ways criticizes him for not being clear about it. He sort of waffled on the use of nuclear weapons against Japan. He said, we’ve… in one place, he says we’ve lowered ourselves to the level of Nazi morality, like the Nazi bombing of London and the bombing of Japan in ‘46. I think he said that, but later during the Cold War, he changed his view and came to see that nuclear war could be within the just war tradition, and that’s a debate that went on. I applied him in the book to the Iraq war, and my conclusion on that one was that the war on terror could be argued as being just. I think he would have argued it as such, but that the war on Iraq was not in the just war tradition. I paired him up against Gene Elshtain, who wrote a book called Just War on Terror. I think the book has tons of holes in it, and I think he would have pointed out all those holes.

I argue that he would not have called the 2003 invasion of Iraq a war in the just war tradition. We were not attacked by Iraq. Iraq, we know now, did not have weapons of mass destruction, although there is evidence that the North Koreans had talked to Saddam about an exchange, but they stymied him, just sort of ripped him off, actually. They were not preparing to attack us, and they were not involved in the 9/11 attacks. For all those reasons, I don’t think that was a good candidate for a just war from an American perspective.

I also argue about China, which is what I study. Most of my writing is about Chinese foreign policy, Chinese politics. I have a chapter, What would Niebuhr say if he was around right now about the rise of China? He wrote a lot about the Soviet Union, and China and the Soviet Union are pretty different, but there are some patterns. They’re both communist dictatorships. Someone might argue China’s not really communist. Yeah, it’s not. Neither was the Soviet Union. If we’re talking about Orthodox Marxism, neither one was, but they both hold to that ideology. It’s a fairly long chapter. I argue that he would have been a hawk on China. Its regime type, being undemocratic, is a threat.

The master narrative of the Chinese Communist Party today stands in direct contradiction to Western theories of openness and liberalism and human rights. The brainwashing that goes on today is more advanced, more heinous than anything we’ve seen so far. North Korea is bad, but they’re closed. It’s a closed society. China’s so open, and yet the people are like the people in The Matrix is the best analogy I can think of. You’re plugged into this thing, and you don’t even know that you’re being fed an alternate world. Their news is not true, and some of my wife’s Chinese relatives that I care about are deceived by this. It’s very dangerous. A government like that can say jump, and the people say how high. That’s dangerous from anyone’s perspective if you’re on the other side of that.

Lastly, the role of human nature. The Communist party is run by humans, and Xi Jinping now is unaccountable to anybody except maybe the United States. He’s unaccountable to the other members of the standing committee. There are seven guys there. There used to be a couple, two or three, that would once in a while say, with all due respect, maybe we should think about this. Those guys are out, and now a couple of new guys are in who are very young and are completely beholden politically to Xi Jinping. It’s a dangerous situation. He doesn’t have anyone to tell him he’s wrong ever now. That does not end well in politics and international relations. The other thing is the material reality of China’s rise.

It’s becoming powerful. The economy is growing, and they have capabilities that they didn’t have before, which means they can do things, and the United States has to be prepared. I also talk about the rise of post-truth. Niebuhr wrote a lot about leaders like Kennedy. He didn’t like Kennedy. He voted Republican, I think, in that election because he didn’t like what Kennedy stood for. He thought Kennedy is a cheater. He’s cheating on his wife. He’s having affairs. He thinks he’s God’s gift to the nation, and he could not support Kennedy.

I conclude that he would not have liked Donald Trump. I don’t think he would like Donald Trump and he would predict, the book came out before Putin invaded Ukraine, but that’s exactly what he would have expected because the West did not stand up to Putin sufficiently and there was so much division in the Western European capitals. They weren’t really afraid of Putin. They thought, he’s not that stupid. He wouldn’t do that. Well, he did, and he wasn’t stupid. He’s smart. He knew. He played his hand very well. Niebuhr would have foreseen that, and I think he would have been skeptical about Donald Trump and Trump’s attacks on truth and both sides’ attacks on truth these days.

We live in a world where truth now is… you can have your alternate facts. One side’s got alternate facts; the other side has mainstream media in their back pocket and can push agendas. It’s a weird place to live.

I read the New York Times and the Washington Times every day and try to figure out what’s really going on. That’s all you can do now. The post-truth world we live in wouldn’t be a surprise to Niebuhr either. He lived in the 30s, which unfortunately is looking more like the 30s than ever. The great ideologies are back. You have the granddaughter of Mussolini now running Italy. You have Putin in Russia with a Euro-nationalist, Russian nationalist ideology that is racist, frankly. It’s a weird world, and Niebuhr is a good tonic for this.

I’ll wind down here. I have a whole chapter if you’re interested in theory. I argue that he had a heavy dose of existentialism undermining his theory, which is why he was interesting, more interesting than, let’s say, Morgenthau or Mearsheimer or those newer realists. I find it helpful to be Christian realist as a prescription to foreign policy when you’re trying to decide what to do. Niebuhr is brilliant. It makes a lot of sense to guide as I think about things. I think about it from a Niebuhrian perspective, but I’m really a constructivist. As I step back and just do analysis of the whole social media of the world we live in and trying to understand what is true. Constructivism makes more sense with the human nature thing in there underneath that. I’m going to end with a couple of quotes of Niebuhr. For those who aren’t familiar with him, he has a famous quote: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” I think that’s really true. The last one, and the one that maybe everybody in this room has heard, but you probably did not know it was Niebuhr is a prayer: “God give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.” I think that’s really good to leave with. We have time for questions, if Mark says it’s okay. Mark is not here. So we can do whatever we want. Oh… oh, he is there. He is listening, okay? Usually, he kind of appears over here.

Q&A

Question: Nathan Boyson, Laturna University. Have you read Moral Man in Immoral Society? I remember Niebuhr brings up this idea of a separated personal morality and a public morality because, as you mentioned, it’s difficult to be moral in large groups of people, or there are all these competing ideologies. We have to somewhat separate ourselves from what… we can see more of that in the national setting. What sort of precedent do you think that sets, especially for us in the Christian national security community, where we’re trying to bring our faith to bear on broader politics? Should we follow Niebuhr’s idea of living out of the door a bit more? Should we try to engage that and risk the people of idealism?

Answer: That’s a great question. You don’t have to leave your morality at the door. Niebuhr, and that’s it. That would be a misreading of Niebuhr, and he would be the first to say I never said that. What he does say… there’s a quote: you can’t deal with Aunt Mary the same way you deal with Hitler. If your Aunt Mary is doing something annoying, you can talk to her. But with Hitler, you can tell him, you can negotiate with him. Neville Chamberlain did, the Russians did. Look at the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. They made a deal, and Hitler violated it.

The point Niebuhr would make is, this is not going to work with Hitler. That doesn’t mean you never negotiate, but it’s just… you have to be realistic about what you’re dealing with. That would be one thing. The moral dualism makes us uncomfortable because, for us as Christians, there’s one Truth with a capital “T,” and we do not compromise. I wouldn’t, and I don’t encourage you to compromise. But that’s where the realism comes in. There’s a Hegelian dualism going on in Niebuhr’s work, and on the cover of the book, I have this little… you see, little orange in the blue fire, kind of like the Emperor in Star Wars. When he goes, you know, that blue fire comes out, and then there’s the different color lightsabers.

Niebuhr saw the world that way. There are opposing forces. But they’re not equal. The light is the light, and the light’s going to prevail. But you’re dealing with, he liked this kind of dualism and this kind of dialectic, and this moral dualism would be one of those things. He would say, we are who we are. We live for Christ. To live is Christ, to die is gain. And yet, if you’re the defense secretary or the president and you’re going to make some decisions, let’s say in World War II, the 633 Squadron, this thing where the Germans were building heavy water plants in Norway, and the RAF decided we’ve got to take it out. They found the Germans had built an Allied prisoner of war camp all around the facility so that if you bomb it, you’re going to kill your own people.

So what do we do? This is the kind of thing that’s dualism. We know what is right, but we also have to look to what is the greater good, and it’s not an ends-justify-the-means thing, but it’s a realism about sometimes you have to make difficult decisions. That’s how he would answer that question. I hope that helps a little bit. Thank you.

Question: John Tierney, Institute of World Politics. That last statement you made about my home driver, that statement, I’ve been in AAA for about 12 years, and that is a statement.

Answer: Oh, the prayer.

Question: Daily prayer, that’s right. That statement is repeated. I’ve never known the source of it. Thank you.

Answer: Isn’t that crazy? Nobody knows where that came from, but he wrote it in about 1955, and Alcoholics Anonymous adopted it, and that’s the prayer they pray. One of my best friends got saved in Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s not an evangelical organization, but God’s kind of there. It’s a beautiful thing.

Thanks for that. I appreciate it. Yeah, that’s right. Old Niebuhr. Any other questions? Niebuhr is so kind of all over the map. I’m surprised there are not more questions. All right. Thank you for your time. God bless.