Mark Tooley: Our next speaker is Greg Moore, who has spoken to us before, several years ago, in his different capacity as a professor at Colorado Christian. He’s now at Patrick Henry College, but he’s still the same man who wrote an important book on Reinhold Niebuhr, the Christian philosopher and theologian who is partly an inspiration for Providence Magazine. So, Greg, thanks so much for joining us.  

Greg Moore: All right. It’s a pleasure to be here. Can you guys hear me all right? I’m a little taller than some, but I think this is a good microphone, and it will pick it up just fine.  

I’m presenting to you from a PowerPoint that is derived from a whole book. So, if you want to hear the whole book, we’ll be here till, you know, 8:00 p.m., but I won’t give you the whole book. What I’m going to do is talk a little bit about who Niebuhr was, his articulation of what we’ve been calling Christian realism, what that looks like, and how that’s different from other schools of thought. Then, I’m going to do what I do in the book, which is walk that thinking through several case studies that are issues of today. I sort of try to bring Niebuhr into the 21st century.

It’s kind of a “What would Niebuhr say?” exercise, and of course, that opens me to criticism because some people would say he would never say that. But with Niebuhr, it’s actually easy to do that because his thinking is so nuanced and sometimes contradictory that I could almost make him say anything I want. If you pull 1930s Niebuhr and compare it to 1960s Niebuhr, they can be pretty different.  

I came to Niebuhr, here’s a little biographical sketch here. I was a graduate student pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Virginia. I was actually an art major as an undergrad, and the Lord saved me right before going to grad school. The Lord gave me this vision of international relations and “blessed are the peacemakers,” and things like that. I don’t know if that rings true for anybody in this room, but the Lord just spoke to me about the world and how He so loved the world that He gave His only Son. We all know that verse, and we usually think the world is all the people that God wants to save, and that’s true. But I think He loves the world too. He loves what’s going on in the world, and there are things going on in this world that are more than just one-to-one evangelism.

There’s international relations, which I’ve been doing really ever since then. When I got to this graduate program in government and foreign affairs, coming from an art background and never having taken a political science course, I had a great class my first semester with a brilliant professor. One day, I was walking across campus, and he came out and walked with me. I told him a little bit about my faith. He was a man of faith, probably more of a liberal faith than my own, but he was a church attender.  

I said, “So, I’m a Christian, and I’m trying to understand how my faith meshes with this discipline.” He said, “Well, you should read Niebuhr.” That began my journey of reading Niebuhr. I started doing that and ended up writing my master’s thesis on Niebuhr under the tutelage of Kenneth Thompson, who is kind of a legend in his own way. Eventually, this work became a book.  

You just never know—even a master’s degree thesis or maybe even an undergraduate senior thesis someday could find its way into book form. If it’s for God’s glory, it will happen.  

So, that’s kind of how I came to Niebuhr. Then, I spent a total of about 14 years as a tentmaker missionary in China. It was actually while I was in China that I felt like the Lord was leading me. My doctoral dissertation was about China-U.S. relations, and I’m really a Sinologist—that’s what I do most of my work on.  

But I felt like God was saying—maybe because I was in China and I might get arrested if I said all that I wanted to say about China—”Why don’t you take that master’s thesis and work on that? Make that a book.” Probably because God knew He wanted me to work at Patrick Henry College someday, where they would appreciate what I did on Niebuhr. Of course, the secular academy didn’t care a whole lot about Niebuhr, but I know folks like us do.  

Most of you are probably not familiar with Niebuhr, I’m guessing. How many of you have read Christ and Culture? Are you familiar with that? I’m actually surprised—I see one hand.  

First of all, that was not Reinhold Niebuhr; that was his brother, H. Richard Niebuhr. I’m actually surprised because, wow, usually, when I was at Colorado Christian, somebody there was assigning Christ and Culture, which is a great book, but his brother, H. Richard, was the theologian of the family. Reinhold Niebuhr always said, “I’m not a theologian; I’m an ethicist.” I think that’s right. He didn’t have a formal degree in theology, but almost all his work was about ethics. That’s how I understand him.  

Let me just read one quote from Niebuhr that you all know. I’m guessing most of you don’t know it’s him. I was delighted to find in that little red bag the first quote I’m going to read—it was a sticker in that bag. I don’t know if you noticed that. I hope you looked past the Rice Krispies bar. There’s a little sticker for your water bottle with Reinhold Niebuhr’s words:  

“Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”  

I found that to be so true because of the imago Dei in us. There’s potential in us to do good, to do amazing things. But because of the sinful nature that is also a part of who we are, democracy is necessary.

As Winston Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government possible, except for every other form of government.” That’s something Niebuhr really understood. The other quote I’m going to read is the one I bet you know. Usually, when I read this one, people are very surprised because they’ve heard it, but they didn’t know it was him. It’s 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.”  

How many of you have heard that before? Did you guys all go to Alcoholics Anonymous? I’m so surprised—I thought you knew Jesus! My goodness.

That’s the Alcoholics Anonymous prayer, actually. He wrote that in the 1930s for Alcoholics Anonymous, and they adopted it. It’s been used by many people over time and has been a blessing to many people. It’s a very wise prayer if you think about it. It’s a prayer you can kind of pray every day after the Lord’s Prayer, if you do it.  

Let me start by talking about him. I don’t look to Reinhold Niebuhr for his theology—there are some quirks in his theology. I don’t look to him for his politics; he was a Democrat, and I’m a Republican. But I do look to Niebuhr for his political philosophy, rooted as it is in a Christian worldview and particularly in his Christian view of human nature. That’s really where the strength of it is. I also look to him for his foreign policy prescription, rooted as it is in Christian realism.

I really do think it’s fair to say he was the most brilliant mind this country produced in the 20th century. If you read more of him, you’ll see that. He was an academic who spent a lot of time at Union Theological Seminary in New York, which is now so liberal as to maybe not be a seminary anymore. But at the time he was there, it was on more solid ground.

He was Time magazine’s Man of the Year two or three times. He was on the cover of Time magazine. In some ways, he was a little bit like Billy Graham. He would be called to the White House or to the State Department to counsel people and give them advice about foreign policy issues.

In 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt was even trying to get him to run for president, but he declined—that was not his vision. He would have run as a Democrat. I guess we can try to forgive him for that. I don’t know—maybe there are some Democrats here; I should be careful. George Kennan once said of Niebuhr, “He is the father of us all,” speaking about the realists of the postwar era. I think that’s true.  

This realism that we talk about—I’m guessing most of the folks in this room have heard of realism: classical realism, structural realism (also known as neorealism), and neoclassical realism, which not everybody has heard about—and that’s okay because it’s less important. Niebuhr is a classical realist, but he’s actually kind of different from the other classical realists because he’s a human nature realist.  

He takes the human nature factor very, very seriously. He believes that the world is driven not by structures or balance of power per se, but by the greed, fallibility, and will to power inherent to human nature itself.  

He takes Scripture very seriously. I think he’s a small-o orthodox Christian in the sense that he starts from Scripture, and that’s non-negotiable for him. In his day, he was not a liberal Protestant—he was a conservative. He started out as a liberal Protestant, then became a Marxist, and then became a Christian realist, which is where he spent most of his career. There is a leftist side to his early work, which later sort of went away as the Cold War developed and as he saw how bad Stalin was. He let go of most of that, I would say.

In the last 20 years or so, there’s been a bit of a renaissance in Niebuhr—interest in Niebuhr. I think after 9/11, a lot of people realized that evil is a real thing. Even on the left, the word “evil” started being used, which is really interesting. If you think about the halls of academia, everything is so secular and materialist. To hear the word “evil” being thrown around—”this was really evil, they flew airplanes into buildings and killed thousands of innocent people”—that’s evil.  

For us, that’s not a surprising thing to say, but it is surprising to hear it in the mainstream media. It’s interesting—I remember at that time, a lot of people were talking about Niebuhr, saying we need somebody like him to help us understand this because this is just evil. Liberalism, critical theory, and constructivism—all these other isms—are not really helping us to understand this. What Niebuhr did is the thing that can help you to understand, I think, these sorts of things.  

Niebuhr starts with human nature. It’s fundamental to all that he does, and you can’t understand him without it. I would say, when we talk about Christian realism today—Christian realism is broader than just IR—but if we’re talking about international relations Christian realism, it is Niebuhr. Maybe Paul Ramsey and some others too, but mainly it’s Niebuhr. He’s the one who articulated this as a view that’s taken seriously, I think, in international relations circles.  

He teaches human realism. When I teach human realism, I break it down into three views. There’s the view that human nature is good—we’re born good, and it’s things in the world that turn us bad. Then there’s a middle view, where we’re born neutral, sort of like a lump of clay, and the world interacts with us. We have our own nature, the world shapes us, and you get an outcome that could be good or bad depending on the environment.  

Then there’s the view that Niebuhr embraced, and I hope all of us embrace, which is the biblical view. Humans are born sinful—from the Fall on up, we are born sinful. Our tendency is to sin. You don’t have to train a baby to be manipulative and narcissistic—that is how they come out.  

I’m a father; I’ve seen it. It’s like a three-month-old baby pounding his mommy’s chest for milk. I didn’t teach him that—I did not. I had to remind my wife, “No, that wasn’t me.” It could have been my genes, but it wasn’t me. That’s just the way we are.  

That’s how Niebuhr viewed human beings. We’re sinful, we’re self-interested, and we work to get what we want. If we build a political system that doesn’t take that into account, we’re going to be very sorry. The Founders got that right. The American Founders understood that, and that was the view of human nature that they shared.  

That is where you have to start with Christian realism, and that’s where you have to start with Niebuhr. Interestingly, I found that in social science and in international relations theory, realism—or I should say, human nature—has kind of made a return. There’s Rosen, and even Alexander Wendt, and some others. Social psychology meets IR. There are a lot of people thinking about human nature, so it’s kind of made a bit of a return in the last few years.  

You start with individuals—they are sinful. Then, the next thing is to move up one level to sort of collective life. Niebuhr starts with individualism.

He would say, “Turn the other cheek” is viable as an individual. If you decide that somebody treats you badly and you want to turn the other cheek, that’s an option for you because there is a cost to that. If they then literally slap you on the other cheek, that’s your cost to bear. 

But Niebuhr would say that’s not necessarily an option if you’re acting on behalf of someone else. So, he begins to build a kind of moral dualism, which some people really don’t like. I understand that.

But he says, you know, when you are a… I read a book by John Howard Yoder called The Politics of Jesus. Anybody familiar with that book? I would say it’s a brilliant book—it doesn’t work, but it’s a brilliant book. 

I read this book—he’s an Anabaptist thinker, passed away now, from the University of Notre Dame back in the day. It’s a brilliant treatise on what pacifism looks like socially, and it’s beautiful. You read it, and it’s beautiful.  

So I was telling my wife about it, and she looked at me kind of funny. My wife’s really a realist at heart. She said, “So you’re telling me that if we’re walking around downtown in the city, and a mugger jumps out and knocks me to the ground and starts beating me, you’re going to stand there and say, ‘Jesus loves you,’ and do nothing?” And that was the end of my pacifism.  

No, I’m going to jump on him. I’m going to pound his head until he gets off, and then I’m going to call the police. I’ll pin him down while you call the police, of course. I’m a husband. If I had kids, I would defend my children. If I was a pastor, that makes me a shepherd, and I’m going to defend my flock. If I’m the President of the United States, I’m going to defend my country, because that’s my job. If I’m a policeman, Romans 13 gives me the right to bear the sword.  

That’s all biblical. Pacifism, it seems to me, is an option for an individual, but I don’t think it is an option for a leader who has responsibility over a group. What Niebuhr began to see was that, for groups, another dimension of this is what he called “group egoism.” It’s another reason pacifism in group dynamics doesn’t really work very well, because while you might expect good behavior from individuals from time to time—maybe if they know Jesus, it becomes a little more likely—but even Christians are sinners too. I think we all know that.  

But groups are much harder to expect good behavior from. To be a member of a group means there’s a kind of social cohesion that’s necessary for the group to survive. If you become a critic of the group, the group tends to turn against you. It’s not just about having different ideas—you’re against the group. You’re not “with us.” You’re not a team player.  

In the workplace, if you’re a Christian, be careful—your faith might be viewed that way. Being divisive, having a different view, holding them accountable within your own group becomes very difficult because it’s a threat to cohesion. Groups are more chauvinistic than individuals—that’s the picture that Niebuhr paints.  

He has a book called Moral Man and Immoral Society, and that’s what he means. He later said he should have called it “Immoral Man and Even More Immoral Society”, which probably would have been a better title, but not quite as snappy. I think he’s right about that.

Moving from the collective to IR (international relations), of course, you cannot then expect that when you’re dealing with another power—another country that has nuclear weapons, tanks, guns, and soldiers—you can’t. Neville Chamberlain is the classic example.  

Eric Patterson talked about this yesterday. It was a great example: “Peace in our time.” It wasn’t, was it? He went home, and he thought he did something heroic. I believe he believed that. He wasn’t stupid, but he was wrong. He sincerely believed it was going to be a good thing to make a deal with Hitler to avoid a war.  

Niebuhr talked a lot about that, and he said that’s a perfect example of good intentions used in the wrong way. If you have a different view of human nature, and you realize that Hitler was building a very powerful military and a very strong political machine so that he had resources and capabilities—as realists like to talk about—you can’t trust him. Even if you think you do trust him, you’d be safer to not trust him, and, as Reagan said, “Maybe trust, but verify” at best.  

Niebuhr decided that was a very immoral policy. Seeking peace turned out to be immoral. That sounds very strange, doesn’t it? But I think it’s absolutely true. That desire for peace that Neville Chamberlain had—he desired it so badly that he set up a situation that led to the deaths of six million Jews, 20 million Russians, and millions and millions of others, including Americans, Brits, French, Italians, and Africans.  

It became a huge world war because of a misplaced desire to have peace at any cost. Niebuhr would have pointed out that that’s not the way to view human nature; it’s not the way to do foreign policy. We need to remember that today.  

I would argue in my book that Niebuhr would have been a supporter—now this will be controversial to some—but I would say, if you’ve read all the Niebuhr stuff I’ve read, then I’ll have a conversation with you. I’ve read a lot of really obscure things that he wrote. It’s really hard to find some of the things he wrote, which is actually why I wrote this book. I tried to pull together all the disparate little articles in Christian Century, The Atlantic, and all these little things he wrote from the 1930s through the early 1970s about foreign policy and politics.  

I think this is right: I think what we know as R2P (responsibility to protect) today, he would have been a cautious supporter of that. In 1931, when Japan invaded China, his brother wrote an article called “The Grace of Doing Nothing,” saying, “We know this is wrong, but in the name of Jesus, we’re not going to do anything about it.” Niebuhr, already that early in the 1930s, thought that was wrong. He said we have a moral responsibility. I have a great quote about this—this is partly about why he’s not a pacifist, but it’s also about his response to this idea of “the grace of doing nothing.”  

Here’s what he says:  

“When a great fire has broken out in a small town, responsible citizens who are in a position to do something about it do not draw their shutters, lock their doors, and crawl under their beds. To do so would be to forfeit forever moral authority in their community. The ethic requires these citizens to go out on the street and do whatever may be necessary to help their fellows bring the fire under control.”  

He argued that the U.S. should do something to help the Chinese people. In the same way, toward the late 1930s, when the U.S. continued to be in an isolationist foreign policy orientation and Hitler began attacking the U.K., he argued similarly.  

They invaded, you know, Czechoslovakia, France. They started bombing the UK, and the US was in a position of neutrality. Eventually, we had this Lend-Lease thing—“Okay, we’ll give you some supplies, but we’re still not coming to your aid, Britain.” Niebuhr just thought that was immoral. He thought, “These are people who need our help.”  

He would talk about the Good Samaritan. You know, there’s an example of somebody who needed help. There’s a cost to helping—you could put yourself in danger—but to not help is to not love, would be his argument. Sometimes, to use force is an act of love; it’s the right thing, the responsible thing to do.

I’d be happy to talk more about this. He has a lot of examples of foreign policy episodes where he thought the great powers should have intervened, and they did not.  

One example—he was also a great Zionist. This may not be well known about him, but he was very active in the World Council of Churches after the war to help the Jewish people get a homeland. That’s something I love about him because I think that was maybe one of the greatest things he ever did. He worked very hard to push the English and the Americans to support an Israeli homeland.

Another very little-known thing about him is that he helped Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s family raise money after the war to support themselves. As you know the story, Bonhoeffer was a pastor who thought Hitler was wrong. He stood up against Hitler, participated in an assassination attempt against him, was arrested, and died in prison. Niebuhr raised money for people like him, for pastors, specifically him, and some others to care for their families after the war.  

I argue another point about Niebuhr: I would say Niebuhr is in the just war tradition. A friend of mine, Keith Pavlischek, and some others would say no, it’s not just war. There’s a consequentialism in Niebuhr’s work, and I understand that. But I was saying in the beginning that Niebuhr was an ethicist, and so everything he did was about ethics—about doing the right thing.  

When it comes to jus ad bellum, the justice of going to war—just cause—he wrote a lot about that. He thought very deeply about it. The one area where he’s maybe a little more open to criticism is in his jus in bello. He didn’t write as much about that, but he did write about it.  

He was against the Dresden bombing. He was against the Tokyo firebombing. He thought that was immoral. He was initially against the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Later, he came to peace—maybe an uneasy peace—with nuclear weapons. He had a lot of very nuanced things to say about the weight of it.  

As we’ve heard some discussion today, I’m with Rebecca on the issue of nuclear weapons. I just think we need to build up our nuclear weapons. We can talk more about that. I think Niebuhr would agree if he were here today.  

I argue in the book that I think he would have been against the Iraq War. He was against the Vietnam War. He was one of the few realists—well, actually, most of the realists were against the Iraq War. We usually think of them as a bunch of hawks, but they’re very prudent in their foreign policy proscriptions.  

Like the other realists of the day, Niebuhr came out against the Vietnam War. He said it was not in our national interest; it was not a vital national interest. We were not attacked by Vietnam. This was a war of nationalism, of independence from French colonial rule. The Americans had kind of replaced the French, and to the Vietnamese, that’s really what the war was about. It wasn’t so much a part of the Cold War as we were making it out to be.  

We can disagree about that, but I argue, contrary to what Jean Bethke Elshtain and some others have argued, that it was not a just war. I think the war on terror was just because we’d been attacked, and Afghanistan was the place the attack came from. I think that was a legitimate enterprise to undertake. But I never thought the war in Iraq was justified. I think the war in Afghanistan was justified for that same reason, but not the war in Iraq. We can talk more about that if you’re interested.  

I’m a Sinologist. I write about China, so I have a whole chapter in the book about what Niebuhr would say about the rise of China. To me, I think he… well, he actually wrote about China. He talked about how difficult it would be for democracy to ever stick there. He said some very wise things, which, as someone who lived there for 14 years and who has been studying and writing about it for 30 years, I find brilliant.  

He reached some conclusions with much less data that I thought were really, really good conclusions. I think he would be very hawkish about the rise of China today, for the same reason that he was hawkish towards the Soviet Union.  

It’s a dictatorship. It has a monopoly on power and an amazing ability to control people’s ideas and shape people’s thinking. The growth of power would concern him, as it would any realist. The master narrative of China today is the “century of humiliation”—that they’re a victim. This kind of narrative makes the party the defender of the people, and foreigners are the problem. This narrative is potentially very dangerous. It makes China a very prickly interlocutor if you’re trying to deal with them.  

China is a very difficult country to work with internationally. Also, just human nature—Xi Jinping has almost total power now. I have an article I’ve been floating around; it’s been rejected so far. If anybody wants to read it and give me feedback, I’d be happy to share it with you. In the article, I make the case that China really should be called totalitarian. I go back to Hannah Arendt and the debates from the 1950s about what totalitarianism is. Totalitarianism has kind of gone away from our discussions, but I think we have to bring it back because China is totalitarian in a 21st-century way that’s different from the 1930s.  

It’s a different kind of totalitarianism. That’s human nature. Humans are sinful, and Xi Jinping is unrestrained in his country. He’s quite unrestrained in many respects outside of his country. If we don’t stand up for deterrence, as Rebecca was saying, it’s a really important message. We need to remember what deterrence is and think about what we can do to deter China—because if we don’t, there’s nobody else who will.  

So, in conclusion, I just think Niebuhr would have a lot to say about where we are right now. I think he would not be a fan of Trump. He was a Democrat, but he didn’t like John F. Kennedy either. He didn’t vote for Kennedy because he thought Kennedy was too… well, he didn’t like his womanizing. He didn’t like some of the moral issues with JFK, even though Kennedy was a great Democrat, I suppose, for the Democrats.

In the same way, I think he would have warned us about some of the things we see with Trump. Though, I guess as a very reluctant supporter of Trump, I would say, “Well, Mr. Niebuhr, what options do we have? Where are we going to turn for conservative policies that have a chance of being reasonable and good for our country?”  

I think he would have had some interesting words about the post-truth era and about the dangers of hubris, which he wrote a lot about. I encourage you, students, if you haven’t read Niebuhr, a short book to start with is The Irony of American History. That’s a good introductory book that Niebuhr wrote about U.S. foreign policy. You’ll get a little taste of him. You could also read Moral Man and Immoral Society. It was written in the 1930s, so it’s a little more of the leftist Niebuhr, but it’s also very insightful in many ways.  

If you really want to go deep, read The Nature and Destiny of Man, both volumes. You should probably reserve two or three months for that, but it’s a great book. Or you could flip through the book that I wrote, which would take a lot less time, and you might learn something from it as well. 

He’s really someone that we should continue to learn from. Even though I think most of us are more conservative politically and theologically than he was, there’s a lot to appreciate about Niebuhr, and I commend him to you.  

I think I’ll just stop there and see if there are any questions from the audience.  

Q&A

I’m just curious—has anybody ever read anything by Niebuhr? The IRD guys are all raising their hands, but some of the students have too. Okay, good, good.  

I’m happy to talk about China. Happy to talk about nuclear weapons. I usually give talks about China. You’re the only people who are interested in Niebuhr because, if I go out there into the regular world, they don’t really care too much about him. He’s a Christian, and that’s like feudalism—we don’t need any of that. Unfortunately, that’s the view some people have.  

Question: Hello, thank you so much for talking with us today. I’m Rosemary from Liberty, and I just wondered—when I read about thinkers, I always try to read side by side with someone who thinks the opposite of what they do. Do you have any people that come to mind whom I could do that with for Niebuhr? An opposite thinker, someone who sees things from the other side?  

Answer: John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus is the book that comes to mind. He presents the Anabaptist tradition—the pacifist tradition. It’s the best articulation of that position, but to me, it’s completely wrong. Neville Chamberlain is what you get in practice. But it’s a good read, and juxtaposing Niebuhr and Yoder is really an interesting thing. I’ve had a class on just war, and I make them read both Niebuhr and Yoder. It’s a really great discussion. Good question.

Question: Hi, my name is Faith from Asbury Theological Seminary. I’m studying ethics, so I’m pretty familiar with Niebuhr. I was actually just having this conversation with my professor about Yoder and how recent things have come out about his moral failings. Not that this necessarily correlates with Niebuhr, but I’d love to hear your opinion on how you reconcile really great written works, especially theologically-based works about ethics, when years down the road—even past their death—things come out about them that are horrendous. How do you hold those two in tension?  

Response: Can I ask—this is interesting—so I’m not aware of any specific moral failings of Niebuhr. The only one that I can think of is possibly that he plagiarized using his wife’s work. His wife was a British woman of great intellect who was also a professor and proofread everything he ever wrote. He grew up speaking German in the home, so his English was never that great, and he really never gave her credit until towards the very end. To me, that’s kind of a moral failing, but that’s the only thing I know about. What are you alluding to?

Question: Oh no, I was talking about Yoder, not Niebuhr.  

Answer: Oh, Yoder! Yes, oh, I’m not surprised. I had an interaction with Yoder once—it’s kind of funny. I was at the Pew Crossroads program that Keith Pavlischek and Ron Sider used to run. I was a fellow, and it was in St. David’s, Pennsylvania, I think. They picked us up at the airport, and I was in the van with John Howard Yoder.  

I was interested to meet him because I knew his book, and I said, “Oh, I’m kind of a Niebuhr guy.” He was violently opposed—literally very, very aggressive. I thought, “You’re the pacifist guy, but you’re one of the most aggressive people I’ve ever met!”  

But another example that’s maybe more famous is Martin Luther King Jr., right? I mean, I think so highly of him, but he had some issues, didn’t he? We know about that. Niebuhr has some insight here—he would say, “Well, we shouldn’t be so surprised. They’re sinners, and they’re human, but that doesn’t mean God can’t still use them for great things.”

So I guess, to me, the question becomes: What kind of man was he? Whether we’re talking about King or Yoder, did they repent? Did they allow themselves to be held accountable by their church, by their family? That’s how I’d like to see it.  

And I don’t know in either case—I don’t really know any details about those things. If they were held accountable, then they’re my brother. I think we extend grace to them like we would hope others would extend to us. That’s my best answer.  

Question: Thank you. I’m an assistant professor of political rhetoric at Abilene Christian university. What do you think Niebuhr would make of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Iran from 1978 until about now?

Answer: That’s a good question. I don’t remember him writing about Iran specifically. He died in 1971, so it was 1979 when we had the revolution in Iran. Iran wasn’t at the top of the agenda during his years because they were kind of in our pocket. We had the Shah, and they were a big oil-producing country, so we were pretty friendly with them.

What would he say today? I suspect that he would have been somewhat in the same league of thinking as Trump has been, and he would say, “You are really naive if you think this kind of a deal is going to make the Iranians follow the rules, and that they’re going to keep their promises.” That’s really naive. So, I think he probably wouldn’t have gone along with the Obama Administration making those accords.  

I think he would have said, “You know, as a human nature realist, as a Christian realist, I would expect they’re going to cheat.” And they have. So, I guess that would be my insight if I were trying to understand what he might have said. I think that’s where he would come down.  

I guess the thing I would say about Niebuhr is that he’s not always pessimistic. Realists tend to be viewed in a very pessimistic way because they have this dark view of human nature. But that’s something that’s different about Niebuhr from other realists.  

The Christian part of Christian realism brings… there’s room for some hope. There’s a transcendent potential there, just as it is in each of our testimonies, right? Who we were before we became Christians, and who we’ve become. We’re still sinners—you can ask our spouses or our roommates. We haven’t arrived, and we won’t until we’re sitting with Him on the other side. But we’re better than we were, I would venture to say.

For Niebuhr, when you consider the glory of God and the potential that Christ brings to each individual soul who is transformed and regenerated, there’s a potential there for good, for hope, for beauty that is much bigger than any regular secular kind of realist or other thinker is going to account for.

That’s something that I also find kind of inspiring. It’s one of the reasons you see what seems like a contradiction in Niebuhr. He’s so realistic about human nature and its darkness—about people like Hitler and the folly of Neville Chamberlain. But then there are other times when you see there’s a kind of hope there that sounds surprising, coming from Niebuhr. I think that’s where that comes from, and I find that kind of beautiful—kind of reassuring.  

Cautiously optimistic. Trusting but verifying. But in Christ, all things are possible. That’s something I like about Niebuhr, something I find in his work that I don’t find in other thinkers.  

Question: So, and forgive me if I’m getting this incorrect—this is based off of vague recollections from high school and a quick Google search just now—Niebuhr was someone who was very much for humility. He kind of pushed back on some ideas of… I wouldn’t say he pushed back on American exceptionalism, but he definitely wanted to make sure the United States approached foreign policy with a more humble air than perhaps it had in the past.  

You mentioned you’re a conservative. In the past couple of years, Donald Trump and the Republican Party have tried to bring back some American resurgence, American pride, and have taken a bit more of a “we’re going to do this, and y’all are going to deal with it” kind of approach.

What do you think Niebuhr’s take would be on the modern political climate? I mean, I know you mentioned he probably wouldn’t like Donald Trump very much. But as a conservative, how do you reconcile his humility, his approach to that, and Christianity’s call for humility with the kind of resurgence in pride in American politics right now? How do you bring those together in a way that’s cohesive and works to invest in American interests while not being arrogant?  

Answer: Well, that’s a great question. It’s a good way to end this discussion too, because I really wish Donald Trump would read Niebuhr.

I think Donald Trump has some brilliant political instincts. He’s got some brilliant political instincts. But there’s a narcissistic sort of trend there that’s very, very dangerous, in my mind, when it comes to Trump. That’s exactly the kind of thing Niebuhr’s radar was attuned to—he’d say, “That’s dangerous.”

I personally think that’s very dangerous about Donald Trump. But then again, I saw that assassination attempt this summer, and I just thought, “That’s God.” I mean, I couldn’t believe he just turned his head and the blow went right by. I couldn’t help but think, you know, at that point, I wasn’t sure I was still going to vote for him. But the way he responded—I think I saw a little humanity and humility in Trump that helped change my mind a little bit and decide to vote for him. 

I think that God uses broken people. Trump’s a broken person. Some of his brokenness is a little more evident than it is with others. I’m being very understated in how I’m saying that. But I think he has great political instincts, and I think he does have conservative values for the most part.  

But I think he needs some of that wisdom of somebody like Reinhold Niebuhr, just to restrain that. Prudence—prudence is a term that realists use a lot, and it’s a really good one. Being cautious, treading carefully, “where angels fear to tread.”  

Walking carefully when you’re the President of the United States, and you’ve got nuclear weapons at your disposal, and you’ve got the National Guard, and you’ve got the bully pulpit—you really need humility.  

I do see—I’m hoping—that maybe Trump has some room to grow in that area. But it’s a political moment right now that probably needs somebody like Niebuhr to speak into. I hope that we find some of that wisdom. It’s kind of hard to find these days, it seems to me.  

Thank you for the question.