NEARLY 46 YEARS after his death, Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr is never very far from the public eye. He’s already immortal as the originator of the world-famous Serenity Prayer (“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”). And just last fall, an article in Harper’s took up the eternal question: “Where is our Reinhold Niebuhr?” President Obama once called him his favorite philosopher, and Niebuhr is regularly “proof-texted” by polemicists across the political spectrum, especially on questions of war and peace.
In April, PBS will air a documentary, An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story, directed by Martin Doblmeier. It will give an even broader public the chance to reflect on Niebuhr’s significance, in the company of such notables as Cornel West, Stanley Hauerwas, President Jimmy Carter, and New York Times columnist David Brooks.
I was eager to see the film. I’ve always felt that Reinhold Niebuhr was somewhere in my family tree. As a student at a Baptist-related college in the 1970s, I got heavy doses of his book Moral Man and Immoral Society. Later, I had the opportunity to interview Myles Horton, founder of the mother church of Southern radicalism, the Highlander Center, and learned that Horton had studied with Niebuhr at Union Theological Seminary. In fact, Niebuhr helped fund Highlander. And about a dozen years after that, I gave one of our sons the middle name Myles, in honor of Horton. So how many degrees of separation is that?
However, Niebuhr has not always been favored in these pages. During the Reagan era he was often posthumously enlisted to promote Cold War military strategies that rested upon a U.S. willingness to use nuclear weapons. This magazine, of course, rejected that notion root and branch. But there was also the Niebuhr who, in 1946, had called the bombing of Hiroshima “morally indefensible” and who, despite accepting the essentials of the anti-communist creed, broke ranks and vocally opposed the war in Vietnam.
Niebuhr was next resurrected with the onset of George W. Bush’s “war on terror.” In those days, the Niebuhr of the 1930s, who urged anti-fascist military intervention, was invoked by the likes of Peter Beinart (then editor of The New Republic), among others, to justify “preventive war” in Iraq in the name of the crusade against Islamic extremists.
Niebuhr is still significant today, if only because of the influence he exerted upon President Obama. That can be seen especially in Obama’s conduct of foreign affairs. From Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History, Obama seemed to gain a measure of humility about the limits of U.S. power. If nothing else, the author of the Serenity Prayer seems to have given our former president the “courage” to successfully prosecute the campaign against al Qaeda, the “wisdom” to get U.S. troops off the front lines of Middle Eastern battles, and the “serenity” to resist overwhelming pressure from all sides of the U.S. globalist foreign policy elite to foolishly plunge into the Syrian disaster.
Today, U.S. politics has been driven mad by 40 years of declining incomes for non-college-educated workers. So maybe now is the time to look further back, to the socialist Niebuhr from Detroit who championed the early struggles of the autoworkers and the rights of African Americans.
In any case, all of these Niebuhrs are present in Doblmeier’s film. In fact, the movie’s sole problem is that it’s only an hour long and so sometimes must skip superficially through the man’s complex and ambiguous legacy. I wanted more about the influence of the Detroit years. You might want more about Niebuhr’s close friendship with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. But for the uninitiated, this hour will provide a mind-opening introduction.

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