Making Niebuhr Matter

Most people know him these days by the so-called “Serenity Prayer,” available at good poster stores everywhere:

God, give us grace
to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things
that should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
- Reinhold Niebuhr, 1943

Seven famous lines, but just an wisp of the lifework of the industrious Protestant theologian who influenced mainstream American culture in a manner now comparable only to that of a powerhouse talk-show host. W.H Auden called Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) a “Christian dynamo,” and so he was, prolifically lecturing, lobbying and  publishing until he became a national icon. Steeped in the nuances and history of church doctrine, Niebuhr, a German-American from Missouri who rose from Midwestern pastor to Union Theological Seminary professor to national voice of reasoned religious thought, insisted that believers confront real life in the trenches.

In June, the University of Chicago Press gifts us with a posthumous short book—Why Niebuhr Now?—by the much-missed cultural and intellectual historian John Patrick Diggins, who died in January 2009. A distinguished professor at CUNY Graduate Center, Diggins, in hard-to-pigeonhole theoretical overviews such as The Lost Soul of American Politics (1984) and The Promise of Pragmatism (1994)—as well as nervy book-length interpretations of figures as varied as Lincoln, Veblen, Eugene O’Neill and Ronald Reagan—brought a feisty energy and ideological independence to American intellectual history reminiscent of Niebuhr’s own.

Thanks chiefly to Elizabeth Harlan, Diggins’s companion at his death, and Robert Huberty, an ex-Diggins student,  this fine assessment, which Diggins largely completed before his death, now joins a fledgling genre that included, a few years back, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s Why Arendt Matters: the compact attempt by a sterling contemporary intellectual to argue why an admired peer of an earlier generation still speaks to us today.

For Diggins, the short answer to his title question is that Niebuhr, by offering a “profoundly new interpretation of Christianity,” managed to “put the pieces back together” of a religion torn to shreds by everyone from Nietzsche to Mencken. Famous for his support of U.S. efforts against fascism in World War II, Niebuhr “shows us how to think about power.” (In her own trenchant book, The Serenity Prayer, Elisabeth Sifton, Niebuhr’s daughter, recalled her father lamenting, “I wish some of these pacifists would hate Hitler more and me less.”)

But Why Niebuhr Now? is much richer than one might expect from its 117-page length. At the end of his life, Diggins, it seems, summoned his powerful grasp of both American intellectual and Christian history to expertly contextualize Niebuhr while also explaining his beliefs. So, for instance, we get sterling word pictures of Niebuhr’s positions that eclipse simplistic notions of him as a “Cold War liberal”—e.g., “Niebuhr abandoned any attempt at a logical argument for religion’s truth claims and instead made his case by emphasizing religion’s resources for ethical action in society.”

Diggins, however, also lines up Niebuhr next to Pascal, Kierkegaard, Karl Barth and other thinkers who wrestled with Christianity’s relation to everyday life and psychology. For Diggins, Niebuhr insisted that “modern man recover Christianity in order to accept the guilt and sorrow that accompanies the necessary use of power.” As if that sort of syncretic work were not enough, Diggins also locates Niebuhr within scholarship on American intellectual history and politics, deftly comparing him with thinkers such as Louis Hartz, Richard Hofstadter and Daniel Boorstin. Finally,  checking off the last task any Niebuhr devotee might reasonably ask of him, Diggins regularly addresses the views of Richard Wightman Fox, Niebuhr’s main biographer, engaging them and taking issue with Fox when he feels it appropriate.

Like many an American thinker skilled at enduring maxims, Niebuhr faced and still faces the problem of being reduced to an aphorist for that quintessential American product: the higher form of greeting card. In his final work, Diggins does the best any scholar possibly could to rescue Niebuhr from that fate.