Opinion of Reinhold Niebuhr (user search)
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  Opinion of Reinhold Niebuhr (search mode)
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Author Topic: Opinion of Reinhold Niebuhr  (Read 612 times)
Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.
Nathan
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« on: March 29, 2013, 01:54:00 AM »
« edited: March 29, 2013, 01:59:38 AM by Nathan »

1892-1971. Theologian and ethicist of some repute, from the days when such people could be credible public intellectuals. Founder (and only significant voice, really) of Christian Realism.

HP. He may have done a creditable job as a secular public intellectual but as a Christian voice he was absolutely atrocious, and is partially to blame for the psychological conflation of Christianity with perceived American national interests that many people have.
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Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.
Nathan
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« Reply #1 on: March 29, 2013, 12:23:03 PM »

True, but other theologians of his times didn't actively support executing the Rosenbergs, or say that the problem with McCarthy was that he wasn't effective enough.
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Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.
Nathan
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« Reply #2 on: March 29, 2013, 02:10:38 PM »

True, but other theologians of his times didn't actively support executing the Rosenbergs, or say that the problem with McCarthy was that he wasn't effective enough.

True, but after witnessing the deaths of 55 million people, the execution of two people for the treasonous act of selling atomic blueprints to a totalitarian state probably didn't seem like much for him. One could easily see a Moderate Hero of the time taking that position.

Oh, yes, obviously Niebuhr was a Moderate Hero (or, rather, committed to a particular type of hawkish liberalism that now strikes us as Moderate Hero-ish) rather than some sort of bloodthirsty reactionary. The problem is that for a Christian theologian to be this kind of Moderate Hero in a case like this is for a Christian theologian to betray his mission. Even Pius XII appealed to Eisenhower for clemency.

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He really was amazingly hawkish. Even secular anti-Communists were impressed by his commitment to extending American military power.
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Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.
Nathan
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« Reply #3 on: March 30, 2013, 03:31:52 AM »
« Edited: March 30, 2013, 03:35:14 AM by Nathan »

He really was amazingly hawkish. Even secular anti-Communists were impressed by his commitment to extending American military power.

But his wiki article says he opposed the Vietnam War. So in practice he was actually quite preferable to most of those and nowhere near as destructive.

Well, yes, and he admitted that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wrong. I reiterate that for a Christian theologian these are very low standards, and it's as a theoretician of religion as a justification for the extension of political power, rather than in his specific good or bad positions, that Niebuhr's awfulness really shines. Even then, you're right that there were obviously far worse and more damaging people in American religious life at the time--Francis Spellman, for instance, or Oral Roberts.
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