REINHOLD NIEBUHR
(1892 - 1971)

For the next thirteen years he served as a pastor in Detroit, Michigan.  His experience with the cruelties of the unregulated capitalism of the early 20th century turned him into an ardent socialist.  He was a co-founder of the Fellowship of Socialist Christians and ran for public office several times on the Socialist ticket.

Then in 1928 he left Detroit to take up a teaching position at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.  In looking back over his Detroit experience, he published in 1929 Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, an exposition of his socialist views.

His "tamed cynicism" led to another work, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), in which he laid at the feet of society the source of all human evil:  collective pridefulness and insecurity, which produced hypocrisy and aggressive cruelty.  However, he was less sure that this inhered in just some group or class structures--but saw the potential for evil in all human groupings.  This put him at odds with the socialist view that the disempowered lower classes were free from such a taint.

Niebuhr found himself moving to a "middling" view about human nature.  For Niebuhr, while human nature was capable of depravity it was also able to respond to Divine grace and move forward under the hope of a higher vision.  Thus Niebuhr's view of human nature remained basically optimistic:  that is, as long as people sought the good and remained aware of how easy their motives could turn evil.  He felt that the tempering of all human behavior came when people realized that only God was sovereign.  [Much of this thinking he laid later out his two-volume, The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941-1943).]

In the face of the horror's of Stalin's and Hitler's totalitarian policies in the early 1930s, Niebuhr found himself breaking with his pacifist colleagues.  Indeed he turned back to his colleagues to challenge the Marxist, Socialist and Libertarian or Liberal "Left" with the need to take action, even military action, against the likes of Stalin and Hitler--and later the military overlords of Japan.  He took strong issue with pacifism because of its "unrealistic" response to the real dangers around them.  When the United States itself finally found itself at war, Niebuhr was very ardent in his support of the war effort--and deeply critical of the idealism of his old liberal colleagues who resisted the war effort.  In his Children of Light and the Children of Darkness he critiqued not only the fascist spirit but also the liberal spirit which he felt had led us into the catastrophe of World War Two.