“A Bad Kind of Magic”: The Niebuhr Brothers on “Utilitarian Christianity” and the Defense of Democracy

Abstract

In August 1947, a few months after President Harry S. Truman pledged the United States to fight communism around the globe, Time magazine delivered a stern warning to its wide readership from Reinhold Niebuhr, the nation's best-known theologian: “The new idolatry in the U.S. may be a blind, uncritical worship of democracy.” The Time article excerpted a Christianity and Crisis piece on “Democracy as a Religion” in which Niebuhr stressed the hidden dangers of the increasingly ubiquitous paeans to democracy in postwar America. That spring's commencement addresses, he noted, would give any sensible observer the distinct impression that “Americans have only one religion: devotion to democracy. They extol its virtues, are apprehensive about the perils to which it is exposed, pour maledictions upon its foes, rededicate themselves periodically to its purposes and claim unconditional validity for its ideals.”

A Niebuhrian pacifism for an imperfect world

“…While he continually recognised the limitations and weaknesses of American power in the world, he variously found himself driven to support "pragmatic" justifications for the use of nuclear weapons against Japan; vigorously cheering on the anti-Communism of the Cold War, including backing the execution of spies and engaging in anti-Communist witchhunts; and offering sustained public support for the Zionist project in Israel which he characterised as a "vanguard of progress and modernization in the Middle East" (Goldman, 2017;Moseley, 2011). As with all of these hot political issues, Niebuhr's attacks on pacifism were heavily dependent on the defence and advancement of a carefully circumscribed, ambiguous, and cautious portrayal democracy as a lesser evil (Gaston, 2014;Niebuhr, 2011), as this introduced a moral distinction between combatants in which one was clearly preferable to another, particularly in the context of World War Two and the Cold War. But Niebuhr's just war thinking, despite its origins as a pragmatic middle road between the dream of perpetual peace and the reality of tyrannical war, morphed too easily into exactly the kind of solution-oriented, certainty-inducing ideal that he himself disdained.…”

“…It is clear that the theological dimension of Niebuhr's thought necessarily comes to the fore at this point. While his concept of justice was much more earthly than the eschatological justice embraced by his brother (Gaston, 2014), it was still very much animated by an underlying love ethic (Flescher, 2000). As Gary Dorrien puts it: Something was missing in his stark dichotomizing between love and justice.…”