I recently came across two articles on the relationship of the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr to the outlook of Barack Obama that I can only call, for lack of a better term, bizarre.
The first comes from an interview with Michael Cromartie, Vice President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. Cromartie begins with an evocation of St. Augustine, which leads to a conversation about Niebuhr and then Niebuhr's influence on Obama, which brings us to this exchange:
One of the great representatives of political realism, in the 20th century, was Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr is often cited as one of the current President's favorite thinkers and inspirations. Is President Obama practicing what Niebuhr preached?
The President seems to have a great admiration and respect for Niebuhr. People all over the political spectrum claim Niebuhr as their mentor. The question is: What part of Niebuhr has the President bought into?
That's a debatable proposition. When there's a problem, the President's instinct is clearly that the state needs to solve it. So there seems to be a lack of appreciation for mediating institutions and the roles they play, as the first instinct is to have government solve all of the many problems that we have. So it's not clear to me what part of Niebuhr he appreciates.
It is clear that Niebuhr's thinking on foreign policy has not influenced President Obama. Niebuhr knew the nature of totalitarianism and critiqued it constantly; he was anything but an advocate of moral equivalence. There's a tendency with President Obama, because he thought Bush bellicose, to believe that he ought to do the opposite. So rather than talking about the virtues of living in a free and democratic society, he has spent a lot of time apologizing for America's problems.
There's a brand of right-wing rap on Niebuhr that wants to appropriate him as a bellicose cold warrior hawk. But this is a severely problematic reading of Niebuhr. Cromartie is no doubt influenced by his colleague George Weigel in this reading of Niebuhr, but that doesn't make it any more right.
It's true that Neibur, particularly during World War II, was adamant about the need for democracies to stand up against the totalitarianism and expansionism of the Nazis. And after the war, he was strongly supportive of U.S. efforts to thwart Soviet expansionism. But if this were all you knew about Niebuhr's politics, you'd have a very distorted view of him.
Niebuhr's outlook was always bi-polar: He emphasized our need to respond morally to the political imperatives of the situation we find ourselves in, but he also emphasized the need not to be moralistic. He was clear that whatever dangers the Soviet Union presented on the international stage, we also had to face the danger of our own sense of certainty and self-righteousness. It was never sufficient to simply "critique totalitarianism," but always to bear in mind and critique our own moral limitations and tendency to evil as well. Certainly this wasn't an argument of "moral equivalence," but it was an argument about the need for a self-critical outlook on our own actions.
Of course, the flip-side of that is that Cromartie seems to be saying that Barack Obama is an advocate of "moral equivalence." But this is utter nonsense. What Obama has taken from Niebuhr (and famously articulated to David Brooks during the 2008 campaign), was on the one hand the necessity to be self-critical, but on the other the necessity to act pragmatically to bring about what good we can in an ambiguous and fallen world. Here's specifically what he said to Brooks:
I take away [from reading Niebuhr] the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away ... the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.” (ellipses in original)
This is far from the "moral equivalance that Cromartie is implying, and it's unfair and disingenuous to try and tar Obama with that brush. Either Cromartie is being dishonest in his assement of Obama, who he's ignorant of Obama's actual positions and their relationship to his Niebuhrian outlook.
And this brings me to my second recent encounter with commentary on Niebuhr and Obama. This one is from the Italian journalist Sandro Magister, writing in L'Esspresso:
One glaring example of contradiction is when Obama cites the Protestant theologian Reinhold Neibuhr as his inspiration.
Niebuhr (1892-1971), a great admirer and interpreter of Saint Augustine, was one of the teachers of "realism" in international politics. He maintained, that is, the primacy of national interest and the balance of power, in a humanity profoundly marked by evil.
Niebuhr defined democracy as "a search for temporary solutions to unsolvable problems." And his famous prayer says, "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change." The exact opposite, therefore, of the messianic rhetoric that pervades Obama's speeches, of his continual proclamation of the advent of a "new era," of a "new beginning," of an "age of peace," of a world redeemed because "Yes, we can."
In his book, Gisotti recalls that the Catholic George Weigel, the famous biographer of John Paul II, has highlighted how Obama's vision is "a perfect example of the kind of utopianism against which Niebuhr, with his profound sense of the fragility of history and of the self-destructive capacity of human beings, fought for three decades."
Here again, "Patient Zero" in this distortion of Niebuhr's outlook seems to be George Weigel. Now, I've never read his biography of John Paul II, for which he is apparently most famous. But if he gets JPII as wrong as he gets Obama, I wouldn't vouch for it. Weigel seems determined to read Niebuhr through the right wing lens that was popular (and equally wrong) when it was espoused in the 1980s and 1990s by Michael Novak. Again, it comes from a one-sided reading of Niebuhr's approach to politics being rooted in a hawkish cold war mentality that represents only a small slice of Niebuhr's overall outlook.
Obama's use of Niebuhr is precisely in the category of the Serenity Prayer's admonition to both "accept what cannot be change" and "change what should be changed." That is the pragmatic idealism that Niebuhr and Obama both share, which is at the heart of a Niebuhrian social ethic rooted in realistic appraisals of the possibilities inherent in our social and political institutions.
But where it gets really strange is in what follows:
Instead of Niebuhr, Obama's speeches seem to espouse the utopia of a famous medieval monk and theologian: Joachim of Fiore, prophet of an "age of the Spirit" after the previous ages of the Father and the Son, a third and definitive age of peace, of justice, of humanity with no more divisions, not even among religions.
The intellectual kinship between Obama and Joachin of Fiore appears so strong that in 2008, the news came out in the media all over the world that the future president of the United States had referred to him three times in key speeches of his electoral campaign.
The news was so widely credited that on March 27, 2009, Franciscan Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, the official preacher of the pontifical household, repeated it in one of his Lenten preachings to the pope and the Roman curia.
This, as it turns out, was a hoax, as Magister notes. But it's difficult to understand how one can get from a generally optimistic program of pragmatic change, such as the one Obama espoused during his campaign, to the kind of messianism and apocalypticism that his opponents often see in his rhetoric. One might almost think they were deliberately misconstruing his outlook for the sake of scoring political points. The only relationship between Obama's rhetoric and that of Joachim of Fiore is in the delusions of those who are determined to find fault with the President.
Of course, it's red meat for conservative Catholics to accuse Obama of being a Joachimite, and therefore a heretic. Of course, it's hard to know what to do with that kind of an accusation in any event, since Obama is (despite another, distinct batch of conspiracy theories) a Protestant, and thus quite openly engaged in what many in the Catholic church would view as heresy in any event. The idea that you'd need to associate Obama with Joachim of Fiore in order to find fault his his theological outlook from a Catholic perspective is strange. And even stranger is to juxtipose Niebuhr's "realism" with Obama's allegedly Joachimite "utopianism."
Neither Obama nor Niebuhr can be called utopian. Both were well aware of the limitations of human possibilities within history, as reflected throughout Niebuhr's writings, and as reflected in Obama's (often frustratingly moderate) approach to politics. Those conservatives who are looking to enlist Niebuhr against Obama as an advocate for the kind of right-wing rollback position that Niebuhr was actually strongly opposed to could do no better than to go back and re-read The Irony of American History (and in particular the new edition with a preface by Andrew Bacevich). For more on Bacevich's more nuanced (and correct) reading of Niebuhr, see his interview with Bill Moyers.
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