Politicians Love to Quote Reinhold Niebuhr. James Comey Actually Gets Him.

By: Drew Christiansen

November 20, 2017

America, November 20, 2017

The late Reinhold Niebuhr, the United States’ premier Protestant public theologian of the mid-20th century, is back the news. Last spring we learned that the former F.B.I. director James Comey had adopted the handle @Niebuhr for his secret Twitter account. On Nov. 6 Politico revealed that Mr. Comey had shed his online alter-ego and gone public with a new Twitter account, @Comey.

Niebuhr continues to be the favorite theologian of Americans in public life. In 2010 President Obama appealed to Niebuhr’s Christian realism in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture to make his case for the use of force to preserve the peace. The New York Times columnist David Brooks, who is theologically well read, appeals repeatedly to Niebuhr in his writing.

Niebuhr’s popularity with pundits and foreign relations realists grew out of his thesis that in a sinful world justice and right have to be defended with countervailing power. Hans Morgenthau, the University of Chicago’s leading international relations theorist at the time, offered Niebuhr the singular tribute, “He is the father of us all.”

Secular thinkers tend to speak of an anarchic, disordered world rather than a sinful one, and later in his career, Niebuhr himself confessed he wished he had not appealed so much to original sin. He had been impressed by a newspaper editorial to the effect that original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of Christianity.

But his contention that nations “do not easily attain any degree of self-transcendence”—so they tend to be “morally complacent, self-righteous” and lack the perception of irony that comes from a sense of the ambiguities of human action—is hard to deny.

Over the years, tough-minded realists and liberals wanting to show their spine cited Niebuhr’s realism as justification for their foreign policy preferences. In large part, Niebuhr himself was responsible for their preening tough-mindedness. He was himself a frequent commentator on international relations and U.S. policy and a controversialist who labeled his adversaries sentimental “idealists.”

Commenting on Pope John XXIII’s encyclical “Pacem in Terris,” for example, he wrote, “[John’s] idealism is a little too easy.” But within a decade that encyclical set off the Catholic human rights revolution, which Samuel Huntington later styled “Third Wave Democratization,” giving the lie to the accusation that the pope was an impractical dreamer.

Since Niebuhr’s day, of course, we have plenty of examples of the illusions of fuzzy-minded realists, too: in Vietnam, in the dirty wars of Latin America’s Southern Cone, in the proxy wars in Central America, in the invasion of Iraq, in the unending war on terrorism and the embrace of the Saudi-Israeli vision for the future of the Middle East.

Niebuhr’s disdain for idealists grew out of his own disillusionment with his early years as a social gospel pastor in Detroit committed to socialism and pacifism. In An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (1935), Niebuhr delivered a full-throated indictment of “the sentimental illusions” of liberal Christianity for holding “that love and cooperation are superior to conflict and coercion, and that therefore they must be and will be established.”

Love, he contended, is “a possibility for the individual” by God’s grace but not by a moralistic will to bring God’s kingdom to earth. On this point, he appealed to the Catholic teaching that the theological virtue of charity is infused.

But the belief that love was wholly beyond the natural capacity of fallen humanity in community he owed to his own Protestant theological tradition.

The conclusion he left with his readers and that he only revised late in his career was that politics and social institutions are necessarily coercive in their working. That was not, however, the Catholic position at the time, nor is it today.

Thomists and neo-Thomists believed that sociality was essential to human nature and that communities were held together first by adhesion to the common good and only then by coercion. Even Augustinians of the day, who had a greater tolerance for coercion to restrain sin, understood political community to belong to the order of human loves.

Only later, as he confessed in Man’s Nature and His Communities (1965), after closer involvement across denominational lines with Catholics and Jews, did Niebuhr come to see the potential for good in human communities.

He would have been surprised, nonetheless, by the role forgiveness, reconciliation and peace building came to play in international affairs in the 1990s and 2000s.

The mistake realist political theorists and politicians make is to hold to Niebuhr’s premise about the need for coercion in politics without appropriating his parallel thesis that in “immoral society” egoism is greatly magnified with pretensions to greatness buttressed by collective rationalizations. As a result, nations easily deceive themselves and lack the self-awareness and humility that can lead individuals to repentance. If they did, they would have a keener sense of their limits.

James Comey, alias Niebuhr, seems not to be one of those tough-guy devotees of Niebuhrian realism. In a careful appreciation of Niebuhr’s significance for Mr. Comey in the New Yorker, Paul Elie suggests that Comey understands the human potential for the abuse of power, the risks of unintended consequences and the downside of making decisions in conditions of uncertainty. Contrasted with most theorists and practitioners who invoke the Niebuhr name, Mr. Comey seems to be “the complete” Niebuhrian.

Mr. Comey is perhaps a better Niebuhrian than Niebuhr himself. A committed Methodist and Sunday school teacher, Mr. Comey, Paul Elie reports, kept on his desk at F.B.I. headquarters J. Edgar Hoover’s request for a warrant to execute surveillance on Martin Luther King Jr.

During his tenure as director, he also required F.B.I. agents in training to “study the F.B.I.’s interaction” with Dr. King and urged them to visit the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the national mall. “The reason I do those things,” he told a Georgetown University audience in 2015, “is to ensure that we remember our mistakes and that we learn from them.”

In the coils of history in which James Comey’s F.B.I. career came to an end—and in the unintended consequences of his handling of the bureau’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails—he may find “the consolations of philosophy” in Niebuhr’s ironic vision.“

There is a transcendent perspective from which ‘all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags,’” Niebuhr wrote in The Irony of American History. “Implied in such a faith,” he went on, “is a sense of a goodness which not only fulfills, but may negate the highest human goodness.” It is the vision of the Book of Job where “God refuses to be judged by human standards of justice and quiets the protests of Job by overawing him with the mysteries of the world beyond his ken.” That is a vision to which Niebuhr’s would-be imitators seldom refer.

This article was originally published in America.

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