Quaker Theology #11 -- Spring-Summer 2005
REVIEW
Review Essay: Taking Up Niebuhr’s Irony: Living a Theological Saga -- page 2
III
Even after half a century, it is possible to read Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History and see there only the dogged Cold Warrior, exhorting his compatriots to unflagging struggle against the Marxist menace. And to be sure, his anti-communist zeal in its pages is unstinting. But when I opened it a few months ago, what leaped from the pages was his repeatedly voiced sense of foreboding, even dread, at the hazards posed by this crusade to America itself, even as he saw it being then on the right side:
. . . [C]ommunism believes that it is possible for man, at a particular moment in history, to take "the leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom." . . . . Its cruelty is partly due to the frustration of the communist overlords of history when they discover that the "logic" of history does not conform to their delineation of it. One has an uneasy feeling that some of our dreams of managing history might have resulted in similar cruelties if they had flowered into action. But there was fortunately no program to endow our elite of prospective philosopher-scientist-kings with actual political power." (Irony, p. 3-4)
But now, unfortunately, such an elite has been so empowered. Its rise is no longer prospective; this elite is in the saddle, and shows no inclination to ponder Niebuhr’s cautionary comment that "Communism is a vivid object lesson in the monstrous consequences of moral complacency about the relation of dubious means to supposedly good ends." (Ibid., p.5)
Niebuhr was clear about the religious sense of election that was at the root of this hazard for the American experiment. The country:
came into existence with the sense of being a "separated" nation, which God was using to make a new beginning for mankind. We . . . had been called out by God to create a new humanity. We were God’s "American Israel." Our pretensions of innocency therefore heightened the whole concept of a virtuous humanity which characterizes the culture of our era; and involve us in the ironic incongruity between our illusions and the realities which we experience. We find it almost as difficult as the communists to believe that anyone could think ill of us, since we are as persuaded as they that our society is so essentially virtuous that only malice could prompt criticism of any of our actions. (p. 24-25)
Niebuhr foresaw the climactic danger:
The real test . . . will occur at the point in time when American preparedness has reached its highest possibility and . . . might tempt American strategists to welcome a final joining of the issue. In that situation many Americans would, of course, strongly resist the temptation to embark upon a preventive war. But their resolution will be strengthened and their cause have a better prospect of success if the decision lies not with one powerful nation but with a real community of nations. (p. 138)
The fact that Niebuhr was imagining a preventive nuclear war against the Soviets rather than a worldwide crusade aimed at "terror," and its Islamic stand-in makes his sense of our plight no less apt. The U.S. has now launched a preventive war, over the strong resistance of many of its own citizens, and in defiance of the "community of nations." As Niebuhr intuited, the war’s "prospects for success" seem murky indeed.
But there is more to this analysis that echoes in the contemporary ear:
[America] might be driven to hysteria by [history’s] inevitable frustrations. We might be tempted to bring the whole of modern history to a tragic conclusion by one final and mighty effort to overcome its frustrations. The political term for such an effort is "preventive war." It is not an immediate temptation; but it could become so in the next decade or two.
A democracy can not of course, engage in an explicit preventive war. But military leadership can heighten crises to the point where war becomes unavoidable. The power of such a temptation to a nation, long accustomed to expanding possibilities and only recently subjected to frustration, is enhanced by the spiritual aberrations which arise in a situation of intense enmity. The certainty of the foe’s continued intransigence seems to be the only fixed fact in an uncertain future. Nations find it even more difficult than individuals to preserve sanity when confronted with a resolute and unscrupulous foe. Hatred disturbs all residual serenity of spirit and vindictiveness muddies every pool of sanity. In the present situation even the sanest of our statesmen have found it convenient to conform their policies to the public temper of fear and hatred which the most vulgar of our politicians have generated or exploited. Our foreign policy is thus threatened with a kind of apoplectic rigidity and inflexibility. (p. 146)
It is possible, as Niebuhr’s New Left detractors would later do, to see in all this no more than dressed-up platitudes, barely covering a sellout to the worst of Cold War excesses (Idealism, p. 480). But Niebuhr’s responses to the Vietnam War, more than a decade later, suggest otherwise.
At first he supported the war, but then followed the lead of Martin Luther King, Jr. into opposition, rebuking those who claimed his earlier work in continued support. Poor health kept him from doing more, but he wielded a sharp and bitter antiwar pen, confessing to a close friend near the end of his life that "I am scared by my own lack of patriotism," doubting the wisdom of his militant anticommunism, and adding, "For the first time I fear I am ashamed of our beloved nation." (Fox, p. 285)
Neoconservatives still brazenly summon Niebuhr’s shade to give posthumous blessing to their imperial ventures. As one such put it, with typical triumphalism, in early 2002:
What might we learn from Niebuhr about our current challenges, which are so different from those presented by the Cold War, though similar in requiring patience, persistence, and firm resolution? First and foremost, that it is right and just for Christians to support this war. Indeed, they have an obligation to do so." (McClay)
It is enough to say that I am persuaded to the contrary,that this eminence of Union Seminary would stand firmly against such bluster, as he did late in his life, as it gave voice to all the worst that he feared could happen to his home country, and like Rauschenbush, saw happening in his final clouded years.
IV
Evidently Union’s search committee agreed with this view, because in Gary Dorrien they have gained a scholar who seems very much aware of the trajectory of Niebuhr’s thinking. He is also ready to pursue its dynamic against, as the title of his most recent book, Pax Americana, indicates, the self-destructive presumptuousness of the neoconservative agenda. Niebuhr would have applauded.
Pax Americana offers a calm and thorough review of the shaping of the neoconservative ideology, its rise to power in the current administration, and its various overlapping plans for U.S. world domination. This book is his second on the topic; the first, The Neoconservative Mind, published in 1993, is out of print and hard to find.
What struck me about Pax Americana, however, was how much was not there. What I missed was an elucidation of the religious aspects of this crusade. To be sure, most of the key neoconservative political actors seem to be confirmed pagans, worshippers of no god but Moloch. But even so, Protestant and Catholic conservatives have been key to assembling and motivating the coalition by which they now rule the country and seek to impose their will on the planet. Why Dorrien bypasses this dimension is a puzzle.
The nearest thing to a clue about this elision that I’ve found was in a talk Dorrien gave to an antiwar group in April of 2003, which summarized the book:
In the interest of inclusivity I have kept my religious feelings out of this talk, but I must at least acknowledge that my own motivation as a participant in the peace movement is primarily religious. From a Christian standpoint it is supposed to be nearly impossible to morally justify the murderous violence of war. The world worships power, but Jesus lived and taught the way of agape – the power of self-sacrificial divine love. To the early church the cross symbolized the fellow-suffering way of Christ, which contradicted the way of violence and domination.
It is painfully true that the Christian church did not sustain this meaning of the cross after the fourth century. To many people, the cross became a symbol of domination and persecution. Nonviolence is supposed to be constitutive in Christianity, yet in recent months I have been asked repeatedly to explain why so many church leaders, including the pope, have opposed the war. It isn’t what people expect. How very sad.
Sad, yes. But it’s also sad that Dorrien does not supply more insight into the religious basis of this reaction. After all, what has "inclusivity" got to do with calling this perversion of religion by its name? Niebuhr would be shaking his head at this.
I was left with a similar sense of disappointment after finishing his book which takes a look over the fence at The Remaking of Evangelical Theology. Here Dorrien does his usual good job of tracing the work and debates of numerous important evangelical thinkers of the past century, in which two themes seemed most salient: the internal struggles over "inerrancy" of the Bible, and the parallel efforts to prove intellectual supremacy for evangelical doctrines by means of one form or another of dogmatic scholasticism.
Pondering this second thrust, I wondered if one could perhaps see in it some of the roots of the religious and organizational resurgence which has so rocked our culture in the past twenty years. Were they in the thick tomes of Carl F.H. Henry and the tragic E.J, Carnell, which purported to show how, compared to their versions of intellectualized fundamentalism, all other religions and theologies were not only wrong but patently irrational? Or did they go back to the efforts of J. Gresham Machen in the 1920s to push all liberals out of the Presbyterian church? Do the tendrils extend all the way to the antebellum Princeton Scholastics’ vigorous defense of slavery as a biblically-blessed institution?