Who was Reinhold Niebuhr?
MILLER: Reinhold Niebuhr was the greatest — well, let’s put it in the largest way, and then if you make me do it, I’ll take it back — the greatest American political thinker of the 20th century. Hans Morgenthau, another political scientist, said he was the greatest American since John C. Calhoun — political thinker. He was the leading — I guess you now say it was Protestant theologian, but theologian only in a loose sense, because politics was his main interest. And through the middle of this century, his role in leading the argument about joining in the resistance to Hitler, his argument after World War II about the pattern of responsibility, a phrase that Dean Acheson picked up — the Secretary of State then — from Niebuhr about the whole shaping of the role of the United States, which is just — the chapter which has just concluded it, 45 years of — or from ’47, roughly, until ’89, ’91, the things we’ve just seen happen in Eastern Europe and in Russia — that whole history. Ge
From the 1930s through the 1960s, he was arguably the nation’s most influential theologian and political theorist. For three decades after his death in 1971, Niebuhr’s influence steadily declined in both ecclesiastical and civic circles. Nearly all of his books had gone out of print. This was quite a tumble in status for a public intellectual who in 1948 graced the cover of Time magazine’s 25th anniversary edition as America’s “No. 1 Theologian.” His crossover popularity was so great that a Harvard critic once joked about “atheists for Niebuhr” clubs. It’s ironic that it took the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent debate over terrorism to resurrect Niebuhr—Paul Elie argues that he has become “a man for all reasons.” New acolytes include a Noah’s Ark of ideological warriors: neoconservatives, liberal hawks, military revisionists, anti-war leftists, theoconservatives and religious liberals. Each of these factions claims him as their own. Regrettably, most of these latter-day d
